FTL missiles

Somtaaw wrote:Well by your own evidence, the absolute smallest DB at 30 ktons, because LAC's are approximately the same size, yet carry the weapons that a DB does not.

War of Honor, Chapter Twenty wrote:Mitchell Clapp had begun his own design process by going back to a blank piece of paper. Rather than designing a starship in miniature, he'd seen it as an opportunity to design a pinnace on the macro scale.
-snip-
He'd started out by accepting a life support endurance of only ninety-six hours rather than the weeks and months which most LAC designers insisted upon.

Pre-Shrike LAC's carried similar sized hydrogen bunkers compared to real starships, which cut into the weapons mass they carried. Which means if LACs and DB's are pretty close to identical sized, LAC single-shot box launchers occupied enough mass to swap out for a hyper generator.

Except as I pointed out earlier the quote from Ashes of Victory that Daryl was using was, confusingly, addressing the minimum size LAC Haven thought you'd need to replicate the initial reported performance of a Shrike using normal LAC design techniques.

No known LAC is actually all that close to that 30 to 50,000 ton range. So the box missile launcher, CMs, and possibly a lighter laser and/or PDLC or two must mass far less than alpha nodes, their corresponding impeller rooms, and a hyper generator (etc?) that a courier carries.

More specifically here's all the LACs I have information handy for, and their source and tonnage.
Ferret-class [HoS] 20,750 tons
Katana-class [HoS] 19,500 tons
Shrike-B-class [HoS] 21,250 tons
Shrike-class [HoS] 20,250 tons
Series 282-class [HoS] 17,750 tons
NNS Wolverine [SftS] 15,000 tons
Highlander-class [HoS] 11,250 tons
Faith-class [HoS] 11,250 tons
Program 13-class [Jaynes] 10,250 tons

The biggest we saw, before the density started going up in the Series 282-class Honor's Warfarer carried in HAE, was the Nuncian Space Force's at 15,000 tons. Far short of 30 - 50k.

Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 16.

Wayfarer was in Walther and gets intercepted by a 55 kton something, with a direct observation she can't possibly be heavily armed and shoehorn a hyper generator and warshawski sails into her hull.

55 kton is a bit small for a destroyer, but Silesia never got the ship creep.

Somtaaw wrote:Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 16.

Wayfarer was in Walther and gets intercepted by a 55 kton something, with a direct observation she can't possibly be heavily armed and shoehorn a hyper generator and warshawski sails into her hull.

55 kton is a bit small for a destroyer, but Silesia never got the ship creep.

I'm sure sure which side you were trying to support with this tidbit.

My reading is Honor assumed that it did have a a hyper generator and warshawski sails into her hull (so not a LAC) and felt fairly secure that Wayfarer wasn't seriously threatened because there wasn't enough displacement to also be heavily armed. If a dispatch boat is 35-40k tons that only leaves 15-20k tons for weapons, firecontorol, sensors, defenses, crew and stations for same, etc. Thought that's not nothing, since LACs manage to mount their basically one-shot sting on less total tonnage than that (not just weapons tonnage)


I suppose it could be read as a raider it must be heavily armed and therefor couldn't have room for hyper capability; making it a giant LAC (which by that displacement I think might be categorized as an old-style Corvette). But if so then Honor's apparent lack of alarm as it moves deeper into weapons range of Wayfarer seem odd (remember Wayfarer which had fairly anemic onboard defenses; even if she could gut an unlucky SD). Still if the Walther authorities were compliant enough I guess it isn't total suicide to play pirate with no ability to flee the system. But being able to run, or at least relocate to lurk in other systems for prey if to many losses in Walther draw outside attention, seems a good thing.


I believe we've seen it said elsewhere that most Pirates used fairly lightly armed ships crammed into the smallest hyper-capable hulls they could get their hands on.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 16.

Wayfarer was in Walther and gets intercepted by a 55 kton something, with a direct observation she can't possibly be heavily armed and shoehorn a hyper generator and warshawski sails into her hull.

55 kton is a bit small for a destroyer, but Silesia never got the ship creep.

I'm sure sure which side you were trying to support with this tidbit.

My reading is Honor assumed that it did have a a hyper generator and warshawski sails into her hull (so not a LAC) and felt fairly secure that Wayfarer wasn't seriously threatened because there wasn't enough displacement to also be heavily armed. If a dispatch boat is 35-40k tons that only leaves 15-20k tons for weapons, firecontorol, sensors, defenses, crew and stations for same, etc. Thought that's not nothing, since LACs manage to mount their basically one-shot sting on less total tonnage than that (not just weapons tonnage)


I suppose it could be read as a raider it must be heavily armed and therefor couldn't have room for hyper capability; making it a giant LAC (which by that displacement I think might be categorized as an old-style Corvette). But if so then Honor's apparent lack of alarm as it moves deeper into weapons range of Wayfarer seem odd (remember Wayfarer which had fairly anemic onboard defenses; even if she could gut an unlucky SD). Still if the Walther authorities were compliant enough I guess it isn't total suicide to play pirate with no ability to flee the system. But being able to run, or at least relocate to lurk in other systems for prey if to many losses in Walther draw outside attention, seems a good thing.


I believe we've seen it said elsewhere that most Pirates used fairly lightly armed ships crammed into the smallest hyper-capable hulls they could get their hands on.

From the SITS shipbook 2, we have the 53,500 ton Gryf class Frigate with a broadside of 6 missile tubes, 1 laser, 1 cm, and 2pds, ans 1 of eah in each hammerhead. It is 324 m long, 38 wide and 22 high, with a crew of 121, and max accel of 529.9 g. It has 136 missiles and 120 CMs.

This is pretty much the definition of the minimum possible hypercapable combatant, And most likely similar to the ship mentioned above ( a second, older frigate class, the Niering class, is also mentioned as being used by the Silesian Navy and Silly SDFs, but no other details were given, so it could also represent that class.)

Could a missile pod that could drop from hyper and launch its missiles be designed in the setting? Probably.

Would it be worth the effort and resources needed to create them? Almost certainly not IMO.

1: IIRC missiles are usually guided using the launching vessel's sensors for most of their attack run because missile sensors are much weaker then ship based ones which means unless they build a warship grade sensor array into the launcher, which would probably up the cost a lot,you are going to have a lot more misses.

2: Unless you don't care about collateral damage you are going to need very detailed data on the system and any ships in it to prevent the missiles from targeting some freighter or passenger liner that happens to come into range.

3: You are screwed if something goes wrong and a missile launched via such a platform hits an inhabited planet. Cue
every major and most minor powers putting your organization or nation at or near the top of their "To Seek and Destroy" list.

4: Since most worthwhile targets aren't going to be hanging around the hyperlimit the targets will usually have plenty of time to jam, decoy, or otherwise neutralize your missiles before they reach attack range and plotting the drive usages of an MDM launched from such a platform will be very complicated.


5: If these missiles are the first wave of an invasion the attacker throws away the element of surprise. Also once knowledge of such weapons becomes common nations will likely start positioning pickets in hyper near their systems to hinder deployment of such weapons. And if memory serves they would only need to picket the alpha band because any such weapon would have to stay in alpha band long enough to recharge the hyperdrive if dropped from a higher band. Unless you fit the pods with multiple hyperdrives which both increases cost and power demand.

I basically agree with the rest of your post so I'm just quoting the bit I wanted to respond to.

Roguevictory wrote:And if memory serves they would only need to picket the alpha band because any such weapon would have to stay in alpha band long enough to recharge the hyperdrive if dropped from a higher band. Unless you fit the pods with multiple hyperdrives which both increases cost and power demand.

Actually the description of Honor's convoy coming into Grayson in HotQ makes it sound like you can do a continuous transition down through multiple hyperbands.

The Honor of the Queen: Ch 5 wrote:Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

This isn't totally definitive, but given the cycle times for SDs 4 minutes seems too quick for even a CA to recycle its generator after discharging it in a jump; much less the much larger freighters that were in company.


Now I'm not sure if you can abort halfway through or if you're locked in once you start the drop, but if you want to do a smooth drop from say the Delta bands to n-space you appear to be able to. (Not sure it works the same way going up )

David says somewhere that you don't need to cycle the hyperdrive to change bands.

AFAIK the only time hyper generator cycling comes into play is shortly after dropping out of hyper and you want to go back into hyper.

Queue any scouts, admiral Pierre's battle cruisers in TSVW attacking Bellerophon, or admiral Diamoto's battle cruisers that watched the Junction during BoMa.

Any other time, hyper generator charge time seems neglible, or they change bands easily. Such as the Artemis during Honor Among Enemies, after Wayfarer intercepted and led the wadi version EW drone. Artemis dropped two full bands with a shot up, ultra damaged generator, then climbed 2 bands to pickup the LACS before dropping all the way back down.

Although if memory serves, wasn't the Battle of Sellers Shear ret conned, because they were using missiles, and changing hyper bands? Maybe not the greatest example.

Somtaaw wrote:AFAIK the only time hyper generator cycling comes into play is shortly after dropping out of hyper and you want to go back into hyper.

Queue any scouts, admiral Pierre's battle cruisers in TSVW attacking Bellerophon, or admiral Diamoto's battle cruisers that watched the Junction during BoMa.

Any other time, hyper generator charge time seems neglible, or they change bands easily. Such as the Artemis during Honor Among Enemies, after Wayfarer intercepted and led the wadi version EW drone. Artemis dropped two full bands with a shot up, ultra damaged generator, then climbed 2 bands to pickup the LACS before dropping all the way back down.

Although if memory serves, wasn't the Battle of Sellers Shear ret conned, because they were using missiles, and changing hyper bands? Maybe not the greatest example.

No, that one was ok because there were in a rift; an area of hyperspace between grav waves. Impellers, missiles, sidewalls, decoys, etc all work fine in hyper except when you're actually in a grav wave.

The one that got (partially, and incompletely) retconned was also it that book, but it was the unannounced drill Hawkwing ran to shake up Artimis (and the rest of the convoy). Originally it had her bringing up sidewalls, launching tractored decoys, and firing missiles while still deep in a grav wave. The partial recon switched the missiles to energy mounts but didn't fix the sidewalls or decoys.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:AFAIK the only time hyper generator cycling comes into play is shortly after dropping out of hyper and you want to go back into hyper.

Queue any scouts, admiral Pierre's battle cruisers in TSVW attacking Bellerophon, or admiral Diamoto's battle cruisers that watched the Junction during BoMa.

Any other time, hyper generator charge time seems neglible, or they change bands easily. Such as the Artemis during Honor Among Enemies, after Wayfarer intercepted and led the wadi version EW drone. Artemis dropped two full bands with a shot up, ultra damaged generator, then climbed 2 bands to pickup the LACS before dropping all the way back down.

Although if memory serves, wasn't the Battle of Sellers Shear ret conned, because they were using missiles, and changing hyper bands? Maybe not the greatest example.

No, that one was ok because there were in a rift; an area of hyperspace between grav waves. Impellers, missiles, sidewalls, decoys, etc all work fine in hyper except when you're actually in a grav wave.

The one that got (partially, and incompletely) retconned was also it that book, but it was the unannounced drill Hawkwing ran to shake up Artimis (and the rest of the convoy). Originally it had her bringing up sidewalls, launching tractored decoys, and firing missiles while still deep in a grav wave. The partial recon switched the missiles to energy mounts but didn't fix the sidewalls or decoys.

Ok, I wasn't sure which combat segment got retconned, I was sure it was the Selker Sheer battle.