munroburton wrote:Bear in mind the scenario you originally outlined has the Katana chasing the Rampart to the hyper limit, required to reach attack range before the Rampart escapes. I do not think the Katana has any time to sneak into range - and if it's been chasing the Rampart at full power, its stealth isn't going to hold all the way into Viper range(3.5million km). If the Rampart starts dumping recon drones in its wake...
This goes to the plot-related
reasons I didn't want to include in the original post to avoid the fanfic policy. The starting conditions of the chase don't necessarily require the Katana to be chasing the Rampart from dead astern; nor does it require the Rampart to know it's being chased at all until the Katana opens up. Even without going to maximum power the Katana has a substantial acceleration advantage on the Rampart, which will also not be at maximum power since it's unaware it's being chased at first. For that matter, if the Katana was chasing from dead astern the Rampart would be limited to its chase tubes anyway!
SLN SDMs are actually marginally faster than the RMN's single drives - 95,000g vs 92,000g. A 1913 Shrike's missiles flew at 85,000g. Granted, a Viper does have 130,000g but as stated above, this reduces its range to approximately half of a standard single-drive missile.
But to get that range, they'd have to be at half power, making them barely a third the speed of a Viper. Max power SDMs have a range much shorter than a Viper.
A stern chase is a long chase(as shown during OBS). It all comes down to how much overtake velocity the Katana(s) would have built up before passing through that deadly 7.5 to 3.5 million envelope in which they can do nothing but fire countermissiles at incoming missiles.
That assumes they've been detected. As we see in EoH, LACs can generate intercept velocities and close to within energy range of ships with pre-war level tech - which is about where the SLN is, for the most part. We can assume an LAC might get picked up further out than that, but probably not a lot further out. Unless it gives itself away by launching missiles at you, of course.
A single Katana doesn't have enough point-defense clusters on its front end(3 front, 6 aft) to tackle five-missile salvos(which might go up to ten if the destroyer remembers that old spinning trick to launch double broadsides). It might just be able to handle five-missile salvos, if it flipped tail over end every time a salvo came in.
It wouldn't need more than three. If it's facing the chase tubes the incoming salvos will only have two missiles. If it's coming in broadside it will face five missile salvos, but at 3.5m km the missiles will still be well below terminal velocity, giving the laser clusters more than enough time to get a second shot off at each salvo between maximum PDLC range and warhead detonation range. SD-quality PDLCs can get a shot off every ~2 seconds and have about 300k km range (IIRC), and half-power SLN missiles would be moving at about 56k km/s at that point. The forward laser clusters would have about 4 seconds to hit 5 targets with six shots, and the time available to hit the missiles would only go up as the range closed.
Again, it's partly about how much time the Katana takes to cross into its own attack range. If this takes half a hour, the SLN DD will be able to launch forty salvos(based on a 45 second launcher). 40 * 5 is 200.
Again, you're assuming detection from about 8 million km away, which is not terribly reasonable for SLN sensors against Manticoran stealth.
It does come down to the human element, I think. If the Rampart has a smart captain(and the SLN does have a few!), forget it. If that captain is more of a Byng type, he could be provoked into making the same mistake which Coglin made - seeking to finish the fight on the basis of faulty information/conclusions. The SLN doesn't have much information on GA LACs and might not realise the Katana's Vipers carry a laserhead.
The human element always needs to be considered.
A side note: the way point defense laser clusters work has always annoyed me. An SD grade laser cluster has 14 emitter heads, but only fire one at a time and cycles through the emitters every 30 seconds or so. That's great against relatively low velocity missiles, or in a situation where salvos might be coming in very closely spaced - every 3-5 seconds for instance. An example of that would be the stream of missiles tactic used to counter the Havenite EMP missile defense tactic. If missiles are coming in all the time, a smaller laser cluster will eventually be caught out with all emitters recharging when one needs to be fired.
Against the current MDM threat that type of cluster is absurdly inefficient. It's much bigger than a DD grade laser cluster which may only have 3-5 emitters but still gets only one shot per salvo due to how fast the missiles cross the effective range. It would make much more sense to accept individually less capable but smaller installations to maximize the simultaneous output in the single second where it matters. For instance, an Invictus has 62 point defense stations per broadside, with 14 emitters per station. To throw numbers at it: replacing those with smaller, less capable stations might make room for 90 stations with only 5 emitters each, which would mean a 48% reduction in the number of shot per minute they could put out but a 48%
increase in the number of shots they could get off in the critical second of a missile engagement.
