Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Each Husky was a specialized towing drone equipped with a small impeller drive, a power receptor antenna, a telemetry relay, and eight tractor beams, each capable of towing one of Technodyne’s missile pods. The Husky’s onboard power was sufficient only for limited — very limited — independent maneuvering, but it could always be towed by a mothership’s tractors. As long as it could be hit by beamed power from that mothership, its endurance was effectively unlimited, however. And it had been designed so that each Husky could “mother” eight additional Huskies. In theory, they could be daisy-chained four-deep, with the actual missile pods forming the fifth tier of an enormous stack. That meant— again, in theory — that a single tractor aboard a single warship could tow 1,024 missile pods. The latest, tweaked version of the Cataphract was somewhat bigger than the model Filareta had taken to Manticore, and the new pods were individually smaller, able to carry only six of Technodyne’s latest mark. So in theory — in theory — that single shipboard tractor could have put 6,144 missiles into space. The power requirement would have far exceeded that of anything short of a superdreadnought, however — in fact, Isotalo doubted even a superdreadnought could have handled that many pods — and the best her battlecruisers could manage was just under a hundred Huskies and “only” 768 pods apiece, which meant the battlecruisers of the lightest of her task groups had almost twelve thousand missiles in its deployed pods.

Without the Huskies’ impellers, their acceleration would have been that of an arthritic tortoise . . . at best. With the Huskies’ impellers, the effect of all that mass outside the battlecruisers’ impeller wedges was negligible. And, all told, that would let her bring over 36,000 missiles to the fight.

author wrote:Missiles don't "trail an antenna." Instead, they periodically "clear the wedge" by reorienting so that the open stern aspect of their wedge is presented to the controlling ship.

penny wrote:Did the author ever say what motive power the pod has?

tlb wrote:What would be involved in actually trailing an antenna? A small tractor beam, a small power beam and a repeater module to detach after the missile launches and be held by the tractor and powered by the beam. It could be positioned right at the open end of the wedge and converse with the ship or other source. Then there would not need to perform any special maneuver to clear the wedge.

tlb wrote:What would be involved in actually trailing an antenna? A small tractor beam, a small power beam and a repeater module to detach after the missile launches and be held by the tractor and powered by the beam. It could be positioned right at the open end of the wedge and converse with the ship or other source. Then there would not need to perform any special maneuver to clear the wedge.

Jonathan_S wrote:If you want to direct where the signal the missile broadcasts goes you'd need to trail an entire phase array out the back, not just a single antenna wire. And given the size of a missiles wedge you'd have to trail it at least half a km astern. That's not impossible, but it is a lot of cable to squeeze into a missile.

And if the area inside the missile's wedge isn't compensated you'd have to worry about manouvers causing that cable to get too close to the wedge and get shredded.

tlb wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:The further away from your ships you destroy though intercept or cause to fail to get close enough to your ships to engage them, the better off you are in terms of defending you ships. And the fewer target you normal CM engagement volley or final defense energy weapons need to deal with. Hell, the missile that was carrying the CM canister is (cause you are not likely to have fired it's maximum range) is going to be able to function as a CM itself because it's not direct impact but mutual destruction by wedge....so you have 7 CM,s not 6 - or whatever your canister load is plus one.

Whether the drive that transports the CM's can itself be used to counter a missile depends om how it is set up. The drive on an RD can be stopped and restarted; but it does not have the power of an attack missile, so will not have the acceleration that will likely be needed. The drive on an attack missile cannot be stopped and then restarted; so if it needs to power down its wedge to fire the CM's in the canister (or pod), then it cannot bring the wedge up again to also attack an incoming missile.

PS: Why, oh why, did you not edit your first attempt, instead of creating a second post? Also why didn't you fix the brackets on the quote from Penny? I think that it always pays to preview a post before submitting, so that you can immediately fix formatting errors and so on.

penny wrote:My guess is that the second post is not his fault, but was symptomatic of a server going haywire. Sometimes when we click the submit button, the server freezes up for an undetermined amount of time and just cycles. If you are not patient and click resubmit, the result is a double post. It has happened to us all. Even to the author.

Question: When missiles go ballistic, where are they getting their power? Plasma cells?

tlb wrote:Going ballistic just means that the wedge is turned off; it need not mean that the capacitors or fusion fuel tanks are empty, even if the wedge is incapable of being turned back on (as with missiles, but not an RD). I am guessing that the last bit of power is reserved to destroying the missile, to prevent the enemy copying the design.

With a fusion powered multi-drive missile, a ballistic stage can occur in between each drive activation and the fusion reactor just keeps powering along.