Battle of Spindle

Jonathan_S wrote:Missile defense DDs aren't necessarily the best approach, but they're one that can be built fairly rapidly compared to other methods and can expect to have improved anti-missile capabilities waiting by the time they start getting out of the yards in any numbers - and hope to have continued updates available over time.

If you're going to make a dedicated anti-missile craft in the Dragon's Tooth era I would go with a design loaded with point defense lasers. No wedge clearance needed, you can pack the whole battle face with lasers.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Missile defense DDs aren't necessarily the best approach, but they're one that can be built fairly rapidly compared to other methods and can expect to have improved anti-missile capabilities waiting by the time they start getting out of the yards in any numbers - and hope to have continued updates available over time.

If you're going to make a dedicated anti-missile craft in the Dragon's Tooth era I would go with a design loaded with point defense lasers. No wedge clearance needed, you can pack the whole battle face with lasers.

The problem with pdlcs is range. Whenever we see discussions about "defense in depth" it is concerning using CMs- they have the range to add their intercept ability an cover other ships. You might be able to assist the ships adjacent to you with pdlcs, but not much more.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Has decided, or hasn't considered that MDMs given a full run hit so hard that attempting to ram is a good idea.

Attempting to ram at 0.8c is not exactly easy. An RMN missile has 46000 gravities, but less than a second to reorient its vector towards the ship. That means its maximum deflection is 225 km. If the missile is outside that radius, it won't hit the ship. That's extremely difficult already, since engagement range is 30000 km or more. The defending ship can use a slow CM that has a comparatively large wedge to interdict this volume.

To make matters more difficult, the ship inside the wedge and the missile needs to get past the leading edge. The fore aspect is 190 km deep, but the after aspect is only 40 km (see Wedge geometry Pearl). Missiles are following a parabolic course at this time. To make the calculation more difficult, they will have a non-zero component in the direction towards the ship, since they will have oriented themselves to take a shot at the closest possible distance anyway.

And even more difficult: a missile that is shot down by laser will stop accelerating. So unless it had already achieved a collision vector, it won't hit.

Finally, the ship is still evading.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Has decided, or hasn't considered that MDMs given a full run hit so hard that attempting to ram is a good idea.

No "or" to be had here, really. Old style "contact" nukes have been repeatedly described as detonating only if they could not make physical contact with the target after penetrating the sidewall. This sort of attack by ramming was an included feature in early missile designs and then dropped from laser head designs. That has to be a conscious decision.

My speculation is that the physical hardware for penetrating a sidewall had to be given up to make room for the laser head hardware, on the theory that missiles that do relatively moderate but consistent damage are better than missiles that do absolutely devastating damage the one time in a trillion they get hull contact at max velocity. Absent that penetration hardware, physical matter gets shredded by the sidewall so at most you'd get a relatively diffuse high-speed plasma spray against your hull from a non-penetrating missile strike.

Outside of Oyster Bay's missile attacks on stationary targets I don't believe we've ever seen a ship-to-ship missile make hull contact like that. ThinksMarkedly's post is a good explanation of why that is.

On the plus side, I can think of one very good reason to program Apollo control missiles and EW missiles to try to ram, but it has nothing to do with the damage they could do to the target. It's an absolutely foolproof way of insuring their total destruction so no one could possibly recover and reverse engineer them. Unlikely to be necessary for several reasons, but if you absolutely positively have to be sure, that's how you'd do it.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Has decided, or hasn't considered that MDMs given a full run hit so hard that attempting to ram is a good idea.

No "or" to be had here, really. Old style "contact" nukes have been repeatedly described as detonating only if they could not make physical contact with the target after penetrating the sidewall. This sort of attack by ramming was an included feature in early missile designs and then dropped from laser head designs. That has to be a conscious decision.

My speculation is that the physical hardware for penetrating a sidewall had to be given up to make room for the laser head hardware, on the theory that missiles that do relatively moderate but consistent damage are better than missiles that do absolutely devastating damage the one time in a trillion they get hull contact at max velocity. Absent that penetration hardware, physical matter gets shredded by the sidewall so at most you'd get a relatively diffuse high-speed plasma spray against your hull from a non-penetrating missile strike.

Outside of Oyster Bay's missile attacks on stationary targets I don't believe we've ever seen a ship-to-ship missile make hull contact like that. ThinksMarkedly's post is a good explanation of why that is.

On the plus side, I can think of one very good reason to program Apollo control missiles and EW missiles to try to ram, but it has nothing to do with the damage they could do to the target. It's an absolutely foolproof way of insuring their total destruction so no one could possibly recover and reverse engineer them. Unlikely to be necessary for several reasons, but if you absolutely positively have to be sure, that's how you'd do it.

Actually, most laserheads have 3 modes of operation, laser, burn (against sidewalls) and boom (with sidewalk penetrators against hulls). They have to be programmed prior to launch as to what their attack profile is. This detail is in IFF. The missile used in the Courageous class (mk 50) was too small (and old) to have both the laserhead and contact functions, so different warheads had to be used. Newer dd/cl designs used the mk 34 missile, which had all 3 functions in 1 warhead.
We rarely see the other 2 attack profiles, simply because, well, the laserhead is so many times more effective at penetrating modern defenses than contact nukes are due to the standoff range and effectiveness of modern sidewalls.

Between, Keyhole II, Apollo control missiles and Ghost Rider drones, how about going back to using CM canisters except you put some of them on missiles.?
The problem (or at least the benefit) of them in the past is that they appear to have been designed as a last-ditch system to attempt to augment the ship's regular CM launchers and pdlcs when you are in deep crap and you are going to allocate a major amount of your missile control channels to the CM in an attempt to just survive whatever massive amount of enemy is incoming even to the point of cutting your links to whatever attack birds you have outbound and not launching any new ones- at least till you get through the next wave.

You don't need DDM missiles, you are not trying to intercept your enemy's shots at those kinds of ranges. But if you can carry CMs out beyond the powered flight distance of your CM's then you have at least doubled the range at which you can engage incomming missiles.

You have FTL to the Ghost Rider drones and you Apollo controllers. Use that kind of ability to update the remotely launched CMs just before they launched from their carrier containers.

How many CM's in a "standard" canister" How many (%) of them can engage and destroy an imcoming missile. Every one you take out at that distance is one more neither your ship launched CMs or pdlcs have to engage. An added benefit: after you advisary realizes you are pumping out CMs well beyond the "normal" engagement range, they are going to have to consider turning on their missile volley's ECMs early in order to defeat the CM. What effect does that have on their energy consumption for powered flight time and, does that give you a longer time read and analysis period on the ECM of the incomming flight?

Worth considering.

Theemile wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:If you're going to make a dedicated anti-missile craft in the Dragon's Tooth era I would go with a design loaded with point defense lasers. No wedge clearance needed, you can pack the whole battle face with lasers.

The problem with pdlcs is range. Whenever we see discussions about "defense in depth" it is concerning using CMs- they have the range to add their intercept ability an cover other ships. You might be able to assist the ships adjacent to you with pdlcs, but not much more.

GA missiles have 50k km standoff range. Since SLN PDCs aren't useless we know they can fire farther than that.

Galactic Sapper wrote:My speculation is that the physical hardware for penetrating a sidewall had to be given up to make room for the laser head hardware, on the theory that missiles that do relatively moderate but consistent damage are better than missiles that do absolutely devastating damage the one time in a trillion they get hull contact at max velocity. Absent that penetration hardware, physical matter gets shredded by the sidewall so at most you'd get a relatively diffuse high-speed plasma spray against your hull from a non-penetrating missile strike.

The switch to standoff warheads happened not because ramming was so hard, but because getting though the defenses to reach that point was so hard. I do agree the sidewall penetrators are gone, that's mass better used for more boom. However, I'm not saying to use sidewall penetrators, I'm saying to simply aim at the ship despite the sidewall. The energy of a missile ramming makes the beams from a standoff detonation look like a candle in an inferno--if the beam can do some good the ramming will do an awful lot more. I don't care if the sidewall somehow stops material objects--stopping something going that fast is going to produce extremely hot gamma rays and they'll go through same as the beam from the warhead.

Outside of Oyster Bay's missile attacks on stationary targets I don't believe we've ever seen a ship-to-ship missile make hull contact like that. ThinksMarkedly's post is a good explanation of why that is.

The opportunity never arises--they detonate. I'm talking about the ones that can't detonate.

On the plus side, I can think of one very good reason to program Apollo control missiles and EW missiles to try to ram, but it has nothing to do with the damage they could do to the target. It's an absolutely foolproof way of insuring their total destruction so no one could possibly recover and reverse engineer them. Unlikely to be necessary for several reasons, but if you absolutely positively have to be sure, that's how you'd do it.

I do not expect ramming to be a high-probability option. The idea is to make them keep their wedges in the way and thus severely limit their ability to shoot at the inbound missile storm. If you simply want to destroy the missiles simply aim for the wedge--you're much less likely to miss.

Brigade XO wrote:Between, Keyhole II, Apollo control missiles and Ghost Rider drones, how about going back to using CM canisters except you put some of them on missiles.?
The problem (or at least the benefit) of them in the past is that they appear to have been designed as a last-ditch system to attempt to augment the ship's regular CM launchers and pdlcs when you are in deep crap and you are going to allocate a major amount of your missile control channels to the CM in an attempt to just survive whatever massive amount of enemy is incoming even to the point of cutting your links to whatever attack birds you have outbound and not launching any new ones- at least till you get through the next wave.

You don't need DDM missiles, you are not trying to intercept your enemy's shots at those kinds of ranges. But if you can carry CMs out beyond the powered flight distance of your CM's then you have at least doubled the range at which you can engage incomming missiles.

You have FTL to the Ghost Rider drones and you Apollo controllers. Use that kind of ability to update the remotely launched CMs just before they launched from their carrier containers.

How many CM's in a "standard" canister" How many (%) of them can engage and destroy an imcoming missile. Every one you take out at that distance is one more neither your ship launched CMs or pdlcs have to engage. An added benefit: after you advisary realizes you are pumping out CMs well beyond the "normal" engagement range, they are going to have to consider turning on their missile volley's ECMs early in order to defeat the CM. What effect does that have on their energy consumption for powered flight time and, does that give you a longer time read and analysis period on the ECM of the incomming flight?

Worth considering.

A second factor here--this is a partial counter to Dragon's Teeth. The max range of the countermissile zone is now variable, the Dragon's Teeth can't be timed to go off just as the missiles enter it.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Theemile wrote:
The problem with pdlcs is range. Whenever we see discussions about "defense in depth" it is concerning using CMs- they have the range to add their intercept ability an cover other ships. You might be able to assist the ships adjacent to you with pdlcs, but not much more.

GA missiles have 50k km standoff range. Since SLN PDCs aren't useless we know they can fire farther than that.

PDLCs have a range of ~100,000km.