?

Jonathan_S wrote:They can - but the enemy rarely fires just one salvo. So by the time the first salvo reaches PDLC range the CMs are usually being fired to meet the 3rd salvo as it enters the outer point defense zone and at leakers from the 2nd salvo (in the middle point defense zone) which got through the first wave of CMs.

(This is also why modern LAC screens are positioned so far out -- they attrit the missiles before they even reach the main body of the fleet's defensive zones and let's them focus on only the surviving missiles. Plus engaging missiles sooner forces them to activate their ECM sooner giving your systems more time to work out the real targets vs the spoofs; and try to kill any dedicated jammers and decoys -- giving the closer-in defenses an easier time)


You could instead aim those CMs at the very close 1st salvo; though that'd have them flying straight through the PDLC firing arcs and blocking some PDLC shots. But the main reason you don't is then nothing has whittled down the follow-on salvos and they'll hit you like a tsunami.

Also depends on whether the ships that would fire those CMs have turned wedge-on or not. As penny noted, the full roll takes 2min 45s, which is way more than the time between salvos crash down on you. There is no time to roll broad-side on to fire more CMs between salvos. If you've rotated wedge-on, you're going to remain in that formation for the duration of the salvos.

At this stage in the war, the shipkillers have a duration of 180s and the CMs only 60s. So the earliest you can fire a CM is 120s from arrival (not exactly; I didn't do the Maths, but it's close enough). Given that the wallers couldn't complete the turn before the shipkillers arrive and given that you want to fire more than one wave of CMs for interception at extreme range, what this tells me is that doctrine at this time was to fight missiles broadside-on, or nearly so. That means they can use their PDLCs.

It looks like later the rotation became practical. The pod-launching wallers of the late Second War, using the Keyhole II platforms, were defending entirely wedge-on. Likewise, in the Battle of the Ajay-Prime Warp Bridge, Sir Martin Lessem's formation fired 5 waves of CMs and rotated to face the SLN's missiles wedge-on too. In both cases, the shipkiller missiles are being fired from pods, so the ships don't have to keep their tubes facing the enemy to launch. But their CM tubes must have been.

Unless CMs can be fired off-bore too?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:165 seconds is still insanely long time in battle, when missile salvos are arriving several times per minute. That is another reason why CM engagement range is far out: if the ships will need to roll to interpose wedge, they can't fire CMs any more. The ability to fire off-bore wasn't present then and I don't think it applies to CMs even now.

off-bore firing actually does also apply to CMs. First seen on the early Shrikes which only carried forward firing CM tubes -- so when running away their CMs had to fire "over the shoulder", making nearly a 180 degree U-turn after firing to engage the missiles closing from the rear.

That's off-bore CM capability is part of how ships with Keyhole can now fight with the bottom* of their wedge always facing the enemy. Both ship killers and CMs can fire out the broadside tubes, pivot 90 degreed downwards, and head off towards the enemy under the control of the offensive and defensive fire control relays within the Keyholes. Then as enemy missile's approach the Keyhole's PDLCs can engage, and if in a multi-ship formation ships that aren't being targeted can roll part way down to bring their broadside mounted PDLCs into play as well. The targeted ships stay rolled behind their wedge so their PDLCs can only get into play once a missile crests the rim of the wedge -- already within standoff range of it's laserhead. So now there's a deadly race to see whether the PDLCs can kill it before the missile's sensors can find the ship and fire [since it's view was blocked previously by the sidewall)



* Or it could be the top of the wedge, in which case reverse all the directions in the above post

I believe that the wall of battle can be visualized as follows:

Take a piece of paper and draw an equilateral triangle. Add more such triangles in an contiguous fashion to cover the entire page. Imagine a warship at each vertex (if there are 4 rows of 5 triangles each on the page, there will be 17 or 18 vertices, thus that many warships).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:They can - but the enemy rarely fires just one salvo. So by the time the first salvo reaches PDLC range the CMs are usually being fired to meet the 3rd salvo as it enters the outer point defense zone and at leakers from the 2nd salvo (in the middle point defense zone) which got through the first wave of CMs.

(This is also why modern LAC screens are positioned so far out -- they attrit the missiles before they even reach the main body of the fleet's defensive zones and let's them focus on only the surviving missiles. Plus engaging missiles sooner forces them to activate their ECM sooner giving your systems more time to work out the real targets vs the spoofs; and try to kill any dedicated jammers and decoys -- giving the closer-in defenses an easier time)


You could instead aim those CMs at the very close 1st salvo; though that'd have them flying straight through the PDLC firing arcs and blocking some PDLC shots. But the main reason you don't is then nothing has whittled down the follow-on salvos and they'll hit you like a tsunami.

Also depends on whether the ships that would fire those CMs have turned wedge-on or not. As penny noted, the full roll takes 2min 45s, which is way more than the time between salvos crash down on you. There is no time to roll broad-side on to fire more CMs between salvos. If you've rotated wedge-on, you're going to remain in that formation for the duration of the salvos.

At this stage in the war, the shipkillers have a duration of 180s and the CMs only 60s. So the earliest you can fire a CM is 120s from arrival (not exactly; I didn't do the Maths, but it's close enough). Given that the wallers couldn't complete the turn before the shipkillers arrive and given that you want to fire more than one wave of CMs for interception at extreme range, what this tells me is that doctrine at this time was to fight missiles broadside-on, or nearly so. That means they can use their PDLCs.

It looks like later the rotation became practical. The pod-launching wallers of the late Second War, using the Keyhole II platforms, were defending entirely wedge-on. Likewise, in the Battle of the Ajay-Prime Warp Bridge, Sir Martin Lessem's formation fired 5 waves of CMs and rotated to face the SLN's missiles wedge-on too. In both cases, the shipkiller missiles are being fired from pods, so the ships don't have to keep their tubes facing the enemy to launch. But their CM tubes must have been.

Unless CMs can be fired off-bore too?

Correction on the roll rates. You misread it. I should have used words instead of numbers.

“Roll ship now!” McKeon barked at the last possible moment.

Prince Adrian snapped up onto her side relative to the incoming missiles. McKeon had cut it too close for her to complete the maneuver before the laserheads reached attack range, but she didn’t need a complete ninety-degree roll. Forty-five degrees was more than enough to bring the perimeter of her wedge up to block the Peeps’ firing bearing. It also blocked her defensive fire, but McKeon had allowed for that. Given an inertial compensator and internal grav plates, impeller-drive ships were capable of incredible rotation rates in a snap roll. A superdreadnought would have taken at least two minutes to complete a ninety-degree roll; with less than a third the mass and seventy percent less beam, Prince Adrian could roll a full hundred and eighty degrees in only twelve seconds. That meant she could roll ship completely in the interval between Peep salvos, and the recon drones she’d deployed on tractors to beyond the perimeter of her wedge kept her plot fully updated while she rolled.

As she completed the one-hundred-eighty-degree roll to come fully inverted to her original position, her port defensive batteries knew exactly where to find the next wave of missiles and opened fire the instant they came on target.

The other ships of CruRon 33 spun with her, blotting away Havenite missiles with deadly precision. Whitworth’s destroyers were even faster on the helm, and if Rear Admiral Moreno’s battlecruisers were slower, they were still far nimbler than dreadnoughts or superdreadnoughts. Rather than complete rolls, they had to settle for thirty-degree arcs up and then back again. It wasn’t as effective, but their close-in defenses were more powerful and their armor was far thicker.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I believe that the wall of battle can be visualized as follows:

Take a piece of paper and draw an equilateral triangle. Add more such triangles in an contiguous fashion to cover the entire page. Imagine a warship at each vertex (if there are 4 rows of 5 triangles each on the page, there will be 17 or 18 vertices, thus that many warships).

I would sincerely like to thank all of you for sharing your vision of a wall. It has bugged me since I first encountered "a wall" in the series. It seems as though our visions differ somewhat. I am surprised that David does not include a drawing of a wall in one of his books.

There are terms or ideas throughout the series that reference a wall. These ideas only added to my confusion. Like in Toll of Honor there is mention of "the heart of the formation."

And there was once a tendency to place the CO at the heart or middle of the formation. Since other navies were aware of that, the Captain began to fly his flag on smaller ships located elsewhere. But the middle of the formation was implied to be the safest. I thought that was self explanatory; the middle represents the deepest location within the formation (I thought) which also enjoyed the greatest massed point defense fire. It would appear that Robert Woodward's vision comes closer to supporting those notions.

penny wrote:I would sincerely like to thank all of you for sharing your vision of a wall. It has bugged me since I first encountered "a wall" in the series. It seems as though our visions differ somewhat. I am surprised that David does not include a drawing of a wall in one of his books.

There are terms or ideas throughout the series that reference a wall. These ideas only added to my confusion. Like in Toll of Honor there is mention of "the heart of the formation."

And there was once a tendency to place the CO at the heart or middle of the formation. Since other navies were aware of that, the Captain began to fly his flag on smaller ships located elsewhere. But the middle of the formation was implied to be the safest. I thought that was self explanatory; the middle represents the deepest location within the formation (I thought) which also enjoyed the greatest massed point defense fire. It would appear that Robert Woodward's vision comes closer to supporting those notions.

If I recall correctly there was a formation drawing in Jayne's RMN, but it was for BCs and so wasn't a true wall of battle. (Edit: I thought to check Jayne's Peeps book and it does have a very simplified 2 squadron, 16 ship, wall of battle diagram)


Of course the wall was simply taking the classic Age of Sail formation of a Line of Battle (as the early Honorverse was inspired by Nelsonian tales) and extending it into the 3rd dimension by placing multiple lines of wallers above each other.
And in the line of battle even heavy rated escorts like frigates (much less the little unrated sloops or corvettes) got out of the way -- acting as scouts and communication relays (observing the admiral's signal flags and echoing them to the rest of the line -- since being in a line-ahead formation the sails of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd rate ships of the line, not to mention the gun smoke, tended to block the direct view of the flagship's flag signals. Whereas frigates holding position off the disengaged side of the formation could see and be seen far better)

So that inspiration has colored my visualization of the Honorverse formation.

penny wrote:Correction on the roll rates. You misread it. I should have used words instead of numbers.

A superdreadnought would have taken at least two minutes to complete a ninety-degree roll; with less than a third the mass and seventy percent less beam, Prince Adrian could roll a full hundred and eighty degrees in only twelve seconds. That meant she could roll ship completely in the interval between Peep salvos, and the recon drones she’d deployed on tractors to beyond the perimeter of her wedge kept her plot fully updated while she rolled.

Thanks.

That shows that CAs of the time could roll between missile salvos so I expect the rotation rate of a Sag-C still retained a roll rate similar to Prince Adrian, despite being nearly 2x the mass. So the Battle of Ajay-Prime doesn't inform us much.

But SDs taking two minutes for a 90° rotation would imply somewhere around 1 minute for a 45° roll. Assuming they can still fire CMs when the roll is at only 15°, that means the latest they could fire CMs is 40 seconds before missile impact.

At 40 seconds before impact, the shipkillers would still be up to 2.9 million km away. With a combined 176,000 gravity closing acceleration between the two groups of missiles and an initial closing velocity of 63155 km/s, they will meet 26.51 s later, just over 1.05 million km downrange from the defending ships. In this scenario, the SDs would have rotated about 30° when the oncoming missiles passed through the inner CM range. The only thing between the shipkillers and the defending ships now are the screening escorts, so yes they still have a purpose. Especially, as textev says, they can do a full 180° rotation in 12 seconds, which would allow them to present a wedge to those missiles, fire on some of the shipkillers that passed them, before turning back the other PDLC broadside to fire on the next shipkiller salvo.

Meanwhile, the CMs that didn't manage to fratricide with shipkillers will meet the next salvo of shipkillers about 10 seconds later and the next one after that less than 10 seconds after. So even if fired 40 seconds from impact, the inner CM wave can meet 3 shipkiller salvos, with a 60-second wedge. With 75 seconds, that's more.

I suppose it might be possible for ships to -at least for the start of an engagement- deploy CM pods to thicken the initial volley total of CMs but that would also mean that there would have to be enough control links. There is also the question of how long such pods will survive to launch faced with soft-kills by the energy etc from the lagerheads being shot at the controlling ships.

At this point, using the RMN/RHN modern LACs starting the attrition of incoming missiles well out between the enemy and their own ships (and just to the sides of the expected firing solutions for the missiles to try and keep LACs from drawing a shipkiller to target a LAC- had become probably the most effective way of handling the need for more interception. You could put a CM canister
(perhaps even multiple canisters)on shipkillers but your going to need the Apollo system out there functioning to provide the targeting data for the CMs. Of course you could also continue to use the now warheadless shipkiller as a giant CM as it continues to interpenetrate the incoming missiles such was done with MDM in using them in barricades.

It's called evolution of tactics and weapons,

Brigade XO wrote:At this point, using the RMN/RHN modern LACs starting the attrition of incoming missiles well out between the enemy and their own ships (and just to the sides of the expected firing solutions for the missiles to try and keep LACs from drawing a shipkiller to target a LAC- had become probably the most effective way of handling the need for more interception. You could put a CM canister
(perhaps even multiple canisters)on shipkillers but your going to need the Apollo system out there functioning to provide the targeting data for the CMs. Of course you could also continue to use the now warheadless shipkiller as a giant CM as it continues to interpenetrate the incoming missiles such was done with MDM in using them in barricades.

It's called evolution of tactics and weapons,

Of course one of the issues with LACs for anti-missile defense is their lack of magazine depth. In a prolonged engagement they'll run out of CMs.

RFC had said the Manties were studying more survivable CLACs that would stay with the wall, to allow LACs to cycle back to be quickly rearmed (since their current CLACs normally drop their brood and escape into hyper until summoned back). We also know
from TEIF that Bolthole is also experimenting with 2-drive CMs. Since we know that the 3.5 million km range of the Mk31 actually exceeds really effective shipboard fire control (over 11 seconds of lightspeed lag each way isn't run) they might be planning to use LAC as forward fire controllers; providing final guidance for extra long ranged 2-drive CMs launched from the formation's ship. Or they might be looking at a automated fire control relay drone with FTL links back to the ship. (Or maybe they've just decided to accept far worse hit percentages as the trade-off for a deeper defensive basket -- if they come out we'll have to see how they integrate into the rest of the formation missile defense)

Also the 2-drive CMs are presumably going to be too large to launch from the existing CM tubes. So they might go pod launched initially (maybe load up some BC(P)s as anti-missile support ships with heavy ERCM pod loads), or adapt them to be fired from ship's main missile tubes. Later on we'll have to see if all CM tubes on new builds get enlarged to handle these, or if ships go with a mix of tubes and mix of extended- and normal-range CMs, or what.

All this talk of CM's and rolling ships makes me wonder why laying a bunch of cold launched CM's would not work as a tactic.

If I'm trying to run away from a larger force for instance or even just slowing down for a 0-0 intercept then cold launching the CM's so they spread ahead of my formation under inertia should put a cloud between me and an incoming missile load. I then reload my CM tubes.

We know from Megan that cold launching and later activating the CM's is possible for the RMN (Used to defend a decoy and kill a SN recon drone.). Sure the efficiency is going to be less than normal but if not detected and avoided by the incoming attack stream then they could gut it before it enters the normal outer CM defense zone.

I suspect that this will only work for certain angles and the incoming missiles could be routed round the projected balistic course of such a cloud in a lot of cases. Onthe otherhand if I restrict the enimies angles of attack I reduce his options and make the defence stronger even without a single intercept.

In some cases the Incoming Stream has to trigger it's ECM's earlier than it would otherwise and even that's a bonus.

Sure this only works if I'm braking towards or accelerating away but if's I have time to manouver then it creates options. Having the LAC's go out and lay a field would probably not be such a good use because of their limited magazine space and having "escorts" run strange courses to create the right balistics would give the game away (Or let me create a bluff?)

.

For most long range missiles I suspect the CM activation could be left to be inside the MDM/ship control loop resulting in a very high intercept rate for the first few uses - and if that guts the pod alpha strike then the tube launched follow up's will be much easier to deal with.