Escort SD

Weird Harold wrote:Well, Contact nukes have to make contact which means their wedge will destroy a missile before they can detonate.

Contact nuke is short for sidewall contacting nuclear weapon. They don't actually physically hit the enemy ship. Furthermore, I am sure there is an easy way to make them detonate where ever the firing ship wants them to.

crewdude48 wrote:Contact nuke is short for sidewall contacting nuclear weapon. They don't actually physically hit the enemy ship. Furthermore, I am sure there is an easy way to make them detonate where ever the firing ship wants them to.

Yes, I know that.

The Triple-ripple wasn't designed around sidewall contact nukes, it was designed around "the dirtiest nuclear weapons she could think of" or something to that effect. A totally different animal with totally different effects on missile sensors.

sturdy00 wrote:I am kind of curious about why they do not use contact nukes (similar to the triple ripple) or flechette type rounds delivered by a full up missile when the missile storm is still out of CM range?

To put what other people have said into perspective, consider this: A counter-missile has a wedge 10 km across. That means that it only has to get within 10 miles of the target to kill it. Now, imagine how many flechettes you would have to use to fill up a 10 km by 10 km square through which the target passes, closely space enough to kill a missile with a diameter of 1 or 2 meters.

If you put 1 flechette per square meter, you will need 1 million flechettes just to do the job of a single counter-missile. And that assumes that you are able to aim your flechette wall with the same accuracy as a counter-missile. Since counter-missiles are guided and flechettes are not, that clearly cannot happen. You might have to fill an area a thousand miles wide or more because you can't predict where the missile will be when it hits your flechette wall. You would need immense numbers of flechettes to stop one missile.

In essence, what you are proposing is similar to the autocannnon that used to be common a hundred years ago in the Honorverse. But that was before the invention of the laserhead. Autocannon can be useful against missiles that get very close to the ship, but they are not useful at the standoff ranges of laserheads.

Weird Harold wrote:Well, Contact nukes have to make contact which means their wedge will destroy a missile before they can detonate.

crewdude48 wrote:Contact nuke is short for sidewall contacting nuclear weapon. They don't actually physically hit the enemy ship. Furthermore, I am sure there is an easy way to make them detonate where ever the firing ship wants them to.

No, I don't believe so. Re-read the battle between Fearless and Sword of God in HotQ.

“Two of them vanished in sun-bright fireballs that shook Thunder to her keel as twin, 78-ton hammers struck her sidewall at .25 C. For all their fury, those two were harmless, but their sisters’ sidewall penetrators functioned as designed.

-- Bob G

No, the phrase "contact nuke" is an shorthand term, not a precise description. They are designed to explode INSIDE the sidewalls, hence the sidewall penetrator.

Old school nukes had two modes, referred to in the text as boom and burn. Boom is sidewall penetration mode, designed to directly damage the ship by detonating very, very close to the ship This means less then 10,000 meters away, but hopefully a lot closer. Even way back when in the Honorverse this was not easy to achieve.

Burn is using the warhead to overload and damage/destroy the sidewall generators. This was done to degrade the opponent before the energy range fight and involved very large (up to gigaton scale) shaped fusion bombs going off at hundreds to thousands of KMs out from sidewall.

Something else that makes flechettes or 'sand clouds' a non-start is that missiles with active wedges have particle screening as well. The particle screen if I understand correctly is like a super weak bow-buckler that prevents micro-meteoroids and space dust from degrading/destroying missiles.

Vince wrote:

Theemile wrote:Whoops - I remembered it as being a tube plug - like the Marksman CL's shipkiller firecontrol plugs. However, going back to MoH and ToF, BC have a couple tubes REPLACED
(2 in each broadside) with the extra CM firecontrol and SDs lose Energy Mounts. Not plug and play, and quite invasive.

IIRC, the SLN Aegis works by using two missile tubes dedicated to firing CM canisters, with the space for fire control being provided by tearing out two energy mounts. This is per broadside.

That's on SD's, as mentioned in MoH. In ToF the mods to the ex-SLN BCs are stated to be a removal of the tubes, not energy mounts, probably because the tubes were a larger % of the bc broadside.

Leon Trotsky's counter-missiles began to launch. The big ship's active antimissile defenses were far weaker than they ought to be for something her size, but the Aegis system which had been added to them went some way towards repairing that weakness. It was scarcely what Luff would have called a sophisticated solution, but there was a certain brutal elegance to the concept. Simply rip out a couple of broadside launchers, use the space they'd previously occupied for additional counter-missile fire control, and then use two of the remaining launchers to toss out canisters of defensive missiles. Even under optimal conditions, Aegis cost the ship which mounted it at least four offensive tubes per broadside.

BobfromSydney wrote:Something else that makes flechettes or 'sand clouds' a non-start is that missiles with active wedges have particle screening as well. The particle screen if I understand correctly is like a super weak bow-buckler that prevents micro-meteoroids and space dust from degrading/destroying missiles.

It's not clear exactly how much particle screening missiles have. There is no textev about it. It is plausible that they have some, but they don't need it quite as much as ships do.

I would say they probably do, but I wouldn't bet the bank on it.

Basically a BCL is this ship. I suggested turning an Agamemnon into an Escort CLAC BC but the chorus dissapproved.

SWM wrote:It's not clear exactly how much particle screening missiles have. There is no textev about it. It is plausible that they have some, but they don't need it quite as much as ships do.

I would say they probably do, but I wouldn't bet the bank on it.

In the scene where Mike was practicing using a single pod of Apollo Missiles as a fast recon drone, it was stated that they had scheaths over their sensors in order it prevent them from becoming degraded over long ballistic stretches because, on a missile, when the wedge was down, so was the particle screening. So they definitely have some under normal circumstances.