Kytheros wrote:Design/Engineering tradeoffs making up the discrepancies in missile drive performance could perhaps be believable for SLN missile drives being slightly better than pre-war Manticoran SDMs.
I'm not sure about that, since the Peeps were shelling out for Solly tech to improve their missiles, and while sensors and EW capabilities are important, better missile drives would have been handy.
Those tradeoffs making the standard SLN deployed missile drives better than 1920 Manticoran missile drives? No, that I don't buy.
Especially since Manticore would have had good access to anything coming from Solarian R&D, between their long-standing practice of exploiting the wormhole network for getting information from everywhere and ties to Beowulf and the Beowulf SDF. Plus the decades of R&D Manticore put into improving their own missile drives.
I could maybe accept that somewhere in the League a somebody made a breakthrough in missile drive performance that Manticore didn't have or hadn't matched/exceeded yet - if it weren't for the fact that the notoriously slow to adopt new things SLN already had these advances in missile drives in standard deployment. Or if they were something brand new to the SLN ... but they're not new.
The People's Republic, under Pierre were desperate for Solarian Navy tech to help even out Manticore's edge. But with missiles, it's more the warhead and EW that makes the missile than just pure range; assuming both sides have loosely equal range missiles.
So pre-MDM's, it wouldn't have really made much difference if your missiles ever so slightly out-ranged mine, if my missiles are both more accurate and hitting harder than yours do. Good samples... CL Fearless vs Sirius, CA Fearless vs Thunder of God, Hancock TG-001 vs Admiral Chin. Three engagements, where Manticore was time and again, scoring far more hits despite firing far smaller salvo, and much smaller missiles than their enemy.
And as someone pointed out, the SLN probably froze missile sizes so they wouldn't have to constantly refit ships in their Reserve. Large performance increases come only at the expense of large size changes. Since the pre-war missiles were size frozen, they could get very tiny increases, like the 'advantage' of a mere 1000 gravs of acceleration for the same runtimes.
But you might also start getting a smaller warhead, in exchange for those better nodes, better seekers without changing the missile's size. After all, look how TIY worked out their MDMs, was Cataphract-B's are Superdreadnought-fired missiles, but they are really only a heavy cruiser/battlecruiser size missile. The Cataphract-C which was the old SD-size missiles became pod-only.