Thanks for your input Relax! Your posts are appreciated and respected.
Relax wrote:So, you want to make a Viper CM Mk2 Dual head version, where its single laser rod takes out clumped missiles. Tonnage ~ 20-->30t for the missile. You can fire 2-->3 normal CM's for identical tonnage.
Percentage of interception @range * number of possible shots.
Well the death blossom idea was conceived to take out at least dozens of CMs with a single CM. If the tactic is not going to threaten that kind of efficacy then what's the point. The notion is, or was, originally suited for a missile technology featuring several seconds of fire. So, an iteration of their technology that I think the MAN might throw at the GA’s horrendously huge salvos. I'm also suggesting that the MAN may have already developed a g-head that fires for only a second or so, in a much smaller missile, with lower output that would be suited for this application.
Relax wrote:So, obvious math shows this will NEVER work at long range as percentage at long range stinks. So, this Viper CM Mk2 dual mode has to potentially take out 2 per shot to equal normal CM's at close in range.
See above. I think the MAN is going to develop a wholly new tactic to deal with the huge GA salvos. I learned from the series that a lot of solutions are born out of future iterations of existing technologies. Havenite navies chastised themselves for not seeing certain iterations coming. Paraphrasing… “We should have known they'd get around to including a laserhead on their stealthy probes,” as one example. A 3-second firing missile technology must have a lot of different applications available to it. I seem to think this might be one of those applications, but then, you know how arrogant I can be. I'm an Alpha too!
I dunno how or what form it would eventually have to take on to be feasible. Those are the kinds of things partly worked out in the field.
Relax wrote:Apollo is 9 supposedly "clumped" missiles. Uh, not exactly, they will still be in a ~50km x 50km square or thereabouts.
Viper current missile we do not know what range they can attack from and actually HIT anything. 1000km? 10,000km used to be "long range" and this is a single DD class laser rod after all. It hit with what diameter from said distance? No one knows, nor will anyone.
Of course in opposition:
This is a DD Grade single shot Viper CMSo, you want to put a PDLC on a missile(effectively), but if this is possible, who in their right mind would not do this from a ship with VASTLY more POWER????? Buehler....? Buehler...? After all the missiles are FAR more clumped up while attacking than while maneuvering in space. Are you telling me Engineers/designers in HV are so DUMB, they cannot do this on a ship, with VASTLY more available tonnage and power and vastly superior sensors??? Really?
No, I'm not saying HV engineers are dumb. More like suffering from “made in the GA” mentality? SLN-like indoctrination? White Haven-itis? Necessity is the mother of invention? Besides, the GA is not a conglomerate made up of Alphas. And Alphas will turn a problem on its head.
Reminds me of the US continuing to rely on aircraft carriers and China and Russia threatening area denial to aircraft carriers with the rail gun. And the tactic of making the US shoot down $2,000 drones with $2M missiles.
Not to mention the relatively cheap $100M Swedish sub that sunk the 6.2B
Ronald Reagan in a wargame.
In a word, complacency.
Anyway, why didn't the GA think of spider-drive ships? Grasers that fire for seconds instead of 5000 microseconds? Mating a CM to a missile? Etc. Are they dumb? No. Just coming from a different mindset.
But I'd like to hover over this thought for a second…
Relax wrote:After all, the missiles are FAR more clumped up while attacking than while maneuvering in space.
Believe it or not, my original death blossom idea was initially meant for missiles that are attacking. Or whatever range is optimal for the application. As you say, that's when they are clumped up. But everybody ran with what they thought I was trying to say in the post that I just went with it. It was interesting and it still applies. I didn't consider those angles.
Anyway, the MAN needs a very efficient CM tactic to counteract the huge GA launches. I still think that if they can develop a CM hat has a firing time measured in seconds, even one second, detonating in the midst of a huge flock of birds can potentially take out many birds with one shot.
I'd like to pause at this point to field another notion. First, I’d like to thank everyone again who posted their idea of a “Wall of Battle.” I'm not the type to shy away from asking these type of questions in class out of embarrassment. I found out long ago that there are other people in class with the same question who are afraid to ask. And in that case it turned out that everyone had a different view of what a Wall of Battle actually looked like.
Having said that, textev has thrown at us a “wall of missiles.” I may be seeing that wall of missiles differently than all of you. I don't see those missiles spread out in a single line like a wall of missiles would normally infer. I simply cannot believe that salvos sporting thousands of missiles will have a chance of attacking a ship if they are all spread out in a line. The line would be so long that the missiles on the ends or so of the line would be out of position to actually attack the ship. For example, let's consider the defensive line on the football field. The defensive end is so spread out that he rarely gets in on the tackle unless the play comes his way. Attacking warships at a warship’s acceleration with a line of missiles spread out horizontally just won't allow all of the missiles to get a shot at the ship. It'll be like being in the wrong lane on the Interstate and missing your exit. It's too late to maneuver for a shot at that exit.
Having said all of that, I envision a wall of missiles having lots of missiles behind it as well. In that configuration a death blossom mode should be able to shoot down the throat of a missile and many of the other missiles trailing it.
Relax wrote:Of course a Katana has 3 ?14 element 200,000km range PDLC which is ~equivalent tonnage as BC Grade Graser. So roughly ?4000t for 3 PDLC, SD grade = 1300t each + power supply required obtains single shot per missiles, at 200,000 range. You don't suppose HV Engineers would have thought about a wider beam dual mode PDLC for close in work eh? I mean common!
There is no way a PDLC actually predicts a missiles path, aims, fires a NARROW beam creating contact. There is a guarantee that PDLC's are already a WIDE dispersal beam. ALREADY doing it.
The notion of the death blossom precludes having to aim. One does not generally do too much aiming when firing a scatter gun into a flock of birds. I'm thinking that control links shouldn't matter much either.
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The artist formerly known as cthia.
Now I can talk in the third person.
