Forcing a Roland to withdraw...

fallsfromtrees wrote:You are going to have an armed missile return to the mother ship? Sounds like a way to have a serious accident. Either you are going to have to have a way to disable the missile before you tell it to return, which means that if the manties learn how that is done, they get to turn off your entire attack, or you have to have way to tell the missiles to return to momma without being disarmed, which also allows the manties to foil your attack, and if you aren't expecting it, possibly lead to the destruction of the mothership, and given the stealthy nature of your missiles, makes it difficult to find them afterward, or you have a way of telling the missiles to make themselves known, which can be used to make them visible for destruction during the attack. Anything which allows you to send a signal to modify the behavior of the missiles becomes a way for the manties to use that same signal to foil the attack.

Golly Gee Whiz, lets wring our hands. Oh my, oh dear me, how can we possibly talk to our missiles that is uncrackable for disablement? Uh, duh, one time stamp or several one time stamps that are time sensitive.

You do not need to worry about missiles being "hacked" in the Honorverse unless one ascribes to being able to send a doppler compensated scaled frequency out. Possible, just not probable. After this technical hurdle has been solved, then and only then, can one try to start actually "cracking". Of course we are talking a stealthed drone/missile, so the bad guys have no clue what velocity or acceleration profile to use in order to create the false doppler wave form!

Besides, the RMN FUSION powered drones return to ship and their exploding core would do plenty of damage... RMN hasn't been wringing their hands about their RD's being Hacked when returning to their ship.

It's capacitor-fed so no exploding if you don't want it to. Unless you're claiming the warhead itself is a danger - in which case the manty SDs with their 10.000+ onboard warheads would have a much higher problem than a battlecruiser with a measly 2700 missiles.



I was wrong on their endurance though; 3 days is for manty drones. Anyone have the endurance for Sollie drones instead?

Belial666 wrote:It's capacitor-fed so no exploding if you don't want it to. Unless you're claiming the warhead itself is a danger - in which case the manty SDs with their 10.000+ onboard warheads would have a much higher problem than a battlecruiser with a measly 2700 missiles.



I was wrong on their endurance though; 3 days is for manty drones. Anyone have the endurance for Sollie drones instead?

No numbers given to us, but the performance levels of SLN drones are really bad:

A Rising Thunder, Chapter 21 wrote:The really tricky part of the timing, however, had focused on the recon drones, and she'd had better numbers to work with there. Without Ghost Rider's onboard fusion plants, Solarian reconnaissance platforms had both lower acceleration rates and--compared to their Manticoran counterpart--pitiful endurance. Five thousand gravities was about the best they could turn out, and they couldn't maintain even that power level for very long. On the other hand, Operation Raging Justice obviously contemplated a very . . . direct approach to its objectives. Filareta wasn't going to need a lot of dwell time out of his reconnaissance shell, and he probably had more than enough platforms to replenish it if he really needed to, anyway.

Boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

I submit that the above quote makes the idea of a Nevada equipped with missiles with drones as the first of 2 stages (second stage a normal missile drive) a complete nonstarter. Even the RMN would have problems making it work, as the Ghost Rider drones are so large as to require deploying them from the boat bays instead of being fired from the missile tubes (unlike the Ghost Rider decoys, which can be fired from the missile tubes--see the Battle of Elric in chapter 26 of Ashes of Victory).

Vince wrote:

Belial666 wrote:It's capacitor-fed so no exploding if you don't want it to. Unless you're claiming the warhead itself is a danger - in which case the manty SDs with their 10.000+ onboard warheads would have a much higher problem than a battlecruiser with a measly 2700 missiles.



I was wrong on their endurance though; 3 days is for manty drones. Anyone have the endurance for Sollie drones instead?

No numbers given to us, but the performance levels of SLN drones are really bad:

A Rising Thunder, Chapter 21 wrote:The really tricky part of the timing, however, had focused on the recon drones, and she'd had better numbers to work with there. Without Ghost Rider's onboard fusion plants, Solarian reconnaissance platforms had both lower acceleration rates and--compared to their Manticoran counterpart--pitiful endurance. Five thousand gravities was about the best they could turn out, and they couldn't maintain even that power level for very long. On the other hand, Operation Raging Justice obviously contemplated a very . . . direct approach to its objectives. Filareta wasn't going to need a lot of dwell time out of his reconnaissance shell, and he probably had more than enough platforms to replenish it if he really needed to, anyway.

Boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

I submit that the above quote makes the idea of a Nevada equipped with missiles with drones as the first of 2 stages (second stage a normal missile drive) a complete nonstarter. Even the RMN would have problems making it work, as the Ghost Rider drones are so large as to require deploying them from the boat bays instead of being fired from the missile tubes (unlike the Ghost Rider decoys, which can be fired from the missile tubes--see the Battle of Elric in chapter 26 of Ashes of Victory).

But that fact that Ghost Rider drones have to be deployed from boat bays does not mean that Solarian ones do. The presence of the fusion bottle may well require a much larger platform, sufficiently that it pushes it out of the missile tube into the boat bay.

fallsfromtrees wrote:But that fact that Ghost Rider drones have to be deployed from boat bays does not mean that Solarian ones do. The presence of the fusion bottle may well require a much larger platform, sufficiently that it pushes it out of the missile tube into the boat bay.

It's been stated since OBS that drones deploy from Boatbays. Ghost Rider has nothing to do with it - in fact some of the children of Ghost Rider WERE a drone which could deploy from Shrike LAC missile tubes and an ECM decoy which deployed from SD tubes. This was a big deal at the time (<1915), so I'd expect it to be a big deal to the Solarians as well.

Theemile wrote:It's been stated since OBS that drones deploy from Boatbays. Ghost Rider has nothing to do with it - in fact some of the children of Ghost Rider WERE a drone which could deploy from Shrike LAC missile tubes and an ECM decoy which deployed from SD tubes. This was a big deal at the time (<1915), so I'd expect it to be a big deal to the Solarians as well.

I'd missed the part where drones deployed from boat bays - I stand corrected. I suppose I was remembering that in OBS, missiles were being modified to act as drones to extend coverage so that one ship could cover the system to some extent, and of course in SoS, a drone was launched from a merchant ship cargo bay, emptying through the rear of the wedge.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Theemile wrote:It's been stated since OBS that drones deploy from Boatbays. Ghost Rider has nothing to do with it - in fact some of the children of Ghost Rider WERE a drone which could deploy from Shrike LAC missile tubes and an ECM decoy which deployed from SD tubes. This was a big deal at the time (<1915), so I'd expect it to be a big deal to the Solarians as well.

I'd missed the part where drones deployed from boat bays - I stand corrected. I suppose I was remembering that in OBS, missiles were being modified to act as drones to extend coverage so that one ship could cover the system to some extent, and of course in SoS, a drone was launched from a merchant ship cargo bay, emptying through the rear of the wedge.

I believe missile maneuvering packs were being used as the basis of the off the cuff drones.

And important thing to remember here is a point that has come up Multiple times over the years - a drone is not a drone is not a drone.... Simply a "Drone" is a reference to a member of a family of autonomous "long lasting" space devices with sensors and comm equipment, and sometimes propulsion. Some are larger, some are smaller. Comparing even similiar teched drones will give you a large varity of shapes and sizes.

The RMN's system arrays (not to be confused with a system Grav array) were really large drones which had long endurance and gave great coverage of a system. The units Honor had Dominica make in OBS were sensor buoys - quite small and limited in capability and movement, but able to be made and deployed in large numbers - to give basic coverage of a system.

The average Boat Bay drone is roughly between 250 and 300 tons. This is the size of a standard recon drone or a Missile Toe drone, or a ship borne Hermes buoy. They may all be related (maybe to the point where they share the same chassis and propulsion system), but not all those capabilities are found in one shipborne set. Hermes Buoys do not have a Missile Toe's 500 MT warhead, and a Missile Toe drone has to sacrifice some of a basic Drone's sensors (or else it has to be on a larger chassis) to incorporate the warhead.

So even if the SLN has a missile tube launched drone (which, as we've seen, is a technical possibility), it will be far less capable than a larger boat bay launched one of the same technology - and every one of those boat bay drones may have far different capabilities.

fallsfromtrees wrote:But that fact that Ghost Rider drones have to be deployed from boat bays does not mean that Solarian ones do. The presence of the fusion bottle may well require a much larger platform, sufficiently that it pushes it out of the missile tube into the boat bay.

No, recon drones and Mk16/23s all use the same fusion reactor.

On the original question,I seem to remember that most of the Rolands going on independent missions in recent books are covered in pods increasing their armament significantly.

rafael wrote:On the original question,I seem to remember that most of the Rolands going on independent missions in recent books are covered in pods increasing their armament significantly.

Um ... Saltash. How many pods were used there?

Just saying,
T2M