Re: Missles?

At 07:40 03/04/97 +0100, you wrote:
>>At 09:48 PM 4/2/97 +0100, Jon wrote:
<gulps at the prospect of having to disagree with Jon..>
>Who ever said anything about the WARHEAD going off? Think of all that
nice
>fuel sitting there in that big, fat missile...:)
A LOT of people have thought of that too. That's why missile launchers
on
modern combat vehicles tend to be of two types..

1) External pepperbox systems so that any explosion has to penetrate the
hull to cause damage 

2) Launch 'tubes' where the missiles are only loaded just prior to
launch,
and otherwise stored deep within the hull.

Basically, there is no good design reason to put the missiles anywhere
where a 'cookoff' would cause any damage. It's a basic design principle
that has existed, well, since gunpowder did. While I also subscribe to
the
idea that FT doesn't HAVE to conform to modern military design, there's
no
reason to presume the designers are stupid either..

Admittedly, stealth aircraft have recessed or covered bays, but the
principle still holds. You either store your missiles outside your hull
armour so a cookoff does no harm OR you store them somewhere such that
by
the time anything gets there to ignite them you've got more to worry
about
than fuel explosions. It's also true that with even 20th century
explosives
the warhead power of a missile is vastly beyond the power of it's fuel
in
an explosion. Let alone nukes/pumps xrays/antimatter warp field/photon
torpedoe sorts of warheads.

I think ANY possible warship design will be such that it is designed to
minimise the effects of such things unless you get something like a full
magazine hit or a catastophic series of ignitions in a ship with (say)
damaged fuel lines or tanks - and that sort of thing is what I always
thought threshold rolls were meant to represent.

I *DO* however think that missile 'swarms' should be vunerable to the
fact
that counterbattery fire could create chain reactions within a 'swarm'
but
then the whole idea of missile swarms is very 'manga' to me and they
always
go for big explosions regardless of logic :-).
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