Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Theemile wrote:A capacitor DDM would be massive - as large as or larger than a Capital missile. Yes, you can build a build a CA/BC with said missiles, but you would need to build larger missile openings, feed tubes and magazine spaces, and hold fewer missiles. Rebuilding current ships would be expensive.

I don't think it would be quite that large -- I'd guesstimate about 80% the size of an SDM capital missile (with the Mk16 at about 75% the size of that SDM capital missile)

Still, no question that refitting existing ships to fire any kind of DDM would be non-trivial and you'd likely be better off with a clean-sheet design. (Especially if you're starting with existing SLN ships which are deficient in modern missile defenses -- if you clean-sheet it you can handle both the larger
missiles and the extra CM and PDLC required for modern combat)

The reason I think the Mk16 is only a bit smaller than a capacitor DDM is I seem to recall that DDM is around the break-even point between capacitor and micro-fusion powered for size. Any micro-fusion incurs a significant minimum size for the reactor, while longer and longer runtimes just require slightly larger fuel tanks. An ERM at 270s runtime is decidedly below the break-even point, a DDM at 360s is very slightly past it, and an MDM at 540s is significantly smaller with micro-fusion.

My understanding is the RMN went with micro-fusion for the Mk16 (despite the larger cofferdamed launchers required) partly because the slight size reduction was nice but mostly because the extra power budget (without much further size increase) for jamming and ECM made the missile overall more capable.

Theemile wrote:

Zendikarofthewest wrote:<snip>

One interesting possibility would be MDCMs, maybe launched from limpet pods or retrofitted to broadsides? Accuracy would be worse at that range, though.

David has said MDCMs would be the size of ship killers, and the throw ratio is usually 2+ CMs for every ship killer targeting a ship. Using them would eat into magazines quickly, and given their size, MDCDs would have a slower fire rate than regular CMs (~4sec for CMs vs ~8 sec for DD sized SDMs)

Just a thought. Honor's little trick with the wedge led to FTL technology. Can we reasonably say that Barricade is the precursor to MDCMs or something similar? 'Twould suit me just fine. Then maybe the big boys can finally tell LACs -- that have no damn business screening for ships of the wall! -- to finally, "get the hell out of the way!"

The MAN is going to eat LACs for snacks. In the case of the MAN, submarine analogues, I agree a screen might be necessary. The lesser of evils if you will.

But presently, LACs are a waste of talent, manpower, future heroes and hardware.

penny wrote:Just a thought. Honor's little trick with the wedge led to FTL technology. Can we reasonably say that Barricade is the precursor to MDCMs or something similar? 'Twould suit me just fine. Then maybe the big boys can finally tell LACs -- that have no damn business screening for ships of the wall! -- to finally, "get the hell out of the way!"

The MAN is going to eat LACs for snacks. In the case of the MAN, submarine analogues, I agree a screen might be necessary. The lesser of evils if you will.

But presently, LACs are a waste of talent, manpower, future heroes and hardware.

Maybe -- both demonstrates something that even a moment's thought would have shown to be the only known viable approach to solving the corresponding problem.

As soon as the technology for MDMs came along it would have been obvious that you could have built a super long ranged CM using it. But there wasn't sufficient demand for that to overcome the drawbacks of the solution. CMs were designed to be small and cheap enough you could carry loads of them. An MDCM is neither small nor cheap, so the practical benefits have to be really good to justify the tradeoffs.
Barracade was a partial demonstration of the possibilities (it did show that interception was possible at extreme range, at least against non-maneuvering targets, if queued by recon drone data.

And FTL comms were another obvious thing that was just waiting for the tech to catch up to the idea. Every navy had known for centuries that wedges could be tracked near-realtime. So of course anybody who'd ever looked at making FTL communicate would have at least looked at the one known FTL signal and tried to figure out how to make it a practical communication method.
And I'm sure attempted ebbed and flowed over that time, rising interested until this latest round also fails to pan out and then it lies fallow for several decades until someone is inspired to try again. Honor just happened to provide the latest round of inspiration right as the necessary supporting technology to actually make it practical was coming into existence. (And I seriously doubt she was the first to use pre-arranged ship maneuvers to send a signal; that's also a pretty obvious thing; if hard to make flexible enough for general usage)

(And yes, I'm a little annoyed with how Timothy Zahn wrote the scene with Hemphill because he made it sound like in centuries of a known FTL signal nobody had ever thought to try to use it to sent an FTL message -- which requires everyone in the Honorverse for the last few centuries to have been thick as a brick)

Daryl wrote:Been discussed previously. A pulsar hand gun is supposed to have a muzzle energy similar o a 50 cal. Try firing a 50 cal on auto in one hand?
Obviously there is some non Newtonian physics, handwavium, unified field gravity tech involved.

I will point out that energy is mass * the square of the velocity while momentum (and that is what causes recoil) is mass * velocity. Thus, a 100gm slug traveling at 100,000 cm/sec has the same energy as a 1 gm pellet traveling at 1,000,000 cm/sec, but the slug has 10 times the momentum of the pellet and thus 10 times the recoil.

Jonathan_S wrote:And yes, I'm a little annoyed with how Timothy Zahn wrote the scene with Hemphill because he made it sound like in centuries of a known FTL signal nobody had ever thought to try to use it to sent an FTL message -- which requires everyone in the Honorverse for the last few centuries to have been thick as a brick.

1. Didn't know the Greek alphabet.
2. Then along came an Alpha.
3. It really takes an Alpha.
4. Better a Beta.

Jonathan_S wrote:And I'm sure attempted ebbed and flowed over that time, rising interested until this latest round also fails to pan out and then it lies fallow for several decades until someone is inspired to try again. Honor just happened to provide the latest round of inspiration right as the necessary supporting technology to actually make it practical was coming into existence. (And I seriously doubt she was the first to use pre-arranged ship maneuvers to send a signal; that's also a pretty obvious thing; if hard to make flexible enough for general usage)

(And yes, I'm a little annoyed with how Timothy Zahn wrote the scene with Hemphill because he made it sound like in centuries of a known FTL signal nobody had ever thought to try to use it to sent an FTL message -- which requires everyone in the Honorverse for the last few centuries to have been thick as a brick)

You don't have to wonder if there was someone. There's a book by a certain Timothy Zahn (and Tom Pope and RFC) called A Call to Vengeance with that

Jeremy Llwelyn, the Axelrod operative embedded with the Volsungs, had pre-arranged an FTL signal to a hidden ship when he was trying to extricate himself from said Volsungs in the Danak system, where a Manticore-Haven taskforce was ready to pound on them. The signal was as gross as FTL signals can be: turn the wedge off and then back on. With just that, you can either do Morse code or binary at a very low bandwidth.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And I'm sure attempted ebbed and flowed over that time, rising interested until this latest round also fails to pan out and then it lies fallow for several decades until someone is inspired to try again. Honor just happened to provide the latest round of inspiration right as the necessary supporting technology to actually make it practical was coming into existence. (And I seriously doubt she was the first to use pre-arranged ship maneuvers to send a signal; that's also a pretty obvious thing; if hard to make flexible enough for general usage)

(And yes, I'm a little annoyed with how Timothy Zahn wrote the scene with Hemphill because he made it sound like in centuries of a known FTL signal nobody had ever thought to try to use it to sent an FTL message -- which requires everyone in the Honorverse for the last few centuries to have been thick as a brick)

You don't have to wonder if there was someone. There's a book by a certain Timothy Zahn (and Tom Pope and RFC) called A Call to Vengeance with that

Jeremy Llwelyn, the Axelrod operative embedded with the Volsungs, had pre-arranged an FTL signal to a hidden ship when he was trying to extricate himself from said Volsungs in the Danak system, where a Manticore-Haven taskforce was ready to pound on them. The signal was as gross as FTL signals can be: turn the wedge off and then back on. With just that, you can either do Morse code or binary at a very low bandwidth.

Thanks, I'd forgotten that one.
Very low bandwidth and likely very high cost. Wedges aren't designed to be 'rapidly' cycled on and off, so I'd bet doing so greatly accelerates the wear on the impeller nodes, tuners, and other associated components -- and those things aren't cheap. And I'd assume back in Travis Young's day their operating life was shorter, and the components less robust, than in Honors; so the wear would be proportionately greater.

The breakthroughs that led to the current FTL comms was in both improving the cycle rate and improving the robustness/longevity so they could better withstand being used at that cycle rate.

Jonathan_S wrote: back to the Nevada as a ersatz Sag-C.
Don't forget that the Nevada is grossly inferior in acceleration. A Nevada's “maximum acceleration was less than four hundred and ninety gravities” [SftS] (from its mass I'd calculate 487.6g), whereas even as designed (before any refits to even newer compensators) a Sag-C's maximum acceleration was 726.2g; so basically 50% quicker.
(And it's even worse since the League is still sticking to 80% at their normal safe acceleration while Manticore is now IIRC using 90% -- giving the Sag-C nearly 70% quicker accel at their respective max non-emergency settings)

That sluggish performance going to be an issue in some heavy cruiser use cases.

True, it would absolutely be a subpar vessel to a Saganami-C. In all seriousness though, I would give it an even chance of smacking a Roland or Avalon down (Avalon especially - it only has ERMs), or with two or three of them taking on a Saganami-C with some degree of success. That acceleration though, oof. I never realized how much damn powercreep they had there - fucks sake, an Invictus goes faster then a damn Culverin.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Bow-launched missiles only? That's going to be two or at most four per launch. Talk about going back to the 16th century!

We don't know when missiles became small enough or the ships big enough to launch from broadsides. During Travis' time, they were all bow- or stern-launched (and stern launches only in battleships I think). We also don't know the original specs of the Ad Astra-class DNs that the RMN built in the 1650s, only that they had been massively refitted and had grown a lot by Honor's time (by King Roger's build-up I guess). We'll know more when Jacob Holo and RFC write the novels about Edward Saganami.

I was moreso thinking along the lines of a Roland, using off-bore capability to get semi-decent viability out of older CA hulls.

To be honest, I think the cost of refits is overstated, and I don't really buy into the idea that refitting a Nevada would be more expensive then buying a brand new DDM-armed CA or BC. I think that refitting older ships to take ERMs and DDMs would be fairly popular, especially for third-rate navies that can get them for dirt cheap.

I will admit though, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the native-born designs of these navies. Maybe some would focus on MDM-armed battleships? Maybe DN(P)s? It's something I want explored tbh.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:You don't have to wonder if there was someone. There's a book by a certain Timothy Zahn (and Tom Pope and RFC) called A Call to Vengeance with that

Jeremy Llwelyn, the Axelrod operative embedded with the Volsungs, had pre-arranged an FTL signal to a hidden ship when he was trying to extricate himself from said Volsungs in the Danak system, where a Manticore-Haven taskforce was ready to pound on them. The signal was as gross as FTL signals can be: turn the wedge off and then back on. With just that, you can either do Morse code or binary at a very low bandwidth.

Jonathan_S wrote:Thanks, I'd forgotten that one.
Very low bandwidth and likely very high cost. Wedges aren't designed to be 'rapidly' cycled on and off, so I'd bet doing so greatly accelerates the wear on the impeller nodes, tuners, and other associated components -- and those things aren't cheap. And I'd assume back in Travis Young's day their operating life was shorter, and the components less robust, than in Honors; so the wear would be proportionately greater.

The breakthroughs that led to the current FTL comms was in both improving the cycle rate and improving the robustness/longevity so they could better withstand being used at that cycle rate.

In Honor's time we have wedge powered weapons that can be carried and deployed by a few people: the Viper used by Kevin Usher's squad in SVW and the shoulder fired weapon in FiE. It seems obvious that the FTL transmitter for a missile must be of similar size to that of one of these weapons. Did such exist in Travis Long's time or was that another piece of technology that still needed to be developed?

tlb wrote:In Honor's time we have wedge powered weapons that can be carried and deployed by a few people: the Viper used by Kevin Usher's squad in SVW and the shoulder fired weapon in FiE. It seems obvious that the FTL transmitter for a missile must be of similar size to that of one of these weapons. Did such exist in Travis Long's time or was that another piece of technology that still needed to be developed?

I don't think we know. A quick check of A Call to Duty shows one use of shoulder-carried missile launcher; but while it isn't explicit about the propulsion type it seems pretty clear that it's not an impeller head missile.
And in A Call to Arms even the countermissiles they were carrying back then appear to be kinetic kill missiles, not impeller heads. I'm not seeing a specific mention of how those are propelled, but they've only got "about a thirteen-hundred-klick range" and the intercept isn't described as a wedge to wedge hit, but "here was a muted double flash on the tac as two of the missiles slammed into the countermissiles and were destroyed"

And we know in HotQ that Grayson's "smallest impeller missile massed over a hundred and twenty tons. That was fifty percent more than a Manticoran ship-killer" If their tech base wasn't able to scale an impeller down to the size of a CM I don't see how they could have scaled it down to the size of a SAM. While it's possible that the rest of the universe figured out small impellers sooner down the tech tree than Grayson, Grayson does appear to have antiship missiles that are far more capable than those of Travis's time. So if Grayson and Travis both seem to lack impeller powered CMs and Grayson seems to lack impeller powered SAMs I think we have to assume Travis's time also lacked impeller powered SAMs.