Battle of Spindle

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Well rocket powered counter missiles (like Grayson still had in OBS) were in use as far back as the Manticore Ascendant series; so mid 1500s.
Not all ships had them but HMS Casey did.

Those are far shorter ranged and less capable than impeller wedge powered CMs - but those came much later when it was possible to shrink the size of the impeller nodes; prior to that carrying many more of the smaller less capable CMs was a better trade off.

As for small wedge missiles, in chapter 25 of The Short Victorious War, one is used by Kevin Usher to assassinate the head of Internal Security[snip]
So they must have developed much earlier, without Grayson being able to get any.

Jonathan_S wrote:But even if they were rolled out 200 years ago in first line navies that's still 150 years after HMS Casey. That qualifies as "much later", at least in my book

(Also, as an aside, the Naval Weapons section of the appendix to SVW mentions that some navies with PDLCs still retained some "last-ditch autocannon defense"; so apparently not all navies were willing or able to immediately replace every autocannon with a PDLC)

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote: Why is firing off-bore so difficult? If I didn't already know better, I'd think it'd be a common ability from the very beginning of missile combat.

This is just my guess. The firing bore actively imparts velocity to the missile by means of a mass driver. It was reported that the reason the old pods were less effective is that they lacked any mass driver, so those missiles were slower that the ship launched ones. Now off-bore firing requires scrubbing the initial velocity to fly in a completely different direction. Therefore until you had more powerful wedges or multi-drives on the missiles, they would lack the velocity that made them so hard to intercept when they reached the target.

Jonathan_S wrote:Plus you need a lot more fire control links on the axis you point at the enemy. Classically a hammerhead's chase fire control was designed to handle a couple salvos of its chase tubes, so using a Star Knight CA as an example that's just 3 tubes so maybe links for 6-12 missiles. To make it copy what the later various Saganami-class CAs can do it would need enough to handle that plus both broadsides, so suddenly you need to find room to mount links for 27 tubes; even if you omit redundancy just 27 tubes is a 2-5x increase in links!!!

(Though it'd be easier to find space for just double the links for one broadside to control missiles launched by both. However the need for the far broadside's missiles to fly safely around some side of the ship's giant wedge would cut a bit into their range and terminal velocity)



IIRC when off bore firing was introduced in the Shrikes there was some mention of needing a new generation of molycirc that could handle the acceleration associated with whipping the missile around up to 135 degrees off bore. For a little while that made me wonder if off-bore firing used something like a tractor beam to pivot the launched missile onto its new vector before drive lights off; but RFC said no; it was all done by the drive.
Though that gets back to the claim that broadside launchers (and new style pods) impart significant (and important) velocity to missiles. Yet that base velocity doesn't seem to show up in the performance numbers sometimes given for missile combat. (Because if the launcher velocity is irrelevant then you could have done a low acceleration off-bore launch be using the missile's thrusters to pivot it towards its target after launch but before wedge activated)


So mostly it was probably theme driven, RFC initially wanted broadside to broadside ship combat, so missiles needed to fire roughly perpendicular to ship facing/

MoH Ch. 22 wrote:The Saganami-C-class heavy cruiser massed four hundred and eighty thousand tons. It mounted forty missile launchers in each broadside, and it had been designed to fire double broadsides at its enemies, then provided with a sixty percent redundancy in control links as a reserve against battle damage. That gave each of Aivars Terekhov's cruisers one hundred and twenty eight telemetry links, and each of those links was assigned to one Mark 23-E missile, which, in turn, controlled eight standard Mark 23s.

cthia wrote:How much independent control does the Mark 23-E allow? Does each missile have to attack where the others do, or can there be separate targets?

Castenea wrote:

cthia wrote:How much independent control does the Mark 23-E allow? Does each missile have to attack where the others do, or can there be separate targets?

I think it likely that in theory, each missile could go after a different target. In practice all eight attack missile will almost always attack the same target.

cthia wrote:How much independent control does the Mark 23-E allow? Does each missile have to attack where the others do, or can there be separate targets?

Castenea wrote:I think it likely that in theory, each missile could go after a different target. In practice all eight attack missile will almost always attack the same target.

cthia wrote:Yea, I thought that all missiles follow their neighbor as well, but if an up the kilt shot presents itself on another target there only needs to be one missile diverted. Which also beckons the question of exactly what happens to the Mark23-E if it isn't destroyed by point defense? Assuming I'm correct that it's simply a control missile with no laserheads. If I am correct, I wonder if it could help prevent missiles wasted on obviously destroyed targets.

cthia wrote:I've just been set straight, because I always thought the velocity imparted to launch the missile was insignificant, and only needed to clear the area of the ship. As with the insignificant velocity imposed upon torpedoes launched from subs before the drive kicks in. Of course, considering the area needed to be cleared imposed by the huge wedge probably conflicts with that thought.

Short Victorious War: Ch 17 wrote:The old pods' launchers had lacked the powerful mass-drivers which gave warships' missiles their initial impetus. That, in turn, gave them a lower initial velocity, and since their missiles had exactly the same drives as any other missile, they couldn't make up the velocity differential unless the ship-launched birds were stepped down to less than optimal power settings. If you didn't step your shipboard missiles down, you lost much of the saturation effect because the velocity discrepancy effectively split your launch into two separate salvos. Yet if you did step them down, the slower speed of your entire launch not only gave the enemy more time to evade and adjust his ECM, but also gave his active defenses extra tracking and engagement time

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:How much independent control does the Mark 23-E allow? Does each missile have to attack where the others do, or can there be separate targets?

Castenea wrote:I think it likely that in theory, each missile could go after a different target. In practice all eight attack missile will almost always attack the same target.

cthia wrote:Yea, I thought that all missiles follow their neighbor as well, but if an up the kilt shot presents itself on another target there only needs to be one missile diverted. Which also beckons the question of exactly what happens to the Mark23-E if it isn't destroyed by point defense? Assuming I'm correct that it's simply a control missile with no laserheads. If I am correct, I wonder if it could help prevent missiles wasted on obviously destroyed targets.

I am fairly certain that RFC said that the Mark 23-E missiles would communicate with each other, sharing target information. If so, then clearly they can do what you suggest. I cannot find the description of the Apollo system, but I remember the control missile as being a bit bigger and lacking a warhead, in order to fit in the communication and control equipment.

cthia wrote:How much independent control does the Mark 23-E allow? Does each missile have to attack where the others do, or can there be separate targets?

Castenea wrote:I think it likely that in theory, each missile could go after a different target. In practice all eight attack missile will almost always attack the same target.

cthia wrote:Yea, I thought that all missiles follow their neighbor as well, but if an up the kilt shot presents itself on another target there only needs to be one missile diverted. Which also beckons the question of exactly what happens to the Mark23-E if it isn't destroyed by point defense? Assuming I'm correct that it's simply a control missile with no laserheads. If I am correct, I wonder if it could help prevent missiles wasted on obviously destroyed targets.

tlb wrote:I am fairly certain that RFC said that the Mark 23-E missiles would communicate with each other, sharing target information. If so, then clearly they can do what you suggest. I cannot find the description of the Apollo system, but I remember the control missile as being a bit bigger and lacking a warhead, in order to fit in the communication and control equipment.

Theemile wrote:It was mentioned in the last 2 books that the -E's in a flight communicated in a mesh network to share uplinks (if needed) and to acquire a fuller sight picture (when in autonomous/RF mode) for making attack decisions. One could assume that there might be the ability to make targeting decisions, within certain parameters (for-ex, do you really want the missiles to attack the helpless the troop transports in the enemy formation? )

It was called "Apollo," after the archer of the gods.
It hadn't been easy for the R&D types to perfect. Even for Manticoran technology, designing the components had required previously impossible levels of miniaturization, and BuWeaps had encountered more difficulties than anticipated in putting the system into production. This was its first test in actual combat, and the crews which had launched the MDMs watched with bated breath to see how well it performed.
Javier Giscard was wrong. There weren't twelve missiles in an Apollo pod; there were nine. Eight relatively standard attack missiles or EW platforms, and the Apollo missile—much larger than the others, and equipped with a down-sized, short-ranged two-way FTL communications link developed from the one deployed in the still larger Ghost Rider reconnaissance drones. It was a remote control node, following along behind the other eight missiles from the same pod, without any warhead or electronic warfare capability of its own.
The impeller wedges of the other missiles hid it and its pulsed transmissions from the sensors of Giscard's ships, and from his counter-missiles. But its position allowed it to monitor the standard telemetry links from the other missiles of its pod. And it also carried a far more capable AI than any standard attack missile—one capable of processing the data from all of the other missiles' tracking and homing systems and sending the result back to its mothership via grav-pulse.