Attack missles

munroburton wrote:You are thinking of a multi-stage missile(or rocket), where used engine stages are simply jettisoned when they expire.

In the later Honorverse, they use a multi-drive missile. Each individual drive is only capable of a X amount of acceleration for Y time before it burns out, which is why they use several of them. They don't decouple any parts until the end of their run when they blow the sheaths and kick the lasing rods out before the warhead goes off.

The SLN's cataphract is kinda a multi-stage missile, using a separate countermissile drive and power system for additional range and run-time. It does not drop any stages or parts, however, as the first activated stage also carries the warhead assembly.

Maldorian wrote:Maybe I couln´t follow the whole discussion! I thought, a Laserwarhead and a normal nuclear warhead have the same size and are exchangeble.

Vince wrote:

munroburton wrote:You are thinking of a multi-stage missile(or rocket), where used engine stages are simply jettisoned when they expire.

In the later Honorverse, they use a multi-drive missile. Each individual drive is only capable of a X amount of acceleration for Y time before it burns out, which is why they use several of them. They don't decouple any parts until the end of their run when they blow the sheaths and kick the lasing rods out before the warhead goes off.

The SLN's cataphract is kinda a multi-stage missile, using a separate countermissile drive and power system for additional range and run-time. It does not drop any stages or parts, however, as the first activated stage also carries the warhead assembly.

The Cataphract missile provided by the Mesan Alignment to the People's Republic Navy in Exile and the Solarian League Navy are true two-stage missiles. Each has a standard attack missile body as the the first stage and a smaller counter-missile body as the second stage. The warhead and lasing rods are in the second stage. That's why the Cataphract's warheads are one less grade powerful* than an equivalent Mark 16 DDM (a CA/BC grade warhead, fired from the Saganami-C CAs, Agamemnon BCPs and the new Nike BCs--and with some major shoehorning requiring leaving out most of a missile tubes supporting machinery--the Roland DDs). It isn't actually specified in the books, but I suspect that the first stage is discarded after its impeller nodes burn out as it would make course changes easier (the missile's second stage wouldn't have to deal with the extra dead weight aft).

* The A model uses a DD/CL warhead, but is fired from a BC missile tube, the B model uses a CA/BC warhead and is fired from a SD missile tube, and the C model uses a SD warhead and currently can only be fired from a missile pod.

Weird Harold wrote:

DrMegaverse wrote:I'm not even sure how much damage a purely kinetic weapon would do to HV armor though.

None at all if the sidewalls and wedge are up.

In previous discussions, I think it was determined that three to five CMs would fit in a Mk23 sized "Canister" round; that means you would have a choice of five "warheads" with a stand-off range of zero vs ten lasing rods with a stand-off range of thirty-million kilometers. I know which I would pick.

Loren Pechtel wrote:There's absolutely no point to a MIRV warhead in Honorverse weapons. The reason we have MIRVs is that one missile can throw more than enough boom to kill whatever it's aimed at. Thus you break that boom into pieces and distribute it over multiple targets.

Since one Honorverse missile is not overkill there's no reason for a MIRV.


The one change I think should happen is a partial shift back to contact weapons. They were abandoned because they couldn't survive the withering fire from the laser clusters--but now a three stage GA missile at maximum range is crossing that zone at .8 lights or so--from it's current standoff to impact is at best a fifth of a second. This is well under the cycle time of the laser clusters, it only gives the defender at best one additional shot at the incoming missile and it very well might not give them any.

On the flip side one missile at contact range kills the target, period--the warhead is totally irrelevant in this and it shouldn't even be fired. This also means the dazzlers--which carry no warhead at all serve no purpose at that point other than being decoys can carry out this attack. Likewise, the Apollo control missiles are useless once their controlled missiles are spent.

You don't want only contact missiles because you won't always have the kind of speed needed to pull it off and not all missiles will be able to hit anyway. (A laser head can hit a ship with a turned wedge, a contact missile can't.)

DrMegaverse wrote:I wonder perhaps if it'd be possible, and useful, to make a MIRV type missile which could release multiple CMs with which you could smack a ship and cause some kinetic damage to the armor. A "real" Dragon's Tooth as it were.

I can't see such a weapon being useful except in some very specific circumstances and I'm not even sure how much damage a purely kinetic weapon would do to HV armor though.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Some damage to the armor?? You don't realize the energies involved! A modern multi-drive missile which impacts a ship will at an minimum take it out of the battle. If it's a solid hit the ship is gone.

DDHvi wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:There's absolutely no point to a MIRV warhead in Honorverse weapons. The reason we have MIRVs is that one missile can throw more than enough boom to kill whatever it's aimed at. Thus you break that boom into pieces and distribute it over multiple targets.

Since one Honorverse missile is not overkill there's no reason for a MIRV.


The one change I think should happen is a partial shift back to contact weapons. They were abandoned because they couldn't survive the withering fire from the laser clusters--but now a three stage GA missile at maximum range is crossing that zone at .8 lights or so--from it's current standoff to impact is at best a fifth of a second. This is well under the cycle time of the laser clusters, it only gives the defender at best one additional shot at the incoming missile and it very well might not give them any.

On the flip side one missile at contact range kills the target, period--the warhead is totally irrelevant in this and it shouldn't even be fired. This also means the dazzlers--which carry no warhead at all serve no purpose at that point other than being decoys can carry out this attack. Likewise, the Apollo control missiles are useless once their controlled missiles are spent.

You don't want only contact missiles because you won't always have the kind of speed needed to pull it off and not all missiles will be able to hit anyway. (A laser head can hit a ship with a turned wedge, a contact missile can't.)

Extra use for the dazzlers - good for you Of course, many won't get through, but if they are there anyway

munroburton wrote:You are thinking of a multi-stage missile(or rocket), where used engine stages are simply jettisoned when they expire.

In the later Honorverse, they use a multi-drive missile. Each individual drive is only capable of a X amount of acceleration for Y time before it burns out, which is why they use several of them. They don't decouple any parts until the end of their run when they blow the sheaths and kick the lasing rods out before the warhead goes off.

The SLN's cataphract is kinda a multi-stage missile, using a separate countermissile drive and power system for additional range and run-time. It does not drop any stages or parts, however, as the first activated stage also carries the warhead assembly.

Vince wrote:The Cataphract missile provided by the Mesan Alignment to the People's Republic Navy in Exile and the Solarian League Navy are true two-stage missiles. Each has a standard attack missile body as the the first stage and a smaller counter-missile body as the second stage. The warhead and lasing rods are in the second stage. That's why the Cataphract's warheads are one less grade powerful* than an equivalent Mark 16 DDM (a CA/BC grade warhead, fired from the Saganami-C CAs, Agamemnon BCPs and the new Nike BCs--and with some major shoehorning requiring leaving out most of a missile tubes supporting machinery--the Roland DDs). It isn't actually specified in the books, but I suspect that the first stage is discarded after its impeller nodes burn out as it would make course changes easier (the missile's second stage wouldn't have to deal with the extra dead weight aft).

* The A model uses a DD/CL warhead, but is fired from a BC missile tube, the B model uses a CA/BC warhead and is fired from a SD missile tube, and the C model uses a SD warhead and currently can only be fired from a missile pod.

munroburton wrote:Nope. The warhead and rods are on the first stage, the original missile body. The second stage was added as a sprint drive to rush the entire first stage closer to a target. Remember that a much smaller CM body is nothing but a drive, power and sensor systems - its wedge is its weapon.

The size/grade reduction is because that sprint drive makes the missile too long to fit into their originally intended launchers.

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 58 wrote:Unlike the Solarian League Navy, the Mesan Alignment had no reservations at all about the missile ranges being reported by observers of the renewed conflict between Manticore and the Republic of Haven. They'd not only realized those reports were accurate, but figured out what the Manticorans and Havenites must have done to produce them.
Unfortunately, deducing what someone else had done wasn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it for oneself. Downsizing missile drive components without reducing their already limited lifetimes still further was a significant technological challenge—one the Alignment was working hard to overcome, but hadn't managed to pull off yet.
So they'd taken another approach as an intermediate step. The Cataphract was a rather basic concept, actually—they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.
There were drawbacks, of course; there always were, and especially so in what had to be a compromise solution.
The weapon carried only half as many lasing rods as a standard laser head. Worse, the Cataphract was twenty percent longer than a standard missile of any given weight, which meant it would no longer fit into launch tubes which had been designed to handle the single-drive missile upon which it was based. The Cataphract-C, built around the SLN's Trebuchet capital missile, could be fired only out of one of the missile pods the MAN hadn't seen fit to offer Citizen Commodore Luff. The Cataphract-B, based on the Javelin missile intended for the League's battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, could be fired from a standard superdreadnought missile tube, but not by an Indefatigable or a Warlord-C. But Luff's battlecruisers could fire the Cataphract-A, based on the Spatha, the SLN's new-model destroyer and light cruiser shipkiller. His Mars-Cs could have, as well, but only the battlecruisers had been supplied with the new weapon, and even they carried only enough of them for a dozen full broadsides.
Compared to standard missiles of their size, their warheads were light, and the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids which could be stuffed into such a size-restricted terminal bus were limited. But the weapon had a powered range from rest of almost 16.6 million kilometers, nobody had ever even imagined that it might exist . . . and Luff's fourteen battlecruisers mounted over eight hundred broadside missile tubes.