Hi HungryKing,
EW has been one of the RMN superior qualities for decades, as demonstrated by HH in OBS when Fearless's EW kept surprising the Sirius, so expecting considerable further improvement shouldn't be a surprise.
RFC has told us the RMN is in ongoing process of massively improving its missile defenses, which from what we've seen so far has barely scratched the surface of the potential, though no one has yet figured out what RFC's improvements are going to be.
Part of the problem is that the SLN doesn't begin to threaten the GA tech-wise, and won't even as its soon destroyed, so the pressure to cope with 'missile storms' has been removed at least until the SLN has been dealt with.
While the post-SL smaller polities may make EW one of their priorities for improvement, it will be years before they'll be close to needing the tech or tactics you cited since they're not needed against each other.
L
HungryKing wrote:My impression, which is based partly on what characters have thought, and partly on some very old pearls, which more or less indicate bounds on what is possible, is that there are going to be competing systems, and they might well vary starkly by size bracket and navy.
Everyone is going to go massive on EW. The RMN, or rather Honor's experiments, is in the process of moving to dispersed doctrine based on squadron drones and personal drones for its capital units, coordinated but not interlocked, its smaller units probably with have some dual use drones, to set up a higher level defense if they are traveling together, but are assigned to duties that might disperse them. The SLN or its successors may still try the huddled turtling strategy, where each unit has personal drones that interlock with its squadron, to generate an area defense.
Everyone is going to use, for the moment, multiple LAC shells. The RMN and GSN, and by implication the BSDF, are the only ones, so far as we know, with the technology to build an active defenses drone, and are definitely feeling their way to using them in the inner shell.
MWW has indicated that the laserhead has the capability to eventually make shipboard PD clusters impractical, and the RMN has a plan for the dealing with that, part of the reason why they are using very overweight PDLCs on their new construction is probably to delay that date. I suspect they will use a variant of Keyhole and just move the PDLCs off board. Counter to this is the fact that MWW has indicated that there is a limit to how many large drones a ship can mount, and that no one is going to go to a giant heavily armored drone carrier, it is too much like an arsenal ship, which he has already shown to have serious problems, even if you build it from an SD or DN schemata, like an RMN CLAC, rather than a freighter.
