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Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next

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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Jun 24, 2022 3:07 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:We... well you, calculated faster than that in a prior discussion I recall. When Terekhov came smashing over the wall, and "talked" the local SLN destroyers into surrendering in Mobius.

Shadow of Freedom Ch 30 wrote:“CIC makes it thirteen sources, Sir,” the lieutenant reported after a moment, and Hammond felt his muscles tighten. “They’re half a light-minute outside the hyper limit,” Garrett continued. “That puts them at a range of two-one-five-point-nine million klicks. Current closing velocity niner-one-three KPS. Acceleration five-point-seven KPS squared.”
-minor Solly question about IDs-
“We won’t have anything lightspeed for another twelve minutes or so, Sir,” Garrett replied in a curiously flat voice. “But from the footprints, CIC is calling it twelve cruisers…and a superdreadnought.”
-snip-
“Anything from them?” Commander Tremont Watson demanded as he strode explosively onto Oceanus’ bridge.

“No, Sir.” Lieutenant Branston Shang, the light cruiser’s communications officer, had managed to beat the CO to the command deck. Now he looked over his shoulder at Watson and shook his head. “Given the range, there won’t be for at least another three minutes, even assuming they know we’re here to be transmitting to, Sir,” he added respectfully.
-snip-
“Not really, Skipper.” Hammond shrugged unhappily. “They only made their alpha translation nine minutes ago, so we still don’t have any lightspeed confirmation, but CIC’s confident about their mass estimates and wedge strengths.”
-snip and jump to Manty POV-
“How much longer for the platforms to give us a good look at the planetary orbitals, Stilt?” he asked.

“Not long, Sir,” his operations officer replied. “They’re only about ninety-six light-seconds from Mobius Beta, now. In fact, if there’s anything in orbit with active impellers, it’s got to be on the far side of the planet from us at the moment, or we’d already have picked it up.”
-snip-
Terekhov tipped back in his command chair, gazing at the master plot. Quentin Saint-James had reentered normal-space twenty-six minutes earlier. During that time, she’d increased her n-space velocity to just over ninety-four hundred kilometers per second and traveled just under 7.8 million kilometers towards the planet officially designated Mobius Beta. During that same interval, the Ghost Rider recon platforms they’d deployed as soon as they’d made their alpha translation had traveled ten and a half light-minutes—almost 200 million kilometers—at their vastly higher acceleration. In fact, they were already decelerating towards a zero/zero rendezvous with the planet.
-minor snip of 2 paragraphs-
“The platforms are still ninety-two light-seconds out, but we should be getting good visual in another minute or so,” the ops officer continued. “CIC is calling them destroyers for now, but—”


In ~26 minutes, the Ghost Rider drones travelled around 200 million km give or take, from a starting distance of 215.9km away from the Sollies; with the Manticoran ships having done their Alpha translation velocity with 913 kps and then accelerating at an additional 5.7kps on top of that as they were dropping the Ghost Riders.

And the Sollies never even had a clue they were less than 92 light-seconds away and still decelerating hard. In addition thanks to Terekhov 'quizzing' Ensign Zilwicki, they additionally deployed a Hermes Buoy that ALSO made the trip from the approaching Manticoran ships to the Sollies at high acceleration and wasn't noticed either.

Edit: 92 light-seconds is just a hair over 27.6 million km, so correction the Ghost Rider drones travelled almost exactly 200 million km in 26 minutes because they were decelerating to bleed off the speed Terekhov brought over the wall with him to match orbits with Mobius itself. But they made the full 200km plus without anybody having a sniff of them, as did the Hermes Buoy.

Edit 2: according to an acceleration calculator, 200milllion km travelled, initial speed of 913 kps and 26 minutes works out to an acceleration profile of nearly 17000 gs, although the drones were decelerating at the time, which should actually increase their speed because they had to get upto speed then turn around and slow way down; so Ghost Riders are (I think anyways) capable of between 20,000 and 30,000 gravs of acceleration with several hours of active time... or you can "pull a Henke" and leave the drones in a stationary & powered-down mode and Ghost Riders are capable of staying on station for at least 2 weeks (per her actions at New Tuscany)
Did I? Guess I forgot. And it's a lot easier to remember the book quotes were they just give you the numbers.

That's 913 KPS residual velocity is a bit interesting. That doesn't seem to match any of the 'default' ones. Because of the way the velocity drops stack the highest residual velocity you can have is when worked up to 0.6c in the Alpha bands.
Here's a list of resulting normal space velocity based on starting at 0.6c in each of these hyper bands:
Alpha: 14,390 KPS
Beta: 2,158 KPS
Gamma: 475 KPS
Delta: 133 KPS
Epsilon: 45.2 KPS
Zeta: 17.6 KPS
Eta: 7.76 KPS
Theta: 3.72 KPS
I doubt they were cruising in the Alpha or Beta bands, so they must have transitioned down to one of them, spent some time working some speed back up (but nowhere near maximum velocity) and then transitioned down.

It's also a high enough velocity to be non-negligible in the calculations; unlike a routine transition down from the Theta bands.


Still, I reworked the numbers just to see if I agreed with your calculations. [Edit - and reworked them again to fix a wrong units issue; which brought our numbers much closer together; and a reworked a 2nd time because I copied some values in the spreadsheet instead of referencing so they weren't updating when the other cells changed -- and then played around with acceleration and timing to get the distance to planet number down]

I don't have them prefect, but now I think 20,000 gravities is close enough. And at that accel for a zero-zero intercept to the planet the deceleration leg needs to be about 4.7 seconds longer than the acceleration one.

Given the base velocity of 913 KPS, accelerating at 20,000 gees for 17.48 min to turnover puts them 108,767,372 km downrange and 206,489 KPS (0.69c), then decelerating another 8.52 minutes (26 minutes total) puts them at 188,708,586 km downrange and 106,305 KPS (0.35c). And that pretty much hits the 10.5 LM (188,870,000 km) @ 26 minutes mark that we get from the quote.

Continuing that deceleration would bring them to a zero-zero stop in another 9.03 minutes [total of 2102 seconds; 35.03 minutes] at 217,536,828 km downrange (or 113,172 km short of the planet)
.
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Sat Jun 25, 2022 12:41 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by Theemile   » Fri Jun 24, 2022 3:35 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:
Edit 2: according to an acceleration calculator, 200milllion km travelled, initial speed of 913 kps and 26 minutes works out to an acceleration profile of nearly 17000 gs, although the drones were decelerating at the time, which should actually increase their speed because they had to get upto speed then turn around and slow way down; so Ghost Riders are (I think anyways) capable of between 20,000 and 30,000 gravs of acceleration with several hours of active time... or you can "pull a Henke" and leave the drones in a stationary & powered-down mode and Ghost Riders are capable of staying on station for at least 2 weeks (per her actions at New Tuscany)


That same reactor in a Pod can last about a month in sysdef mode (so all systems powered on, active communications and station keeping, while retaining enough power to energize the missile reactors, reorient, and fire all the grav tubes. So it might be able to last significantly longer than 2 weeks.
******
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Jun 24, 2022 3:55 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:Given the base velocity of 913 KPS, accelerating at 12,600 gees for 17.22 min to turnover puts them 66,879,833 km downrange and 128,520 KPS (0.43c), then decelerating another 6.78 minutes (26 minutes total) puts them at 117,436,077 km downrange and 63,499 KPS (0.21c). And that pretty much hits the 10.5 LM @ 26 minutes mark that we get from the quote.

Continuing that deceleration would bring them to a zero-zero stop in another 8.57 minutes [total of 2,074 seconds; 34.57 minutes] at 133,740,053 km downrange (or 12.4 million km short of the planet)


It's not clear from the text if the 913 km/s were carried over the alpha wall or after some acceleration at the time of the discussion. But at the acceleration of 5.7 km/s², they'd have needed 160 seconds to reach that high a relative velocity, and the time interval from translation to this moment can't have been that high.

What this tells us is that Terekhov thought it best to carry some speed from alpha into n-space, so he must have spent some time re-accelerating in alpha before making the translation. The consequence of doing this is that they'd arrive sooner at their destinations (and make our calculations harder). That means time in n-space was of the essence.

He didn't have to decelerate the drones, though. He could send one flight without turnover before arriving, only turning after flying past the targets and then coming back for recovery, with a second flight doing turnover to achieve relative zero speed and maintain observation. This manoeuvre allows them to get some information the quickest, to allow for decisions to be made as early as possible. For example, if he had to turn around and go away because of some surprise on the far side of the planet, he'd need time to turn around, decelerate, then accelerate back towards the hyperlimit, without being overhauled by whatever that threat could be.

While time was of the essence, it wasn't that short he needed this manoeuvre, though. For any known solly threat, he wouldn't be in any danger until much later. Cataphract missiles wouldn't be a danger to his ships unless he committed to reaching 40 or maybe 50 million km from the planet. No solly ship could match his acceleration, not even a destroyer on zero compensator guardband (War Harvests could do 519; he was pulling 581). But even if the sollies had a matching ship, he still had time: starting from 216 million km away, a ship pulling 600 gravities needs 142 minutes to reach the hyperlimit, so the point of commitment was when his flight back to the hyperlimit was 142 minutes minus missile flight time.

So he could and did decelerate the Ghost Riders. At the same time, we know it wasn't a zero-relative to the ships, because they wanted to see what was behind the planet. At least one GR would need to fly past the ships at non-zero velocity and reach zero relative to the planet somewhere past it.

Calculating exactly what that acceleration would have been if he had done that is not easy, because we don't have all the data from the text. We know the flight time so far had been approximately 26 minutes and the drones were still 92 light-seconds away from the ships, which in turn were 96 light-seconds from the planet. But we don't know what velocity they were relative to the ships, so we can't calculate how much longer they'd need to reach them. Further, we don't know where those drones would reach zero relative velocity. That's why we're getting different answers: each one is making different assumptions.

We can at best calculate the lowest possible acceleration, which is that if the drones had not decelerated at all. Starting at 913 km/s and covering 200 million km in 26 minutes gives approx. 16700 gravities.
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Jun 24, 2022 4:17 pm

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Oh crap; I just found a massive reason we differ. I used google to convert the 10.5 LM into km (since that's what my spreadsheet works in) and didn't notice that I'd accidently converted it into miles instead; and used that number as it if was km. So I was working with a distance that was 60% too short :eek: (sort of -- I'd correctly converted the 96 remaining light second to the planet into km)

I'll go back and edit my post, but as you'd expect that drastically increases the acceleration numbers required.

Also; the text explicitly says the RDs are "decelerating towards a zero/zero rendezvous with the planet." And I assume that doesn't mean blow past the plant first and have to come back to it :D - so we can't take the lower bound acceleration from going for a no-deceleration flyby.


I've rerun the numbers and I'm now getting around 23,700 gravities.
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Jun 24, 2022 10:52 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:Oh crap; I just found a massive reason we differ. I used google to convert the 10.5 LM into km (since that's what my spreadsheet works in) and didn't notice that I'd accidently converted it into miles instead; and used that number as it if was km.


Google uses geolocalisation on your IP to determine which default to use, if you're not logged in. Very surprising for foreigners living in or visiting the US. You can force it by just saying "in km" ("10.5 light-minutes in km"). And if you want the exact answer without the annoying drop-downs and rounding, just multiply by 1.

https://www.google.com/search?q=10.5+light-minutes+*+1+in+km

Also; the text explicitly says the RDs are "decelerating towards a zero/zero rendezvous with the planet." And I assume that doesn't mean blow past the plant first and have to come back to it :D - so we can't take the lower bound acceleration from going for a no-deceleration flyby.


That's still slightly imprecise, we don't know the exact distance they stopped relative to the planet. If we were to read it literally, "zero/zero" means zero velocity and zero distance, meaning the drones should land on the planet. But that's not a good idea: I wouldn't stop in low orbit to scout something might be hidden. So it's likely they used the expression in an imprecise manner, with a rounding of a million km or more. And they don't need to actually very close to the planet at all: with two drones 1 million km away to the sides of the planet and equidistant from the launching ships would equally well give a perfect view of behind the planet.

In any case, I don't think your calculations are right. All we know is that the drones had flown for 26 minutes, had reached a distance of 96 light-seconds from the ships, which in turn were 92 light-seconds from the planet. But we don't know the speed they were at this point in time, nor as I said what exact distance from the planet they were going to stop.
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sat Jun 25, 2022 12:00 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Also; the text explicitly says the RDs are "decelerating towards a zero/zero rendezvous with the planet." And I assume that doesn't mean blow past the plant first and have to come back to it :D - so we can't take the lower bound acceleration from going for a no-deceleration flyby.


That's still slightly imprecise, we don't know the exact distance they stopped relative to the planet. If we were to read it literally, "zero/zero" means zero velocity and zero distance, meaning the drones should land on the planet. But that's not a good idea: I wouldn't stop in low orbit to scout something might be hidden. So it's likely they used the expression in an imprecise manner, with a rounding of a million km or more. And they don't need to actually very close to the planet at all: with two drones 1 million km away to the sides of the planet and equidistant from the launching ships would equally well give a perfect view of behind the planet.

In any case, I don't think your calculations are right. All we know is that the drones had flown for 26 minutes, had reached a distance of 96 light-seconds from the ships, which in turn were 92 light-seconds from the planet. But we don't know the speed they were at this point in time, nor as I said what exact distance from the planet they were going to stop.

My calculations weren't right; I went back and found some more errors I'd made in adjusting spreadsheet to calculate this. Enough to cause me to further tweak it and play with the numbers to get the final distance to planet down to something much closer that 10-20 million km. After a lot of fiddling I got some nice numbers with 20,000g acceleration.
However, in any case, my calculations are still not better that a rough approximation.


But, we do actually know a few other things beyond " the drones had flown for 26 minutes, had reached a distance of 96 light-seconds from the ships, which in turn were 92 light-seconds from the planet".
We know:
- the drones had been deployed "as soon as they’d made their alpha translation".
- hence that they should shared the ship's emergence velocity (reported by the SLN folks as 913 KPS)
- the drove have traveled "ten and a half light-minutes" (which is about 188,870,000 km).
- they've already made turn-over and are decelerating
- they're aiming to stop somewhere reasonably close to the planet

With a bit of math we get that the total distance between launch and the planet is 10.5 LM (188,870,000 km) + 96 LS (28,780,000 km) for a total of 217,650,000 km. (Allowing for some rounding)

(FWIW that seems pretty consistent with the SLN hyper footprint report; "two-one-five-point-nine million klicks" from the SLN ships)


I think we can reasonably assume a constant rate of acceleration; and, if so, then because we know they're decelerating to zero we know the turnover point is going to have to be, roughly, half-way along their journey (though actually a bit short of that due to the 913 km added each second by the drone's base velocity).

From those additional pieces of information I think it's possible to work out the kind of fairly rough approximation of their acceleration that I did. (Though it's taken me a few rounds of revisions; so far)

Obviously if we knew a few more data points we could dial it in more precisely and with higher confidence (and I'd have been able to catch my errors more easily).
For example if the text had given us their velocity at 26 minutes; or better, their velocity at turnover; or even their distance at turnover this all would have been a lot simpler.
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by Relax   » Sat Jun 25, 2022 3:24 am

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Got early night crying baby duty so...

Jeepers, ran the RD numbers and yup, between 20,000G and 25,000G is their actual acceleration to make the numbers work out.

So, why not just carry detachable laser heads on these drones completely negating CM interception basket entirely?

Since we are throwing tens of thousands of missiles, this truly comes down to a tonnage calculation. Not to mention we are already throwing away ~250 ton FTL control missiles at a rate of 1:8....

NIT: If FTL control missiles are this big, why the hell would they not just graft on a warhead anyways?

Tonnage missiles thrown <<and $$$/missile tonnage>> - tonnage missiles intercepted - PDLC = hits = destroyed ship tonnage.

How much tonnage is saved by dodging CM basket? True, PDLC hit percentage would probably be higher as less maneuvering, but then PDLC info is ~3s old anyways so... who cares in reality, but... almost completely negating active sector of defensive fire is worth an awful lot of tonnage saved in missile bodies and at 150tons/missile and 250ton FTL control missiles at a guaranteed rate of 1:8 or roughly 30 ton of FTL control missile per real missile. This adds up in a hurry when an RD is ~250t.

Can one actually "save" ~2 missiles

Hrmm, what would happen if already "spent" RD's stay around town and become giant jammers for follow on waves? We have already seen them act as jammers... but what is their relative jamming ability compared to a dazzler... hrmm

Well bed for me. Adios
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Jun 25, 2022 5:23 pm

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Relax wrote:So, why not just carry detachable laser heads on these drones completely negating CM interception basket entirely?


An RD with a warhead has a codename in the RMN and it's called the Mistletoe. The MAN called it the Silver Bullet; the SLN called it the Hasta. So this has been invented at least three times in the last couple of T-years alone.

But how would "negating" work? Honor saw the Hastas because they had a bowshock at 0.4 c, and there's more than enough time to reach that speed with 25000 gravities and 10.5 light-minutes to play with. If the RD speed must be kept below 0.4c, then those warheads would be moving very slowly once they reached attack range.

RDs are stealthy, but not invisible. Depending on the enemy's technological level, they'll be detected anywhere between 100,000 and 500,000 km. So if they were to launch the warhead at 0.4c at 200,000 km away from the target and this warhead could not meaningfully accelerate, it would take 1.67 seconds to reach the target or 1.5 to reach the 20,000 km firing range.

Or it can accelerate meaningfully, but that's going to likely be a very bright wedge. With a CM-like acceleration, it would shave about 2 milliseconds in flight time. It may be able to evade better, but it's also more visible.

Either way, it's past the regular engagement range of CMs, but CMs can still intercept if wanted. More crucially, it's very much within PDLC interception range and moving slowly. And there's one important question to be answered: is this any better than missiles?

Since we are throwing tens of thousands of missiles, this truly comes down to a tonnage calculation. Not to mention we are already throwing away ~250 ton FTL control missiles at a rate of 1:8....


Indeed. An RD that can last weeks probably weighs and costs a lot more than an FTL control missile. That means the throw weight is probably much lesser. That means not only are those warheads moving at less than half the speed that a missile could have been moving at, but also that there will be fewer of them.

Note I am assuming some RDs carried ECM payloads too.

NIT: If FTL control missiles are this big, why the hell would they not just graft on a warhead anyways?


Because that would make them even bigger, then it wouldn't be 1 controlling 8, it would be 1 controlling 7. Or they'd have to redesign the pods so they could pack this even bigger ACM inside.

How much tonnage is saved by dodging CM basket? True, PDLC hit percentage would probably be higher as less maneuvering, but then PDLC info is ~3s old anyways so... who cares in reality, but... almost completely negating active sector of defensive fire is worth an awful lot of tonnage saved in missile bodies and at 150tons/missile and 250ton FTL control missiles at a guaranteed rate of 1:8 or roughly 30 ton of FTL control missile per real missile. This adds up in a hurry when an RD is ~250t.


We have some numbers of the most skewed scenario possible, in the Battle of the Ajay-Prime Warp Bridge. The task force commanded by Sir Martin Lessem intercepted the SLN missiles with a full 5 waves of 520 CM launchers and 2080 CMs against 6000 Cataphract-C missiles (that is, nearly three attack missiles for each CM). The interception ratio climbed from 152/520 in the outermost wave (29.2%), to 260, 300, 393 and 471 (90.6%), for an average interception ratio of 75.7%. In no other future battle should we expect the technological gap to be so wide.

And yet, that cut 1576 out of 6000 missiles.

The PDLCs, however, are another story. His three late-flight Sag-C had 576 emitters and the six Sag-B had 288. That's nearly 3500 emitters, not including the destroyers'. We don't have accurate numbers on how many were intercepted, only the Solly admiral's thinking that "over 75% were intercepted before firing," which is 4000. that means the PDLCs must have struck down at least 2500 themselves.

The text says those Cataphracts were moving at 0.802c, but I think that's a mistake. Either way, they were moving faster than the 0.4c that an RD-mounted warhead would. So their interception ratios by PDLC should be lower than what the RD-mounted warhead would face.

So my conclusion is that a Mistletoe weapon is not a currently a good idea against a formation of warships. There are some advantages, but they don't look like enough to compensate the loss in quantity, closing speed, and the logistics problems that would arise.
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by Relax   » Sat Jun 25, 2022 8:03 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:[

Since we are throwing tens of thousands of missiles, this truly comes down to a tonnage calculation. Not to mention we are already throwing away ~250 ton FTL control missiles at a rate of 1:8....


Indeed. An RD that can last weeks probably weighs and costs a lot more than an FTL control missile. That means the throw weight is probably much lesser. That means not only are those warheads moving at less than half the speed that a missile could have been moving at, but also that there will be fewer of them.


Most everything you wrote is 100% correct or close enough as we have no true information regarding most of what I postulated as DW has expressly stated missiles are his piggy bank for plot twisting and does not want his toes jammed.

NIT: RD, we know from SoSAG is 250t
We know 2 Capital micro fusion MK23 missiles were displaced for 1 FTL Apollo missile. MK16 is 94t so MK23 has to be ~120t with 3rd stage, larger warhead and 10 rods instead of 6. A laser head appears via drawings to encompass ~50% of said missile. If we ***assume*** equal distribution in density of tonnage, a MK16G warhead should be roughly speaking 45t for 6 rods. ~7tons/rod so 4 more would be 28tons.

MK 94t + 28t extra rods = 122tons even though we KNOW MK23 rods are LARGER, with larger warhead. So, minimum MK23 can be with a 3rd stage is more than likely 140t-->150t

So, throwing on a laser head, who cares really apollo is pod based unless length destroys SDP ability to carry more pods. Not that I expect it was drawn to scale and pencil pushed as a reason before hand. Who knows, maybe DW did, but I doubt it.

NIT: They would not be moving at half speed except at short ranges where you are understating how badly they actually would perform compared to a missile with 96,000G. In that aspect they would be WOEFULLY underperforming. Medium range is just blah at best. Due to FTL, ranges are going to blow up quite large. Also as we know we have ~23,500G in the tank for the RD, range to 0.8c is roughly 130Mkm. So, in between to sucks pathetically at short range. :P

NIT: All missiles currently do not maneuver the last ~1 light second(300,000km) to target which is why PDLC is even viable in the slightest. Without this steadying effect as DW puts it, PDLC would be utterly useless. An RD dropping a laser warhead at say 600,000km would not exactly be much different as PDLC effective range is ~300,000 to begin with and would be 2 seconds behind which is just as abysmal as 1 second behind. The error probabilities are beyond absurd frankly for ANY PDLC to work at any range other than right at their sidewall. But, we are supposed to close our eyes and minds to this aspect as the HV says it happens therefore it must be true.

Anyways.
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Re: Fall 1924: What will the Admiralty build next
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sat Jun 25, 2022 8:52 pm

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Relax wrote:NIT: All missiles currently do not maneuver the last ~1 light second(300,000km) to target which is why PDLC is even viable in the slightest. Without this steadying effect as DW puts it, PDLC would be utterly useless. An RD dropping a laser warhead at say 600,000km would not exactly be much different as PDLC effective range is ~300,000 to begin with and would be 2 seconds behind which is just as abysmal as 1 second behind. The error probabilities are beyond absurd frankly for ANY PDLC to work at any range other than right at their sidewall. But, we are supposed to close our eyes and minds to this aspect as the HV says it happens therefore it must be true.

Anyways.

Though MDMs tend to have terminal velocities cross the final 300,000 km at somewhere between 0.7 - 0.85c (depending on range and base velocity at launch); and so would cover a final 300,000 km in 1.4 to 1.18 seconds. And they survive for that long thanks to jamming, decoys, and sheer numbers to collectively be effective despite attrition from the defenses.

And RD able to coast a warhead in a that kind of velocity would be moving so fast it's bow wake could be detected and and it's likely course swept by CMs. And if the RDs need to rely on jamming, decoys, and attrition to get warheads into range then are they really much more effective that missiles?

(Admittedly, to detect that lightspeed wake in time to mount a useful defense against a target moving that fast you basically need a shell of something with FTL coms well out away from the fleet to detect the passing light speed emissions and give the distant fleet sufficient warning. So, for the moment, the number of potential opponents would could do that is extremely limited). But an RD going slowly enough to sneak in undetected is going to take probably 3 or 4 times longer to coast something across 300,000 km. And those extra seconds may significantly decrease the attacks effectiveness -- though it's true a ship doesn't have the acceleration to meaningful alter it's current trajectory in a handful of seconds -- even at 500 gees, an entire 30 seconds only displaces it by 2,205 km; which isn't much when facing a modern laser head with its 50,000 km engagement range. Still extra time to detect and engage the coasting warhead is likely to cost the attack something noticeable in effectiveness.
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