Future Point Defense Options

captinjoehenry wrote:Also where are the keyhole platforms located when they are deployed because I think they are located above and below the ships wedge but they are mounted in broadside bays which is not where I would put them if they were going to be above and below the wedge.

When Keyhole is deployed, they sit along the broadside a bit beyond the edge of the ship's wedge. The ship needs to communicate constantly with the Keyhole platforms; Keyhole mostly just relays communications between the ship and the missiles. If the Keyhole were above or below the wedge, the wedge would block communication between the Keyhole and the ship.

While deployed, the ship turns its wedge toward the enemy, with the Keyholes on either side of it providing the ship with a view around the wedge.

Katanas are valuable because:

1) There are a lot of them screening the wall. Pumping out 100+ LACs per CLAC means a lot of defenses. A SD(P) cannot hope to match that scale while still carrying everything else its supposed to.

2) They can be distributed much farther from the wall. Keyhole is relatively closely tethered to its mothership, both for receiving power and reducing comm lags. LACs have no requirement to be within a few hundred clicks of anything. That means they can be deployed any distance away from the wall, and can independently engage threats using their own onboard capabilities.

Hutch wrote:First of all, welcome to the forum captain joe (and remember, periods are your friend--that first paragraph is a bit hard to parse) and the first Old Tillman is on the house.

captinjoehenry wrote:Ok here is an idea how about they just delete most of the energy broadside armament as on a SD(P) if you have anything in energy range something has already gone terribly wrong

It's been moving that way; Gryphon-calss SD's (the last non-pod-layer) had 22 Grasers and 19 Lasers in their broadsides and 5 Grasers/4 lasers as chase. Medusa's (the first SD(P)'s), had only 15 Grasers/13 Lasers and the same chase armament. Invictus-class podnoughts dispensed with lasers altogether and have 18 Grazers per broadside and 10 Grasers per chase.

So it's gone from 98 energy mounts to 72 to 56, so about a 40% reduction.

and you are screwed anyways so after you delete all of the energy weapons why don't you replace them with more laser clusters and in some of that space put in some sort of Keyhole like platform that is dedicated purely to missile defense so it has a large number of laser clusters built into it along with a bunch of CM command channels

Definitely survivability in the next generation of SD(P)'s is a concern after recent demonstations of the destructive power of Apollo, so it will be interesting to see if any of your ideas are used.

and if there is enough space also load it up with CM launchers AKA basically attach a remote platform to the SD(P) that fills the same role as the Katanas except it is built into the SD(P) so it has access to all of the SD(P) resources. Now if it turns out that you still need some sort of energy weapons i would say use more of the freed up space to expand the CM tubes magazines and load them up with lots of MK-9 Vipers which you could use to deal with light vessels that get to close.

Here I think you are complicating matters, but I'll leave it to others to comment, as this is not really my best skill set.

Another option would be to make the CMs have longer range and load them up with much more powerful sensors and ais so they become fire and forget missiles so you do not need to provide as much guidance from the launching platform.

The longer and more capable, the larger they may get and ship size/capabilites do have a limit. And with the LAC Doctrine in place, there is already a major forward defense screen out there.

We shall see.

Furthering what Hutch said, We see the 3rd generation Medusa B design - which probably was never completed prior to OB:

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/81/1

It had a further reduction to 50 Grasers total.

For all the podnaughts, it is important to see what environment they were designed for:

Medusa - Pod missile - lessons from 1st Havenite war through ~1913
Invictus - MDM Pod Missile - Lessons learned through Buttercup campaign (~1913-1916)
Medusa B - Sustained pod combat - Lessons learned from Interwar years and early 2nd Havenite war(~1916-1919)

In short, every design is designed to fight the conditions of the LAST conflict stage. Even the unfinished Medusa B would not have been optimized for Apollo combat, even though the previous design (Invictus) fielded the control hardware.

The "yet to be seen" 4th gen podnaught will probably have some responses to Apollo (and further movement from energy based combat).

Duckk wrote:Katanas are valuable because:

1) There are a lot of them screening the wall. Pumping out 100+ LACs per CLAC means a lot of defenses. A SD(P) cannot hope to match that scale while still carrying everything else its supposed to.

2) They can be distributed much farther from the wall. Keyhole is relatively closely tethered to its mothership, both for receiving power and reducing comm lags. LACs have no requirement to be within a few hundred clicks of anything. That means they can be deployed any distance away from the wall, and can independently engage threats using their own onboard capabilities.

Of course, as we all know, the tradeoff is that they have pretty limited CM magazines. So they can only significantly attrit the first few waves of incoming missiles before they run out and either have to return to the CLAC to rearm or are reduced to only using their PDLCs.

(Though of course you can, in various ways, trade off reduced CM fire rates for increased on-station duration)

Hutch wrote:First of all, welcome to the forum captain joe (and remember, periods are your friend--that first paragraph is a bit hard to parse) and the first Old Tillman is on the house.

captinjoehenry wrote:Ok here is an idea how about they just delete most of the energy broadside armament as on a SD(P) if you have anything in energy range something has already gone terribly wrong

It's been moving that way; Gryphon-calss SD's (the last non-pod-layer) had 22 Grasers and 19 Lasers in their broadsides and 5 Grasers/4 lasers as chase. Medusa's (the first SD(P)'s), had only 15 Grasers/13 Lasers and the same chase armament. Invictus-class podnoughts dispensed with lasers altogether and have 18 Grazers per broadside and 10 Grasers per chase.

So it's gone from 98 energy mounts to 72 to 56, so about a 40% reduction.

and you are screwed anyways so after you delete all of the energy weapons why don't you replace them with more laser clusters and in some of that space put in some sort of Keyhole like platform that is dedicated purely to missile defense so it has a large number of laser clusters built into it along with a bunch of CM command channels

Definitely survivability in the next generation of SD(P)'s is a concern after recent demonstations of the destructive power of Apollo, so it will be interesting to see if any of your ideas are used.

and if there is enough space also load it up with CM launchers AKA basically attach a remote platform to the SD(P) that fills the same role as the Katanas except it is built into the SD(P) so it has access to all of the SD(P) resources. Now if it turns out that you still need some sort of energy weapons i would say use more of the freed up space to expand the CM tubes magazines and load them up with lots of MK-9 Vipers which you could use to deal with light vessels that get to close.

Here I think you are complicating matters, but I'll leave it to others to comment, as this is not really my best skill set.

Another option would be to make the CMs have longer range and load them up with much more powerful sensors and ais so they become fire and forget missiles so you do not need to provide as much guidance from the launching platform.

The longer and more capable, the larger they may get and ship size/capabilites do have a limit. And with the LAC Doctrine in place, there is already a major forward defense screen out there.

We shall see.

Theemile wrote:
Furthering what Hutch said, We see the 3rd generation Medusa B design - which probably was never completed prior to OB:

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/81/1

It had a further reduction to 50 Grasers total.

For all the podnaughts, it is important to see what environment they were designed for:

Medusa - Pod missile - lessons from 1st Havenite war through ~1913
Invictus - MDM Pod Missile - Lessons learned through Buttercup campaign (~1913-1916)
Medusa B - Sustained pod combat - Lessons learned from Interwar years and early 2nd Havenite war(~1916-1919)

In short, every design is designed to fight the conditions of the LAST conflict stage. Even the unfinished Medusa B would not have been optimized for Apollo combat, even though the previous design (Invictus) fielded the control hardware.

The "yet to be seen" 4th gen podnaught will probably have some responses to Apollo (and further movement from energy based combat).

Even if there is only a squadron of Medusa B's eauipped with Apollo, it looks like it take on just about any fleet that the Sollies are likely to put together. The question is, how many of them were completed before OB. We do have textev that some of the ships in the yards had been pulled out to Trevor's Star prior to OB - were any of them Medusa B's?

Jonathan_S wrote:

Duckk wrote:Katanas are valuable because:

1) There are a lot of them screening the wall. Pumping out 100+ LACs per CLAC means a lot of defenses. A SD(P) cannot hope to match that scale while still carrying everything else its supposed to.

2) They can be distributed much farther from the wall. Keyhole is relatively closely tethered to its mothership, both for receiving power and reducing comm lags. LACs have no requirement to be within a few hundred clicks of anything. That means they can be deployed any distance away from the wall, and can independently engage threats using their own onboard capabilities.

Of course, as we all know, the tradeoff is that they have pretty limited CM magazines. So they can only significantly attrit the first few waves of incoming missiles before they run out and either have to return to the CLAC to rearm or are reduced to only using their PDLCs.

(Though of course you can, in various ways, trade off reduced CM fire rates for increased on-station duration)

That's where David's proposed combat CLAC comes in--a CLAC with defensive suite, designed to stay with the combat ships and allow LACs to reload quickly. Whether this actually gets built--and actually works well--is something we'll have to see.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Duckk wrote:Katanas are valuable because:

1) There are a lot of them screening the wall. Pumping out 100+ LACs per CLAC means a lot of defenses. A SD(P) cannot hope to match that scale while still carrying everything else its supposed to.

2) They can be distributed much farther from the wall. Keyhole is relatively closely tethered to its mothership, both for receiving power and reducing comm lags. LACs have no requirement to be within a few hundred clicks of anything. That means they can be deployed any distance away from the wall, and can independently engage threats using their own onboard capabilities.

Of course, as we all know, the tradeoff is that they have pretty limited CM magazines. So they can only significantly attrit the first few waves of incoming missiles before they run out and either have to return to the CLAC to rearm or are reduced to only using their PDLCs.

(Though of course you can, in various ways, trade off reduced CM fire rates for increased on-station duration)

Ok if we are now moving away from organic missile defense for SD(P) I would suggest that they make dedicated anti missile LACs for the role of fleet defense so these would be LACs optimized to carry the most CM they possibly can by sacrificing performance or ability to engage other threats. I know that they do not want to make dedicated platforms but I feel the need for missile defense in the pod era would justify the deployment of specialist LACs for fleet missile defense role. These would also be useful in any situation where forces expected to be under attack from large numbers of missiles.

That's basically what the Katana does in fleet combat. Magazines are packed full of CMs and Vipers, and it has 3 SD point defense laser clusters.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Theemile wrote:
Furthering what Hutch said, We see the 3rd generation Medusa B design - which probably was never completed prior to OB:

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/81/1

It had a further reduction to 50 Grasers total.

For all the podnaughts, it is important to see what environment they were designed for:

Medusa - Pod missile - lessons from 1st Havenite war through ~1913
Invictus - MDM Pod Missile - Lessons learned through Buttercup campaign (~1913-1916)
Medusa B - Sustained pod combat - Lessons learned from Interwar years and early 2nd Havenite war(~1916-1919)

In short, every design is designed to fight the conditions of the LAST conflict stage. Even the unfinished Medusa B would not have been optimized for Apollo combat, even though the previous design (Invictus) fielded the control hardware.

The "yet to be seen" 4th gen podnaught will probably have some responses to Apollo (and further movement from energy based combat).

Even if there is only a squadron of Medusa B's eauipped with Apollo, it looks like it take on just about any fleet that the Sollies are likely to put together. The question is, how many of them were completed before OB. We do have textev that some of the ships in the yards had been pulled out to Trevor's Star prior to OB - were any of them Medusa B's?

No idea. The Python lump was all Invictuses, but the 35 slips with pre-war start Invictuses were emptied in early to mid 1920, and the timing is "just" tight enough for a few SD(p)s laid in those slips to complete prior to OB. Did they... don't know. David said that the 3rd generation podnaught program will essentially be skipped due to OB, and any later builds after reconstruction will be a 4th gen design.

Not proof positive that a ship or 2 (or 8) didn't complete and were in Trevor's star for workup prior to the OB strike. However, we have 0 proof any Medusa B hulls were ever laid, or that those 35 slips held any type of SD(p)s and not CLACS, Nikes, or large support ships. But if they did complete any, there are no more than a handful.

Duckk wrote:That's basically what the Katana does in fleet combat. Magazines are packed full of CMs and Vipers, and it has 3 SD point defense laser clusters.

So you are saying that the Katanas are already fully optimized for carrying huge numbers of CM and that there is no real way to cram even more CMs into a LAC sized ship to make that type of design worthwhile? If that is the case I would suggest that they work on a new larger lac that is developed from the ground up as a fleet missile defense platform or make a new class of destroyer sized ships which are dedicated to the fleet missile defense role. I know that if it is at all possible the SEM would want to make a multi role ship but I would say that the current state of warfare would justify making some sort of dedicated missile defense platform for fleet engagements as the current technology makes it impossible to make a capital ship be capable of defending itself against the amount of missiles that are used in current fleet battles. Now I am not sure if this should be some sort of supersized LAC that is carried in a CLAC or if it should be hyper capable but other than something like that or Hamphill coming up with some sort of fancy new missile defense technology the only answer I can see right now is some sort of anti missile platform that you can deploy between your fleet and the enemy.