Somtaaw wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:Now if the SLN Admiral only has SDMs he's still screwed unless he takes advantage of the LACs reduced acceleration to run away.
This coming from the guy with the spreadsheets, exactly how many pods would a Shrike or Katana have to be towing, to reduce it's top acceleration from the ~800 gravity range, to somewhere a Frontier Fleet battlecruiser's going to be able to "run away" from the LACs?
I'm thinking, only about oh, 30 or 40 pods limpeted up against the LAC's, so we'd need a freighter or a full up podnought shadowing the CLAC to deploy enough pods that they'd be notciably slowed enough, FF can actively maneuver whether accepting action at all, or flat running away.
Remember LACs (even modern
Shrikes,
Ferrets and
Katanas) are small in comparison to hyper-capable ships, so they can't limpet pods against their hulls. They lack the
wedge depth that larger ships have (you can get around the tractor problem by putting tractors in the pods, but the lack of wedge depth to have a pod limpeted against the hull is driven by the size of the pod and the ship's size):
Echoes of Honor, Chapter 33 wrote:In keeping with that recommendation, she'd also argued that the retention of their own ships' full acceleration capability was more important than putting the maximum possible number of pods in space. That liveliness in maneuver, after all, was the one advantage battleships held over ships of the wall, and she refused to throw it away. So rather than tow the pods astern, she'd suggested, they should take a page from the Manties' book in the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin and tractor the pods inside the wedges of their battleships, where they would have no effect on their acceleration curves. Their battlecruisers could tractor only two pods inside their wedges, and the heavy cruisers and destroyers lacked the tractors and wedge depth to tractor any inside at all, but that was fine with her.
Some of the squadron ops officers had hit the deckhead at the very suggestion, but she had simply waited them out with a cold, almost mechanical patience. And when the hubbub had settled, she'd pointed out that battleships had been designed as general purpose workhorses, which meant, among other things, that they had more tractors on a ton-for-ton basis than any other ship type in the Republican order of battle. Each of them could tractor eleven pods— more than most superdreadnoughts, actually—tight in against their hulls. That meant that when they actually deployed them, they could still put over forty-two hundred missiles into space at once, with another three hundred eighty from the battlecruisers. In the meantime, their entire task force's ability to maneuver at full acceleration would not only make them fleeter of foot but might actually convince the defenders that they hadn't brought along any pods until it was too late.
So it takes at least a battlecruiser size hull to have the wedge depth in order to tractor a pod tight in against its hull.
And for the actual numbers on how towing pods degrade a
Shrike's acceleration:
David Weber on Shrikes wrote:On the electronics front, the new LACs have EW (and especially ECM) capabilities superior to most light cruisers. Coupled with their much smaller impeller signatures, which are already much less readily detectable than a DD's, that makes them far more stealthy than any other warship yet built.
A SHRIKE mounts 3 tractors, which means it can tow up to 3 missile pods, but only with severe degradation of its acceleration curve. A SHRIKE with a single pod suffers a 20% reduction in accel; one with 2 pods suffers a 50% reduction; and one with 3 pods suffers an 80% reduction (max military power accel of only 127.2 gees). In addition, even a single pod on tow requires drive power levels which make stealth very difficult even with all the EW built into the new class.
Boldface and underlined text in the above quotes is my emphasis.
holy crap, that's a massive reduction if it's true. Even the older designs, like the Reliant Honor used at Hancock Station could tow something like 10 pods without reducing her accel unacceptably. I don't have access to my books atm, so I cannot confirm quantity of towed pods, nor just how much accel she gave up to do so.
We could handicap the RMN and make them tow the pods in with a tug... and Foraker's donkey system. Still need the LACs to make sure there's no golden BB shots on our big boy, but Capn' SD-puller can launch at say 45-50 million km with our SD(p) fire control equipped CLAC handling the merchandise.