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[spoiler] The future of missile combat

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Re: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by n7axw   » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:18 pm

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IIRC, Erowhon had the older capacitor driven MDMs and provided that tech to the Republic prior to round 2 of the war with Manticore. I would imagine that is what Maya would have received when they got their MDMs.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by Vince   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 8:22 am

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munroburton wrote:
Theemile wrote:I didn't include the viper because it is not a universal classification, they are expensive and only the GA has them.
Daryl wrote:In the 1950s the British Navy was carrying out police operations around Malaysia and Singapore with their absolutely latest guided missile destroyers. The Captains had a dilemma, having decided that guns were old hat they had none, so did you use a million pound missile to take out a pirate junk that refused to stop? They were retrofitted with 20 mm Bofers, as a temporary measure.
This is why I mentioned the Viper. It might be restricted to the GA currently, but how difficult is it really to fit a small warhead+rod on a countermissile?

Especially if ships are being redesigned to fire multi-drive missiles and the traditional single-drive shipkiller begins to disappear. I can't see a viper type missile being more expensive than an ERM or DDM from the same manufacturing tech base.

Regarding the question that I bolded. Not difficult at all, for most if not all practical purposes it has already been done (and has been given to both the PRN in exile and the SLN). The second stage of the Cataphract A is a missile body with a counter missile drive, and has half the normal number of lasing rods of a DD/CL missile:
Torch of Freedom, Chapter 58 wrote:Unlike the Solarian League Navy, the Mesan Alignment had no reservations at all about the missile ranges being reported by observers of the renewed conflict between Manticore and the Republic of Haven. They'd not only realized those reports were accurate, but figured out what the Manticorans and Havenites must have done to produce them.
Unfortunately, deducing what someone else had done wasn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it for oneself. Downsizing missile drive components without reducing their already limited lifetimes still further was a significant technological challenge—one the Alignment was working hard to overcome, but hadn't managed to pull off yet.
So they'd taken another approach as an intermediate step. The Cataphract was a rather basic concept, actually—they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.
There were drawbacks, of course; there always were, and especially so in what had to be a compromise solution.
The weapon carried only half as many lasing rods as a standard laser head. Worse, the Cataphract was twenty percent longer than a standard missile of any given weight, which meant it would no longer fit into launch tubes which had been designed to handle the single-drive missile upon which it was based. The Cataphract-C, built around the SLN's Trebuchet capital missile, could be fired only out of one of the missile pods the MAN hadn't seen fit to offer Citizen Commodore Luff. The Cataphract-B, based on the Javelin missile intended for the League's battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, could be fired from a standard superdreadnought missile tube, but not by an Indefatigable or a Warlord-C. But Luff's battlecruisers could fire the Cataphract-A, based on the Spatha, the SLN's new-model destroyer and light cruiser shipkiller. His Mars-Cs could have, as well, but only the battlecruisers had been supplied with the new weapon, and even they carried only enough of them for a dozen full broadsides.
Compared to standard missiles of their size, their warheads were light, and the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids which could be stuffed into such a size-restricted terminal bus were limited. But the weapon had a powered range from rest of almost 16.6 million kilometers, nobody had ever even imagined that it might exist . . . and Luff's fourteen battlecruisers mounted over eight hundred broadside missile tubes.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.
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History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.
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Re: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by Theemile   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 10:03 am

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n7axw wrote:IIRC, Erowhon had the older capacitor driven MDMs and provided that tech to the Republic prior to round 2 of the war with Manticore. I would imagine that is what Maya would have received when they got their MDMs.

Don

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Yes, 12 of Erewhon's DNs took part in the Buttercup raids with 8th fleet. They at least had their firecontrol modified to manage MDM and routinely carried them as part of 8th fleet. Though unstated, one could also assume that some MDM pods were sent to Erewhon for defensive purposes. It's obvious they never had their own assembly line.
******
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: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by n7axw   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 12:45 pm

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Theemile wrote:
n7axw wrote:IIRC, Erowhon had the older capacitor driven MDMs and provided that tech to the Republic prior to round 2 of the war with Manticore. I would imagine that is what Maya would have received when they got their MDMs.

Don

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Yes, 12 of Erewhon's DNs took part in the Buttercup raids with 8th fleet. They at least had their firecontrol modified to manage MDM and routinely carried them as part of 8th fleet. Though unstated, one could also assume that some MDM pods were sent to Erewhon for defensive purposes. It's obvious they never had their own assembly line.


I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by Theemile   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 3:49 pm

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n7axw wrote:
I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

Don

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They would have to. Part of the Erewhon buildup was an acknowledgement that to be a major power, you needed your own infrastructure, or you were forever beholden to those who did. Part 2 of the buildup was undoubtedly a shipyard in Maya space to build and support it's growing fleet. They probably would have preferred to build their own ships and missiles from the start, but the need to hide it from the SL an spin the Erewhonese involvement for financial purposes required as much Erewhonese construction as possible.
******
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: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by kzt   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 4:43 pm

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n7axw wrote:I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

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The Andies didn’t have MDM production until post OB. So maybe not.
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Re: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by Theemile   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 5:54 pm

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kzt wrote:
n7axw wrote:I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

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The Andies didn’t have MDM production until post OB. So maybe not.


The Andies did have their own DDM lines for their domestically developed capital DDM, and they didn't have a ship that could fire fusion MDMs until late 1920/early 1921.

The original 40ish Adler SD(p)s were modified to fire Manticore's remaining stocks of mk 41 pods as in intirm measure (which took 4-6 months to complete), so the Andies pretty much got free missiles, just for joining up, knowing that the Fusion birds were just around the bend for their new construction - but then the new construction started being modified for Apollo with Keyhole II and delays in Manticore kept pushing out Apollo production there.

So I can see the Andies not building a mk 41 line (dead end tech that will be retrofitted out asap), and not starting a mk 23 line, (wait, we're finalizing a new missile called Apollo, it's almost ready, why waste your time and money), and not starting a Apollo line (wait another week then we'll send it - we're still ironing out bugs...)
******
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: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by ywing14   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 6:20 pm

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Theemile wrote:
n7axw wrote:IIRC, Erowhon had the older capacitor driven MDMs and provided that tech to the Republic prior to round 2 of the war with Manticore. I would imagine that is what Maya would have received when they got their MDMs.

Don

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Yes, 12 of Erewhon's DNs took part in the Buttercup raids with 8th fleet. They at least had their firecontrol modified to manage MDM and routinely carried them as part of 8th fleet. Though unstated, one could also assume that some MDM pods were sent to Erewhon for defensive purposes. It's obvious they never had their own assembly line.

I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

Don

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Agree, I don't think they'd build the ships if they couldn't arm them.
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Re: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by ywing14   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 6:22 pm

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kzt wrote:
n7axw wrote:I would imagine that as they developed their capacity for building warships that an assembly line for MDMs would have been part of the mix. They wouldn't be current tech, but far better than no MDM at all.

-

The Andies didn’t have MDM production until post OB. So maybe not.


The Andies did have their own DDM lines for their domestically developed capital DDM, and they didn't have a ship that could fire fusion MDMs until late 1920/early 1921.

The original 40ish Adler SD(p)s were modified to fire Manticore's remaining stocks of mk 41 pods as in intirm measure (which took 4-6 months to complete), so the Andies pretty much got free missiles, just for joining up, knowing that the Fusion birds were just around the bend for their new construction - but then the new construction started being modified for Apollo with Keyhole II and delays in Manticore kept pushing out Apollo production there.

So I can see the Andies not building a mk 41 line (dead end tech that will be retrofitted out asap), and not starting a mk 23 line, (wait, we're finalizing a new missile called Apollo, it's almost ready, why waste your time and money), and not starting a Apollo line (wait another week then we'll send it - we're still ironing out bugs...)[/quote]

I'd be hard pressed to believe though by uncrompromising honor that the Andies hadn't taken apart an Apollo pod and were in the process of duplicating it.
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Re: [spoiler] The future of missile combat
Post by Weird Harold   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 6:56 pm

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Theemile wrote:So I can see the Andies not building a mk 41 line (dead end tech that will be retrofitted out asap), and not starting a mk 23 line, (wait, we're finalizing a new missile called Apollo, it's almost ready, why waste your time and money), ...


An Apollo pod needs eight Mk23s to go with the ACM. There's no reason the Andermani wouldn't build Mk23s while waiting for the final Apollo specs. Making minor modifications to the line if needed for Apollo compatibility wouldn't be a big deal and their non-Keyhole ships could still use Mk23 pods.
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

(Now if I could just find the right questions.)
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