First New Manticore Ships

kzt wrote:

Star Knight wrote:That’s 7 salvos with 150k missiles before Tourvilles fire arrives and takes out most of his remaining deployed pods fairly quickly.

No. RMN pods are attached to the hull and hence inside the sidewalks and radiation shields and hence immune to the mystical "proximity kill" mechanism.

So Home blows up all the pods the RHN deploys and does some damage, while the return fire does much less damage (as RHN missiles are terrible way out) and has no effect on the RMN pods. I don't see how this can possibly end in a worse outcome.

That's not entirely true. The pods may be tractored against the hull but they still have to be deployed outside the wedge before they can be fired so they would still be vulnerable to proximity hits then.

Rincewind wrote:That's not entirely true. The pods may be tractored against the hull but they still have to be deployed outside the wedge before they can be fired so they would still be vulnerable to proximity hits then.

It's just like they were dropped out of the back of a podlayer. And for some reason (PLOT) nobody in the Honorverse has considered the obvious trick of using continuous fire to use the mysterious "proximity soft kill" mechanism to prevent return fire.

So no, I don't consider that a problem.

kzt wrote:

Rincewind wrote:That's not entirely true. The pods may be tractored against the hull but they still have to be deployed outside the wedge before they can be fired so they would still be vulnerable to proximity hits then.

It's just like they were dropped out of the back of a podlayer. And for some reason (PLOT) nobody in the Honorverse has considered the obvious trick of using continuous fire to use the mysterious "proximity soft kill" mechanism to prevent return fire.

So no, I don't consider that a problem.

Well one reason. Ot to go with continuous fire is if you need to hit more often from the same ships you are hitting with correspondingly fewer missiles. Unless you've got a huge numeric advantage (in which case you don't need continuous fire) you would seem to risk getting all of your diffuse spray if missiles stopped in the CM intercept zone; where they're killed prior to detonation (and presumably too far out to affect anything if they blew just before interception). So s continuous stream might result in no hits and fail to prevent your opponent from risking building a multi-salvo stack.

Jonathan_S wrote:Well one reason. Ot to go with continuous fire is if you need to hit more often from the same ships you are hitting with correspondingly fewer missiles. Unless you've got a huge numeric advantage (in which case you don't need continuous fire) you would seem to risk getting all of your diffuse spray if missiles stopped in the CM intercept zone; where they're killed prior to detonation (and presumably too far out to affect anything if they blew just before interception). So s continuous stream might result in no hits and fail to prevent your opponent from risking building a multi-salvo stack.

Your CMs are very, very successful. For the first minute. Then you have the entire depth of the defenses fully saturated end to end with all your CMs firing at maximum rate until they run out of missiles, you run out of CMs, they blow up or you blow up.

What? Everyone is Kuzak in the RMN?

Calculating defense penetration with the goal of EMP'ing/crippling pods too difficult for the RMN? Really?

So, fairly simple multiplication, division, and fractions are too difficult for people 2000 years from now? Really?



Either pods are vulnerable or they are not. Which is it?

Anyhow, if your objective is to induce "proximity soft kills" you don't need to actually hit the ship. For that matter you don't need to actually guide them because you don't really care if they go after decoys, because decoys are necessarily so close that it won't matter for this purpose. And I can't think of any way the defender can tell the difference between a controlled missile and an autonomous missile as they scream in at .8c, particularly as all missiles are fully autonomous at the end of their run.

So a RMN SDP can pretty much fire 5 missiles per second (60 missiles per 12 seconds) until they go winchester or they/the target gets all blowed up (I'd bet on b happening before a myself). So they deploy a bunch of pods and tractor them to their hull prior to combat. Then they deploy a heavy salvo based on some of the pods they have on the hull, then everyone goes to continuous fire from the pod bay.

So a sizable number of missiles come screaming in at .8c and behind them is a continuous stream. We'll assume 10 vs 10 and make up some numbers for RHN CMs. So assume they have 120 CMs that bear and cycle at 10 seconds, so each ship can fire 12 CMs per second.

This is the killer, you are going to be barely keeping up with incoming missiles coming out of the pod bay as CMs have a pretty mediocre hit rate, so you normally need more than 2 per missile. So your CMs are running at cyclic to deal with the initial salvo of 400 and behind them are more missiles, which will cross your entire defense zone in something like 4-6 seconds (as I can't remember the range of RHN CM). However it takes multiple seconds for a CM to fly out and be effective, so you need to launch them well before their target gets into your defense zone. Plus every few seconds they white out your sensors with jammers, at which point you'll get leakers. So your CMs and your PDLCs are in continuous fire until this stops.

And at any time the RMN ships can, using their tractored pods, add additional missiles to a given moment without interrupting their missile stream.

So yeah, I think they can keep you pretty busy worrying about defense and get enough nukes going off to induce "proximity soft kills" on any pods that you might try to deploy and build to a huge number. I would expect you will probably see one or more nukes to be getting to detonation range per second, though the number doing damage would be far lower. However, in theory any pods you are deploying during that time will get destroyed by "proximity soft kills", so essentially they will shut down your return fire.

It should also be noted that you are pretty much 100% occupied dealing with the missile stream, if they choose to pulse say 400 missiles each into the stream you are going to have have a bad time as you will either have to stop shooting CMs at the missile stream for a minute or pretty much not engage the pulse with CMs. And it would be pretty unsporting of them to arrange to have a whole lot of jammers going off throughout the depths of your defenses as their pulse arrives, so I'm sure they wouldn't do anything like that.

As nobody in the Honorverse has tried this trick (and in theory they are much more motivated to find ways to break the system than we are) I would bet that having a nuke or two going off as a pod gets dropped off a ship is highly unlikely to cause it to die.

I get the distinct impression that D'Orville was a bit short of modern combat experience, and that could have meant he didn't really realise he needed to fire his missiles earlier to hamper the stacking attempts.

To give him credit though he was not aware of the donkey and therefore Havens ability to put so many birds in the air all at once.

A couple of things, Hexapuma was just going into her refit and had a number of crew already off either to new postings or on leave. Where had she been waiting until the space opened up on the Station? Well, it is going to a fair distance from the station because nobody wants a lot of ships just parked around a working station and yard. Then there is that whole 2 pilot rule and NO wedge activity within X km of the stations. So you have some parking locations (multiple) outside of the normal shipping and traffic lanes that will not interfere with ANY of the stations normal activity.
What happens to any other ships that were still in a holding area durring OB? Probably nothing. Depends what the Ghost crews could make of the numbers and activities of ships that were in those places. They change. It was a relative long time between the targeting was fed to the Graser Trops or any of the ballistic packages and -particularly give the low numbers the Alignment said it had (vs what they would have brought if it was not a rush job)- why send a weapon on ballistic course to where a ship may or may not be weeks later. Remember, at NO point have we been told that the ballistic packages lit up and went active before hitting their targets. Ok, I could be wrong about that but that was a tight operation and the Alignment weapons were sent at specific targets that were primarily of a "stationary" nature as much as anyting in orbit can be stationary. Things in long term, predictable obits like major space stations, like Grayson style orbital yards that are essentialy very small stations with a starship construction slip attached to it. Disbspersed yards, not tied together except in a very specific set of positioning requirements so nobody gets in the way and supplies and components arrive at the same place (relative) as needed.

So there were PROBABLY more ships either in holding areas or parked off out of traffic awaiting service that =while high value targets- were lower than the actual stations and manufacturing operations and were clearly, probably, going to move before the ballistic package could get there. That migh be different if a ship was paired off with a repair vessel and were going to be parked somewhere (again, out of traffic) and were boing to -probably- be there a while. That none of that was germain to the story or had to be cut and we don't see it.

Second, the SL Reapir/Engineering Ships would have some value but they are NOT set up or supplied to do more that fairly gross work on Manticore or Grayson ships. They don't have the tech, the electronics, any of the testing and tooling to repair the Manticor teck. Work on 15 year old ships, perhaps and useful in many regards (like helping with the gross reconstruction of stations etc) but current generation Manticorian or Grayson ships, not so much. Along with everyting else, Manticore is going to need more Astro Control Tugs.

I would guess that BuShips went through a lot of work figuring out what it could- right after OB- build (as opposed to repair) with the surviving slips and "parts" along with repairing as many existing ships as possible. Logistics, it always comes down to logistics.

The missiles were used because they didn't have enough confidence in a fully ballistic attack. .2c has a lot of KE, if you hit something. So yeah, they were designed to find and attack a certain target (or class of targets) that was supposed to be at a particular place when they were ejected from the pod and they used large warheads (presumable shaped ones like are used in sidewall burners) because they were not confident that they would be able to get close enough to hit them with a missile wedge (or a missile wedge is easy to overload with mass and wouldn't be assured to destroy them).