Future Point Defense Options

To bring back another tech based discussion there is a paragraph in A Rising Thunder which discusses the future need for new forms of point defense given the altered MDM environment:

Ultimately, if ships-of-the-wall weren't going to become simply very expensive target drones, they needed to begin intercepting missiles farther out, expand the fleets active interception envelope beyond the roughly 3.6 million kilometer reach of the current Mark 31 counter-missile. The problem was how to accomplish that. Pushing the perimeter LAC's farther out, getting those screening platforms deeper into the threat zone, was one approach, but what Honor really wanted was an organic ability for the wallers to extend their own intercept range. She and her staff had a few thoughts on how that might be accomplished, and she knew Sonja Hemphill was looking into the question as well, but for now, she had to fight with what she had, not what she'd like to have, which was why Eight fleets formation wasn't quite what The Book envisioned.

Lets have some ideas on how this could be achieved both in forms of the ship tactics (some of which the next paragraph discussed) and new forms of weapons/sensors/drones/ECM technology.

P.S. However lets leave out CM pods since they have been adequately discussed elsewhere.

Valen123456 wrote:To bring back another tech based discussion there is a paragraph in A Rising Thunder which discusses the future need for new forms of point defense given the altered MDM environment:

Ultimately, if ships-of-the-wall weren't going to become simply very expensive target drones, they needed to begin intercepting missiles farther out, expand the fleets active interception envelope beyond the roughly 3.6 million kilometer reach of the current Mark 31 counter-missile. The problem was how to accomplish that. Pushing the perimeter LAC's farther out, getting those screening platforms deeper into the threat zone, was one approach, but what Honor really wanted was an organic ability for the wallers to extend their own intercept range. She and her staff had a few thoughts on how that might be accomplished, and she knew Sonja Hemphill was looking into the question as well, but for now, she had to fight with what she had, not what she'd like to have, which was why Eight fleets formation wasn't quite what The Book envisioned.

Lets have some ideas on how this could be achieved both in forms of the ship tactics (some of which the next paragraph discussed) and new forms of weapons/sensors/drones/ECM technology.

P.S. However lets leave out CM pods since they have been adequately discussed elsewhere.

This will sound really weird, but it seems like a slow speed, close-in CM shell might work, let me explain: If each CM wedge is 1km wide, and the targeting aspect for a ship is less than that, the further the missile is from the defending ship, the smaller the angle that it is protecting from an attack missile's terminal manuevers.

It's a similar design as to LACs fitting into the wall of battle to form a good layer of protection, nothing can penetrate the wedge of the LAC. So an interlocking wedge design is much tighter than an SD wall can create.

Thoughts?

SharkHunter wrote:This will sound really weird, but it seems like a slow speed, close-in CM shell might work, let me explain: If each CM wedge is 1km wide, and the targeting aspect for a ship is less than that, the further the missile is from the defending ship, the smaller the angle that it is protecting from an attack missile's terminal manuevers.

It's a similar design as to LACs fitting into the wall of battle to form a good layer of protection, nothing can penetrate the wedge of the LAC. So an interlocking wedge design is much tighter than an SD wall can create.

Thoughts?

A couple points. First, a counter-missile wedge is 10 km wide. Second, the targeting aspect for a ship is around 100-300 km wide, at the edge of its wedge.

That said, there is some merit to the idea. But you don't want "slow counter-missiles", you want drones. This idea has been proposed before on this forum--a shell of drones with overlapping wedges which rotate like vent vanes to block incoming shot and allow outgoing shots. There are significant technical difficulties with it, including timing rotations and coordinating the drones to match vectors, especially when the drones are wedge-on to their ship. The arguments on both sides have been fierce.

The Andermani used something similar recently to block attacks from a mine field.

I would point out that this does not actually meet the question in the original post, since this is not point-defense. But the original poster might accept the expansion of the question.

Valen123456 wrote:To bring back another tech based discussion there is a paragraph in A Rising Thunder which discusses the future need for new forms of point defense given the altered MDM environment:

Ultimately, if ships-of-the-wall weren't going to become simply very expensive target drones, they needed to begin intercepting missiles farther out, expand the fleets active interception envelope beyond the roughly 3.6 million kilometer reach of the current Mark 31 counter-missile. The problem was how to accomplish that. Pushing the perimeter LAC's farther out, getting those screening platforms deeper into the threat zone, was one approach, but what Honor really wanted was an organic ability for the wallers to extend their own intercept range. She and her staff had a few thoughts on how that might be accomplished, and she knew Sonja Hemphill was looking into the question as well, but for now, she had to fight with what she had, not what she'd like to have, which was why Eight fleets formation wasn't quite what The Book envisioned.

Lets have some ideas on how this could be achieved both in forms of the ship tactics (some of which the next paragraph discussed) and new forms of weapons/sensors/drones/ECM technology.

P.S. However lets leave out CM pods since they have been adequately discussed elsewhere.

We have had several discussions about the future of defenses here on the forum.

What 'hunter and SWM have described, I call Tortuga drones; They are designed to let you "turtle up" when a large wave is incoming. Some counters to the systems and issues with it are fairly obvious, but it is better than a x-ray laser in the head.

There are also Naginata drones that are basically unmanned Katanas with a high level AI, FTL comms tying them into the tactical net, and loads of CMs. The fact they are unmanned would let you get something like 5000 g's accel from them, and make it less of an issue if (when) you lose some. The problem is they would probably need a CLAC to drag them around, rather than having them as "an organic ability for the wallers."

My personal favorite, and germane to your question, is a longer legged CM with a grav receiver instead of a laser receiver. The problem with current gen CM's is that by the time they are at max range, (about 3 Million KM,) they don't do much good because of the long control loop. The reason the ACM is so large is because it has to fit in a receiver and a transmitter that operate over light minutes. I have a feeling that if you only include a receiver that is only designed to operate up to a range of about 5 MKM, you could make it about the same size, or only a little bigger, as current CMs. It would make the control loop at 5 MKM shorter than current loops are at 3 MKM. (About 17 seconds vs 20, respectively.)

SWM wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:This will sound really weird, but it seems like a slow speed, close-in CM shell might work, let me explain: If each CM wedge is 1km wide, and the targeting aspect for a ship is less than that, the further the missile is from the defending ship, the smaller the angle that it is protecting from an attack missile's terminal manuevers.

It's a similar design as to LACs fitting into the wall of battle to form a good layer of protection, nothing can penetrate the wedge of the LAC. So an interlocking wedge design is much tighter than an SD wall can create.

Thoughts?

A couple points. First, a counter-missile wedge is 10 km wide. Second, the targeting aspect for a ship is around 100-300 km wide, at the edge of its wedge.

That said, there is some merit to the idea. But you don't want "slow counter-missiles", you want drones. This idea has been proposed before on this forum--a shell of drones with overlapping wedges which rotate like vent vanes to block incoming shot and allow outgoing shots. There are significant technical difficulties with it, including timing rotations and coordinating the drones to match vectors, especially when the drones are wedge-on to their ship. The arguments on both sides have been fierce.

The Andermani used something similar recently to block attacks from a mine field.

I would point out that this does not actually meet the question in the original post, since this is not point-defense. But the original poster might accept the expansion of the question.

Indeed he might

What I think your both describing is a sort of missile salvo sweeper that is used to breakup the incoming wave and so soften it for the remaining more traditional point defense. These would be more like drones than counter-missiles and would be spread out in front or around a wall-of-battle either deployed by the screen or moving in stealth under their own power. They remain in hiding between the two forces, then when the enemy opens fire they fire-up a large net of interwoven, overlapping impeller wedges that then advances slowly (compared to missiles) as a massive screen sweeping up the missile salvo potentially millions of kilometers ahead of a normal defense perimeter.

This method would be slow to setup admittedly; all the "sweeper drones" would probably be lost in the wedge on wedge fratricide; they effectively blind both sides unless you have remotes that are watching "around" the wedge net, and would not be deployed via missile tubes. However I could see this being a good defensive tactic in full scale fleet battles when you have the time to set up while the fleets maneuver into position.

Valen123456 wrote:To bring back another tech based discussion there is a paragraph in A Rising Thunder which discusses the future need for new forms of point defense given the altered MDM environment:

Ultimately, if ships-of-the-wall weren't going to become simply very expensive target drones, they needed to begin intercepting missiles farther out, expand the fleets active interception envelope beyond the roughly 3.6 million kilometer reach of the current Mark 31 counter-missile. The problem was how to accomplish that. Pushing the perimeter LAC's farther out, getting those screening platforms deeper into the threat zone, was one approach, but what Honor really wanted was an organic ability for the wallers to extend their own intercept range. She and her staff had a few thoughts on how that might be accomplished, and she knew Sonja Hemphill was looking into the question as well, but for now, she had to fight with what she had, not what she'd like to have, which was why Eight fleets formation wasn't quite what The Book envisioned.

Lets have some ideas on how this could be achieved both in forms of the ship tactics (some of which the next paragraph discussed) and new forms of weapons/sensors/drones/ECM technology.

P.S. However lets leave out CM pods since they have been adequately discussed elsewhere.

crewdude48 wrote:
We have had several discussions about the future of defenses here on the forum.

What 'hunter and SWM have described, I call Tortuga drones; They are designed to let you "turtle up" when a large wave is incoming. Some counters to the systems and issues with it are fairly obvious, but it is better than a x-ray laser in the head.

There are also Naginata drones that are basically unmanned Katanas with a high level AI, FTL comms tying them into the tactical net, and loads of CMs. The fact they are unmanned would let you get something like 5000 g's accel from them, and make it less of an issue if (when) you lose some. The problem is they would probably need a CLAC to drag them around, rather than having them as "an organic ability for the wallers."

My personal favorite, and germane to your question, is a longer legged CM with a grav receiver instead of a laser receiver. The problem with current gen CM's is that by the time they are at max range, (about 3 Million KM,) they don't do much good because of the long control loop. The reason the ACM is so large is because it has to fit in a receiver and a transmitter that operate over light minutes. I have a feeling that if you only include a receiver that is only designed to operate up to a range of about 5 MKM, you could make it about the same size, or only a little bigger, as current CMs. It would make the control loop at 5 MKM shorter than current loops are at 3 MKM. (About 17 seconds vs 20, respectively.)

Alternatively you might go with a variant of the Apollo missile - a singel larger CM missile that locally controls a raft of CM missiles. The larger missile has FTL communication, the raft of conventional missiles do not.

crewdude48 wrote:We have had several discussions about the future of defenses here on the forum.

What 'hunter and SWM have described, I call Tortuga drones; They are designed to let you "turtle up" when a large wave is incoming. Some counters to the systems and issues with it are fairly obvious, but it is better than a x-ray laser in the head.

There are also Naginata drones that are basically unmanned Katanas with a high level AI, FTL comms tying them into the tactical net, and loads of CMs. The fact they are unmanned would let you get something like 5000 g's accel from them, and make it less of an issue if (when) you lose some. The problem is they would probably need a CLAC to drag them around, rather than having them as "an organic ability for the wallers."

My personal favorite, and germane to your question, is a longer legged CM with a grav receiver instead of a laser receiver. The problem with current gen CM's is that by the time they are at max range, (about 3 Million KM,) they don't do much good because of the long control loop. The reason the ACM is so large is because it has to fit in a receiver and a transmitter that operate over light minutes. I have a feeling that if you only include a receiver that is only designed to operate up to a range of about 5 MKM, you could make it about the same size, or only a little bigger, as current CMs. It would make the control loop at 5 MKM shorter than current loops are at 3 MKM. (About 17 seconds vs 20, respectively.)

Thanks for the well thought out answer, its always great when you have a reply when the respond-er has sat down and thought out all the pros and cons of a technical solution and even given it a code name of their own.

I opened a convo a while back about attack drones of several varieties, some of which seemed feasible to people here, and some less so. But I still think that the future for many Honorverse weapons and defenses is going to be integrating them into drones or remote platforms of some variety. With the development and inevitable refinement of the FTL comm you have solved most of the range and lag-time problems and so could attack and defend from greater ranges without endangering larger forces.

Just look at what satellite and remote arrays have done for our own technology in this day and age. The FTL comm can achieve many of the same things on great spacial scales the Honorverse works on.

--snipping--

Valen123456 wrote:What I think your both describing is a sort of missile salvo sweeper that is used to breakup the incoming wave and so soften it for the remaining more traditional point defense. These would be more like drones than counter-missiles and would be spread out in front or around a wall-of-battle either deployed by the screen or moving in stealth under their own power. They remain in hiding between the two forces, then when the enemy opens fire they fire-up a large net of interwoven, overlapping impeller wedges that then advances slowly (compared to missiles) as a massive screen sweeping up the missile salvo potentially millions of kilometers ahead of a normal defense perimeter.

Distinctively the opposite of what I am thinking of. The necessity of putting the counter missiles between oncoming attack missiles combined with defending ships under maneuver make deploying a large enough globe of CMs at super-extended distances unwieldy if not impossible.

I'd want the "slow CM's" forming a disk as close to the ship's 'walls and unprotected spaces as I could possibly launch them in sequence, because an attack missile has maybe 1/10th of a second at high fractions of C before it's out of range. Keep in mind the ship knows where it is inside the wall and wedge, the attack missiles don't, so it doesn't require 100% coverage, just "attack angle coverage".

SharkHunter wrote:Distinctively the opposite of what I am thinking of. The necessity of putting the counter missiles between oncoming attack missiles combined with defending ships under maneuver make deploying a large enough globe of CMs at super-extended distances unwieldy if not impossible.

I'd want the "slow CM's" forming a disk as close to the ship's 'walls and unprotected spaces as I could possibly launch them in sequence, because an attack missile has maybe 1/10th of a second at high fractions of C before it's out of range. Keep in mind the ship knows where it is inside the wall and wedge, the attack missiles don't, so it doesn't require 100% coverage, just "attack angle coverage".

Either you have FTL RD's or you do not.

If you have FTL RD's you know how many incoming and exactly where the missiles are in real time. Well 62X c "real-time", or close enough as one gets. Therefore all CM's launched have homing solutions. Depending on what interval you place your FTL relay RD's to CM's, the time delay varies accordingly.

What is TRUE is that the further out one wishes to interdict the missiles, the total number of FTL RD's becomes a burden. Then again, you do not need an even globe. It is after all why you have scout FTL RD's. You know the threat axis. We know at 5000g, an RD can move ~6.5Mkm at a "typical" launch distance of 6minutes of flight. MDM's have 9minutes of flight, so you noticed I rounded down just for ease of manipulating numbers for a "rough" number.

Time required for an offensive missile to move 6.5Mkm laterally depends entirely upon ones assumptions of its throat opening angle. RFC has stated that the throat sensors must hold lock, must be pointed, at ships at all times. From wedge geometry pearls, a ships throat opening is about 60 degrees(+-30deg) and changes via differing acceleration states. Who knows what a missiles wedge angle is. Could be huge, or tiny in comparison. If 30 Degrees ability to create lateral distance of 6.5Mkm, an MDM would have to turn back toward its target ~160s, out.

You will note MDM's have 3 stages of 180s and I only used 2 stages of 180s of "time" for the RD's to react. This aligns perfectly with the calculated 30 degree change of vector of 160s. At a 160s out, this distance is equivalent to 30Mkm. Somehow I highly doubt they will even bother with CM's this long legged. The CM's effectively would have to be the same size as a DDM!

In short, RD's at only 5000g's, RMN RD's can accelerate faster than this but lose stealth, can easily shadow any delta dodge vector from the MDM. Therefore any long legged, even DDM, long legged CM's can be homed onto MDM's via FTL RD's

In short: You do not need a gigantic globe of RD's. You need a swarm of RD's at distinct intervals so the data transmitted to the CM's is only ~1s old, 2s old, etc depending on interval banding of the RD's talking to CM's in question. At 1s or 2s old "info", Cm's have very high interception rates.

***** Lets play SOLON *****
Ships hyper in on your rear 30,000,000km. Your ships only have a few RD's back there. They start rolling pods for a nice FAT salvo.
Takes em a ~4minutes(4*60/12*6)=120pods.
Flight time ~6minutes.
When they hyper in you see total number of point sources, you immediately launch RD's. They have 10,000gs accel without stealth, 5000g with stealth. How far out do they get? Will start by using the 4 minutes + 1st stage of MDM, or at current tech 1/2 drive time required to kill your ships.

D(5000g) = 1/2*5000*10*(4*60+180)^2
D(5000g) = 4.4Mkm
D(10,000g) = 8.8Mkm

Have time to spare, so in reality is around 6Mkm and 11Mkm respectively.

If pods are all tractored in across the hyper wall, wait for light speed data of your enemy(2min)

Drops to 2(60)+180 = 300s
D5000g = 2.25Mkm
Refine: as additional flight time remains. +280 = 400s
D5000g = 4Mkm

In short: Can have FTL RD CM vector information for current generation CM's at maximum range +++ even for a hyper in behind scenario like Solon.

*** Note I specifically rounded all numbers down that would help increase the FTL RD's ROP(radius of Operations) ***

Simply using existing FTL RD's to broadcast using their light speed transmitters as CM vector middlemen is imminently feasible and practical under even harsh "surprise" situations like Solon. The only question is: Can ships carry enough RD's. Broadcasting vector information does not require didlee in bandwidth. One RD could effectively cover a sphere one light second in diameter for thousands of CM's with MDM vector data updates multiple times a second. Of course as soon as they do broadcast, they also become targets. Need overlapping redundancy, keeping the MDM's from knowing where data is coming from.

Lets do an RD count if 1 RD = 1 spherical ls.

Above, just got done analyzing that RD's can simply shadow MDM's. Thus a solid cone is not needed. Rather

RD #'s = (distance/Interval)*MDM/RDperMDM*Redundancy

Lets just say RDperMDM is 1RD/1000MDM, This is absurdly low, but hey, DW has monstorous computers, so why not purposely throw out basic radio bandwidth physics as well...

Interval = 1ls so oldest data is 1s old, so distance between RD's is 2ls, 600,000km.

Total number of shells required for current CM's is 3.75Mkm/600,000km = 6 shells.

So, if under 1000 missiles incoming, require 6 RD's for at worst, 1s old data and no redundancy.

This is easily doable.

There is no reason for the missiles to be locked on all the time. Hell, they can't even SEE the target at max range. And the text contradicts the idea that they are locked during launch and midrange flight. For example, BoM, the 8th fleet Apollo salvo at 5th. If the missiles had target acquisition and required it to attack they would have been expected to use RCS to maintain this during the ballistic phase. Instead the presumably competent 5th fleet staff was absolutely certain, presumably based on their professional and detailed understanding of how missiles work in the honorverse, that moving out of the projected path would prevent target acquisition - which means they knew it was not possible the missiles had target acquisition at that range.

So no, the way you bypass all these cute midrange ideas is by sending the missiles several million KM out of the direct path, far enough to evade CMs from something on the direct path. The counter to this requires something that accelerates at roughly missile velocity and can produce a midrange intercept, out in the 6M or greater KM range. If you can intercept at tens of millions of KM with this then you can produce layers of attrition on incoming missiles. That works best with FTL command links, but could work without them too.