Battle of Spindle

Theemile wrote:Reguardless of the firing source, one point the SLN ONI missed was that 12 Heavy cruisers fired ~10,000 Guided, long ranged capital missiles per salvo. Yes, they didn't come from internal tubes, but 12 CAs had the firecontol to easily destroy 2x their number in SDs in one swat.

That alone should have had someone saying "excuse me?"

They decided it was a system defense setup that did it, not the cruisers.

tlb wrote:She came looking for a fight and got one. She could not run and would never surrender without a shot fired. The only change that I can see worth making would be to save missiles and only blow up Crandall's ship and a couple others, then explain to the new CO that they had no option but surrender.

I don't think that was a viable option. Crandall was coming down their throats and had to be stopped before she got within missile range. The GA also didn't know how effective their missiles would be. While they certainly could have popped Crandall with a targeted attack that would mean a lot of range lost. If the second in command figured it was another bluff (their missiles were deadly but they couldn't throw a lot of them) and pressed on and the more pessimistic estimates of how they would fare were right Crandall's fleet would have been savaged but victorious.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:A more probable response would be "oh SHIT!" followed by "I need to change my panties."

Except for the little detail that she certainly wasn't wearing any.

When ships are at battle stations the crew is in suits. Suits have sanitary arrangements built in. Since you obviously can't remove underwear while wearing a suit they must be donned sans underwear. Taking an unplanned dump in a suit is a non-issue.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:A more probable response would be "oh SHIT!" followed by "I need to change my panties."

Except for the little detail that she certainly wasn't wearing any.

When ships are at battle stations the crew is in suits. Suits have sanitary arrangements built in. Since you obviously can't remove underwear while wearing a suit they must be donned sans underwear. Taking an unplanned dump in a suit is a non-issue.

In the Victoria Secret's "Ironic" section they sell a style of panty called "Proverbial." You can't see them because they produce no panty lines. They're what some women call "barely there." They're called barely there because they have holes in them, one very large strategic hole. Some women find a way to wear panties.

Maybe instead of it being pinecones that Crandall was experiencing, it was her ill-fitting Victoria Secret's "barely there" collection riding up her "tube," or the proverbial "wedgie."

'Course, Henke'll go down in history as having given her that wedgie.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

tlb wrote:She came looking for a fight and got one. She could not run and would never surrender without a shot fired. The only change that I can see worth making would be to save missiles and only blow up Crandall's ship and a couple others, then explain to the new CO that they had no option but surrender.

I don't think that was a viable option. Crandall was coming down their throats and had to be stopped before she got within missile range. The GA also didn't know how effective their missiles would be. While they certainly could have popped Crandall with a targeted attack that would mean a lot of range lost. If the second in command figured it was another bluff (their missiles were deadly but they couldn't throw a lot of them) and pressed on and the more pessimistic estimates of how they would fare were right Crandall's fleet would have been savaged but victorious.

There was at least time to test the waters - two launches, err lunches. This brings me head-to-head with something I've always wondered about. A missile lock "sweet spot." Henke could have launched two salvo's, staggered. The second salvo launched at the optimum range that would allow time for the effectiveness of the first launch to be digested and new missile locks on surviving targets input into the trailing launch. Is that accomplished now? It would fall more in line with not completely scratching the surface of the capabilities of Apollo.

At any rate, the way I see it, Henke had a responsibility to gain intel on the effectiveness of Waller defenses, to pay it forward. In a way, she could have lost the opportunity to do exactly that, in the same vein that SL COs constantly failed to acquire accurate intel on Manty capabilities. The fact that this was the first encounter with SL SDs, it could have become a serious tactical fail for Henke not to gain that intel in case her shit quickly went into the crapper with no unit detached to ferry back the warning . . .

"They've gotten themselves 'back on balance.' "

The RMN has been there and done that with Haven. Remember when the RHN returned loaded for bear with the "Tripple Ripple?" Intel on the effectiveness of any new SL wrinkles, like Aegis, on Manty ECM was imperative. I thought that's exactly what Henke was alluding too.

If Henke was feeling jumpy, that staggered launch could have been massive and already enroute if range was a problem. And, of course, she would have had to settle on whether testing the waters was comprised of internal tube launchers.

if Michelle had even 2 podnoughts she would likely have been more willing to get fancy. As the biggest true combat ships she had were BCs, she didn't want to get too fancy, and decided that the statement of 1 immense salvo doing serious damage to the SLN fleet was was of more value then finding exactly how many hits a solly SD could take or just how poor its EW and PD was.

bear in mind that a lot of that info will have been in the captured databases she already possessed. yes they were from frontier fleet databases but there will have been some info on battlefleet ships. not as in depth as what was later recovered from crandall's but given the distrust between BF and FF, FF are bound to have some at least basic files on BF (just so they know how much money would stolen from their budget to buy new toys for BF), particularly if they might end up escorting BF's SD as BF was seriously lacking in escorts of all sizes.

so henke already had SOME info, and the statement that a couple of squadrons of CA's managed to control a launch that savaged a fleet of a couple dozens SDs and screen would have given anyone with more then 2 brain cells serious food for thought.

It would probably WOULD have if not for Oyster Bay, making SOME idiots think that they would not be ready if someone else with lots of big guns turned up and started making demands.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:A more probable response would be "oh SHIT!" followed by "I need to change my panties."

Except for the little detail that she certainly wasn't wearing any.

When ships are at battle stations the crew is in suits. Suits have sanitary arrangements built in. Since you obviously can't remove underwear while wearing a suit they must be donned sans underwear. Taking an unplanned dump in a suit is a non-issue.

When referencing Admiral Henke, Queen Elizebeth, Abigail Hearnes or Honor Harrington, the image of not wearing panties appeals to me. In reference to AAdmiral Crandall, not so much. My impression of Admiral Crandall is that she is a very large, brutal woman whom is beholden to Manpower and Mesa because she has an appetite for Genetic Sex Slaves that seldom survive an encounter with her.

tlb wrote: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.

Well rocket powered counter missiles (like Grayson still had in OBS) were in use as far back as the Manticore Ascendant series; so mid 1500s.
Not all ships had them but HMS Casey did.

Those are far shorter ranged and less capable than impeller wedge powered CMs - but those came much later when it was possible to shrink the size of the impeller nodes; prior to that carrying many more of the smaller less capable CMs was a better trade off.
I can't recall seeing one of those in action but I'd assume it was either hit-to-kill kinetic or a shrapnel warhead of some sort.

Clearly the kind of particle screens it was practical to put on missiles simply aren't up to the task of shunting away debris as large as a auto-cannon round or CM warhead. But those could easily be more than a kg - so vastly more impact energy than the normal micro-meteorites or dust particles the missile might run into.

As for using directed energy mounts earlier for missile defense there are a number of issues unique to that which would have to be overcome even after you had practical main energy mounts. Broadside mounts can be mounted pretty solidly, you mostly aim the ship not the mount. Also they were historically pretty slow firing and very large. For laser point defense you need to be able to fire a lot of sufficiently powerful shots very quickly, you need the mount to be able to slew around rapidly to engage missiles coming from multiple angles, you still need extremely accurate pointing, and you need the mount to be sufficiently rigid that the laser still goes where you point it and you're not messing up the lasing chamber by too much structural 'whipping'. To get the desired firing rate they ended up clustering groups of lasers that could be slewed around together. But that requires relatively compact very high power laser emitters - something that clearly took much longer to develop than improvements in auto-cannon did.

Jonathan_S wrote:Well rocket powered counter missiles (like Grayson still had in OBS) were in use as far back as the Manticore Ascendant series; so mid 1500s.
Not all ships had them but HMS Casey did.

Those are far shorter ranged and less capable than impeller wedge powered CMs - but those came much later when it was possible to shrink the size of the impeller nodes; prior to that carrying many more of the smaller less capable CMs was a better trade off.
I can't recall seeing one of those in action but I'd assume it was either hit-to-kill kinetic or a shrapnel warhead of some sort.

Clearly the kind of particle screens it was practical to put on missiles simply aren't up to the task of shunting away debris as large as a auto-cannon round or CM warhead. But those could easily be more than a kg - so vastly more impact energy than the normal micro-meteorites or dust particles the missile might run into.

Chemical reaction drive counter missiles are used by Grayson in HotQ, their mode of operation is not described; but it must be shrapnel, because direct impact would be too difficult to achieve. There is also mention of an auto-cannon 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 auto-cannon is for the final close-in targeting.

As for small wedge missiles, in chapter 25 of The Short Victorious War, one is used by Kevin Usher to assassinate the head of Internal Security:

"Mark!" the spotter's whisper crackled over her com, and Usher and his team tensed in readiness. The spotter shifted position, aligning the passive sights of her designator on the nose of the limousine sliding out of the access point, and tension crackled silently across the roof.

"Painting—now!" she snapped, and squeezed the stud.
* * *
An alarm shrieked, and Palmer-Levy's pilot twitched in his seat. One eye dropped to the lurid light on his EW panel, and his face paled.

"We're being lased!" he barked.
* * *
The launching charge lit the tower roof like lightning as it spat the Viper missile from the tube. Its tiny impeller drive kicked in almost instantly, accelerating it at over two thousand gravities even as its sensors picked up the glare of reflected laser light from the air car below and in front of it, and its nose dipped.
* * *
The pilot twisted the controls in a frantic evasion maneuver, but the Viper had an optical lock now, and his speed was too low to generate a miss. He did his best, but it was too late for his best to be enough.

Constance Palmer-Levy had one fleeting instant to realize what was happening, and then the edge of the Viper's impeller wedge struck.

The air car tore apart in a hurricane of splintered composites. Its hydrogen reservoirs exploded in balls of brilliant blue flame, and the commander of Internal Security and her bodyguards cascaded down across Nouveau Paris in a grisly rain.

So they must have developed much earlier, without Grayson being able to get any.

Jonathan_S wrote:

tlb wrote: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.

Well rocket powered counter missiles (like Grayson still had in OBS) were in use as far back as the Manticore Ascendant series; so mid 1500s.
Not all ships had them but HMS Casey did.

Those are far shorter ranged and less capable than impeller wedge powered CMs - but those came much later when it was possible to shrink the size of the impeller nodes; prior to that carrying many more of the smaller less capable CMs was a better trade off.
I can't recall seeing one of those in action but I'd assume it was either hit-to-kill kinetic or a shrapnel warhead of some sort.

Clearly the kind of particle screens it was practical to put on missiles simply aren't up to the task of shunting away debris as large as a auto-cannon round or CM warhead. But those could easily be more than a kg - so vastly more impact energy than the normal micro-meteorites or dust particles the missile might run into.

As for using directed energy mounts earlier for missile defense there are a number of issues unique to that which would have to be overcome even after you had practical main energy mounts. Broadside mounts can be mounted pretty solidly, you mostly aim the ship not the mount. Also they were historically pretty slow firing and very large. For laser point defense you need to be able to fire a lot of sufficiently powerful shots very quickly, you need the mount to be able to slew around rapidly to engage missiles coming from multiple angles, you still need extremely accurate pointing, and you need the mount to be sufficiently rigid that the laser still goes where you point it and you're not messing up the lasing chamber by too much structural 'whipping'. To get the desired firing rate they ended up clustering groups of lasers that could be slewed around together. But that requires relatively compact very high power laser emitters - something that clearly took much longer to develop than improvements in auto-cannon did.

See my thread on Phased Array Grasers.

Given phases array lasers, the slew rate is effeftively 180 eegrees within a microsecond. One mount might even be able to simultaneously target multiple missiles.