Scenario of War with the League

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:Then again, the RMN/GSN can't figure out what a power cord is, so... Maybe Bolts are ultra advanced!

The SLN is known for its innovative and imaginative officers.

But consider what would happen if you tried to bolt a Russian Sunburn onto a USN Little Crappy Ship. You might be able to fire the damn thing, but you are not going to be able to program the guidance module using the ships fire control system, or that if any USN vessel without a bunch of special purpose built for this function dedicated hardware to do the required conversions.

Weird Harold wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The enemy will of course realize there are more missiles out there but they can't just saturate space with nukes.

The enemy can't saturate space with nukes, but you can seed enough pods to take out SDs throughout your system so that it doesn't matter what vector the enemy approaches on?

Space is big and with SDMs, you have to have an enormous number of pods to have any point in your system within range of just a single pod.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:No. Laser heads use a lensing system to focus the bomb energy--without it the lasers simply wouldn't have the punch to be worthwhile. While they obviously can kill a pod at 30,000km on the right axis that doesn't mean they can kill every pod within 30,000km.

Um, yeah it does. The lasers weren't what were killing the pods. The lasers were aiming for the ships.

It was the collateral damage from the exploding nukes, that power those lasers, that was killing the pods. From 6 million km away you didn't have the accuracy or sensor reading to hit a towed pod with one of the 6 (?) lasers from a laser head except by pure luck. And yet we're told any towed pods (that weren't fired off before the first salvo of laser heads arrived) were wiped out by proximity kills. (And a laser in a vacuum can't generate a proximity kill; do the damage must be coming from the nuclear explosion 30,000, or so, km away)

Relax wrote:Hrmm mabye because the engineers who built the pods weren't stupid and took preexisting SLN C&C hardware and integrated it into the pods... "Mounting"... It is called a tractor. There is no "mount". IF there was, yea, it is really hard to bolt something on a ship... Really advanced stuff, bolts...

Then again, the RMN/GSN can't figure out what a power cord is, so... Maybe Bolts are ultra advanced!

War of Honor, Chapter 43 wrote:"Yes, Your Grace," Brigham confirmed, and Honor nodded. Royalist was a Reliant-class ship, like Honor's own one and only battlecruiser command, HMS Nike. The Reliants were no longer the latest, most modern ships in the Royal Navy's inventory, but they remained large and powerful units, capable of taking on anything below the wall, and they'd had priority for refits and upgrades.
"He and his division were picketing the Walther System, over in the Breslau Sector. They'd been on station there for just under five days when an Andermani cruiser squadron entered the system. As per your orders, Ellis transmitted a warning to the Andies to stay clear of his ships."

***Snip***

"Apparently," Brigham continued, "the Andies weren't impressed by his warning. They split up into two four-ship divisions and started maneuvering to sandwich Ellis between them. According to his report, he was inclined to play tag with them in order to maintain our position on freedom of navigation, but he'd deployed his long-range recon drones, and one of them got close enough to pull a clear visual up the kilt of one Andie wedge. It saw this, Your Grace."
The chief of staff handed over a memo board, and Honor keyed the flatscreen display alive. Unfortunately, its image was too tiny for her to make out any details, so she pressed another control and activated the holographic display, instead. The much larger "light sculpture" version of the imagery appeared above the board, and she frowned. There was something odd about it. . . .
"What are those things?" she murmured, mostly to herself, and felt Nimitz raising his head on the back of her chair to gaze at the imagery with her as he tasted her intent curiosity. Then her lips tightened.
"Those are missile pods," she answered herself, and looked up at Brigham with arched eyebrows.
"More precisely, Your Grace, according to Ellis—and George's first run at the data agrees with him—those are half missile pods. It looks like they sawed a conventional pod in half lengthwise and bolted the resulting abortion onto the ship right at the upper turn of the hull."
"My God." Honor looked back at the imagery and did a quick mental estimate. Assuming that the spacing of the handful of undersized pods she could see was maintained uniformly for the length of the ship between its hammerheads, then the cruiser floating before her had to have mounted at least thirty-five or forty of them. "What about the lower turn?" she asked.
"We don't know, Your Grace. Let's face it, Royalist was dead lucky to get as much as she did. If I had to guess, though, I'd guess they probably mounted them top and bottom both. If it were me, that's certainly what I would have done, and I think we have to assume the Andies are at least as smart as I am." She smiled with absolutely no humor. "Assuming they are top and bottom, George and I estimate they probably have between sixty and eighty of them in each broadside. That gives them a maximum salvo throw weight of between three hundred and four hundred birds."
Honor's lips pursed in a silent whistle of dismay. No non-pod ship in her order of battle could even come close to that heavy a broadside. And mounting the pods directly onto the hull of the ship also put them inside the cruiser's impeller wedge and sidewalls, protecting them from the proximity "soft kills" which threatened pods deployed behind ships on tractors. Which meant the ship would be much freer of the "use them or lose them" constraints which normally affected pods deployed by light and medium combatants.
"Unless they've upgraded their fire control suites massively," she thought out loud, "no ship this size could manage a salvo that heavy."
"No, Your Grace," Brigham agreed. "They wouldn't have the telemetry links, even if they could see past the wedge interference of that many missiles to guide them in the first place. But if they use them right, they can probably fire broadsides of up to fifty, maybe even sixty, missiles each. Assuming that there's some way for them to see around the pods themselves, that it is."
"I see your point." Honor rubbed the tip of her nose in thought. The long row of pods was mounted well clear of the cruiser's standard weapon decks. As Mercedes had observed, they were carried at the turn of the hull, where the central spindle of a warship curled over into the relatively flat top and bottom of her hull. Those areas, protected by the impenetrable roof and floor of her wedge, were effectively unarmored. And they were also where most warships mounted additional active sensor arrays for their missile defenses and offensive fire control. The main arrays would be clear, but not the supporting ones used to manage individual missile telemetry links or for dedicated laser cluster fire control. Which meant that the Andie's pods almost certainly had to be interfering with her ability to see her targets . . . not to mention incoming fire.
"I'll bet you these things are designed to jettison," she told Brigham. "Probably mounted on some sort of external hard point."

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:Then again, the RMN/GSN can't figure out what a power cord is, so... Maybe Bolts are ultra advanced!

The SLN is known for its innovative and imaginative officers.

But consider what would happen if you tried to bolt a Russian Sunburn onto a USN Little Crappy Ship. You might be able to fire the damn thing, but you are not going to be able to program the guidance module using the ships fire control system, or that if any USN vessel without a bunch of special purpose built for this function dedicated hardware to do the required conversions.

Vince wrote:

Relax wrote:Hrmm mabye because the engineers who built the pods weren't stupid and took preexisting SLN C&C hardware and integrated it into the pods... "Mounting"... It is called a tractor. There is no "mount". IF there was, yea, it is really hard to bolt something on a ship... Really advanced stuff, bolts...

Then again, the RMN/GSN can't figure out what a power cord is, so... Maybe Bolts are ultra advanced!

Bolts (and by inference power cords) have been invented in the Honorverse for missile pods by the IAN

Jonathan_S wrote:And yet we're told any towed pods (that weren't fired off before the first salvo of laser heads arrived) were wiped out by proximity kills. (And a laser in a vacuum can't generate a proximity kill; do the damage must be coming from the nuclear explosion 30,000, or so, km away)

Loren Pechtel wrote:No. Laser heads use a lensing system to focus the bomb energy--without it the lasers simply wouldn't have the punch to be worthwhile. While they obviously can kill a pod at 30,000km on the right axis that doesn't mean they can kill every pod within 30,000km.

Jonathan_S wrote:Um, yeah it does. The lasers weren't what were killing the pods. The lasers were aiming for the ships.

It was the collateral damage from the exploding nukes, that power those lasers, that was killing the pods. From 6 million km away you didn't have the accuracy or sensor reading to hit a towed pod with one of the 6 (?) lasers from a laser head except by pure luck. And yet we're told any towed pods (that weren't fired off before the first salvo of laser heads arrived) were wiped out by proximity kills. (And a laser in a vacuum can't generate a proximity kill; do the damage must be coming from the nuclear explosion 30,000, or so, km away)

Loren Pechtel wrote:You're missing the lensing system. It can't focus the bomb's energy perfectly (if it could there would be no reason for the laser rods at all) but it channels it into a pretty small segment of the sky--the segment where those missile pods are.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:No. Laser heads use a lensing system to focus the bomb energy--without it the lasers simply wouldn't have the punch to be worthwhile. While they obviously can kill a pod at 30,000km on the right axis that doesn't mean they can kill every pod within 30,000km.

Jonathan_S wrote:Um, yeah it does. The lasers weren't what were killing the pods. The lasers were aiming for the ships.

It was the collateral damage from the exploding nukes, that power those lasers, that was killing the pods. From 6 million km away you didn't have the accuracy or sensor reading to hit a towed pod with one of the 6 (?) lasers from a laser head except by pure luck. And yet we're told any towed pods (that weren't fired off before the first salvo of laser heads arrived) were wiped out by proximity kills. (And a laser in a vacuum can't generate a proximity kill; do the damage must be coming from the nuclear explosion 30,000, or so, km away)

Loren Pechtel wrote:You're missing the lensing system. It can't focus the bomb's energy perfectly (if it could there would be no reason for the laser rods at all) but it channels it into a pretty small segment of the sky--the segment where those missile pods are.

[unnested]
Sorry, I misunderstood. You meant the grav "lensing" system that focusing the nuclear blast forwards; not the laser lensing that focuses the laser beams.

That's a good point, the majority of the nuke's blast is getting projected in a more concentrated cone forwards. So the EMP or whatever from the laser head's nuke probably looks more like a shotgun blast than a grenade blast.
It can kill pods up to 30,000 km away, but probably only in a 60-90 degree cone; not in a 360 sphere.

Still if we assume a 60 degree cone that's every pod at 30,000 km within a roughly 942,531,332 sq-km circular area. OTOH, if I didn't screw the match up, big as that is that's still only 1/12th the surface area of the entire 30,000 km radius sphere.
So yes, you'd need more nukes to 'plow the road' of probably pods - but still doable should you be able to make reasonable guesses as to where those pods would have to be.