Somtaaw wrote:
That's not an advantage, even missiles know (more or less) where your ships are.... if you suddenly turn your wedges off, because your decoys that are say only 2 or 3 million km ahead of you are finally in position, then missiles are simply going to IGNORE the decoys because they have enough processing power to know ships can't suddenly move 2 or 3 million km from where they should be. That's part of the reason decoys were kept on tethers, not just because of power issues but because there literally was no point to putting a decoy more than a couple hundred km away. Even the full up Ghost Rider derived Lorelei decoy's were at best a wedge width or two away, that's pathetically close compared to chucking decoys somewhere downrange.
If the EWO was stupid enough not to place the drones to cover the emissions of the real ship, and was also stupid enough not to max-out the real ships' ECM while the missiles are getting blinded, then yes, I'd agree that the incoming missiles might ignore the 'obvious' and nearer targets and fly past them to hit the obvious ships farther away. Of course, the EWO was stupid enough to not establish the drones as valid threats early in the conflict so the enemy can easily identify them as fake targets.
A competent EWO however would activate the drone capability early on, place the pod-drones in such a way that the fake emissions will hide the real ship/s, synchronize the real ship/s' ECM with the defensive Dazzlers and 'hit me' mode of the pod-drones such that recently blinded missiles on AI mode will have the least amount of desire to go looking for 'possible' targets hiding behind inviting targets right in front of them.
I'm quite sure that if somebody created doctrine for the use of these defensive pods, all the things that need to be done for their proper use would be covered.
The second any hostile, incoming shipkillers start exploding any of your "silent running" pods just got proximity disabled at best, or outright destroyed. This is the whole point behind "use 'em or lose 'em" mentality that existed both pre-podlayers and that even with podlayers stacking huge salvo's, they still fire well before incoming fire has a chance to detonate first (thus disabling the pods you want to fire).
If I'm not mistaken, missiles by default go for the throat and kilt aspects of the wedge and since the kilt is wider, that's where most of them try to go boom. Kilt of the wedge, pods launched astern, lots and lots of fusion explosions, formula for proximity kills no matter what you do.
MOBILE defensive pods need not be anywhere near that area. They can be millions of kilometers away.
Despite the numerous quotes from Hamish Alexander, Admiral Caparelli, Admiral Givens, and even the SLN's ONI paranoic in chief Daud al-Fanudahi outright stating (paraphrased because I really don't feel like digging up every single quote they've made) "for the next 3 to 5 T-years, we[Manticore] would run wild and nothing the Sollies can do would stop us". Bolded the key part there, and in case you seem to be mistaken about exactly what a T-year is, it's a standard Earth year, 3 to 5 of them to be exact. Over 1000 Earth days, or if you want to get that technical, 26000+ hours even if the Solly scientists worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week before the SLN could even think about laying down new missile lines of their own.
One company was able to build the semi-MDM Cataphract. Imagine what hundreds of planets's worth of scientists and engineers can do.
True, it will take time for the SLN to get up to par with all the current GA warfighting tech but in the case of MDMs, they already have a leg up with existing samples from Technodyne.
They won't have the targeting capability of GA ships, but the SL is so large that they can waste huge salvos just to make up for the tech disadvantage. Quantity is a quality of its own.
even Ghost Rider [strikethrough]drones[/strikethrough] decoys that are so big they can be launched from SD internal launchers, can still be pushed out from a destroyers boat bays. They won't be bigger than pinnaces, so you could stack a bunch of them and use the big, exo-suit tractor/pressor equipped powersuits and get them launched in plenty of time to get a shell out before you actually need them. And actually what they were launching out of the SD tubes at Elric were full up decoys, Ghost Rider drones are the scouts, and one was deployed in Monica by a single work team aboard the freighter Terekhov borrowed and deployed in short order.
So going through all those is better than limpeting a couple of pods on the hull and detaching them when the enemy is detected. How long would that 'work around' with big missiles thru the boatbay going to take? How many of them are you going to stash in the boat bay? They weigh tons and moving them around even with tools isn't going to be easy, especially when ship's crews are already too few for adhoc things like these.
You have it rather backwards, why use pods to launch Dazzlers, when pods already fire generally larger missiles than most ships can possibly launch internally. The smallest pods that Manticore deploys, fire Mk 16's, which are if memory serves cruiser weight missiles. Too large for pre-Rolands to fire, and Roland's can only carry a maximum of 240 of them. But with flatpack pods, a Roland could then bring something like 1000 Mk 16's to a fight, and reserve its internal missiels for later in a fight. And if you start launching full up Manticoran capital grade MDM's, you're now firing the largest and most powerful shipkillers in known space, and doing it from any size ship to boot.
You already answered the question. Rolands only have 240 Missiles. Why should you allocate a bigger chunk of those for Dazzlers (that you'll use for defensive purposes) when you can grab a couple of half pods and keep your tubes launching offensive birds?
If it's a one vs one ship duel, smaller ships actually start having the defensive advantage of being able to roll ship far more effectively. This was proven even during the Battle of Blackbird, when then-Commander Theisman took a mostly missile armed destroyer into energy range of two cruisers and a destroyer and still performed a stunning attack by constantly rolling ship to absorb incoming fire on his wedge before rolling down to return fire. With current Manticoran/Grayson doctrine giving smaller ships upsized energy weapons, they also have the firepower to beat larger ships more powerful sidewalls, so a destroyer now isn't helpless in energy range with even a heavy cruiser. Light cruiser's can now sneer at battleships, and god help the poor superdreadnought that thinks it can take on a Haven Sector battlecruiser...
Of course! Drones 3 or 4 million miles away are going to be useless in energy combat! But wait, the drones are supposed to be used for the longer ranged missile combat.
As for GA's lighter ships carrying heavier energy armaments and everything in
BOLD, if any GA light cruiser is dumb enough to sneer at battleships at energy range, it deserves the destruction it
Any podlayer that stuffs these in also has to worry about how much ammo they'd give up for, at best, a mediocre defense increase at a time they're already more strapped for ammo than non-podlayers. A BCP can run through her pods in what, 15 minutes, while a Nike has enough for I think it was an hour of steady firing. I'll grant you a Nike is 1.4x larger than a Agamemnon (which carries 330 pods normally), so a direct size increase would give a newer BCP 462 pods (divide by 4 for a single pattern gives us 115 patterns) which would take a maximum of 1386 seconds to deploy all of them, 23 minutes worth of fighting. The second you put more than one layer of your defensive pods in, you've sacrificed more offensively than you'd gain defensively and you'd have to put more than one layer in because the first incoming hostile salvo would proximity mission kill any defense pods you dont use but deployed simply to clear the way for your shipkiller pods.
I believe there's a misdirection in the bolded part. The non-pod layer might have longer endurance but, if the battle lasted that long, that means the salvo sizes it was throwing wasn't getting through the enemy defenses, not enough to take the enemy out. Pod layers however may not have the ammo for a long battle but that's because they can throw a lot more missiles per salvo than non-pod layers and if they do, the enemy would surely get hammered.
As for your computation about benefit/cost returns of these defensive pods. 1 pattern of full sized pods = 12 drones. That means an additional 12 targets for the enemy spread their fire. If those 12 drones aren't there, the real ship will be the recipient of 13x the number of missiles (if the enemy was spreading the salvo equally). Guess how long your real ship will survive if all the enemy ships' missiles are targeting it instead of going after 13 targets. If the enemy salvo is big enough, your pod layer isn't even going to have the time to run out of ammunition.
