Javelin/Cataphract

Relax wrote:So, according to Cataphract logic, Vipers should be carrying Capital grade laser heads... Making LAC's the ultimate offensive weapon system. Fire from stealth and return into stealth without ever being fired upon... Somehow if this were true, there should be a massive rearmament program for all LAC's changing out missile tubes for the slightly larger size.

For rather large values of "slightly" given that the warhead is about half of the missile http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/F ... -465723413

Also once the enemy knows about them LAC stealth can be greatly degraded so they can't sneak in close enough to make your idea effective, especially as they would now be high priority targets. Plus there is the time requirement for getting the LACs into strike range

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:On another note:

It is rather odd that a CM drive can magically house a DD grade laser warhead, a Cruiser weight warhead and a capital grade warhead without changing its drive... Looking at drawings of a missile it would appear that ~1/2-2/3's of the volume(mass) of a missile is its warhead on an MK-16 drawing. That would equate to roughly 55tons(equivalent to Capital grade laser head) and yet it is still a CM drive in SLN parlance??? In fact, one would have to argue that the Capital grade SLN warhead would be larger as they do not have the grav tech 2X+ multiplication factor of the MK-16G.

Really a CM drive moving a 50+ton warhead? It would make far more sense for the drive to change on the larger missile to the point where it is just a full power Javelin drive to MOTIVATE said 50+ ton warhead, but due to size constraints cannot fit more capacitors on the missile. Of course a Javelin can only attain its high rate of acceleration for 60s... not 75s...

For what it's worth Manticore's new 4-stage system defense Apollo's use a CM drive to (as far as I know) push an even larger package; the entire 4-drive Mk-23F with it's microfusion power plant and it's SD+ grade laserhead. Compared to that pushing a detached 2nd stage with an SD grade laserhead should be a snap.

So, despite the fact that I've also speculated about maximum sizes that CM drives can push, it looks like there may not be size limits on them. (Wish I'd thought of this counter example earlier, before making guesses that it shoots down).

We do not know about the 4 stage missile other than it has... 4 stages. I took the higher acceleration ability to mean, get it up to velocity/range and then last stage has ability like any other stage to enable maximum acceleration at startup.

Though, I thought compensator field size was the limit for a drive... yet we have CM's compensator fields being enlarged... If they can be enlarged to such an extent wouldn't they have been better off shrinking it and obtaining a higher acceleration or longer run time from a CM perspective? I would 100% agree if the drive in question was "down tuned" enabling it to hold a Capital laser head. So, does this mean that the MALIGN CM is actually ~~~ equivalent to the Viper?

Relax wrote:It is rather odd that a CM drive can magically house a DD grade laser warhead, a Cruiser weight warhead and a capital grade warhead without changing its drive... Looking at drawings of a missile it would appear that ~1/2-2/3's of the volume(mass) of a missile is its warhead on an MK-16 drawing. That would equate to roughly 55tons(equivalent to Capital grade laser head) and yet it is still a CM drive in SLN parlance??? In fact, one would have to argue that the Capital grade SLN warhead would be larger as they do not have the grav tech 2X+ multiplication factor of the MK-16G.

The viper has the same engine and frame as the CM.

The caparact removes the engine and mounts it onto a new frame. Therefore, the second stage of the caparact is much bigger than the CM, and that is how it is able to put a bigger warhead on the missile.

darrell wrote:

Relax wrote:It is rather odd that a CM drive can magically house a DD grade laser warhead, a Cruiser weight warhead and a capital grade warhead without changing its drive... Looking at drawings of a missile it would appear that ~1/2-2/3's of the volume(mass) of a missile is its warhead on an MK-16 drawing. That would equate to roughly 55tons(equivalent to Capital grade laser head) and yet it is still a CM drive in SLN parlance??? In fact, one would have to argue that the Capital grade SLN warhead would be larger as they do not have the grav tech 2X+ multiplication factor of the MK-16G.

The viper has the same engine and frame as the CM.

The caparact removes the engine and mounts it onto a new frame. Therefore, the second stage of the caparact is much bigger than the CM, and that is how it is able to put a bigger warhead on the missile.

Compensator field... Look up its limitations and what creates it. Suggest pearls and also IFF, More than Honor appendix.

EDIT: Power available is proportional to compensator field size. An efficient compensator field will hug the outline of a missile.
EDIT: Why an 8Mton freighter is a volume, not exactly a tonnage persay.

Grashtel wrote:Also once the enemy knows about them LAC stealth can be greatly degraded so they can't sneak in close enough to make your idea effective, especially as they would now be high priority targets. Plus there is the time requirement for getting the LACs into strike range

Yes, and no. Most of the time LACs are detected prior to reaching attack range, is because they were forced into maneuvers that were too high acceleration for their stealth to keep them concealed. This is the same problem that occured during the opening of the second haven war at Trevor's Star, the Grayson force coming in behind Giscard were forced to come in just slightly too fast and they couldn't bring Giscard to a decisive fight.

If the LACs have the time, they'll get much closer, perhaps even into attack range before the enemy spots them because ton for ton, nothing has more ECM than modern LACs do. But if you're forced to accelerate too high, the best your EW can do is try to distract hostile missiles, than to keep you in a stealth mode.

Relax wrote:Compensator field... Look up its limitations and what creates it. Suggest pearls and also IFF, More than Honor appendix.

You mean like this pearl?

Missile wedges use a slightly different variant of impeller technology. They don't use inertial compensators at all. Or, rather, the minimal compensator effect needed to permit them to accelerate that such velocities without suffering serious damage is built into the nodes themselves, and not into a separate compensator. There have been efforts -- quite a few of them -- over the centuries to adapt this type of designed to starships, but without success, primarily because the amount of inertia which can be disposed of is insufficient for a manned vessel. Missile components can be engineered to survive the equivalent of thousands of gravities of acceleration; human beings can't. A portion of all of the man-centuries of research which has gone into trying to find some way to adapt missile propulsion systems to manned vessels did find its way into the "beta-squared" nodes of the RMN, but even Manticoran is still hopelessly far away of finding any way to build compensatorless manned vessels.

Grashtel wrote:For rather large values of "slightly" given that the warhead is about half of the missile http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/F ... -465723413

Not quite. Perspective is distorting the length of the laserheads. I've given the rough missile lengths in the Bellerophon thread, and the laserhead* lengths are:

Viper - 3m
Mk-13 - 3m
Mk-16 - 5m
Mk-23 - 5m

It works out to slightly less than 1/3 the length of the missile, except in the case of the Viper, in which case, it IS closer to half the overall length.

*Need to make a distinction here: a missile warhead is the nuke that "powers" the laserheads (sphere behind the conical sensors package on the large missiles - buried inside the capacitors of the Viper). The laserheads are the green cylinders that house the lasing rods and assoiated RCS and guidance equipment to point more or less at the target.

It appears that the Missile stages add almost nothing to the length of the missiles. I expected each stage to add meters to the missile length, it appears the missile is just bulked up.

I could see future missile tubes made for Apollo Diameters makes my thinking on the Refit of the old SD and DR so much easier now that I can see the stages only add cm to the length of the missiles. Bore the Missile tubes and Laser Graser tubes out on the Ships and rebuild the inside, taking into account the inner armour scheme and even a Silesian could refit a SD. Missiles are a lot smaller than one assumed.

Lord Skimper wrote:It appears that the Missile stages add almost nothing to the length of the missiles. I expected each stage to add meters to the missile length, it appears the missile is just bulked up.

I could see future missile tubes made for Apollo Diameters makes my thinking on the Refit of the old SD and DR so much easier now that I can see the stages only add cm to the length of the missiles. Bore the Missile tubes and Laser Graser tubes out on the Ships and rebuild the inside, taking into account the inner armour scheme and even a Silesian could refit a SD. Missiles are a lot smaller than one assumed.

For Cataphracts they do add singificant length to the missile; because they graft an entire (apparently detachable) 2ns state powered by a CM drive onto the front of a normal shipkiller.

But if you looked at the line drawings of the true MDMs from the books (or the renderings Maxxq of BuNine has done) you'd notice that MDMs and DDMs don't have seperate stages. They have multiple drive rings, all stacked next to each other at the rear of the missile.

Due to the gravimetric "baffle" technology Manticore invented, covered in the novella within House of Steel, a true MDM can shield the inactive additional drive rings from the normal destructive interference they'd receive from a nearby active impeller ring. So they don't need significant additional length; just enough room for one more drive ring, baffle projectors, and a marginally larger hydrogen tank.



The early Manticoran capacitor powered ones were bigger because 3x the capacitors had to be squeezed in somewhere. And the Havenite ones were bigger than that because their capacitors weren't as energy dense. But Manticore's current microfusion powered MDMs you don't need much extra room at all for the additional hydrogen to run the fusion reactor an extra 6 minutes. So the fusion reactor plus fuel tank is smaller than the capacitors needed to power the missile for even 6 minutes (of a DDM), much less the 9 of an MDM.