Battle of Spindle

Theemile wrote:To hit the passive missile body, you need to hit it on your wedge. It is possible for the body to pass into the 5km wide open maw of the wedge and be missed. I'm just pointing out that while you still have alot of wedge to swat the passive missiles with, it is orders of magnitude more difficult than hitting the 10 km wide wedge of another active missile.

Of course if the SLN wedges had been active this would never have been attempted, because then both missiles are destroyed; something that acceptable for a CM, but not for a ship killer missile.

tlb wrote:

Theemile wrote:1/3rd of the reserve still mounts autocannon - not the active fleet, which is either new or upgraded from the original 275 year old spec.

A question just occurred to me: If the missile were equipped with a particle shield, then wouldn't an auto-cannon be ineffective? Frankly, even in the age of contact explosives, I would not expect an auto-cannon to be as effective as a defensive laser array. Given that energy weapons were the main armament at the time, then why use guns?

Autocannon were only effective out to a couple thousand KM - Laserheads activate a 20-60 thousand KM from their target. So autocannon were never effective against laserheads, only contact nukes.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote: Why is firing off-bore so difficult? If I didn't already know better, I'd think it'd be a common ability from the very beginning of missile combat.

This is just my guess. The firing bore actively imparts velocity to the missile by means of a mass driver. It was reported that the reason the old pods were less effective is that they lacked any mass driver, so those missiles were slower that the ship launched ones. Now off-bore firing requires scrubbing the initial velocity to fly in a completely different direction. Therefore until you had more powerful wedges or multi-drives on the missiles, they would lack the velocity that made them so hard to intercept when they reached the target.

Plus you need a lot more fire control links on the axis you point at the enemy. Classically a hammerhead's chase fire control was designed to handle a couple salvos of its chase tubes, so using a Star Knight CA as an example that's just 3 tubes so maybe links for 6-12 missiles. To make it copy what the later various Saganami-class CAs can do it would need enough to handle that plus both broadsides, so suddenly you need to find room to mount links for 27 tubes; even if you omit redundancy just 27 tubes is a 2-5x increase in links!!!

(Though it'd be easier to find space for just double the links for one broadside to control missiles launched by both. However the need for the far broadside's missiles to fly safely around some side of the ship's giant wedge would cut a bit into their range and terminal velocity)



IIRC when off bore firing was introduced in the Shrikes there was some mention of needing a new generation of molycirc that could handle the acceleration associated with whipping the missile around up to 135 degrees off bore. For a little while that made me wonder if off-bore firing used something like a tractor beam to pivot the launched missile onto its new vector before drive lights off; but RFC said no; it was all done by the drive.
Though that gets back to the claim that broadside launchers (and new style pods) impart significant (and important) velocity to missiles. Yet that base velocity doesn't seem to show up in the performance numbers sometimes given for missile combat. (Because if the launcher velocity is irrelevant then you could have done a low acceleration off-bore launch be using the missile's thrusters to pivot it towards its target after launch but before wedge activated)


So mostly it was probably theme driven, RFC initially wanted broadside to broadside ship combat, so missiles needed to fire roughly perpendicular to ship facing/

tlb wrote:

Theemile wrote:To hit the passive missile body, you need to hit it on your wedge. It is possible for the body to pass into the 5km wide open maw of the wedge and be missed. I'm just pointing out that while you still have alot of wedge to swat the passive missiles with, it is orders of magnitude more difficult than hitting the 10 km wide wedge of another active missile.

Of course if the SLN wedges had been active this would never have been attempted, because then both missiles are destroyed; something that acceptable for a CM, but not for a ship killer missile.

Well, not normally acceptable for a ship killer.

But I could see a situation where cruisers with towed pods, caught in a one-shot pod based ambush, might well justify using a significant tithe of their offensive missiles in mutual annihilation with the enemies inbounds in order to survive. Stupidly expensive, yes, but less so than letting you get blown away (even if dedicating all your pods to a single counter attack might let you posthumously take out the enemy)

However if the enemy is close enough to have their missiles maneuver evasively your hit percentages beyond CM range are going to suck. And inside CM range modern ships can already launch as many CMs as they can control, so using offensive missiles doesn't really help that close in.

Theemile wrote:1/3rd of the reserve still mounts autocannon - not the active fleet, which is either new or upgraded from the original 275 year old spec.

tlb wrote:A question just occurred to me: If the missile were equipped with a particle shield, then wouldn't an auto-cannon be ineffective? Frankly, even in the age of contact explosives, I would not expect an auto-cannon to be as effective as a defensive laser array. Given that energy weapons were the main armament at the time, then why use guns?

Theemile wrote:Autocannon were only effective out to a couple thousand KM - Laserheads activate a 20-60 thousand KM from their target. So autocannon were never effective against laserheads, only contact nukes.

You miss the point of my question; I understand that auto-cannon are not effective against laser-head missiles. I was wondering whether they were equally less effective before, when compared to a laser defensive array. We know that the main armaments were grasers (correct?), so shouldn't laser technology already have superseded guns before the missile laser-head was developed?

And when was the CM developed? They should be more effective than auto-cannon also, even in the day of the contact nuke.

Further wouldn't putting a strong particle shield on a missile render the auto-cannon ineffective. I find it difficult to believe that an auto-cannon would have been effective to even a thousand KM.

tlb wrote:
Further wouldn't putting a strong particle shield on a missile render the auto-cannon ineffective. I find it difficult to believe that an auto-cannon would have been effective to even a thousand KM.

At the battle where Honors CA got smashed up prior to fun with BCs, David noted in HoS that the grav guns they had bought (from the SL iirc) did a pretty good job of stopping the massadan missiles.

cthia wrote:Am I wrong that less than 150 Mark 23s would mission kill a Havenite SD of similar capability back before Haven quadrant warships started taking steroids? And that's with much better defensive systems utilizing an efficient formation allowing mutual ship defense?

Am I also wrong that SLN doctrine did not allow for mutual ship defense? I may be incorrect on that note. At any rate, Michelle stated she wanted to test their analysis on SLN systems which were thought to be sorely lacking. Surely their analysis didn't recommend 500 MK 23s per SD? IINM, they were still using autocannons for point defense at this time. It just seemed like the RMN had a habit of chucking missiles that didn't grow on trees. And Michelle did mention that she wanted to test their systems, I suppose for the next CO on the spot.

You are not wrong.

However, firing 500 missiles at a ship does not guarantee 500 hits. Some missiles will be intercepted by active defenses. Some will be fooled by EW or decoys. Many will waste hits against an impeller wedge or simply miss.

tlb wrote:Further wouldn't putting a strong particle shield on a missile render the auto-cannon ineffective. I find it difficult to believe that an auto-cannon would have been effective to even a thousand KM.

kzt wrote:At the battle where Honors CA got smashed up prior to fun with BCs, David noted in HoS that the grav guns they had bought (from the SL iirc) did a pretty good job of stopping the massadan missiles.

The only mention I can find after a brief search of HoS is for the pre-Alliance Ararat (1 built, service ended 1903) and Zion (3 built, service ended 1905) class destroyers. Also the Glory (1 built, service ended 1903) and Austin Grayson (2 built, service ended 1904) class cruisers. The only mention of autocannon that I found in HotQ is in chapter 12:

Orbit Four's defenses had never been intended to stand off eighty percent of the Masadan Navy all by themselves. The fixed fortifications were sitting ducks for missile solutions; anything fired at them was almost bound to hit, unless it was stopped by point defense, and there simply wasn't enough point defense to stop the scores of missiles coming at them.

Radar locked onto the incoming warheads, and counter missiles raced to meet them. The chances of interception were far lower than they would have been for more modern defensive systems, but Captain Hill's men did well. They stopped almost a third of them, and lasers and last-ditch autocannon went to continuous fire against the survivors.

So, at that time they are for final close-in defense.

Theemile wrote:Besides, in war there is no such thing as overkill.

SAC Policy for targeting (alleged):

Enough is too little.
Too much is not enough.
Overkill is just right.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Deploying a squadron of "mere" Saganami C heavy cruisers along with one geriatric DN to defend Spindle while covertly deploying a freighter full of Apollo pods is sneaky.

Not warning Adm Crandal that the Mark 23 missile is designed to ream Haven SDs which have far better missilr defenses and tougher armor than SLN SDs is decrptive.

Not warning Crandal that even without Keyhole 2 to provide FTL fire control, the Apollo control missiles effectively multiply the number of FC control channels by a factor of 8, and Saggy Cs have far more control channels than they ought to, is just plain diabolical.

Not warning Crandal that all of those recon drones provide FTL sensor readings effectively reduce the control time lag by 50% is just evil.

She wouldn't have believed any of it if she had been told. She would have assumed it was nothing but a bluff. Nothing but being savaged by a missile storm would get through to her.