Do we actually need SD(P)s?

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.

If I remember correctly they retrieved a bunch of spent pods, reloaded them with missiles and put them back into the rail system, then off-loaded some to leave behind as part of the defence picket.

So just how many did Wayfarer have prior to the incident with the BC?

George J. Smith wrote:

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.

If I remember correctly they retrieved a bunch of spent pods, reloaded them with missiles and put them back into the rail system, then off-loaded some to leave behind as part of the defence picket.

So just how many did Wayfarer have prior to the incident with the BC?

The text only says "a few dozen" were left behind so at best we can guess somewhere around 30-40 were left behind leaving 130-140 on board (several were not recoverable or otherwise not serviceable after recovery).

The Series 282 LACs the Trojans carried probably didn't have the fire control to launch more than one pod at a time, since their broadside consisted of 12 one-shot box launchers. Against the likely opponents they were facing (3 DDs and a CL, probably not all at once) the six LACs being able to put a volley of 72 capital missiles into space at a time should have been able to end any of those threats with a single launch. Thus it seems unlikely they'd need more than five or six pods per LAC, meaning 30 or 36 being left behind.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:You're forgetting one important functionality of the pod: powering the missiles up, either by initiating the compact fusion bottle or by charging the capacitors. Once the missile is powered up, its lifetime clock is ticking down. So current technology wouldn't allow you to individually fire missiles that loiter around you before you point them at the enemy and they go. And that doesn't even answer the issue of how much time you'd need to build a massive launch.

Sorry for the delayed reply, life has been busy.

We already see missiles loiter in space before lighting off--stacked salvos from internal tubes. I'm simply proposing a design where that's normally the only option rather than simply the preferred option.

Jonathan_S wrote:But Cataphracts don’t use a baffle. They are (apparently) 2 entirely separate missile stages using distance (and possibly also other unstated methods) to protect the 75 second endurance CM drive on the 2nd stage from the conventional missile drive on the first. (After all, something seems to force them to use a smaller diameter for the 2nd stage; forcing the warhead size reduction)
But I always envisioned the CM stage bolted to the front of the conventional missile.

I have pictured it with the second stage replacing the warhead off the base missile. Since the second stage mounts a drive as well the warhead is obviously a lot lighter.

locarno24 wrote:I think the argument about "Do we need SD(P)s?" was more about 'do the missiles need to be in pods' - as in, do we need the (P) rather than do we need the SD.

Exactly. System defense pods lurk about in space, they're still needed. However, it seems to me that pretty much all the reasons for pods on ships have been overtaken by technology, a SD spitting missiles out of it's hammerheads from a collection of launch tubes in it's heart seem to me to be able to do everything a SD(P) can without losing the amount of space to the pods themselves.

kzt wrote:I suggested that if were the MA I'd be sending out ships to collect debris from BoM. Most particularly missile pods or missiles that were duds or just missed. David assured us that every honorverse missile has a 100% effective self-destruction system that only goes off when it's supposed to.

Whatever.

It wouldn't be hard to make something virtually foolproof. Put a simple acid fuse that's activated by missile-level acceleration. The hard part would be making it destroy enough. Complete destruction would require firing the warhead and that obviously could malfunction.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:That said, perhaps in the background they have tech for stuff like thi, but for a future book, RFC could authorially create something like a "gravitational scoop ship" (in my head) more like using a bit of carefully shaped bow wall to push the debris bits at a time into a slowly moving ship's overpowered wedge. I guess my question there is "would the wedge itself shred the debris bits into micro-meteorite size particles?

If such a thing existed and did not irreparably shred the pieces into tiny bits, then the discussion above about recovering lost missiles and other pieces of tech becomes doable. It's still difficult to scoop quadrillions of cubic km, but it's orders of magnitude easier than rendezvousing with each piece of debris to figure out what it is.

You don't need to rendezvous with everything--you have tractor beams. Match velocity with the debris field, build a vector that moves across it slowly and grab anything that you pass. Done within days it shouldn't be hard and normally there wouldn't be that much to clean up.

Loren Pechtel wrote:It wouldn't be hard to make something virtually foolproof. Put a simple acid fuse that's activated by missile-level acceleration. The hard part would be making it destroy enough. Complete destruction would require firing the warhead and that obviously could malfunction.

You'd think so. But we've been building and firing fuzes out of cannons and dropping them from airplanes for well over a century. Nobody wants an accurately delivered bomb or shell to not go off on the target, and nobody wants kids getting blown up for the next 50 years by duds.

I would still very strongly urge you not to cross the fence of a military impact area. I know a guy who was towing a target into an impact area behind an M88 when they found an 8" artillery shell the hard way. Which lifted the 50 ton M88 into the air and blew the tracks and road wheels off one side.

The current US weapons still has a dud/non-self-destruction rate ranging from 4% to 0.2%. That's because one of the critical things you need ordinance to do is not explode while you are handling, or firing it, or transporting it. So there are numerous safety measures that prevent the weapon from arming until it senses whole series of events that should only be experienced when you deliver the weapon.

So the idea that you can magically have a 100% success rate in the future is akin to the idea that you can magically prevent everyone from committing crimes in the future.

Particularly when you consider that there were tens of thousands of entire pods containing missiles that were totally cold and in magazines that would have been moving at a noticeable percentage of the speed of light out of the system when the ship they were in tore apart. I really, really doubt that the self-destruction system of RMN warheads will go off if a forklift drops a missile inside a 200 km long space station.

kzt wrote:Particularly when you consider that there were tens of thousands of entire pods containing missiles that were totally cold and in magazines that would have been moving at a noticeable percentage of the speed of light out of the system when the ship they were in tore apart. I really, really doubt that the self-destruction system of RMN warheads will go off if a forklift drops a missile inside a 200 km long space station.

Yeah, I can't think of any remotely foolproof way of destructing these.

What I was picturing is an old fashioned acid fuse except contained in something that would only break with the sort of acceleration a missile puts out.

An artillery round has to contend with slamming into things, that could break a destruct system. If an Honorverse missile slams into something you don't need to worry about a destruct system.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:You're forgetting one important functionality of the pod: powering the missiles up, either by initiating the compact fusion bottle or by charging the capacitors. Once the missile is powered up, its lifetime clock is ticking down. So current technology wouldn't allow you to individually fire missiles that loiter around you before you point them at the enemy and they go. And that doesn't even answer the issue of how much time you'd need to build a massive launch.

Sorry for the delayed reply, life has been busy.

We already see missiles loiter in space before lighting off--stacked salvos from internal tubes. I'm simply proposing a design where that's normally the only option rather than simply the preferred option.

The question is how long they can loiter. We do know that they can for a short time, as building up double broadsides is possible, but we've never seen anything much bigger. The only bigger salvos are done by buiilding patterns of pods that themselves are towed and often powered from the mothership.

Which means:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Exactly. System defense pods lurk about in space, they're still needed. However, it seems to me that pretty much all the reasons for pods on ships have been overtaken by technology, a SD spitting missiles out of it's hammerheads from a collection of launch tubes in it's heart seem to me to be able to do everything a SD(P) can without losing the amount of space to the pods themselves.

If you're defending a system with plenty of pods already available, I agree with you. There's little need to have a ship bigger than a BC picket a system. And the reason you'd want a BC and not something even smaller is its Keyhole capability, which multiplies the control links and allows it to completely control the salvos with wedge towards the enemy.

But if you're either attacking a system or trying to defend one before the pods were delivered by freighters or FSVs, you need to have carried sufficient missiles with you. Firing from the hammerhead or broadsides can limit your rate or fire and that might be fatal, depending on just who your enemy is.