Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

Theemile wrote:Remember, even if it a Burn warhead goes off - modern sidewalls are strong enough that they many times can shake off burn attempts - and heavy units have multiple overlapping sidewalls to spread the load of such an attack, and cover if a generator is overwhelmed. The overlapping sidewalls also make it more difficult for a Boom warhead to harmonize through the sidewall to attack. AS you mentioned in your last paragraph, This is the reason Missiles were falling out of Fashion in the 1800s - Heavy units took too many hits to swamp each layer of their defenses.

And, of course, bow/stern walls now exist to make boom attacks even less effective.

I was not seriously advocating for missiles to go back to boom/burn settings, even though such attacks could be at least theoretically effective with pod missile combat. Although BuWeaps might wish to examine the feasibility for Mk 16 warheads in particular to aim much closer to their targets when attacking at full terminal velocity - if close enough (10-15k km) the warhead could effectively be both a laser head and a burn warhead, with the burn wave front arriving a couple microseconds before the lasers do.

Galactic Sapper wrote:I was not seriously advocating for missiles to go back to boom/burn settings, even though such attacks could be at least theoretically effective with pod missile combat. Although BuWeaps might wish to examine the feasibility for Mk 16 warheads in particular to aim much closer to their targets when attacking at full terminal velocity - if close enough (10-15k km) the warhead could effectively be both a laser head and a burn warhead, with the burn wave front arriving a couple microseconds before the lasers do.

What for?

The laser can effectively go through the sidewall as if it weren't there. So why does it need a burn mode?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:I was not seriously advocating for missiles to go back to boom/burn settings, even though such attacks could be at least theoretically effective with pod missile combat. Although BuWeaps might wish to examine the feasibility for Mk 16 warheads in particular to aim much closer to their targets when attacking at full terminal velocity - if close enough (10-15k km) the warhead could effectively be both a laser head and a burn warhead, with the burn wave front arriving a couple microseconds before the lasers do.

What for?

The laser can effectively go through the sidewall as if it weren't there. So why does it need a burn mode?

On top of that, the missile needs to travel another 1/3 of the distance of the PD's range, increasing the hit probability. That is the whole point of the laserhead, doing damage from further away to limit the chances of the pdlcs having a chance to fire at the warhead.

Theemile wrote:On top of that, the missile needs to travel another 1/3 of the distance of the PD's range, increasing the hit probability. That is the whole point of the laserhead, doing damage from further away to limit the chances of the pdlcs having a chance to fire at the warhead.

And, while pre-Apollo, the RMN went to increased rather than decreased stand-off ranges well after they'd adopted SD(P)s with their pod swarms of MDMs.

AFAIK the Andies were the first to demonstrate the increase from 30,000 to 50,000 km laserhead standoff range; but the RMN quickly mirrored the capability. Hardly indicative that they're looking to return to burning down sidewalls in order to get contact nukes into play. Despite hopefully saturating the defenses the Manties are still looking to reduce the exposure their missiles have to those defense.

(And after all, they may end up tangling with someone who unexpectedly rolls out a defensive improvement as large as what Keyhole did for the RMN. Where it turns out that their supposed saturation strike, well, isn't. And then you'd want as little exposure to defensive fire as you can manage)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:I was not seriously advocating for missiles to go back to boom/burn settings, even though such attacks could be at least theoretically effective with pod missile combat. Although BuWeaps might wish to examine the feasibility for Mk 16 warheads in particular to aim much closer to their targets when attacking at full terminal velocity - if close enough (10-15k km) the warhead could effectively be both a laser head and a burn warhead, with the burn wave front arriving a couple microseconds before the lasers do.

What for?

The laser can effectively go through the sidewall as if it weren't there. So why does it need a burn mode?

Because even when the laser gets through, there is some spread and degradation of the power behind it. Which is why I specifically mentioned doing so on Mk 16's, since they may well require a second or third salvo to kill something heavy. Not much is going to survive a successful Mk 23 salvo, so defense degradation for the follow on salvos is irrelevant.

And it's not so much a separate burn mode as it is using the existing detonation to achieve additional, attritional damage as well as the direct structural damage the bomb-pumped lasers inflict.

Theemile wrote:On top of that, the missile needs to travel another 1/3 of the distance of the PD's range, increasing the hit probability. That is the whole point of the laserhead, doing damage from further away to limit the chances of the pdlcs having a chance to fire at the warhead.

The travel distance is trivial for an end-run DDM, much less an MDM. The point defenses are not going to get another shot off in the two tenths of a second difference that a missile moving at over half c needs to cross 30k kilometers, seeing as the cycle time on the lasers is about 2 seconds. They still only get one shot, regardless of how close or far away the warhead detonates. At most it might make a marginal difference if the closer detonation meant the warhead got in range of the point defense of a distant ship in a fairly spread out formation (but then, that's not the engagement scenario where close detonations would be used anyway).

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Theemile wrote:On top of that, the missile needs to travel another 1/3 of the distance of the PD's range, increasing the hit probability. That is the whole point of the laserhead, doing damage from further away to limit the chances of the pdlcs having a chance to fire at the warhead.

The travel distance is trivial for an end-run DDM, much less an MDM. The point defenses are not going to get another shot off in the two tenths of a second difference that a missile moving at over half c needs to cross 30k kilometers, seeing as the cycle time on the lasers is about 2 seconds. They still only get one shot, regardless of how close or far away the warhead detonates. At most it might make a marginal difference if the closer detonation meant the warhead got in range of the point defense of a distant ship in a fairly spread out formation (but then, that's not the engagement scenario where close detonations would be used anyway).

The entire time a missile is in PDLC range, the missile body isn't maneuvering and is setting up for detonation. you are saying that during this critical, exposed time, if you increase the loiter time before missile firing by 50%, you will not increase the possibility of one of an Invictus' 992 broadside pd lasers (62 clusters of 16 lasers) hitting you? Really? if it takes 2 seconds for 1 laser to cycle, with roughly a thousand lasers, one will be firing every .002 seconds.

Or on a production Sag-C - with 24, 12 emitter PDLCs gives you 288 broadside emitters firing ~.007 seconds each?

Theemile wrote:The entire time a missile is in PDLC range, the missile body isn't maneuvering and is setting up for detonation. you are saying that during this critical, exposed time, if you increase the loiter time before missile firing by 50%, you will not increase the possibility of one of an Invictus' 992 broadside pd lasers (62 clusters of 16 lasers) hitting you? Really? if it takes 2 seconds for 1 laser to cycle, with roughly a thousand lasers, one will be firing every .002 seconds.

Or on a production Sag-C - with 24, 12 emitter PDLCs gives you 288 broadside emitters firing ~.007 seconds each?

Correct, because they don't fire in sequence like that. They basically fire as a broadside - all at once. And even if they didn't, the transit time is too short for any individual emitter to fire more than once. Regardless of the firing pattern, that 992 shot broadside is all you're going to get off in that transit time.

Theemile wrote:The entire time a missile is in PDLC range, the missile body isn't maneuvering and is setting up for detonation. you are saying that during this critical, exposed time, if you increase the loiter time before missile firing by 50%, you will not increase the possibility of one of an Invictus' 992 broadside pd lasers (62 clusters of 16 lasers) hitting you? Really? if it takes 2 seconds for 1 laser to cycle, with roughly a thousand lasers, one will be firing every .002 seconds.

Or on a production Sag-C - with 24, 12 emitter PDLCs gives you 288 broadside emitters firing ~.007 seconds each?

I don’t disagree with your main point, but David has ‘somewhere’ said what the cycle rate is and it is slower than 2 seconds. I vaguely recall it was somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds.

Theemile wrote: you will not increase the possibility of one of an Invictus' 992 broadside pd lasers (62 clusters of 16 lasers) hitting you? Really? if it takes 2 seconds for 1 laser to cycle, with roughly a thousand lasers, one will be firing every .002 seconds.

Or on a production Sag-C - with 24, 12 emitter PDLCs gives you 288 broadside emitters firing ~.007 seconds each?

We have it in the Shadows book, Saganami-C only have 24 clusters per flank, and each cluster only has 8 lasers with a cycle time of a 8 econds, from when Hexapuma used her PDLCs in force neutralization mode, the Marianne in orbit of Montana.

Shadows of Saganami wrote:Each of a cluster's eight lasers was capable of cycling at one shot every sixteen seconds. That was one shot every two seconds from every cluster in Hexapuma 's starboard broadside

So cycle time on Sag-C is 16 seconds, and I believe the cycle time is the same for the PDLC's that Nike & Invictus use, they just have more lasers per cluster. They can either burst and all 8 lasers of a cluster fire at once putting the entire cluster on cooldown for 16 seconds, or they stagger by varying amounts upto 2 seconds to always have a laser available.

So sure a Sag-C can fire all 24*8 lasers simultaneously, but that's only 192 lasers but PDLCs like countermissiles do not have 100% accuracy. So firing all 192 possible lasers at once means for the next 16 seconds any MDM could physically impact your ship (ala Second Grayson, Fearless vs Thunder) and there's nothing you could do to stop them because at MDM terminal velocity they cross the entire PDLC envelop in less than 1 second. Which obviously is a situation you'll stagger your lasers, rather than fire all at once, reducing the chances your (staggered) PDLC's will kill a missile because you're opting for firerate over maximum shots.

Somtaaw wrote:So sure a Sag-C can fire all 24*8 lasers simultaneously, but that's only 192 lasers but PDLCs like countermissiles do not have 100% accuracy. So firing all 192 possible lasers at once means for the next 16 seconds any MDM could physically impact your ship (ala Second Grayson, Fearless vs Thunder) and there's nothing you could do to stop them because at MDM terminal velocity they cross the entire PDLC envelop in less than 1 second. Which obviously is a situation you'll stagger your lasers, rather than fire all at once, reducing the chances your (staggered) PDLC's will kill a missile because you're opting for firerate over maximum shots.

If the missiles cross the entire engagement envelope in less than half a second, you want to fire all your 192 lasers in less than half a second too. Any laser you didn't fire is a laser that will definitely not hitting anything. So we're still talking about an average fire rate of 2.6 milliseconds per laser.

Of course, averages are deceptive. As Asimov wrote in one of the Foundation books (Forward the Foundation, I think), "Three mathematicians go duck-hunting; the first fires one metre too high, the second fires a metre too low, the third exclaims 'we got it!'" (to which the counterpart in the conversation asks, "what's a duck?"). Far more likely, the ship will fire in bursts of 24 or 48 lasers (1 or 2 per cluster), so it's firing only once every 31.25 or 62.5 ms. In that time, a missile travelling at 0.8c crossed an additional 9400 or 18800 km.