On Oct 22, 2015, at 1:58 PM, Grimmund <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Greg Nokes <xxxxxx@nokes.name> wrote:
I’ve always assumed that there was a small railgun or coil gun that would “toss” the projectile away from the launcher, The projectile would then orient to the target and burn away.

Way too much work and fragility for not enough return. You can soft launch with compressed non-flamible gas.

In Striker terms, firing missiles leads to a substantial bloom. OTOH, you're almost certainly already spotted if you are firing missiles.

Submarine warfare; half the trick is spotting the other unit while staying hidden yourself. Local defense forces, for example in a gas giant, would like to minimize their profile when launching missiles. Once you've been spotted by the other team, it's not that much of an issue, as they should be able to track you without any trouble.

I was thinking the coils would be in the tubes. I liked the idea of keeping to a standard across all missiles.

However, you could add a compressed gas container as the “first stage” to the missile, so it gives itself a little kick out of the tube, and then does it’s thing. That’e even less moving parts.

I like it.

I also always assumed that the bays did not launch “bigger” missiles, just scads of smaller ones. My description was always that a 50ton bay would launch 50 std missiles, and a 100 ton bay would launch 100.

I am OK with that, although I have always envisioned a bay as 50/100 launch tubes, potentially with several missiles each.

(There is an option to "stack" four smaller diameter missiles in the Standard launch tube. They are nestled in 2x2, not stacked lengthwise.....)

The part that has always boggled me is 1). how many times the bay gets to fire before it has to be reloaded; and 2). how to reload that from inside. Wet navy shipboard tubes are reloaded externally…..

I always assumed they are using the same launchers as are mounted on Turrets - so three shots. Reloading is done via access points inside of the bay. The three missiles are a cassette, and you just plug a new one into the back end of the launcher, and it reloads itself. Same as you would do in a turret. My main difference was that you could only load a single cassette at a time into a turret, but you can load all of the launchers at the same time in a bay. That explains the smaller density of tubes/ton in bays - more access room for quicker reloads and repairs etc.

So if you build in a auto loader system for a bay, you can reload the entire thing in a turn. Where as turrets take up to three turns.