Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Jonathan_S wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Hhese are spider drive weapons so they don't have any wedge protection at all and unlike Barricade or even counter missiles, they would be destroyed by the wedge of a shipkiller they got too close to- not mutual destruction as in a counter missile. Barricade had the advantage of RMN multi-drive missiles so they were interpenetrating the incoming SLN missile volleys when the SLN missiles were in ballistic mode - so no mutual destruction.

I thought he was suggesting this for the graserhead cataphracts that Galton had -- weaker than the grasers on the spider torp; but much higher acceleration. OTOH I don't know whether or not you can fire their graser with their wedge up.

And Barricade benefitted too much from the power of the plot.

Yes, it says the Mk23 wedge is bigger than a standard missiles but smaller than a CM's -- but Catapracts use a CM wedge for their second stage so they should be staying far enough apart that there's no wedge fratricide when those bigger CM wedges come up. Meaning that they should have been offset from each other by more than the width of even a Mk23's wedge.

Yet it claims that 72 missiles on high-high power settings ran their wedges through the first 500 missile salvo; and took out 409 of them. Okay, even inside that one salvo some might have been flying 'in train' 2 or 3 deep (which the book mentions as a tactic against heavy CM fire) -- but each Mk23 had to average a wedge impact on 5.68 Cataphracts!
Even if they were piled up 3 deep how do you hit twice that many when they should be too far apart for your wedge to hit two columns?

(And even if you want to hit the defense with 3 missile 'in train' it'd be stupid to position them like that during the ballistic segment. If your wedge activation timing is off by even fractions of a second the rearmost missile could run over the two leading ones. It'd make far more sense to remain abreast and only tuck into train after the 2nd stage wedges have all come up)

So it seems to require significant and pointless stupidity on the SLN part to artificially bunch them so close they'd be within mutual wedge fratricide range during the ballistic segment (say by using RCS thrusters. But what's the point when you'd have to spread them again before the second stage could light-off?) so that the RMN trick can be maximally effective.

Yes, I was suggesting the graserhead Cataphracts. I don't think the tactic would be possible with ordinary g-torps. And it'd be very expensive.

And Jonathan, even if the tactic only worked once, that would be one battle or series of battles. Which would be fine. The MAN needs a short victorious war. Are you suggesting that Apollo can adjust on the fly? The RMN couldn't adjust on the fly against the Triple Ripple. Sonja had to work out the solution once the after action report came in. IOW, at a later date.

It might not be as easy to adjust as you think. At range, the GA's warships would not know when the Cataphracts are ready to fire. Unlike when missiles are attacking ships. Plus, I didn't think missiles could withstand 3-second firing grasers.

About the SL launches. I was under the impression that their missile launches were like their formation as far as separation. The GA would not accept their huge separation between warships; and Apollo launches are packed tightly together. So, Barricade? I dunno.

Jonathan_S wrote:A follow up on the death blossom idea; I so focused on whether it could even work (and I still don’t really think it can work well) that I hadn’t gone ahead and thought out what the likely response to it would be.

I think even if this works it’s pretty much a “works once” technique — like using the triple ripple for missile defense was.

That’s because I realized there’s an easy change to missile programming that renders the death blossom nearly ineffective. All you’d have to do is have the few missiles closest to the graser head, on each sides, sacrifice themselves from the salvo by bringing up their wedge, on the lowest acceleration setting they can, as the salvo is about to pass the graser head.
Even missile wedges are completely invulnerable against energy weapon fire, so each missile that interposes an active wedge creates a broad area beyond its that’s shaded from the graser fire. So even if the graser could, someone, project a vast solid disc of death, the rest of the salvo can still safely pass through it in the shadow of the few missiles the interpose a wedge.

Now that I think about it, I don't think that would work. If the standoff range is 50,000 km, and the missiles lead with their open throats, then they are going to get force-fed graserheads right down the gullet. Like humpback whales swimming with their mouths open swallowing krill.

penny wrote:And Jonathan, even if the tactic only worked once, that would be one battle or series of battles. Which would be fine. The MAN needs a short victorious war. Are you suggesting that Apollo can adjust on the fly? The RMN couldn't adjust on the fly against the Triple Ripple. Sonja had to work out the solution once the after action report came in. IOW, at a later date.

It might not be as easy to adjust as you think. At range, the GA's warships would not know when the Cataphracts are ready to fire. Unlike when missiles are attacking ships. Plus, I didn't think missiles could withstand 3-second firing grasers.

About the SL launches. I was under the impression that their missile launches were like their formation as far as separation. The GA would not accept their huge separation between warships; and Apollo launches are packed tightly together. So, Barricade? I dunno.

Well Zizka, the anti-missile variant of the Triple-Ripple failed even the first time it was used.

At All Costs wrote:Two hundred Cimeterre-class LACs launched their full missile loads. Six thousand far-shorter ranged missiles, launched in three slightly staggered waves, went streaking to meet the incoming Manticoran MDMs, and Broughton watched his display narrowly as they spread apart, each bird positioning itself precisely to play its part in the "Triple Ripple." Designed to knock back the sensors and EW of Manty LACs, it ought to do a real number on missile sensors which had to be pointed directly towards their target at this point.
The lead wave of his missiles was almost into position when the MDMs abruptly changed heading. Schneider's jaw muscles clenched painfully as the attack missiles' vectors changed. Half of them were "climbing" sharply, while the other half "dove" equally sharply, and he swallowed a venomous oath as he realized what they were doing.
So one of their pickets who saw the Ripple did get home, he thought. And the bastards decided to do something about it. Worse, they figured out the possibilities for missile defense and did something about them, too..
The maneuver had to be the result of a preprogrammed attack profile. There was far too little time for whoever had fired them to change profiles that quickly on the fly. But whoever had done the preprogramming had timed it well. The change in attitude interposed the floors and roofs of the MDMs' impeller wedges between them and the Cimeterres' missiles just as the powerful, dirty warheads of the Republican missiles began to detonate. The solid wall of blast fronts and EMP which was supposed to blind and burn out the Manticoran missiles' seekers wasted itself against sensors which couldn't even see it.
All three Zizka waves detonated, and the flood of attack missiles which had parted around the Triple Ripple's roadblock, altered heading once more. Their noses swung back towards their targets

So we don't know how quickly a counter to it could be worked out. It was effective against unsuspecting LACs. But unlike with missiles you've no follow-up salvos of LACs to throw, so we couldn't see whether a couple of minutes would be enough time to realize and implement the obvious counter (the pop-up maneuver that interposed the wedge)

However, if it had been used against Apollo first I think the counter could have been worked out during the battle. It might take a couple of salvos, but it is pretty obvious. However since Zizka or the Triple-Ripple required the full missiles loads of the defensive LACs it wouldn't actually matter whether it could we worked out because, in the event, the Peeps would've shot their bolt and wouldn't have the missiles to repeat the attempt against any subsequent salvos.

So we don't have a baseline for how long it'd take to figure out a counter to a graser death blossom. Again I tend to think it wouldn't be long. Wedges are impenetrable - 100% completely immune to weapons fire; so protecting missiles by using a few wedges to block the energy weapons fire should be an obvious counter to a trained tac officer. Sure the missile body, if hit by the graser isn't going to survive -- but if its wedge is interposed it'll utterly block the graser and the missile will be just fine.

(Of course the other equally obvious counter is just to spread the missiles really wide prior to the ballistic phase -- so that any one graser can't reach more than a few of them)

As for not knowing when the Catapracts are going to fire -- that's true. But there's a pretty limited window during which the salvos are within range of each other AND the GA salvo is currently ballistic. The Cataphracts have to fire in that window or they can't hit anything. And it should be damned obvious if they start to spin up to the insane kind of rotation they'd need to get any useful coverage -- so you can tell a Cataphract that going deathblossom from one that's still heading to attack you.
However, yes, with a sufficiently long ranged shot your salvo's ballistic segment might take it past several Cataphract salvos going the other way -- or even a stream of them. That might force you to sacrifice a few missiles as blockers each time you pass Cataphracts going the other way.

As for the SL salvos that Barricade ate -- yes they were tightly packed together. But just like a ship formation, they shouldn't be so tightly packed that they risk wedge fratricide. The ships or missiles need to remain somewhat over one wedge width apart lest they get too close and the wedge interaction mutually destroy both ships or both missiles (assuming roughly similar power wedges).

While the missiles are ballistic, with wedges down, you could use RCS to push them closer -- but there's no advantage to doing so and you'd just have to spread them out again before you could bring up their wedge (otherwise you don't need Barricade as the Cataphracts would have blown each other up when their CM drives activated). So I can't see it being standard procedure, and the SL folks were aghast that Barricade
had turned following their standard missile flight/spacing procedure against them.

penny wrote:Now that I think about it, I don't think that would work. If the standoff range is 50,000 km, and the missiles lead with their open throats, then they are going to get force-fed graserheads right down the gullet. Like humpback whales swimming with their mouths open swallowing krill.

You'd never try to shoot at the missiles down their throats. Better to just soot them on their sides, because you see longer of them, and missiles have no sidewalls.

Either way, we have a problem of timing and of missile flying completely predictable and parallel flight tracks. They're not going to do that if their wedges are active. Before, when we discussed shooting at them with grasers, it was at a point when they were flying ballistically between the second and third stages of the MDM, so they'd be flying at 0.54c, so they'd cross the 50,000 km stand-off range in a mere third of a second. There's no need for a 3-second graser for this because it's 10x longer than necessary.

Now talking about shooting down the throat, we can't pinpoint at what stage of the flight it would be. It could be anywhere from 2 to 9 minutes into the flight, so 0.18c to 0.81c. Most likely it's closer to the higher ends, as 2 minutes into the flight only means 3.2 million km from the launching ships and only 2 minutes since launching, so they could easily reprogram later launches. So most likely they'd be at 0.4c or more, which means crossing the stand-off range in 450 ms or less.

Then there's the fact that missiles won't cooperate and fly in parallel lines. We don't have the measurements of a missile's wedge. If I simply assume 1/100th the wedge of an SD, the wedge would be 3 km long and wide, with a throat opening of 1.9 km, for the same 65° aperture from the missile's nose. If the graser warhead stood in front of them and fired from the 50,000 km mark, it would ned to be within 63000 km vertically from every missile it's shooting at in order to hit them.

And besides, how the hell are those warheads going to arrive at this position? It's not going to be using wedges, because that would be visible from across the system. They could be a modification of Hastas, but given the experience that the GF had at Galton, they're going send drones ahead to spot the Hasta-like stealth devices. That leaves spider drives, which means torpedoes.

And all for what? If we're talking about any meaningful GA formation, it will simply reprogram the later salvos that are already in flight via the Mk23E control missile to go up and down in a see-saw motion so the wedges don't face long the straight ahead, and take sideways detours so they aren't in the straight path. This may blunt an Alpha launch, but not salvoes 2 through 18.

Again, the MAN is going to eat Manty LACs for lunch. On second thought, make that LACs for snacks. The GA (the RMN anyway) has never met a foe with a salvo density equal to their own. And the RMN has never met a foe with a CM defense as effective as their own. I think Galton showed us a glimpse into the future. Also, didn't text state that the C-phract CMs didn't have as much utility as they could have due to the limited FTL? Implying the CMs have even more range. IINM.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Then there's the fact that missiles won't cooperate and fly in parallel lines. We don't have the measurements of a missile's wedge. If I simply assume 1/100th the wedge of an SD, the wedge would be 3 km long and wide, with a throat opening of 1.9 km, for the same 65° aperture from the missile's nose. If the graser warhead stood in front of them and fired from the 50,000 km mark, it would ned to be within 63000 km vertically from every missile it's shooting at in order to hit them.

Somewhere it's mentioned that as acceleration increases the wedge angles tend to flatten a bit. At over a hundred times the acceleration of the old-style SD we got the wedge geometry numbers of, a missiles wedge might be expected to be significantly flatter. Maybe only 32° or even only 20° -- but if it's flatter that'd dramatically reduce the offset from vertical that could hit a missile.

Jonathan_S wrote:As for not knowing when the Catapracts are going to fire -- that's true. But there's a pretty limited window during which the salvos are within range of each other AND the GA salvo is currently ballistic. The Cataphracts have to fire in that window or they can't hit anything. And it should be damned obvious if they start to spin up to the insane kind of rotation they'd need to get any useful coverage -- so you can tell a Cataphract that going deathblossom from one that's still heading to attack you.
However, yes, with a sufficiently long ranged shot your salvo's ballistic segment might take it past several Cataphract salvos going the other way -- or even a stream of them. That might force you to sacrifice a few missiles as blockers each time you pass Cataphracts going the other way.

Of course they know exactly when the Cataphracts are going to fire, because they know exactly where the Cataphracts are in their flight. Either they have their wedges still up or they are ballistic. In the first case, they are visible gravitically and in the second, they were visible gravitically when the wedges powered down so their last position and current velocity are known. If you know or suspect something could happen when two salvoes interpenetrate, just don't let them.

The only way not to know when this technique would occur would be to not know the position of the warheads, which implies not knowing they were there in the first place. The GA fleet can't have seen a launch using wedges, so they'd have to be low-powered RD wedges (a Hasta) or spider drive. See my reply above.

And I'm also going to call BS on the spinning effect too. You calculated earlier the maximum spin rate before the tip of the missile goes superluminal. I think that's way higher than is possible. Instead, I'm going to place the limit at a spin rate such that the centrifugal acceleration matches that of the wedge itself. For a CM, that would be 130,000 gravities, which puts the spin rate at just over 20 Hz. After this, re-add your calculation about the probability that the beam intersect any missile that is flying past, perpendicularly, at 0.54c.

I'd frankly be astonished if this technique resulted in one missile kill per graser. The other 10,995 missiles would continue onwards.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Now that I think about it, I don't think that would work. If the standoff range is 50,000 km, and the missiles lead with their open throats, then they are going to get force-fed graserheads right down the gullet. Like humpback whales swimming with their mouths open swallowing krill.

You'd never try to shoot at the missiles down their throats. Better to just soot them on their sides, because you see longer of them, and missiles have no sidewalls.

Either way, we have a problem of timing and of missile flying completely predictable and parallel flight tracks. They're not going to do that if their wedges are active. Before, when we discussed shooting at them with grasers, it was at a point when they were flying ballistically between the second and third stages of the MDM, so they'd be flying at 0.54c, so they'd cross the 50,000 km stand-off range in a mere third of a second. There's no need for a 3-second graser for this because it's 10x longer than necessary.

Now talking about shooting down the throat, we can't pinpoint at what stage of the flight it would be. It could be anywhere from 2 to 9 minutes into the flight, so 0.18c to 0.81c. Most likely it's closer to the higher ends, as 2 minutes into the flight only means 3.2 million km from the launching ships and only 2 minutes since launching, so they could easily reprogram later launches. So most likely they'd be at 0.4c or more, which means crossing the stand-off range in 450 ms or less.

Then there's the fact that missiles won't cooperate and fly in parallel lines. We don't have the measurements of a missile's wedge. If I simply assume 1/100th the wedge of an SD, the wedge would be 3 km long and wide, with a throat opening of 1.9 km, for the same 65° aperture from the missile's nose. If the graser warhead stood in front of them and fired from the 50,000 km mark, it would ned to be within 63000 km vertically from every missile it's shooting at in order to hit them.

And besides, how the hell are those warheads going to arrive at this position? It's not going to be using wedges, because that would be visible from across the system. They could be a modification of Hastas, but given the experience that the GF had at Galton, they're going send drones ahead to spot the Hasta-like stealth devices. That leaves spider drives, which means torpedoes.

And all for what? If we're talking about any meaningful GA formation, it will simply reprogram the later salvos that are already in flight via the Mk23E control missile to go up and down in a see-saw motion so the wedges don't face long the straight ahead, and take sideways detours so they aren't in the straight path. This may blunt an Alpha launch, but not salvoes 2 through 18.

But if the missiles are firing for three seconds there's the best of both worlds.

I forgot to mention. Even if it works only a handful of times, it could be an emergency option for an LD.

penny wrote:Again, the MAN is going to eat Manty LACs for lunch. On second thought, make that LACs for snacks. The GA (the RMN anyway) has never met a foe with a salvo density equal to their own. And the RMN has never met a foe with a CM defense as effective as their own. I think Galton showed us a glimpse into the future. Also, didn't text state that the C-phract CMs didn't have as much utility as they could have due to the limited FTL? Implying the CMs have even more range. IINM.

Well, as the GA they haven't. Well, Fileretta blindfire pod launch of Cataphracts actually was -- but it was so undirected that it hardly mattered.

However the RMN and PSN have absolutely faced opponents (each other) who could throw salvo densities of MDMs equal to their own. That's why they have some very hard learned lessons on what is needed to survive that kind of salvo density. (And now they're teaming up to merge the best of each of their ideas and tech to make their missile defense even better)

1) Do we know that g-torps detonate the exact same way as GA missiles; by ejecting laser rods?

2) Are we absolutely certain that missiles cannot fire with their wedge up? Is dropping the wedge simply a requirement when painstakingly targeting an object like a warship? This tactic is like shooting a scatter gun into a flock of geese.