[spoiler] The future of missile combat

munroburton wrote:

Theemile wrote:I didn't include the viper because it is not a universal classification, they are expensive and only the GA has them.

Daryl wrote:In the 1950s the British Navy was carrying out police operations around Malaysia and Singapore with their absolutely latest guided missile destroyers. The Captains had a dilemma, having decided that guns were old hat they had none, so did you use a million pound missile to take out a pirate junk that refused to stop? They were retrofitted with 20 mm Bofers, as a temporary measure.

This is why I mentioned the Viper. It might be restricted to the GA currently, but how difficult is it really to fit a small warhead+rod on a countermissile?

Especially if ships are being redesigned to fire multi-drive missiles and the traditional single-drive shipkiller begins to disappear. I can't see a viper type missile being more expensive than an ERM or DDM from the same manufacturing tech base.

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 58 wrote:Unlike the Solarian League Navy, the Mesan Alignment had no reservations at all about the missile ranges being reported by observers of the renewed conflict between Manticore and the Republic of Haven. They'd not only realized those reports were accurate, but figured out what the Manticorans and Havenites must have done to produce them.
Unfortunately, deducing what someone else had done wasn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it for oneself. Downsizing missile drive components without reducing their already limited lifetimes still further was a significant technological challenge—one the Alignment was working hard to overcome, but hadn't managed to pull off yet.
So they'd taken another approach as an intermediate step. The Cataphract was a rather basic concept, actually—they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.
There were drawbacks, of course; there always were, and especially so in what had to be a compromise solution.
The weapon carried only half as many lasing rods as a standard laser head. Worse, the Cataphract was twenty percent longer than a standard missile of any given weight, which meant it would no longer fit into launch tubes which had been designed to handle the single-drive missile upon which it was based. The Cataphract-C, built around the SLN's Trebuchet capital missile, could be fired only out of one of the missile pods the MAN hadn't seen fit to offer Citizen Commodore Luff. The Cataphract-B, based on the Javelin missile intended for the League's battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, could be fired from a standard superdreadnought missile tube, but not by an Indefatigable or a Warlord-C. But Luff's battlecruisers could fire the Cataphract-A, based on the Spatha, the SLN's new-model destroyer and light cruiser shipkiller. His Mars-Cs could have, as well, but only the battlecruisers had been supplied with the new weapon, and even they carried only enough of them for a dozen full broadsides.
Compared to standard missiles of their size, their warheads were light, and the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids which could be stuffed into such a size-restricted terminal bus were limited. But the weapon had a powered range from rest of almost 16.6 million kilometers, nobody had ever even imagined that it might exist . . . and Luff's fourteen battlecruisers mounted over eight hundred broadside missile tubes.

n7axw wrote:IIRC, Erowhon had the older capacitor driven MDMs and provided that tech to the Republic prior to round 2 of the war with Manticore. I would imagine that is what Maya would have received when they got their MDMs.

Don

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Theemile wrote:

n7axw wrote:IIRC, Erowhon had the older capacitor driven MDMs and provided that tech to the Republic prior to round 2 of the war with Manticore. I would imagine that is what Maya would have received when they got their MDMs.

Don

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Yes, 12 of Erewhon's DNs took part in the Buttercup raids with 8th fleet. They at least had their firecontrol modified to manage MDM and routinely carried them as part of 8th fleet. Though unstated, one could also assume that some MDM pods were sent to Erewhon for defensive purposes. It's obvious they never had their own assembly line.

n7axw wrote:
I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

Don

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n7axw wrote:I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

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kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

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The Andies didn’t have MDM production until post OB. So maybe not.

Theemile wrote:

n7axw wrote:IIRC, Erowhon had the older capacitor driven MDMs and provided that tech to the Republic prior to round 2 of the war with Manticore. I would imagine that is what Maya would have received when they got their MDMs.

Don

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Yes, 12 of Erewhon's DNs took part in the Buttercup raids with 8th fleet. They at least had their firecontrol modified to manage MDM and routinely carried them as part of 8th fleet. Though unstated, one could also assume that some MDM pods were sent to Erewhon for defensive purposes. It's obvious they never had their own assembly line.

I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

Don

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kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

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The Andies didn’t have MDM production until post OB. So maybe not.

Theemile wrote:So I can see the Andies not building a mk 41 line (dead end tech that will be retrofitted out asap), and not starting a mk 23 line, (wait, we're finalizing a new missile called Apollo, it's almost ready, why waste your time and money), ...