Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Dominus Atheos]

That scene always struck me as one of the stupidest in the series. Besides "blind panic", why the hell would Pierre fire on the dreadnaught? They aren't actually at war yet, there is no reason to think Bellerophon would fire on his ships unless he fired first.

[Batman]

Screw the power capacity of the pod. For reloading the pods in mid-combat to be useful they'd have be able to do that faster than simply deploying another set of pods, and given that 'Wayfarer' way back when could deploy pods at a rate of one salvo every 12 seconds they'd practically have to teleport new missiles into the pods to make this worthwhile. They can and do reuse the pods out of combat as early as 'Honor Among Enemies' (Ginger Lewis has her little spacewalking 'accident' while they're in the process of retrieving pods).

(Dude, did you read the whole paragraph you're responding to?)

Yes I did and I absolutely noticed you already mentioning they can shove out new pods faster than they can reuse old ones, I just think your idea of why they don't reload spent pods mid-combat is garbage.

As for reloading pods sucking: not necessarily. The pods are in 12-second podsides on both the HMAMCs and SD(P)s, but the reload of a broadside tube is, for capship missiles at least, in the <20 second range (as I recall). Before they had podnaughts/HMAMCs, their initial salvos of pod-launched missiles are just one-shot salvos, and having the pods thicken two salvos instead of just one isn't a bad idea. A larger pod with a larger power supply could fire two salvos of missiles, rather than one.

Only if the pod already has the ammunition for two salvoes, which brings us back to the size issue. I seriously doubt reloading pods in mid-combat is going to be faster than just going with broadsides and/or stacking pod salvoes. Also, multi-salvo pods wouldn't be reloading pods in combat so much as them being preloaded for several launches. Call me pedantic but to me, reloading pods means the pods are empty and with Honorverse technology no way in hell are you going to reload them faster than a podlayer can drop another pod pattern.

[Terralthra]

"I just think your idea of why they don't reload spent pods mid-combat is garbage."

By the time they have enough power capacity (miniature fusion plants) to spin up more than one, they can just dump another podside much faster than the tubes could reload anyway.

For reloading the pods in mid-combat to be useful they'd have be able to do that faster than simply deploying another set of pods, and given that 'Wayfarer' way back when could deploy pods at a rate of one salvo every 12 seconds they'd practically have to teleport new missiles into the pods to make this worthwhile.

If you think my idea of why they don't have pods which reload instead of being one-salvo is garbage, you think your own idea is also garbage because we said the same thing.

What you aren't taking into account is that they had pods well before they had podlayers. In the years between SVW (inclusive) and EoH (when SD(P)s first come into service), the fact that pods are only good for thickening one salvo - as a downside of pods - is mentioned at least three times that I can think of. There must be a reason during that period that they didn't try pods that had more than one salvo's worth of ammunition to try to overcome that downside. My personal hypotheses are that they couldn't reasonably put enough capacitance in one pod to spin up more than one salvo's worth of missiles, or that it would overcomplicate the design to the point where the maintenance costs/failure rate are too high.

By the time they had miniaturized the fusion plants enough that they had that sort of power capacity, SD(P)s were a reality and there was no point, since they could just roll more pods.

Call me pedantic but to me, reloading pods means the pods are empty and with Honorverse technology no way in hell are you going to reload them faster than a podlayer can drop another pod pattern.

I think you're splitting a hair there. Reloading the pods could mean reloading the entire pod from the external ammunition source (like we see in HAE), or it could mean the tubes within the pod being reloaded from an internal ammunition bay. Since the original question was asking about the latter, I chose to focus on that interpretation.

[Ahriman238]

Okay, Pods, a couple things I'm not getting. The miniaturised launchers, in pods they throw full sized missiles as fast as the full sized launchers right? That's the justification or why pods work now and not before. And, I've read enough here and on the wiki to know they're later used to revitalise the LAC concept so they must be reloadable.

Not exactly, no. It's more like the miniaturized parts are good for both. The LAC revival is linked through miniaturization of existing parts being needed for both, and having big breakthroughs at the same time.

A parasite pod is pretty much 10 metal tubes with missiles inside, bolted or welded together, with a blocky bit for the mass-driver at the end. Or so I have always pictured them. I suppose they need some form of onboard computer, possibly some thrusters for orientation and a battery or power generator, but with Honorverse tech it needn't be intrusive or obvious.

So yes, there are ten missiles that fire as fast as a shipboard launcher, but it's a one-shot.

Also, they need to be towed and fired outside the ship's wedge and sidewall shielding, making them really vulnerable once missiles start detonating. Hence use-it-or-lose-it single-salvo assets. I believe, and it's been a while so don't hold me to this, this is because a) the internal launched missiles take up enough of the limited space to launch from and b.) they aren't entirely confident of opening holes in the sidewalls for the pods missiles.


Right now, the pods are a nice advantage, especially the first time when they're a surprise. Think about it, a pod fires a single salvo of 10 missiles. A battlecruiser's standard missile broadside is about 20, a superdreadnought about 40-50. Now a cruiser can only tow and launch 2 or 3 pods, a BC six. But that means a BC gets off one 80 missile salvo. This is the dawn of Honorverse missile spam.

But it would be sort of awkward to reel them in by tractor and have EVA crews reload them by hand in the middle of battle.


So what happens? You've read this far where people have been discussing these things, and reading the wiki, so here's the concise history:

Manticore starts using pods. Haven follows. Haven pods are freaking huge and unwieldy because they can't make tiny mass-drivers, so they compensate by using 16 missiles, and bigger ones than the Manties.

Honor gets beached and exiled to Grayson for one book. When she comes back, she's put in command of a Q-ship, (kind of full circle there) the Wayfarer. Well, they couldn't give her military-grade armor, drives, shielding or even basic compartmentalization without rebuilding it keel out as a warship, buth they had a ton of space, so they gave it a serious armament, made it a carrier for a dozen improved LACs, then did something real clever. They left the after third of the ship hollow, fitted with six rails leading to a back hatch, then strung hundreds of missile pods along the rails.

Suddenly, there was a ship that could carry 500 missile pods inside, and kick out 30 of them a minute. And Hemphill liked her own idea so much, she wanted to include it in the next generation of superdreadnoughts.


Around this time, they got so good at the miniaturization game, the managed to make missiles with two or three drives that were only 20% bigger than the old ones. The MDMs (multi-drive missiles) opened up whole new worlds, since they didn't have to be fired all at once, or even sequentially missiles now had effectively unlimited range.

Only one small snag in fire control. See, the major limit in pods a ship could use wasn't tractor beams, but fire control links. Missiles have their own computers with a number of canned routines to evade point-defense and counter missiles, to try and find the real target through hazy clouds of ECM. But missiles are pretty dumb, so when possible they're managed by the ship's computer and the tactical officer, who are much better equipped to figure out ECM and tell them which target to go for, when to accelerate and to jink and so on. Ideally they guide them all the way in, but at max missile ranges there can be something like a 20-30 second transmission delay, making this impractical. Naturally, every ship has redundant links which is why they could handle pods in the first place. But at MDM ranges, there is no mothership fine-control, and missile accuracy and ability to foil PD and ECM fell dramatically.

Of course, with podnoughts firing MDMs they can afford to spam 1200 missiles knowing that just 200 hits will kill or cripple the enemy force.

But because Sonja Hemphill's year wasn't busy enough, she went through a project Ghost Rider, ushering in the next generation of electronic warfare with vastly superior recon drones, superior seekers for missiles, untethered decoys, Well, the MDMs were also part of Ghost Rider. Actually most of those systems made MDMs somewhat manageable.

As for the LACs, she finally got her way. The Shrike was built around a battlecruiser graser and had just four missile launchers, with five birds in each. Shrikes would approach a ship en masse with their wedges facing the enemy, then turn into them and unload everything on a strafing run while raising bow walls. See, the only reason they don't shield the front and back of a ship is they can't maneuver or change velocity while the ends of the wedge are blocked, but including an option to do so if shielding becomes more important than maneuver... Yeah, it worked great.


Now Manticore actually managed to keep these developments secret for a year while building a join Manitocre/Grayson fleet armed with all these shiny toys that fly straight for Haven itself. Eighth Fleet under White Haven in their great offensive Operation Buttercup. And never in the annals of naval history was so much whoop-ass unleashed on so unsuspecting a foe. Until the Sollie stuff. And Oyster Bay.

On a related note, now "Horrible Hemphill" is what the Peeps call her.

The only thing White haven had to worry about was running out of ammunition, so he delayed the actual attack on Haven for a couple of weeks to restock. During that time Haven sues for peace, the Manty PM is assassinated and the new guy accepts the cease-fire, then Haven has a regime change- it was a busy couple of weeks.

But when the dust cleared there was peace for several years. Military spending was cut to pre-War, levels, most officers were beached, R&D and new construction mostly dried up because hey, they have the invincible Eighth Fleet to protect them.

Some stuff went on though. Cruisers started getting bow walls, even two stage ones where the could cover all but a kilometer around the edge of their front, which inspired Sonja to add power spinal energy weapons. They also came up with missile launchers that could fire radically off-bore, so ships could now fire both broadsides into your teeth. And an improved "gravity lens" shapes the nuclear blast of a laser head and effectively doubles the punch of the lasers.

And the whole time Haven was scrambling to duplicate the Eighth Fleet hardware. And mostly succeeded, though again they tended to be unlovely by comparison, they too got MDMs, podnoughts and LAC carriers. Actually, their LAC carriers are bigger and maybe better, because Manticore used dreadnought hulls to carry a hundred LACs, while both Grayson and Haven use SD hulls to carry 200.

Haven got a new trick too, Ziska, the "Triple Ripple" where they fire a fuckton of missiles into a Manty missile/LAC swarm to blind them. And the war starts up again.

The Andermani also get the bright idea of attaching half-pods with 5 missiles to their ships with a tractor beam built into the back of the pod. Whenever they want to, just kick them loose and fire, and now every ship is pod-laying. The Manties take the idea and run with it.



Honor is stuck in charge of a new Eighth Fleet, the old one being broken up to cover alliance members. Her mission to make deep raids into Haven territory and hold up their war effort. She's given the latest ships to do this including pod-laying battlecruisers (bit of a duff idea) and the new podnoughts that carry over a thousand pods.

But the Peeps outdo her by filling key systems with ALL THE PODS!!! controlled from a central 'Moriarty' station the size of a light-cruiser that's crammed to the gills with fire control and computer support for firing more missiles than there are stars in the sky. Honor barely escapes with her life and half her fleet.

When Hemphill figures out how they did it, she takes half an hour to bolt a laser-head to a stealth recon platform and program it to seek and destroy Moriarty stations, naming it Mistletoe because it gives a little kiss. Then she jumps to the "anything you can do" stage of a mad genius and unveils her latest game-changer, Apollo. Apollo is a missile with the warhead replaced by an FTL comm. By including one in every pod, they can control MDM missiles in real-time, or close enough, making them about four times more dangerous.

The grand unveiling of Apollo convinces Haven, they lost full stop... unless they could possibly punch out Manticore before this thing enters general production. Come on, all or nothing. And they come packing a device called the Mule (wound up called Donkey on the wiki for some reason, but I remember clearly, it;s the Mule) which is a cluster of 10 tractor beam projectors that can be towed behind a ship which beams it power. Then each mule pulls ten mules, which pulls ten mules, which pull ten missile pods apiece, except a couple also pull mules...

All the mass of metal in the missiles at the Battle of Manticore. They probably could have built a Death Star. But through good luck, Manticore triumphs.


And then a Sollie officer, armed with first-tier technology from the start of the series wanders in and says "Battlecruiser from a single-system government? Meh, I could take her." and terrible things happen.

[Crazedwraith]

Okay, I think I misphrased my initial post. I wasn't intending to ask about reloading pods mid-combat. My initial thought was the miniturisation of launchers into the pods might come with some drawbacks from the full-size ones used on the ships: like the miniturised components burned themselves out when fired (not unreasonable limitation) so the pods really were only oneshot though physical limitations.

But if they used the same mini-launchers on the LACs that meant they could use them anywhere. Like in ships broadsides.

Or if you can build small launchers that are as good as big launchers can you not scale up from the small ones to make new big ones that are a lot more powerful and throw missiles at much high velocities. (therefore lowering time for PD to get them, therefore getting more through) But the engineering probably doesn't work that way.

[Marko Dash]

i've always wondered why the none of the honorverse powers ever developed a purpose built missile defense ship. something like the Atlanta class light cruiser or modern aegis ship. take a cruiser or battlecruiser weight ship, remove most the heavy ship to ship weapons and stuff it full of contermissiles and laser CIWS.

would be fairly useless for peacetime duty, but so is an SD.

[Batman]

Laser clusters would likely be moderately useless for defending anything other than the ship they're mounted on due to range limitations but since we see as early as 'Honor of the Queen' that networking defenses is pretty much SOP for the RMN it's obviously not a case of ships being incapable of defending anything other than themselves due to distances involved, which indeed raises the question of why nobody ever came up with a Space Ticonderoga.

[Terralthra]

It wouldn't just be useless for peacetime, it'd be useless under any detached duty. The lighter classes (destroyer through battlecruiser) aren't just used in fleets, they're used for convoy escorting, scouting, and tons of other stuff. Removing most of the offensive weaponry creates battlecruisers that can't actually cruise for battle. According to word of Weber, most modern navies have no desire to create warships that are that specialized.

[Batman]

A dedicated missile defense cruiser would indeed be pretty damned useless operating by her lonesome, but I think she'd make a nice convoy escort. The main purpose of an escort isn't to kill the opposition, it's to make sure the convoy lives. Granted, killing the enemy so they're no longer around toshoot at the convoy is a pretty reliable way to do that, but escorts can't count on being able to do that whereas being a Space Ticonderoga is pretty much always useful (for an escort).

[Terralthra]

A missile defense cruiser can't ensure convoy safety either. Sure, it can shoot missiles down all day, but when the bogies close to energy range...?

[eyl]

A dedicated missile defense cruiser would indeed be pretty damned useless operating by her lonesome, but I think she'd make a nice convoy escort. The main purpose of an escort isn't to kill the opposition, it's to make sure the convoy lives. Granted, killing the enemy so they're no longer around toshoot at the convoy is a pretty reliable way to do that, but escorts can't count on being able to do that whereas being a Space Ticonderoga is pretty much always useful (for an escort).

Even if a single such cruiser could defend the entire convoy - which is unlikely (for one thing, I doubt civilian systems can network as well as military ones for PD, and IIRC convoys tend to be somewhat strung out and a defense cruiser has to be next to the ship its defending), it's still useless for anything except sitting on the escorts, such as scouting ahead, or trying to take down the enemy before it gets into range of the transports.

I suppose it might come in handy if you have a ship with a cargo which needs to be defended, but in that case you'd be better off making a dedicated transport (take e.g. a battlecruiser, strip off the offensive weapons and replace them with cargo space*)

*Which IIRC is the approach Manticore took for the Royal Yacht.

[Nephtys]

Presumably in Honorverse, it's somewhat harder to cover for someone else's inbounds, than it is to engage the ones on yourself. Particularly as laser clusters only get one or two shots before missiles enter attack range, and counter-missiles are said to be quite limited in their engagement profile. Some sort of 'defense battlecruiser' probably isn't as effective as just having an extra battlecruiser in the squadron, and having each ship carry a few more launchers and ECM, and a tad less offensive weapons. Sorta like how dedicated command cruisers fall out of favor, as being 'too specialized' as opposed to just having command decks on every cruiser.

[Batman]

It is inevitably harder to cover for someone else's inbounds due to the separations wedges force on formations and the range limits of their defensive weapons. And while I still maintain that the Space Ticonderoga would be useful in realspace and travelling between grav waves, the fact that convoys very much like to travel in grav waves pretty much renders them if not entirely useless, than at least of seriously limited utility.

[Terralthra]

Well, even without the physics and formations of the Honorverse, it's easier to intercept one's own inbounds because they're traveling directly toward you, and don't tend to engage in much maneuvring while they are in flight. No need to significantly calculate leading the targets for travel time or (at extreme speeds) relativity: they're going to be on more or less the exact same bearing, but closer.

[jollyreaper]

I'm working my way through this thread. It's reminding me of what I liked about Honor early on. Space opera, battles, an attempt at being a little sophisticated while still pandering to the twelve-year old in all of us.

Where I checked out of the series was at about the point where there was a coup in Haven that happened off screen after an entire novel filled with padding. And this is after reading all the prior books back to back thanks to the cd included in that last book, baen free library. This looked like late series rot to me. The early novels are good because they have to stand on their own, later novels become forced and padded because the author has run out of ideas but not expenses.

Has that trend reversed? I'm looking at the wiki and the answer seems like no. Says the last main series novel is actually a continuation of a side series and was split off from the poor novel because that one bad grown too big. Shades of GRRM?

[Ahriman238]

Just a quick update and apology. While doing Christmas shopping I found Field of Dishonor in a secondhand store for three dollars, so I'll at least be covering that too. There's the good news. The bad news is everything I'm working on is delayed while I'm trying to backup all my notes and work to my new computer, and figure out how to do anything at all on Windows 8. The Rifts stuff I just sit down and write, and use the pictures Terralthra kindly hosts for me. Honor takes several day of typing out passages verbatim, checking every few words, and so will be hit the hardest by this.

Sorry all, but thanks for your patience and understanding.

[Terralthra]

I have Kindle/txt editions of most of (pretty much all of) the HH series, which you should be able to open on a computer using Mobipocket Reader or some such and copy/paste from there. If you want, that is, and already legally own the books.

[Simon_Jester]

Hi everyone I'm back!

Looking at the turn information, we can deduce the following:

The Havenite battlecruisers can turn far enough in ten seconds to fire beam weapons. We don't know how far 'off-axis' their beams can engage: are they limited to firing at targets within a few degrees of a single fixed axis? Or can they shoot anywhere within, say, a cone ninety degrees wide? We don't know.

The Manticoran dreadnought can turn far enough in ten seconds to put her sidewall between her hull and the Havenite ships. This does NOT take very much actual turning- five or ten degrees would do it, given the geometry of wedges. I can find a link to justify that claim but not right now.

I find it a bit hard to believe that the velocity advantage is that substantial. Can you give me a set of powered-range-from-rest and exact acceleration/burn time figures for a missile? Any missile will do.

[Actually I may not be able to act on the information for a week because honeymoon, but I can work with it anyway]

The default setting for Manticoran missiles at this time (even single drive-missiles get an upgrade between Haven Wars.) is 42,500 Gs of accel for 3 minutes. They can be dialed up to 85,000 Gs but will burnout in just one minute. Likewise the speed can be lowered for a longer burn.

Of course, the whole point of that is that ship-launched missiles are effectively fired out of a high-speed cannon (the mass-driver) presumably until they cross the sidewall before lighting up their drives, and until very recently pods and LACs didn't have that capability. Two missiles with the same acceleration, but one starts off going 20x (asspull number for example) faster, that one will win the race every time.

Unless the starting speeds are on the order of several thousand kilometers per second, I can't see it making that much of a difference.

I was hoping for one of those horrible passages Weber writes where he says "missiles were fired with acceleration X and burn time Y to have powered range from rest Z," so I could computer the actual muzzle velocity of these vaunted mass drivers.

Where I DO see the mass driver helping significantly is in getting the missiles clear of the ship, and in position to fire up their drives, more readily and quickly. You need the missile to be about 100 kilometers away from everything (the ship, plus any other missiles in the same salvo) pronto.

Okay, Pods, a couple things I'm not getting. The miniaturised launchers, in pods they throw full sized missiles as fast as the full sized launchers right? That's the justification or why pods work now and not before.

And, I've read enough here and on the wiki to know they're later used to revitalise the LAC concept so they must be reloadable.

Not necessarily. They were imagined in the context of a LAC which has its missiles in box launchers, like a real life ballistic missile submarine. Those box launchers are 'reloadable,' but there is literally no space inside the ship to store the reloads. You fire the missiles, then run like hell and reload from an ammunition tender or dockyard. Heck, the act of firing might even require the launch tube to be refurbished in some way.

Later we do see LACs develop what MAY be a reloadable launcher of this type, but it comes after several years of missile pod deployment, so let's reserve judgment until we get more details on the capabilities of Manticore's Shrike-class LAC.

So do they start using them as broadside ship armament as well? Surely rather than dropping pods all over the place it'd be better to use it dramatically increase the side of your broadside?

Probably because the missiles themselves don't get much smaller, so the available magazine space doesn't increase significantly when you miniaturize the launchers. All you're doing is throwing your missiles out the tubes faster. In the context of 1905 PD naval design theory, this is not desirable; you don't want your ships to 'shoot their bolt' and exhaust their broadside magazines too quickly.

The SD(P) concept gets away with increasing the rate of fire (from about 40 missiles every 20 seconds to 60 every 12) because it also devotes a huge percentage of the ship's internal volume to a gigantic hangar dedicated purely to storing extra missiles to be fired at that rate. In addition the SD(P) gets the ability to stack multiple pod salvoes and fire them simultaneously, which is now deemed desirable in light of the 1912 PD doctrine. The new doctrine says that it's actually worth bothering to spam thousands upon thousands of missiles, if you have hardware that lets you do so, because this can overwhelm enemy point defense where smaller salvoes could not.


Another possibility: the point of the new miniaturized launchers is not that they are simply a smaller version of the old one. It is that they let you coilgun your missiles out the tube at high speed without a hookup to an onboard power plant. This is important to a missile pod, which has no onboard power plant. It's important to a LAC which has feeble wimpy onboard power plants. But it's irrelevant aboard a starship, which by definition has plenty of power to coilgun missiles out the tube at high speed and gains nothing from the new system.

The amount of launchers one can fit inside a broadside is fixed based just as much on wedge fratricide by the missiles once their drives start up. Surely they use the miniaturized grav drivers inside the broadside tubes, but that just makes room for other things (ammunition, other new systems like Apollo), not additional missile tubes.

Can't you just angle the tubes to spread them out as they come out of the broadside and engage their wedges? Like, the frontmost tubes are angled 10 degrees towards the bow, then nine, eight seven, until you get to the rear tubes, angled ten degrees sternwards? Or you could salvo fire them, just enough at once to not pile up. Surely it takes longer to reload the tubes than it does for the first set of missiles to be away and clear?

They probably already do this; the problem is that missile impeller wedges are BIG, so no matter how you angle or configure them, a given ship can only fire so many of them in a given span of time without one missile crashing into the wedge of the next missile. The wedges are physically much larger than the ships, on the close order of 100 kilometers.

[Simon_Jester]

Also, multi-salvo pods wouldn't be reloading pods in combat so much as them being preloaded for several launches. Call me pedantic but to me, reloading pods means the pods are empty and with Honorverse technology no way in hell are you going to reload them faster than a podlayer can drop another pod pattern.

My impression is that missile pods aren't physically much bigger than the volume occupied by the missiles themselves, and that a lot of the extra volume is capacitors needed to power the mass drivers. Put a second salvo of missiles in the same pod, and you need twice as much missile-storage volume and twice as much energy storage, so you nearly double the volume of the pod.

Thus, one "double-stuffed" pod is not actually going to be much more compact than two normal pods. And two normal pods are far less complex mechanically than the single double-stuffed pod; they have fewer systems to maintain.

i've always wondered why the none of the honorverse powers ever developed a purpose built missile defense ship. something like the Atlanta class light cruiser or modern aegis ship. take a cruiser or battlecruiser weight ship, remove most the heavy ship to ship weapons and stuff it full of contermissiles and laser CIWS.

would be fairly useless for peacetime duty, but so is an SD.

This role has been taken by swarms of LACs. As far as I can tell, LACs haven't done anything particularly decisive or important in the antiship strike role since Book Ten, and not very much then either- but they do help shoot down and generally blunt the effect of massive incoming missile salvoes.

[Terralthra]

It's a bit disingenous to say that missile pods don't have power plants on-board. They don't, prior to Ghost Rider, but they do have fuckoff-big superconducting capacitor rings. They have to, because until Ghost Rider, the missiles themselves are powered by capacitor rings that are charged up by the launcher. Ghost Rider put mini-fusion plants in the pods, then the missiles themselves, but before that, capacitor rings were everywhere.

[eyl]

Just a quick update and apology. While doing Christmas shopping I found Field of Dishonor in a secondhand store for three dollars, so I'll at least be covering that too. There's the good news. The bad news is everything I'm working on is delayed while I'm trying to backup all my notes and work to my new computer, and figure out how to do anything at all on Windows 8. The Rifts stuff I just sit down and write, and use the pictures Terralthra kindly hosts for me. Honor takes several day of typing out passages verbatim, checking every few words, and so will be hit the hardest by this.

Sorry all, but thanks for your patience and understanding.

You can legally download DRM-free (And thus copy-pastable) versions of all the books baencd.thefifthimperium.com (the most recent collection is Mission of Honor (~300Mb))

[Batman]

Depends on how you define 'power plant'. Me, I see this as something that generates power. The capacitors merely store it. I don't care if it's one hell of a battery, it's still a battery, not a generator.

[Simon_Jester]

It's a bit disingenous to say that missile pods don't have power plants on-board. They don't, prior to Ghost Rider, but they do have fuckoff-big superconducting capacitor rings. They have to, because until Ghost Rider, the missiles themselves are powered by capacitor rings that are charged up by the launcher. Ghost Rider put mini-fusion plants in the pods, then the missiles themselves, but before that, capacitor rings were everywhere.

I don't think it's disingenuous because there is a very important point here. As far as I can tell, prior to about 1905 PD, a mass-driver missile launcher had to be hooked up directly to a fusion reactor, one bulky enough that it wouldn't fit on anything smaller than a seventy thousand ton destroyer. Capacitor rings weren't going to cut it, not by themselves.

[Terralthra]

I don't think that's true. They miniaturized the mass drivers, not the fusion reactors, first. They state explicitly that prior to the Shrikes and their fission plants, LACs ran mainly on capacitor rings (powered by a shitty little fusion reactor), and those capacitor-ring LACs still had mass-driver missile launchers. Hell, the Shrikes and Ferrets still have giant-ass capacitor rings for the fuck-off graser of doom and the huge missile-loadout. The fission plant is keeping the capacitor rings powered, not tapped directly into any of the subsystems.

It was the mass of the launcher itself that made pods impractical, not the lack of a fusion plant. The mini-fusion plant made Ghost Rider phase II and Apollo work, but wasn't required for pods.

Unless your argument is that by miniaturizing the launcher, they made it somehow more efficient so it could be powered by a capacitor ring...? The text is fairly clear that the missile pod was brought back to practicality by getting mass drivers small enough to fit in it, not anything to do with power, explicitly, so if that's your argument, I think I'd like you to spell out where you're seeing that in the text.

[Batman]

I'm with Terralthra (other than not wanting to call capacitors power plants). The pre-Ghost Rider II pods and all pre-Ghost Rider missiles used capacitors. They may very well have needed charging from the launching ship before deployment, but there was massdriver pod useage up the wazoo long before Ghost Rider came along.