Defensive pods

Jonathan_S wrote:Which works unless the enemy is detected when they attack from ambush. Then you would have your pod rails jammed with defensive pods; which in one respect is nice since you'll spend the first minute or two adding to you defense. But it also means the enemy is free to continue fire at you undistracted.

Why would you stack a hell of a lot of defensive pods which will take you minutes to deploy? The equivalent of the standard 6 MDM pod set out of the rails is 12 half pods, which means you got 12 drones already out. I believe that is more than enough to start off any battle.

Having a minute's worth of defensive pods at the head of your launching rails is stupid and anybody who went out on a combat patrol with that configuration deserves whatever beating he/she is going to receive for being that stupid.

There do seem to be limits to the strategic endurance of externally towing pods. I'm fairly sure that individual warships weren't towing the original pods for weeks through hyper. (And we've been told that the new Mantie pods with integral tractors have fairly limited tractor lendurance. Maybe a day or two. The external towing appears to be a tactical capability; not a strategic one. It wasn't shown onscreen but the implication of what RFC has later said about tow endurance implies that offensive attack with towed pods must have done something like haul the pods almost to the enemies doorstep in freighters of the fleet train then dump them where the warships could tow them a last short hop through hyper to the target.

So due to that it seem smaller ships couple expect to always have a towed supply of you defensive drone-pods available. They'd only have it when defending a friendly system (where the drone-pods could have been freighted in) or making a heavy prepared attack with fleet train (or podlayer) support.

The defensive pods are half the size of standard pods. You can more easily find places where you can limpet/attach half sized pods onto the hull than full sized pods. The Andermani did that with their cruisers way back before they became allied with the RMN.

Somtaaw wrote:But they already do the synchronized Dazzlers in both offensive and defensive roles. By the time my shipkillers + EW are reaching attack range of you, your shipkillers + EW are generally approaching me (and you've probably cut control links). So at the same time my Dazzlers are jamming you, I'm also going to be kicking Dazzlers out to blind your self-guided missiles, except you've cut control links so the fact my Dazzlers are blinding your ship doesn't matter to your missiles.

And you are making the assumption that the drones are going to be in the same distance as the actual ships, that they will not be pushed out to increase the defensive envelope?
Also, are you assuming that battles will be one salvo affairs or maybe like the duel protocol giving each duelist 1 shot each, asking a question then another set of one shots again from each?

Synchronized jamming is almost totally irrelevant at MDM ranges, because without Apollo FTL links, a missile that's reaching attack range is almost always going to have its control link cut because the launching ship can no longer give it commands before it detonates on its own. Haven cut its control links to missiles even earlier than the RMN, but the RHN usually also rotated control links to fire larger salvos than they can actually control to make up for differential in EW, and hit ratios. The RMN only fires salvo's it can actually control, and cuts links at the last moment (before the missiles are too far to even bother sending updates too), to maximize performance.

Re: Cut control links.
1) Will only make the defensive pods' Dazzlers' job easier.
2) You NEVER know when they get cut. Assuming you KNOW when the enemy will do that is not a good mindset. One should always assume the enemy is trying his damned best to hit you and would try to guide his attack birds up to the last second he can.

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Just because I used the word synchronized does not mean the defensive and offensive Dazzlers pop at the same time. Synchronized means coordinated which is not always simultaneous. That means it can be useful even when the target is not using Apollo.

Synchronized use of Dazzlers. Attack Dazzlers pop, ships' sensors blinded, calculate the time when the outgoing control commands from the ships would be arriving to their attacking missiles and then blast the missiles with the defensive dazzlers. Whether you should time the defensive Dazzlers before/during/after the ships sensors' blindness happens would be determined by tests during the doctrine generation stage.
Remember that battles are usually multi-salvo affairs, not a one shot sweep of missiles and then it is over.

Rakhmamort wrote:And you are making the assumption that the drones are going to be in the same distance as the actual ships, that they will not be pushed out to increase the defensive envelope?

I commend the strength of your defense, but these defensive pods are just plain useless to the Grand Alliance, everything they already have is better both offensively and defensively than any known competitor's tech. And said competitor's literally cannot get competing tech in less than 2 years, multiple books have quoted that from Hamish Alexander, to even Daud Al-Fanunandi (or whatever it was again, the ONI paranoic).

But addressing the point here, your defensive pods are basically just standard MDM "half" pods, stuffed with Dazzlers right? Why? Standard MDM shipkiller pods already seem to load at least one Dazzler and one Dragon Teeth + shipkillers, and ships already kick more out to seed their own broadsides and kick out Dazzlers + decoys defensively AT NEED.

Your pod launched decoys & Dazzlers are going to get proximity nuked and disabled unless you're constantly rolling more pods. Which is then interefering with your maximum SHIPKILLER pods, because you have to insert these defensives into your rails periodically.

Plus if you're trying to pull off the super salvo's that Giscard used at Solon, where he shot SIX entire podlaying superdreadnoughts DRY and he still couldn't even kill TWO Manticoran SDP's before Moriarty fired. Except if he'd been "padding" his rails with these notional defensive pods, he'd have needed at least another FOUR SDP's to get the same damage results. And at Solon he was not receiving any fire until the very end, so all those defensive pods would have been unfired for considerable time, which means now you need to pack tractor's into every single one.

Which means you are NOT going to fit 12 pods into the same space as 6 shipkillers, and still fill them with Dazzlers, plus Ghost Rider level decoys, PLUS have every defensive pod also have a tractor beam flatpack style AND a fusion core to power up the Dazzlers and decoys.

Keep in mind that Ghost Rider decoy's are also larger than all MDM's except capital ship versions. Which means these defensive pods would be restricted purely to SDP's, which already carry more of everything than anything else in space, and BCP's wouldn't be able to load them which it might possibly be of value.


Sacrificing offensive firepower, for a pod that only gets in the way, when everything it does, I can do from my ship and do it better to boot.... sorry man, while like I said I commend the strength you're defending this with, it's a bad idea. Useless to the Alliance, and unbuildable by their enemies.

The defensive pods are half the size of standard pods. You can more easily find places where you can limpet/attach half sized pods onto the hull than full sized pods. The Andermani did that with their cruisers way back before they became allied with the RMN.

The IAN pods are attached at the top and bottom of tge hull broadsides, effectively giving the ships a deeper draught than normal. They also created walls blocking any of the equipment mounted on the dorsal or ventral sides from working laterally. Many radars, firecontrol, and comm equipment is located up there. I don't know how the IAN worked around it, but thete us a good reason the RMN did not copy it.

Theemile wrote:The IAN pods are attached at the top and bottom of tge hull broadsides, effectively giving the ships a deeper draught than normal. They also created walls blocking any of the equipment mounted on the dorsal or ventral sides from working laterally. Many radars, firecontrol, and comm equipment is located up there. I don't know how the IAN worked around it, but thete us a good reason the RMN did not copy it.

I think the implication in WoH was that those mounted pods would be fired early in the battle to get a very dense initial salvo off, then be jettisoned to clear the firecontrol and comm equipment.

Rakhmamort wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Which works unless the enemy is detected when they attack from ambush. Then you would have your pod rails jammed with defensive pods; which in one respect is nice since you'll spend the first minute or two adding to you defense. But it also means the enemy is free to continue fire at you undistracted.

Why would you stack a hell of a lot of defensive pods which will take you minutes to deploy? The equivalent of the standard 6 MDM pod set out of the rails is 12 half pods, which means you got 12 drones already out. I believe that is more than enough to start off any battle.

Having a minute's worth of defensive pods at the head of your launching rails is stupid and anybody who went out on a combat patrol with that configuration deserves whatever beating he/she is going to receive for being that stupid.

Sorry I must have misunderstood your intention when you talked about a ship dumping all its defensive pods the moment an enemy was detected, and then letting them keep station with it for the rest of the fight. I assumed that meant that you had to have a significant number of them (if they're going to last for the whole fight) and have them positioned at the aft end of your pod rails (so you can dump them the moment the enemy is sighted)

Those two assumptions let me to think you were thinking of loading up the back couple minutes of the pod rails with your defensive drone-pods.

But clearly I misunderstood - can you please provide more detail on how you were thinking these defensive drone-pods would be loaded and dropped? Thanks

Rakhmamort wrote:The defensive pods are half the size of standard pods. You can more easily find places where you can limpet/attach half sized pods onto the hull than full sized pods. The Andermani did that with their cruisers way back before they became allied with the RMN.

A half sized pod might be capable of being dropped slightly faster than a full sized one, but I doubt they could do so twice as fast. (Maybe if the two halfpods could be bolted together so the pod rails and deployment hardware could always treat it as a full sized pods - so it only split after being dropped.


But I still have reservations about being able to cram in a drive ring, bigger fusion reactor, and reaction mass, into the volume freed up by deleting a couple missiles and trimming a meter or so off the lenght of the dazzlers (dropping them from fusion 3-drive to fusion 1-drive. You still need to fusion plant to drive the ECM jammers, but a missile's fusion reactor is bigger than the capacitors needed to power even an ERM, much less an SDM. So the microfusion plant alone means these SDMs will closer to the volume of a Mk16 DDM than an SDM)

The E wrote:

Theemile wrote:The IAN pods are attached at the top and bottom of tge hull broadsides, effectively giving the ships a deeper draught than normal. They also created walls blocking any of the equipment mounted on the dorsal or ventral sides from working laterally. Many radars, firecontrol, and comm equipment is located up there. I don't know how the IAN worked around it, but thete us a good reason the RMN did not copy it.

I think the implication in WoH was that those mounted pods would be fired early in the battle to get a very dense initial salvo off, then be jettisoned to clear the firecontrol and comm equipment.

Or more likely the other way round, especially if you want to coordinate them with your broadside tubes you'd be much better off jettisoning the half-pods and firing them from astern of you. That clears your sensors and fire control links to handle them the moment they launch, and frees up the broadside arc for the missiles from your tubes.

Somtaaw wrote:
I commend the strength of your defense, but these defensive pods are just plain useless to the Grand Alliance, everything they already have is better both offensively and defensively than any known competitor's tech. And said competitor's literally cannot get competing tech in less than 2 years, multiple books have quoted that from Hamish Alexander, to even Daud Al-Fanunandi (or whatever it was again, the ONI paranoic).

And that is exactly the point. The SLN's combat tech is so far behind RMN's that the GA need not be using their most advanced tech at all. High-tech equipment costs a lot. Imagine if you were using Patriots to shoot down stones launched by catapults. Would that be a cost effective defense?

But addressing the point here, your defensive pods are basically just standard MDM "half" pods, stuffed with Dazzlers right? Why? Standard MDM shipkiller pods already seem to load at least one Dazzler and one Dragon Teeth + shipkillers, and ships already kick more out to seed their own broadsides and kick out Dazzlers + decoys defensively AT NEED.

Wrong. The defensive pod also incorporates Drone equipment. It is not just for throwing short ranged Dazzlers, it's main purpose is to act as a drone, the short ranged Dazzlers are there to make it more effective by blinding the incoming missiles first so they will have to 'look' for a target and then inviting them to hit the pod's fake ship projection.

Your pod launched decoys & Dazzlers are going to get proximity nuked and disabled unless you're constantly rolling more pods. Which is then interefering with your maximum SHIPKILLER pods, because you have to insert these defensives into your rails periodically.

And why should that be a bad thing for equipment that is designed to make the enemy waste missiles on it? That is exactly what the defensive pods are supposed to do. BE THE TARGET. While they are doing that job, the real ships are not the target.

Plus if you're trying to pull off the super salvo's that Giscard used at Solon, where he shot SIX entire podlaying superdreadnoughts DRY and he still couldn't even kill TWO Manticoran SDP's before Moriarty fired. Except if he'd been "padding" his rails with these notional defensive pods, he'd have needed at least another FOUR SDP's to get the same damage results. And at Solon he was not receiving any fire until the very end, so all those defensive pods would have been unfired for considerable time, which means now you need to pack tractor's into every single one.

Why am I going to try to pull off a super salvo? Why is that relevant?

Which means you are NOT going to fit 12 pods into the same space as 6 shipkillers, and still fill them with Dazzlers, plus Ghost Rider level decoys, PLUS have every defensive pod also have a tractor beam flatpack style AND a fusion core to power up the Dazzlers and decoys.

I'll agree with you on that. shipkillers fit into a pod, pods don't fit inside shipkillers.
Current pods already have a fusion plant to spin up the missiles that they are supposed to launch. I don't need to slap one in. If you think about it for one moment, with less missiles to spin up, the defensive pod will need a smaller one.

Keep in mind that Ghost Rider decoy's are also larger than all MDM's except capital ship versions. Which means these defensive pods would be restricted purely to SDP's, which already carry more of everything than anything else in space, and BCP's wouldn't be able to load them which it might possibly be of value.

Also keep in mind that a non-Apollo pod has 10 MDMs. The half pod is only going to launch 4 non-MDM Dazzlers. The space saved from the missile downgrade, plus the space from the 'missing' 5th missile and it's grav launcher is there to use. The Elric level tech had Ghost Rider drone tech on ship launched missiles. That means whatever it was can be put in the space vacated by the 'missing' 5th missile.

If I'm the engineer, I'll just enlarge that 'missing' 5th missile's fusion reactor and use it to power up the 4 Dazzlers. It will also be the power source for the pod's impellers (which would be the 'missing' 5th missile's relocated to the pod itself). The space for the grav driver for the 'missing' 5th missile can be used for additional bunkerage to give the pod/drone more endurance.

Sacrificing offensive firepower, for a pod that only gets in the way, when everything it does, I can do from my ship and do it better to boot.... sorry man, while like I said I commend the strength you're defending this with, it's a bad idea. Useless to the Alliance, and unbuildable by their enemies.

Why would you be sacrificing offensive firepower? Instead of firing off Ghost Rider missile drones and Dazzlers from your ship's tubes for defense, use the pods and continue to throw attack missiles at the enemy. You can only use the ship's tubes for one purpose at a time after all.

The E wrote:

Theemile wrote:The IAN pods are attached at the top and bottom of tge hull broadsides, effectively giving the ships a deeper draught than normal. They also created walls blocking any of the equipment mounted on the dorsal or ventral sides from working laterally. Many radars, firecontrol, and comm equipment is located up there. I don't know how the IAN worked around it, but thete us a good reason the RMN did not copy it.

I think the implication in WoH was that those mounted pods would be fired early in the battle to get a very dense initial salvo off, then be jettisoned to clear the firecontrol and comm equipment.

Which is what you should be doing for these pod/drone hybrid. The drone capability of the pod isn't really going to work well if it is limpeted on the hull when the enemy missiles are doing their attack runs.

So yes, they are attached at the start but you 'jettison' them at the start of combat.

Jonathan_S wrote:Sorry I must have misunderstood your intention when you talked about a ship dumping all its defensive pods the moment an enemy was detected, and then letting them keep station with it for the rest of the fight. I assumed that meant that you had to have a significant number of them (if they're going to last for the whole fight) and have them positioned at the aft end of your pod rails (so you can dump them the moment the enemy is sighted)

Those two assumptions let me to think you were thinking of loading up the back couple minutes of the pod rails with your defensive drone-pods.

But clearly I misunderstood - can you please provide more detail on how you were thinking these defensive drone-pods would be loaded and dropped? Thanks

You didn't misunderstand when the pods are supposed to be deployed. What I don't understand is for somebody who will need 2 minutes worth of defensive pods.
Let me do some math here. In 1 minute, a pod layer can launch 5 (or 6) salvos of pods. That is 5 x 6 MDM pods which means 5 x 12 of the proposed defensive pods. In 2 minutes, that's 120 defensive pods.
1 ship using 120 drones is, I don't know, I don't have the words to describe what the tac officer was thinking or trying to do.

A half sized pod might be capable of being dropped slightly faster than a full sized one, but I doubt they could do so twice as fast. (Maybe if the two halfpods could be bolted together so the pod rails and deployment hardware could always treat it as a full sized pods - so it only split after being dropped.

I've already pointed out that it would be a nice feature. 2 half pods to have the contour of 1 standard pod. Better handling and all that it entails.

But I still have reservations about being able to cram in a drive ring, bigger fusion reactor, and reaction mass, into the volume freed up by deleting a couple missiles and trimming a meter or so off the lenght of the dazzlers (dropping them from fusion 3-drive to fusion 1-drive. You still need to fusion plant to drive the ECM jammers, but a missile's fusion reactor is bigger than the capacitors needed to power even an ERM, much less an SDM. So the microfusion plant alone means these SDMs will closer to the volume of a Mk16 DDM than an SDM)

As I've posted above. The standard non-Apollo MDM pod has 10 missiles. The half pod is going to launch 4 missiles (MDM or not). There is a 'missing' 5th missile and its grav launcher. I did not come up with the number 4 just for kicks. The 5th missile's impellers becomes the pod's impellers, its fusion reactor becomes the pod's reactor (enlarged of course, but not as large as the standard pod's), its Ghost Rider warhead would be in the pod too, probably with more space available for it even if the bunkerage space was increaased.