Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

Galactic Sapper wrote:I'm basing this assumption on the fact that RFC said they were useful energy weapons at close enough range. I'm assuming he meant approximately the useful range of shipboard lasers and grasers against sidewalls, not grav lance range or less. Even energy torpedoes have a useful range out about that far, and even point defense lasers have a useful range well beyond 300 km (assuming a bare hull).

The text says "sufficiently short range" and the key word in the phrasing here is "sufficiently". The presence of that extra qualifier tells me that it's shorter range than short-range weapons.

You're correct here. I managed to locate the text description of the spider drive in MoH and the drives are described as "literally dozens" of nodes acting in "micro-spaced bursts". So at a guess this cuts the number of emitters to 50-100ish, with the timing I assumed to be approximately correct. Sort of. That cuts the high end of missile defense down to 3000 or fewer shots per ship - still a massively useful addition to conventional missile defenses but not the salvo-shredding defensive wall I'd imagined.

I'd be surprised if it can get that many. On the other hand, it may not need shots, but may be able to make a long, continuous sweep.

I am actually assuming tractor emitters are constructed similar to a solid-state phased array emitter we have today for some radars. Switching between targets wouldn't necessarily require physically steering the emitter at all.

I was thinking of solid-state too. Makes sense because a spider-driven ship is probably suffering from around an apparent 5 gravities. Moving parts may be brittle. But even without moving parts, changing the focusing angle of a power component takes time. The text does say it brought up the power output to previously-ridiculous levels and you can't change power components on a whim. The energies involved will resist the change all by themselves.

An example of such current limitation is a power thyristor: a thyristor is a solid-state device based on the same principles as a transistor, but with four layers instead of three. Transistors are used today with billions of changes per second, but power thyristors get nowhere near that. This is a difference of purpose: one is designed for fast switching, the other for massive power loads. I'd assume the same principle applies: the components for the drives are designed for driving the ship and wouldn't easily apply for defence.

I AM assuming this to a degree. First, a missile wedge is far weaker than even a small ship's wedge, so what damage even these tractor emitters might do to a missile would probably not translate to a ship-sized wedge. Second, the effect does not have to cato-kill the missile or its wedge, just induce enough instability/wedge torque/etc. that the warhead cannot compensate in the few milliseconds it has left to successfully aim its rods and detonate. A warhead forced to miss is as good as a kill.

Interesting. I don't think you're right about interfering with the wedge sufficiently to destroy the ring: the only thing we know to cause a wedge to fail is a stronger wedge. But the effect of distorting space-time such that the wedge or the missile itself is off-aim.

Having found the text I did earlier, I'm assuming a combination of the two. Massed point defense batteries along with defensive use of the spider, although now I'm thinking one keel aimed directly at the threat with one broadside full of PD "above" that keel and one "below", getting a full two broadsides worth of point defense into the fight (and all three could be launching CMs, assuming they've developed or stole that sort of off-bore targeting).

I'd do the opposite and point one edge, not one face, towards the incoming missiles. That way, you have two keels' worth of point defence towards the missiles, not just one. All you need is that the laser clusters can target 60° from straight "up". You want to pick as many missiles as early as possible.

The problem with turning broadside towards the incoming missiles is that the missiles now have a larger cross-section to target. A missile that will pass 0.5 light-second away at the closest approach enters the 1-light-second short range distance 0.5 light-second off and 0.866 (√3/2) light-second away and sees the ship at a 30° angle from the line of travel. A 2 km long face at that distance represents a mere 0.69 arc-second target. If that face is turned towards you, the target is instead 1.21 arc-seconds. That's a 75.8% bigger target, though whether it matters or not is unknown. Probably doesn't, since missiles are designed not only to fire onto a target this small, but within the wedge and only after the pen-aids have brought the sidewall down.

But it could mean the range at which the missile is effective is longer. The range is limited by the decoherence of the beam, but also the ability for the target to move away from the beam was aimed. With a bigger target and with a slower drive, the missiles may very well be effective from further: an LD performing evasive manoeuvres at 100 gravities requires √5 times (2.236x) more time to move the same distance as an SD evading at 500 gravities.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:You're correct here. I managed to locate the text description of the spider drive in MoH and the drives are described as "literally dozens" of nodes acting in "micro-spaced bursts". So at a guess this cuts the number of emitters to 50-100ish, with the timing I assumed to be approximately correct. Sort of. That cuts the high end of missile defense down to 3000 or fewer shots per ship - still a massively useful addition to conventional missile defenses but not the salvo-shredding defensive wall I'd imagined.

I'd be surprised if it can get that many. On the other hand, it may not need shots, but may be able to make a long, continuous sweep.

I am actually assuming tractor emitters are constructed similar to a solid-state phased array emitter we have today for some radars. Switching between targets wouldn't necessarily require physically steering the emitter at all.

I was thinking of solid-state too. Makes sense because a spider-driven ship is probably suffering from around an apparent 5 gravities. Moving parts may be brittle. But even without moving parts, changing the focusing angle of a power component takes time. The text does say it brought up the power output to previously-ridiculous levels and you can't change power components on a whim. The energies involved will resist the change all by themselves.

We have no way of knowing whether the direction of the bursts can be altered without physically adjusting the node. We have no way of knowing whether something that emits a micro spaced burst can also emit a longer lived spike; the power levels you mention might preclude that.

Most importantly if it is too short ranged, then it will not reach the missile warheads at their stand-off range.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The text says "sufficiently short range" and the key word in the phrasing here is "sufficiently". The presence of that extra qualifier tells me that it's shorter range than short-range weapons.

It depends on the target. Against a bare hull, an energy weapon is effective far beyond the current 300-400k km "energy range". Shots were taken at 800k in Cerberus, so "sufficiently short" may mean less than that range, less than regular energy range, less than grav lance range, or even less than pissing range.

I'd be surprised if it can get that many. On the other hand, it may not need shots, but may be able to make a long, continuous sweep.

I was thinking of solid-state too. Makes sense because a spider-driven ship is probably suffering from around an apparent 5 gravities. Moving parts may be brittle. But even without moving parts, changing the focusing angle of a power component takes time. The text does say it brought up the power output to previously-ridiculous levels and you can't change power components on a whim. The energies involved will resist the change all by themselves.

The emitter has to have at least some "swing" built into its design, as it essentially links a moving ship with a stationary position for the length of the "micro-spaced bursts." Since the fixed point cannot be directly ahead of the ship, there is going to be some fraction of angular shift between the beginning of the pull and the end of it, so the emitter's ability to deal with that has to be included in the design. And of course the shorter the range the emitter is capable of, the shorter the distance between the anchor point and the ship and the greater that angular displacement is going to be.

Having found the text I did earlier, I'm assuming a combination of the two. Massed point defense batteries along with defensive use of the spider, although now I'm thinking one keel aimed directly at the threat with one broadside full of PD "above" that keel and one "below", getting a full two broadsides worth of point defense into the fight (and all three could be launching CMs, assuming they've developed or stole that sort of off-bore targeting).

I'd do the opposite and point one edge, not one face, towards the incoming missiles. That way, you have two keels' worth of point defence towards the missiles, not just one. All you need is that the laser clusters can target 60° from straight "up". You want to pick as many missiles as early as possible.

You have this backwards. If you imagine the ship's profile as an equilateral triangular prism (it's not, but close enough for this), the drive nodes are situated at the edges of the prism, not on the faces. Those edges are what are called the "keels" or "skegs" in the text. The faces are the "broadsides" of this design, so aiming one edge of the prism at the threat opens two faces worth of weapons mounts at the income threat (assuming of course they can aim that far from normal to the face).

The problem with turning broadside towards the incoming missiles is that the missiles now have a larger cross-section to target. A missile that will pass 0.5 light-second away at the closest approach enters the 1-light-second short range distance 0.5 light-second off and 0.866 (√3/2) light-second away and sees the ship at a 30° angle from the line of travel. A 2 km long face at that distance represents a mere 0.69 arc-second target. If that face is turned towards you, the target is instead 1.21 arc-seconds. That's a 75.8% bigger target, though whether it matters or not is unknown. Probably doesn't, since missiles are designed not only to fire onto a target this small, but within the wedge and only after the pen-aids have brought the sidewall down.

Several things wrong here. First, no missile warhead yet seen can target a ship at 0.5 LS. The best we've seen is IIRC 50k km, which is 0.16 LS. Second, the ship really isn't shaped like a triangular prism, but more of a cylinder with three ridges sticking out at 120 degrees from each other. The profile of the ship doesn't change much when rotating. Some, but not much. You may well be correct about warheads being able to target a spider further out without the obscuring effects of the wedge.

Third, I'm not sure how relevant "pen aids" are. As originally introduced, they were a design feature of dual purpose "burn/boom" contact nuke warheads, where a bit of the drive from the missile forced the sidewall open enough to get the warhead inside the sidewall before it detonated. If it failed, the warhead detonated just short of the sidewall to "burn" the wall down, giving follow up salvos an easier shot at the enemy. If it worked, the warhead went "boom" in close proximity to the enemy's hull (if it didn't hit it, which was even better than a detonation).

In terms of laser heads, though, the "pen aids" don't seem to have a physical function. They don't take the sidewall down; that much is established many times in text - the warhead laser shoot through the sidewall, and the sidewall comes down due to damage to the sidewall generators caused by the lasers hitting the hull. Otherwise we wouldn't see so many instances of warhead lasers hitting sidewalls and not doing damage to the ship behind them, such as the first salvo at the wormhole battle in UH. Lots of lasers hit the bow wall, almost none of them got through, and the bow wall was still up afterward.

At this point "pen aid" seems to be a catch-all term for any sort of defensive EW that helps the warhead survive long enough to get to detonation range

But it could mean the range at which the missile is effective is longer. The range is limited by the decoherence of the beam, but also the ability for the target to move away from the beam was aimed. With a bigger target and with a slower drive, the missiles may very well be effective from further: an LD performing evasive manoeuvres at 100 gravities requires √5 times (2.236x) more time to move the same distance as an SD evading at 500 gravities.

It's not a matter of the target moving in most cases, since the target is barely capable of moving within the easily defined volume of the wedge. The wedge moving evasively doesn't help all that much, since the wedge is easily located on sensors and the target ship MUST be bracketed within the confines of that wedge. The problem is the missile having a target volume where it knows the enemy ship HAS to be, but having a very limited window in which to detect where the ship actually is, aim, and hit it.

The OMG Sapper is tired analogy: the ship is the equivalent of a tic tac taped to a blackboard, and you're leaning out a car window with a rifle as it speeds past the blackboard at 90 miles per hour. And you can't even SEE the tic tac until you're even with the blackboard. Hitting the blackboard is relatively easy, but close doesn't count. You have to hit the tic tac.

Galactic Sapper wrote:You have this backwards. If you imagine the ship's profile as an equilateral triangular prism (it's not, but close enough for this), the drive nodes are situated at the edges of the prism, not on the faces. Those edges are what are called the "keels" or "skegs" in the text. The faces are the "broadsides" of this design, so aiming one edge of the prism at the threat opens two faces worth of weapons mounts at the income threat (assuming of course they can aim that far from normal to the face).

Ah, thanks for the correction. Indeed, if you're going to turn broadside to the incoming missiles, you want two of the three in view of the swarm. The back broadside will target whatever flies past and tries to fire backwards.

The problem with turning broadside towards the incoming missiles is that the missiles now have a larger cross-section to target. A missile that will pass 0.5 light-second away at the closest approach enters the 1-light-second short range distance 0.5 light-second off and 0.866 (√3/2) light-second away and sees the ship at a 30° angle from the line of travel. A 2 km long face at that distance represents a mere 0.69 arc-second target. If that face is turned towards you, the target is instead 1.21 arc-seconds. That's a 75.8% bigger target, though whether it matters or not is unknown. Probably doesn't, since missiles are designed not only to fire onto a target this small, but within the wedge and only after the pen-aids have brought the sidewall down.

Several things wrong here. First, no missile warhead yet seen can target a ship at 0.5 LS. The best we've seen is IIRC 50k km, which is 0.16 LS. Second, the ship really isn't shaped like a triangular prism, but more of a cylinder with three ridges sticking out at 120 degrees from each other. The profile of the ship doesn't change much when rotating. Some, but not much. You may well be correct about warheads being able to target a spider further out without the obscuring effects of the wedge.

Ok, thanks. Recalculating the geometry: the missile is at one edge of a rectangle triangle with a hypotenuse of 50000 km and adjacent to the 60° angle (the missile must turn 30° to hit the ship). If the ship is oriented parallel to the direction of the missile's motion, the 2 km length of the ship spans 4.13 arc seconds. If, instead, the ship is perpendicular to the direction of motion, that's 7.16 arc seconds, or a 73% bigger target. The shallower the attack angle, the bigger the target: at a 10° turn, it's a 567% bigger target.

But it could mean the range at which the missile is effective is longer. The range is limited by the decoherence of the beam, but also the ability for the target to move away from the beam was aimed. With a bigger target and with a slower drive, the missiles may very well be effective from further: an LD performing evasive manoeuvres at 100 gravities requires √5 times (2.236x) more time to move the same distance as an SD evading at 500 gravities.

It's not a matter of the target moving in most cases, since the target is barely capable of moving within the easily defined volume of the wedge. The wedge moving evasively doesn't help all that much, since the wedge is easily located on sensors and the target ship MUST be bracketed within the confines of that wedge. The problem is the missile having a target volume where it knows the enemy ship HAS to be, but having a very limited window in which to detect where the ship actually is, aim, and hit it.

It does matter because once the missile has determined where the ship is, aimed and fired at 50,000 km, the beam will take 1/6th of a second to reach the ship. In that time, the ship can move. However, 1/6th of a second isn't much and even if it can move 5x less in the same time, it's still too little to evade a well-placed beam. And besides, the missile isn't coming alone, so the swarm is going to bracket all the possible places the ship could be.

The OMG Sapper is tired analogy: the ship is the equivalent of a tic tac taped to a blackboard, and you're leaning out a car window with a rifle as it speeds past the blackboard at 90 miles per hour. And you can't even SEE the tic tac until you're even with the blackboard. Hitting the blackboard is relatively easy, but close doesn't count. You have to hit the tic tac.

We go back to the question of how to find the ship in the first place. On one hand, you don't have the wedge to give you a volume where it certainly is. You have to find it on its own, maybe by detecting the effect of the spider drive. On the other hand, there is no wedge or sidewall to distort the picture: if you can detect the ship itself, you may be able to detect it from further away.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Ok, thanks. Recalculating the geometry: the missile is at one edge of a rectangle triangle with a hypotenuse of 50000 km and adjacent to the 60° angle (the missile must turn 30° to hit the ship). If the ship is oriented parallel to the direction of the missile's motion, the 2 km length of the ship spans 4.13 arc seconds. If, instead, the ship is perpendicular to the direction of motion, that's 7.16 arc seconds, or a 73% bigger target. The shallower the attack angle, the bigger the target: at a 10° turn, it's a 567% bigger target.

I'm still not sure I'm getting you're point here. You seem to be arguing that it's optimal to give the lowest target cross section by going bow-in to the missile fire? Admittedly, that's a better idea for a spider ship than an impeller ship, since they're not giving up anything in terms of wedge protection or sidewalls, but they're still giving up a lot of defensive fire potential. The broadsides have a much greater area to mount point defenses compared to the bow or stern.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Ok, thanks. Recalculating the geometry: the missile is at one edge of a rectangle triangle with a hypotenuse of 50000 km and adjacent to the 60° angle (the missile must turn 30° to hit the ship). If the ship is oriented parallel to the direction of the missile's motion, the 2 km length of the ship spans 4.13 arc seconds. If, instead, the ship is perpendicular to the direction of motion, that's 7.16 arc seconds, or a 73% bigger target. The shallower the attack angle, the bigger the target: at a 10° turn, it's a 567% bigger target.

I'm still not sure I'm getting you're point here. You seem to be arguing that it's optimal to give the lowest target cross section by going bow-in to the missile fire? Admittedly, that's a better idea for a spider ship than an impeller ship, since they're not giving up anything in terms of wedge protection or sidewalls, but they're still giving up a lot of defensive fire potential. The broadsides have a much greater area to mount point defenses compared to the bow or stern.

Yes, that's what I meant, but it only makes a difference if the larger cross-section translates to improved accuracy for the missiles proportionately more than the gain of having those point defences towards the missiles. And we don't know that it does. In fact, it probably doesn't: a 567% increase in cross-section is still smaller than the gain in PDs, which are going to be in the range of 20x-50x.

Sigs wrote:Was their goal the destruction of everything in the system including Home Fleet? Would the destruction of Home Fleet and every other major concentration of wallers and industry accomplished the MA's goals? If they had 300 Shark-class ships at their disposal instead of 30, would it have benefited their end result to destroy 200+ RMN SD(P)'s, 150+ GSN SD(P)'s and all of the SEM's out-system industry?


If their ultimate goal was the destruction of the 3 yards and all the ships being built there and all the ships in refit would sending double or triple the attacking force accomplish that any better?

It seems they needed something like 100% availability and better than expected performance to hit all the targets that they did.

While it's possible that the target set they actually hit represented their best case of minimum desired + all bonus targets I don't think it did.

They ran the attack so minimalist that a single ship becoming unservicable; losing the forward fire control provided by even one Ghost and its fire control relay platforms; having non-trivial numbers of failures of the missile pods they coasted in at relatively high speed would have led to failure take out all the OB targets that they actually managed. So if the targets they hit were the minimum targets they wanted to be quite likely of killing they really needed to bring along 15-25% more forces across the board. And that's if they still assumed they'd remain undetected until it was too late for defensive measures to come online. If they allowed for the possibility of detection even at little as 5-10 minutes earlier they did need to bring at least twice as much firepower to be likely to get the results they managed on the day.

That additional force would give them redundancy to still hit all those targets even if a more realistic level of things went wrong with these new and never combat tested systems.



So in order for the Admiralty to assume that the MAlign probably had lots of unused forces they'd have to assume the MAlign weren't interested in capturing the system AND were only expecting to hit no more than 75-80% of the targets they actually managed to hit (and were willing to accept getting maybe as little as 20-30% of those targets if any warning brought defenses online). But since getting that little of the "arms and legs" of Manticoran industry and shipbuilding makes little sense the Admiralty can be reasonable sure than the MAlign was having to stretch to get the targets that they did and that they didn't have a significant amount of identical capability that they could have committed to the attack.

Sigs wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:As for Mannerheim destroying the HMS Haverst Joy at the Twins, that was a squadron of BCs. The commanding officers and crew knew why, but I doubt the impeller techs on third shift knew. They know that they are protecting a wormhole that is a secret but think it's an economic reason.

And you have to rotate the picket home eventually, you cant set up a picket for long term without this getting out and the GA sending a ship or two to investigate this “secret” wormhole. Even when Torch was under Mesa’s control you would still want a picket there just in case. Rotating ships through this deployment for any length of time even if its only the 3 years since Torch was liberated it would mean you have to rotate at LEAST 3 squadrons in which still leaves the crew’s of 24 BC’s with the knowledge of a “secret” wormhole. How long before someone brags at a bar or a party somewhere that in early 1921 they were in a battle while guarding a secret wormhole terminus? And how long before one of the GA’s intelligence services manages to get a sniff of that? At this point with the RF being an independent nation if I were the GA I would make sure that we have intelligence assets on the ground in the main systems of that nation. The battle that they hear about coincides with Harvest Joy going missing, soon enough they cut back through the bullshit and exaggerations and they have all they need “secret wormhole, picket squadron, date of contact”. If you have ships that are not in the public eye and crews that don’t officially belong to you it works, otherwise you leave scarps even if you feed your crews some BS about guarding important economic assets.

Wasn't much of a battle. The BCs fired a few missiles into a basically defenseless ship (still caught within the grav eddies of the terminus and therefore unable to deploy wedge, sidewall, decoys, missiles or CMs) and destroyed it.

If they wanted to they could probably easily convince the majority of the crews that it was an unscheduled live fire drill. Do a couple of those before you expect Harvest Joy to pop through, then after you kill her keep the BCs there another several months holding a few more unscheduled live fire drills and it all become nothing worth talking about.

The number of crew who actually saw that there was a real target on their sensors is going to be pretty small - and as ThinksMarkedly said in a later post the MAlign was able to basically hand pick the crews for reliability anyway.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The problem with raising sidewalls is that you have to drop your stealth, as the sidewalls are very visible at a distance. So you'd do it only if you find yourself already in a pickle, usually having lost your stealth by other means. And raising a bubblewall is a last resort activity, since you become ballistic after this.

I haven't seen anything that says bubble sidewalls are incompatible with fusion thrusters. Of course those aren't especially stealthy if sensors are looking in the right direction - but that hardly matters once you're forced to abandon stealth by deploying the sidewall anyway.

As long as the fuel lasts the LDs should be able to pull almost as many Gs on thrusters as they could with their spider drive. So I think the lack of maneuvering under bubble shield is probably being oversold as an issue. The big one is that all your propulsion is slower than any warship you'd be fighting so you still can run away or run them down.

Sigs wrote:I never said someone would do it by accident. If Harvest Joy's mission had been kept quiet by the Leadership at Torch, and Manticore had not released any information about it by the time the MA finds out that someone came through they would be back in Torch sipping Pina colada's. Assuming that your enemy who doesn't know you exist is going to announce that they are sending a ship to survey the wormhole with enough notice for you to set up an ambush seems like a terrible way to secure your most important asset.

It would be fairly obvious to even casual observation of the Torch terminus area whether or not someone was surveying the wormhole. And remember it's much closer in that most wormholes so it should be easier for agents in the Torch system to surreptitiously monitor (and that's assuming you don't get the info via agents working on infiltrating the Torch government).

A ship surveying is going to be deploying lots of drones and running back and forth across the terminus area. That looks very different than a picket defending the terminus as those would be staying well out of energy weapons range of the potential terminus area - they should be back at least a couple million km englobing the area ready to launch laserheads at any hostile transit.

So even if the MAlign didn't bother to deploy any defenses until they knew a transit was possible they should still have had plenty of warning. However I suspect there was a lighter (or at least less manpower intensive) defense there from the moment they lost Torch. Because deploying 8 BCs was utter and complete overkill - that's enough to be likely to kill at least a 16 SD transit; much less the single survey ship that's likely to pop through. Frankly a freighter able to deploy, recover, and pull servicing on missile pods (even pods of SDMs) is more than enough to protect against any conceivable first transit; heck its probably more effective overall than the BCs. That could be done with way fewer potential questions than diverting a BC squadron to cover the terminus.
I half think the BCs showed up for the expected transit just because that navy higher-ups wanted the privilege of killing the survey ship personally; rather than letting a bunch of pods do it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The big difference between an MDM and a G-torp is flight time. When two forces are engaged at any given distance and velocity vectors, the weapon with the highest acceleration will reach the target first, if fired at the same time. I've made the argument that a spider-driven G-torp should have an acceleration similar to that of a Ghost Rider RD: in the range of 3500 G. Possibly less. Without a wedge, there's no gravity sump for compensators, so they're limited by gravity plates. Those take energy and generate heat, so you can't have something very big in the torpedo if you want it to be stealthy. And you can't rack up acceleration even for a solid-state technology without compensating somehow.

The acceleration isn't that much of a problem. Its possible to design hardware to handle hundreds to thousands of gees; especially if the jerk (change in acceleration) isn't too high. We already have hardware than can survive getting fired out of a howitzer which (briefly) experiences thousands of gees. So you don't need to limit the structure and internals of a graser torp to the 5 or so gees humans can tolerate. Even if you used grav plates to take the edge off you'd have no problem building hardware that could take at least 100 gees bleeding through the grav plates.

That said however, I seem to recall RFC saying that the graser torps had fairly low acceleration, far less than an RD, because they were too small to mount enough spider drive nodes for really high accel. I think they might even have less acceleration than a modern RMN SD(P) running flat out.

So not only would they have issues with far too long transit times in a missile duel, but depending on the relative base velocities they might actually have trouble pulling off an attack intercept against modern RMN warship that had a good idea where they were coming from.

2 items - The Mannerheim BCs used Grasers (small quibble) at the twins and Graser Torps are limited to ~250 Gs accel.

David said the upper limit of accel on the Spider Drive increases with the size of the installation, but manned spider drive vessels are limited to 150 Gs, which still imparts 5 Gs to the Crew due to the advanced Grav Plates.

Could that mean that LDs are optionally manned? (If so, why train crews on the Sharks....)

Theemile wrote:2 items - The Mannerheim BCs used Grasers (small quibble) at the twins and Graser Torps are limited to ~250 Gs accel.

It's probable that missiles can't work in the terminus. It seems reasonable that if the interference is enough to keep a ship from raising a wedge it would also be enough to make bad things happen to missile wedges.