Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Anyway, the death blossom notion was an attempt for the MAN to step up CM warfare. Presently, CM warfare is a one-to-one exchange. But to get that exchange, more CMs than missiles have to be launched. I do not know what the exchange rate is of CMs launched to missile density, but that can't continue.

Barricade was an attempt to milk more efficiency out of CM warfare. Same as this failed death blossom idea.

At any rate, as far as using LACs for screens to thin out huge salvos, the GA better be working on something better. LACs won't be able to thin ham to serve to wicked mother-in-laws if they are turned into debris.

Upstream someone disagreed when I said the RMN has not faced a navy whose launches were as dense as their own. The PRN's hat was thrown into the ring. And I agree. Their launches were huge as well. But I didn't think they were quite as large as the RMN's. Except perhaps when the size of the OOB was woefully lopsided?

The idea of CM warships is an attempt to greatly increase the effectiveness of CM warfare as well. Such a dedicated ship can also release platforms that supply control links for CMs. If enough control links can be supplied for CMs, would that increase the effectiveness of CMs and decrease the number of CMs launched? It certainly appears so for the MAN if we factor in the acceleration of their CMs! Plus the fact that the MAN has developed FTL. Limited as it is, it would suffice just fine for CM warfare.

P.S. Thanks to everyone for helping with the viability of death blossom.

penny wrote:At any rate, as far as using LACs for screens to thin out huge salvos, the GA better be working on something better. LACs won't be able to thin ham to serve to wicked mother-in-laws if they are turned into debris.

That assumes something shooting at them. That implies either getting something very stealthy close enough to them to shoot but not be seen, while something else (a missile salvo) is coming to attack the big ships. Otherwise, you're wasting ammunition on the least important ships in the enemy formation while they're attacking your most important ones. There's a reason the missiles are never targeted on the escorts first.

The MAN has impressive stealth, but considering the LACs can pull 700 gravities to the SB's paltry commercial freighter-range acceleration, it would be difficult to keep up with the LACs in the first place, if they are doing random-walk and basic evasion in a threatening scenario. And a missile salvo coming in 3 minutes is a "red alert" scenario.

Maybe they use conventional (wedge) drones for this, but here the advantage is on the GA side: they will have a shell of drones outside of the LACs and their wedge-detection sensors are probably better than the MAN's, And again those LACs are either doing active evasion or have bowwall and buckler up, making them very tough customers for single-shot weapons.

So, no, I don't doubt that the MAN could kill the LACs. I doubt that they would try to expend resources on this instead of attacking the far more threatening ships the LACs are protecting.

Upstream someone disagreed when I said the RMN has not faced a navy whose launches were as dense as their own. The PRN's hat was thrown into the ring. And I agree. Their launches were huge as well. But I didn't think they were quite as large as the RMN's. Except perhaps when the size of the OOB was woefully lopsided?

Indeed the Alliance routinely fought and won against larger RHN formations, but that's because the RHN had to replace quality with quantity. And more importantly: the ratio was not an order of magnitude. There's no way that Eighth Fleet could have survived against a 50,000-missile salvo. You saw what happened to Home Fleet when they went out to meet Tourville's 250 SD(P)s>

In any case, it shouldn't matter, because the one thing we know about the LD class ships is that they're big, therefore they have a lot of volume in which to store missiles, and area to mount launchers from or stick pods to. Missile quantity isn't going to be an issue for the MAN, if they want to use this tactic.

The idea of CM warships is an attempt to greatly increase the effectiveness of CM warfare as well. Such a dedicated ship can also release platforms that supply control links for CMs. If enough control links can be supplied for CMs, would that increase the effectiveness of CMs and decrease the number of CMs launched? It certainly appears so for the MAN if we factor in the acceleration of their CMs! Plus the fact that the MAN has developed FTL. Limited as it is, it would suffice just fine for CM warfare.

I still think a CM warship is a bad idea. Take all your other ideas and simply distribute the CMs to the other ships; that would make far more sense to me. Again, volume is not an issue for the MAN spider ships.

Then again, in a fleet-on-fleet action, every ship below the wall is a "CM warship."

Do remember: Missile interception rates from the books of even RMN CM's with an FTL component(everyone elses will be worse)

Outer: 2+Mkm roughly ~15%
Middle: 1-->2Mkm roughly ~35%
Inner: >1Mkm = ~70%

Outer requires: 7 CM's to kill 1. So against a missile like MK16, this is roughly 1:1 tonnage ratio. Against full up MDM capital missiles this is positive.

*** If 10 CM salvos launched, & HV = CONSTANT acceleration
Outer = ~2 launches
Middle = ~3 launches
Inner = ~5 launches

So, crudely speaking the problem is NOT a CM tonnage problem, the problem is an interception percentage problem. Offensive missiles can dodge in ever increasing maneuvers the further they are away from their final destination.

This should indicate one should prioritize inner missile defense by figureing out how to launch more even quicker AKA--> CM missile pods + extra tonnage for control links.

Remember: Defenders are throwing away ~70tons of CM to kill a MDM at 2+Mkm. Extra control links are not that heavy. Wasting some tonnage in a pod so one can launch 2X as many CM's is not that heavy.

Remember: FTL RD's with vastly superior sensors can see the spoofs from the real, whereas the CM's can't(or less likely to do so). The problem is getting that info to the CM's. At range this is ~impossible. Close in, this is possible with HIGH accuracy & alacrity of said data.

2 Stage CM's are NOT a solution. That makes your tonnage ratio suck even worse. FOrward deployed LAC's are NOT a solution. Further out they go the worse their interception will be as MDM can just go around them ever more easily.

Now if you could use your already existing wedges be they ship or Keyhole or Drone in a task force formation to FUNNEL missiles into a corridor, where a SHIP BASED giant PDLC could swat multiple missiles at same time using, your already existing GRASERS and give them a dual broad beam mode in missile defense... Now we are talking. GRASERS which in a modern context are essentially dead weight.

The above paragraph seems a FAR more likely R&D solution using tactics combined with existing hardware. This would make a Task force a MUCH harder nut to crack compared to a handful of ships. = from an author perspective ways to distinguish between competent and incompetent navies etc as well as showing some ACTIVE defense situations, such as opening one side of formation while closing off another to say, protect a damaged ship, etc.

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Now maybe the solution is a Forward deployed RD with CM control nodes. At 250t+ control nodes so ~300t... this has to save over 300t of CM or 25-->30, or roughly 4 additional interceptions to equal Outter zone interception rates. If we can achieve a 40% interception rate this would be 10 CM's needing to be controlled by an RD+control node. It uses existing OLD tech. All this requires is a software handoff at distance between said RD and the mothership.

This seems VASTLY superior to a 20kton LAC who can only hold ~150CM's{20,000/150 = 133ton/CM without counting the CLAC!!!. The above scenario is ~400t/10CM's, or 40t per CM. And this RD CM controller can be used on EVERY SINGLE defensive wave of CM's launched. LAC's go bingo on CM's and can take nice video's of their CLAC blowing up. LAC's as missile defense is beyond dumb. LAC's make long range CM fire look good.

Relax wrote:Do remember: Missile interception rates from the books of even RMN CM's with an FTL component(everyone elses will be worse)

RMN CMs don't have an FTL component. The only missile with such is the Mk23E, the Apollo Control Missile. However, the Ghost Rider recon drones do and that allows the controlling ship to basically halve the reaction time to any reaction observed in the missiles. I'm not entirely sure what use this is, because the oncoming missile wave is visible gravitically in FTL anyway, so the RDs downrange won't be adding a lot of detail that the ships hadn't known.

So, crudely speaking the problem is NOT a CM tonnage problem, the problem is an interception percentage problem. Offensive missiles can dodge in ever increasing maneuvers the further they are away from their final destination.

This should indicate one should prioritize inner missile defense by figureing out how to launch more even quicker AKA--> CM missile pods + extra tonnage for control links.

Makes sense.

Remember: Defenders are throwing away ~70tons of CM to kill a MDM at 2+Mkm. Extra control links are not that heavy. Wasting some tonnage in a pod so one can launch 2X as many CM's is not that heavy.

One way of doing that is adopting the Grayson doctrine and forego shipkiller missile tubes on your capital ships. Fill it with CM tubes and PDLCs and a few grasers that can also be used defensively.

2 Stage CM's are NOT a solution. That makes your tonnage ratio suck even worse. FOrward deployed LAC's are NOT a solution. Further out they go the worse their interception will be as MDM can just go around them ever more easily.

Agreed on the 2-stage CMs but that may be happening anyway. The interception ratio may suck, but you get more time to intercept, so it's an incremental gain in defence.

On the LACs, evidence has proven otherwise. The processing power and the sensors onboard the LACs are much better than the CMs alone, so being able to provide better command and control to those CMs. That seems to help tremendously.

The above paragraph seems a FAR more likely R&D solution using tactics combined with existing hardware. This would make a Task force a MUCH harder nut to crack compared to a handful of ships. = from an author perspective ways to distinguish between competent and incompetent navies etc as well as showing some ACTIVE defense situations, such as opening one side of formation while closing off another to say, protect a damaged ship, etc.

Aren't you just describing the role of escort ships? How would this differ from the current doctrine?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:RMN CMs don't have an FTL component. The only missile with such is the Mk23E, the Apollo Control Missile. However, the Ghost Rider recon drones do and that allows the controlling ship to basically halve the reaction time to any reaction observed in the missiles. I'm not entirely sure what use this is, because the oncoming missile wave is visible gravitically in FTL anyway, so the RDs downrange won't be adding a lot of detail that the ships hadn't known.

I can think of a couple of things they could add.

It seems like (maybe due to their small size?) CMs don't have grav sensors of their own; so they seem to rely on guidance from the ship that launched them and EM active and passive sensors to lock onto and hit the incoming missiles. (Hence subject to EM jamming and spoofing; in addition the the gravametric spoofing that Dragons Teeth do to fool the grav sensors on the ships)

The recon drones could relay EM jamming and other ECM signals to the ships more quickly than the CMs could; possibly even quickly enough that the ships can update at least some CMs to help them overcome that defensive electronic warfare.

(They might even be able to tell, from the volume of jamming coming off each missile, which ones are laserheads using their more limited jamming and which are dedicated jammer missiles which therefore don't carry a warhead and should be deprioritized in the point defense threat matrix)

And against people who have Dragon's Teeth style gravametric spoofing the RD might be close enough show which ostensible wedge signatures are real and which are generated from decoys -- helping the ships focus their fire on real threats.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:On the LACs, evidence has proven otherwise. The processing power and the sensors onboard the LACs are much better than the CMs alone, so being able to provide better command and control to those CMs. That seems to help tremendously.

And while 2-stage/2-drive CMs are a lot bigger one way to increase their effectiveness and reduce the issue with LACs shooting themselves dry, it to use that greater processing power and sensors aboard the LACs to turn them into forward fire controllers for the long range CMs.


Yeah, the fleet would still have to dedicate more volume/tonnage to carry those much bigger CMs. But if they do (and from the text is does seem like Bolthole is going exploring going down that route) combining them smartly with a downrange LAC screen could cancel out issues with both longer range CM accuracy and LAC magazine endurance.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:Do remember: Missile interception rates from the books of even RMN CM's with an FTL component(everyone elses will be worse)

RMN CMs don't have an FTL component.

YES, RMN CM's do have FTL component and have had this for a decade due to FTL RD's relaying far superior positional data and better eyes on ECM. True, that is only ONE leg of the CM C&C loop, but, increased accuracy and also true not the MOST important C&C loop leg.

As for LAC's. It is just blatantly not true.
20k LAC/150cm/LAC= 133t/cm +
6Mton/100LAC or an additional [~60,000 ton per LAC]/150CM =4000t/CM

Even if you assume LAC's have 100% interception rates(they don't),
150CM @[10t-->15t/CM] =~2250t at most * 7:1 ratio of Outter missiles intercepted range = ~15000t

That Single LAC requires ~80,000t + human beings for 150CM(Katana's are more but we do not know HOW many more). Even if it is 300 CM does not change the math any... 15,000t verses 60,000t-->80,000t of warship to kill an identical number of MDM's at long range. Even assuming perfect 100% interception rate by the LAC. So in reality, it is an equivalent interception rate by tonnage stated above of MDM kill since reality has LAC's 50% lower interception rate which when comparing against Katana's(hypothesized) have ~2X as many CM's so it balances out in the wash.

PS: No competent navy would allow their MDM's to pass within PDLC range of LAC's when forward deployed. Or at minimum would bias their ENTIRE missile swarm so only a small portion of LAC's forward deployed could use their PDLC on them at best.

CM handoff to LAC's[XLAC or FLAC? ]
Assume possible(I do not see why it would NOT be possible).
What is the interception rate? INNER of ~70%? MID~40%?
Would it be 70% interception rate both sides of a LAC?

IE If XLAC @3.5Mk from ship, would there now be a zone from 2.5Mkm to 4.5Mkm obtains 70% interception instead of 15%? Could be. How many per LAC?

IF: Assume xLAC could give updated info BEHIND at same time as in FRONT of it... Would require a KATANA B mod as all their armament is forward facing I am thinking or a SHRIKE C design mod, then it could be possible we see-->

INNER: >1Mkm ~70%
MID: 1Mk-->2.5Mkm ~40%
XLAC: 2.5Mkm-->4.5Mkm ~70%
OUTMID: 4.5Mkm-->5.5Mkm ~40%
OUTTER: ~5.5Mk+ (Why bother), though if you have an hour to Forward double deploy XLAC's.

For a CM to reach 4.5Mkm it only needs drive endurance extension from 75s@130kG, to 85s@130kG, or do not bother and Anything past 3.5Mkm are CM's from the LAC's.

Of course this is only an improvement of SHIP based launched CM's of maybe 2 salvos Due to DW's constant acceleration of CM's out of the possible ~10 salvo's, or in Solon's case 11 in chase scenario. So, only viable to increase 20% of the fired CM's from 15% to ?70% or ~5X improvement. Nothing to sneer at, that is for sure.

For XLAC, deployment time is?
LAC ~800G. SD~500G Del = 300G ~25 minutes or so.

So, how many CM's can be handed off per XLAC? 10? 20?

ROLAND: Has 20CM tubes and 800CM's 40CM/tube
ROLAND CM control link surely has to be at least equivalent in redundancy as SAG-C has in offensive links right? so ~2.5X or so, ~= ~50 or thereabouts

Shrike has 4 CM tubes and ~150CM or 37:1, but shorter cycle time(why is this cycle time NOT on all ships?) though I notice it has never made a reappearance in text. So, 10 minimum CM control links
Katana has 5CM tubes and ??300?? CM or ??60:1? and 12 CM control links minimum.

Lets just pick 10 CM handed over per XLAC and those 10 CM missiles instead of having 1.5 hits now have 7. 5X. You save ~50t minimum if 10t/CM but is more likely 15t/CM at this point of the books so upwards of 75t per salvo. At long range there are ~2 such salvos per Wave of offensive missiles you can save 150t per forward deployed XLAC. Great there are multiple waves... That XLAC costs you 70,000t of mass. 70,000t/150t/salvo = 450++ waves required to break even

Oh yea! I'll let the economists crunch that juicy tidbit... Makes the cost of DDCM look cheap or MIRV DDCM + Modded FTL RD's who simply rebroadcast which incoming missiles are fakes and position data of incoming missiles through their sector who do not even have to tell CM's where to go, they just have to broadcast where the actual MDM's are. Even if this system only obtains ~40% interception rate, this requires VASTLY less tonnage than LAC's.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:The above paragraph seems a FAR more likely R&D solution using tactics combined with existing hardware. This would make a Task force a MUCH harder nut to crack compared to a handful of ships. = from an author perspective ways to distinguish between competent and incompetent navies etc as well as showing some ACTIVE defense situations, such as opening one side of formation while closing off another to say, protect a damaged ship, etc.

Aren't you just describing the role of escort ships? How would this differ from the current doctrine?

Uh, no, not as described in the books it is not. They should literally have dedicated Drone wedge formations protecting their forward/aft sections who do nothing but just SPIN in place. Literally making them immune other than tiny gaps. Or in task force parlance, literally make half their formation immune forcing ALL attacking missiles to only attack from a single quadrant. Partially shown in previous books around end of 1st Havenite war where all ships did nothing but present wedges to enemy. Uh, why can't they do this PERMANENTLY with drones? After all...

***One can communicate through single impeller generated wedges*** unlike dual band impeller warship generated wedges.

Jonathan_S wrote:It seems like (maybe due to their small size?) CMs don't have grav sensors of their own; so they seem to rely on guidance from the ship that launched them and EM active and passive sensors to lock onto and hit the incoming missiles. (Hence subject to EM jamming and spoofing; in addition the the gravametric spoofing that Dragons Teeth do to fool the grav sensors on the ships)

Ah, middle of night on Kid Flu duty. Ah fun times. Work is going to be a yawn tomorrow!

CM's: They do have Grav sensors; they are not very good. I tried to find DW's post he typed here, but could not find it.

This topic reminds me of when I was TTF(True true false) combining critical sensors for work. While at surface level it seems you just position lock up TTT = go and if it is TTF = NO GO, but in reality, each sensor type has different error bands and reliability so no, one sensor is not equal to another even though they are supposed to be when software looks at the input. Why one actually RSS(Root sum squares) your physical errors, temperature errors, etc and your sensors back end reading errors. What often is true is that one sensor in one range of say, temperatures will be DOMINANT and if it says TRUE, you greenlight the operation in most circumstances even if another sensor is near FALSE or barely into FALSE territory.

So, here we have a CM, sure it has multiple sensors, but how BIG are the error bands? Sure you use them, but, do you trust them? Which one is dominant and in WHICH portion of the intercept?

Relax wrote:PS: No competent navy would allow their MDM's to pass within PDLC range of LAC's when forward deployed. Or at minimum would bias their ENTIRE missile swarm so only a small portion of LAC's forward deployed could use their PDLC on them at best.

No competent Navy would want to do that, but they may no have a choice, because in war, the enemy gets a vote. When the missiles are crashing in upwards of 0.75c, their ability to deflect perpendicularly is fairly small. That means the enemy knows roughly the path the missiles will have to take, if they want to strike the capital ships. And therefore, they can position the LACs such that there's a good chance a quantity of them will be close by the missiles' path. With a thick enough deployed LAC wing, they could ensure they can intercept some missiles nearly 100% of the time. And those LACs will keep their wedges in low power until the missiles are actually close by, when it's too late to deflect.

Don't think two-dimensionally. The LACs won't form a line, but a wall, or a section of a sphere, in front of the missiles' path. The missiles will try to deflect sideways to sidestep that and they definitely have an acceleration advantage.

But missiles are also very dumb and myopic and they need to focus on the ships they're going to attack. Without an ACM and relayed control data from the ships or other forward-deployed units, they may not see the LACs at all.