FALL 1924: Missile possibilities

1924 New Build Missiles
Date in books is currently 1923

In Uncompromising Honor Cataphracts are given definitive distances, accelerations from rest.

Cataphract C III's 84,000 G, Range 1st stage = 19.3Mk. Runtime first stage 215s
*Earlier versions had lower duration and accelerations
Cataphract IIIs 2nd stage @60s ~100,000G ~31Mkm total

*** Anyone get a chuckle out of the fact that the Cataphract C III's 84,000G's is identical to the large moon based missiles fired in Honor of the Queen? True the runtime is longer, but it also shows the arbitrary 60s/180s multiplier of early books is truly arbitrary and DW has decided to remove it completely now.

6 Cat C III's per pod + Husky. How big are pods? Unknown

3 Colliers of 7,500,000 ton ships carried 95,000 pods to Ajay. Each Collier holds ~32,000 pods. If tonnage carried is the 7,500,000 as how ships are classed today, then each pod is

7,500.000/32,000 = 234tons/pod or 6 missiles Cataphract C III with capital grade warhead/laser missiles weigh no more 30~40tons a piece...

Uh someone missed a zero it appears to make battle of Ajay bigger and badder than it appears to show how big and scary the League is. 400,000 missiles sounds a lot bigger and badder than 40,000. Or...

The GA had better surrender now as Technodyne and their buddies in the MALIGN have capital grade missiles a fraction the size of the GA's with 31,000,000km range

***Honor/GA just grabbed ALL R&D info from Ganymede***

1Q: Technodyne is based at YILDUN, not SOL, does Ganymede have the tech specs for new 215s duration 84000G missiles?

1aQ: Where were the missiles built as shown in Uncompromising Honor? If built in SOL, then the GA has these specs.

This brings up a more important Q: HOW did Technodyne increase the drive time and the acceleration? In only 30-->40 tons.

What we can surmise based on books:

1) Manticore has already increased drive time past the 180 second mark with LERM's 270s duration@46000G which leads everyone to ask, why not before, and what is the limitation of going to 84,000G and 215s compared to the 46,000G and 270s of the LERM?

2) Manticore has increased capacitor density so each Ton of missile Capacitor holds more energy, Technodyne has not done so, yet their missiles are vastly smaller even though we are told they are MUCH larger. Nah, I wouldn't have my tongue firmly planted in my cheek here or with my fingers crossed behind my back or anything... oh no of course not! Of course we have tube fired Javelin Cataphracts which seem immune to this limitation as power required to move ever more mass should decrease drive time due to lack of power from said capacitors, but...

3) Manticore has a “baffle” for 2nd stage impeller making missile more compact without need of entirely separate missile, though how the initiation of the 1st set impeller does not destroy the 2nd missiles impeller when the entire reason was “proximity of impeller nodes to begin with is still Baffling(pardon the pun couldn't help myself), as I thought that was the ENTIRE reason for the introduction of the baffle in the first place. Yet cataphracts can do it just fine without said baffle... why bother inventing the “baffle” to begin with? Just build a long missile to get impeller seperation. In effect that is exactly what the Cataphract is.

3a) If one can graft a 2nd missile onto nose of a missile without impeller node from 1st stage, then graft another one to the ass of the missile as well. Now we have 2 missiles being sent down range instead of 1. And if we can do this with missiles... why not counter missiles?

4) Acceleration is based on “energy siphon” effect between impellers and wedge and this 100% has an efficiency quotient so, maybe Technodyne has impellers with ability to be several times superior to Manticoran missiles in this aspect

***All of this to get to the REAL MEAT of the this long winded post regarding new 1924 build post Oyster Bay: ***

The real question is WHY does the 92ton MK16 have 2 stages of equal 180s duration instead 1st stage using the smaller in diameter impeller nodes of the ~70-->80ton LERM of 270s and a 2nd stage of equal duration? Or if total power is the problem, then a drive time of 90s?(with micro fusion I do not see this as problem) Even if one used a 60s duration impeller node instead of a 2nd LERM impeller, range would in effect be identical in same period of time.

So, if your industry is all blown up in oh, I don't know, maybe an Oyster bay Raid or some such....

From a manufacturing perspective it would be FAR cheaper to make a single impeller drive + built in compensator etc than 2 separate such very complex systems. Also a DDM using the LERM impeller nodes for 270's@46,000G would have a range from rest of 65Mkm which the books have shown is the ***true limit of light speed missile control.

And if the above is true... How hard would it be to add a 2nd impeller node ring + baffle to the LERM, even if you had to cut its 270's drive time down to 2 stages of sub 150s so your brand new ~200 Avalons, ~50 Kamerlings, ~30 Wolfhounds, Flight IV Reliants, SAG-B's etc can all have a real missile to fire? Can't fit the larger diameter micro fusion plant of course.

And uh, if my tongue in cheek it not TOO cheeky yet, then why not DDM's with 84,000G 215s 1st stages with design grabbed from Technodyne.

Ok, slight different topic: In the age of FTL, system defense needs missiles for FAR higher maximum acceleration to get out to the 0.8C limit quicker so your missiles arrive first, otherwise you cannot kill the FTL aspect of the missiles coming at you and you will die. So, System Defense Missiles with 4 stages etc MUST have 84,000G +++ 1st/2nd/3rd Drives of whatever duration to get your velocity up as quick as possible to the 0.8c limit before going ballistic and lighting off final drive or 2 drives depending on changing situation due to LONG ballistic phase and stealth at range making even SD's "stealthy" at 200Mkm as sensor degredation is going to be mass/range limited just as it is for a LAC or RD or etc.

Relax wrote:1924 New Build Missiles
Date in books is currently 1923

In Uncompromising Honor Cataphracts are given definitive distances, accelerations from rest.

To End in Fire also gave us some numbers, but they're all wrong.

3 Colliers of 7,500,000 ton ships carried 95,000 pods to Ajay. Each Collier holds ~32,000 pods. If tonnage carried is the 7,500,000 as how ships are classed today, then each pod is

Ignoring this. How much cargo a ship of a given tonnage can carry is completely unknown. The numbers do not make any sense in the HV. We're told that a 9-million tonne warship locks the Junction for a certain amount of time, but that doesn't seem to depend on how much mass it's actually carrying. The number we're told appears to be a simple proxy for volume, not mass, as a relic of the Great Ship Resizing that dropped all other measurements except the mass. It would have been better if the volume had been kept, but then we'd have had to discard the measurement most often mentioned, which wasn't acceptable.

***Honor/GA just grabbed ALL R&D info from Ganymede***

1Q: Technodyne is based at YILDUN, not SOL, does Ganymede have the tech specs for new 215s duration 84000G missiles?

Yes. There's discussion in TEiF as to how the documentation for the Hasta was all present, from design phases to final production model, but not so for the Cataphract. It had just appeared out of nowhere and went into production, with Technodyne uncooperative on explaining that. But this means some documentation was found. Maybe not the theoretical background that led to the 215-second 84000 G burn, but the construction methods must be there. So it's a matter of reverse-engineering.

And remember that Galton was also captured, which probably does include the Cataphract development, because it was probably produced there.

1aQ: Where were the missiles built as shown in Uncompromising Honor? If built in SOL, then the GA has these specs.

I don't think they were built in Sol. The Ganymede installation appears to be an R&D centre, not an industrial facility. Those missiles were built at Technodyne's multiple factories throughout the Galaxy.

Oh, the initial ones came from Galton, including the ones for Filareta. That's how they triangulated Galton in the first place. But to have that many million missiles flying around, Technodyne would have had to pick up the production by themselves. There's no way tens of millions of missiles coming out of Galton would have remained a secret.

So it's likely the ones fired at Prime-Ajay, which were hotter than Filareta, were Technodyne production. It's possible that the innovations came from Technodyne themselves, not the MAlign-at-Galton.

This brings up a more important Q: HOW did Technodyne increase the drive time and the acceleration? In only 30-->40 tons.

Ignoring the question about mass.

Please remember that Cataphract-C are built around a Javelin capital-grade anti-ship missile. Those were fired from superdreadnought missile tubes, so one thing they weren't is light.

If you find the numbers for the Cataphract-A first stage performance, we can compare to LERMs.

But you're right that we missed the point where the 180s barrier was broken for the SLN. Going from 180 to 215 isn't much and wouldn't have helped against an ERM that had 270-second time. But managing to keep 215 seconds for what is effectively the high power mode does make a difference, a huge one actually.

1) Manticore has already increased drive time past the 180 second mark with LERM's 270s duration@46000G which leads everyone to ask, why not before, and what is the limitation of going to 84,000G and 215s compared to the 46,000G and 270s of the LERM?

We're not told.

My speculation is that there was a theoretical breakthrough that happened off-camera at some point around the time of the First Haven-Manticore War. We know that the laserheads were not invented by Manticore and we've been told the backstory of how that happened. So I'd expect the same thing happened to the 3-minute breakthrough, with a difference that this time Manticore would have been even more in the forefront. Haven never developed the same because of the educational limitations of its Legislaturalist regime and because it was buying from the League -- and the League would not have sold its 215-second first-generation missiles.

The 84,0000 G is a different breakthrough. As I said above, it might have been done by Technodyne itself, not the MAlign. Why it happened, that's no secret: the pressure of war. That spurred a huge innovation cycle between the Technodyne and MAlign researchers. Not having access to the quantum baffle for a proper MDM, all they could do was supercharge the missile.

We also don't know what other consequences there are for this. For example, is the failure rate much higher? Out of 100,000 missiles fired, how many reach their 215-second mark without catastrophically blowing up?

2) Manticore has increased capacitor density so each Ton of missile Capacitor holds more energy, Technodyne has not done so, yet their missiles are vastly smaller even though we are told they are MUCH larger. Nah, I wouldn't have my tongue firmly planted in my cheek here or with my fingers crossed behind my back or anything... oh no of course not! Of course we have tube fired Javelin Cataphracts which seem immune to this limitation as power required to move ever more mass should decrease drive time due to lack of power from said capacitors, but...

Ignoring discussion about mass.

3) Manticore has a “baffle” for 2nd stage impeller making missile more compact without need of entirely separate missile, though how the initiation of the 1st set impeller does not destroy the 2nd missiles impeller when the entire reason was “proximity of impeller nodes to begin with is still Baffling(pardon the pun couldn't help myself), as I thought that was the ENTIRE reason for the introduction of the baffle in the first place. Yet cataphracts can do it just fine without said baffle... why bother inventing the “baffle” to begin with? Just build a long missile to get impeller seperation. In effect that is exactly what the Cataphract is.

We've discussed this before and, while we have not been able to reach a conclusion, it's possible that those missiles are simply very, very long. It's always been theoretically possible to have two rings and not destroy each other, so long as they were far enough away from each other. The limitation was the material to make the missiles with so they wouldn't be prohibitively expensive.

And we don't know how much a Cataphract costs. The MAlign footed the bill for the initial development and production runs; for the later runs, the League had no choice but to buy them for whatever price was charged.

3a) If one can graft a 2nd missile onto nose of a missile without impeller node from 1st stage, then graft another one to the ass of the missile as well. Now we have 2 missiles being sent down range instead of 1. And if we can do this with missiles... why not counter missiles?

I don't see any reason why they couldn't do that, or use quantum baffles either. The problems with that might be size, price, and accuracy. The latter can't be solved without FTL links to recon drones, something the GA does have but the SLN didn't.

The size can be worked around by firing from pods, but that's a workaround, not a proper solution. If you can only fit two extended-range CMs where three regular ones might fit in your magazines, then you have that much fewer missiles available. It might be better to fire a thicker but closer salvo -- that also improves accuracy. The issue is really the number of launchers you have available.

And if you want to have more launchers, you need more platforms. That's where CM pods as well as LACs can come in.

The real question is WHY does the 92ton MK16 have 2 stages of equal 180s duration instead 1st stage using the smaller in diameter impeller nodes of the ~70-->80ton LERM of 270s and a 2nd stage of equal duration? Or if total power is the problem, then a drive time of 90s?(with micro fusion I do not see this as problem) Even if one used a 60s duration impeller node instead of a 2nd LERM impeller, range would in effect be identical in same period of time.

Again ignoring the question about mass because I don't think you can reach the conclusions you have. Mind you, I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying that they're unfounded because the logic chain is has holes due to completely misleading numbers about physics in the HV.

From a manufacturing perspective it would be FAR cheaper to make a single impeller drive + built in compensator etc than 2 separate such very complex systems. Also a DDM using the LERM impeller nodes for 270's@46,000G would have a range from rest of 65Mkm which the books have shown is the ***true limit of light speed missile control.

And if the above is true... How hard would it be to add a 2nd impeller node ring + baffle to the LERM, even if you had to cut its 270's drive time down to 2 stages of sub 150s so your brand new ~200 Avalons, ~50 Kamerlings, ~30 Wolfhounds, Flight IV Reliants, SAG-B's etc can all have a real missile to fire? Can't fit the larger diameter micro fusion plant of course.

That's a possibility. Considering that the GA has the technology for ERMs, both heavy and light, and has the technology for multiple drives in the missile, why not do extended multi-drive missiles? This is something I'd expect RFC to have already answered, but I don't remember having ever read about it. It could be some technobabble like the quantum baffle not operating as well in extended range power levels as in standard ones. Do remember that the RMN missiles went down from 48500 gravities in the early books' single-drive missiles to 46000 in the multi-drive ones.

And uh, if my tongue in cheek it not TOO cheeky yet, then why not DDM's with 84,000G 215s 1st stages with design grabbed from Technodyne.

That's also a good question, but as I asked above: what is the failure rate?

It might have been unacceptable for the RMN and RHN back hen they created those, and since neither side had a meaningfully higher acceleration, neither side felt the need to compromise on reliability. But if now everyone is firing 75,000+ gravity missiles, they may need to accept some losses.

Relax wrote:Ok, slight different topic: In the age of FTL, system defense needs missiles for FAR higher maximum acceleration to get out to the 0.8C limit quicker so your missiles arrive first, otherwise you cannot kill the FTL aspect of the missiles coming at you and you will die. So, System Defense Missiles with 4 stages etc MUST have 84,000G +++ 1st/2nd/3rd Drives of whatever duration to get your velocity up as quick as possible to the 0.8c limit before going ballistic and lighting off final drive or 2 drives depending on changing situation due to LONG ballistic phase and stealth at range making even SD's "stealthy" at 200Mkm as sensor degredation is going to be mass/range limited just as it is for a LAC or RD or etc.

That made no sense. Can you rephrase this entire section? What do you mean by "kill the FTL aspect"?

I agree you want your missiles to arrive first, but the defenders usually have far more missiles than the attackers and equally much more robust defensive capabilities. So all else being equal, those faster missiles aren't going to save the bacon of the attacking force. If they don't want to simply accept a suicide mission, then they need more than simply faster missiles.

A 4DM missile @ 46000 gravities reaches 0.81c in 9 minutes; at 84000 gravities, that takes only 4.91 minutes. This means that at 84000 gravities, you wouldn't need 4 stages, because two could get you to max n-space speed relative to the local rest frame, and you only need one more for final manoeuvres. But crucially, both missiles reach the same speed and they both have long ballistic phases. And equally important, the pod shoals are not the target.

That is to say, the sources of the defensive missiles are not where the attacker's missiles are going. There's a very good chance that those would have a significantly shorter ballistic phase, and thus be able to reach at about the same time or sooner.

Another important aspect is that the defender will have FTL recon assets relatively close to the attacker, while the attacker has no assets in the first place. The attacker only has whatever telemetry the missiles are sending back.

All in all, this says that the defender's counter fire is thicker, more accurate, and possibly arrives before the attacker's attack, even with a slower missile. The defender will also have had 15 minutes of warning to bring up defending wedges over crucial installations. So the conclusion is that this is either an inconclusive attack, or a suicide mission.

This isn't to say that you don't want faster missiles. But you don't need them to survive.

TM: Thanks for the replies and yes, the holes in physics regarding mass etc are large enough to swallow whole ships.

As for the negating the FTL aspect.

FTL communicates 62X faster right? So, if your missiles arrive first and blow up their ships, then said ships cannot send FTL updates to their missiles and in effect those missiles will be based on their last communication and light speed based sensors. In effect you cut the loop back to light speed coms instead of FTL, thus hit rate will suffer.

Math: With 84,000G or whatever acceleration one achieves; Time to 0.8C ~ is as you stated ~5 minutes. Time to 0.8C at 48,000G is ~510s or 210s difference or 3.5minutes. Travel distance at 0.8C in 210s is 50M km.

So, FTL missile would have 3s old information and light speed would have 3 minute old info. At longer ranges it gets worse.

Hit rates comparing Apollo to MK-23 without it is night and day.

Acceleration matters quite a LOT especially when FTL enters the picture.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:1924 New Build Missiles
Date in books is currently 1923

In Uncompromising Honor Cataphracts are given definitive distances, accelerations from rest.

To End in Fire also gave us some numbers, but they're all wrong.

Uh, sorry, thought it was obvious, numbers are from UH at battle of AJAY. Looks like I edited that part out. TEIF yes, has wacko numbers. UH gives numbers from rest. Yes, I had to back calculate some of the numbers to get TIME, but acceleration numbers and distances were all given at AJAY.

If TEIF is to believed, between the destruction of Galton forts etc by Harrington's forces and the self destruction of the various remaining Alignment command stations/forts/manufacturing there will be no records trail to hunt back or on various equipment developments. Sure, they may get some unused missiles etc and they have the telemetry and sensor reading but hard data in computers the prospect is probably zero. And, giving the Alignment habit of not keeping that kind of sensitive data in ground locations (Torch had nothing on the wormhole etc) the enclave on Galton won't have anything either.

The base(s) at Ganymede is unlikely to have much of the early development information on the Technodyne's products of Cataphract, only what was passed along in marketing etc.

A real question is IF the GA is willing or thinks they are able to go right at Technodyne and vacuums out their records. Yeah, there is a political component of the independent system Technodyne holds (with no habitable planet) and is it worth the fallout of sending in a GA taskforce to .....well, search down to all the computer cores.

What we do know so far is that the Grazer Torpedoes are in nobody's available database and they were not used at Galton. So there is this massive gap on where the advanced weapons the Alignment is using came from or the early development of Cataphract etc. Also to this point, nobody in the GA has a handle on the ships that carried out Oyster Bay nor where they came from. Again.....no records of anything that could do what they did. Somebody created them, built them, used them...but were are they and where have they vanished too.

It is POSSIBLE that the Alignment developed the Cataphract (and improvements) as an outgrowth of their innovation and R&D work on SLN (Technodyne) supposed equipment, just followed differing lines of research but working hard to keep it close enough to "SL" tech to hide the rest of what is going on. Consider that the Cataphract is a plausible development of a normal suppler to the SLN- plausible enough to keep almost anybody from digging deeper, particularly when the SLN was having a great need for improvements. The samples worked, they could be examined by SLN and the engineering could be handled by the people who had to maintain, load and fire them.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's a possibility. Considering that the GA has the technology for ERMs, both heavy and light, and has the technology for multiple drives in the missile, why not do extended multi-drive missiles? This is something I'd expect RFC to have already answered, but I don't remember having ever read about it. It could be some technobabble like the quantum baffle not operating as well in extended range power levels as in standard ones. Do remember that the RMN missiles went down from 48500 gravities in the early books' single-drive missiles to 46000 in the multi-drive ones.

I swear I've heard/seen RFC address this - but I can't find it in the infodump or in my cache of his old posts. So, it might have been on a con panel or something.

IIRC (and there's a good chance I don't) it was something along the lines of the combination of combining ERM nodes (which make the missile bigger) with DDM and the baffle (which make the missile bigger) would result in a missile that's seen as too large relative to the additional benefits it delivers. And possibly something about ships below the wall shouldn't be encouraged to fight very long range missile duels anyway, as they haven't the magazine capacity to do so effectively; so don't need a missile that can reach out much beyond 30-million km (but that last bit is the recollection I trust the least)

And of course, and I think this was pre-Apollo when he said this, and at that time making MDMs larger by giving them ERM nodes would have been really pointless as their hit percentages at 65 million km were already too low to generally bother with -- so why give them 100+ million km powered range? (And if you tried for a high accel snap shot Mantie ER-MDMs would reach only 22.8 million km; assuming a 75/225s runtime)

Relax wrote:TM: Thanks for the replies and yes, the holes in physics regarding mass etc are large enough to swallow whole ships.

As for the negating the FTL aspect.

FTL communicates 62X faster right? So, if your missiles arrive first and blow up their ships, then said ships cannot send FTL updates to their missiles and in effect those missiles will be based on their last communication and light speed based sensors. In effect you cut the loop back to light speed coms instead of FTL, thus hit rate will suffer.

Math: With 84,000G or whatever acceleration one achieves; Time to 0.8C ~ is as you stated ~5 minutes. Time to 0.8C at 48,000G is ~510s or 210s difference or 3.5minutes. Travel distance at 0.8C in 210s is 50M km.

So, FTL missile would have 3s old information and light speed would have 3 minute old info. At longer ranges it gets worse.

Hit rates comparing Apollo to MK-23 without it is night and day.

Acceleration matters quite a LOT especially when FTL enters the picture.

Acceleration mattered a lot even before FTL. Consider how Sebastian D'Orville having at least some four-ring missiles on tow might have changed BoM. With that inherent ~2-minute advantage, he has time to throw two controlled salvoes before anything of Tourville's can reach him, even if he still waits until Tourville shoots first.

Unfortunately, the next step is for any attacker force to go to four-rings as well, whatever the mass penalty. Subsequent to that, the way to .8c quicker is to use more and more shorter-lived countermissile style rings. Redline them so hard they start to burn out as quickly as 30 seconds, but spew more than 130,000g.

Killing the FTL is certainly an objective but I think winning the sprint to .8c overall is the most important factor. Mind you, perhaps other people's FTL missiles won't have the native capabilities of the MK23-E, making that FTL deprivation much more effective.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's a possibility. Considering that the GA has the technology for ERMs, both heavy and light, and has the technology for multiple drives in the missile, why not do extended multi-drive missiles? This is something I'd expect RFC to have already answered, but I don't remember having ever read about it. It could be some technobabble like the quantum baffle not operating as well in extended range power levels as in standard ones. Do remember that the RMN missiles went down from 48500 gravities in the early books' single-drive missiles to 46000 in the multi-drive ones.

All valid points, though one NIT: MK23 still has the 48,000G at 180s of its predecessors. It is only the MK16 with its 46,000G. By playing with the numbers it is also apparent that the LERM also has a 46,000G.

It should be noted that early in the war, missile accelerations were lower than the above numbers. In the case of PN, MUCH lower. Same goes for the Javelin missile for the SLN.

Still begs the question: What has to happen to an impeller node to go from ~45,000G@180s to 84,000G@215s even if said missile is several times larger than the other. 84,000G is what the PN missiles could do in HotQ IIRC for 60s and I think RMN missiles could hit?? 94,000G for 60s as well? Hrmm.

Still makes one wonder at what point is a "booster" stage carrying 2 missiles grafted at each end to the booster with high acceleration, long endurance viable on a per ton basis? Especially since everything is going towards pod based format and initial velocity imparted from a missile tube is in effect not required at all. Not doing so makes sense as LONG thin objects cannot be moved/stored very well on the narrow beam of a ship. Of course then one must ask, can one mate those section in the missile tube itself? What does that do to rate of fire? Drops it obviously, but how much?

Oh yea, and if boosters are viable offensively... What would be required to double use said boosters as long range CM's once launched?

Relax wrote:As for the negating the FTL aspect.

FTL communicates 62X faster right? So, if your missiles arrive first and blow up their ships, then said ships cannot send FTL updates to their missiles and in effect those missiles will be based on their last communication and light speed based sensors. In effect you cut the loop back to light speed coms instead of FTL, thus hit rate will suffer.

Math: With 84,000G or whatever acceleration one achieves; Time to 0.8C ~ is as you stated ~5 minutes. Time to 0.8C at 48,000G is ~510s or 210s difference or 3.5minutes. Travel distance at 0.8C in 210s is 50M km.

So, FTL missile would have 3s old information and light speed would have 3 minute old info. At longer ranges it gets worse.

Hit rates comparing Apollo to MK-23 without it is night and day.

Acceleration matters quite a LOT especially when FTL enters the picture.

The point I was making is that such a long-range and surprise engagement (like Operation Fabius and the Battle of Beowulf) would require more than higher acceleration missiles. I'm not dismissing them as useful; I'm saying they're not the silver bullet.

I was considering a surprise attack because on any other condition, the defenders could have fired earlier, negating the advantage of a higher-acceleration missile. This scenario was driven by the fact that you were talking about 4-stage system defence missiles. And as I said, the defence missiles don't need to be launched from the location of the attacker's target, so they won't have the same distance to overcome.

If we switch to the scenario of two fleets fighting in a random system neither has fixed defence assets employed, such as what we saw on BoMa for plot reasons, then yes, the higher-acceleration missiles will arrive first. The side that destroys the other's ships first wins.

But that won't necessarily negate the Apollo FTL link. Everyone else's accuracy sucks at 65 million km.. or 75, or 225, while Apollo's is acceptable. That means the side with Apollo can afford to start firing from a much bigger range and that's the range that the battle will start at (both sides know this). But if both sides fire roughly the same number of missiles, the Apollo ones will do far more damage, despite arriving later.

Do note that if those higher-acceleration missiles are bigger, then if the two forces are roughly the same size, then this side is sending fewer missiles per salvo. This shows a trade-off in the higher acceleration.

Then you add that the Mk23 are far more deadly than everyone else's missiles. So, in order to win with higher-acceleration but bigger and dumber missiles, you need far ships to launch them from. That's a "something else" I said you need to bring to the table.