Posted by: Maxsimal
« on: August 19, 2013, 03:09:53 PM »Hey, here are some thoughts on the missile issue, and a few issues I've got with the tech (I've only recently taken a look at Aurora, and never played StarDrive)
Missile Engagement/Tactics issues.
One big assumption this makes is that there is no effective ECM in space. Everything seems to have perfect track on everything else, there's no usage of decoys, ECM, etc. Which means that all the fire control is pretty heavy overkill. So one easy 'fix' is to create PD miss chance out of passive or active missile ECM. This is one of the solutions used by Weber in the harrington novels, which you're likely familiar with.
Anyway, given that situation, and the tech involved, the most likely answer to getting misses past PD is to use MIRV's.
Observe:
If you consider that each missile could carry a payload of 1000 20cm long, 2mm cross section 1kg high density (osmium) bars, each of which would deliver 23 GJ of energy. This would hole any of the ships armor's, as well as spalling interior components. They would also release enough chaff to confuse the position of penetrators.
To kill the barbarian ships, the bars could create an 800m diameter saturation kill field to make sure 1 strikes. Vs the enterprise, this widens out to 2. 3km's.
Because of the barbarian ship's acceleration, the missile can release the unguided bars about 75 seconds before contact. 16k kms away, well outside the point defense engagement envelope.
Further, even if the barbarian picked the 'right' bar to burn, the laser would not be able to dump enough energy into the bars at such a low cross section. Even the laser fired at point blank range, (200 km, 1 second before impact, no time for a second shot), its spot size would still be large enough (15cm) that it would only put 17kj into the bar. If we cared, we could put a cap of 10 grams of cryogenic hydrogen on the top of each bar, which would gas off but still be -151 Kelvin. Or we could just make the bar thinner and longer (which also increases armor penetration depth) Gauss cannon jitter would of course give no chance at all of an intercept.
Even if they got that bar - the next missile's shotgun pattern would be 1 second behind it, the next a second behind that, no time for the point defense to engage each.
The Enterprise, given its sluggishness and greater size, fares much more poorly. The missile could release much much earlier (200 seconds, 40k kms), or just go for a much denser kill pattern
This leaves AMM systems to kill incoming missiles, which is more along the lines of what you'd want. Even in that case, missiles would probably be built with many small guided sub munitions, which would deploy and spread out linearly to prevent them from being killed by a single nuke- and for certain, actual missiles would NEVER clump together 1km apart the way yours did. Sub munitions would spread out over dozens of kilometers , and given the large amount of reserve delta V, the missiles themselves would all incoming be on slightly different converging vectors, rather than all being on the same vector, giving them additional spacing. The only limitation on submunition size would be the minimum size of an effective drive - the lack of any ECM/ECCM and fire control being relayed from a control submuntion would make guidance otherwise trivial.
So AMM's would either be Mirv'd themselves or just be much lighter and more numerous, which creates the appropriate 'missile duel' feeling.
Given all that, I think you would be better off creating some sort of ECM/ECCM system for missile combat, which would at least keep missiles 'intact'.
Missile Engagement/Tactics issues.
One big assumption this makes is that there is no effective ECM in space. Everything seems to have perfect track on everything else, there's no usage of decoys, ECM, etc. Which means that all the fire control is pretty heavy overkill. So one easy 'fix' is to create PD miss chance out of passive or active missile ECM. This is one of the solutions used by Weber in the harrington novels, which you're likely familiar with.
Anyway, given that situation, and the tech involved, the most likely answer to getting misses past PD is to use MIRV's.
Observe:
If you consider that each missile could carry a payload of 1000 20cm long, 2mm cross section 1kg high density (osmium) bars, each of which would deliver 23 GJ of energy. This would hole any of the ships armor's, as well as spalling interior components. They would also release enough chaff to confuse the position of penetrators.
To kill the barbarian ships, the bars could create an 800m diameter saturation kill field to make sure 1 strikes. Vs the enterprise, this widens out to 2. 3km's.
Because of the barbarian ship's acceleration, the missile can release the unguided bars about 75 seconds before contact. 16k kms away, well outside the point defense engagement envelope.
Further, even if the barbarian picked the 'right' bar to burn, the laser would not be able to dump enough energy into the bars at such a low cross section. Even the laser fired at point blank range, (200 km, 1 second before impact, no time for a second shot), its spot size would still be large enough (15cm) that it would only put 17kj into the bar. If we cared, we could put a cap of 10 grams of cryogenic hydrogen on the top of each bar, which would gas off but still be -151 Kelvin. Or we could just make the bar thinner and longer (which also increases armor penetration depth) Gauss cannon jitter would of course give no chance at all of an intercept.
Even if they got that bar - the next missile's shotgun pattern would be 1 second behind it, the next a second behind that, no time for the point defense to engage each.
The Enterprise, given its sluggishness and greater size, fares much more poorly. The missile could release much much earlier (200 seconds, 40k kms), or just go for a much denser kill pattern
This leaves AMM systems to kill incoming missiles, which is more along the lines of what you'd want. Even in that case, missiles would probably be built with many small guided sub munitions, which would deploy and spread out linearly to prevent them from being killed by a single nuke- and for certain, actual missiles would NEVER clump together 1km apart the way yours did. Sub munitions would spread out over dozens of kilometers , and given the large amount of reserve delta V, the missiles themselves would all incoming be on slightly different converging vectors, rather than all being on the same vector, giving them additional spacing. The only limitation on submunition size would be the minimum size of an effective drive - the lack of any ECM/ECCM and fire control being relayed from a control submuntion would make guidance otherwise trivial.
So AMM's would either be Mirv'd themselves or just be much lighter and more numerous, which creates the appropriate 'missile duel' feeling.
Given all that, I think you would be better off creating some sort of ECM/ECCM system for missile combat, which would at least keep missiles 'intact'.