New Tower system ships.

Eagleeye wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Bigger this time for consideration. Still much smaller than the HAC call it a medium small attack craft.

Tower, an LAC / Keyhole II / Roland.

Roland without Mk16 missiles. Add 6 CM Launchers in place of the 6 Mk16 tubes fore and aft. Add a chase fore and aft pod bay, two or three pods each. Used for maintaining fixing and keeping pods on station.

Each Tower is a full Keyhole II with added CM tubes and DD lasers.

Without the Mk16 magazines and without Hyper generators or Alpha Nodes. Beta squared nodes only. The Tower is shorter and bigger around than a Roland. More powerful Wedge and sidewalls. Carries lots of CM's.

Maybe DDCM?

Correct me if I'm wrong - but as far as I remember, a KH2-module for SD(P)s masses around 25.000 tons - or as much as a Shrike-LAC. I don't know if you can minimize it to a mass that you could put into a 35.000-40.000-Ton MAC (Medium Attack Craft). If the relation between Mass of "Mothership" and Mass of KH2 remains the same, (the KH2 masses around 0.25% of the mass of its mothership) the MAC-KH2-Module had to be around 100 Tons, max. That seem's impossible to me ...

And if you build your MAC around a Roland with its mass of 270.000 Tons or so (as you propose), the KH2 could only have around 600-700 Tons. Maybe as much as 1.500 to 2.000 tons, if you only uses Beta-square-nodes in your MACs). But ... I simply can't see, how you could minimize the necessary hardware enough and still have an effective KH2-platform. Maybe it is possible 50 or 100 years down the road, but in 1923/1924 PD? I don't think so.

A 2nd point: How do you want to transport your Roland-based MAC? You would need a complete new Carrier-class, a C-MAC, and you could only transport a dozen MACs or so in one of them. That, too, is not something I would call effective.

The nature of Manticore's battlecruisers wrote:The original Keyhole-One platform was about the size of a LAC. The more fully developed Keyhole-One platform carried aboard units like the Nike-class battlecruisers is substantially larger, and fitting a ship to carry it costs quite a bit of potential broadside armament space. It also presents some armoring difficulties, since the platform itself has to be armored when it is tractored into its bay on the exterior of the mounting ship, and the bay itself has to be armored in order to protect the ship when the platform is deployed. Because of those considerations, at the moment, no Keyhole-capable ship currently carries more than one platform in each broadside. This would give a squadron of six ships 12 Keyholes, and, especially given the platform's elusiveness and self-defending capability, the RMN regards this as sufficient to guarantee reasonable survivability through redundancy.

Keyhole-Two is another can of worms entirely. First, the platforms themselves are substantially larger. While the final (or, at least, currently final) generation of Keyhole-One is somewhere around 65,000 tons (or darned near the size of a prewar destroyer), Keyhole-Two is even larger. This is because in addition to the requirement that it must retain its light-speed telemetry links for counter-missiles and non-Apollo shipkillers, it must also fit in the dedicated FTL coms used to communicate with the Apollo control missiles. In other words, a Keyhole-Two platform has to be "bilingual," with the capability to perform its Apollo control function in addition to all of the standard Keyhole-One functions, and this inevitably drives size upward. It is also even more heavily defended, since each platform is individually bigger (and more expensive), represents a larger increment of the mounting ship's capabilities, and (because of its size and emission signature) is a less elusive target. The power budget is also substantially greater. A very large percentage of the computer support carried on board by Keyhole-One has to be located inside the mounting ship, which eats into the ship's internal volume. Additional power generation and transmitting equipment is also necessary, which eats even further into internal volume.