ERIM

crewdude48 wrote:Personally, I suspect that it would be possible, using current Manticoran tech, to extend the ranges of CMs to upwards of 5 Mkm without to much more work or upsizing them to badly, and with out the need to initialize a second wedge. However, at that point (again according to David Weber) the light speed delay of information from the ship to the missile will be just too long for the missile to be effective enough to bother using.

Theemile wrote:MaxXQ weighed in on this old topic about a year ago. There's insufficient room to fit more than 1 CM in the warhead space on Missiles. Multiple CMs can fit in an unpowered CANISTER (a missile sized plastic/foam sabot holding several CMs which breaks away after the CMs have passed throuigh the Side walls), but the power and drive systems on a Missile take up too much space for multiple CMs to fit in - even in MDMs.

BrigadeΔ wrote:What about if you took a last gen. Capital ship single drive missile, stacked a couple of CM's on top of it with thrusters to push them away so there is no wedge interference and stuff the assembly into a missule pod or missile tube designed for an MDM, the MDM missile body is much bigger then the SDM missile body giving you space in the tubes, you could probably do the same thing with MK 16's and MK 50's. You could use apollo drones possibly with some modifications to provide control links positioning them 9 million kilometers out and maybe 150,000 to 300,000 kilometers off the missile flight leading to 1 to 1.5 seconds of one way control link delay and sensors within 1 light second.

crewdude48 wrote:

exiledtoIA wrote:Brigade and JeffEngle: Have you been hacking into classified document storage again.
You have just revealed the basics of the Atl-Atl system.
A standard Apollo pod with the warheads removed and ERIM's replacing them.
As for the pearls....
At one time it was impossible to build a DualDrive Missile. Why can't two or more Countermissile drives be fitted onto one frame? It would be bigger than a standard CM but hey aren't the 16's and 23's bigger than the missiles preceeding them?

It wouldn't be hard at all to fit a two CM drives onto something the size of a current CM. The problem would be also including capacitors big enough to power the second stage. The most energy intensive part of using an impeller drive is initial drive activation. after it is activated, it draws a huge amount of its power out of hyperspace or something like that. (RFC has said so.) The reason that the first generation MDMs were so much bigger than old school SDMs was due to the larger capacitor rings more than anything else.

Personally, I suspect that it would be possible, using current Manticoran tech, to extend the ranges of CMs to upwards of 5 Mkm without to much more work or upsizing them to badly, and with out the need to initialize a second wedge. However, at that point (again according to David Weber) the light speed delay of information from the ship to the missile will be just too long for the missile to be effective enough to bother using. Due to the extreme speed and maneuverability of their targets, CMs need more hand holding than attack missiles do. The acceleration differential between attack missiles and CMs is so very much smaller than the difference between target ships and attack missiles after all.

That is why I suspect that the next evolution in active defense will be the above mentioned 5 Mkm CM with a very simple gravity receiver in the aft end. This will allow a shorter two way control loop at 5 Mkm than current CMs at their 3 Mkm range. These, coupled with the Naginata drones some forumites have developed, would be a huge boon to fleet defense.

MaxxQ wrote:

BrigadeΔ wrote:What about if you took a last gen. Capital ship single drive missile, stacked a couple of CM's on top of it with thrusters to push them away so there is no wedge interference and stuff the assembly into a missule pod or missile tube designed for an MDM, the MDM missile body is much bigger then the SDM missile body giving you space in the tubes, you could probably do the same thing with MK 16's and MK 50's. You could use apollo drones possibly with some modifications to provide control links positioning them 9 million kilometers out and maybe 150,000 to 300,000 kilometers off the missile flight leading to 1 to 1.5 seconds of one way control link delay and sensors within 1 light second.

Won't work. Clearance for missiles between the missile body and the inner wall of the missile tube is only a centimeter or two. Otherwise, one could fire smaller missiles from larger tubes, and that doesn't happen - missile tubes are designed to fit closely around the missile they are designed to launch, with tight tolerances.

I have some older art with a missile that is a few cm smaller in diameter than another. They both use the same tube because there's a sleeve attached to the smaller diameter missile to bring at least the center section *up* to the same size as the other missile.

WilliamHall wrote:I wonder if a possible improvement could be found using somewhat unrelated improvements. Like the general ideas behind Forrakers donkey. Beamed power to tractored PDCs? Move the last ditch defense systems out from the ships?

The E wrote:

WilliamHall wrote:I wonder if a possible improvement could be found using somewhat unrelated improvements. Like the general ideas behind Forrakers donkey. Beamed power to tractored PDCs? Move the last ditch defense systems out from the ships?

Yes, a platform that sits outside of the wedge and which can carry a useful amount of PDLCs is a great idea.

And while you're at it, you can stuff fire control links and sensors on it, which would allow you to look and shoot past your wedge while rolled on the side relative to the target.

I think "Keyhole" would be a good name for it, right?

(The problem is that I think increasing the last-ditch defences is reaching diminishing returns; Every piece of defensive tech you mount on the ships decreases the amount of offensive equipment it can carry. The way forward seems to be to push the defensive perimeter outward, and towed platforms like Donkeys or Keyhole just can't get an amount of separation from their motherships that is aiding in that regard)

JeffEngel wrote:

The E wrote:
Yes, a platform that sits outside of the wedge and which can carry a useful amount of PDLCs is a great idea.

And while you're at it, you can stuff fire control links and sensors on it, which would allow you to look and shoot past your wedge while rolled on the side relative to the target.

I think "Keyhole" would be a good name for it, right?

(The problem is that I think increasing the last-ditch defences is reaching diminishing returns; Every piece of defensive tech you mount on the ships decreases the amount of offensive equipment it can carry. The way forward seems to be to push the defensive perimeter outward, and towed platforms like Donkeys or Keyhole just can't get an amount of separation from their motherships that is aiding in that regard)

Offenses have jumped up by leaps and bounds. Destroyers are killing battlecruisers, quickly. It's really quite all right to decrease offensive capability quite a bit for more defenses, if you can get a good enough deal on the exchange.

But that's the rub - the extreme missile ranges have come to mean a long while to see the threat coming and only a tiny amount of time to do stuff about it, because the active "hard" defenses - the ones that straight-up kill the incoming missiles - have limited range and the missiles cross that range so quickly.

Keyhole systems do help. Longer ranged CM's do too. Less dependent CM's would. And an anti-missile screen - nowadays, LAC's, Katanas better than anything else - gives you more interception opportunities. But maybe the defensive deal would be better with more "soft" defenses - decoys and ECM that send missiles out against things other than their proper targets. The short engagement time and longer observation time would respectively not hinder and actively assist that form of defense, and in a way, the way Keyhole developed sort of drew off work on better decoys. It'd be good to get back on that.