Are missile pods obsolete?

No, MDM capacitor birds are capable of wedge restart. Iirc, each stage requires a wedge restart and the RHN has been noted as using missiles with ballistic intervals.

kzt wrote:No, MDM capacitor birds are capable of wedge restart. Iirc, each stage requires a wedge restart and the RHN has been noted as using missiles with ballistic intervals.

Cap birds have never been shown to have this feature. Otherwise there never would have been all that hullabaloo in AAC concerning RHN units missile range at BOMA. Cap birds range would then be infinite, only limited to signal strength.

The cluster pack of Mk16 tubes in a Roland's hammerhead doesn't scale past the 2x3 layout

You don't want it to. If you put all the tubes into one cluster, a single lucky hit will take them out. That's why you got 40 entirely separate clusters, with their own feeding mechanisms and support.
And physically, there's no reason why you can't have separate clusters like that - 40 entire Roland hammerheads physically fit in an SD's broadside after all.

and even if it did the missiles wouldn't be able to spread (in distance or time) enough to avoid wedge fratricide.

You fire 1 tube per cluster every 1/6 of a second, taking 1 second for firing the whole broadside. That's a mere 40 missiles per broadside at once so no fratricide (we've seen bigger waves). Given that tubes impart a speed of several hundred kilometers/second, you get separation of 100 kilometers between the mini waves, which is much bigger than any missile's wedge could ever be.
EDIT:
This also allows each cluster to use a single gunport instead of six, fixing the problem of having too many gunports per sidewall.

Relax wrote:

kzt wrote:No, MDM capacitor birds are capable of wedge restart. Iirc, each stage requires a wedge restart and the RHN has been noted as using missiles with ballistic intervals.

Cap birds have never been shown to have this feature. Otherwise there never would have been all that hullabaloo in AAC concerning RHN units missile range at BOMA. Cap birds range would then be infinite, only limited to signal strength.

Don't the nodes on the first drive burn out before the second starts?
I think the 2nd or 3rd drive in an MDM is effectively always a restart; even if it's at the shortest possible interval that doesn't cause destructive interference.

But in any case, a ballistic phase is brought up as a possibility the very first time we hear about MDMs - Honor's talk with White Haven in IEH. And that's way before the micro-fusion Mk23s came around

In Enemy Hands: Chapter 2 wrote:That's a range of three-point-six light-minutes, and we can get even more than that if we use one or two 'stages' to accelerate the weapon, let it ride a ballistic course to a preprogrammed attack range, and then bring up the final 'stage' for terminal attack maneuvers at a full ninety-two thousand gravities

Don't we have diagrams of at least one MDM clearly showing the separate drive stages? Separate drive stages with separate nodes would require separate activations 'cause you can't have multiple full wedges active on the same craft. (I think)




The problem I see is power supply. If a superdreadnought's power plants, which are more efficient than small craft power plants that missiles use, can't raise its own wedge without capacitors, how does a missile raises the wedge multiple times from its powerplant alone?

Relax wrote:

kzt wrote:No, MDM capacitor birds are capable of wedge restart. Iirc, each stage requires a wedge restart and the RHN has been noted as using missiles with ballistic intervals.

Cap birds have never been shown to have this feature. Otherwise there never would have been all that hullabaloo in AAC concerning RHN units missile range at BOMA. Cap birds range would then be infinite, only limited to signal strength.

Zanzibar.

Belial666 wrote:Don't we have diagrams of at least one MDM clearly showing the separate drive stages? Separate drive stages with separate nodes would require separate activations 'cause you can't have multiple full wedges active on the same craft. (I think)




The problem I see is power supply. If a superdreadnought's power plants, which are more efficient than small craft power plants that missiles use, can't raise its own wedge without capacitors, how does a missile raises the wedge multiple times from its powerplant alone?

Ding Ding. How it was explained in a pearl. When one wedge collapsed the energy is transferred to the next wedge initiation.

What I think we have going on here is that RFC has spoken out both sides of his mouth.

Zanzibar? You mean the retcon where he effectively said the absurdity that RHN birds could hit infrastructure from outside the hyper limit and yet we have RHN units a few chapters later who do not do the exacdt same thing to Manticore... Yea. I called that pearl a giant pile of stinky CYA BS when he posted it.

Missiles and their plot usage goes whichever way the wind is blowing. So honestly I could see it going both way depending on the exigencies of the plot.

Relax wrote:Zanzibar? You mean the retcon where he effectively said the absurdity that RHN birds could hit infrastructure from outside the hyper limit and yet we have RHN units a few chapters later who do not do the exacdt same thing to Manticore... Yea. I called that pearl a giant pile of stinky CYA BS when he posted it.

Missiles and their plot usage goes whichever way the wind is blowing. So honestly I could see it going both way depending on the exigencies of the plot.

Pretty much....

As was stated several posts above Honor Harrington specifically stated in IEH that the brand new capacitor MDMs could have a ballistic phase between drives. This was the very first model of capacitor MDM, so it has been part of the design from the very beginning.

SWM wrote:As was stated several posts above Honor Harrington specifically stated in IEH that the brand new capacitor MDMs could have a ballistic phase between drives. This was the very first model of capacitor MDM, so it has been part of the design from the very beginning.

Then we should have seen it in the books. Been throwing MDM's around for a very long time.