Hybrid missile/Graser Torp

Jonathan_S wrote:Though we go on to a discussion about how the 4 drive system defense missiles work around that to have a higher acceleration fourth drive.

cthia wrote:Oh là là ! Nice thread! I was anticipating a thread like this myself, delving inside MA tech. I'll just post it here . . .

INSIDE MALIGN TECH: STRATEGIC and TACTICAL OPTIONS

SNIPPED

I was wondering what impact it will have on MA tech if they happen to reproduce the Manty micro fusion plant. We all know what impact Grayson's brainchild had across the board on Manty tech.

Rob wrote:The Graysons developed the fission plant, not the fusion plant. From HOS:

Snipped the HOS quote.

They were working on that one a LOOOONNG time, Cthia. And didn't get it into missiles until Ghost Rider circa 1910?

Rob

cthia wrote:Thanks Rob. But what effect across the board will stealing the secrets of the fission plant have on MA tech? If the Alignment can manage the same enormous power budget per liter of displacement (big block engines, baby), may the fat lady sing?

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:No need for theft, really. When they go to researching it (they have some very good physicists) they will likely find a lot of the same starting data that Manticore got--from Uni-Grendal, or elsewhere. It came from the League in the first place, just no one pushed it as far as Project Gram did. And no one else was keeping such close tabs on other research centers as the Manties; likely no other system had people (reserve officers and enlisted) in so many ships running all over the place.

But a big university library supporting a cutting-edge physics department would subscribe to all those peer-review journals. . . .once they start looking.

The effect: a) graser torp goes on a diet; recon drones and ew emitters get drastically improved; but not missiles right off the bat. Even the Manties used capacitor based ones at first.

Incidently, we seem to have forgotten that the Manties improved their capacitor tech first, it was one reason why their missiles outranged Haven's at the start of the war. And a second improvement, maybe, became a big part of the development of the ERM/LERM and the Mk 41's.

Rob

Relax wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Though we go on to a discussion about how the 4 drive system defense missiles work around that to have a higher acceleration fourth drive.

Maybe RFC is going senile and does not remember what he has already written and cannonized into text... Lets hope he does not Alzheimers. My grandma had that and started at age 62 if not before then.

Relax wrote:In Enemy Hands wrote:
"Certainly she came up with the concept, but R&D took it and ran with it. We're talking about a 'multistage' missile—one with three separate drives, which will give us a degree of tactical flexibility no previous navy could even dream of! We can preprogram the drives to come on-line with any timing and at any power setting we wish! Simply programming them to activate in immediate succession at maximum power would give us a hundred and eighty seconds of powered flight . . . and a powered attack range from rest of over fourteen and a half million kilometers with a terminal velocity of point-five-four cee. Or we can drop the drives' power settings to forty-six thousand gees and get five times the endurance—and a maximum powered missile envelope of over sixty-five million klicks with a terminal velocity of point-eight-one light-speed. That's a range of three-point-six light-minutes, and we can get even more than that if we use one or two 'stages' to accelerate the weapon, let it ride a ballistic course to a preprogrammed attack range, and then bring up the final 'stage' for terminal attack maneuvers at a full ninety-two thousand gravities.

Book Canon is book canon. Posts on the forum are not.

I believe it is in Storm from the Shadows they are playing with training scenarios using 2 stages @46kG and final at 92kG final stage using apollo.

Storm from the Shadows wrote:The range-to-target sidebar on the tactical display was preposterous.
The missile salvo was sixty-eight million kilometers from Artemis, speeding steadily onward at 150,029 KPS. Its birds had been ballistic for four and a half minutes, ever since the second drive system had burned out, and they were still ninety-three seconds—almost fourteen million kilometers—from their target
<snip>
The missiles in the attack salvo had been preloaded with dozens of possible attack and EW profiles. Now Adenauer's flying fingers transmitted a series of commands which selected from the menu of preprogrammed options. One command designated the superdreadnoughts as the attack missiles' targets. Another told the Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth seeded into the salvo when to bring their EW systems up, and in what sequence. A third told the attack missiles when to bring up their final drive stages and what penetration profile to adopt when they hit the enemy force's missile-defense envelope. And a fourth told the Mark 23-Es when and how they should take over and restructure her commands if the enemy suddenly did something outside the parameters of her chosen attack patterns.
Entering those commands took her twenty-five seconds, in which the attack missiles traveled another 3,451,000 kilometers. It took just under four seconds for her commands to reach from Artemis to the Apollos. It took another twelve seconds for her instructions to be receipted, triple-checked, and confirmed by the Apollo AIs while the shrouds on the attack missiles were jettisoned. Forty-five seconds after the first pod's missiles had jettisoned their shrouds, the follow-on salvo opened its eyes, looked ahead, and saw its targets, still two and a quarter million kilometers in front of it.
<snip>
The simulated targets' fire control had only a relatively imprecise idea of where to look for the attack missiles before their third-stage drives came suddenly on-line. They'd still been so far out when they shut down for the ballistic leg of their flight that the defenders' on-board sensors hadn't been able to fully localize them. The target ships had gotten enough to predict their positions to within only a few percentage points of error, but at those velocities, and on such an enormous "battlefield," even tiny uncertainties made precise targeting impossible. And precise targeting was exactly what was necessary for a counter-missile to hit an attack missile at extended range.
The defenders saw the Mark 23s clearly when the attack missiles' final stages came suddenly and abruptly to life, but by then it was already too late. There was no time for any long-range counter-missile launch, and even the short-range CMs had rushed targeting solutions. Worse, the EW platforms supporting the attack came on-line at the worst possible moment for the defenders.

Jonathan_S wrote:If the missiles were always capable of flexibly choosing different accelerations for each drive then we're confronted with virtually every engagement we've ever seem both sides used sub-optimal acceleration profiles. Setting all 3 drives to low acceleration isn't the best profile until the range is in excess of 70 million km.

cthia wrote:How much of a diet? Enough to be fired from tubes? IINM that they are not tube fired now.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:Re: Spider drive graser torpedo.
ISTR that Spider Drive Graser Torpedoes are larger than missile pods. Partly because they still require a ton of capacitor space.

kzt wrote:

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:Re: Spider drive graser torpedo.
ISTR that Spider Drive Graser Torpedoes are larger than missile pods. Partly because they still require a ton of capacitor space.

I think they are more LAC sized than missile or missile pod sized. The graser alone is like 3000 tons, which is roughly in the scale of an RMN MK23 pod.

kzt wrote:

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:Re: Spider drive graser torpedo.
ISTR that Spider Drive Graser Torpedoes are larger than missile pods. Partly because they still require a ton of capacitor space.

I think they are more LAC sized than missile or missile pod sized. The graser alone is like 3000 tons, which is roughly in the scale of an RMN MK23 pod.