Destructionator XIII wrote:On accuracy: I read somewhere (citation needed take with salt) that the accuracy wasn't so much due to poor technology but because they wanted the enemy's hit chances to be low too, so they'd engage at the biggest possible range where they had a chance of hitting.
So it wasn't "we have this tech and want this range, so we get this hit percent" but rather "we have this tech and want this hit percent, because it makes kills and survival both possible, so we start shooting at X range and are happy to stay out there".
I imagine something like that might apply in space war too.
Oh, that could very easily be true. It certainly was during the World Wars: battleships
could have closed to a range of a few thousand yards (at which distance a battleship is
fucking huge; you literally can't miss). But that would, as you say, be suicide range.
The problem is that once you commit yourself to tactics that give you a low hit rate, you
do need a certain amount of massed fire in order to recover an acceptable amount of damage inflicted on the target. This is one reason why ship concepts like "
light battlecruiser with single 18-inch guns" never got off the ground; if the volume of fire drops too low, the time it takes to inflict a kill at extreme range drops toward zero.
Of course, in a space battle "extreme range" is a more flexible concept. For any given range, you can always find a compromise point between probability of a kill and probability of being killed, but unless you have significantly superior weapons, you must still accept that the enemy's chance of killing you is comparable to your chance of killing them unless you have much superior volume of fire with which to make up for poor accuracy.
Purple wrote:That is mostly what happens. However take the mentioned shells for example. The 10m in diameter, 20 meters long shells are guided, capable of short range high speed turning and capable of accelerating to a fair fraction of C unaided within a reasonably short time. They also have 7.5 Gigatons worth of explosives in them. They use the kinetic energy and a high density penetrator to punch through armor and detonate inside a ship.
Meanwhile, the ships firing it tend to take low teraton level firepower to bring down.
So they tend to instant gib smaller ships and cause structural damage (to weapons, sensors, and other external equipment) on larger ones.
Ah, I see, these are missile ships not gun ships. That aside:
How many of these weapons do they throw in a broadside? If the answer is "hundreds because we have hundreds of guns," then we run into the earlier problem that this thing is like a battleship armed entirely with 5" guns: each individual shot has a negligible chance of killing the target even on a direct hit and you're making up for it with volume of fire.
Since the problem obviously isn't your ability to fit bigger launchers into the hull, I would think it would make sense to build larger "anticapital" missiles, at least up to some point.
Can this be said for modern ships?
Can a modern Kirov class Missile Cruiser take several hits from it's own missiles?
If yes, why did they not build gunboats with a single missile mounting? And if no, why did they not make even huger missiles?
Since the answer to the second question is "not necessarily," that addresses the issue right there.
Scaling up the missiles for increased antiship firepower won't help them, because each individual missile is already a credible threat to a ship of its opposing class. One antiship missile hit can do enough damage to put a major dent in the operations of an opposing ship, and might well destroy it, even if that ship is large (like the
Kirov).
Historical battleships mounted 16" guns that, again,
could penetrate the armor belt of an opposing warship.
Why do your dreadnoughts
not mount such weapons, and instead mount enormous numbers of weapons that are apparently incapable of punching through to the enemy's core hull and causing critical damage?
Weapons become larger the stronger they grow. Ammunition and fuel/coolant for them takes up more and more space etc.
And with your leviathans you very, very clearly have that size. I find it highly counterintuitive that an optimal design would feature hundreds upon hundreds of weapons that are "light" relative to the durability of a ship in its own class, while mounting no weapons that are "heavy" relative to the durability of a ship of its own class. It's not as if the
Kirovs carry so many missiles because they need to score dozens of hits to knock out an opponent, after all.
Hence our projectiles tend to be overkill on smaller ships, and use force of numbers to overwhelm the protection of larger ones.
The guidance and speed of the shells makes them able to hit smaller ships without problem.
So you have effectively 100% hit probability against ships of all sizes, regardless of combat range? In that case, I'd think the logical response would be to increase payload at the expense of guidance equipment for dedicated "anticapital" munitions. A shell or missile that has 100% accuracy against a target 100 meters long is overkill against a target 10000 meters long.
On the other hand, if these ships can withstand sustained fire from their own main battery, would it not be logical to carry smaller numbers of larger guns that will be more effective at punching deep into the structure of enemy battleships and blowing them apart?
In some sense yes. But that would consume valuable space for ammunition and/or supporting equipment.
Yes, you would lose ammunition space: you would be trading, say, two shells that can't penetrate the enemy's armor belt for one that can.
WWII battleships could easily carry something like... I don't know, twenty times more 5" shells than 16" shells in a given magazine. That wouldn't justify replacing the 16" guns with a dozen 5" guns apiece.
It sounds like your design paradigm is just
itching for the Dreadnought Revolution here...
And since the main batteries of many warships tend to double as overkill point defense larger shells are easier to destroy. And having a smaller number of guns means you can engage a smaller number of targets. Thus leaving you open to swarm attacks by smaller craft.
But your main battery weapons, just as they are ludicrous underkill against enemy capital units, are ludicrous overkill against enemy missiles and fighters.
Perhaps a better analogy would be a pre-dreadnought battleship armed only with 6" guns. When I ask "why do you have no 12" guns?" you say "They would reduce our volume of fire!" And when I ask "why do you have no 3" guns?" you say "They would reduce our firepower!"
The problem is that you've chosen a compromise position that offers you
neither high firepower per shot
nor high volume of fire. Instead you have weapons that are inefficiently small for fighting large targets (because of the ridiculous volume of fire you need to score kills) and inefficiently large for fighting small targets (because they take up more space and presumably fire more slowly than smaller weapons that would serve equally well to swat fighters would).
In that case, your massive behemoths are inefficient because they do not carry firepower suitable for defeating opponents of their own class. They could be made more efficient by the addition of larger weapons. As it stands, they're the equivalent of WWII battleships armed with no guns larger than 5" caliber: a joke.
Your comparison does not really fit our universe.
If anything, our warships tend to resemble pre dreadnought navies.
Predreadnoughts
had big guns for engaging enemies of their own class. You don't.
Also, in space a lot of smaller projectiles have the advantage of putting more rounds out there makes it harder for the enemy to take down with point defenses.
What does doubling your probability of getting the round through the target's point defense get you if you halve the probability of killing the target with a successful hit?
Do any of these factors apply in your case?
Well, we do have problems with ship sizes.
And point defenses tend to threaten larger shells.
And the capacity to engage many targets at once or single huge targets makes shells more versatile as weapons.
Ship size is not your problem when you're mounting hundreds of guns on a single ship; you could easily double the size of the guns and reduce the number of mounts. Note that predreadnought capital ship designs did
exactly that after the Dreadnought Revolution: mixed batteries of 8" and 5" guns were replaced with uniform batteries of 8" guns, for example.
Point defense is a problem only because you're imagining "bigger shell" as "bigger target." As opposed to, say, "bigger gun" meaning "shell with higher initial velocity and with an extra booster stage that increases its terminal speed for the approach to the target, thus allowing it to cross the target's point defense envelope faster
and inflict more damage on arrival."
Moreover, this argument would not apply against, say, energy weapons... which may be an excellent argument for using them. If you could replace twenty of your hundreds of light antiship relativistic-missile-launchers with a single heavy antiship laser, you might well vastly increase the effectiveness of your ship.
Chemically, you could use compressed gas and call it inert. However, a propellant does have to story energy one way or another, which is what I was thinking when I said that. If you rupture a tank of CO2, that gas is going to go somewhere in a hurry.
"
