Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

penny wrote: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 in a flock of geese.

1) Based on the description I don't think g-torps or graserheads fire the same way. Their graser isn't bomb pumped; there's no nuke on those missiles, so you wouldn't be putting rods out in front of the (non-existent) nuke.

2) I'm certain that laserheads can't fire with their wedge up; they need it down to eject and position their rods.

A contact nuke in sidewall penetrator mode needs the wedge up as it attempts to penetrant the sidewall (the wedge forms part of the penetration mechanism) though it sounds like the wedge fails as the ejected warhead travels though (or fails to travel through) the sidewall.

(And of course g-torps don't have a wedge in the first place; so they definitely don't fire with a wedge up )

But graserhead missile -- there I'm not sure (and I believe said as much in an earlier post). Because it has no rods, no nuke, and no need to eject anything, I don't know if there's a reason it would have to drop its wedge before firing.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Or, just like tightly packed GA launches, MAN launches could be packed tightly together and detonate at all possible and optimum angles. And if detonating for 3-seconds and GA launches fly by at 1.6 nanosecond, then it'd be like dragging a light saber through GA launches! Strafing! Somewhere there is an application lurking and Alphas will find it.

FYI you caught my post before I corrected and expanded it.

(Hate how I often manage not to notice an error until after I hit submit)


Of course the other difference from Barricade (not that barricade made physical sense either) is the Barricade missiles could continue on to attack their original targets after running over the ballistic Cataphracts; whereas blowing up ?thousands? of graserheads to erode a Mk23 salvo means those Cataphracts are gone and can't go on to attack the RMN fleet.
Not the worst problem in the world, but it doesn't give the full benefit of Barricade

Although, if the tactic is as effective as I think it would be, and if 3-second firing grasers can be fired for a second (or so) while saving the remaining two seconds (or so) then they can. They can simply swat a few on the way.

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

Still overkill because the missiles will only be in range for less than a second, frequently way less than that.

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

Very ineffectively. If the LD is lucky, it'll take out the first and second salvos. But not the next 10 or 20. If the spider ship had to resort to this type of action, it's already been detected by the GA ships and locked on. Its only chance is to escape into hyper and an LD is going to need several minutes to go from ready hypergenerators to translating (we know it's 3 to 4 minutes for SDs). GA missile salvoes are going to be 20 to 30 seconds apart at the worst case.

And an act of desperation wouldn't allow firing graser torpedoes to execute this tactic. This would require having fired them an hour earlier, before the situation became this critical, or deployed pods of Cataphract or Ninurta missiles that long ago too. The chance that you happen to have positioned the pods or torpedoes on the exact flight path of the missiles now coming to you is nil.

penny wrote:Although, if the tactic is as effective as I think it would be, and if 3-second firing grasers can be fired for a second (or so) while saving the remaining two seconds (or so) then they can. They can simply swat a few on the way.

There's no indication that they can fire more than once. It might be like lighting a match more than once: it does last several seconds once you light it up, but it's not a cigarette lighter.

Even if you could, it's pointless: the moment that the warhead is localised there, the remaining salvoes will just detour from it. The Apollo swarms are communicating with their motherships via FTL, so they're at most ~10 seconds away round-trip. That's less than the interval between salvoes.

They could be further out in system-defence mode. During the Battle of Beowulf, they were something like 10 light-minutes away, so ~10 seconds each way or 20-21 seconds round-trip. But in system defence mode, you've got other problems: a) the salvoes can be arbitrarily big, much more so than the preplaced warheads could hit; b) subsequent salvos can be also arbitrarily big, so blunting the first doesn't increase survival chances by much; c) they can come from multiple sources in the system, negating the ability to preplace warheads; and d) intervals between salvos can be arbitrary, but a smart controller would send them at bigger than the control loop so they have time to send some updates between salvos.

penny wrote:Although, if the tactic is as effective as I think it would be, and if 3-second firing grasers can be fired for a second (or so) while saving the remaining two seconds (or so) then they can. They can simply swat a few on the way.

If you want that; put a regular graser on the missile, instead of the one shot variety.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Although, if the tactic is as effective as I think it would be, and if 3-second firing grasers can be fired for a second (or so) while saving the remaining two seconds (or so) then they can. They can simply swat a few on the way.

If you want that; put a regular graser on the missile, instead of the one shot variety.

[RANT]
And I'm going to return with why none of this makes sense - a ship borne missile is usually 70-150 tons - capacitor MDMs might get up to 300 or so.

But their warheads are only 30% the mass of a standard Missile, and 10% or so of a capacitor MDM, the rest is drive, and power systems.

A shipborn laser STARTS at a couple hundred tons for a small DD model, Grasers - high 100s/low 1000s. Even stripped of safety hardware, how can a Laser/Graser mount fit in a missile? Even the shipborne version only has enough on-mount power for 3-4 shots of several milliseconds. How can you miniaturize them to get sufficient power to damage an SD and fit in a 30Ton bundle able to be mounted on top of a missile?

A graser Torp which fires for 3 seconds requires ~100x the power of a shipborne mount of the same size.

It just doesn't make sense.
[/RANT]

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.

Three pieces here.

A graser can fire from a body with a wedge- that what happens with Shrike LACs or the grazer broad side of an SD...you point the LAC or at least orient the opening of the wedge in the direction of target and continue to head in the original direction. At worst you could flicker off or open a "gunport" the wedge when you fire then bring it right back up.

Remember that at this point- using Barricade -- both sides now have at least DDMs if not the RMN MDMs but nobody on the SLN side thought about using the 2nd drive of a MDM to destroy their DDM in the ballistic phase.

The standard ship mounted grazer is powered from the warships's systems but we have seen them using capacitors to allow multiple shots if they lose ship power to the individual grazers in their mounts. We have also been told that as a result of the investigations on Filler's SD, RMC was looking to pull the SLN SD grazers and most them in pods for wormhole defense - which I believe also using capacitors along with reactors to provide the ability to be more than one-shot weapons in the defensive role.

The G-Torp was described in Oyster bay as bing oscillated (sort of waived around) and being used like a light-saber to cut though (like said light-saber) targets at dam near zero range. They were chopping up 100+km orbital stations with massive industrial frabication facilities and yards like gigantic salamis. This was not thrusting a sword right though and making a hole one part of a SD, this was chopping all the way though a body multiple times and turning it into several pieces.

It was initially suggested to use a G-torp for this---so that is a spider drive weapon and they don't have a wedge to deal with.....stealth but none of the protection a wedge can provide.
But you put a capital ship grazer with capacitor (as well as being hooked up with a missile's reactor) on a DDM or MDM and you might not have the slicing ability of the G-torp but you end up a grazer that can be used for a number of shots and you are talking about being able to hit a target at the range of the grazer and not just the much more limited range of washing a wedge against your target.

Either way you are going to lose the grazer and the missile. If it does get all the way though your opponent's volleys at your ships, you can still have it fire one last time at the attacking ships and be one more target they have to honor with CM and PD light speed weapons which means they are not shooting at something with a laser head on it. You just don't hot-wire it to a discharge that is going to burn out everything in 3 seconds.

Brigade XO wrote:Three pieces here.

A graser can fire from a body with a wedge- that what happens with Shrike LACs or the grazer broad side of an SD...you point the LAC or at least orient the opening of the wedge in the direction of target and continue to head in the original direction. At worst you could flicker off or open a "gunport" the wedge when you fire then bring it right back up.

I don't think anybody have forgotten that a (ship mounted) graser can fire from within a wedge.

But can a graserhead do the same? Likely it can, but I can think of at least two plausible reasons it might not be able to.
* The less likely possibility is that a graser requires some support equipment to prevent it's grav lens from interacting with a wedge -- and if so that support equipment might have been among what was jettisoned when they stripped down a CL-weight graser enough to squeeze it into the gtorp (or the even less powerful graser into the graserhead missile).
* The seemingly more likely possibility is power supply. The missile simply may not be able to power both the wedge and the (presumably) energy hungry graser simultaneously. It's going to have far less robust power supply than even a LAC.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Three pieces here.

A graser can fire from a body with a wedge- that what happens with Shrike LACs or the grazer broad side of an SD...you point the LAC or at least orient the opening of the wedge in the direction of target and continue to head in the original direction. At worst you could flicker off or open a "gunport" the wedge when you fire then bring it right back up.

I don't think anybody have forgotten that a (ship mounted) graser can fire from within a wedge.

But can a graserhead do the same? Likely it can, but I can think of at least two plausible reasons it might not be able to.
* The less likely possibility is that a graser requires some support equipment to prevent it's grav lens from interacting with a wedge -- and if so that support equipment might have been among what was jettisoned when they stripped down a CL-weight graser enough to squeeze it into the gtorp (or the even less powerful graser into the graserhead missile).
* The seemingly more likely possibility is power supply. The missile simply may not be able to power both the wedge and the (presumably) energy hungry graser simultaneously. It's going to have far less robust power supply than even a LAC.

I can't remember which Detweiler (if you've seen one you've seen them all) who stated their drive to break the secret of the GA's mini power plant. He stated that in the context of increased missile capabilities IINM.

penny wrote:I can't remember which Detweiler (if you've seen one you've seen them all) who stated their drive to break the secret of the GA's mini power plant. He stated that in the context of increased missile capabilities IINM.

No, it was in the context of the Silver Bullet, which is twice the size of a Ghost Rider.

A Silver Bullet might be able to fire more than once, indeed. But it's going to be as big as a GR, so you're not going to be able to fire thousands of them like people file missiles. Or, for that matter, the hundreds of torpedoes.

The Hasta is indeed a missile bolted on an RD so that the RD stealth drive can bring the missile closer. But with a year of lead time, Galton managed to produce a limited amount of them and that destroyed 3 capital ships.

Both the Mistletoe and Silver Bullet can probably fire more than once. For the purposes that they were used, this wasn't useful: they to get close to something to destroy it, so there wasn't a point in a second shot. Moreover and more to the point, once anything fires, it's visible and can be tracked. So the other side can just send a missile that way or shoot from something else.

I don't see the point of having multiple-firing missiles. They'd make more sense for a CM, because one CM could intercept multiple missile salvos and it's not trying to be stealthy in the first place. But CMs don't fire on other missiles, they ram them with their wedges; adding a warhead to a CM would make it far more expensive, much less a multiple-firing graser.