New Weapons - Armed Recon Drones

tonyz wrote:I was referring to Theisman's post-Solom analysis, from At All Costs, chapter 58:

tonyz wrote:It looks like the Havenites can spot these weapons (or think they can) from just outside point defense range, but evidently they have practice tracking Ghost Rider recon drones.

Thanks for that, I am relistening to At All Costs right now, and I see your point about the Havenites stance on the matter.

tonyz wrote: We've seen a number of occasions when Sollies haven't been remotely aware of Manty recon platforms within 10K of their ships. I'm guessing Sollie software packages haven't been tweaked to look for such signatures. Given how many missile hits one needs to mission-kill even a Sollie SD, one Mistletoe platform won't kill ships, but it could be a nasty surprise to start a battle, or to hit a ship just before the mistle wave comes into range -- though you have to balance the additional damage versus the loss of info from the recon platform.

That was more or less what got me started on this idea, if you can get a weapons system that close to an enemy you have yet another advantage that they would find very hard to counter.

Also the Holly component was devised to allow a drone to launch and coordinate a bigger attack without needing to commit suicide itself. The Mistletoe Type II would act basically as the point-man and rangefinder, then paints its target with a new control missile or a similar system, and allows another hidden drone carrying the main firepower to launch the attack from a much closer range, all without putting the warships that deployed them in any danger, and maintaining the drones sensor coverage.

The question I guess is, is all this effort really worth it when you have Apollo already. The problem with the massive missile salvos now used is that while they are impressive and very distructive you also cannot hide it. That allows an enemy (once exposed enough times) to develop a counter. I was considering a new alternative that could flatfoot an enemy while building on what is currently the GA's key battle strength.

The question I guess is, is all this effort really worth it when you have Apollo already. The problem with the massive missile salvos now used is that while they are impressive and very distructive you also cannot hide it. That allows an enemy (once exposed enough times) to develop a counter. I was considering a new alternative that could flatfoot an enemy while building on what is currently the GA's key battle strength.

If an enemy is capable of dealing with massed missile salvos then they're likely also going to be capable of preventing your recon drones from getting close enough for this weapon system to be effective. Your new system really only works well against targets that you don't need it for anyway.

It's too limited for several reasons:

1) Small salvo sizes - you can't possibly put thousands of these things out there, and that means less total missiles AND less EW platforms mixed in with the attack missiles.

2) really low attack speeds - one of the things that makes the SLN incapable of defending against MDMs at the moment is that they haven't faced weapons with such high velocities before. Your proposed system will be firing from much closer and won't be able to generate such high velocities because of it.

Even the SLN is going to have point defense that can take small salvos at lower velocities with less EW platforms, even if it does come from a surprise angle.

The Other thing you might want to keep in mind is what Mistletoe was used against. Moriarty was ONLY protected by it's stealth and the clusters of Missile pods likewise.

In the moment targeting goes active your drone would be a sitting duck to active defenses (unless your target doesn't have defenses).

I would look defensively. They have a powerfull enough drones, decoys to mount laser heads or defensive missiles on. They can be deployed to add defense in depth. Have a shell(s) deployed around the ship or in the direction of an attack to thin out the massive amounts of missiles.

showtime555 wrote:I would look defensively. They have a powerfull enough drones, decoys to mount laser heads or defensive missiles on. They can be deployed to add defense in depth. Have a shell(s) deployed around the ship or in the direction of an attack to thin out the massive amounts of missiles.

First off, welcome to the forums. First virtual Old Tilman is on the house.

If you're using Point Defence clusters, you'd need a *lot* of drones, due to the very limited range of PDLCs. Also, a PDLC is pretty much as long as a pinnace, and that's just the cruiser-grade PDLCs - BC and above are going to be longer than the current size drones.

If you're using countermissiles, again, you'd need a *lot* of drones, because they can't carry all that many CMs due to their size (only slightly smaller than a pinnace - see my sig for an idea of how big a pinnace is at about 300 tons, as well as the size of various countermissiles).

Basically, to do what you suggest would require larger numbers of drones that have also increased in size by quite a bit.

For good defence in depth against the massive missile storms in modern naval combat (unless you're the ISLN), you need Katanas or other ships that can carry more than a couple CMs. Katanas mass just under 20k tons. Due to not exactly being hollow like a pinnace, I'd guess a drone masses about 500-700 tons.

The real world example is "why don't the special forces operating primarily as forward battlefield controlors (dudes with laser munitions designators) in faraway places like the Pakistani outback, Syria, Somalia, formerly Iraq and Afghanistan try to sneak in with "great big mortars" instead of infantry weapons. Detection.

I'm guessing that in short order ALL of the recon drones have been or will be are armed with multimegaton warheads. For the simple reason that they're being fired from multi-mission ships which don't come "over the hyper wall and then figure out which drone package to strap on to which "leetle eety beety stealthy" impeller drive.

Drones in station with ships can already be used to launch pods, but sending a recond drone down range towed pods would increase the required energy signature, ergo losing the stealth. The moment those ships detect any impellers, they bring up their countermeasures, and the drone and towed pods are moving so slow that they are toast. Aka not worth the risk of even trying it as a weapon system.

The only time the RMN has shown their hand with that stealth has been to try to whack SLN officers upside the head to force a surrender without having to blow up a bunch of starships and "innocent" crew members in the mean time. The fact that they COULD detonate those warheads on the recon drones offers no whack value, only kill value, and the RMN officers aren't just thuggish murdering killers.

Zavala told the SLN forces as much at Saltash and thereby save a certain percentage of their crews from the high speed missiles which they had no chance of stopping.

MaxxQ wrote:If you're using Point Defence clusters, you'd need a *lot* of drones, due to the very limited range of PDLCs. Also, a PDLC is pretty much as long as a pinnace, and that's just the cruiser-grade PDLCs - BC and above are going to be longer than the current size drones.

If you're using countermissiles, again, you'd need a *lot* of drones, because they can't carry all that many CMs due to their size (only slightly smaller than a pinnace - see my sig for an idea of how big a pinnace is at about 300 tons, as well as the size of various countermissiles).

Basically, to do what you suggest would require larger numbers of drones that have also increased in size by quite a bit.

For good defence in depth against the massive missile storms in modern naval combat (unless you're the ISLN), you need Katanas or other ships that can carry more than a couple CMs. Katanas mass just under 20k tons. Due to not exactly being hollow like a pinnace, I'd guess a drone masses about 500-700 tons.

You could have something like this built to replace one or more of the pinnaces in the boat bay. A waller with the fleet isn't going to be needing every pinnace too badly too often - you could swap in the "Auto-Pinnace Recon/Defense Platform" for one or two of the pinnaces in the boat bay and use them together as another layer of the LAC missile defense group, along with an extended range recon/attack system with or without the rest of the fleet. That latter may be more useful for cruisers and battlecruisers operating alone or in pairs way out wherever, though they may also feel the loss of a standard pinnace more.

Instead of Apollo missile carrying drones why not build one around a energy torpedo projector, if you had a dozen you could rip up anything not protected by a sidewall, not useful against haven sector ships with bow walls but the Sollies do not have bow walls and even with haven sector ships the bow wall is not up all of the time and recon drones are very fast by non-missile standards and so could easily be maneuvered into an easy down the throat shot probably killing or at least crippling the SD in question.

BrigadeΔ wrote:Instead of Apollo missile carrying drones why not build one around a energy torpedo projector, if you had a dozen you could rip up anything not protected by a sidewall, not useful against haven sector ships with bow walls but the Sollies do not have bow walls and even with haven sector ships the bow wall is not up all of the time and recon drones are very fast by non-missile standards and so could easily be maneuvered into an easy down the throat shot probably killing or at least crippling the SD in question.

David's been clear that you can't mount an energy torp projector on a drone, or a pinnace, or anything short of a real ship.

The plasma they fire is tapped from the reactor(s) of a full up starship. Even the microfusion plants in ghost rider drones don't generate anywhere near enough power (or plasma) to run an ET projector.

BrigadeΔ wrote:Instead of Apollo missile carrying drones why not build one around a energy torpedo projector, if you had a dozen you could rip up anything not protected by a sidewall, not useful against haven sector ships with bow walls but the Sollies do not have bow walls and even with haven sector ships the bow wall is not up all of the time and recon drones are very fast by non-missile standards and so could easily be maneuvered into an easy down the throat shot probably killing or at least crippling the SD in question.

A recon drone does not have the energy generation capacity to power a Point Defense Laser Cluster. Nor does it have the volume (tonnage) to mount it. And if it can't carry a PDLC (a defensive, lower power, less mass-intensive system), there is no way it can even mount, much less power an energy torpedo launcher.

Edit: Jonathan_S beat me to it. And the forum did not alert me to the fact at least on other post in the thread had been made, as it used to. Has anyone else noticed this behavior?