Battle of Spindle

munroburton wrote:

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.

Jonathan_S wrote:And if they were moving missiles at anything close to that it would show up when missile combat was described. We get statements scattered through the books giving missile acceleration, missile time to distance, and/or missile burnout velocity. Any significant velocity introduced by the launchers would skew those numbers, but ever time we get enough on the same combat to cross check them the numbers they seem to work out with only ship closing velocities affecting things; otherwise they're the from rest numbers. So despite what SVW said it appears that RFC's number crunching does treat the launchers as if they imparted negligable velocity. (But in that case there shouldn't have been performance issues with old-style pods. And yes, this kind of number crunching probably encourages him and other authors to simply skip the numbers so they can't have their story contradicted by them)

Dauntless wrote: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.

cthia wrote:Granted. But I can't see the same number of missiles launched at a Havenite ship of the same capability. Especially considering the lack of mutual Solarian ship support and their ECM which is little more than a paperweight. Henke really had a responsibility to accurately size up the SD Wallers to pay forward. Or the next CO may have to waste the same number of missiles, or someone without the pods wasting too much of needed stock at enemy ships.

The twelve superdreadnoughts of Task Force 82 had rolled quadruple patterns before they launched. Two hundred and eighty-eight Apollo pods had launched nineteen hundred attack missiles and four hundred EW platforms, along with two hundred and eighty-eight control missiles.
Javier Giscard's counter-missiles stopped only three hundred of the attack birds. His desperate point defense clusters, in the single volley each of them got, killed another four hundred.
Twelve hundred got through.
<snip>
All of Judah Yanakov's fire had been concentrated on only two ships.

munroburton wrote:

cthia wrote:Granted. But I can't see the same number of missiles launched at a Havenite ship of the same capability. Especially considering the lack of mutual Solarian ship support and their ECM which is little more than a paperweight. Henke really had a responsibility to accurately size up the SD Wallers to pay forward. Or the next CO may have to waste the same number of missiles, or someone without the pods wasting too much of needed stock at enemy ships.

The Battle of Lovat:

The twelve superdreadnoughts of Task Force 82 had rolled quadruple patterns before they launched. Two hundred and eighty-eight Apollo pods had launched nineteen hundred attack missiles and four hundred EW platforms, along with two hundred and eighty-eight control missiles.
Javier Giscard's counter-missiles stopped only three hundred of the attack birds. His desperate point defense clusters, in the single volley each of them got, killed another four hundred.
Twelve hundred got through.
<snip>
All of Judah Yanakov's fire had been concentrated on only two ships.

We're comparing apples and cider at this point, but Apollo's first outing against the RHN saw approximately 1,200 missiles used per target. As ~32 SD(P)s were destroyed, that means Eighth Fleet used almost forty thousand missiles at Lovat.

Michelle only used a little more than half of that at Spindle.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:How much independent control does the Mark 23-E allow? Does each missile have to attack where the others do, or can there be separate targets?

Castenea wrote:I think it likely that in theory, each missile could go after a different target. In practice all eight attack missile will almost always attack the same target.

cthia wrote:Yea, I thought that all missiles follow their neighbor as well, but if an up the kilt shot presents itself on another target there only needs to be one missile diverted. Which also beckons the question of exactly what happens to the Mark23-E if it isn't destroyed by point defense? Assuming I'm correct that it's simply a control missile with no laserheads. If I am correct, I wonder if it could help prevent missiles wasted on obviously destroyed targets.

tlb wrote:I am fairly certain that RFC said that the Mark 23-E missiles would communicate with each other, sharing target information. If so, then clearly they can do what you suggest. I cannot find the description of the Apollo system, but I remember the control missile as being a bit bigger and lacking a warhead, in order to fit in the communication and control equipment.

Theemile wrote:It was mentioned in the last 2 books that the -E's in a flight communicated in a mesh network to share uplinks (if needed) and to acquire a fuller sight picture (when in autonomous/RF mode) for making attack decisions. One could assume that there might be the ability to make targeting decisions, within certain parameters (for-ex, do you really want the missiles to attack the helpless the troop transports in the enemy formation? )

I found the first description of Apollo in At All Costs, chapter 57:

It was called "Apollo," after the archer of the gods.
It hadn't been easy for the R&D types to perfect. Even for Manticoran technology, designing the components had required previously impossible levels of miniaturization, and BuWeaps had encountered more difficulties than anticipated in putting the system into production. This was its first test in actual combat, and the crews which had launched the MDMs watched with bated breath to see how well it performed.
Javier Giscard was wrong. There weren't twelve missiles in an Apollo pod; there were nine. Eight relatively standard attack missiles or EW platforms, and the Apollo missile—much larger than the others, and equipped with a down-sized, short-ranged two-way FTL communications link developed from the one deployed in the still larger Ghost Rider reconnaissance drones. It was a remote control node, following along behind the other eight missiles from the same pod, without any warhead or electronic warfare capability of its own.
The impeller wedges of the other missiles hid it and its pulsed transmissions from the sensors of Giscard's ships, and from his counter-missiles. But its position allowed it to monitor the standard telemetry links from the other missiles of its pod. And it also carried a far more capable AI than any standard attack missile—one capable of processing the data from all of the other missiles' tracking and homing systems and sending the result back to its mothership via grav-pulse.

cthia wrote:Thanks for the textev. I remembered that it followed along behind the brood of missiles like a trailing choir director, which allows it plenty of time to use its final maneuvers to avoid dying and to remain useful by staying in the network as long as possible. No need committing suicide before its time. I've always wondered what becomes of the control missile. Possibly after it becomes orphaned it becomes visible, no longer hidden within the noise and is quickly destroyed if anything is left of targets that can destroy it.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Thanks for the textev. I remembered that it followed along behind the brood of missiles like a trailing choir director, which allows it plenty of time to use its final maneuvers to avoid dying and to remain useful by staying in the network as long as possible. No need committing suicide before its time. I've always wondered what becomes of the control missile. Possibly after it becomes orphaned it becomes visible, no longer hidden within the noise and is quickly destroyed if anything is left of targets that can destroy it.

I have to think that there is a self destruct charge, to make sure it never falls into enemy hands. Perhaps activated when missiles are gone or before loss of power?

PS. RFC has a Pearl on firing off-bore missiles:
http://www.davidweber.net/posts/160-off ... getin.html

Jonathan_S wrote:My guess is self-destruct could be just turning off the containment on the micro-fusion power plant and letting the plasma tear the missile apart.

Jonathan_S wrote:My guess is self-destruct could be just turning off the containment on the micro-fusion power plant and letting the plasma tear the missile apart.

Theemile wrote:That will work NOW, for Manty missiles - for everyone else, they probably just use the warhead.