Sprint drive

Guys, I am part Native American. Killing birds and ducks is easy as our ABCs. When you have to hunt for food, as did the Native Americans, it becomes an art. Not a sport.

Attacking a bird that is perching is the easiest kill, if there are certain things that you know. First, his acceleration is going to be insignificant at rest within certain distances within your optimum strike zone per weapon. One could even force the bird to flight, at which point he is very vulnerable. It is called making him commit. Also, while watching a bird watch you, you'll notice that the bird telegraphs his direction of flight, if you know what to look for. If a bird is looking up, he's going to fly up. Above the power line. You won't have to aim anywhere below. Only left or right. The bird also telegraphs which direction, with his eyes. A bird won't naturally attempt to fly backwards from his line of sight. Unless startled by input. Then all bets are off and the poor frightened creature may attempt to fly through something. Backing up in the direction behind us w/o sight is just as unnatural for the bird. Not impossible, unnatural. Hovering notwithstanding. But the birds that can accomplish hovering have completely different flight mechanics, such as humming birds. Don't know many Native Americans who attempted to live off of humming birds.

If a bird is looking right at you, dipping his head, his line of flight will be below the power line. Read for direction. There are many more clues to bird hunting that simply comes natural to a Native American as we are taught them as very young kids. Duck hunting is so easy, its like pushing baby chicks into the kill zone. We can get really close. And the weapon of choice now is a shotgun. Easy for us, as there were no guns in the earliest history of Native hunting techniques. My choice of weapons as a kid was a bow and arrow or a sling with a heavy rounded metal ball. The metal marbles that we called bombers were instruments of mass destruction in my hands. There are quite a number of these metal balls found throughout history. Part of my family members were watching tv one day and the show featured artifacts from history. The speaker speculated on a particular round metal ball. She got it wrong. We didn't.

Skeet shooting I began when I was a kid. My grandfather was a natural. At some targets I can shoot from the hip.

Remember the story I posted in the very early days of my joining? My first trip to Romania, the bird I killed as a kid that I never got over? That post is gone now, and quite a few of my friends have alerted me.

The simplest solution to producing variable speed missiles is to not use missile drives. Use standard drives. This means you have to set the missile up to handle tens of thousands gravitates of acceleration , but we do that today in gun launched missiles. So it’s an engineering problem that is clearly solvable.

That also means your drive doesn’t burn out, it runs until you turn it off or run out of power.

kzt wrote:The simplest solution to producing variable speed missiles is to not use missile drives. Use standard drives. This means you have to set the missile up to handle tens of thousands gravitates of acceleration , but we do that today in gun launched missiles. So it’s an engineering problem that is clearly solvable.

That also means your drive doesn’t burn out, it runs until you turn it off or run out of power.

In other words use a drone or small craft drive for one stage. I wonder if you could stealth a drive that low. So Drone, Missile, Missile. No one would see the missile until it was 1/2 way to it's target.

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kzt wrote:
The simplest solution to producing variable speed missiles is to not use missile drives. Use standard drives. This means you have to set the missile up to handle tens of thousands gravitates of acceleration , but we do that today in gun launched missiles. So it’s an engineering problem that is clearly solvable.

That also means your drive doesn’t burn out, it runs until you turn it off or run out of power.


In other words use a drone or small craft drive for one stage. I wonder if you could stealth a drive that low. So Drone, Missile, Missile. No one would see the missile until it was 1/2 way to it's target.
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RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."

I had the idea to put an engine and a stealth generator at a pod, and move the pod in range. In my eyes a good and an idea that a solly could have to solve the current tech differnce between solly and manty tec.

However: Someone here wrote, that that is one of the tecnologies, like AI, that Mr. Weber don´t want in Honorverse.

We saw probes armed with energy weapons used by Honor at raids against Haven and probes armed with nukes at the assasination of Grayson. A missle is much bigger so you would end up at a size like a pod and you read above: "No pods with engines"!

Maldorian wrote:
I had the idea to put an engine and a stealth generator at a pod, and move the pod in range. In my eyes a good and an idea that a solly could have to solve the current tech differnce between solly and manty tec.

However: Someone here wrote, that that is one of the tecnologies, like AI, that Mr. Weber don´t want in Honorverse.

We saw probes armed with energy weapons used by Honor at raids against Haven and probes armed with nukes at the assasination of Grayson. A missle is much bigger so you would end up at a size like a pod and you read above: "No pods with engines"!

David's original post on the subject.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/176/1

And Honor's weapon against the Peeps, MisitleToe, was just a nuke in a drone. Only the Mesan Gtorp is a true energy weapon on a stick.

Theemile wrote:In other words use a drone or small craft drive for one stage. I wonder if you could stealth a drive that low. So Drone, Missile, Missile. No one would see the missile until it was 1/2 way to it's target.

A recon drone is a lot bigger than a missile, but we've seen Ghost Rider drones (or Mistletoe armed versions) pulling 5,000 gees while fairly effectively stealthed (and they seem to be good for twice that if you don't care who sees you).

You'd presumably need to cut back on accel as you got closer, at least against a 1st line target - but yeah, they're stealthy. You could probably derive something from that base design that could just carry and drop one normal DDM missile if, as seems quite possible, it turns out you can't make make a missile style 2nd drive work on something that big.
Just as long you don't mind the per round cost or how few you can carry - IIRC those things are at least the size of 5-6 MDMs.

Theemile wrote:And Honor's weapon against the Peeps, MisitleToe, was just a nuke in a drone. Only the Mesan Gtorp is a true energy weapon on a stick.

Some of them had lasing rods as well, for a full laserhead on a drone rather that 'just' a straight boom nuke.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Stages don't really exist on GA missiles. The are separate drive units to burn out but they coexist, it's not like a typical rocket where the boosters fall off when they're spent. (Sollie missiles are, though!)

Take what probably is an oversize MDM. Outfit it with the drive system used by recon drones. Obviously it can't be used at the same time as the main drive but it could be used on the ballistic components. As it's a standard restartable drive they can do what they want with it.

I'm pretty sure a recon drone's drive is a large part of why they run over 10 times the size of a missile (and have 1/10th the acceleration). So that'd be a very oversize MDM

There's also the minor issue that you'd have to shield the inactive missile drive rings from the active drone drive ring, but I assume the MDM 'baffle' tech would work there as well. I'm not sure if a missile's drive could give the same accel putting an object that about 10 times as large. So the final sprint might be slower.

And of course with lower accel the drone/missile hybrid would take longer to cross the defensive zones of the target - again appearing the offset much if not all of the advantage of the momentary surprise of jumping to a radically different acceleration.


Though Manticore is clearly not entirely opposed to using big expendable weapons when it makes sense (Mistledoe) to date they've only done so when the drone drive weapon can sneak all the way to detonation range.

Recon drones have a bunch of spy equipment, grav pulse transmitter etc that you don't need in this case. I don't think the missile is anything like as big as you picture.

Jonathan_S wrote:You'd presumably need to cut back on accel as you got closer, at least against a 1st line target - but yeah, they're stealthy. You could probably derive something from that base design that could just carry and drop one normal DDM missile if, as seems quite possible, it turns out you can't make make a missile style 2nd drive work on something that big.
Just as long you don't mind the per round cost or how few you can carry - IIRC those things are at least the size of 5-6 MDMs.

1) No reason for even a DDM--the drones can close to deep within SDM range and remain stealthy. The problem is that such missiles are coming in slow.

2) It shouldn't be expensive--the drones could generally be recovered. It just means a small salvo size.

I'd prefer to hit from farther away so my missiles streak through the defense zone as fast as possible. The best defense is not to be shot at in the first place--and an MDM near the end of it's run means one CM launch and one PD shot only. Defenders can be double-teamed if they have them to spare but there won't be two shots.

I'm not sure recon drones are significantly bigger than Mk23s. In mass like 50% IIRC.

kzt wrote:I'm not sure recon drones are significantly bigger than Mk23s. In mass like 50% IIRC.

As I said before, a drone's not a drone. We're still thinking 1905 drones with a ~300K boat bay launched device, with a destroyer only having 4-8. Manticore has a gamut of drones now, from Hermes buoys and the small inner shell defense drones to the huge system monitoring drones placed at the hyperlimit. We can't just say "drone" because there are a selection of different sizes available.