Shipkiller Missile
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"Shipkiller" Missile
A Shipkiller Missile is the primary naval anti-ship missile used by the Confederacy. It is approximately 55 centimeters in diameter and roughly 2 meters long.
Platforms
Capabilities
- Longer range than Sa'arm beam weapons
Story Usage
A textual analysis of the story repository, current as of 9/2019 and performed on 2019-12-28 and using SS Lib ver 1.16.07 (10/21/2019) identified the following usage counts for Shipkiller:
- Ending This Mess by Zen Master (Timeline month: 164) 6 instances.
- First Cruise of Lt. Steward by John Lewiston 4 instances.
- Independent Command by Zen Master (Timeline month: 72) 2 instances.
- The Troubled Celestial River by SGTStoner 2 instances.
References
The following quotes were taken from the stories archive documenting how this story element has been handled using get_refs.py v1.0 9/9/2019.
From Independent Command by Zen Master
As usual, the AI's video records of everything on the ship made tracking down the truth very easy. Fuck, that was close. Our missiles have been standardized on 55 cm diameter, or 21" if you are American. Think submarine torpedo or several different surface-launched missiles which are nominally 21". By the time those things have accelerated (to use nice round numbers, assume 100g for 100 seconds) to burnout, they are moving so fast that an explosive warhead is completely redundant. Instead, they have as much of a sensor package and brain as we can fit, as all that kinetic energy is wasted if they miss.
From Independent Command by Zen Master
All of our ships needed self-guided missiles that could swat incoming small craft. They didn't need the 55 cm shipkillers that the Patricians had, because those were far larger than needed to kill small craft. They weren't big enough to kill larger ships, unless you could get several hits at long range after full acceleration, and that appeared to be a losing game. _If_ they hit they did a lot of damage, but they could be seen coming, they could be intercepted, and after burnout they could be dodged. And, the smaller ships could only carry a few of these larger missiles.
From Ending This Mess by Zen Master
For offense, we gave the craft a single 55 cm shipkiller missile, like the old torpedo bombers, and added a light Particle Beam mount for close-in defense. Okay, the PB mount was really just there to make the crew feel better, and they knew it. The Sa’arm didn’t have anything that that weapon could knock out, except maybe their own bombers and the Plasma Torpedos that the Dickhead bombers were armed with. We also gave them the Confederacy’s old “nav shield”, the original shield we had started with before we figured out how to improve it.
From Ending This Mess by Zen Master
More Snakes, yes, but with our first run’s problems all fixed during construction. We also lengthened them just a little, and added a battery of eight 55 cm shipkiller missile launchers in their nose. Adding missile launchers gave us more options than just having the guns. Putting them in the middle where we had originally planned would move the turrets farther from the center of mass and add stability problems for no good reason.
After a bit, the mid-course stage of the missiles kicked in, accelerating them through the thinning cloud of ribbons. Now the missiles could see the targets, not only because they were closer, but also because they could detect the lasers firing at the Mylar cloud. The final phase kicked on; thirty seconds with active homing sensors. They were well inside the envelope and would probably not miss, IF they made it that far. For some reason, even with junky sensors, Swarm ships were very good at missile defense. A flurry of lasers and particle accelerators tracked and destroyed the first missile. It was now a cloud of debris that would move close, but not close enough to strike the target. The second missile took a hit that killed the drive but left the missile intact. It would miss, to continue on as a one-ton stray bullet.
See Also
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