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Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3

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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by pappilon   » Fri Sep 29, 2017 5:30 am

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n7axw wrote:Define conventional forces please. Not everybody is talking about the same thing.

Don

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I am assuming non-alligned worlds riding in the shell with basically a LAC force for pirate suppression and customs ie NO hyper-capable warships. You know, the ones a smart BF admiral could actually defeat, the one that would have to resort to unconventional warfare. Without Hyper capable ships they don't have missiles, Tac officers, some fire control to put on your freighter. no launchers to launch the missiles they do not have. The ones the Mandarins do not want to encourage to build SDFs capable of defending themselves against BF.

Or are we talking about someone like Mesa or Yildun?
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The imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.
Ursula K. LeGuinn

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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by WLBjork   » Fri Sep 29, 2017 2:39 pm

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kzt wrote:It’s a fairly trivial trick to build a interferometer out of a bunch of missiles and have that feedback into the missiles guidance. Each salvo will form a 2d array with the pointy end toward the enemy with at least 15km between them, so they can all not collide, see the enemy, and talk to the controlling ship. So an array of transceivers on the flanks would work fine. Even with the missiles rotating you’ll get enough traffic through at the hundreds of km range to be able to very effectively communicate. The fact that nobody did it speaks more the the lack of motivation by the SLN to improve weapons rather then the inherent difficulties.


No-one else did this either, which suggests more that there wasn't enough of an advantage to doing so. I'd bet that the ability of the Apollo Control Missile to reduce bandwidth by processing the images *plus* the higher quality sensors Manticore has access to (remember the comments about the quality of the recon drone sensors). Oh, and the shorter range the SDMs are operating at - would this offer a significant upgrade over shipboard sensors?
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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by Theemile   » Fri Sep 29, 2017 3:53 pm

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pappilon wrote:
n7axw wrote:Define conventional forces please. Not everybody is talking about the same thing.

Don

-


I am assuming non-alligned worlds riding in the shell with basically a LAC force for pirate suppression and customs ie NO hyper-capable warships. You know, the ones a smart BF admiral could actually defeat, the one that would have to resort to unconventional warfare. Without Hyper capable ships they don't have missiles, Tac officers, some fire control to put on your freighter. no launchers to launch the missiles they do not have. The ones the Mandarins do not want to encourage to build SDFs capable of defending themselves against BF.

Or are we talking about someone like Mesa or Yildun?


One item to remember is that Missiles are EXPENSIVE. During the build-up years, Manticore spent as much for the missiles in the magazine as the they spent for the SD/DN they were arming.

While the war was on, Missiles became a lot cheaper as they were built in mass and ways were found to lower the production cost/complexity, but not by THAT much. But that is only for Manticore, Grayson and Haven. For everyone else, they are still very expensive.

For system X to fill a 4 Mton's freighter full of missile pods, you are talking about the loadout of 2 SD(p)'s. If you cannot afford to field 1 SD, you are not going to field enough missiles to purchase one and arm it all on your own.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by pappilon   » Fri Sep 29, 2017 7:53 pm

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Theemile wrote:
pappilon wrote:
I am assuming non-alligned worlds riding in the shell with basically a LAC force for pirate suppression and customs ie NO hyper-capable warships. You know, the ones a smart BF admiral could actually defeat, the one that would have to resort to unconventional warfare. Without Hyper capable ships they don't have missiles, Tac officers, some fire control to put on your freighter. no launchers to launch the missiles they do not have. The ones the Mandarins do not want to encourage to build SDFs capable of defending themselves against BF.

Or are we talking about someone like Mesa or Yildun?


One item to remember is that Missiles are EXPENSIVE. During the build-up years, Manticore spent as much for the missiles in the magazine as the they spent for the SD/DN they were arming.

While the war was on, Missiles became a lot cheaper as they were built in mass and ways were found to lower the production cost/complexity, but not by THAT much. But that is only for Manticore, Grayson and Haven. For everyone else, they are still very expensive.

For system X to fill a 4 Mton's freighter full of missile pods, you are talking about the loadout of 2 SD(p)'s. If you cannot afford to field 1 SD, you are not going to field enough missiles to purchase one and arm it all on your own.


I was thinking a system like Zunker. Entire fleet of 5 LACs. They don't have missile manufacturing capability or R&D capability to develop pods. They are nominally independent, nominally in possession of a WHJ.

O fcourse, Zunker is not a good candidate for this warfare because they are nominally under the protection of the SEM and the detachment there to secure the WHJ.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.
Ursula K. LeGuinn

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Fri Sep 29, 2017 8:09 pm

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kzt wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:You're assuming no midcourse correction.

Consider a bombardment missile: It's a lot larger than a conventional missile but mounts only reaction thrusters, no wedge. It's employed only in c-frac attacks. It attempts to function as a contact nuke but has a laser head in case it misses.

Against a ship it would be useless. Against a base not at red alert it probably would get through. It's got a map of it's target system and keeps adjusting it's course, you don't need a bazillion zeroes of accuracy at launch.


The midcourse burn capability of the average rock is 0mm/sec. And I was replying to a discussion of rocks.


I was looking at a c-frac with a "missile" mounting only reaction thrusters for course correction. Since detection is based on the drive unless it happened to pass very close to a ship (quite unlikely) it should get very close indeed before it's seen. From the Cerberus battle we saw that ships should be able to be picked up at a million km. But the missile is closing at .8c, it's chasing it's own signal. The radar return arrives when it's 200,000km out--about .66 seconds. That only alerts the computer that there's something out there, it has to wait for the next pulse to have enough data to have the slightest chance of being able to shoot, but I'll ignore that. At least with modern military stuff search radar isn't good enough to shoot with, especially since it's already passed the countermissile envelope, you'll have to use the lasers and they need a direct hit. Now you use your targeting radar. The pulse goes out when it's 200 kkm out. The pulse meets it when it's 111kkm out. The return from that pulse reaches the ship when it's 22.2kkm out--already within laser head range. Thus laser heads simply can't be stopped by the target.

On the other hand, if it's targeting is good enough it could hold off and try to ram. Sure, it's giving the defender the best shot--but an abysmal tracking situation and less than a tenth of a second to do it in--and even if you do manage to put a laser into it do you stop it?

I would think the only defenses would be for it to run into a wedge or for some outlying defender to spot it and engage.
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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by kzt   » Fri Sep 29, 2017 8:21 pm

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Loren Pechtel wrote:I would think the only defenses would be for it to run into a wedge or for some outlying defender to spot it and engage.

In the real world anything with a drive capable of maneuvering is almost certainly well above the 2.7K background temp of the universe, so you'd see it if you were looking for it.

Also consider that low PRF is 3000 pulses per second, so the range closed beween pulse 1 7 2 isn't that great. Also not sure how LIDAR would play.
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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Fri Sep 29, 2017 8:39 pm

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kzt wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:I would think the only defenses would be for it to run into a wedge or for some outlying defender to spot it and engage.

In the real world anything with a drive capable of maneuvering is almost certainly well above the 2.7K background temp of the universe, so you'd see it if you were looking for it.

Also consider that low PRF is 3000 pulses per second, so the range closed beween pulse 1 7 2 isn't that great. Also not sure how LIDAR would play.


I'm looking at the detection capabilities we saw at Cerberus. Starships aren't detected by IR.

Lidar would lock on faster which is why I didn't worry too much about the pulse rate. The timeline I gave were purely due to lightspeed delays.
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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by runsforcelery   » Fri Sep 29, 2017 11:35 pm

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Loren Pechtel wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:I would think the only defenses would be for it to run into a wedge or for some outlying defender to spot it and engage.


kzt wrote:In the real world anything with a drive capable of maneuvering is almost certainly well above the 2.7K background temp of the universe, so you'd see it if you were looking for it.

Also consider that low PRF is 3000 pulses per second, so the range closed beween pulse 1 7 2 isn't that great. Also not sure how LIDAR would play.


I'm looking at the detection capabilities we saw at Cerberus. Starships aren't detected by IR.

Lidar would lock on faster which is why I didn't worry too much about the pulse rate. The timeline I gave were purely due to lightspeed delays.



IR certainly would have spotted Honor at Cerberus. She was capitalizing on the fact that any ship under power can be detected even more readily, far farther away, and at FTL speeds from its impeller signature and that her victi --- er, opponents, I mean, "knew" there were no enemy starships in-system when they arrived and that they'd see anyone arriving after them long before anything coming in from outside the limit could get into range to be a threat. Because of all that, no one was using IR to look for serious threats. The situation was much like that of a 21st century naval captain who has 360-degree radar coverage. He may have visual lookouts as a last ditch tripwire, but he's not going to rely on them as his primary detection mode against hostile aircraft. In other words, there was a blindness of technique not an incapacity of the hardware that could have been available.

You may, ah, assume that attitude has changed somewhat (on the GA's part, at least) post Oyster Bay.


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by kzt   » Sat Sep 30, 2017 12:00 am

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runsforcelery wrote:
The situation was much like that of a 21st century naval captain who has 360-degree radar coverage. He may have visual lookouts as a last ditch tripwire, but he's not going to rely on them as his primary detection mode against hostile aircraft. In other words, there was a blindness of technique not an incapacity of the hardware that could have been available.

You may, ah, assume that attitude has changed somewhat (on the GA's part, at least) post Oyster Bay.

A friend was talking about his time in the Navy, when a lookout on his destroyer spotted a Bear (Soviet bomber) coming in low from the stern. CiC didn’t see it on radar, so obviously it wasn’t there. So he was accused of making it up A few minutes later when the non-existent bear flew over the carrier at 500 feet...
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Re: Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3
Post by drinksmuchcoffee   » Sat Sep 30, 2017 12:06 am

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Theemile wrote:One item to remember is that Missiles are EXPENSIVE. During the build-up years, Manticore spent as much for the missiles in the magazine as the they spent for the SD/DN they were arming.
...


Something I have never been able to work out is *why* missiles would be expensive.

From a resources standpoint, there isn't any kind of precious unobtanium that is required to produce missiles. A trillion-ton stony asteroid likely has all of the raw materials required to make literally millions of missiles. A decent-sized asteroid belt probably has a million or more such asteroids.

From a labor standpoint, the whole manufacturing process (from mining and refining raw materials to final assembly) is going to be highly automated. It wouldn't be like producing P-38s or B-29s during WWII. Even on the transport of raw materials a ship with a crew of a few dozen might be transporting millions of tons of material. So the number of person-hours per missile is likely to be quite low.

The actual production lines would of course be enormously expensive to build. But that is a sunk cost and could be amortized over the production of literally millions of missiles, so the actual per-missile cost would at least be theoretically low.

So it is a puzzle to me.
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