UC: TUFT capacities

I think I'm missing something relative to the SLN freighters carrying missiles listed in Uncompromising Honor. I know that SD(P)s have higher weight penalties related to armoring, etc. but the SLN missile counts per freighter still seem too d--- high.

Here' my logic: we read that most of the podnaughts are in about the same weight range, but they carry somewhere less than 10,000 missiles. Or, I guess if the flatpack pods double the capacity by their stackable shape, maybe less than twenty thousand. In the first battle sequence, calculates that the freighters have kicked out between 30,000 pods... somewhere between 180,000 to 300,000 missiles... that are bigger than the RMNs, and they're supposed to be able to salvo those more than once and still have enough left to carry out Buccaneer against Ajay. Heck HMAMC Wayfarer back in Honor Among Enemies -- listed as a similar size freighter (plus grazers, etc.)-- doesn't list anywhere near that number of missiles, and the captain of the Q Ship (PN Sirius) in OBS doesn't think "well I have hundreds of thousands of missiles to launch at Courageous" (CL-56).

Plus the SLN micro jumps having only launched about 6000 missiles and without undeploying the Husky led missile train, but we read that the RMN tactical section observes the freighters sending new pods forward via the Huskies' impeller drives, yadda yadda yadda. In Hypatia, the SLN loses three freighters and their commander is lamenting the loss of "literally millions of missiles" (in twenty million tons of ships).

Discounting even the weight differentials, I can't even picture the volumes working out. Am I missing something or is the math off by at least an order of magnitude? Yes/No? Thoughts?

SharkHunter wrote:I think I'm missing something relative to the SLN freighters carrying missile listed in Uncompromising Honor. I know that SD(P)s have higher weight penalties related to armoring, etc. but the SLN missile counts per freighter still seem too d--- high.

Here' my logic: we read that most of the podnaughts are in about the same weight range, but they carry somewhere less than 10,000 missiles. Or, I guess if the flatpack pods double the capacity by their stackable shape, maybe less than twenty thousand. In the first battle sequence, calculates that the freighters have kicked out between 30,000 pods... somewhere between 180,000 to 300,000 missiles... that are bigger than the RMNs, and they're supposed to be able to salvo those more than once and still have enough left to carry out Buccaneer against Ajay. Heck HMAMC Wayfarer back in Honor Among Enemies -- listed as a similar size freighter (plus grazers, etc.)-- doesn't list anywhere near that number of missiles, and the captain of the Q Ship (PN Sirius) in OBS doesn't think "well I have hundreds of thousands of missiles to launch at Courageous" (CL-56).

Plus the SLN micro jumps having only launched about 6000 missiles and without undeploying the Husky led missile train, but we read that the RMN tactical section observes the freighters sending new pods forward via the Huskies' impeller drives, yadda yadda yadda. In Hypatia, the SLN loses three freighters and their commander is lamenting the loss of "literally millions of missiles" (in twenty million tons of ships).

Discounting even the weight differentials, I can't even picture the volumes working out. Am I missing something or is the math off by at least an order of magnitude? Yes/No? Thoughts?

I cannot help you, but I have a few thoughts:
The Havenite Q-ship was a combat ship built to look like a freighter, so would not have a freighter's cargo space. Its missiles would have been in magazines to feed the tubes.
The Wayfarer also had the LAC wings, but probably had a lot of empty space; I doubt that it was filled to capacity with pods.
The SLN freighters, on the other hand, could have been filled to capacity with pods. If they are a combined twenty million tons of capacity, then divide that by the weight of a pod times the number of missiles per pod to get an approximation for the number lost.

SharkHunter wrote:I think I'm missing something relative to the SLN freighters carrying missile listed in Uncompromising Honor. I know that SD(P)s have higher weight penalties related to armoring, etc. but the SLN missile counts per freighter still seem too d--- high.

Here' my logic: we read that most of the podnaughts are in about the same weight range, but they carry somewhere less than 10,000 missiles. Or, I guess if the flatpack pods double the capacity by their stackable shape, maybe less than twenty thousand. In the first battle sequence, calculates that the freighters have kicked out between 30,000 pods... somewhere between 180,000 to 300,000 missiles... that are bigger than the RMNs, and they're supposed to be able to salvo those more than once and still have enough left to carry out Buccaneer against Ajay. Heck HMAMC Wayfarer back in Honor Among Enemies -- listed as a similar size freighter (plus grazers, etc.)-- doesn't list anywhere near that number of missiles, and the captain of the Q Ship (PN Sirius) in OBS doesn't think "well I have hundreds of thousands of missiles to launch at Courageous" (CL-56).

Plus the SLN micro jumps having only launched about 6000 missiles and without undeploying the Husky led missile train, but we read that the RMN tactical section observes the freighters sending new pods forward via the Huskies' impeller drives, yadda yadda yadda. In Hypatia, the SLN loses three freighters and their commander is lamenting the loss of "literally millions of missiles" (in twenty million tons of ships).

Discounting even the weight differentials, I can't even picture the volumes working out. Am I missing something or is the math off by at least an order of magnitude? Yes/No? Thoughts?

Your first guess at GA podnaught missile capacity was closer to correct. Even using the latest flat packs an Invictus can carry fewer than 1200 pods with 9600 standard missiles and the corresponding 1200 Apollo missiles, for 10800 missiles total. And that's only for Manticoran Invictus class ships; every other class carries fewer than that.

Beyond that, though, the TUFT ships have every cargo capacity advantage a civilian freighter has: only a couple dozen crew, with corresponding savings in habitable volume and life support machinery; space-efficient drive nodes, compensators, and hyper generators rather than the bulkier but more powerful military equivalents; and no space wasted on armor, weapons, or defenses. In short, it's a darn big box with engines strapped to it.

In terms of missile mass carried, we can spitball an answer. I'm pulling some WAG numbers here, so if anyone can provide better numbers please do so. I'm going to guess somewhere around 60 tons per Cataphract-D and we know they have six per pod. Their energy budget is much smaller than a late GA pod, since SLN missiles are capacitor powered rather than fusion, so the pod doesn't need to spin up the missiles. Given all the other features missing from SLN pods as well, I'm going to guess a stripped down mass of 40 tons for the pods just so I can guess the loaded pod mass is 400 tons. It may be as high as 500 tons, but I'll go with 400.

For another spitball estimate, assume the 7 million ton freighter can actually carry 7 million tons of cargo. Probably not, but that puts an upper bound on the possible cargo mass. That gives 17500 pods or 105,000 missiles per ship. Pretty good evidence for an order-of-magnitude error.

But wait, there's more! We have ample evidence that ship "tonnage" has very little to do with the actual tonnage of stuff on the ship. In fact the rated "tonnage" seems to have more to do with ship volume than mass, given that ships that shoot themselves dry don't gain higher acceleration even though the missiles expended account for a substantial fraction of the ship's mass (about half the total mass in the extreme case).

So it could be that the SLN used a pod designed to tessellate extremely well to maximize the number of pods per volume as well as pods designed to minimize the pod to missile volume ratio. Doing a WAG estimate of usable volume based on Wayfarer's gross dimensions gives something like 23 (+/-5) million cubic meters of internal volume for pods. To carry a million missiles gives 138-ish cubic meters per pod, which is far too small. Each missile takes up considerably more volume than that (WAG-ing 25 meters by 4 meter cylinder or 314 m^3 per missile).

Very long answer short, yes, you are correct in that the numbers presented do not fit the known data or reasonable estimates where data is not known.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:I think I'm missing something relative to the SLN freighters carrying missile listed in Uncompromising Honor. I know that SD(P)s have higher weight penalties related to armoring, etc. but the SLN missile counts per freighter still seem too d--- high.

Here' my logic: we read that most of the podnaughts are in about the same weight range, but they carry somewhere less than 10,000 missiles. Or, I guess if the flatpack pods double the capacity by their stackable shape, maybe less than twenty thousand. In the first battle sequence, calculates that the freighters have kicked out between 30,000 pods... somewhere between 180,000 to 300,000 missiles... that are bigger than the RMNs, and they're supposed to be able to salvo those more than once and still have enough left to carry out Buccaneer against Ajay. Heck HMAMC Wayfarer back in Honor Among Enemies -- listed as a similar size freighter (plus grazers, etc.)-- doesn't list anywhere near that number of missiles, and the captain of the Q Ship (PN Sirius) in OBS doesn't think "well I have hundreds of thousands of missiles to launch at Courageous" (CL-56).

Plus the SLN micro jumps having only launched about 6000 missiles and without undeploying the Husky led missile train, but we read that the RMN tactical section observes the freighters sending new pods forward via the Huskies' impeller drives, yadda yadda yadda. In Hypatia, the SLN loses three freighters and their commander is lamenting the loss of "literally millions of missiles" (in twenty million tons of ships).

Discounting even the weight differentials, I can't even picture the volumes working out. Am I missing something or is the math off by at least an order of magnitude? Yes/No? Thoughts?

Your first guess at GA podnaught missile capacity was closer to correct. Even using the latest flat packs an Invictus can carry fewer than 1200 pods with 9600 standard missiles and the corresponding 1200 Apollo missiles, for 10800 missiles total. And that's only for Manticoran Invictus class ships; every other class carries fewer than that.

Beyond that, though, the TUFT ships have every cargo capacity advantage a civilian freighter has: only a couple dozen crew, with corresponding savings in habitable volume and life support machinery; space-efficient drive nodes, compensators, and hyper generators rather than the bulkier but more powerful military equivalents; and no space wasted on armor, weapons, or defenses. In short, it's a darn big box with engines strapped to it.

In terms of missile mass carried, we can spitball an answer. I'm pulling some WAG numbers here, so if anyone can provide better numbers please do so. I'm going to guess somewhere around 60 tons per Cataphract-D and we know they have six per pod. Their energy budget is much smaller than a late GA pod, since SLN missiles are capacitor powered rather than fusion, so the pod doesn't need to spin up the missiles. Given all the other features missing from SLN pods as well, I'm going to guess a stripped down mass of 40 tons for the pods just so I can guess the loaded pod mass is 400 tons. It may be as high as 500 tons, but I'll go with 400.

For another spitball estimate, assume the 7 million ton freighter can actually carry 7 million tons of cargo. Probably not, but that puts an upper bound on the possible cargo mass. That gives 17500 pods or 105,000 missiles per ship. Pretty good evidence for an order-of-magnitude error.

But wait, there's more! We have ample evidence that ship "tonnage" has very little to do with the actual tonnage of stuff on the ship. In fact the rated "tonnage" seems to have more to do with ship volume than mass, given that ships that shoot themselves dry don't gain higher acceleration even though the missiles expended account for a substantial fraction of the ship's mass (about half the total mass in the extreme case).

So it could be that the SLN used a pod designed to tessellate extremely well to maximize the number of pods per volume as well as pods designed to minimize the pod to missile volume ratio. Doing a WAG estimate of usable volume based on Wayfarer's gross dimensions gives something like 23 (+/-5) million cubic meters of internal volume for pods. To carry a million missiles gives 138-ish cubic meters per pod, which is far too small. Each missile takes up considerably more volume than that (WAG-ing 25 meters by 4 meter cylinder or 314 m^3 per missile).

Very long answer short, yes, you are correct in that the numbers presented do not fit the known data or reasonable estimates where data is not known.

Quick missile mass #s.

Mk 50 DD/CL missile from the CL Fearless, 70 tons
Mk 13 CA/BC missile from CA Fearless in 1902, 84 tons.
Mk 16 CA/BC DDM from the Hexapuma in 1920, 94 tons
Mk 19 Capital missile from 1900, 130 tons
Mk 26/27 Capital missile from the Wayfarer in ~1910, 120 tons
Mk 29 Counter Missile from 1900, 12 tons.
Mk 31 Counter Missile from 1919, 7 tons.a

A Cataphract C is a standard SLN Capital missile with a standard SLN counter missile grafted onto it using roughly 1900 tech. I figure it's mass is in the 140-145 ton range. The D mod, based on a large system defense missile would be larger still. The six in a single pod would mass over 1000 tons alone. Early Manty and Havenite pods massed 2-3 tons for every 1 ton of missiles onboard, and modern ones mass at best 1:1 (a mk 16 pod with 14 missiles probably masses between 2500 and 3000 tons.) Chances are the Cataphract pods mass in the 3-4 kton range.

At 3 ktons per pod, an 8 mton freighter can hold ~2700 pods mass wise.

Even if the Malign can match the Manty mass ratio, we are still talking just ~4000 pods.

Just missile wise, for a rough Cataphract C, an 8 mton freighter can hold 55,170 missiles by mass, or enough missiles for ~9200 pods - but without the pods themselves. For the -D, there would be fewer.

I'd go with the TUFT ships being standard VERY LAGE capacity commercial freighters that had essentilay no other cargo and were stuffed to the hatches with SLN pods.

They had very little beyond the ability to essentialy dump pods out the cargo hold hatches and send them along to the warships that were going to do the actual targeting and updating the computers in the pods and missiles with the current live information. Despite the reasonable supposition that the TUFTS had anything like the racking systems of the Wayfarer, they probably didn't. Why? Because these ships were Commercial shipping transports and more likely configured to take large batches of cargo from place to place with delivery in bulk as fast as they could move the "containers" out of the holds. No elegent deployment solutions other than move the containers out as fast as possible and then receive in similar containers for the next systems. So, they make up batches of containers for delivery and while it will take them signifcantly more time -in commercial service- to sort incomming cargo containers to groups for the next/rest of delivery points- they are essetialy able to push volume out and let the local version of stevedores handle it.

How many pods did the SLN decide was right for pushing out with their powered automated pod tug systems? Have no idea. But I suspect that, knowing how many actual warships they were going to supply under the plans for a Buccaneer raid, they would have said "make the delivery into units of X pods plus the tugs" and expect that each TUFT ship would deliver a more or less equal share at each of the targeted systems. There was apparently no anticipation of any need to do that under combat- certainly not in the intial investment of the system - and then there would be, of course, no actual problem after the warships had the system suitably "under control" and then there was the vast lack of funtional all-up warships in what might comprise the SDF of the targets.
Remember, they were going into systems that probalby had mostly SLN variety LACs and customs plus Coast Guard S&R ships. Much was made of the decision process of what might happen if (gasp) the Manties or Beowulf had warships in a target system and then it was mostly that they would go to Partian Shot plan to shoot and leave- from the WARSHIP tubes against nice, slow, predictable, industrial and habitat targets instead of trying to deal with the RMN etc.

So, cram the frighters with pods, keep them out of range of anything and send in loads of what are essentialy powered demolition charges which will be distributed to the BCs as planned and methodically destroy everything useful that is spaceborn in the cowering system.
The TUFTS had CIVILIAN sensors and no defensive weapons. They were not intended to go into combat. Big, fat, slow, small crew (all fairly junior officers and enlisted for the size of ship) and mostly dumb civilian freighters just moving cargo and dumping it out per orders of the Fleet commander. Then just make best civilian speed to the next target.

Oops.

David has said multiple times that the only way to start up the reactors on modern RMN pods is to feed it plasma from the ship's reactors.

Old school pods also need that, the capacitors are plasma capacitors.

So no, they are not standard freighters.

kzt wrote:David has said multiple times that the only way to start up the reactors on modern RMN pods is to feed it plasma from the ship's reactors.

Old school pods also need that, the capacitors are plasma capacitors.

So no, they are not standard freighters.

But those aren't RMN pods. They are SLN ones, full of Cataphract missiles, not RMN mini-fusion power ones. They had capacitors to power themselves.

How they were initially powered and how long that charge would last is unknown.

kzt wrote:David has said multiple times that the only way to start up the reactors on modern RMN pods is to feed it plasma from the ship's reactors.

Old school pods also need that, the capacitors are plasma capacitors.

So no, they are not standard freighters.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But those aren't RMN pods. They are SLN ones, full of Cataphract missiles, not RMN mini-fusion power ones. They had capacitors to power themselves.

How they were initially powered and how long that charge would last is unknown.

Stupid question time: is it possible that the warship that receives them is required to charge them before firing? Otherwise there has to be a plasma feed as part of the unloading process, since they would be uncharged in the freighter until time for use.

tlb wrote:Stupid question time: is it possible that the warship that receives them is required to charge them before firing? Otherwise there has to be a plasma feed as part of the unloading process, since they would be uncharged in the freighter until time for use.

My mistake, I thought you were talking about the absurd stuff surrounding the LACs towing 2 million tones, etc.

Yes, they would.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:David has said multiple times that the only way to start up the reactors on modern RMN pods is to feed it plasma from the ship's reactors.

Old school pods also need that, the capacitors are plasma capacitors.

So no, they are not standard freighters.

But those aren't RMN pods. They are SLN ones, full of Cataphract missiles, not RMN mini-fusion power ones. They had capacitors to power themselves.

How they were initially powered and how long that charge would last is unknown.

SLN missiles are still Plasma Capacitor missiles, like KZT said. Before the microfusion reactors, all missiles used plasma capacitors for power. Capacitor missiles took on plasma in the magazines of a ship before they are fired. ( They can also be drained, so many missiles are spun up before use). In RMN and RHN service, tractors could also beam energy (perhaps a second emittor was used) to power the systems in pods and fill up the plasma capacitors before podnaughts were on the scene

Think of capacitor missiles like steam torpedos. You need a source of live steam or a pressurized flask of steam to fill the internal flask of the torpedo, so the torpedo can operate. The flask cannot sit for lengthy periods or it loses pressure as the steam cools.

So their has to be some mechanism to spin up the pods with plasma for use - and it needs to be done "soon" before use.