First Technical Mission To Bolthole

cthia wrote:My niece is considering much longer legged conventional missiles as those supplied by Technodyne, significantly upgraded.

She says that the MAlign are saving the better missiles for themselves!

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:My niece is considering much longer legged conventional missiles as those supplied by Technodyne, significantly upgraded.

She says that the MAlign are saving the better missiles for themselves!

No, we were told the MAN hadn't yet gotten true multi-drive missiles to work as of a book or two ago. But all it takes is a guy with a taste for the good life and more access that he should have...

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm trying to remember it it was a really authoritative source (like from one of the Detwiller clan) or if it was info that might have been edited before distribution (like a MAN officer or worse a Mesan patsy in the SLN)

Theemile wrote:My personal feeling on why the Cataphracts have been seen all over the place is to hide their true origin - that way when the Renasaince Factor's conventional fleets are equipped with them, there is no smoking gun linking the Spider attacks with the RF - everyone would think they both must had access to SLN military hardware, pure and simple, but no more.

TheMonster wrote:

Theemile wrote:My personal feeling on why the Cataphracts have been seen all over the place is to hide their true origin - that way when the Renasaince Factor's conventional fleets are equipped with them, there is no smoking gun linking the Spider attacks with the RF - everyone would think they both must had access to SLN military hardware, pure and simple, but no more.

That definitely fits into the MAlign's modus operandi of the Onion. They never do anything directly; they have to build up layers of deception, misdirection, obfuscation, and confusion, so that enemies never really know what they're really up to. It is so ingrained in them to always lay false trails that they have become incapable of doing much in a straightforward manner.

And one day, I hope to see explicitly how their propensity for duplicity, adding complexity beyond necessity, creates the opportunity for Murph(it)y to bring calamity, with intensity, upon them.

cthia wrote:

TheMonster wrote:
That definitely fits into the MAlign's modus operandi of the Onion. They never do anything directly; they have to build up layers of deception, misdirection, obfuscation, and confusion, so that enemies never really know what they're really up to. It is so ingrained in them to always lay false trails that they have become incapable of doing much in a straightforward manner.

And one day, I hope to see explicitly how their propensity for duplicity, adding complexity beyond necessity, creates the opportunity for Murph(it)y to bring calamity, with intensity, upon them.

Damn Monster...funny...funny!

Can't stop laughing!

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm trying to remember it it was a really authoritative source (like from one of the Detwiller clan) or if it was info that might have been edited before distribution (like a MAN officer or worse a Mesan patsy in the SLN)

I think it was authoritative.

Unlike the Solarian League Navy, the Mesan Alignment had no reservations at all about the missile ranges being reported by observers of the renewed conflict between Manticore and the Republic of Haven. They'd not only realized those reports were accurate, but figured out what the Manticorans and Havenites must have done to produce them.

Unfortunately, deducing what someone else had done wasn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it for oneself. Downsizing missile drive components without reducing their already limited lifetimes still further was a significant technological challenge—one the Alignment was working hard to overcome, but hadn't managed to pull off yet.

So they'd taken another approach as an intermediate step. The Cataphract was a rather basic concept, actually—they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.

There were drawbacks, of course; there always were, and especially so in what had to be a compromise solution.

The weapon carried only half as many lasing rods as a standard laser head. Worse, the Cataphract was twenty percent longer than a standard missile of any given weight, which meant it would no longer fit into launch tubes which had been designed to handle the single-drive missile upon which it was based. The Cataphract-C, built around the SLN's Trebuchet capital missile could be fired only out of one of the missile pods the MAN hadn't seen fit to offer Citizen Commodore Luff. The Cataphract-B, based on the Javelin missile intended for the League's battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, could be fired from a standard superdreadnought missile tube, but not by an Indefatigable or a Warlord-C. But Luff's battlecruisers could fire the Cataphract-A, based on the Spatha, the SLN's new-model destroyer and light cruiser shipkiller. His Mars-Cs could have, as well, but only the battlecruisers had been supplied with the new weapon, and even they carried only enough of them for a dozen full broadsides.

Compared to standard missiles of their size, their warheads were light, and the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids which could be stuffed into such a size-restricted terminal bus were limited. But the weapon had a powered range from rest of almost 16.6 million kilometers, nobody had ever even imagined that it might exist

He had to admit that the Cataphracts in his battlecruisers' magazines were better than anything the People's Navy—or State Security—had ever been able to provide him with. They weren't as good as the multidrive missiles the damned Manties had introduced...but they offered a far greater capability than the PNE had ever before possessed, and they could be launched internally, rather than requiring pods.

“The same thought had occurred to me,” Benjamin said grimly. As the commander of the Alignment’s navy, he was only too well aware of what the only navies with operational pod-laying ships-of-the-wall and multidrive missiles could do if they were allied instead of shooting at one another.

"Get Gustav out of the Sollies’ line of fire and let him take care of us. It’s not like they’re going to need his pod-layers to kick the SLN’s ass! And we just happen to have left the Andies’ support structure completely intact, haven’t we? That mean’s they’ve got plenty of MDMs, and if Gustav comes after us while staying out of the confrontation with the League, do you really think any of our ‘friends’ in Old Chicago’ll do one damned thing to stop him?"