TBX in space

[Elheru Aran]

There are only two, perhaps three, ways to move light. Reflect it-- mirrors and other shiny surfaces. Channel it-- fiber optics and such. Bend it directly-- manipulating the force of gravity, which would be quite the achievement.

I could be wrong about the latter, but I am fairly certain all those are correct.

[Corvus 501]

Huh. Guess that every bit of semihard scifi that I've read that features EM shields mislead me.

[Elheru Aran]

Huh. Guess that every bit of semihard scifi that I've read that features EM shields mislead me.

The bolded bit in your quote is the problem right there.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Huh. Guess that every bit of semihard scifi that I've read that features EM shields mislead me.

Pretty much. EM fields might do some good against charged particle beams but not lasers, or sensors of any kind.

Depending on how soft you are willing to go, you could just handwave an Energy Shield of Unknown Mechanism into existence, and so long as it is internally consistent and works for the story you want to tell, awesome.

[Corvus 501]

The whole point is that the shields are nearly useless at stopping missiles and slugs, but stops plasma and messes with sensors. I would think that it would be much harder to hit a ship in an EM "blizzard" than if it was uncovered.

[Simon_Jester]

Mostly addressed to Corvus:

Huh. Guess that every bit of semihard scifi that I've read that features EM shields mislead me.

"Shielding" against electromagnetic radiation is not something you can do with electric fields or magnetic fields. It requires something outside the Standard Model, which is why shields are normally the province of 'soft' science fiction, along with things like faster than light travel, reactionless drives, psychic powers, and so on.

I have a dear friend who put a fair amount of effort into coming up with a concept for hard-SF shielding, but it took a lot of thought.

A ship equipped with a shield is harder to hit, as there this massive shifting magnetic field, one powerfull eanough to scramble radar, lidar, and similar sensors, not to mention mess with beam weapons, and scramble guidence packages. A shielded ship isn't a like a Covanent ship facing a UNSC ship, it's more like an AGIS crueiser with armor and missiles facing a conventional crueiser.

As far as I know (and one of the local physicists can correct me on this) a massive electromagnetic field will not do that. RADAR frequency spam can deal with radar by fucking up range finding in various ways, an EM field wont do shit to photons of light. RADAR and LIDAR would be unaffected by such measures. The same for IR, X Ray, or optical telescopes.

The reasons to generate an magnetic field around the ship have little to do with generating interference against enemy sensors, although a magnetic field 'pumped' with charged particles (like a miniature, condensed version of a planet's Van Allen belts) would really screw with an enemy's radar.

I would refer you to concepts like the dusty plasma sail, which if put on sufficient steroids turn into a form of shielding... against some and only some threats.

The way I see battles working out is like this: Capitol class ships advance spamming missiles until they reach effective range of their projectile weapons, which they switch to to take advantage of a higher ROF. Meanwhile, battlecruisers, destroyers, and light cruisers slash in, fireing missiles from range, and lighter ships act as a point defence screen. Carriers, (if they exist, and I find their lack of presence unlikely) spam out fighters, bombers, and inteceptors. Whoever has the most ships, ammunition, and parasite craft wins, in theory.

The only interesting question here is "why do the intermediate size classes exist?"

You should think "does it make sense to build three of this ship, instead of four ships each with 3/4 the tonnage, or 2 ships with 50% greater tonnage?"

The EM shields are there mostly to scramble guidance devices, and mess with targeting, they might block a plasma bolt, which is why no o e would use them. They wouldn't have much use as shields, which is why armor would be relied on so much.

I've heard similar concepts. One interesting observation a friend of mine made is that a strong magnetic field can trap charged particles. A dense cloud of such particles can block or at least attenuate a charged particle beam... and it tends to radioactively 'poison' nuclear warheads, making them less likely to detonate successfully.

---

Aaaand to Purple:

Which changes the fact that the rods need to know where they are relative to their intended targets...how, exactly?

Because the rods know nothing. They are just a mechanism with no software at all.

Then how are they targeted? Again, you can't physically bolt the lasing rods to the missile warhead; they have to be able to maneuver and align themselves independently.

I think you are overstating things. Thy don't need to kill that many missiles each. Remember, these things are deployed in swarms. And you can fully expect that multiple lasers from multiple missiles or in fact multiple beams from the same missile to be targeted at the same target.

The real question is, if you launch one of these with (say) eight lasing rods, does it actually have better than a 1/8 chance of any given lasing rod hitting a given enemy missile? I honestly suspect the answer is 'no.'

Yes, but they have to be independently maneuvering in response to commands from the missile bus (the big thing that actually knows where the enemy is). This creates complexity because if the rod is either located or pointed in the wrong place, the beam is going to miss the target.

This is indeed true. Which is why I used it in concentrations and against concentrations of enemy missiles. I made no pretenses at using just one and at distant targets or anything like that. That would indeed have lead to a lot of power being wasted.

Using the lasing rods against a close-up target makes things worse because a close-up target is one that is changing its angular position rapidly.

Think about shooting at a car with a rifle while it drives past, with you standing on the sidewalk. When the car is far away aiming at it may actually be easier because the direction you have to point the rifle doesn't change very fast. When it's right next to you, aiming is in some ways harder because you have to turn rapidly to keep the gun pointed at the target.

I think that this is where part of our misunderstanding came from. I was not firing this at anything that can and would try to dodge. Enemy missiles would for all intents and purposes be flying along a very predictable path from the enemy ship to my own only changing their direction if my ship tried to dodge. And most battles were conducted by two fleets lining up at huge distances and than advancing on one another. That is why I invented this thing late in the game to let my offensive missiles take out enemy missiles as they passed one another.

If all the missiles fly close together in a tight stream along a single fixed path, then the obvious solution is to use big warheads and just detonate them in the middle of the enemy 'missile stream,' with each blast destroying multiple enemy missiles with proximity effect. That way you can quite reliably kill more than one X-ton 'offensive' missile with each identical X-ton 'defensive' missile.

If the missiles are widely dispersed, there is nothing preventing them from, say, rapidly altering their acceleration along that fixed trajectory. Or making hundred-gravity lateral 'sidesteps' just to screw with you.

Missiles do not have to mindlessly fly in a straight line toward their targets. They can jink back and forth, or speed up and slow down. And in 3D space this is functionally equivalent to them 'dodging.'

True. But it's not a problem that can't be solved by using motors and computers. And for a nation state that can afford to fight space wars using 15km long starships which fire thousands of missiles per volley at one another for several hours I can say that the costs are not that great.

They greatly increase the mechanical complexity of individual missile warheads. It's only worth it if you can be sure of each defensive missile reliably killing considerably more than one enemy attack missile with this system.

And I am sincerely uncertain that you can pull it off. Especially since by your own statement the defensive missiles have to steer close to an enemy offensive missile to target it reliably. In that case, why doesn't the enemy simply increase the separation between their own missiles enough that you only have a good targeting solution on one, rather than several at a time?

Basically, to physically steer a counter-missile into an enemy missile and blow it up at close range, you only have to command one object to maneuver into the general vicinity of one target. For this abortion, you have to command several objects to remain very precisely aligned relative to each other while the overall system tracks numerous distant targets.

Well actually I have to roughly fly my cloud into the enemy cloud and see what happens.

If you're that sloppy about it, nothing happens. The vast majority of your defensive lasermissiles' beams will miss, and you'll go "well shit, we fired 10000 countermissiles and only shot down 5000 enemy missiles."

I think you sometimes fail to grasp that just saying "this is an attritional system" does not mean that you will win the resulting battle of attrition. There are smart and stupid ways to fight a battle of attrition.

Thing is, the mass of independently steerable lasing rods adds considerable bulk to the warhead. It is not a given that you gain all that much extra mass to devote to propulsion.

Well for a start I dropped the warhead yield by an order of magnitude when designing these. And the whole steering system can't possibly be that big. I mean, the missiles were already 10m in diameter and stuff. There is room in there.

If your missiles are ten meters in diameter you can easily fit a gigaton bomb inside, which means that with no focusing mechanism whatsoever it's powerful enough to fry everything within hundreds of kilometers.

If the enemy missile swarms are as tightly packed as you make them out to be, then you should be able to get by with just flying these huge gigaton missiles into the middle of the enemy missile stream and detonating them, relying on proximity kills to blow up enemy weapons.

Alternatively, use a nuclear shaped charge as an intermediate step, detonate the warhead pointed in the general direction of the enemy, and focus the full gigaton-sized yield of the blast into region that is, oh, a thousand kilometers across.

One kiloton per square kilometer is enough to do a pretty good job of frying enemy missile warheads and preventing them from working and destroying your ships. The lasing rods are just unnecessary at that point.

Imagine things this way. You have 1200 missiles flying past 1200 enemy missiles at several or maybe tens of kilometers range. Both swarms are taking the quickest path to the enemy to give him least time to react. Out of your 1200 missiles maybe 200 are point defense, the rest are attackers. As the two swarms pass your "defense" missiles open up and try to hit as many as they can.

I expected these to account for maybe 200-250 enemy missiles destroyed. Maybe 300 if I am lucky. But that's enough to give my other defenses that come after a fighting chance.

I would argue that it makes far more sense to build a smaller, dedicated countermissile that exists solely to home in on, and destroy, one enemy missile. These jumbo lasermissile designs just aren't going to be economical, they're too big compared to a smaller, more agile design that uses destructive energy more efficiently.

In which case you can still easily need to fire hundreds or thousands of individual laser beams at each missile to shoot it down. You'd do better to simply build each missile to have a warhead that will reliably kill one and only one enemy missile, and simply make it smaller than the enemy's offensive missile so that you can afford to fire more of them.

I thought of that. But due to the above situation you'd end up with a lot of fratricide and a self defeating system.

Why would fratricide be a problem? You fire the countermissile salvo separately from your offensive missiles, because there is no logical reason to fire it simultaneously. Countermissiles are highly unlikely to kill each other rather than enemy missiles, because it's so easy to tell them apart. And, for that matter, so easy to just launch the countermissiles in staggered waves so that they're far enough apart to not fry each other.

If you're engaging from only a few kilometers away, a bomb-pumped laser is a pointless idea. An omnidirectional burst warhead, or a shaped nuclear charge, would be more effective.

A few to a few hundred at most. The two are synonymous in space.

No they are not, because there are things that are highly effective at five kilometers but totally useless at five hundred. Please be accurate about orders of magnitude, they do matter.

In any case, if your offensive missiles are that big, then you actually can fit them with an omnidirectional warhead big enough to wreck any enemy missile within a five hundred kilometer radius, or at least come close to it, unless those missiles are a lot better armored than I expect.

Even if they are, the best solution would be to use a huge defensive missile as a 'bus' for a large number of independently targeted 'hunter-killer' missiles, which would probably just detach from the bus as the enemy missile swarm approaches and just fucking ram the enemy missiles. They're ten-meter wide targets, presumably built to the same scale as a Saturn V; it wouldn't be that hard to build a countermissile comparable to the Sprint to engage them with.

And one Saturn V-sized missile bus could carry many, many Sprints into range to engage many enemy missiles with. They'd probably have a much better chance of killing two, or three, or a dozen enemy missiles this way than they would with bomb-pumped lasers.

The way these battles were fought you see is that the fleets would basically line up and advance on one another firing volley after volley of missiles. The closer you are the more of your missiles would get through the layered point defense (these things, nuclear attack missiles, laser PD's etc.). So the fleets would slowly chip away at one another with each volley being progressively more deadly up until the point where they get into knife fighting range. At that point PD was mostly useless and you'd end up with massive slaughter and death. This is assuming that one side does not realize they are screwed, turn tail and run.

So anything that helps my fleet advance on the enemy that bit further before taking damage was a good thing.

My basic argument is that use of a bomb-pumped laser system in this fleet paradigm is not an efficient way to go about it.

Your ships could take the space that is currently devoted to huge Saturn V-sized laser-missiles, and far more efficiently employ it to store larger numbers of smaller, more conventional countermissiles. Or they could redesign the huge Saturn V-sized laser-missile to more efficiently kill larger numbers of enemy missiles, in at least two different ways.

I get "anything that kills enemy missiles is good," but that doesn't mean you're immune to the criticism "this system would not reliably kill enough enemy missiles to be worth the trouble."

[Purple]

Then how are they targeted? Again, you can't physically bolt the lasing rods to the missile warhead; they have to be able to maneuver and align themselves independently.

The lasing rod is a stupid mechanism with no software at all. It has an electric motor or several that rotate it round. The electric motor is run by software that's inside the missile body and connected to a central computer that manipulates all rods. Thus any single rod does not know anything.

The real question is, if you launch one of these with (say) eight lasing rods, does it actually have better than a 1/8 chance of any given lasing rod hitting a given enemy missile? I honestly suspect the answer is 'no.'

It depends on the concentration of rounds I am firing this into. A single starship can project a number of projectiles in the low thousands. An average "fleet" as the primary organizational formation was around a thousand starships. Combined fleet actions AKA battles went as high as a quarter of a million on each side.

It became hard to miss.

Using the lasing rods against a close-up target makes things worse because a close-up target is one that is changing its angular position rapidly.

This again is under the wrong assumption that the enemy missiles would try to dodge my attack. This is NOT the case as I explained.

Think about shooting at a car with a rifle while it drives past, with you standing on the sidewalk. When the car is far away aiming at it may actually be easier because the direction you have to point the rifle doesn't change very fast. When it's right next to you, aiming is in some ways harder because you have to turn rapidly to keep the gun pointed at the target.

There is absolutely no need to do this with a bomb pumped laser weapon. Simple fact is that against a target following a predictable straight line path there is no chance it is going to move out of the effect of my beam during the fraction of a second the thing lasts in the first place before the atomic bomb vaporizes the lasing rods.

If all the missiles fly close together in a tight stream along a single fixed path, then the obvious solution is to use big warheads and just detonate them in the middle of the enemy 'missile stream,' with each blast destroying multiple enemy missiles with proximity effect. That way you can quite reliably kill more than one X-ton 'offensive' missile with each identical X-ton 'defensive' missile.

I did that early on in the war. But the problem with that was fratricide. One missile going off in defense could not only kill X enemy missiles but also X of mine as well. This setup allows me to trade in efficiency for the ability to specifically target enemy projectiles.

If the missiles are widely dispersed, there is nothing preventing them from, say, rapidly altering their acceleration along that fixed trajectory. Or making hundred-gravity lateral 'sidesteps' just to screw with you.

100G's is still insignificant before the speed of light of my laser beam. One key factor in this type of missile was that until it deploys to fire it looks identical to an offensive one. So by the time you see it deploying it's too late to dodge.

Missiles do not have to mindlessly fly in a straight line toward their targets. They can jink back and forth, or speed up and slow down. And in 3D space this is functionally equivalent to them 'dodging.'

When you are routinely firing thousands upon thousands of them to the point where people start wondering if you are fighting not with a starship but a TARDIS cost starts mattering.

They greatly increase the mechanical complexity of individual missile warheads. It's only worth it if you can be sure of each defensive missile reliably killing considerably more than one enemy attack missile with this system.

It is useless to compare them one on one as they are not designed to be used one on one. One on one I'd just use my other PD. These things are meant to attack in swarms against swarms. And under those conditions you would get a favorable kill ratio.

And I am sincerely uncertain that you can pull it off. Especially since by your own statement the defensive missiles have to steer close to an enemy offensive missile to target it reliably. In that case, why doesn't the enemy simply increase the separation between their own missiles enough that you only have a good targeting solution on one, rather than several at a time?

Coordination. When you have a quarter of a million starships all firing thousands of missiles each you want to make sure they each occupy their own square of space and not interfere with one another. Otherwise you'd have to disperse your formation so widely that it would become ineffective in providing a PD screen.

If you're that sloppy about it, nothing happens. The vast majority of your defensive lasermissiles' beams will miss, and you'll go "well shit, we fired 10000 countermissiles and only shot down 5000 enemy missiles."

I used a bloody metaphor. Guess I am not allowed to do that.

I think you sometimes fail to grasp that just saying "this is an attritional system" does not mean that you will win the resulting battle of attrition. There are smart and stupid ways to fight a battle of attrition.

And killing as many weapons as possible WITHOUT murdering my own allied weapons in the process counts as smart.

If your missiles are ten meters in diameter you can easily fit a gigaton bomb inside

Yes, I know. I worked those numbers out back than.

which means that with no focusing mechanism whatsoever it's powerful enough to fry everything within hundreds of kilometers.

Hence the drop in order of magnitude into the double digit megaton range and filling the space gained with laser rod equipment. I really, really, really did not want to detonate a gigaton device in a swarm of friendly and enemy missiles alike.

If the enemy missile swarms are as tightly packed as you make them out to be, then you should be able to get by with just flying these huge gigaton missiles into the middle of the enemy missile stream and detonating them, relying on proximity kills to blow up enemy weapons.

They are tightly packed enough. But I can't just fly a solitary missile at them. Because if I did that, and the enemy detected one (metaphorically speaking, a small percentage) of my projectiles breaking off from my formation of projectiles to chase his he'd shoot those down with his other PD.

Alternatively, use a nuclear shaped charge as an intermediate step, detonate the warhead pointed in the general direction of the enemy, and focus the full gigaton-sized yield of the blast into region that is, oh, a thousand kilometers across.

That's what I did to fight starships.

One kiloton per square kilometer is enough to do a pretty good job of frying enemy missile warheads and preventing them from working and destroying your ships. The lasing rods are just unnecessary at that point.

I know. But read the last 2 quote replies to realize my problem.

Think of these battles as Jitland, in space, happening at single digit percentage fractional C velocities, fought by AEGIS cruisers. You have missiles and counter missiles and counter-counter missiles and laser beam defenses and mass driver defenses and armor and ECM and counter-ECM and the list goes on. This was one component in a huge array of things.

I would argue that it makes far more sense to build a smaller, dedicated countermissile that exists solely to home in on, and destroy, one enemy missile. These jumbo lasermissile designs just aren't going to be economical, they're too big compared to a smaller, more agile design that uses destructive energy more efficiently.

I use those as well. But those are more of a close up weapon for when their missiles get out of the range of his countermeasures for my countermeasures.

Why would fratricide be a problem? You fire the countermissile salvo separately from your offensive missiles, because there is no logical reason to fire it simultaneously. Countermissiles are highly unlikely to kill each other rather than enemy missiles, because it's so easy to tell them apart. And, for that matter, so easy to just launch the countermissiles in staggered waves so that they're far enough apart to not fry each other.

And than the enemy shoots them down. As you so astutely noted all he has to do is detonate one of his missiles the right way if he suspects his salvo is compromised. But as long as I get him to think it's just attack missiles he wants to let those fly by because he thinks he can handle them with his own PD's and does not want to lose his missile salvo.

Even if they are, the best solution would be to use a huge defensive missile as a 'bus' for a large number of independently targeted 'hunter-killer' missiles, which would probably just detach from the bus as the enemy missile swarm approaches and just fucking ram the enemy missiles. They're ten-meter wide targets, presumably built to the same scale as a Saturn V; it wouldn't be that hard to build a countermissile comparable to the Sprint to engage them with.

And one Saturn V-sized missile bus could carry many, many Sprints into range to engage many enemy missiles with. They'd probably have a much better chance of killing two, or three, or a dozen enemy missiles this way than they would with bomb-pumped lasers.

I did that as well.

I get "anything that kills enemy missiles is good," but that doesn't mean you're immune to the criticism "this system would not reliably kill enough enemy missiles to be worth the trouble."

I understand very well what you are saying. It's just that all the other systems attempted had too high a fratricide rate or alternatively risked just getting shot out of space before firing. So this was a part of a layered defense. Outside of that context it probably would not be effective.

[Corvus 501]

Mostly addressed to Corvus:

Huh. Guess that every bit of semihard scifi that I've read that features EM shields mislead me.

"Shielding" against electromagnetic radiation is not something you can do with electric fields or magnetic fields. It requires something outside the Standard Model, which is why shields are normally the province of 'soft' science fiction, along with things like faster than light travel, reactionless drives, psychic powers, and so on.

I have a dear friend who put a fair amount of effort into coming up with a concept for hard-SF shielding, but it took a lot of thought.

A ship equipped with a shield is harder to hit, as there this massive shifting magnetic field, one powerfull eanough to scramble radar, lidar, and similar sensors, not to mention mess with beam weapons, and scramble guidence packages. A shielded ship isn't a like a Covanent ship facing a UNSC ship, it's more like an AGIS crueiser with armor and missiles facing a conventional crueiser.

As far as I know (and one of the local physicists can correct me on this) a massive electromagnetic field will not do that. RADAR frequency spam can deal with radar by fucking up range finding in various ways, an EM field wont do shit to photons of light. RADAR and LIDAR would be unaffected by such measures. The same for IR, X Ray, or optical telescopes.

The reasons to generate an magnetic field around the ship have little to do with generating interference against enemy sensors, although a magnetic field 'pumped' with charged particles (like a miniature, condensed version of a planet's Van Allen belts) would really screw with an enemy's radar.

I would refer you to concepts like the dusty plasma sail, which if put on sufficient steroids turn into a form of shielding... against some and only some threats.

The way I see battles working out is like this: Capitol class ships advance spamming missiles until they reach effective range of their projectile weapons, which they switch to to take advantage of a higher ROF. Meanwhile, battlecruisers, destroyers, and light cruisers slash in, fireing missiles from range, and lighter ships act as a point defence screen. Carriers, (if they exist, and I find their lack of presence unlikely) spam out fighters, bombers, and inteceptors. Whoever has the most ships, ammunition, and parasite craft wins, in theory.

The only interesting question here is "why do the intermediate size classes exist?"

You should think "does it make sense to build three of this ship, instead of four ships each with 3/4 the tonnage, or 2 ships with 50% greater tonnage?"

The EM shields are there mostly to scramble guidance devices, and mess with targeting, they might block a plasma bolt, which is why no o e would use them. They wouldn't have much use as shields, which is why armor would be relied on so much.

I've heard similar concepts. One interesting observation a friend of mine made is that a strong magnetic field can trap charged particles. A dense cloud of such particles can block or at least attenuate a charged particle beam... and it tends to radioactively 'poison' nuclear warheads, making them less likely to detonate successfully.

Ok, so a limited use shield that dosn't block much, but makes everyone's life harder, (unless one side has all the shields) that's what I've been aiming for. Knocking it down is not the point of the battle, by the time you've knocked it down the ship is probably out of the fight anyways. Thank you.

[Simon_Jester]

Then how are they targeted? Again, you can't physically bolt the lasing rods to the missile warhead; they have to be able to maneuver and align themselves independently.

The lasing rod is a stupid mechanism with no software at all. It has an electric motor or several that rotate it round. The electric motor is run by software that's inside the missile body and connected to a central computer that manipulates all rods. Thus any single rod does not know anything.

The lasing rods can't simply be rotated 'around,' they have to be able to maneuver along multiple axes in 3D. Attaching the mechanisms to make that happen to the missile warhead itself is NOT going to work. Not if you're actually trying to aim the lasing rods.

The real question is, if you launch one of these with (say) eight lasing rods, does it actually have better than a 1/8 chance of any given lasing rod hitting a given enemy missile? I honestly suspect the answer is 'no.'

It depends on the concentration of rounds I am firing this into. A single starship can project a number of projectiles in the low thousands. An average "fleet" as the primary organizational formation was around a thousand starships. Combined fleet actions AKA battles went as high as a quarter of a million on each side.

It became hard to miss.

If the missiles are that close together they'll destroy each other with their own exhaust plumes. Even if they don't, a single omnidirectional blast warhead would destroy hundreds of such missiles, if not thousands.

This is a matter of basic geometry and common sense. I'm not sure how to explain without drawing you a picture and discussing basic mathematics with you.

Using the lasing rods against a close-up target makes things worse because a close-up target is one that is changing its angular position rapidly.

This again is under the wrong assumption that the enemy missiles would try to dodge my attack. This is NOT the case as I explained.

Are your enemies such fools that they do not design their weapons to dodge enemy fire? Who are you fighting, the Pakleds?

What kind of drooling idiots are they, and how did they ever succeed in building starships?

If all the missiles fly close together in a tight stream along a single fixed path, then the obvious solution is to use big warheads and just detonate them in the middle of the enemy 'missile stream,' with each blast destroying multiple enemy missiles with proximity effect. That way you can quite reliably kill more than one X-ton 'offensive' missile with each identical X-ton 'defensive' missile.

I did that early on in the war. But the problem with that was fratricide. One missile going off in defense could not only kill X enemy missiles but also X of mine as well. This setup allows me to trade in efficiency for the ability to specifically target enemy projectiles.

Clearly, your own admirals are also too stupid, because it did not occur to them to first fire the defensive missiles, and later fire offensive missiles, or the other way around. So that your offensive missiles do not have to actually fly through the fireballs created by your defensive missiles.

What will we hear next, that your admirals did not believe in opening doors before trying to walk through them?

If the missiles are widely dispersed, there is nothing preventing them from, say, rapidly altering their acceleration along that fixed trajectory. Or making hundred-gravity lateral 'sidesteps' just to screw with you.

100G's is still insignificant before the speed of light of my laser beam. One key factor in this type of missile was that until it deploys to fire it looks identical to an offensive one. So by the time you see it deploying it's too late to dodge.

Such dodges are made continuously and randomly, not to 'dodge the laser,' but to interfere with targeting. You are trying to align a very narrow, precisely aimed lasing rod. At the moment the warhead goes off, having the missile suddenly be a few hundred meters away from where you thought it was is enough to cause the beam from the lasing rod to miss.

Missiles do not have to mindlessly fly in a straight line toward their targets. They can jink back and forth, or speed up and slow down. And in 3D space this is functionally equivalent to them 'dodging.'

When you are routinely firing thousands upon thousands of them to the point where people start wondering if you are fighting not with a starship but a TARDIS cost starts mattering.

It is pathetically cheap to add rudimentary dodging capability to each missile; this is a very bad counterargument.

I mean, you're firing very expensive 'defensive' heavy missiles into the enemy missile stream. And these defensive missiles can be largely neutralized by a cheap modification to the enemy's offensive missiles.

Therefore, you lose as soon as the enemy stops using drooling idiots as a high command.

This is a very important issue with some of your ideas. You cannot say "this is an attritional situation" as a way to justify doing something that costs you more than it costs the enemy. That's the opposite of attritional logic. Attrition works by expending cheap assets to destroy expensive assets.

What you tend to do is expend expensive assets to destroy cheap assets. Or expend expensive assets in a way that can be cheaply countered.

It is useless to compare them one on one as they are not designed to be used one on one. One on one I'd just use my other PD. These things are meant to attack in swarms against swarms. And under those conditions you would get a favorable kill ratio.

And an equally large swarm of defensive missiles, with different warheads, would get an even more favorable kill ratio!

Coordination. When you have a quarter of a million starships all firing thousands of missiles each you want to make sure they each occupy their own square of space and not interfere with one another. Otherwise you'd have to disperse your formation so widely that it would become ineffective in providing a PD screen.

Either your ships are so stupidly close together they're in danger of colliding, or they're far enough apart that you can disperse your salvoes more widely than is required to avoid this kind of "just shoot randomly and expect to hit one" attack.

If you're that sloppy about it, nothing happens. The vast majority of your defensive lasermissiles' beams will miss, and you'll go "well shit, we fired 10000 countermissiles and only shot down 5000 enemy missiles."

I used a bloody metaphor. Guess I am not allowed to do that.

Your metaphor brought up an issue at the heart of this debate: that "it's attritional" is not a defense for being ineffective at attritional warfare. If there are other better ways to do this, use those ways, and don't waste time and assets doing things that do not weaken the enemy as much as they weaken you.

Hence the drop in order of magnitude into the double digit megaton range and filling the space gained with laser rod equipment. I really, really, really did not want to detonate a gigaton device in a swarm of friendly and enemy missiles alike.

The counter to this is stupidly obvious- don't launch the "defensive" and "offensive" missiles at the same time. Duh.

If the enemy missile swarms are as tightly packed as you make them out to be, then you should be able to get by with just flying these huge gigaton missiles into the middle of the enemy missile stream and detonating them, relying on proximity kills to blow up enemy weapons.

They are tightly packed enough. But I can't just fly a solitary missile at them. Because if I did that, and the enemy detected one (metaphorically speaking, a small percentage) of my projectiles breaking off from my formation of projectiles to chase his he'd shoot those down with his other PD.

Uh, just to be clear, you're saying that "other PD" weapons have sufficient range to engage enemy missiles that are out in the space halfway between the two fleets?

Think of these battles as Jitland, in space, happening at single digit percentage fractional C velocities, fought by AEGIS cruisers. You have missiles and counter missiles and counter-counter missiles and laser beam defenses and mass driver defenses and armor and ECM and counter-ECM and the list goes on. This was one component in a huge array of things.

Yes, but if you show any basic common sense in designing and organizing your missile defense, it should be child's play to disentangle your missile salvoes from those of the enemy.

And than the enemy shoots them down. As you so astutely noted all he has to do is detonate one of his missiles the right way if he suspects his salvo is compromised. But as long as I get him to think it's just attack missiles he wants to let those fly by because he thinks he can handle them with his own PD's and does not want to lose his missile salvo.

With nuclear shaped charges you can detonate your countermissiles before they interpenetrate the enemy salvo. Also, countermissile salvoes are not as dense, with fewer missiles per billion cubic kilometers of space, as the enemy's missile salvo. If the enemy wants to counter them by detonating some of his own offensive missiles to kill your defensive missiles before they engage him, let him- he'll kill more of his missiles than he will of yours, and you win by default.

You're stuck in the Lanchester Linear Law scenario here- you're firing blindly into the space the enemy (missiles) occupy, so the more densely packed they are, the more of them you kill.

If the enemy fires a million missiles all packed into a volume ten thousand kilometers on a side, and you respond by launching one thousand antimissiles, and he tries to shoot down your countermissiles by blowing up some of his own missiles... he's going to have to sacrifice too many of his own missiles. He can do it, but you still win the battle of attrition, without ever actually firing a shot.

Even if they are, the best solution would be to use a huge defensive missile as a 'bus' for a large number of independently targeted 'hunter-killer' missiles, which would probably just detach from the bus as the enemy missile swarm approaches and just fucking ram the enemy missiles. They're ten-meter wide targets, presumably built to the same scale as a Saturn V; it wouldn't be that hard to build a countermissile comparable to the Sprint to engage them with.

And one Saturn V-sized missile bus could carry many, many Sprints into range to engage many enemy missiles with. They'd probably have a much better chance of killing two, or three, or a dozen enemy missiles this way than they would with bomb-pumped lasers.

I did that as well.

Why would you ever do anything else?

[Terralthra]

Yeah...if you have a PD counter-counter-missile that can overtake your offensive missiles to blow up the enemy counter-missiles before they hit your missiles, I suggest maybe you should be using the PD CCMs as your offensive missile to begin with.

[Purple]

The lasing rods can't simply be rotated 'around,' they have to be able to maneuver along multiple axes in 3D. Attaching the mechanisms to make that happen to the missile warhead itself is NOT going to work. Not if you're actually trying to aim the lasing rods.

On the other hand attaching a USB cable that leads to a central computer works just fine.

If the missiles are that close together they'll destroy each other with their own exhaust plumes. Even if they don't, a single omnidirectional blast warhead would destroy hundreds of such missiles, if not thousands.

It's space. You don't use your engines outside of the initial acceleration phase. And with an unmanned missile with no crew to worry about that is quite a short time. So simple timing helps alleviate that issue. This is all assuming you even use reaction drives. A question which in the setting was newer really addressed or answered. Although the lack of any mention to engine plumes being an issue or weaponized would probably indicate that they weren't.

Note that I am talking about a RP that was running up to over a year ago. So I am not so much defending my train of thought at the time of designing this buy piecing it together based on what I know the setting was.

Are your enemies such fools that they do not design their weapons to dodge enemy fire? Who are you fighting, the Pakleds?

Dodging slows you down as it makes the path you take to the enemy longer. This in turn gives him more chances to shoot at you. So it becomes a loosing proposition after a certain point. Especially if enemy countermeasures can maneuver better than you can or target you with lasers that you can't really dodge. If you have to make a detour of several hundred kilometers to get out of laser beam range than I'll just chuck a second set of missiles at you because my reload time is just a couple of minutes between volleys.

Clearly, your own admirals are also too stupid, because it did not occur to them to first fire the defensive missiles, and later fire offensive missiles, or the other way around. So that your offensive missiles do not have to actually fly through the fireballs created by your defensive missiles.

And than one defensive missile fires a fraction of a second too soon and wipes out all my defensive missiles before they have the chance to do their thing. Thought about that? I have.

What will we hear next, that your admirals did not believe in opening doors before trying to walk through them?

Come to think of it my writing did contain a large lack of reference to any doors. I mentioned them some times, but not very often. So this is an interesting conundrum.

Such dodges are made continuously and randomly, not to 'dodge the laser,' but to interfere with targeting. You are trying to align a very narrow, precisely aimed lasing rod. At the moment the warhead goes off, having the missile suddenly be a few hundred meters away from where you thought it was is enough to cause the beam from the lasing rod to miss.

I am not sure that we are talking about the same orders of magnitude acceleration vise. Also, beam width and stuff.

Also, if one beam can kill one missile than the only thing I have to do to get a positive ratio is hit with 2 of my many beams. Puts me in the lead.

It is pathetically cheap to add rudimentary dodging capability to each missile; this is a very bad counterargument.

I am not sure that I can agree with this. It requires adding some rather hefty acceleration.

I mean, you're firing very expensive 'defensive' heavy missiles into the enemy missile stream. And these defensive missiles can be largely neutralized by a cheap modification to the enemy's offensive missiles.

You keep ranting about this being so very expensive. But why should it be? It might cost more than an offensive missile but frankly at the kind of scales we are talking about the cost per shot is so small it might as well be free. These were empires that could afford to build millions of starships tens of kilometers long each.

This is a very important issue with some of your ideas. You cannot say "this is an attritional situation" as a way to justify doing something that costs you more than it costs the enemy. That's the opposite of attritional logic. Attrition works by expending cheap assets to destroy expensive assets.

Because ultimately in battle attrition is not about depleting the enemies treasury but his magazines. Cost per shot is far less of a factor than shots per starship before needing to return to base for resupply.

What you tend to do is expend expensive assets to destroy cheap assets. Or expend expensive assets in a way that can be cheaply countered.

Because it was a continuing arms race. And none of my other assets worked without massive fratricide problems.

And an equally large swarm of defensive missiles, with different warheads, would get an even more favorable kill ratio!

They generally did. Which is why I keep mentioning that I used those as well. But due to the overall environment they were used more close up to my fleet. These things were basically a way to soften enemy attacks up for them to finish off when they do get into range. Remember, you can't just fire 100 missiles at a swarm of 10000 because even though on paper you only need 10 to kill them all your enemy can afford to fire 100 counter-missiles as escorts. But if you get them close enough that his counter-missiles can't reach you in time you are golden. On the other hand, allowing enemy missiles to get that close means you don't have much time to react to them dodging, trying to ECM you or just flying really fast. So anything that thins their numbers before that is great.

Either your ships are so stupidly close together they're in danger of colliding, or they're far enough apart that you can disperse your salvoes more widely than is required to avoid this kind of "just shoot randomly and expect to hit one" attack.

When your ships are tens of kilometers side to side and not shaped like Star Destroyers but like boxes and you have hundreds of thousands of them just keeping them in a tight enough formation not to incur light speed lag is a feat.

Your metaphor brought up an issue at the heart of this debate: that "it's attritional" is not a defense for being ineffective at attritional warfare. If there are other better ways to do this, use those ways, and don't waste time and assets doing things that do not weaken the enemy as much as they weaken you.

And your arguments for why it supposedly weakens me more always go back to cost. If I can shoot two bullets down using one that's great. And it does not matter if the bullet costs a million dollars a pop if my economy chews planets up for lunch.

I mean seriously. At one point my fleet just ignited a small gas giant using atomic weapons fire to flush out enemies hiding inside it. Imagine how many missiles that would take. My economy found it cost effective.

The counter to this is stupidly obvious- don't launch the "defensive" and "offensive" missiles at the same time. Duh.

Do try coordinating that across a giant fleet of hundreds of thousands of ships. And once again, it's simple math. If one missile has a kill radius of 100m. You put two of them 100m apart and the fireballs will ensure that you get a nice and perfect kill zone for everything in between. But if one goes off too soon or lags behind a bit or anything goes wrong the other is dead as well. On the other hand if you space them out more you get empty patches the enemy can go through. And will.

Uh, just to be clear, you're saying that "other PD" weapons have sufficient range to engage enemy missiles that are out in the space halfway between the two fleets?

Given that the battles start out at distances of several AU you can imagine different PD weapons being effective at different ranges.

Yes, but if you show any basic common sense in designing and organizing your missile defense, it should be child's play to disentangle your missile salvoes from those of the enemy.

Do remember that you have hundreds of thousands of starships coordinating volleys totaling hundreds of millions missiles to make things more difficult for enemy PD. That also tends to make IFF a bit of a chore.

With nuclear shaped charges you can detonate your countermissiles before they interpenetrate the enemy salvo. Also, countermissile salvoes are not as dense, with fewer missiles per billion cubic kilometers of space, as the enemy's missile salvo. If the enemy wants to counter them by detonating some of his own offensive missiles to kill your defensive missiles before they engage him, let him- he'll kill more of his missiles than he will of yours, and you win by default.

Just for the record, the offensive missiles were atomic shaped charges.

You're stuck in the Lanchester Linear Law scenario here- you're firing blindly into the space the enemy (missiles) occupy, so the more densely packed they are, the more of them you kill.

And in turn I am forced to pack missiles because I don't want to have my fleets trying to coordinate fire whilst stretching across half the solar system.

If the enemy fires a million missiles all packed into a volume ten thousand kilometers on a side, and you respond by launching one thousand antimissiles, and he tries to shoot down your countermissiles by blowing up some of his own missiles... he's going to have to sacrifice too many of his own missiles. He can do it, but you still win the battle of attrition, without ever actually firing a shot.

Or he can devise some clever counter-missile escort thing of his own. And we are back to square one.

Even if they are, the best solution would be to use a huge defensive missile as a 'bus' for a large number of independently targeted 'hunter-killer' missiles, which would probably just detach from the bus as the enemy missile swarm approaches and just fucking ram the enemy missiles. They're ten-meter wide targets, presumably built to the same scale as a Saturn V; it wouldn't be that hard to build a countermissile comparable to the Sprint to engage them with.

That's actually another thing I had in my arsenal. I can't remember if it was just mentioned or used though. It would probably have been far more effective. I'll give you that.

Why would you ever do anything else?

If I recall correctly the two ideas came one after the other. But basically in game my army was experimenting with all sorts of things as the arms race went on. Like using those drone swarms I mentioned to project a giant energy shield around my entire fleet. What ever I used in one battle I could expect my enemy to have a counter to in the next.

[Simon_Jester]

The lasing rods can't simply be rotated 'around,' they have to be able to maneuver along multiple axes in 3D. Attaching the mechanisms to make that happen to the missile warhead itself is NOT going to work. Not if you're actually trying to aim the lasing rods.

On the other hand attaching a USB cable that leads to a central computer works just fine.

...How does that solve the mechanical problem of having a rod that is free to move in three dimensions, so that it can line itself up between the warhead and the target? How are you visualizing this actually working? Because it sounds to me like you're not thinking this through?

If the missiles are that close together they'll destroy each other with their own exhaust plumes. Even if they don't, a single omnidirectional blast warhead would destroy hundreds of such missiles, if not thousands.

It's space. You don't use your engines outside of the initial acceleration phase. And with an unmanned missile with no crew to worry about that is quite a short time. So simple timing helps alleviate that issue. This is all assuming you even use reaction drives. A question which in the setting was newer really addressed or answered. Although the lack of any mention to engine plumes being an issue or weaponized would probably indicate that they weren't.

How are you able to think of 'timing' as a way to avoid having a large missile salvo fry itself... but unable to grasp how 'timing' can be used to avoid having the offensive and 'defensive' missiles of a single salvo blow each other up?

Are your enemies such fools that they do not design their weapons to dodge enemy fire? Who are you fighting, the Pakleds?

Dodging slows you down as it makes the path you take to the enemy longer. This in turn gives him more chances to shoot at you. So it becomes a loosing proposition after a certain point. Especially if enemy countermeasures can maneuver better than you can or target you with lasers that you can't really dodge. If you have to make a detour of several hundred kilometers to get out of laser beam range than I'll just chuck a second set of missiles at you because my reload time is just a couple of minutes between volleys.

Vectors don't work that way- you can have lateral engines that fire independently of your main engine. There is no need to introduce a 'delay' by doing this.

Clearly, your own admirals are also too stupid, because it did not occur to them to first fire the defensive missiles, and later fire offensive missiles, or the other way around. So that your offensive missiles do not have to actually fly through the fireballs created by your defensive missiles.

And than one defensive missile fires a fraction of a second too soon and wipes out all my defensive missiles before they have the chance to do their thing. Thought about that? I have.

This is simple enough- you have a thin scattering of missiles launched ahead of the main salvo, and a thin scattering behind. If the enemy plans to sweep the space in front of them to kill all your scattered 'lead wave' missiles, they'll have to expend a disproportionate number of warheads doing so. If they don't, they allow some of those 'lead wave' missiles into range of their own missile stream.

You seem to be stuck with the idea of missiles having to fly in tightly packed clusters, which is simply not true, especially if the missiles in question aren't actually aimed at enemy ships. They can fly all kinds of trajectories in that case.

Such dodges are made continuously and randomly, not to 'dodge the laser,' but to interfere with targeting. You are trying to align a very narrow, precisely aimed lasing rod. At the moment the warhead goes off, having the missile suddenly be a few hundred meters away from where you thought it was is enough to cause the beam from the lasing rod to miss.

I am not sure that we are talking about the same orders of magnitude acceleration vise. Also, beam width and stuff.

The width of the beam from a bomb-pumped laser is not great enough to make evasive maneuvers useless at long range. At very short range, the missiles' own relative velocities do a lot to make targeting difficult, because the window in which pointing a lasing rod in Direction X actually results in it killing a missile is very narrow and small errors count a lot.

Also, if one beam can kill one missile than the only thing I have to do to get a positive ratio is hit with 2 of my many beams. Puts me in the lead.

My argument is that your odds of hitting with this system, as you have portrayed it, is so low that your ability to score hits with two beams out of several dozen is in doubt.

It is pathetically cheap to add rudimentary dodging capability to each missile; this is a very bad counterargument.

I am not sure that I can agree with this. It requires adding some rather hefty acceleration.

Relative to the speeds the missiles supposedly travel at (on the order of ten thousand kilometers per second) the accelerations involved are tiny.

I mean, you're firing very expensive 'defensive' heavy missiles into the enemy missile stream. And these defensive missiles can be largely neutralized by a cheap modification to the enemy's offensive missiles.

You keep ranting about this being so very expensive. But why should it be? It might cost more than an offensive missile but frankly at the kind of scales we are talking about the cost per shot is so small it might as well be free. These were empires that could afford to build millions of starships tens of kilometers long each.

They're expensive in absolute terms, not relative terms. Saturn V-sized missiles are not objectively 'cheap,' and should never be used without regard to the cost-benefit ratio from doing so.

This isn't the first time I've looked at your proposed designs for ships and weapons and seen, frankly, thoughtless waste of resources and a refusal to acknowledge that waste of resources can even be a thing that happens.

This is a very important issue with some of your ideas. You cannot say "this is an attritional situation" as a way to justify doing something that costs you more than it costs the enemy. That's the opposite of attritional logic. Attrition works by expending cheap assets to destroy expensive assets.

Because ultimately in battle attrition is not about depleting the enemies treasury but his magazines. Cost per shot is far less of a factor than shots per starship before needing to return to base for resupply.

In that case the 'cost' of a weapon system is measured in the magazine capacity it takes to store that weapon. In which case any defensive missile system that takes up as much space as a single offensive missile had better be reliably able to destroy quite a lot more than one enemy offensive missile. Otherwise, it is not cost-effective to bother carrying such a system at all. You'd do better to remove the 'defensive missiles' entirely, and repurpose the magazine space they occupy, in exchange for some other system that is more effective.

They generally did. Which is why I keep mentioning that I used those as well. But due to the overall environment they were used more close up to my fleet. These things were basically a way to soften enemy attacks up for them to finish off when they do get into range. Remember, you can't just fire 100 missiles at a swarm of 10000 because even though on paper you only need 10 to kill them all your enemy can afford to fire 100 counter-missiles as escorts. But if you get them close enough that his counter-missiles can't reach you in time you are golden. On the other hand, allowing enemy missiles to get that close means you don't have much time to react to them dodging, trying to ECM you or just flying really fast. So anything that thins their numbers before that is great.

If countermissiles can reliably overtake the offensive missile salvoes over long distances between fleets... frankly, those countermissiles should be your offensive missile systems.

Either your ships are so stupidly close together they're in danger of colliding, or they're far enough apart that you can disperse your salvoes more widely than is required to avoid this kind of "just shoot randomly and expect to hit one" attack.

When your ships are tens of kilometers side to side and not shaped like Star Destroyers but like boxes and you have hundreds of thousands of them just keeping them in a tight enough formation not to incur light speed lag is a feat.

In which case I'm correct; you can afford more than enough dispersion to avoid bunching up your missiles so tightly that "just shoot and you're bound to hit something" is effective.

Unless you use something like a conical blast from a nuclear shaped charge.

Your metaphor brought up an issue at the heart of this debate: that "it's attritional" is not a defense for being ineffective at attritional warfare. If there are other better ways to do this, use those ways, and don't waste time and assets doing things that do not weaken the enemy as much as they weaken you.

And your arguments for why it supposedly weakens me more always go back to cost. If I can shoot two bullets down using one that's great. And it does not matter if the bullet costs a million dollars a pop if my economy chews planets up for lunch.

I mean seriously. At one point my fleet just ignited a small gas giant using atomic weapons fire to flush out enemies hiding inside it. Imagine how many missiles that would take. My economy found it cost effective.

Thing is, it matters a great deal if you're using million dollar bullets when hundred thousand dollar bullets would suffice, if you use them in sufficient quantities, which by your own admission you do. By coming up with more efficient ways to use his resources, your enemy can build larger, stronger fleets, defeating you by attrition.

The counter to this is stupidly obvious- don't launch the "defensive" and "offensive" missiles at the same time. Duh.

Do try coordinating that across a giant fleet of hundreds of thousands of ships. And once again, it's simple math. If one missile has a kill radius of 100m. You put two of them 100m apart and the fireballs will ensure that you get a nice and perfect kill zone for everything in between. But if one goes off too soon or lags behind a bit or anything goes wrong the other is dead as well. On the other hand if you space them out more you get empty patches the enemy can go through. And will.

Space out the salvoes five or ten seconds apart. This does not require fine coordination beyond the level of "gentlemen, synchronize your watches," and is quite simple.

Moreover, since this kind of defense by firing large warheads into the missile stream is, by your own admission, attritional... it doesn't matter if there are gaps in the blast patterns you've set up. Some enemies get through, but you already accepted that this would happen anyway. The only difference is that instead of killing 10% of all enemy missiles everywhere in their salvo, you've killed 100% of their missiles in some parts of their salvo, and 0% of the missiles in other parts.

Yes, but if you show any basic common sense in designing and organizing your missile defense, it should be child's play to disentangle your missile salvoes from those of the enemy.

Do remember that you have hundreds of thousands of starships coordinating volleys totaling hundreds of millions missiles to make things more difficult for enemy PD. That also tends to make IFF a bit of a chore.

...There are missiles going "this way" and missiles going "that way." And if there is any semblance of fleet coordination, the missiles fired in a single salvo by the fleet will all (mostly) occupy a single volume of space, which (most of the time) will not simultaneously be occupied by enemy missiles in any event.

With nuclear shaped charges you can detonate your countermissiles before they interpenetrate the enemy salvo. Also, countermissile salvoes are not as dense, with fewer missiles per billion cubic kilometers of space, as the enemy's missile salvo. If the enemy wants to counter them by detonating some of his own offensive missiles to kill your defensive missiles before they engage him, let him- he'll kill more of his missiles than he will of yours, and you win by default.

Just for the record, the offensive missiles were atomic shaped charges.

Yes, and my argument is that for this very reason they are more effective countermissiles than your dedicated countermissile built on the same chassis.

You're stuck in the Lanchester Linear Law scenario here- you're firing blindly into the space the enemy (missiles) occupy, so the more densely packed they are, the more of them you kill.

And in turn I am forced to pack missiles because I don't want to have my fleets trying to coordinate fire whilst stretching across half the solar system.

Wouldn't having to pack all their missiles into the same volume make it harder? There's an intermediate solution here, where your fire comes from a 'dispersed' volume a light-second or two across, you know.

The point here is that deliberately firing dispersed salvoes at enemy missile concentrations can work rather well. You could even designate specific subcomponents of the fleet to handle that responsibility.

A good coordinated missile defense scheme for a "superfleet" composed of hundreds of fleets that in turn consist of hundreds of individual ships might have the following breakdown:

"Long range fleet defense" by dedicated subfleets that do nothing but fire long range barrages of heavy missiles into oncoming missile streams. They are ONLY responsible for tracking and controlling their own barrages in this way.

"Medium range fleet defense" is handled by ships that fire similar long-range antimissile weapons at the 'leakers' left behind by the attritional barrages of the "long range fleet defense" units. "Medium range fleet defense" can be a task handled by a separate set of dedicated subfleets, or by a certain percentage of units within each subfleet.

"Local area defense" is handled by each subfleet's fire control systems engaging a large volume surrounding that entire subfleet. The key idea is that even this (relatively) short ranged area defense consists mostly of ships shooting down missiles that are not headed for them personally, and may even be so far away it's impossible to tell which target they're going after. Local area defense may extend to protecting other subfleets in the same formation; one might assign fleets to "local area defense" of the long and medium range fleet defense assets. Or to protecting the command ship, or to protecting troopships and repair vessels and so on that must be especially well protected from enemy fire.

"Point defense" is the defense of individual ships by weapons physically mounted on that ship, usually aimed at missiles directly headed for that ship. It is not a concern of fleet-level tactics any more than the doings of individual microbes are to a physician- the ships will defend themselves effectually, or they won't. The admiral's sole responsibility is to make sure all ships are well-trained in using their own point defenses, and are organized in formations that allow them to use point defenses effectively.
_____________

Once you clearly distinguish among these separate responsibilities, it's easy to see how coordination is handled. Defensively, any given ship is only responsible for handling very specific tasks, like "spot enemy missile barrages at extreme range and fire your own heavy missiles into them to break them up" or "track missile contacts passed to you by the long range defense force and engage them with countermissiles between (say) one and five million kilometers from the task force." Or "only worry about shooting down missiles that fly within a million kilometers of you."

Breaking down the responsibilities makes fleet coordination less of a problem.

[Purple]

...How does that solve the mechanical problem of having a rod that is free to move in three dimensions, so that it can line itself up between the warhead and the target? How are you visualizing this actually working? Because it sounds to me like you're not thinking this through?

By making enough rods and realizing that some will miss. But if you fly in between enemy ships you only have to hit twice for the weapon to pay off. So if every other shot misses, big woopedy do. I won't shed tears over it.

How are you able to think of 'timing' as a way to avoid having a large missile salvo fry itself... but unable to grasp how 'timing' can be used to avoid having the offensive and 'defensive' missiles of a single salvo blow each other up?

As I said, we did not really discuss engines at the time. But given that our ships routinely traveled at fractional C velocities AND newer used their engines as weapons or had problems flying in formation they were likely reactionless. As in, no engine plume, no exhaust, no nothing.

Vectors don't work that way- you can have lateral engines that fire independently of your main engine. There is no need to introduce a 'delay' by doing this.

There is if you have to leave more room in your formation to account for it, so the thing has to stretch out and a lot of missiles have to start curving to assume positions.

I do not think you can imagine the sheer apocalyptic scale of these battles.

This is simple enough- you have a thin scattering of missiles launched ahead of the main salvo, and a thin scattering behind. If the enemy plans to sweep the space in front of them to kill all your scattered 'lead wave' missiles, they'll have to expend a disproportionate number of warheads doing so. If they don't, they allow some of those 'lead wave' missiles into range of their own missile stream.

Or just figure out some counter-missile that works. Like this thing. Or a missile bus missile. Or any number of other things.

You seem to be stuck with the idea of missiles having to fly in tightly packed clusters, which is simply not true, especially if the missiles in question aren't actually aimed at enemy ships. They can fly all kinds of trajectories in that case.

Yea, you try coordinating that over millions of missiles. Just try.

Let me give you an example of one of our battles. Maybe you will understand.

It started when one of my enemies had his Jupiter sized Death Star sighted off my allies border. He was surprised to find it there so he mobilized what ever he had on hand which happened to be roughly 1/4 of a million ships. As his ally, I mobilized what ever patrols I had near our border. That was roughly another 1/4 of a million. Our enemy meanwhile produced his escort fleet that was roughly the size of our combined fleets.

Begin border skirmish.

The width of the beam from a bomb-pumped laser is not great enough to make evasive maneuvers useless at long range. At very short range, the missiles' own relative velocities do a lot to make targeting difficult, because the window in which pointing a lasing rod in Direction X actually results in it killing a missile is very narrow and small errors count a lot.

As I said, as long as I get a 2+ ratio of kills that's a win for me. So not all the rods have to hit.

My argument is that your odds of hitting with this system, as you have portrayed it, is so low that your ability to score hits with two beams out of several dozen is in doubt.

On the other hand scoring 2 million hits out of several dozen million isn't due to saturation if nothing else.

Relative to the speeds the missiles supposedly travel at (on the order of ten thousand kilometers per second) the accelerations involved are tiny.

A lot of their velocity comes from being shot off by starships advancing at one another at velocity. They would not be capable of accelerating to those speeds otherwise.

They're expensive in absolute terms, not relative terms. Saturn V-sized missiles are not objectively 'cheap,' and should never be used without regard to the cost-benefit ratio from doing so.

But they are cheap. The amount of material and work hours that goes into one is negligible given the scales of the economies seen here. It's like complaining about using how a civilization the size of the Empire from SW uses expensive bullets for their rifles.

This isn't the first time I've looked at your proposed designs for ships and weapons and seen, frankly, thoughtless waste of resources and a refusal to acknowledge that waste of resources can even be a thing that happens.

Because you insist that resources are very scarce, where as they really weren't in the setting. The scarcest of all was trained ship crews.

In that case the 'cost' of a weapon system is measured in the magazine capacity it takes to store that weapon. In which case any defensive missile system that takes up as much space as a single offensive missile had better be reliably able to destroy quite a lot more than one enemy offensive missile. Otherwise, it is not cost-effective to bother carrying such a system at all. You'd do better to remove the 'defensive missiles' entirely, and repurpose the magazine space they occupy, in exchange for some other system that is more effective.

As far as efficiency goes you are probably right on that.

If countermissiles can reliably overtake the offensive missile salvoes over long distances between fleets... frankly, those countermissiles should be your offensive missile systems.

They don't have enough punch. You need huge warheads to go through several kilometers of armor.

In which case I'm correct; you can afford more than enough dispersion to avoid bunching up your missiles so tightly that "just shoot and you're bound to hit something" is effective.

Can I? I mean I have not modeled this but just fitting these things together takes space up massively even when they are jammed side to side.

Unless you use something like a conical blast from a nuclear shaped charge.

That's what I did for anti ship weapons. A warhead would get in close enough to ensure no energy misses the enemy ship and than detonates. Repeat that several thousand times and you might start seeing damage to the hull.

Thing is, it matters a great deal if you're using million dollar bullets when hundred thousand dollar bullets would suffice, if you use them in sufficient quantities, which by your own admission you do. By coming up with more efficient ways to use his resources, your enemy can build larger, stronger fleets, defeating you by attrition.

Only if either of the two costs is actually large enough to matter.

Space out the salvoes five or ten seconds apart. This does not require fine coordination beyond the level of "gentlemen, synchronize your watches," and is quite simple.

Make sure to convey that to hundreds of thousands of ships all traveling at fractional C and with different lag effects and ensure they tell that to all their missiles. At this point you'd literally reach frequency saturation. And that's without any jamming to make your life difficult.

Moreover, since this kind of defense by firing large warheads into the missile stream is, by your own admission, attritional... it doesn't matter if there are gaps in the blast patterns you've set up. Some enemies get through, but you already accepted that this would happen anyway. The only difference is that instead of killing 10% of all enemy missiles everywhere in their salvo, you've killed 100% of their missiles in some parts of their salvo, and 0% of the missiles in other parts.

If dodging is as simple as you say than any gap is easy to slip through for 100% of enemy missiles. And any 100% zone is actually a "I might hit something here" zone.

...There are missiles going "this way" and missiles going "that way." And if there is any semblance of fleet coordination, the missiles fired in a single salvo by the fleet will all (mostly) occupy a single volume of space, which (most of the time) will not simultaneously be occupied by enemy missiles in any event.

Given a reload time of several minutes and battle times of several hours between closing I'd say that more than likely half way through the battle you'd have what amounts to continuous waves of missiles from one side to the other.

Yes, and my argument is that for this very reason they are more effective countermissiles than your dedicated countermissile built on the same chassis.

At a higher risk of fratricide, yes. I used those initially and ended up with fantastic effects such as completely clearing both volleys.

Wouldn't having to pack all their missiles into the same volume make it harder? There's an intermediate solution here, where your fire comes from a 'dispersed' volume a light-second or two across, you know.

Disperse your missiles too much and they start coming in patches that the enemy close in PD can just wipe out piecemeal.

A good coordinated missile defense scheme for a "superfleet" composed of hundreds of fleets that in turn consist of hundreds of individual ships might have the following breakdown:

I had all those. It's just that in my case each ship was capable of filling each of the roles, and would do so as the battle progressed. Necessitating a lot of fire for anything to get through.

Once you clearly distinguish among these separate responsibilities, it's easy to see how coordination is handled. Defensively, any given ship is only responsible for handling very specific tasks, like "spot enemy missile barrages at extreme range and fire your own heavy missiles into them to break them up" or "track missile contacts passed to you by the long range defense force and engage them with countermissiles between (say) one and five million kilometers from the task force." Or "only worry about shooting down missiles that fly within a million kilometers of you."

Do that and you won't have enough firepower for any of the individual stages.

Breaking down the responsibilities makes fleet coordination less of a problem.

At the cost of not having enough resources for any of the tasks and failing at each.

[Enigma]

Would an armor penetrating nuke missile be useful in ship combat? Fire missile, punch through the hull and then once the warhead is inside, detonate its payload?

This would of course be used on an unshielded ship.

Also, would a nuke missile (not the type I mentioned), detonated near a ship, dose the crew with radiation?

[Vejut]

For the first, it depends on expected relative speeds, expected internal compartmentalization and size, and how small a bomb you can make I'd think. Back-of-the-envelope using Galilean physics says about ~7x106 m/s is the turnover point where even theoretically perfect fusion bombs will have less energy per kg than the impact itself (using wiki's 6 MT/kg), and that's only what, 1% of light speed? Below that, it gets murky, and depends on "how big a bomb", and "how heavily built is the target?". After all, you can do decent damage to a fairly large modern battleship with just a quarter ton or so of conventional modern explosives once inside the armor, so unless you really need to pierce some heavy internal armoring, or you can make a very small nuke, it may just be massive overkill.

For the second...it depends again, but I think the inverse square law, as well as the fact that radiation hazards in space are a thing needing protecting against, even if nobodies shooting at you, means they probably won't be very effective compared to just making the bomb get boomier. I mean, consider the normal "enhanced radiation" weapon only really has a few miles of effectiveness even against unprotected targets, and against something like a spacecraft, I don't think you'll get a useful gain in effect radius.

[Simon_Jester]

Hypervelocity impact physics is very unfriendly to any attempt to build something like a World War-era armor piercing shell.

The problem is that it is very unlikely that a nuclear warhead (or chemical explosive) can survive being "punched through" armor at speeds of many, many kilometers per second. Anything made out of conventional materials is going to be smashed into unrecognizable junk by an impact at, say, 10 to 100 km/s.

I mean, think about it in terms of the amount of energy in the bonds that hold atoms together into molecules. Using a calculation similar to what Vejut has done it is straightforward to prove that molecules do not hold together at impact velocities in the tens or hundreds of kilometers per second. Because the kinetic energy released on impact is much larger than the energy required to reduce the projectile to a cloud of vapor.

At speeds well below that 'critical' figure of seven thousand kilometers a second that Vejut cites, where a nuclear warhead still carries significantly more energy than a sack of bricks traveling at the same speed, the impact energies are still far more than is required to destroy any conceivable projectile made out of atoms.

So without some really impressive technomagic that would be better used in other applications, the odds are that you're better off just physically ramming the projectile into the armor and leaving a crater rather than trying to 'penetrate' it with an exploding warhead.
________

By the way, I have a rule of thumb for estimating impact energies to a precision of 10-20%. 1% of the speed of light translates roughly as "one kiloton per kilogram," in that a one kilogram projectile going at 0.01c will have roughly one kiloton of impact energy.

Square-law scaling applies: 3% of c is "nine kilotons per kilogram," 10% of c is "100 kilotons per kilogram," and 0.1% of c is "ten tons of TNT per kilogram."

This will hold with acceptable accuracy up until you hit, oh... I don't know, somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.2 to 0.3c, past which point the relativistic correction becomes more significant. At which point you can just multiply by the relativistic gamma factor to correct; that can be found using online calculators.