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NEED TO KNOW

Join us in talking discussing all things Honor, including (but not limited to) tactics, favorite characters, and book discussions.
Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by cthia   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 5:01 pm

cthia
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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
cthia wrote:Interesting post. I always wondered why missiles would not be a part of energy battles. It seems that an enemy should find it difficult to maneuver against energy fire while maneuvering against incoming missiles. I don't think we have ever seen missiles used in energy duels, but I see no reason they can't be used even in a single ship-to-ship duel.


Ships mount more CM tubes than anti-ship missile tubes and can cycle them faster, so the defender can spit out more counter-missiles than the attacker can anti-ship ones. And while that's true for any range, at short ranges, the biggest difference is that the anti-ship missiles are still moving much, much slower, while the CMs are still in their regular range. Additionally, the ship is tracking those slow-moving missiles and is ready for them with PDLCs as soon as they cross the lip of the wedge.

As a result, I expect that at short range, the effectiveness of the defence is disproportionately higher, making the attack with missiles useless.

Of course, if you can tow pods of missiles and fire them at that time, then you could overwhelm the defence. But two problems with this: first, if you're this close, the enemy can likely see your pods and you can't hold on to them for too long due to proximity kills. The enemy could force you to expend them (use-or-lose case).

And second, by the time pod tactics came about, the battles were decided with missile duels. No one reached energy range any more.

Good point. But it seems that an enemy's ECM at energy range would be a beast. Because at that range active ECM from an enemy ship itself should also be a beast. Even bracketing the fact that the RMN has now realized that "Ghost Rider ECM" can be used against an incoming salvo.

But a ship at that range should have an inherently powerful ECM against incoming missile fire.

It is like the tactic in chess where you use your King as a piece to attack. Getting the ship close enough to affect ECM.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 6:03 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
cthia wrote:Interesting post. I always wondered why missiles would not be a part of energy battles. It seems that an enemy should find it difficult to maneuver against energy fire while maneuvering against incoming missiles. I don't think we have ever seen missiles used in energy duels, but I see no reason they can't be used even in a single ship-to-ship duel.


Ships mount more CM tubes than anti-ship missile tubes and can cycle them faster, so the defender can spit out more counter-missiles than the attacker can anti-ship ones. And while that's true for any range, at short ranges, the biggest difference is that the anti-ship missiles are still moving much, much slower, while the CMs are still in their regular range. Additionally, the ship is tracking those slow-moving missiles and is ready for them with PDLCs as soon as they cross the lip of the wedge.

As a result, I expect that at short range, the effectiveness of the defence is disproportionately higher, making the attack with missiles useless.

Of course, if you can tow pods of missiles and fire them at that time, then you could overwhelm the defence. But two problems with this: first, if you're this close, the enemy can likely see your pods and you can't hold on to them for too long due to proximity kills. The enemy could force you to expend them (use-or-lose case).

And second, by the time pod tactics came about, the battles were decided with missile duels. No one reached energy range any more.

Plus of course we have seen missiles used at energy range. In OBS the very missile heavy destroyer Theisman was captain of whipped around the Blackbird moon and engaged Fearless with laserheads at energy range -- the surprise and odd angle let it work reasonable well; for one shot and then Fearless pivoted and that fight was over.

But generally your points are spot on. Without any distance to build up velocity missiles are dead meat in the face of modern point defense -- basically standing still and utterly exposed.
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 6:25 pm

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cthia wrote:Good point. But it seems that an enemy's ECM at energy range would be a beast. Because at that range active ECM from an enemy ship itself should also be a beast. Even bracketing the fact that the RMN has now realized that "Ghost Rider ECM" can be used against an incoming salvo.

But a ship at that range should have an inherently powerful ECM against incoming missile fire.

It is like the tactic in chess where you use your King as a piece to attack. Getting the ship close enough to affect ECM.

The ECM has more power at close range, because the inverse square law is diluting its power less. But for energy range combat the active sensors of your own ships are willing that race by miles because their radar's power falls off as the inverse cube of distance -- so as range falls the radars are gaining in power exponentially (literally) faster than the ECM being broadcast by the other ship is -- so the radars can far more easily burn through it.

Basically close the range from 1 million to half a million km and the strength of the ECM broadcasts you received has gone up in strength 4x, but the power of your radar's return signal has gone up 16x :eek:
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by cthia   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 6:30 pm

cthia
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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
cthia wrote:Interesting post. I always wondered why missiles would not be a part of energy battles. It seems that an enemy should find it difficult to maneuver against energy fire while maneuvering against incoming missiles. I don't think we have ever seen missiles used in energy duels, but I see no reason they can't be used even in a single ship-to-ship duel.


Ships mount more CM tubes than anti-ship missile tubes and can cycle them faster, so the defender can spit out more counter-missiles than the attacker can anti-ship ones. And while that's true for any range, at short ranges, the biggest difference is that the anti-ship missiles are still moving much, much slower, while the CMs are still in their regular range. Additionally, the ship is tracking those slow-moving missiles and is ready for them with PDLCs as soon as they cross the lip of the wedge.

As a result, I expect that at short range, the effectiveness of the defence is disproportionately higher, making the attack with missiles useless.

Of course, if you can tow pods of missiles and fire them at that time, then you could overwhelm the defence. But two problems with this: first, if you're this close, the enemy can likely see your pods and you can't hold on to them for too long due to proximity kills. The enemy could force you to expend them (use-or-lose case).

And second, by the time pod tactics came about, the battles were decided with missile duels. No one reached energy range any more.

Jonathan_S wrote:Plus of course we have seen missiles used at energy range. In OBS the very missile heavy destroyer Theisman was captain of whipped around the Blackbird moon and engaged Fearless with laserheads at energy range -- the surprise and odd angle let it work reasonable well; for one shot and then Fearless pivoted and that fight was over.

But generally your points are spot on. Without any distance to build up velocity missiles are dead meat in the face of modern point defense -- basically standing still and utterly exposed.

Oops, you are correct, as I now remember you mentioned it before that there was such a case.

But it nags at me, because, well, my rejected notion of a missile whose accel blows its wad straightaway. Essentially, it is something the MA has achieved?, by strapping a warhead onto a CM?

I wonder if the mode of GR's ECM could be selected to also shoot it's wad quickly. Perhaps the power budget could be used more efficiently if it can is higher levels of power for a shorter duration. But at that range could ECM be made effective?

I see your new post but haven't read it.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by Brigade XO   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 6:55 pm

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[quote="tlb"][quote="cthia"]A GL indeed makes a lot of sense if it costs nothing to mount it. In an energy duel it could mean the difference between life and death, especially for someone like Honor who knows how to knife-fight. Some of that Top Gun maneuvering. :D

You need every edge you can get in every tactical situation. It would be a pity to be ahead of the enemy in missile combat but lag sorely behind in energy battles.

As a matter of fact, now I realize why the SLN's energy weapons surprised the RMN. The SLN's thinking was that since it led the Galaxy in order of battle, it is likely that they would always be able to at least force an energy battle. And win.

/quote]

If your talking about the discussion in Uncompromising Honor, when the RMN was looking at the SLN captured ships at Manticore they were surprised what these ships had for grazers ---but that isn't to mount them on RMN ships (perhaps they might want to investigate how the differences might make some improvements). What RMN decided to do was extract and repurpose the SLN grazers for essentially "fixed" defenses......mines et for the Junction and probably other termini. They work, they are almost free (check them, pull them, install them in housings (said mines) and supply proper power conversion.
Kind of like taking 42 lb muzzle loading cannons off a Spanish Galleon and mounting on a coastal defense site.

You still have to do some fabricating, work on the software etc but you don't have to manufacture he compleat grazers and subsystems so your industry can concentrate on your own design weapons.
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 8:12 pm

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cthia wrote:
But it nags at me, because, well, my rejected notion of a missile whose accel blows its wad straightaway. Essentially, it is something the MA has achieved?, by strapping a warhead onto a CM?

Even the fastest CM we've seen, the 130,000 gees Mk30s and Mk31, would take 26.5 seconds to make it from the edge of energy range to within range of their own laserhead. That's approximately 24.4 more seconds for your PDLCs to track and engage it than the incoming MDMs they're used to. It's a dead missile.

Also in the time it takes the CM to crawl across energy ranges your energy mounts could have smashed the enemy dozens of times -- the energy range fight (assuming anything smaller and less well defended than SD's slugging it out) is probably effectively over before the first missiles come into play.


So you'd need something utterly unprecedented in the Honorverse -- some kind of missile with acceleration at least 3 orders of magnitude (around 1000x) faster than anything we've ever seen. A missile with a 100,000,000g (one hundred million gravities acceleration) could cover energy range in a single second -- and so be a target maybe half as difficult to stop as a terminal MDM. But that's just an insane improvement needed!!
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 8:15 pm

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cthia wrote:But it nags at me, because, well, my rejected notion of a missile whose accel blows its wad straightaway. Essentially, it is something the MA has achieved?, by strapping a warhead onto a CM?

I wonder if the mode of GR's ECM could be selected to also shoot it's wad quickly. Perhaps the power budget could be used more efficiently if it can is higher levels of power for a shorter duration. But at that range could ECM be made effective?


We don't know if it is possible to make such a missile. I suppose if RFC decides to explain how those Cataphract performance numbers kept climbing up, we may get an idea whether they can continue to climb up. But remember you weren't talking about incremental improvements, but about 10 to 50x.

As for using the power budget of a graser torpedo faster, I doubt it. That thing is a controlled explosion, so I don't expect you can get it to explode faster if you don't want it to run away from you. The focusing parts are probably close to their limits, so pushing more power through them is likely going to cause them to fail faster. And by that I mean that 2x more power would mean 1/4th or 1/8th the time.
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by cthia   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 8:39 pm

cthia
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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
cthia wrote:But it nags at me, because, well, my rejected notion of a missile whose accel blows its wad straightaway. Essentially, it is something the MA has achieved?, by strapping a warhead onto a CM?

I wonder if the mode of GR's ECM could be selected to also shoot it's wad quickly. Perhaps the power budget could be used more efficiently if it can is higher levels of power for a shorter duration. But at that range could ECM be made effective?


We don't know if it is possible to make such a missile. I suppose if RFC decides to explain how those Cataphract performance numbers kept climbing up, we may get an idea whether they can continue to climb up. But remember you weren't talking about incremental improvements, but about 10 to 50x.

As for using the power budget of a graser torpedo faster, I doubt it. That thing is a controlled explosion, so I don't expect you can get it to explode faster if you don't want it to run away from you. The focusing parts are probably close to their limits, so pushing more power through them is likely going to cause them to fail faster. And by that I mean that 2x more power would mean 1/4th or 1/8th the time.

It would also mean more range for a specially designed missile to showcase the technology.

I think you misunderstood or misread the other part of my post. I was talking about the power budget of the ECM missiles that are needed throughout a salvo may have more of a power budget to expend at shorter ranges.

I should have said Apollo missile's ECM power budget.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Jun 07, 2022 8:56 pm

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cthia wrote:I think you misunderstood or misread the other part of my post. I was talking about the power budget of the ECM missiles that are needed throughout a salvo may have more of a power budget to expend at shorter ranges.


Ah, indeed I'd missed it.

A torpedo definitely has a much higher energy budget than a missile. So in theory, it could produce either a better jamming through a larger power output in the same time, or a longer-lasting jamming. And it's also true that, while the MAlign doesn't have the same technology, this is an area where brute force can help. Just push more power through the emitters.

However, the torpedo is also much, much bigger. So they should cost vastly more than a missile, and also be present in a battle scene in comparatively fewer numbers. I suspect it's better to have fewer and weaker sources of jamming and ECM, so long as they are a disperse source, than to concentrate. Once you've saturated the scanners, there's little point in doing more of it, but the energy dissipates with the square of the distance.

In any case, remember why the Silver Bullets were twice the size of a Ghost Rider: that was because the MAlign hadn't cracked the secret of the dense energy production. What this means for any ECM platform the MAlign can do, the GA can do better. They have a bigger power budget and better ECM hardware for any platform size.
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Re: NEED TO KNOW
Post by cthia   » Thu Jun 09, 2022 7:35 pm

cthia
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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
cthia wrote:I think you misunderstood or misread the other part of my post. I was talking about the power budget of the ECM missiles that are needed throughout a salvo may have more of a power budget to expend at shorter ranges.


Ah, indeed I'd missed it.

A torpedo definitely has a much higher energy budget than a missile. So in theory, it could produce either a better jamming through a larger power output in the same time, or a longer-lasting jamming. And it's also true that, while the MAlign doesn't have the same technology, this is an area where brute force can help. Just push more power through the emitters.

However, the torpedo is also much, much bigger. So they should cost vastly more than a missile, and also be present in a battle scene in comparatively fewer numbers. I suspect it's better to have fewer and weaker sources of jamming and ECM, so long as they are a disperse source, than to concentrate. Once you've saturated the scanners, there's little point in doing more of it, but the energy dissipates with the square of the distance.

In any case, remember why the Silver Bullets were twice the size of a Ghost Rider: that was because the MAlign hadn't cracked the secret of the dense energy production. What this means for any ECM platform the MAlign can do, the GA can do better. They have a bigger power budget and better ECM hardware for any platform size.

Until the MA cracks the mystery.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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