ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.
It all depends on the tactical situation though, I'm pretty certain RFC has stated Manticore, and most of the galaxy for that matter, operate their PDLC's in both manners (steady firerate, or fire every laser simultaneously).
That's why the earlier battles where Manticore fighting against Republican LACs they went for a stream/river of missiles that was going to hit the Republican ships/LACs with hundreds of missiles per second for several minutes continually.... versus slamming them with 1000 missiles at a time every 6+ minutes.
In the second case, firing every single PDLC laser at once is smarter because you have the time between salvos, while your lasers are still unable to cycle twice in a single salvo. In the first case you quite literally CANNOT afford to put an entire cluster out of commission for 16 seconds, or more for non-Manticoran clusters, so you have to stagger those lasers so every cluster has 1 or more shots ready at all times until the stream ends.