Post by r***@gmail.comPost by deowllModern SD (P) carry the Apollo or better which does a lot to reduce long
range misses. The Apollo developed from a towed sensory platform and is in
fact nothing more or less than a rather large robotic LAC with or without
point defense and no weapons load though point defense was becoming more
popular.
Where does it say that? Apollo is a based on a sensor remote that is
the same size and has the same performance as a missile, as it fits in
the same pod.
Apollo fire control for light units
By and large, the reasons this won't work (or, at least, won't be
used) have already been ably advanced. To sum up from my own perspective,
(1) Destroyers, even Rolands, are neither intended nor designed to
engage in combat with capital units. They don't need that capability to
perform their designed functions.
(2) If it were possible to use standard FTL communications
channels/installations to do what Keyhole II and Apollo do, then Sonja
Hemphill wouldn't have spent billions of dollars and incredibly precious
man-years of R&D developing the platforms and the attendant shipboard
installations required to make the system work.
(3) You aren't going to be able to fit Keyhole II and the required
shipboard hardware and software into something the size of a destroyer --
not even one of the new DD(L)s. As things currently stand, you would be
hard-pressed to fit it even into something the size of a Nike, and doing
so would require a significant reduction in magazine capacity.
(4) The Rolands were designed to fit a very specific tactical and
strategic niche. They were also very deliberately designed not to fit
other tactical and strategic niches. They are the fleet's new-generation
destroyer, and one of the considerations that went into their design was
the identification of capabilities which had to be left out in order to
keep them from being pressed into roles for which they were never
intended. There is no way that BuShips is going to go back and look at
ways to cram in the very sorts of capabilities they very carefully
designed out.
(6) The Mark 16, which the Roland was designed around, is still seen
as a very significant and useful weapon system post-Apollo. The Mark 16
was never intended to reach out and engage capital ships, and especially
not to engage superdreadnoughts. It has evolved into a significantly more
powerful weapon than was originally envisioned, and that's just fine with
the Royal Manticoran Navy. However, what they were looking for with it --
and what they got -- is a medium-range missile (in an era of MDMs), with
sufficient range and sufficient hitting power to deal with other
relatively light units (specifically, those lying "below" the wall battle)
and to force commerce raiders -- especially commerce raiders -- to honor
the threat it represents. The Rolands are intended as scouts, convoy
escorts, LAC-killers, additional missile-defense platforms, commerce
raiders in their own right, and force multipliers in a strategic sense by
providing the RMN with enough hyper-capable platforms of sufficient combat
power to cover relatively large volumes of space without tying up CA(L)s
and BC(L)s that may well be urgently needed somewhere else. For all of
those roles, the Mark 16 is fully adequate as it stands. That isn't to say
that it can't be improved upon, or that it won't be, but there is no way
that the Navy is going to accept the mass and volume penalties of building
the components for Apollo into a unit intended to employ dual-drive
missiles rather than multi-drive missiles.
None of this should be taken as a flat statement on my part that
Apollo capability will never creep downward into ships smaller than
SD(P)s. What it should be taken as is a comment on the engineering
difficulties inherent in doing so, on the cost in terms of combat
endurance and flexibility for the units in question, and the nature of the
DD(L)'s designed role and intended function. And, I suppose, also a
comment on the current Manticoran thinking on the viability and utility of
the Mark 16 as opposed to the Mark 23 MDM and its sub-variants."
Nike (big BC) clarification
I think this has been addressed at least once before, but the
answer (in large part) is an error that got made in the copy-editing
just a snippet
If the RMN's planners were not currently at war with another
podlayer-equipped adversary, they would probably be building nothing but
Nikes at this point. As it is, they were more or less forced to build more
Agamemnons for two reasons. First, it was politically acceptable to the
Janacek Admiralty (because BCs are somehow less "imperialistic" than
wallers), which means that they were laid down in at least some numbers,
whereas Nike was seen as a one-off (and expensive) testbed by Janacek &
Co. Second, the RMN needs podlayers, and BCs can be built faster than SDs.
As a result, more Agamemnons were laid down in the early days of the White
Haven Admiralty before Apollo had proven itself. Now, of course, the ships
are seen as too small for Apollo, and therefore the building programs were
once again switched to concentrate on "proper" wallers (with the new
system) once the BC(P)s in the pipeline had been launched to clear the
ways.
Does any of that make sense?
It may be that I'm confabulating Apollo with keyhole however you aren't
going to stick either in a BC(P):
More on the Keyhole platforms
I really shouldn't be getting involved with this entire topic. For
that matter, I don't have any business even skimming the Bar at the moment,
with everything that's going on. Nonetheless...
There are two varieties of Keyhole platforms. One of them, the first
developed, is primarily a light-speed communications node and sensor
platform designed to be gotten beyond the interference of the mounting
ship's impeller wedge. It has some limited onboard power storage capability,
and most ships fitted with it carried to a bit, in order to provide
redundancy and also -- for the first time -- to give an impeller
wedge-equipped warship an effective 360 degree coverage area for both
communications and sensors.
Keyhole-Two, on the other hand, is fitted with FTL telemetry and
communications channels. Because the grav-pulse coms are a heck of a lot
bigger than the light-speed coms, the platform had to get a lot bigger, as
well. In addition, its power requirements rose pretty severely. And whereas
the original Keyhole had only extremely limited anti-missiles self-defense
capabilities, Keyhole-Two (in part because it's so much more valuable) has
several point defense clusters added to the rest of its size and energy
budget. As with the original Keyhole platform, ships equipped with
Keyhole-Two are fitted with two platforms each, once again for combined
redundancy and 360 degree coverage.
By the time you get up to Keyhole-Two sizes, anything smaller than a
capital ship is going to be giving up too much of its broadside weaponry --
offensive or defensive -- simply to carry the damned things (which are
docked in hull recesses which are specifically designed and provided for the
purpose) when they aren't deployed.
Keyhole -- and Keyhole-2 -- are both towed systems, and they are not
towed on any physical tether. They are towed on tractors, and they are
primarily powered by transmission from the mothership. They do have some
onboard propulsive capability, using the same impeller hardware which was
developed for the Ghost Rider recon drones, but that capability is purely
secondary. In theory, they could maintain the station on their onboard
drives while remaining in the basket to be hit by power transmissions from
the mothership and to continue to perform their relay functions. In fact,
it's simpler and less complicated to operate them in what amounts to
full-time towed mode. There are less things to go wrong, and if the ship
takes battle damage sufficient to cut it off from a still functional
Keyhole, the ship in question is probably so far up the creek already that
it's not going to worry about bells and whistles.
Superdreadnoughts and ships-of-the-wall generally can fairly readily
be equipped with multiple Keyhole-One platforms -- that is, the platforms
themselves are small enough, with sufficiently low energy requirements, but
there's no real reason a ship the size of a waller couldn't be equipped with
four or even six of them. Doing that would cut into volume (and broadside
area) available for other purposes, however, and the RMN more or less
decided that giving every ship in a battle squadron two of them and allowing
for weapons to be handed off between one ship in another provided enough
redundancy through simple dispersal of the system.
One interesting thing the RMN has observed now that Keyhole-Two has
actually been deployed in combat is that the platforms' "self-defense"
capability has proved a very valuable adjunct to be Navy's starships'
antimissile defenses. Indeed, our good friend Sonja Hemphill is currently
tinkering around with a considerably smaller, simpler platform whose primary
function would be missile defense and which could probably be fitted to
smaller combatants.
The main limiting factors which have so far restricted Keyhole and
Keyhole-Two to capital ships are (1) the simple physical size of the
platforms; (2) the amount of shipboard power generation and transmission
designed into the system; (3) the fact that the system is most useful in
long-range missile duels and that nothing smaller than a battle cruiser was
likely to be engaging in extremelylong-range combat. Even the Saganami-C and
the Roland are equipped with only dual-drive missiles, and BuShips and
BuWeaps were thinking in terms of all-up MDMs. Keyhole-Two, in addition,
there's no real point to providing the system to somebody who isn't also
capable of firing the Apollo control missiles. It's entirely possible that a
Keyhole-Two for battlecruisers, possibly with somewhat downsized
capabilities, will eventually be produced for the Agamemnons and their
Grayson and Andermani counterparts, but that's definitely been a secondary
or even tertiary priority in light of other, more immediately critical
demands.
That's probably not everything about the system, but it's the best I
can do without digging out my detailed technical notes (and spending a lot
longer on this than I have any business doing). I hope it's enough to deal
with most of the questions raised in this thread.
That being the case your best bet is to stick it in a remote control
platform as in keyhole or use a LAC if you lack the ability to make the
remote control platforms that your other systems can take advantage off.
This is what I think actually happened at Spendle. They used advanced fire
control systems that the ships employed weren't equiped to transport as part
of themselves and after the battle they promptly had to pack them up and
ship them back to Manticore along with the more powerful missiles.