Next Bolthole devellopment

[quote="Jonathan_S I may be wrong about the "Streak Drive'" It is an advantage in Hyper but not at all in N space? Also while it has been in research for centuries, only recent technical breakthroughs in other fields have allowed research to develop. Again I may be confusing the two.

Would love to see a redesigned a la Grayson Streak Drive that gives ships more N-space accel. That would be a battle advantage.[/quote]

I think improvements in compensator design/ability is where any added acceleration will come from, ships can already accelerate at rates their organic crews can not tolerate without adequate compensation.[/quote]
Yep. And (Manticoran) ships can already accelerate 50% faster than they could at the beginning of the series. That's a pretty major major improvement...[/quote]

The sgreak would probably be the next non-ghost rider thing out. Even if it gives you no tactical advantage, the strategic value of getting information across light centuries faster has to be worth something. Not to mention the shorter transit times from station to battle and back again.

pnakasone wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:Just rereading TSVW and the description of the battle where Helen Zilwicki's squadron defends the convoy.

Warshawski sails are used by ships in hyper to provide propulsion, as they would be destroyed if they bring up their wedges.

OK, what if S&S could give missiles Warshawski sails?

In order to get beyond wedge interference range before lighting off the impeller a missile is launched using some form of railgun technology so if the missile was designed to go directly to Warshawski sails instead of the normal wedge could that work? And if it could it would be a game changer.

(or is that something to be added to the ship that must not be named along with its weapon that must not be named)

I think the cost per unit of such a limited use weapon would be more of a problem then any thing else.

Not only that given the size a W-sail missile would have to be it would be the RW equivalent of mounting a ICBM on a surface ship to serve as a anti-ship missile. E.g. when the USN converted the first four Ohio class SSBN's to SSGN's the missile tubes went from carrying one Trident ICBM to carrying seven Tomahawk cruise missiles 24 vs 157.

pnakasone wrote:
I think the cost per unit of such a limited use weapon would be more of a problem then any thing else.

It strikes me as something that the MA might play with, as it seems more useful as a sneak/terror weapon.

Basically you know a ship you want killed is going on an established route, you have an MAA ship lay a trap, the missile drone takes out the ship in a grav wave, mid transit.

Haven/Manticore/other GA nations will see that it's not great for combat. Its big, expensive and requires sneaking up in hyper in a grav wave. Hyper combat we've seen has been all about using places where there's a natural nexus between grav waves which funnels ships there.

The MA under their traditional doctrines could use this as a way to make ships disappear in hyper. EG taking out a transport in a grav wave makes it easier to say its an accident compared to outside a grav wave. Using it against military targets is chancier, as its a big target usually in a convoy, and unless large group of missiles are used, something will get thru.

It seems like something useful for the MA, but I don't think they'd have the ability to make a useful number for anything but assassination.

feyhunde wrote:

pnakasone wrote:
I think the cost per unit of such a limited use weapon would be more of a problem then any thing else.

It strikes me as something that the MA might play with, as it seems more useful as a sneak/terror weapon.

Basically you know a ship you want killed is going on an established route, you have an MAA ship lay a trap, the missile drone takes out the ship in a grav wave, mid transit.

Haven/Manticore/other GA nations will see that it's not great for combat. Its big, expensive and requires sneaking up in hyper in a grav wave. Hyper combat we've seen has been all about using places where there's a natural nexus between grav waves which funnels ships there.

The MA under their traditional doctrines could use this as a way to make ships disappear in hyper. EG taking out a transport in a grav wave makes it easier to say its an accident compared to outside a grav wave. Using it against military targets is chancier, as its a big target usually in a convoy, and unless large group of missiles are used, something will get thru.

It seems like something useful for the MA, but I don't think they'd have the ability to make a useful number for anything but assassination.

Might work if you're targeting a freighter, but not so well for a warship. The warship and the missile drone will have virtually identical energy ranges, and the ship will be a bigger target with more defensive depth, likely more armor, and certainly more/heavier chase mounts. So a single sail powered missile drone is unlikely to be able to take down any single warship.

And that's assuming it get into range in the first place. One of the difficulties of mid-'wave intercepts of a warship in a grav wave it that it'll almost always be at max velocity (0.6c), since thanks to the roughly 10x acceleration boost the wave provides they can reach that in about an hour of boosting. However that hour is long enough that you can't sit around near stationary and wait for it because unless it almost literally ran you over it'll zip across your sensor range and disappear long before you got up to speed. You need to be cruising along at nearly full speed in the same direction as the target and let it catch up to you, you can then attempt to maneuver into energy range. But then there's plenty of time for it to see you coming. (It's slightly easier to intercept a convoy because merchant grade drives top out at 0.5c in hyper so you do have a velocity advantage)
(And of course unless you want to add even more size and cost to the missile drone it won't have a hyper generator - so anybody who knows what it is can escape it by changing even a single hyper band)

And even an unmanned drone probably has little to no max speed advantage over a warship. The warship will be cruising along at 0.6c in the 'wave as that's as much as it's rad shielding can handle. We don't know how those shields deal with velocities exceeding that - it's possibly that they still degrade the particle impacts enough that you could build an unmanned ship with rad hardened components and extra ablative armoring of the hammerhead to survive say 10-15% higher velocity. But it's also possible that once you exceed their limits they fail and let everything through, in which case the ship would rapidly turn into a ball of plasma


If you want to spend a lot of money on killing people in grav waves build a limited number of interceptor ships built around a bubble sidewall. Then you do have a major energy range advantage, and you can follow them if they change bands. Of course you still need amazing intel to pull of the intercept, but if you do you've a better chance of killing your target(s).

Xuan-Wu wrote:What does anybody think the next Haven/Grayson/Star Empire development would be ?

The NEXT one, I think would be MDCM's (Multi-drive Counter Missiles).

The manties have both recon drones and now a missile that gives regular missiles the ability to receive FTL targeting orders things at far distances almost as easily as if they right next to the ship. I see no reason that targeting and control capacity can't be used for counter-missiles as well.

What I'm thinking of is the Sollies idea about launching canisters of CM's out of main missile tubes. Stick that canister on top of a MDM instead, have one of the missiles be a command and control missile, just like they have for the current MDM's, and now you are forcing the incoming wave of missiles to use up their ECM abilities while far away from their true targets.

The NEXT development after that will be the streak drive, because they have one of the developers of it.

And the FINAL development before the series ends is when people figure out that since you can put a grav lance on a destroyer, and the Skrikes have comparable power to a destroyer, that "Horrible Hemphill's" Lance-and-torpedo combo is a LOT deadlier on a modern LAC than it was on Fearless.

manty5 wrote:The NEXT one, I think would be MDCM's (Multi-drive Counter Missiles).

The manties have both recon drones and now a missile that gives regular missiles the ability to receive FTL targeting orders things at far distances almost as easily as if they right next to the ship. I see no reason that targeting and control capacity can't be used for counter-missiles as well.

What I'm thinking of is the Sollies idea about launching canisters of CM's out of main missile tubes. Stick that canister on top of a MDM instead, have one of the missiles be a command and control missile, just like they have for the current MDM's, and now you are forcing the incoming wave of missiles to use up their ECM abilities while far away from their true targets.

It's an interesting concept that has been floating around for some time.

The problem these things have is that an opponent who is willing to accept lengthy ballistic phases can do an end-run around them rather easily; while a CM can no doubt intercept a coasting MDM and shred it with its wedge, intercepting a ballistic target is much, much harder than one that has a wedge up (because the missile is a ~20m target, the wedge is several km).

Ultimately, because these multistage CMs need to be fired from capital missile tubes, the number of missiles a single ship or task force can fire is strictly limited, and given the density of the missile storms that occur in pod combat, the number of missiles that can be intercepted reliably by these things is strictly limited.

For the moment, the best option for forward deployed missile screens are LACs; I think it is far more likely to see the antimissile capability of LACs to improve than it is for a Navy to deploy an MDCM.

The NEXT development after that will be the streak drive, because they have one of the developers of it.

Which I think is going to come first (Although this is a development that will only make an impact one or two decades down the line, unless the required hyper generators are easy to refit into existing construction).

And the FINAL development before the series ends is when people figure out that since you can put a grav lance on a destroyer, and the Skrikes have comparable power to a destroyer, that "Horrible Hemphill's" Lance-and-torpedo combo is a LOT deadlier on a modern LAC than it was on Fearless.

Ehhhhh, no.

The time to deploy the grav lance on LACs is past, pretty much. Successful use of it requires that the LAC using it is able to sneak up on an unsuspecting (but battle-ready) victim before firing the lance, with it and other ships providing the knockout punch that follows (For obvious reasons, LACs cannot use energy torpedoes and must rely on grasers and missiles, which given the limitations of LACs require a lot of ships to generate enough damage output to kill capital ships).
That scenario will become harder and harder to pull off once more navies start work on CLACs of their own.
Furthermore, the grav lance takes a rather large amount of usable tonnage out of the mass budget for a ship as small as an LAC. Designing a class of LACs that can do virtually nothing else except carry a lance does not sound like something a sane person would do.

manty5 wrote:The manties have both recon drones and now a missile that gives regular missiles the ability to receive FTL targeting orders things at far distances almost as easily as if they right next to the ship. I see no reason that targeting and control capacity can't be used for counter-missiles as well.

Well, it's current implementation is big they had the build a double-sized, warhead-less, MDM to carry the FTL transceiver and control relays for each Apollo pod worth of missiles.

That makes the FTL transceiver about as big as a normal CM. At a guess a shorter ranged FTL transceiver, plus two CM power drives, and no warhead would be about the size of a Mk-16; if not a little bigger. Since you only need power for 120 - 150 seconds capacitors are probably smaller than micro-fusion, plus deleting the warhead frees up some space over a normal Mk16 - but again the transceiver is big so it still may not squeeze in.


Now there have been various speculations about how this could be overcome - all of which involved either moving the FTL transceiver off-board or removing the FTL transmitter portion.
1) Use dual-drive CMs in conjunction with a forward LAC screen. The LACs control the CMs via normal light-speed links, just like their onboard CMs, but using the far deeper CM magazines of the wallers means the LACs don't shoot themselves dry in minutes.

2) Build a free-flying remote drone to act as the FTL to light-speed relay. Kind of a cross between a ghost rider recon drone and a (defensive only) Keyhole. You'd need a few minutes to push the drone shell out to provide long range control but at least the big FTL transceiver isn't taking up space in a horde or expendable CMs it's sitting in a reusable drone that can control wave after wave of CMs.

3) Assuming that the FTL transmitter is the big part, and grav sensors capable of reading the high bandwidth FTL fire control channels are a much smaller part of the transceiver, simply make CMs that are receive only for FTL. Yes that means they can't provide (near) real-time sensor data back to the launch ship -- but even at 10 million km or so the launching ship's got a good enough read of the incoming missile's own drive (which is seen via FTL grav sensors) that it doesn't really need the CM's own myopic view. But even the ship blindly sending (suitably redundant and error correction heavy) updates in (near) realtime should be a major improvement in targetting


But we don't know if any of these will be taken up by the RMN anytime soon. All of them require that you use bigger CMs which means you're giving up something else on the ship to get your improved CM range. Might be total numbers of CMs carried, or maybe you make the pod bays shorter to build bigger CM magazines, or reduce internal armoring - or just build bigger SD(P)s. But something has to give if you want the same number of bigger CMs...
That tradeoff may not yet be worth it.

The E wrote:The problem these things have is that an opponent who is willing to accept lengthy ballistic phases can do an end-run around them rather easily; while a CM can no doubt intercept a coasting MDM and shred it with its wedge, intercepting a ballistic target is much, much harder than one that has a wedge up (because the missile is a ~20m target, the wedge is several km).

Going ballistic isn't as hard of a counter as you're proposing, because otherwise they'd be able to do the same thing to bypass the LAC screeen - just go ballistic till you sail past them.

Before you object that LACs have scanners... what exactly do you think ghost rider is?

And even forcing a ballistic phase is a victory in itself... these missiles cannot step down and ramp back up, if they go ballistic, any remaining fuel in that stage is WASTED. So their legs are shorter, AND they can't react to their target's movements until they bring up ANOTHER stage, and if a second launch of MDCM's arrive reasonably after the next stage comes up, you have to accept the thinning of the herd or write ANOTHER stage off.

The E wrote:Ultimately, because these multistage CMs need to be fired from capital missile tubes, the number of missiles a single ship or task force can fire is strictly limited, and given the density of the missile storms that occur in pod combat, the number of missiles that can be intercepted reliably by these things is strictly limited.

If one MDCM salvo (several canister CM's, one control missile) can take out several salvos of MDM's, then it's worthwhile.

manty5 wrote:Going ballistic isn't as hard of a counter as you're proposing, because otherwise they'd be able to do the same thing to bypass the LAC screeen - just go ballistic till you sail past them.

Before you object that LACs have scanners... what exactly do you think ghost rider is?

This is a good point.

If one MDCM salvo (several canister CM's, one control missile) can take out several salvos of MDM's, then it's worthwhile.

I have my doubts on that, but that's the crux of the matter: To be worthwhile, a single MDCM must be able to reliably kill multiple incoming MDMs.

There is also this post from RFC himself:

The two-stage proposal would be workable from an engineering viewpoint, but only if you wanted to accept counter-missiles larger than your shipkiller missiles, which strikes me as a questionable bargain. Honorverse missile defense is based on the premise that a certain, quite possibly large, percentage of your defensive missiles are going to fail to take out the incoming hostile missile which you launch them to intercept. In other words, the entire reason that existing counter-missiles are designed the way they are is to permit warships to carry them in sufficient quantity to mount a sustained, credible defense. In order to build a counter-missiles which would have (1) the twin drive capabilities you've described, (2) the sensor capability to acquire, track, and intercept hostile missiles at a range which would make the drive capabilities useful, and (3) the ability to build in an FTL two-way communications link to permit the firing ships to control them usefully at extended range, you would require something larger than existing recon drones, and they are already quite large. To give you an idea, the standard Manticoran counter-missile as of War of Honor, masses about 12.5 tons. Havenite counter-missiles are about 25% larger, and individually less capable despite their greater size. A single-drive capital ship missile runs to about 135 tons, or better than ten times the size of a single counter-missile. The remote platforms being deployed by the RMN these days, which would approximate the minimum size capable of squeezing in the proposed drive arrangement, are over twice the size of an old-style capital missile, which is why they are deployed by swimming them out of boat bays rather than firing them through tubes. So, let's assume that you could build one of these things for "only" 270 tons. In that case, each of them would replace something like 22 standard counter-missiles. Not a good trade in the opinion of the missile defense officers.

I wonder if the good doctor can provide enough details to start development of their own version of the Streak and Spider drives. The streak drive would be simpler, the alliance do currently have the fastest warships around. Hopefully they have the capability to adapt their current ships to be capable of achieve higher levels of hyper space,

The real issue would be the spider drive. We know ships have to be specially built to make use of it. I wonder what ships would truly make best use of is system.