FTL missiles

I think you lost a couple of zeros there.

Somtaaw wrote:

darrell wrote:
based on information found in pearls of Weber, I am guessing that the flat pack missile pod is somewhere between 1.5-2K tons.

Old fashioned cruiser missiles were about 100 tons, and capital missiles were even larger. Missile packs prior to Apollo had either 10 or 14 birds, which would be around 1.5-2 tons just for the missiles, since they used capital missiles in early pods. As the pods evolved, they became more and more weight, due to the ever increasing need for reactor power and fire control electronics.

Flatpack pods are probably a minimum of 5 tons because they also had to fit in the tractor emitter, and the even larger reactor to spin up the MDM's, even if it was all inside a smaller pod than previous iterations, or at least differently shaped pod which allowed them to stack more flatly.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/81/1

Medusa-Bs wrote:
The traditional percentage of a waller's tonnage which was used for offensive weapons systems was only about 45% of the ship's total. By the time the designers got done with the Harrington/Medusa-B, that percentage had been increased to over seventy percent. And do you want to know what the result was, children?
Well, I'm glad you asked. The ship carries 50 grasers, 40 missile tubes… and over four times as many missile pods as the original SD(P) design. She carries enough missiles for her broadside armament for a 2-hour engagement at what the RMN defines as "heavy sustained rates of fire" in addition to her pod armament.

If a missile pod is 5K tons and the medusa B has 2,000, that means that the pod rails take up more than 10M space. That would make the medusa B bigger than the current junction forts.

My best calculation on missile size:
Original manticore SDM's were 135tons
manticore Mk-41 capacitor MDM's sacrificed 18% of missile storage = 165 tons
manticore Mk-31 MDM's are 12% smaller = 145 tons

My best guess on Medusa B would have been 9M tons (invictus 8.77M) 70% = 6.3M tons for offensive armament

if the B was built like the invictus, a flat pack pod would be just over 3 tons (3.15) but the medusa B has grasers, missile tubes and missiles in storage for them.

An SD graser is 8 M tons. 16*50=400K *** 6.3M-400K=5.9M
An SD missile tube is 4K tons = 160K *** 5.9M - 160K = 5.74M
2 hours * 50 tubes * 30 second firing rate = 12K missile storage *** 12K*145*1.05= 1.8M *** 5.74M-1.8M = 3.96M

3.96M for 2,000 flat pack pods = just under 2K tons per pod.

You can use standard missiles in hyperspace, just not in a gravity wave. A mycroft? can't recall name of the ghost rider contact nuke could be used for long range even sit and wait attacks on ships in hyperspace. Outside of gravity waves.

Theoretically you could fire MDM in hyperspace have them travel at whatever speed to their destination then crash through the bands to normal space and light up their remaining stages and attack. You can't fire them into hyperspace from normal space but if your ship is in hyperspace there shouldn't be a problem firing them out of hyperspace.

A large hyperspace transport could remotely enter hyperspace crash down and out of hyperspace and fire a huge number of missiles without any crew on board. Targeting might be on board missile only. But a million or two missiles are known to be pretty good at destroying just about anything. Cost would be huge. But it could be done. Perhaps a good way to get rid of old missiles.

Lord Skimper wrote:Theoretically you could fire MDM in hyperspace have them travel at whatever speed to their destination then crash through the bands to normal space and light up their remaining stages and attack.

Well, except for the part where you need a hyper generator to translate out of hyperspace, or indeed shift between bands. And once you add a hyper generator to a missile, you have, oh, something about the size of a dispatch boat.

Missile = 100 tons (roughly)
Dispatch boat = 40,000 tons (roughly)

So your missile will be accelerating ... very ... slowly ... and its drive will probably burn out before it gets outside the safety perimeter. I'd have to chalk this up to another example of why Skimper will not be employed even by the Invincible Solarian League Navy.

tonyz wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Theoretically you could fire MDM in hyperspace have them travel at whatever speed to their destination then crash through the bands to normal space and light up their remaining stages and attack.

Well, except for the part where you need a hyper generator to translate out of hyperspace, or indeed shift between bands. And once you add a hyper generator to a missile, you have, oh, something about the size of a dispatch boat.

Missile = 100 tons (roughly)
Dispatch boat = 40,000 tons (roughly)

So your missile will be accelerating ... very ... slowly ... and its drive will probably burn out before it gets outside the safety perimeter. I'd have to chalk this up to another example of why Skimper will not be employed even by the Invincible Solarian League Navy.

Well.... yeah.

The only way to make a missile fired in hyperspace enter realspace is by fitting it with a hyper generator of its own; without it, the missile will just go splat against the hyper wall.

tonyz wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Theoretically you could fire MDM in hyperspace have them travel at whatever speed to their destination then crash through the bands to normal space and light up their remaining stages and attack.

Well, except for the part where you need a hyper generator to translate out of hyperspace, or indeed shift between bands. And once you add a hyper generator to a missile, you have, oh, something about the size of a dispatch boat.

Missile = 100 tons (roughly)
Dispatch boat = 40,000 tons (roughly)

So your missile will be accelerating ... very ... slowly ... and its drive will probably burn out before it gets outside the safety perimeter. I'd have to chalk this up to another example of why Skimper will not be employed even by the Invincible Solarian League Navy.

well, exept for the part that the missile won't have crew, or a lot of other things, I would place it at half the size of a dispatch boat, or about the size of a shrike.

There is another problem, how do you aim it? When in hyperspace you can't see where your targets are at in normal space, nor can you communicate with it.

tonyz wrote: I'd have to chalk this up to another example of why Skimper will not be employed even by the Invincible Solarian League Navy.

Please don't verbally attack another person. You can say that an idea is silly, but you are in effect calling skimper stupid.

Understand that I am not singling you out specifically, Over the last week I have seen several similar posts and don't want to see this forum degenerate into name calling.

I was very active in the forum 3-4 years ago but left when the forum degenerated into mostly personal attacks. I came back only a couple of months ago and was presently surprised that things had cleaned up, but in the last week I can see things start to degenerate again. If this happens I will leave again.

darrell wrote:well, exept for the part that the missile won't have crew, or a lot of other things, I would place it at half the size of a dispatch boat, or about the size of a shrike.

Life support, consumables and crew take up a smaller percentage than that in a Dispatch Boat. I'd be surprised if more than 20% of a DB's size was crew related.

tonyz wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Theoretically you could fire MDM in hyperspace have them travel at whatever speed to their destination then crash through the bands to normal space and light up their remaining stages and attack.

Well, except for the part where you need a hyper generator to translate out of hyperspace, or indeed shift between bands. And once you add a hyper generator to a missile, you have, oh, something about the size of a dispatch boat.

Missile = 100 tons (roughly)
Dispatch boat = 40,000 tons (roughly)

So your missile will be accelerating ... very ... slowly ... and its drive will probably burn out before it gets outside the safety perimeter.

Oh and don't forget that you lose 92% of your velocity dropping from even the Alpha bands into n-space.
So even if you could get an MDM with a hyper generator attacking from hyper would result in a lower terminal velocity than it the launch ship first dropped into n-space.

Oh and you can't provide fire control until you follow this ship sized missile into n-space.
Plus finally most targets in a system aren't within 16m km or so of the hyper limit. So you need a long long ballistic coast to reach most targets.

All kinds of reasons this isn't an effective method.