Do we actually need SD(P)s?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I have no doubt that the RMN is going to introduce a new DN which is to the SD(P) what the Nike BC is to the BC(P).

Consider the logistical issues. In HAE, Weber describes the Wayfarer retrieving expended missile pods to be reused. This suggests that they are expensive hardware. Weber does not describe or mention retrieval of pods in subsequent books. In most battles, the situation is far to dynamic for pod recovery to be possible.

I have a feeling that the pod costs went down as the wars progressed, and retrieval became less important. To begin with, they iterated the pods multiple times, driving size down, increasing capability, and (presumably) increasing reliability and decreasing costs.

Also, pod usage increased dramatically. Before the Wayfarer, ships towed a single alpha launch of missile pods. That size of the alpha launch and # of pods had been increasing as the size of the pods decreased, and more ships were able to use them, with originally only SDs and DNs shaving the capability to tow a handful of Pods to eventually DDs towing 4-6 pods each.

After the Wayfarer, SD(p) carried first 500, then 1000, then even more pods, with every launch using pods. So battles went from using dozens of pods - to hundreds.

Essentially bulk manufacture and iterated design drove costs down over time. I'm not saying that they are cheap... just cheaper... and probably more expensive to refurb to boot.

DN(P)? A DN is just a small SD and generally speaking you are better off with the SD

the RMN only had so many because the smaller size was seen as slightly less confrontational by the idiots in parliament and because the tech advantage was theoretical, so the admiralty wanted greater number of platforms to somewhat help offset the Peeps numerical advantage.

It is possible in 10 years when a new High Ridge is PM, that there might be a move towards something like the DN(P) but I doubt we'll see it much before then.

the empire has 3 main thins on its mind for the foreseeable future:

rebuilding the home systems industry (maybe not all but certainly a large chunk)
continue integrating Talbott and Silessa
continue to hunt for the MAlign (though that will be likely be done from the shadows by SIS and Zilwicki & Co)
Keep an eye on the Sollys
General Anti pirate patrol (probably in the verge and former OFS territory) to keep the new blood to the RMN gain their spurs and return the RMN to a peacetime Navy but one that most of its people have seen the elephant at least a little.

almost all of this is going to be done by ships below the wall. Major systems will still be picketed by SDs, i.e all junction terminaii, Spindle and wherever Sarnow is running Silesa.

there are threats out there like Malign and return of the Sollys, and these are hard threats that just about every idiot in parliament will have a hard time arguing against, so I can see the RMN cutting back SD(P) construction with no ACTIVE threat but not stopping or replacing with DN(P).

locarno24 wrote:Actually, I agree with Relax. A Fire Control LAC held close to the firing ship is basically a Keyhole relay. If you have the latter, you'd never bother developing the former.

But just because your navy has Keyhole for some ships doesn’t mean a fire control LAC might not provide useful assistance to ships too old or small to carry Keyhole.

We saw how many more CM salvos Keyhole let Invictus-class ships control. And one of the major limitations of LACs in anti-missile roles is their small CM magazines. So a LAC tucked in close that can let ships effectively fire more CMs would boost missile defense even without its own CMs.
But the problem I see is that while the LAC could easily positioned itself clear of the “gun smoke” of the CM drives it still has limits to how many CMs its fire control can handle. And neither it nor the non-keyhole ships have the high speed data links that let it act as a relay for the ship. So it’d be limited to what it’s own tac dept could handle.

Dunno if it’s worth making a dedicated missile defense LAC built around a data link relay and modifying smaller ships to provide that data link. Plus I figure since a LAC is smaller than even the non-FTL keyhole 1, and has to dedicate a lot of volume to non-relay functions it’s pretty much got to end up less capable defensively even if all the larger offensive fire control relay links were omitted.

Jonathan_S wrote:

locarno24 wrote:Actually, I agree with Relax. A Fire Control LAC held close to the firing ship is basically a Keyhole relay. If you have the latter, you'd never bother developing the former.

But just because your navy has Keyhole for some ships doesn’t mean a fire control LAC might not provide useful assistance to ships too old or small to carry Keyhole.

We saw how many more CM salvos Keyhole let Invictus-class ships control. And one of the major limitations of LACs in anti-missile roles is their small CM magazines. So a LAC tucked in close that can let ships effectively fire more CMs would boost missile defense even without its own CMs.
But the problem I see is that while the LAC could easily positioned itself clear of the “gun smoke” of the CM drives it still has limits to how many CMs its fire control can handle. And neither it nor the non-keyhole ships have the high speed data links that let it act as a relay for the ship. So it’d be limited to what it’s own tac dept could handle.

Dunno if it’s worth making a dedicated missile defense LAC built around a data link relay and modifying smaller ships to provide that data link. Plus I figure since a LAC is smaller than even the non-FTL keyhole 1, and has to dedicate a lot of volume to non-relay functions it’s pretty much got to end up less capable defensively even if all the larger offensive fire control relay links were omitted.

Awhile back, I mentioned that a KH lite for smaller ships could be built on an automated LAC Chassis, and hauled around by a support ship with a LAC bay. All the smaller ships would need was the high speed data links and tractors. This woukd give so equipped smaller ships RF based Keyhole capability. Probably not a massive amount, but enough to control all your launchers, both cm and shipkiller, while your wedge is rolled. it would probably have concessions, but this is a bonus for older/smaller ships, who are not intended to stand in the wall or trade shots with BC divisions anyway.

Theemile wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I have no doubt that the RMN is going to introduce a new DN which is to the SD(P) what the Nike BC is to the BC(P).

Consider the logistical issues. In HAE, Weber describes the Wayfarer retrieving expended missile pods to be reused. This suggests that they are expensive hardware. Weber does not describe or mention retrieval of pods in subsequent books. In most battles, the situation is far to dynamic for pod recovery to be possible.

I have a feeling that the pod costs went down as the wars progressed, and retrieval became less important. To begin with, they iterated the pods multiple times, driving size down, increasing capability, and (presumably) increasing reliability and decreasing costs.

Also, pod usage increased dramatically. Before the Wayfarer, ships towed a single alpha launch of missile pods. That size of the alpha launch and # of pods had been increasing as the size of the pods decreased, and more ships were able to use them, with originally only SDs and DNs shaving the capability to tow a handful of Pods to eventually DDs towing 4-6 pods each.

After the Wayfarer, SD(p) carried first 500, then 1000, then even more pods, with every launch using pods. So battles went from using dozens of pods - to hundreds.

Essentially bulk manufacture and iterated design drove costs down over time. I'm not saying that they are cheap... just cheaper... and probably more expensive to refurb to boot.

It may have been even simpler than that. The Wayfarer design was pretty ad hoc and only had one hold modified to drop pods. It could be that the ships only carried a relatively small number of pods (a hundred or two) and carried a much larger supply of missiles to reload them simply because the ships weren't designed around the ability to carry all their missiles in pre-loaded pods.

Galactic Sapper wrote:It may have been even simpler than that. The Wayfarer design was pretty ad hoc and only had one hold modified to drop pods. It could be that the ships only carried a relatively small number of pods (a hundred or two) and carried a much larger supply of missiles to reload them simply because the ships weren't designed around the ability to carry all their missiles in pre-loaded pods.

The text says Wayfarer could carry hundreds of pods, but it also says there was a stupendous missile supply in the magazines for the broadside tubes; so it could be that recovered pods were reloaded out of the magazines as you say.

In this case the the pods were still being developed and did not have beacons to make recovery simple, so there was more to the process than there would have been later. I assume that the beacons required a coded signal to turn on, and perhaps another coded signal would result in self-destruction of the pods for safety and security.

There is nothing in the description to indicate how the missiles in the pods were charged (there had to be a plasma feed somewhere from the fusion plant) and note that pods and LAC's were to be left at Marsh as a deterrent. So did an early LAC have the ability to charge the missiles in a pod?

Dauntless wrote:DN(P)? A DN is just a small SD and generally speaking you are better off with the SD

the RMN only had so many because the smaller size was seen as slightly less confrontational by the idiots in parliament and because the tech advantage was theoretical, so the admiralty wanted greater number of platforms to somewhat help offset the Peeps numerical advantage.

It is possible in 10 years when a new High Ridge is PM, that there might be a move towards something like the DN(P) but I doubt we'll see it much before then.

the empire has 3 main thins on its mind for the foreseeable future:

rebuilding the home systems industry (maybe not all but certainly a large chunk)
continue integrating Talbott and Silessa
continue to hunt for the MAlign (though that will be likely be done from the shadows by SIS and Zilwicki & Co)
Keep an eye on the Sollys
General Anti pirate patrol (probably in the verge and former OFS territory) to keep the new blood to the RMN gain their spurs and return the RMN to a peacetime Navy but one that most of its people have seen the elephant at least a little.

almost all of this is going to be done by ships below the wall. Major systems will still be picketed by SDs, i.e all junction terminaii, Spindle and wherever Sarnow is running Silesa.

there are threats out there like Malign and return of the Sollys, and these are hard threats that just about every idiot in parliament will have a hard time arguing against, so I can see the RMN cutting back SD(P) construction with no ACTIVE threat but not stopping or replacing with DN(P).

I meant an SD.

tlb wrote:

locarno24 wrote:Actually, I agree with Relax. A Fire Control LAC held close to the firing ship is basically a Keyhole relay. If you have the latter, you'd never bother developing the former.

Very nice explanation.

I think there was a battle (which I cannot find now) where Haven had forward observer LAC's, using primitive FTL communication, and they were wiped out by RMN or Grayson LAC forces.

War of Honor, Trevor's Star.

"The power requirements and mass costs of the RHN's current grav-pulse transmitters were far too high to permit it to employ the remote drones the RMN and its allies could deploy. The Manties were considerably ahead in super-dense fusion bottle technology and several other areas—including the newest generation of superconductor capacitor systems—and Haven was unable to match the onboard power levels of their remote platforms. But even without that, the sheer size of the early-generation RHN hardware would have made it impossible to squeeze it into such tight quarters. Indeed, it could be fitted into nothing smaller than a LAC. And, as Foraker strongly suspected had been the case for the Manties when they first developed the system themselves, any LAC or starship had to temporarily cut its acceleration to zero in order to transmit a message. Coupled with the slow pulse repetition frequency rate they'd so far managed to achieve, that limited them to very short and simple messages or to the use of preplanned ones which could be transmitted in shorthand code groups. Which was the reason Sovereign of Space's CIC couldn't receive the raw sensor data directly; there simply wasn't enough bandwidth available.



He glowered at the display, where the steadily, if cautiously, advancing impeller signatures of scouting LACs crept ever closer to his own stealthed units. The question wasn't whether or not they knew he was here—it was whether or not they knew what he had. If they did realize that he was coming in behind them with another forty SD(P)s, plus carriers, anyone but idiots would disengage in a moment, and those probing LACs were going to provide their commander with that information before very much longer. However good his own EW and however poor Peep sensor suites might be, he couldn't hide from them if the range fell much further. Of course, it was always possible that they already had him. There was no way for anyone to be certain how much Shannon Foraker might have managed to improve their sensors in the last three or four years. But if they hadn't managed to lock up his units yet they might not know just how powerful his force was."


That's essentially using LACs in place of recon drones, which is not quite the same thing, for a selection of reasons:

1) The point of them is to use FTL to report what they see back to the fleet. That means an FTL transmission, which means a very-hard-to-hide grav signature when it's a low-tech version (and requires all the power problems of FTL tech, and requires you to know how to make FTL comms).

2) They're looking for stealthed units (the Grayson ships) rather than being in position between two fleets engaged in shooting at one another, and there's no indication they're running silent themselves.

3) The Grayson Katanas do cut them to ribbons, but I'm not seriously suggesting otherwise; without Grayson tech you struggle to make a 'combat' LAC worth spit, and a recon/fire control bird will always lose to a dedicated interceptor of comparable tech level if it gets caught.


As it happens, that scenario is an interesting one to point at. The Recon LACs aren't the most forward unit; they're engaged in a constant whisker-laser communication with a bunch of drones, which there's no indication the Manticorans ARE seeing, and then the information from the drones is FTL-transmitted by the LAC back to the fleet. Which - since the LAC is basically using a signal drum, means it's pretty darn obvious. It's not a bad plan to get FTL recon data, but - as Giscard notes - it does suck to be the LAC crews.

If you don't do that - and 'trust' the forward LAC to handle terminal fire control of extreme-range missile fire as needed without needing a continuous comms link with the fleet, then you don't need it to be using a 'loud' FTL comm, and just need the sneaky local whisker lasers. Which means there's no reason the LAC can't be on as silent a running as you can make it. Also - by comparison - Stealth and EW is consistently the PN's weakest tech field.

tlb wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:It may have been even simpler than that. The Wayfarer design was pretty ad hoc and only had one hold modified to drop pods. It could be that the ships only carried a relatively small number of pods (a hundred or two) and carried a much larger supply of missiles to reload them simply because the ships weren't designed around the ability to carry all their missiles in pre-loaded pods.

The text says Wayfarer could carry hundreds of pods, but it also says there was a stupendous missile supply in the magazines for the broadside tubes; so it could be that recovered pods were reloaded out of the magazines as you say.

In this case the the pods were still being developed and did not have beacons to make recovery simple, so there was more to the process than there would have been later. I assume that the beacons required a coded signal to turn on, and perhaps another coded signal would result in self-destruction of the pods for safety and security.

There is nothing in the description to indicate how the missiles in the pods were charged (there had to be a plasma feed somewhere from the fusion plant) and note that pods and LAC's were to be left at Marsh as a deterrent. So did an early LAC have the ability to charge the missiles in a pod?

HoS lists the Trojan class as carrying 180 pods, meaning the 30 Harrington spent killing the CAs in Marsh were almost 17% of her total supply. The 60 used to kill the Peep BC would have dropped her to half capacity had she not reloaded as many expended pods as possible in Marsh.

As for the charging thing, I'm almost certain it was a retcon addition later in the series. As far as I remember, no mention is ever made of it prior to the second war.

Galactic Sapper wrote:HoS lists the Trojan class as carrying 180 pods, meaning the 30 Harrington spent killing the CAs in Marsh were almost 17% of her total supply. The 60 used to kill the Peep BC would have dropped her to half capacity had she not reloaded as many expended pods as possible in Marsh.

As for the charging thing, I'm almost certain it was a retcon addition later in the series. As far as I remember, no mention is ever made of it prior to the second war.

IIRC The first mention of pod powering was in AAC concerning retrofitting IAN SDs to take old capacitor pods and the inability to take Fusion pods. David expounded on that in the Forums, and later discussed that when discussing the inability for captured RHN SD(p)s to RMN pods easily. ("Reasons not to use captured RHN Podnaughts").

It's been mentioned a few times that capacitor missiles are powered in the Magazines, but never to the degree as when David described the new feed mechanism of the Mk 16 and Mk 23 - these, of course, were explained in the "Why can't you just upgrade the tube SD" debates, when he finally stepped in shortly before HoS was published , and discussed the Gryphon upgrades, and the difficulty to upgrade SLN SDs.