Attack missles

Weird Harold wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Which if you think about it doesn't make all that much sense because Mk16s were used a BC(P) and BC(L) missiles before the Mod-G version came along.

I don't have any problem with a Battle Cruiser throwing "Cruiser-weight" missiles around.

The problem I had was describing the "cruiser-weight" missile carried by BCs as something that could "only penetrate Battle Cruiser armor with difficulty and a great deal of luck".

That fits a CL's missiles fairly well, and I'd buy it for a CA's missiles (when they aren't the same missiles carried by BCs), but seems a poor description for the missiles a battlecruiser would carry.
I'd agree a Mk16 is cruiser-weight; at least CA/BC weight. But it's designed to engage and defeat BC defenses and armor.

Remember the glorious tales of BCs raiding the Peep systems? Me neither. It apparently turned out that RMN BC missiles couldn't do much to the ancient Peep BBs, the reverse was apparently not true.

Weird Harold wrote:

munroburton wrote:...I think the Mod G made the MK16 equivalent to a first-gen MDM - it was already about as powerful as a capital SDM....

The textev:

Storm From the Shhadows
Chapter Thirty wrote:But now, thanks primarily to fallout from the Star Kingdom's ongoing emphasis on improving its grav-pulse FTL communications capability, BuWeaps had completed field testing and begun production of a new generation of substantially more powerful gravity generators for the cruiser-weight Mark 16. In fact, they'd almost doubled the grav lens amplification factor, and while they were at it, they'd increased the yield of the missile warhead, as well, which had actually required at least as much ingenuity as the new amplification generators, given the way warheads scaled. They'd had to shift quite a few of the original Mark 16's components around to find a way to shoehorn all of that in, which had included shifting several weapons bus components aft, but Helen didn't expect anyone to complain about the final result. With its fifteen megaton warhead, the Mark 16 had been capable of dealing with heavy cruiser or battlecruiser armor, although punching through to the interior of a battlecruiser had pushed it almost to the limit. Now, with the new Mod G's forty megaton warhead and improved grav lensing, the Mark 16 had very nearly as much punch as an all-up capital missile from as recently as five or six T-years ago.

It clearly states that it is the Mod G that makes the Mk-16 as powerful as an older (Implied SLN) capital missile.

SftS set in 1921 PD. So they're talking about capital missiles from 1915.

Ashes of Victory started in 1913. So those "all-up capital missiles" must be early MDMs.

Jonathan_S wrote:
I don't have any problem with a Battle Cruiser throwing "Cruiser-weight" missiles around.

The problem I had was describing the "cruiser-weight" missile carried by BCs as something that could "only penetrate Battle Cruiser armor with difficulty and a great deal of luck".

That fits a CL's missiles fairly well, and I'd buy it for a CA's missiles (when they aren't the same missiles carried by BCs), but seems a poor description for the missiles a battlecruiser would carry.
I'd agree a Mk16 is cruiser-weight; at least CA/BC weight. But it's designed to engage and defeat BC defenses and armor.[/quote]

What sticks in my mind here is the size comparisons of various missle types shown in some of the mid-period books (around the time of EoH and AoV). As I recall, those showed five basic missile types. At the top of the scale were the new MDMs. At the bottom were the new LAC shipkillers. In between were three older types - one carried by ships of the wall, one by battlecruisers and heavy cruisers and one by light cruisers and destroyers.

The implication seems to be that battlecruisers and heavy cruisers fired the same missiles - which would be acceptable for a battlecruiser, as it's really only intended to fight cruisers and below, where a battlcruiser's larger salvos, stronger active defences, tougher sidewalls and thicker armour would give it all the cards.

Weird Harold wrote:

Storm From the Shhadows
Chapter Thirty wrote:Now, with the new Mod G's forty megaton warhead and improved grav lensing, the Mark 16 had very nearly as much punch as an all-up capital missile from as recently as five or six T-years ago.

It clearly states that it is the Mod G that makes the Mk-16 as powerful as an older (Implied SLN) capital missile.

Weird Harold wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:
I think the actual implication is it's as powerful as Alliance capital missiles.

Re-read SFtS Chapter Thirty again. The entire discussion of how the Mod G warhead would have affected the tactics at Monica. It flatly states that the Mk-16E (as used by Hexapuma at Monica) was a "cruiser-weight" missile that could only penetrate Battle Cruiser armor with difficulty and a great deal of luck.

The part I bolded earlier flatly says, nearly as powerful as older (Older Alliance >= Current SLN) Capital Missiles four five years prior to Monica. But that is explicitly about the Mod G warhead and how the improvement changed the tactical consideration; eg the Mk-16E was not powerful enough to go for long distance kills and the Mk-16G would have been.

Yes, which is what I said. The Mk 16 mod G, is as powerful as Alliance capital missiles, which are more powerful on a missile per missile basis than Solarian missiles. You can hardly call Solarian capital missiles 'modern', which means any meaningful comparisons have to be against the same yardstick.

Otherwise, it's like trying to compare say the M1A (whatever mod they're upto now) Abrams versus say Hitler's maniacs that designed the Maus or the Ratte tanks. Sure, they're all tanks.... but comparing them doesn't mean a thing really.

The Mk 16G's are "cruiser weight" missiles, that just happen to have the same destructive power as those capital missiles being fielded 6 years prior, which as pointed out:

munroburton wrote:SftS set in 1921 PD. So they're talking about capital missiles from 1915.

Ashes of Victory started in 1913. So those "all-up capital missiles" must be early MDMs.

First-generation MDM "capital missiles" were only capital sized because they literally could not even FIT the Multiple drives into anything smaller, and even then they were larger than everybody ELSE's capital missiles. Which, if they were built similar to how Haven did it, means that the first-gen MDM's also had a larger warhead in addition to multi-drives. And then Haven figured it out, and because they had to build even larger, they 100% for sure put in larger warheads to make up for the size.

Which leads to my statement of the Mark 16 mod G being more powerful than Solarian capital missiles being accurate.


Also keep in mind Hexapuma was a Sag-C, so a heavy cruiser. They were never intended originally to stand-up fight battlecruisers, which are intentionally built to destroy anything smaller than them, and fast enough to run away from anything larger. Even if they fire the same sized missiles, battlecruisers have the mass to mount everything the heavy cruiser could and more. Without something they had to defend at any cost (such as Hancock station, or Helen Zilwicki senior defending her convoy), heavy cruisers are always going to yield to battlecruisers.

At this point I'm going to step in and say, yes, David was referring to Alliance capital missiles when he was doing that comparison in SftS. The mod G is substantially more powerful than the SLN's capital missiles, but still weaker than Manticore's current capital MDM.

MaxxQ wrote:Look up the Wac Corporal (and its Tiny Tim booster), the Aerobee series (Aerobee Hi, Aerobeee 150, Aerobee 300, etc) of sounding rockets, and many other real-world unmanned rockets. Many of them use boosters that are smaller than the upper stage. Some boosters are even less than half the size of the upper stage.

I don't think that the Cataphract has the counter-missile body aft of the standard missile body, because of this sentence:

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 58 wrote: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.

Boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

As I understand Honorverse missiles, the sensors are carried on the very front of the missile (right in front of the warhead) so they can see the target (as shown in the Figure 1: MK-13 General Arrangement in "An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design" in the In Fire Forged anthology--note the location of the AW/SQ-39 Multi-Spectrum Sensor Package).

"A size-restricted terminal bus" that has "the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids" stuffed into it strongly suggests to me that the terminal bus is on the counter-missile body (with a smaller diameter), because if it was on the standard missile body (with a larger diameter), it wouldn't be considered "size-restricted".

All this would seem to indicate that the Cataphract has the counter-missile body in front of the standard missile body.

Good luck on reconciling all the conflicting data in a way that makes sense for your models.

That makes no sense. Why are you using a normal missile body at all then?

I guess if one has not figured out the gravitic baffles that makes MDMs work, one needs sheer physical separation between drive rings. One would use a standard missile body as the booster. The payload volume would be elongated, then stuffed with the smaller CM drive plus laser heads. Using two standard missiles nose to tail would be far too long; likewise, two CMs nose to tail would not have significant range.

Potato wrote:I guess if one has not figured out the gravitic baffles that makes MDMs work, one needs sheer physical separation between drive rings. One would use a standard missile body as the booster. The payload volume would be elongated, then stuffed with the smaller CM drive plus laser heads. Using two standard missiles nose to tail would be far too long; likewise, two CMs nose to tail would not have significant range.

I've also wondered if molycircs placed within the virtual cylinder formed by an impeller ring are less affected by interference than those of the same (or larger) diameter. (After all a podlayer'd drive doesn't screw with the inactive missile drive nodes of the pods getting sent through.

If that's the case then a smaller diameter second stage would get a double benefit - reduction in interference and damage to the non-powered nodes due to both distance and to being smaller diameter (within the linear projection of) the first stage node ring.


But back to ktz's previous post; whatever the diameter of the second stage you can't shrink the first stage diameter much if you still want it to have the same range. (You lose too much volume for it's capacitors). So if you can't make it significantly smaller you might as well leave it the diameter the missile handling equipment and tubes are optimized for.