Missile

From Honorverse

A missile was a self-propelled projectile used as a weapon.

Missiles came in varying masses, depending on the ship class that fired them, with larger vessels capable of firing missiles that had greater acceleration and endurance and heavier warheads. Missiles could be tipped with several kinds of war heads, including contact fusion warheads, bomb-pumped laser warheads, sidewall penetrators, and electronic counter-measure (ECM) to help breach missile defenses. Some smaller missiles were even purely kinetic.

Anti-missile defenses included rolling a ship's wedge to interpose it between missile and ship, electronic countermeasures to confuse missiles, countermissiles to destroy or damage them, and point defense (largely computer controlled lasers).

Contents 1 Missile Types 1.1 Nuclear Warhead 1.2 Laser Warhead 1.2.1 Technical Specs 1.3 Multi-Drive Missile 1.4 Dazzler 1.5 Dragon's Teeth 1.6 Viper 1.7 Mistletoe 2 Missile Tube 3 Missile Pod 4 Donkey 5 Apollo System 6 Countermissile 7 References

[edit] Missile Types

The most common weapons of the 20th Century PD were impeller drive missiles. They came in varying sizes: a typical capital ship missile massed 80 tons and could accelerate at 46,000 G for perhaps 180 seconds before its drive burned out, giving it a powered flight range of over six million kilometers. Naturally, in space, it was possible to reach a target beyond powered range, but it was very easy to avoid a missile which could no longer maneuver. Missile drives were frequently adjustable, allowing the acceleration to be "stepped down" in order to increase the powered lifetime, although at a cost of giving the opposing force more time to throw up defenses. Even within powered range, electronic countermeasures, evasive systems, point defense and countermissiles were effective, though efficiency varied amongst navies. A direct hit on a defended ship was nearly unheard of given impenetrable wedges above and below the ship, and less resistant, but still tough sidewalls. Missiles spin while in flight, to make it more difficult for point defense lasers to get a clear shot past their impeller wedges and to distribute any delivered energy across the missile's surface.

[edit] Nuclear Warhead

During the time of Edward Saganami, missiles used megaton-yield fusion warheads. Such weapons had to get very close to the target to do damage in space, and were made practically obsolete by improvements in point defense. They were initially developed as pure contact weapons, and the advent of sidewalls made them far less effective. They remained in use largely as "sidewall busters", attempting to open an opportunity to deploy broadside lasers and grasers.

By 1900 PD, nuclear warheads were mostly relegated to "warning shots", as well as against ships with no intact defenses.

During the Second Havenite-Manticoran War, PN Admiral Shannon Foraker revived nuclear warheads as a means of "overwhelming" superior Manticoran sensors, decoys, and other sensitive targeting systems in a maneuver called the "triple ripple"; it require three precisely timed and detonated volleys of nuclear missiles. While initially successful, Manticoran EW techs quickly adapted.

[edit] Laser Warhead

The nuclear warhead was superseded as a ship-killer by the laser head. Originally conceived in pre-Diaspora days,^[1] the concept of a laser head was simple. A cylindrical rod, or "medium"^[2] focused the x-ray pulse of a nuclear detonation into a high-energy gamma-ray laser beam, which would continue to fire until the medium was destroyed by the thermal pulse of the explosion.^[3] The problem was that the process was inefficient, since an explosion was spherical, and each rod would only capture a small percentage of the energy of the detonation. Since such a small amount of energy was unlikely to be sufficient to blast through a warship's sidewalls, anti-radiation shielding, and armor, laser warheads were considered too cost-inefficient to use.

Around 1800 PD, developments in fusion plants meant that the technology needed to focus the blast could be fit into a capital missile.^[4] A ring of gravity generators, placed behind the warhead, and activated prior to detonation, used gravatic lenses to focus the blast in a Gaussian shape, "aimed" at the lasing rods. By 1860 PD, refinements had been made to the point that even the most heavily armored of ships were no longer immune to an attack from a laser head. The laser rod were mounted in bays on the sides of the missile, would eject when the missile settled on it's final attack bearing. Each mounted it's own thrusters and sensors, allowing it to align itself with it's target, and position itself about a hundred meters in front of the missile's nuclear warhead, in between it and it's intended target.

Unlike a pure fusion warhead, meaningful damage could be dealt to anything within 25,000 kilometers of the detonation. It was more effective at penetrating sidewalls than a pure fusion explosive.

Both lasing rod dimensions, warhead yield, and grav lens amplification were critical factors in determining laser head power. This meant that larger capital ship missiles were much more powerful than smaller ones. Larger missiles were able to carry more powerful grav lensing assemblies, increasing the total percentage of the blast that was focused onto the lasing rods, a larger fusion warhead, which increased total energy released, as well longer lasing rods, which allowed for longer stand-off range, since the beam divergence was smaller on longer rods.

Thanks to it's technological advancements, Manticoran missile were able to squeeze more destructive power out of a smaller missile (and by proxy, fusion warhead), thanks to advances in gravity lens development, sensors, and targeting. Havenite missile were bulkier because they had to rely on larger lasing rods and larger warheads to achieve the same destructive power.

Compared to a ship-board energy weapon's grav lenses, a lasing rod was woefully inadequate at focusing the laser's energy, so until the advent of missile pods, energy mounts continued to be the main armaments for any warship.

[edit] Technical Specs

The Royal Manticoran Navy's Mark 16 G cruiser weight laser head (deployed in 1921 PD) was as powerful as a 1917 PD Mark 16 capital ship missile.

• Manticoran Mark 16 E (cruiser weight) Laser Head
  • Fifteen megaton warhead
• Manticoran Mark 16 E-1 (cruiser weight) Laser Head (Mark 16 E with gravity generator replaced)
  • Fifteen megaton warhead
  • Improved gravity lensing
• Manticoran Mark 16 G (cruiser weight) Laser Head (5x more powerful than the "E")
  • Forty megaton warhead
  • Improved gravity lenses
• Manticoran Mark 23 (capital weight) Laser Head
  • 6x 300cm x 40cm rods

[edit] Multi-Drive Missile

Advances in warship technology during the First Haven-Manticore War include the development of the MDM (multi-drive missile). First built by Manticore's researchers (see Ghostrider Project), these missiles used the ancient concept of staging. Manticoran designs included three separate drives. Drives could be configured independently, to either fire sequentially, or incorporate "coasting" between stages, to increase their maximum powered envelope. Manticoran designs incorporated a revolutionary compact fusion plant (although launchers needed to be redesigned to incorporate a large energy transfer to initially fire up the plant). Havenite designs were forced to rely on incorporating more capacitor rings into missiles, although this allowed them to avoid the radical launcher redesign. Havenite MDMs were limited to two-stage due to the bulk of the rings. Manticoran MDMs were eventually upgraded to three-stage.

Due to their size and the launcher requirements they could not be carried by smaller starships, but this was a minor limitation.^[5] When they were first introduced, they made the Royal Manticoran Navy nearly invincible and contributed greatly to their victory in the First Haven-Manticore War. During the five-year armistice, the Havenites copied the weapon. By the commencement of the Second Haven-Manticore War, the Imperial Andermani Navy had developed two-stage MDMs, and were being refit to accommodate the Manticoran three-stage missiles.

Along with the development of the Apollo missile, Mark 23 three-stage MDMs loaded into Mark 17-D missile pods were equipped with protective shrouds which shielded their sensors from particle damage^[6]. The shrouds would be jettisoned as the clutch of missiles approached it's target, in order to allow the missiles to begin scanning and analyzing their target's defenses.

Manticore developed a four-stage system defense MDM, the Mark 25, which also incorporated longer lasing rods and more powerful grav focusing to increase it's offensive power. (SI2)

Specs

• SKM Mark 16 two-stage ^[7]
  • mass: 94 tons
  • accel: 96,000 G
    • maximum powered missile envelope: 15 million km
  • accel: 48,000 G
    • maximum powered missile envelope: 63 million km
    • terminal velocity: 0.83c

[edit] Dazzler

The Dazzler was a Manticoran-designed missile developed as part of the Project Ghostrider, designed to confuse defending ships' anti-missile systems by strobing jamming. They were fired alongside regular MDMs, jamming enemy fire control. Thanks to the micro-fusion plant on board, they had a massive amount of energy to throw at enemy sensors. (HH9, SI2)

[edit] Dragon's Teeth

Dragon's Teeth were Manticoran-designed missiles developed as part of the Project Ghostrider, designed to act as decoys for anti-missile systems targeting standard MDM missiles. They pretended to be an entire volley of missiles, attracting countermissile fire that would otherwise be targeted at actual missiles. (HH9)

[edit] Viper

The Viper was a Grayson-designed anti-LAC missile, based on the Mark 31 countermissile. It was developed for use with the newer Katana-class space superiority LACs, and was two-thirds the size of a normal LAC-launched missile. Because it was designed to target LACs, the Viper adopted a much smaller warhead, but added much better seekers and an enhanced AI, allowing it to become a "fire and forget" weapon. It incorporated the Mark 31's drive system, which allowed it both to have high acceleration and maneuverability, and to also, if needed, be used in the role of countermissile.

• 130,000 G accel
• powered envelope (from rest) of 3.6 million km
• 75 second flight time
• could double as countermissile

The Viper could also be fired from standard countermissile tubes on larger warships as part of anti-LAC defenses. (HH11)

[edit] Mistletoe

The Mistletoe was an offensive reconnaissance drone designed for the Royal Manticoran Navy by Sonja Hemphill.

Mounting a standard missile warhead on a recon drone, Mistletoe was designed as a "hunter-killer" weapon to stealthily seek and then destroy critical defence system architecture such as the Republic of Haven's Moriarty platforms.

First deployed during Operation Sanskrit. (HH11)

[edit] Missile Tube

Originally, missile tubes merely housed the missile prior to launch. Missiles would receive pre-programmed instructions from their ship, and would then use reaction thrusters to move out beyond the ship's impeller wedge before activating their own. This severely limited the fire rate.

More modern tubes contained mass drivers that "flung" a missile out past a starship's wedge, allowing the missile to activate it's own wedge without fear of interference.

At one point, curved tubes and drivers were considered for the "top" and "bottom" of a warship, in order to pack more launchers into a ship, allowing for a larger broadside. But this was deemed impractical, as the tonnage required was enormous. The idea was made obsolete by the re-introduction of the missile pod, as well as developments by the Royal Manticoran Navy. The Edward Saganami-class could fire a double broadside of missiles out of it's tubes, and they would re-orient themselves before activating their drives, allowing them to be fired "off-bore".^[8] (SI1)

[edit] Missile Pod

Originally, missile pods existed in the form of clusters of single-shot launchers designed to be towed by tractor beam. When mass-driver launch tubes were developed, they could not be fitted to pods. Pod-launched missiles were therefore slow and obsolete.

At the beginning of the First Havenite-Manticoran War, the Royal Manticoran Navy developed a miniaturized mass driver that could be fitted in a pod. Immediately, pods became crucial to warfare again, as a ship could tow pods containing far more tubes than its broadside. As pods could not be reloaded under combat conditions, this made the first salvos of a battle the decisive ones. Pods were also vulnerable to "proximity kills" since they were not protected by either a ships armor or it's sidewalls or wedge. Towing pods reduced the acceleration of a vessel if it could not be towed inside the wedge of its control ship. Manticoran designs, due to their more advanced tech, were able to put fourteen missiles in each pod. Havenite designs, far more bulky, were only able to fit ten missiles into each pod.

The dynamic of war changed again with the design of the 'pod-layer' ships. These vessels sacrificed aft chase armament, considerable magazine space, and some structural integrity to store enormous racks of expendable missile pods. With each broadside, a new set of pods could be dropped, fired, and discarded. Starships could carry sufficient missile firepower to destroy considerably superior enemy vessels. (Energy firepower had always been similarly excessive.) Pod-layer designs were predominant among new-build superdreadnoughts, and the first pod-laying battlecruisers had entered service by 1918 PD.

Manticoran pods also gained built-in tractors, eliminating one limitation on how many pods a ship could tow. Previously, a ship was limited by the number of tractor projectors it was equipped with. (SI1)

With the development of the bulkier three-stage Mark 23 missiles, Manticoran pods, in order to still fit them in podnaughts, reduced the load to ten missiles in the Mark 17 "flat pack" pods. With the advent of Apollo, the Mark 17 Mod D's load was reduced to eight, to make room for the bulkier Apollo control missile.

[edit] Donkey

Havenite designers, unable to duplicate the miniaturization used to cram both a fusion reactor and tractor beam into a missile pod, developed the Donkey. The Donkey was a pod-sized platform, studded with tractor beam projectors, and a receiver for power beamed from the ship that towed it. Each Donkey could tow ten pods by itself, and a Sovereign of Space-class superdreadnought had enough tractors to directly tow twenty Donkeys. And if they were lined up properly, in order to receive power beamed from the ship, each Donkey could tow ten more Donkeys (up to three tiers deep if necessary). Like the built-in tractors of Manticoran pods, each pod towed outside the wedge impacted the acceleration of the ship, but if a captain was willing to sacrifice speed for weight of fire, an initial volley could be quite large. After the volley, the Donkeys themselves could be discarded like the now empty pods they towed, and potentially retrieved after a battle. (HH11)

[edit] Apollo System

Another advance over standard missiles was the Apollo system, deployed by Manticore and initially only in very limited numbers. In this system, the salvo from a single pod contained two types of missiles. Eight of the missiles were standard Mark 23 three-stage MDMs with a variety of warheads and ECM. The second type was a single larger Mark 23-E^[9] missile fitted with an FTL telemetry link instead of a warhead^[10]; this missile acted as a control node for the other eight missiles in the pod and allowed a Keyhole II equipped ship to provide effectively real-time control to the missiles across their range envelope. If the Apollo missile was destroyed, the rest of the cluster could continue on with whatever their last telemetry had given them.

The Apollo control missile could also analyze the readings from the sensors on it's clutch of missiles, and report back via FTL to the Keyhole II platforms, essentially allowing it to act as a high-speed recon platform as well.^[11] A tactic developed by BatCruRon 106 was to fire two extra pods, one ahead of the salvo, and one behind the salvo. The initial clutch would act as the recon platform, allowing them to both confirm their targets, and refine targeting data (since most ship-based sensors would be far out of range for precise targeting), while the follow-up clutch would be in position to observe the actions of the main salvo, allowing a ship commander real-time analysis of the enemy's battle-damage.

There was also a system-defense version of Apollo, the Mark 23-F, to go with the new four-stage Mark 25. (HH11, SI2)

[edit] Countermissile

The first line of active defense against missile fire was the countermissile. Countermissiles were used to intercept incoming missiles at ranges of 1 to 4 million kilometers. Countermissiles had no warheads; they merely attempted to overlap their impeller wedges with those of the attacker's missiles. This overlap was mutually destructive as the gravitic stress vaporizes the nodes of both missiles.

Countermissiles were much much smaller than ship-killers (approximately 12 tons), and were usually fired from dedicated launchers. Countermissiles may also have been fired from standard missile tubes through the use of countermissile canisters, which launched several missiles at once, similar to a shotgun blast. However, this was normally only used to maintain a constant level of defensive fire if counter missile launchers were destroyed.

Countermissiles were less capable of independent targeting than attack missiles, which means they could lose lock by the electronic counter measures carried by an attack missile. However, they were capable of much higher accelerations. The tactical reality during the First and Second Havenite-Manticoran Wars was that many countermissiles had to be fired in order to generate a kill.

• Star Kingdom of Manticore
  • Mark 30 Countermissile
  • Mark 31 Countermissile - 130 kG accel, 75 second flight time, powered range from rest of 3.6 million km
  • Viper Anti-LAC Missile - modified Mark 31 CM, was also used in countermissile role.
• Republic of Haven
  • latest countermissile - 100 kG accel

[edit] References