Jonathan_S wrote:Somtaaw wrote:
-Madrigal vs Thunder and Principality (the ambush of Grayson forces)
* Principality vs Troubadour. Energy range fight, except Principality has to use missiles due to her deficiency in energy mounts. Troubadour was snapping down to use her lasers, then rolling back to make a harder missile target. It
appears she was restricted to using PDLCs to pick of missiles "popped up, fighting for a look-down shot through Troubadour’s upper sidewall".
That was a different battle, the one I was referring to, was the original ambush that lead to the deaths of Admirals Yanakov and Courvosier. Courvosier was aboard the Madrigal, and was using her sensors to help the Grayson force intercept the Masadan raiding fleet.
Jonathan_S wrote:And because she rolled ship so early, had that difficulty intercepting the Havenite laserheads while defending the whole fleet.
So yes, you can track missiles through your wedge but not as clearly, or as far out, as you can through a broadside. So a Keyhole still gives you a defensive advantage. Also we're told that you can't maintain a fire-control link through a wedge - so the CMs you launch while rolled seem like they'd be flying autonomous for the majority of their flight; which has to hurt their hit percentages. (There's where I think McKeon made a mistake. He should have held Prince Adrian broadside on for as long as possible to maximize her CM hit percentages against the pod based missiles - especially with the early CM launches that are attempting max range intercepts. She should still have time to roll away in the ~20 seconds it'll take the attacking missiles can cover the 147k km from extreme CM range to laserhead standoff range.
Also when rolled behind your wedge your PDLCs can't fire until the attacking missile pops over the 'horizon' of your wedge. And it'll do so within it's own standoff range - so the PDLC lacks it's normal range advantage. That means everything comes down to whether the PDLC can refine an accurate firing solution from the fuzzy position the through-wedge tracking handed off before the laserhead spots the ship, performs final alignment of its lasing rods and detonates.
Prior to the return of pod combat, it does appear that rolling ship was better. There's a few occasions (which I don't currently have quotes for), where ships chose to continue combat with chaser only armaments rather than presenting broadsides and "giving the enemy a better angle" or something like that. You may have sacrificed the pinpoint accuracy that Manticore prizes so, but you gained more than you lost.
Rolling ship too late, such as after you've launched a few salvo's of counter missiles reduces your ability to move from "last known position relative to wedge" to almost non-existant. You would be able to displace at most a few meters, which is probably not enough to throw off shots compared to forcing even SDM missiles to come streaking in totally blind, and having to react to ship position in seconds. Which means the PDLC's have that slight edge that even a fuzzy idea of where the missile
should be is better than zero idea where the ship is.
But that's all pre-pod combat, with pod missile saturation the defense side literally cannot afford to sacrifice those extra launches to keep the incoming missiles blind.
if a stripped down Keyhole can take the place of the older decoys, even the light cruiser Fearless carried six 50-ton decoys. So it's possible if you exchanged 100% of tethered decoys, and relying purely on the shuttle bay (or tube) launched Ghost Rider derived decoys, you could squeeze a 150-200t "Keyhole-Lite" onto each broadside of the 88 kton CL Fearless and you wouldn't have changed the ship much.
Now obviously due to ship size creep, something as old as a Courageous class at 88 ktons compared to the more modern 276 kton Kamerlings, means equal decoy enlargement means you could be dropping anywhere upto 450 tons per broadside for a Keyhole-Lite without even touching your offensive broadsides.
From the pearls,
And whereas the original Keyhole had only extremely limited anti-missiles self-defense capabilities, Keyhole-Two (in part because it's so much more valuable) has several point defense clusters added to the rest of its size and energy budget.
So as long as these notional Keyhole-Lite are purely countermissile fire control, and
maybe a Ghost Rider drone style fusion plant, and maybe even reduce the limited active defenses of a Keyhole-I, you could reduce a Keyhole II's tonnage down from 20 ktons down to perhaps 2 or 3 ktons. A Ghost Rider spy drone alone is about 100 tons, evidence from Shadows of Saganami when one was handlaunched in Monica. The extra fire control, more sensors, and maybe some EW emitters would increase that, and increase fusion plant size a little to keep it all powered.
That wouldn't require much butchering of even existing ship broadsides for a defensive Lite Keyhole... however, as I observed above, to get the Keyhole-Lite, you'd have to completely eliminate the traditional broadside tethered decoys and shift entirely to deployed drones. All ships carried those, and once the RMN got Ghost Rider, even before they developed Lorelei they had free-flying GR decoys flitting about.
