Talkregh wrote:Let´s consider what you are saying with an example actually in the books. The first part of the battle of Manticore. The battle lasted 11.9 minutes, and the incoming fire was 524.000 missiles. Going even under the estimate someone else did, assume a velocity for the flak round of 300,000 m/s. Let´s cut 1.9 minute for the calculations etc for the Flak fire to start. Again, just to go with a worse than optimal scenario. In those minutes, the round would reach 180,000 kms, well far out of detonation range for the missile. Admittedly there's at least 1 more minute (leaving aside the 0.9) and assuming a rate of fire of 1 round per second (again way under possibilities) you could get 60 other rounds of flak fire in the way.
Given the geometries the longest single salvo in that battle took less than 8.4 minutes (500 seconds) to cover the 65 million km between the fleets. So even if you fired instantly at 300,000 m/s (and they can't) the round could only go 150,000 km.
But, for the sake of argument let's use that 300 km/s number for a moment. In the battle of Manticore Home Fleet was accelerating hard (about 615 gees) almost straight down the throat of the Havenite fleet. That sounds like good geometry for the autocannon shells, but it isn't.
In the same 500 seconds the shells could travel 150,000 km the Home fleet ships would cover an additional 754,600 km (500 seconds at 615 gees) - so the initial shells would be far behind them!
You've got a similar problem if you're moving parallel to the enemy. If you fire your autocannon tangent to the ship the shells will be 3/4rds of a million km
behind the path any attacking missile will fly through. If you fire them at a sharp angle forward so that they're only 55,000 km closer to the enemy then they'd
only be 606,601 km behind your ships...
Basically the shells can only stay between you and the enemy if you're either sitting still or accelerating directly away from them - otherwise you quickly outfly your own flak zone.
The math simply doesn't work for this, space it too big and ships are too quick - that's why autocannon became obsolete once missiles had to be engaged more than a could thousand km out from the sidewalls.
Also no autocannon in the Honorverse has managed a muzzle velocity of anything like 300,000 m/s (that number was to show that impossibly high required velocity was why autocannon became useless). A modern grav driven one would probably be doing excellent to manage 30,000 m/s. (A pulse rifle's grav driver can only manage 2,000 m/s)WeirdlyWired wrote:[quote="Talkregh]
I think that is highly unlikely. While Moriarty and Mycroft will certainly make impossible for the SLN to claim the orbitals of a planet and demand its surrender in accordance with the Eridani Edict, i think we would be overlooking what has already happened in the Honorverse.
The Havenite raids on different systems, and 8th fleet posterior raids, have shown that fixed defenses can´t hope to stop the damage a raiding fleet would inflict on all the orbital infrastructure. It´s been stated, in the most clear terms (Zanzibar, Alizon, Grendelsbane, Basilisk...) that to avoid said damage to a system´s infrastructure you need mobile units, because otherwise the attacking force can launch its missiles BALLISTICALLY, since orbital installations can´t dodge.[/quote]
Moriarty played Holy Heck with the RMN the first time it was encountered. It is a bit more than missile batteries on a moon or larger asteroids. It is shoals of pods scattered through the system with remote fire management platforms which are as maneuverable 9at least) as junction forts.
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And Mycroft is far, far, more capable. Truly effective range for (non-FTL) control of MDMs is normally considered around 40 million km (of their 65 million km effective range). Given sufficient Mycroft FTL fire control relay platforms that system enables that same fire control lag at almost 2.3 lighthours (2.4 billion km); or around 10 times the size of a habitable system's hyper limit!!
If you've got out-system pod arrays near the hyper limit (as we've seen Manticore employ even before Apollo) any raiding squadron is likely to get splattered well beyond the range they'd normally consider launching ballistic missiles from.
And as seen in the latest book, if you've got a good enough lock on the ballistic course the missiles are following, you can use your same MDMs to sweep them with their wedges. (And the kind of FTL linked sensors you'd put in to back up and provide targeting data for Mycroft should give you a damned good missile track.
You could still try an attack, but you'd have to launch from so far that you'd be very likely to hit the planet instead of the orbital infrastructure - or just have a missile deflected or destroyed from space dust encountered over its many hours of unpowered relativistic flight.
MDMs, FTL, and Mycroft really are a system-defense game changer in an unprecedented way.
], and use one simplifying assumption - because I'm too lazy to break out the integral table - on how to calculate the volume concerned, you should find that you need to cover about 5% of the volume around the ship out to 50,000km. Which 5%, of course, depends on how the ship is maneuvering, but only 5%. Mind you, since missiles can enter that volume from anywhere on its perimeter outside the wedge, you have to cover all of it, continously.
