The roof and belly of a ship is naked... here's a fix.

Not necessarily, if (for example) your fleet is engaging an enemy fleet in a running battle. The tendency for admirals is to fire at the biggest, scariest, target first. So your pounding on their SDs (& back). What happens if (realizing their getting the worst anyway) the enemy suddenly detaches a group of cruisers & BCs to turn 90deg strait behind you while redirecting on your own BCs? Do you turn to keep your broadside to the BCs and give your nose to the SDs? No you keep your broadside to the SDs, use your chase on the BCs, & hope for the best.

I'd just use my own screening cruisers (whose utility and survivability isn't too great in wall-on-wall combat) to engage the detachment long before they cross my T at energy range. That's what they're there for. One of the jobs of the screen is to provide an antiharassment bubble around the wall. Things would have to be really up the creek to let those lighter combatants sweep around into energy range like that.

MAD-4A wrote:That’s not true and maneuvering anything larger than a DD is like rolling a beach whale over with a plastic shovel. Read HotQ. If turning is so easy then why couldn’t the Peep fleet at Basilisk just turn “up” & impose its belly wedges on the mass of incoming missile?

I said sidewall, not wedge.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/images/wedge.gif

A small amount of yaw will put one of the sidewalls in the way.

MAD-4A wrote:

The E wrote:If an enemy combatant gets inside energy range of your podnought, the situation is already dire. There is no way that is going to happen unless several other parts of the situation have already gone to hell. I mean, what's the scenario here? How is this going to work? How is any ship going to be able to get into energy range of a podnought wall without being engaged?

Not necessarily, if (for example) your fleet is engaging an enemy fleet in a running battle. The tendency for admirals is to fire at the biggest, scariest, target first. So your pounding on their SDs (& back). What happens if (realizing their getting the worst anyway) the enemy suddenly detaches a group of cruisers & BCs to turn 90deg strait behind you while redirecting on your own BCs? Do you turn to keep your broadside to the BCs and give your nose to the SDs? No you keep your broadside to the SDs, use your chase on the BCs, & hope for the best.

I am not exactly sure how you come to this conclusion. Combat happens over ranges of several lightminutes, even if you're detaching part of your screen (and if you're on the losing side of an engagement, why would you weaken your missile defense like that?), the attacking Wall will have ample time to throw a pattern of pods or two in the general direction of those detachments. Basically, combat ranges are far too high for such a maneuver to work, and as Duckk said, there's a reason why you have a screen with you at all times.

No there has always been the vulnerable ends. Having a bow wall on that BC in HotQ would have saved the Masds. But nobody bothered to give them one. If facing a catastrophic capping of the T it would be more important for a commander to temporarily sacrifice his accel for protection. So all ships always had a reason for one, but no-one ever thought to give them one

Except a good commander is supposed to avoid getting into a situation where his ship is pointed towards the enemy broadsides. A bow/sternwall makes kills harder in that situation, but not impossible; The attacker is still perfectly capable of firing past said wall into the sides of the defender. Point being, in a situation where you need a bow or sternwall, you also need all the maneuverability you get, which means having your wedge up and running normally.

LACs can get around that by using spinal armaments, a concept not taken up for real starships. For an LAC, the bow and sternwalls make sense; they actually want to cross their own T when attacking, and they want some extra protection for their backsides once they've passed their targets and haven't yet made a turn to present their wedges.

Its not faulty – just because someone has come up with a non-cannon excuse why it’s not, doesn’t mean it just can’t be done.

Oh for crying out loud. Your only argument for why this thing can be done is "because I think that's how the universe works". That's not an argument, especially when you have people who are working on the canon for said universe tell you that no, it doesn't work.
This has nothing to do with me or the other critics of your ideas being too married to old ideas to see the obviously superior concepts you're presenting and all to do with you being too stubborn to accept that your idea of what is possible in the Honorverse is simply wrong.

That’s not faulty (also even if plasma were being used – which is old 22nd cent S.T. tech & shouldn’t be introduced to a superconducting gav control universe). As I pointed out before. They have PISTOLS that use gav tech. how bulky are these pistols & dose someone have to carry a micro fusion plant on their back to power it? No. so why does the same weapon scaled up to naval size suddenly need this overly complicated & highly dangerous tech to support it when SC are available? Go with “no one thought of it before!” & it’s not getting support in the “old navy” niche.

Handheld plasma weapons are not the same technology as shipmounted Lasers and Grasers. It's like asking "Why does an SPY radar on an Aegis need so much power anyway? After all, the police are using handheld radar guns, that's basically the same, right?"

No there has always been the vulnerable ends. Having a bow wall on that BC in HotQ would have saved the Masds. But nobody bothered to give them one. If facing a catastrophic capping of the T it would be more important for a commander to temporarily sacrifice his accel for protection. So all ships always had a reason for one, but no-one ever thought to give them one

Until the recent invention of the laser head, the threat of a down the throat or up the kilt attack was not worth worrying about. Getting contact nukes into range was hard to do under any circumstance - let alone on a perpendicular crossing route that is typical of broadside exchanges - and only a massive incompetent would let someone get into energy range for a throat/kilt shot (which describes the Masadans at Second Yeltsin). Naval designers did not bother to worry about it, accepting that while there are rare cases where it does happen, it is not worth the cost to take mitigation steps above and beyond extra armor on the hammerheads. That is the same reasoning they do not armor the dorsal and ventral sides of a ship in the off chance someone can get a shot at them. They chose to maximize their defenses for the most likely scenarios, and accept the risks that come with it.

What changed for the Havenite Wars was the increasing power and accuracy of the laser head missile (whose standoff range allowed those crossing attacks ahead or astern to occur at range) coupled with the prominence of the missile pod (which massively increases the frequency of those attacks). Now a defense along that axis becomes highly desirable, and hence the development of the bow and stern wall.

MAD-4A wrote:

The E wrote:If an enemy combatant gets inside energy range of your podnought, the situation is already dire. There is no way that is going to happen unless several other parts of the situation have already gone to hell. I mean, what's the scenario here? How is this going to work? How is any ship going to be able to get into energy range of a podnought wall without being engaged?

Not necessarily, if (for example) your fleet is engaging an enemy fleet in a running battle. The tendency for admirals is to fire at the biggest, scariest, target first. So your pounding on their SDs (& back). What happens if (realizing their getting the worst anyway) the enemy suddenly detaches a group of cruisers & BCs to turn 90deg strait behind you while redirecting on your own BCs? Do you turn to keep your broadside to the BCs and give your nose to the SDs? No you keep your broadside to the SDs, use your chase on the BCs, & hope for the best.

Others have already given good responses, but I'd like to note that the superdreadnoughts would actually have their wedge to the enemy, not the broadside, because they have Keyhole. So even if the enemy BCs did get sent to flank you (weakening the enemy defenses) and you were for some reason unable to detach screen or send any missiles at the BCs on their long long way in--you could turn your broadside to the BCs and still keep your wedge at the enemy superdreadnoughts.

MAD-4A wrote:

Duckk wrote:It doesn't take much of a course change to get a sidewall interposed. The channel created by the sidewalls to either side is fairly narrow.

That’s not true and maneuvering anything larger than a DD is like rolling a beach whale over with a plastic shovel. Read HotQ. If turning is so easy then why couldn’t the Peep fleet at Basilisk just turn “up” & impose its belly wedges on the mass of incoming missile?

To expand on the diagram that Duckk posted, there's a big difference between changing heading by 4 degrees to twist the vulnerable throat of your wedge away from an attacker and changing heading or rotation by nearly 90 degrees to impose your wedge.

The sidewalls are only 10 km out from the broadside of the ship, and the stretch the entire length of the wedge; so the vulnerable throat (or skirt/kilt) is a 20 km wide corridor stretching around 150 km ahead of (or behind) the ship. That tells me the vulnerable cone (where a shot has to come from to miss the sidewalls and hit the ship) is only 7.6° wide (but very tall). You don't need to change heading much to force an attacker to shoot through one sidewall or the other, even while they're basically still shooting at your hammerhead.

For example see the dreadnaught HMS Bellerophon in SVW. Totally surprised with a junior communications officer having the con, and still managed to raise sidewalls and swerve to interpose them before the Havenite BCs managed to land a shot.

SWM wrote:

MAD-4A wrote:
Not necessarily, if (for example) your fleet is engaging an enemy fleet in a running battle. The tendency for admirals is to fire at the biggest, scariest, target first. So your pounding on their SDs (& back). What happens if (realizing their getting the worst anyway) the enemy suddenly detaches a group of cruisers & BCs to turn 90deg strait behind you while redirecting on your own BCs? Do you turn to keep your broadside to the BCs and give your nose to the SDs? No you keep your broadside to the SDs, use your chase on the BCs, & hope for the best.

If youare fighting at MDM ranges, and the enemy admeral separated his BCs and sent them in, you would thank your lucky stars that he was being an idiot. In your scenario, pull your BCs in tight for their own defence. Give enemy BCs a few minutes to get out of the antimissile umbrella of their SDs, then hit them with a few salvos from your entire wall. After they have been destroyed, shift fire back to the SDs, who now have a weekend point defence network.

crewdude48 wrote:
If youare fighting at MDM ranges, and the enemy admeral separated his BCs and sent them in, you would thank your lucky stars that he was being an idiot. In your scenario, pull your BCs in tight for their own defence. Give enemy BCs a few minutes to get out of the antimissile umbrella of their SDs, then hit them with a few salvos from your entire wall. After they have been destroyed, shift fire back to the SDs, who now have a weekend point defence network.

Or keep pounding on the SDs, who now don't have the BCs supporting their missile defence. Meanwhile, your CIC keeps refining their firing solution on the BCs as they close, so you can take them out with the minimum number of missiles just before they reach their effective weapons range.

Delete option A or B as appropriate, depending on your circumstances.

MAD-4A wrote:...your fleet is engaging an enemy fleet in a running battle...

"RUNNING ENGAGMENT" did I realy have to say "AT SHORT RANGE" not sniping from across the system. As battles, progress fleets tend to close range (unless someone decides they don't want to play anymore). also I forgot to mention my SD redirect there fire (just before detatching) at your screen (anyway thats what I would've targeted to begin with - target the closet ship that can return fire) of-course in the opening salvos where I'm still out of your DD missile range I would ignore them, but as soon as you're screan ships begin firing back I would blow them to scrap (easyer targets, remove their threat quick & you have both less throw weight back at me & less PD to cover ships further in - the exception would be in situation where I'm sure my shots are going to hurt your big boys - like 2nd New Tuscany & Spindle! )

Small fry missiles can't even penetrate through the sidewall of SD's...