Battle of Spindle

Brigade XO wrote:Between, Keyhole II, Apollo control missiles and Ghost Rider drones, how about going back to using CM canisters except you put some of them on missiles.?
The problem (or at least the benefit) of them in the past is that they appear to have been designed as a last-ditch system to attempt to augment the ship's regular CM launchers and pdlcs when you are in deep crap and you are going to allocate a major amount of your missile control channels to the CM in an attempt to just survive whatever massive amount of enemy is incoming even to the point of cutting your links to whatever attack birds you have outbound and not launching any new ones- at least till you get through the next wave.

You don't need DDM missiles, you are not trying to intercept your enemy's shots at those kinds of ranges. But if you can carry CMs out beyond the powered flight distance of your CM's then you have at least doubled the range at which you can engage incomming missiles.

You have FTL to the Ghost Rider drones and you Apollo controllers. Use that kind of ability to update the remotely launched CMs just before they launched from their carrier containers.

How many CM's in a "standard" canister" How many (%) of them can engage and destroy an imcoming missile. Every one you take out at that distance is one more neither your ship launched CMs or pdlcs have to engage. An added benefit: after you advisary realizes you are pumping out CMs well beyond the "normal" engagement range, they are going to have to consider turning on their missile volley's ECMs early in order to defeat the CM. What effect does that have on their energy consumption for powered flight time and, does that give you a longer time read and analysis period on the ECM of the incomming flight?

Worth considering.

Been asked many times. Problem is the CM canister is the size of the whole missile and only holds 2-4 12 ton CMs depending on it's size.( DD=2, CA=3, SD=4) In the end, you can only replace a missile warhead with 1 CM at best.

As for a missile with a CM on top, see Cataphract. It also Carrys a small undersized warhead, but it is what you are asking for.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I do not expect ramming to be a high-probability option. The idea is to make them keep their wedges in the way and thus severely limit their ability to shoot at the inbound missile storm. If you simply want to destroy the missiles simply aim for the wedge--you're much less likely to miss.

The problem is that if they still have their wedges, they haven't done their job. What's the use of a Dragon's Teeth or Dazzler that didn't create ghost images of more missiles and did not create a wave of EM interference? What's more, if they have their wedge, they are still supremely trackable, as the wedge is one of the most brilliant sources. And finally, as swarm converges on the target, the wedge still up can interfere with the missile's brethren tracking, if not block the line-of-sight.

Yes, aim the Dragon's Teeth and Dazzlers at the wedge or sidewalls so that the bodies get vapourised and no technology can be recovered by the enemy. They has something like 5 orders of magnitude more area than the ship itself. The probability of hit is much higher.

One other detail is that we don't know what happens to the body when the missile activates. Did we get information on what powers the warhead itself? We know the impellers are powered by a capacitor or a micro-fusion reactor. Clearly a nuke is well, a nuke. But what about a laser? Is it bomb-pumped? And if it is, what does it do to the missile when it goes?

Jonathan_S wrote:Plus given how long it takes to design and build a ship the SLN would want to commit to such an anti-missile ship before they were sure they'd improved their CMs and systems enough to make it really effective.

Agreed - but at the same time churning out destroyers doesn't take that long, and whilst a destroyer can't carry anything meaningful in a wall engagement I don't recall any statement that its defensive weapons are different to its bigger siblings'.

There's nothing wrong with the Solly's ability to design and build light combatants provided they're not being asked to design something based of technology they don't understand, so....yeah. It's not a good solution, but it is a solution and it's one you can get started on right away without waiting for any breakthroughs in tech.



A Samothrace-class SD packs a broadside defensive launch of 18 counter-missiles, whilst the contemporary Falcon-class DD lobs 3. I've only got Manticoran class numbers to go on, not SLN, but we're talking proportions anyway, so it's not unreasonable to assume the ratios between contemporary classes in the same navy are about the same. I get that the numbers for SLN ships will probably be lower, but it's the relative proportion I'm interested in.

If you start with the assumption that for a battle fleet unit (rather than a frontier fleet unit which might be asked to do conventional light warship 'stuff') the battle fleet DD's sole and only real job is to provide a screen for the big warships, you could discard most of its offensive armament. Even swapping the regular missile tubes for countermissiles on a 1-for-1 basis would double your defensive armament, and give you 1/3 the defensive launch of an SD, on a ship about 1/100th the size. Drop the heavy energy weapons for PDLs on a 1-for-1 basis and you get 8 PDLs, again about 1/3 of the SD's loadout.

Granted, said ship is good for nothing other than hugging a wall and trying not to die, but a group of 3 of them has proportionately a similar defensive capability as an SD, requires no dramatic tech advances, and the assumption of a 1-for-1 swap is very conservative indeed.

Is it the ideal answer? Of course not. Because it's still designing a new class, which requires some direction from on high, which would - theoretically - kick off the tech initiatives the Alliance is scared of anyway. But it's a very easy way to seriously uprate the defensive ability of a wall of battle and the SL has light warship yards coming out of its ears....


Essentially, the resulting ship is not a million miles from the principle behind the Katana; it's just something you can do with an armament change to an existing destroyer class rather than needing to develop new missile tech, new compensators, or what have you.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I don't care if the sidewall somehow stops material objects--stopping something going that fast is going to produce extremely hot gamma rays and they'll go through same as the beam from the warhead.

The evidence from the only time someone managed to hit a sidewall with a missile was that it did NOTHING.

I do not expect ramming to be a high-probability option. The idea is to make them keep their wedges in the way and thus severely limit their ability to shoot at the inbound missile storm.

The front of the wedge is open. It offers no protection from fire from the target.

Theemile wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Between, Keyhole II, Apollo control missiles and Ghost Rider drones, how about going back to using CM canisters except you put some of them on missiles.?
The problem (or at least the benefit) of them in the past is that they appear to have been designed as a last-ditch system to attempt to augment the ship's regular CM launchers and pdlcs when you are in deep crap and you are going to allocate a major amount of your missile control channels to the CM in an attempt to just survive whatever massive amount of enemy is incoming even to the point of cutting your links to whatever attack birds you have outbound and not launching any new ones- at least till you get through the next wave.

You don't need DDM missiles, you are not trying to intercept your enemy's shots at those kinds of ranges. But if you can carry CMs out beyond the powered flight distance of your CM's then you have at least doubled the range at which you can engage incomming missiles.

You have FTL to the Ghost Rider drones and you Apollo controllers. Use that kind of ability to update the remotely launched CMs just before they launched from their carrier containers.

How many CM's in a "standard" canister" How many (%) of them can engage and destroy an imcoming missile. Every one you take out at that distance is one more neither your ship launched CMs or pdlcs have to engage. An added benefit: after you advisary realizes you are pumping out CMs well beyond the "normal" engagement range, they are going to have to consider turning on their missile volley's ECMs early in order to defeat the CM. What effect does that have on their energy consumption for powered flight time and, does that give you a longer time read and analysis period on the ECM of the incomming flight?

Worth considering.

Been asked many times. Problem is the CM canister is the size of the whole missile and only holds 2-4 12 ton CMs depending on it's size.( DD=2, CA=3, SD=4) In the end, you can only replace a missile warhead with 1 CM at best.

As for a missile with a CM on top, see Cataphract. It also Carrys a small undersized warhead, but it is what you are asking for.

Additionally RFC has said that the fire control links are dedicated - you cannot dynamically assign offensive ones to talke to CMs or CM ones to talk to (even close-range) offensive missiles.

Of course you presumably could design your canister CMs with offensive control link receivers to work around this problem - but Honorverse navies apparently went to some effort to keep tactical departments from dynamically altering their offensive to defensive missile control ratio.

As such CM canisters were NOT used to augment all the existing launchers when you were in deep crap. They were only when you'd lost CM tubes to enemy fire; and therefor could no longer launch as many CMs as you could control.

(The SLN aegis hack-job is a partial exception - they were launching canisters of CMs to augment their defensive fire but only because they'd also ripped out even more offensive missile tubes to bolt on add additional CM fire control. Even before damage that bodge gave them more CM fire control than CM tubes -- but between the CM canisters and the ripped out tubes it cost them a lot of their offensive punch)

Loren Pechtel wrote:The energy of a missile ramming makes the beams from a standoff detonation look like a candle in an inferno--if the beam can do some good the ramming will do an awful lot more. I don't care if the sidewall somehow stops material objects--stopping something going that fast is going to produce extremely hot gamma rays and they'll go through same as the beam from the warhead.

The sidewall stops matter cold, unless it has a penetrator. Which, by what little we know about how they work, sound an awful lot like an incredibly short ranged thing that shall not be named which punches a warhead-sized hole in the sidewall.

The opportunity never arises--they detonate. I'm talking about the ones that can't detonate.

They're really a non-issue. They can't go through the sidewall and geometry prevents them from going through the fore or aft openings in the wedge unless they're incoming from those directions to begin with - you simply can't physically hit a broadside-on ship with a missile, it can't make the turn.

I do not expect ramming to be a high-probability option. The idea is to make them keep their wedges in the way and thus severely limit their ability to shoot at the inbound missile storm. If you simply want to destroy the missiles simply aim for the wedge--you're much less likely to miss.

It doesn't matter either way. Intact sidewalls are as effective a barrier to physical missile hits as the wedge is - unless the missile is specifically configured to do so, which they are not as a general principle.

Edit: the target ship is significantly smaller than wedge clearance of the attacking missiles. At most one, maybe two, missiles of the entire missile launch are going to have the direct incoming vector to even have a chance at impacting the hull. Assuming that it could get through the sidewall, that is, which it can't do anyway.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:One other detail is that we don't know what happens to the body when the missile activates. Did we get information on what powers the warhead itself? We know the impellers are powered by a capacitor or a micro-fusion reactor. Clearly a nuke is well, a nuke. But what about a laser? Is it bomb-pumped? And if it is, what does it do to the missile when it goes?

Lasers are bomb-pumped, so they get vaporized when the warhead goes off. The laser rods separate from the rest of the warhead just before detonation, since there needs to be some separation between the two to allow for the laser effect to work properly. The nuke part of the warhead may or may not separate from the missile body as part of the detonation process, but even if it does separate the body's wedge is already down at that point and the body is still going to be close enough to the nuke when it goes off to get partially if not fully vaporized.

locarno24 wrote:Granted, said ship is good for nothing other than hugging a wall and trying not to die, but a group of 3 of them has proportionately a similar defensive capability as an SD, requires no dramatic tech advances, and the assumption of a 1-for-1 swap is very conservative indeed.

Is it the ideal answer? Of course not. Because it's still designing a new class, which requires some direction from on high, which would - theoretically - kick off the tech initiatives the Alliance is scared of anyway. But it's a very easy way to seriously uprate the defensive ability of a wall of battle and the SL has light warship yards coming out of its ears....

The problem with a DE (Destroyer Escort) is that it has limited ammo load-out and very thin armour compared to the big ships it's trying to protect. If it takes 150 missiles to mission-kill an SD, a 1/100th size ship should take just 2 or 3. So they are not going to survive the bombardment long, even if they are dedicated units. The attacker won't be targetting those ships, usually, but they are targets of opportunity for any missiles that have lost the lock on their actual target or are unable to vector on it.

What's more, they won't have sufficient ammunition to stay in the battle for long. A long-range exchange could last for an hour, starting at the extreme range of 64 million km. The DEs will have run dry after a few minutes, especially if they have a lot more tubes than normal DDs.

And since the SLN does not have the automation that the RMN enjoys, those are also manpower-intensive ships. You're talking about a crew of 250 to basically soak up missiles.

The SLN should just invest in LACs instead. The RHN could develop them in early 1915, with a tech base not much different than the SLN has now.

kzt wrote:The front of the wedge is open. It offers no protection from fire from the target.

Indeed, but battle geometry exposes the sidewall-protected broadside, not the fore or aft of the ship. Any ship that is facing 50 missiles with only its chase guns is not going to need any ramming in about 10 seconds anyway.

As Galactic Sapper said above, the missiles can't make the turn to enter the kilt or throat and still ram. We're talking about a 2-km wide gap that is 150 km long, on a missile that is speeding past its target at a speed better than 0.6 c. At that speed, it crosses the 2 km of the space between sidewalls in 11.1 microseconds. At 46000 gravities, the maximum deflection it can do in that time is 27 microns. Nowhere close to the 150 km.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The problem with a DE (Destroyer Escort) is that it has limited ammo load-out and very thin armour compared to the big ships it's trying to protect. If it takes 150 missiles to mission-kill an SD, a 1/100th size ship should take just 2 or 3. So they are not going to survive the bombardment long, even if they are dedicated units. The attacker won't be targetting those ships, usually, but they are targets of opportunity for any missiles that have lost the lock on their actual target or are unable to vector on it.

What's more, they won't have sufficient ammunition to stay in the battle for long. A long-range exchange could last for an hour, starting at the extreme range of 64 million km. The DEs will have run dry after a few minutes, especially if they have a lot more tubes than normal DDs.

And since the SLN does not have the automation that the RMN enjoys, those are also manpower-intensive ships. You're talking about a crew of 250 to basically soak up missiles.

The SLN should just invest in LACs instead. The RHN could develop them in early 1915, with a tech base not much different than the SLN has now.

All of what you said is also true of LACs. More so, in fact. Katanas can shoot themselves dry in just a few minutes, Shrikes even faster.

Even assuming the SLN had carriers to put them on, their LACs would also be manpower intensive, use too much of their mass on nodes and life systems, and be horrendously underarmed as a result. At best it might take them a few years to duplicate early Havenite LAC designs and build carriers to put them on. Modifying and building an existing destroyer design would buy them years of a head start in almost-good-enough missile defense.