New LAC's

darrell wrote:ammunition storage should be about the same for both single use and component LAC's.

With three types of weapons packs, presuming that a LAC's offensive weaponry is 25% of it's hull volume, storage for the 10 unused weapons packs should be less than 50% of the full LAC. In other words, instead of 112 LAC's in a SD-CLAC, you would have 80 LAC's.

I do agree there is a trade off. with current LAC's and LAC carriers you can have more total LAC's, but they are probably of mixed types. For example, 64 katanana's plus 32 shrikes & 24 ferrets.

With a component LAC you would have fewer total LAC's, (112 vs 80) but you can optimize all your LAC's for the mission (80 vs 32-60)

I do agree that they would need a new carrier, so I don't expect them to show up in fleet actions for a few years, but would be a simple matter for the hauptman cartel to build stand alone bolt together "LAC bases" for places like the Talbert cluster.

John Prigent wrote:I keep wondering how many LAC's have to be dropped from the complement in order to have room to store all these alternative weapon modules. I rather think that most commanders would rather have (say) 5 complete squadrons than 3 squadrons and a batch of modules to be swapped around IF there's time, and IF the single squadron that's equipped to meet a particular threat can hold off the enemy long enough for the other two to be rearmed.
Cheers
John

kzt wrote:

darrell wrote:You can't use the graser torpedo as a basis for size, there is too many differences.

First, the duration of fire is a full three seconds vs a fraction of a second for a shipboard unit.

Second, the entire graser torpedo is 3,000 tons, the graser head is just a fraction of that.

Nope. Graser Tops are BIG. They are too big to fit into the missile pods bays of the Sharks. 3000 tons is vaguely missile pod scale based on the what most commenters here have written.

David was very clear that the graser alone was about 3000 tons. I suspect you are dealing with a LAC scale weapon, in the 10-20K ton range, which is why the sharks had a jury-rigged rail system bolted onto the exterior of the ship to carry a few tops each.

Ammunition storage is a primary factor on the size of the graser torpedo. If the graser torpedo was 20K tons, an SD would not be able to store more than about 150 of them, even if it had no standard missiles. If the graser torpedo was 3,000 tons, an SD would be able to store 500 of them and still have room for a conventional missile supply. on the order of 18,000.

John Prigent wrote:Darrell, I'm thinking about the space needed to store the actual modules - not the space needed for ammunition to refill them after use. Even if stowed fully loaded, each module is going to take up space that was previously used for those reloads - and I don't see how the interchangeable module can NOT be bigger than the ammo load that fits inside it.
Cheers
John

darrell wrote:ammunition storage should be about the same for both single use and component LAC's.

With three types of weapons packs, presuming that a LAC's offensive weaponry is 25% of it's hull volume, storage for the 10 unused weapons packs should be less than 50% of the full LAC. In other words, instead of 112 LAC's in a SD-CLAC, you would have 80 LAC's.

I do agree there is a trade off. with current LAC's and LAC carriers you can have more total LAC's, but they are probably of mixed types. For example, 64 katanana's plus 32 shrikes & 24 ferrets.

With a component LAC you would have fewer total LAC's, (112 vs 80) but you can optimize all your LAC's for the mission (80 vs 32-60)

I do agree that they would need a new carrier, so I don't expect them to show up in fleet actions for a few years, but would be a simple matter for the hauptman cartel to build stand alone bolt together "LAC bases" for places like the Talbert cluster.

darrell wrote:No way would I accept that the graser torpedo was LAC sized. nothing near that size could be fired by any conceivable """LAUNCH TUBE"""

Duckk wrote:

Ammunition storage is a primary factor on the size of the graser torpedo. If the graser torpedo was 20K tons, an SD would not be able to store more than about 150 of them, even if it had no standard missiles. If the graser torpedo was 3,000 tons, an SD would be able to store 500 of them and still have room for a conventional missile supply. on the order of 18,000.

Check your math again. You're wildly off on your numbers here.

Duckk wrote:

Ammunition storage is a primary factor on the size of the graser torpedo. If the graser torpedo was 20K tons, an SD would not be able to store more than about 150 of them, even if it had no standard missiles. If the graser torpedo was 3,000 tons, an SD would be able to store 500 of them and still have room for a conventional missile supply. on the order of 18,000.

Check your math again. You're wildly off on your numbers here.

darrell wrote:I stand by my statement that you would not be able to store more than 150 graser torpedo's on a lenard detweiler if a graser torpedo is 20K tons.

Weird Harold wrote:Do you know something about the size of the Lenny Dets the rest of don't?

The first wave of each attack consisted of a weapon which was as much a fundamental breakthrough, in its own way, as the Manticoran introduction of the multidrive missile: a graser torpedo which used its own variant of the spider drive. It was a large and cumbersome weapon, with the same trilateral symmetry as the Shark-class ships which had launched it, and for the same reasons.
The torpedo's size made fitting it into magazines and actually firing it awkward, to say the least, and the Sharks had never been intended to deploy it operationally. For that matter, the Sharks themselves had never been supposed to be deployed "operationally." The Leonard Detweiler class, which had been intended to carry out this operation, had been designed with magazines and launch tubes which would make it possible to stow and fire torpedoes internally, but none of the Detweilers were even close to completion, and it had required the development of an ingenious external rack system to allow the Sharks to use it for Oyster Bay.
For all its size, it was also a slow weapon. It was simply impossible to fit a spider drive capable of more than a few hundred gravities' acceleration into something small enough to make a practical weapon. As compensation, however, its drive had almost as much endurance as most of the galaxy's recon drones, which gave it an impressive absolute range. And a large percentage of the torpedo's volume had been reserved for systems which had nothing at all to do with propulsion. Whereas the Royal Manticoran Navy had concentrated on improving the efficiency of its standard laser heads, Daniel Detweiler's R&D staff had taken another approach. They'd figured out how to squeeze what amounted to a cruiser-grade graser projector into something small enough to deploy independently.
The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there'd never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing