April's thought experiment

Jonathan_S wrote:MDMs in particular would be very hard to recover. They can actually max out at a velocity higher than a manned ship's particle shielding can handled -- so if you fire them at extreme range your ships literally couldn't catch them to try to haul aboard.

And even when fired are somewhat shorter ranges their terminal velocities will still be pretty close to what your ships can manage -- so it's be a very long slow stern chase to run down the expended missile. So, not only will all its drive rings be unrecoverable burned out, it'll also have taken many hours of particle collisions at its > 0.7c terminal speed after its particle shielding goes down. So it'll be in rough shape.

Question: Do the missiles fired at shorter range shut down their drives when they reach the enemy or do the drives continue to run for as long as they can? If the later, then every intact missile of the same type and drive setting will have nearly the same speed at the end of its powered flight.

PS: I agree that any spent missile would be very hard to find. However consider a destroyer on the far side of the main body from an enemy force. If it records a missile that has come through intact and gets a good reading on its course, then it could jump ahead and try to capture the missile with a tractor after it becomes inert. I think that possibility is sufficient reason to force a detonation when the power drops to some preset minimum.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:MDMs in particular would be very hard to recover. They can actually max out at a velocity higher than a manned ship's particle shielding can handled -- so if you fire them at extreme range your ships literally couldn't catch them to try to haul aboard.

And even when fired are somewhat shorter ranges their terminal velocities will still be pretty close to what your ships can manage -- so it's be a very long slow stern chase to run down the expended missile. So, not only will all its drive rings be unrecoverable burned out, it'll also have taken many hours of particle collisions at its > 0.7c terminal speed after its particle shielding goes down. So it'll be in rough shape.

Question: Do the missiles fired at shorter range shut down their drives when they reach the enemy or do the drives continue to run for as long as they can? If the later, then every intact missile of the same type and drive setting will have nearly the same speed at the end of its powered flight.

PS: I agree that any spent missile would be very hard to find. However consider a destroyer on the far side of the main body from an enemy force. If it records a missile that has come through intact and gets a good reading on its course, then it could jump ahead and try to capture the missile with a tractor after it becomes inert. I think that possibility is sufficient reason to force a detonation when the power drops to some preset minimum.

Early RMN missiles could modify a missile runtime/speed ratio slightly, but modern ones can't - so a missile launched will continue to run until it's drives run out. You can just just select the slow/fast setting, pauses between drives, and whether to light later drives.

tlb wrote:Question: Do the missiles fired at shorter range shut down their drives when they reach the enemy or do the drives continue to run for as long as they can? If the later, then every intact missile of the same type and drive setting will have nearly the same speed at the end of its powered flight.

PS: I agree that any spent missile would be very hard to find. However consider a destroyer on the far side of the main body from an enemy force. If it records a missile that has come through intact and gets a good reading on its course, then it could jump ahead and try to capture the missile with a tractor after it becomes inert. I think that possibility is sufficient reason to force a detonation when the power drops to some preset minimum.

I kind of assumed a missile wouldn't bother accelerating after missing the enemy; but I don't actually know. Certainly they're capable of cutting off a drive early (they just can't ever restart it again)

(Though I guess if it had time left on the drive(s) it might be programmed to try to twist its vector clear of anything and as such might continue to accelerate for a while -- though in that case peak velocity wouldn't be its goal -- it'd be accelerating perpendicular to its base velocity to most efficiently alter its vector)

But then I also assume that a missile would have a self-destruct mechanism which would pretty reliably blow it up if it missed -- both to avoid risk of capture and reverse engineering and to avoid leaving a multi-ton relativistic impactor flying who knows where.

So if you want to capture one for reverse engineering you'd need one where the self-destruct failed. Stationing some light ships well behind your own formation might be your best bet -- but pulling off the intercept is still going to be "fun". Most combat happens inside the hyper limit, where the DD can't jump ahead of the missile's trajectory -- it'd have to chase it.
I also would think that there's a maximum energy that a tractor can handle, so trying to snag a multi-ton relativistic missile as it screams past you ballistically is likely to vastly exceed that. I suspect you need to get pretty close to matching its vector before you can successfully snag it.
And in general jumping through hyper has two other problems:
1) It robs you of nearly all your velocity -- so if I'm right about the max speed/energy differential for tractors that'd make that differential worse.
2) Jump error -- there's a very good chance you'll end up well outside tractor range of the missile.

I think if you really want to snag one to attempt to reverse engineer you're probably best off with several well separated shells of lighter ships arrayed behind your formation.
The closest one spots a missile that failed to self destruct and tracks it long enough to get a reasonable vector -- then via radio (or ideally FTL comms) alerts the further shells of that trajectory. Then the further ships that are sufficiently close to its track start accelerating outwards while angling towards an intercept. The mid-field ones likely can't manage well enough to actually snag it but can pass along refined trajectory information leaving the most distant ships able to shape their course and speed so they are in a spot to successfully slap a tractor on it as it overtakes them (but at a lot lower speed differential).

That's a huge amount of work -- but could be worth it if you've a good chance of learning useful things from dissecting an enemy weapon.

Theemile wrote:Early RMN missiles could modify a missile runtime/speed ratio slightly, but modern ones can't - so a missile launched will continue to run until it's drives run out. You can just just select the slow/fast setting, pauses between drives, and whether to light later drives.

Interesting, I had not considered that the missile might never light the second or third drive. However I do not know what is gained by that.

Jonathan_S wrote:That's a huge amount of work -- but could be worth it if you've a good chance of learning useful things from dissecting an enemy weapon.

Which is only possible if the missile does not self-destruct and that is a huge argument to have the surest self-destruct.

Theemile wrote:Early RMN missiles could modify a missile runtime/speed ratio slightly, but modern ones can't - so a missile launched will continue to run until it's drives run out. You can just just select the slow/fast setting, pauses between drives, and whether to light later drives.

Modern RMN anti-ship missiles do seem to only every use the slow or fast setting (and 99% of the time it's the slow setting). Though RFC has clarified that CMs (and Vipers which use a CM drive) never allowed you to adjust their accel -- that's part of their tradeoff to get an overpowered drive; it's irrevocably locked to fast mode.

But I thought even modern DDM/MDMs would still have the option to shut any of their 3 drives down early (even if I can't recall seeing them do so on-screen). Of course shutting a drive down early still slags it; and so it can't be restarted -- meaning there's very little reason you'd ever want to shut a drive down unless you'd already missed the enemy. But you should be able do

Jonathan_S wrote:That's a huge amount of work -- but could be worth it if you've a good chance of learning useful things from dissecting an enemy weapon.

tlb wrote:Which is only possible if the missile does not self-destruct and that is a huge argument to have the surest self-destruct.

There is one very limited class of missile that could be reused; those missiles where the first stage is a recon drone, such as Mistletoe or Hasta, provided only the drone motor was used. I do not include the Silver Bullets, because their warhead had to be kept secret before the fall of Galton.

I do have a couple of questions:
First, how did they know to deploy the correct number of Silver Bullets? Did they prioritize the Mycroft stations that would be closest to the SLN attack, if the number was short? Were all of them programmed to fire when they see any other one fire, even if they did not have a target?

Second, why was this true? From At All Costs, chapter 58:

"We should have realized that sooner or later they were going to strap weapons onto their recon drones. They've demonstrated they can operate them deep inside our defended areas with virtual impunity, and they probably took a certain pleasure from applying a variant of the same technique Saint-Just used to destroy Elizabeth's yacht in Yeltsin. The bad news is how close they can get them; the good news—such as it is—is that, even so, they can't get them all the way into attack range in stealth. They still have to get into range to execute their attacks, and not even Manty stealth systems can hide them during the last hundred thousand kilometers or so of their runs. They don't have the sort of acceleration rates missiles do, either, and to be used properly, they have to attack virtually from rest, or else they can't loiter until the proper moment. So they have relatively low closing velocities when they come in, and they can be engaged by counter-missiles and standard point defense, now that we know they're out there. Our intercept probabilities won't be good, especially given how little warning we'll have between the moment their drives peak and the moment they reach attack range, but we can probably cope with the threat."

Can't a drone always get into range if it knows the approximate location, by going ballistic after building sufficient velocity when out of detection range? So could the loiter stage (if any) be done out of range?

tlb wrote:Second, why was this true? From At All Costs, chapter 58:

"We should have realized that sooner or later they were going to strap weapons onto their recon drones. They've demonstrated they can operate them deep inside our defended areas with virtual impunity, and they probably took a certain pleasure from applying a variant of the same technique Saint-Just used to destroy Elizabeth's yacht in Yeltsin. The bad news is how close they can get them; the good news—such as it is—is that, even so, they can't get them all the way into attack range in stealth. They still have to get into range to execute their attacks, and not even Manty stealth systems can hide them during the last hundred thousand kilometers or so of their runs. They don't have the sort of acceleration rates missiles do, either, and to be used properly, they have to attack virtually from rest, or else they can't loiter until the proper moment. So they have relatively low closing velocities when they come in, and they can be engaged by counter-missiles and standard point defense, now that we know they're out there. Our intercept probabilities won't be good, especially given how little warning we'll have between the moment their drives peak and the moment they reach attack range, but we can probably cope with the threat."

Can't a drone always get into range if it knows the approximate location, by going ballistic after building sufficient velocity when out of detection range? So could the loiter stage (if any) be done out of range?

I'm sure it could -- if you didn't mind quite lengthy lag between when you hit 'attack' and when the drone reached it's target. Could be a slight issue of coordination if you wanted to kneecap the enemy defenses the moment your main force was detected but your drones were all loitering 20 minutes away; so they'd have time to accelerate up and come in ballistic.


But if the drone is stealthy enough to park itself nearly within weapons range then it can react far quicker when it gets the order to attack. Also if it can sneak all the way in then it's close enough to be 100% sure of its target. Be a bit embarrassing if you'd kept the drones back and then they come coasting in and it turns out you'd been wrong about where the target actually was and so they either go coasting past nothing or else hit a decoy you didn't get close enough to sniff out the fakery of.

Now you could try to coordinate things so the drones were passing their targets ballistically just when you needed them all to attack. But better hope that nothing disrupts your timeline one way or the other or the drones will either not be in range yet or will have coasted back out of range when your now off schedule attack has to happen.



So I guess, technically, drones don't have to attack from rest -- it's just easiest to coordinate with the rest of your attack if the drones can hide close enough that they can attacking quickly from rest.

(For that matter, the Peeps may be guilty of over extrapolating from how the Mistletoe drones were used this one time. Just because this time they attacked from near rest doesn't necessarily mean they always have to -- even if I tend to think there are advantages to doing so. But if their defenses get better then the trade-offs might tilt in favor of coming in ballistic; and the RMN switches tactics)

tlb wrote:Can't a drone always get into range if it knows the approximate location, by going ballistic after building sufficient velocity when out of detection range? So could the loiter stage (if any) be done out of range?

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm sure it could -- if you didn't mind quite lengthy lag between when you hit 'attack' and when the drone reached it's target. Could be a slight issue of coordination if you wanted to kneecap the enemy defenses the moment your main force was detected but your drones were all loitering 20 minutes away; so they'd have time to accelerate up and come in ballistic.

But if the drone is stealthy enough to park itself nearly within weapons range then it can react far quicker when it gets the order to attack. Also if it can sneak all the way in then it's close enough to be 100% sure of its target. Be a bit embarrassing if you'd kept the drones back and then they come coasting in and it turns out you'd been wrong about where the target actually was and so they either go coasting past nothing or else hit a decoy you didn't get close enough to sniff out the fakery of.

Now you could try to coordinate things so the drones were passing their targets ballistically just when you needed them all to attack. But better hope that nothing disrupts your timeline one way or the other or the drones will either not be in range yet or will have coasted back out of range when your now off schedule attack has to happen.

So I guess, technically, drones don't have to attack from rest -- it's just easiest to coordinate with the rest of your attack if the drones can hide close enough that they can attacking quickly from rest.

(For that matter, the Peeps may be guilty of over extrapolating from how the Mistletoe drones were used this one time. Just because this time they attacked from near rest doesn't necessarily mean they always have to -- even if I tend to think there are advantages to doing so. But if their defenses get better then the trade-offs might tilt in favor of coming in ballistic; and the RMN switches tactics)

The main issue is a matter of coordination, if one drone attacks too soon, then any remaining Moriarty station could fire off any remaining missile pods. So it is mainly a problem of hitting all the Moriarty stations at once and then afterwards the missiles pods can be destroyed. But Moriarty can be destroyed by laser warheads with each having a standoff range, so there does not need to be any loiter if all the Mistletoes arrange their speed to be within a good kill distance at the designated attack time.

The missiles targeting the pods do not need to be as coordinated as long as it is shortly after the Moriarty attack.

Alternatively the missiles can brake to a stop once they are within a good kill range for Moriarty, if that process is stealthy enough. Indeed, the missiles attacking the pods could brake within the pod swarm, if they are early. How much sensor ability is normally among the pods?

tlb wrote:First, how did they know to deploy the correct number of Silver Bullets? Did they prioritize the Mycroft stations that would be closest to the SLN attack, if the number was short? Were all of them programmed to fire when they see any other one fire, even if they did not have a target?

They may not have known for sure how many there were. The number of Silver Bullets was probably based on inferred information from human intelligence about how many Mycroft stations there would be plus a modicum of overkill, and the number of bullets that would be necessary to guarantee locating the stations in the time between delivery and the arrival of Operation Fabius.

I don't think the location to the attacker would be much of a difference, since those stations are coordinating with the Apollo launches via FTL. They could be on the other side of the system, within the hyperlimit, and still only add about 15 seconds to the lag, or roughly double it.