Discouraging missile alpha strikes

Question

I am looking at tactics for using missiles as space-to-space weapons. The missiles in question will be chemically fueled, higher acceleration but lower deltaV than the warships.

Since they are essentially self contained, you can chuck your entire missile load out out a hatch, and fire them in one massive salvo.

Against a single target this seems always like the ideal strategy. Laser/Particle Beam/Gun point defense is all limited by energy throughput, making it essential to minimize the time PD has to engage the salvo. Since active defenses are not degraded, saving missiles makes no sense. If your wave did not get through, neither will any equal sized follow-up.

Edit: Heat may degrade active defenses, but if you fire the second salvo along with the first one, you have a much better chance of getting them through than allowing engagement time.

What device or method could be used to draw out missile combat and make multiple waves a desirable tactic?

Answer 1

Short-Term but High Effect Shield

Introduce a shielding capability that is extremely effective but has a short duration and long cool-down. Maybe a ship can run it in 5 second increments, store up to 30 seconds worth of shield, and needs to restock or take a huge amount of time to replenish the reserve.

This essentially gives it the ability to absorb the 6 largest salvos sent against it. IF you only send a few huge waves, they will all be blocked by the shield. If you keep up a steady bombardment or many smaller waves, the shield becomes much less effective.

There should be numerous physical/handwavium ways to create a shield like this.

Answer 2

• You can never be certain that what is currently just one target will stay just one target. Each side would be wary of being tricked of flushing all of their missiles against a part of the enemy force.
• Missile seekers might observe the defensive EW of the target and transmit this data to the follow-up salvo, increasing the hit probability. This is balanced by adjustments in the EW.
• It could be easier to temporarily degrade the defenses of a target than it is to kill it outright. For instance, a near miss might blind the sensors of the target. So the 'main wave' of the attack could be preceded by a few 'defense suppression' missiles. (Since the 'main wave' knows the timing, it can cover or avert the seekers to protect them. Blinding countermissiles would still be a problem.)
• In a similar vein, the 'main wave' could be followed by a few missiles to 'clean up' cripples before the damage control teams can get them back into battle. Mixing them into the main wave could mean that these missiles are wasted against an intact point defense.
• Missiles could work better if they are guided for most of the flight. This requires sensors, computers, operators, and communications on the launching vessel. These could be in short supply.

Answer 3

Answer inspired by "The Matrix Revolutions"

One of the effective anti-missile weapons is an EMP charge. Once an incoming wave is detected, a powerful missile carrying an EMP device is launched. Once in proximity to the wave, the missile is detonated, making the entire wave ineffective. The EMP charges, however, are large missiles and are unlikely to be deployed against individual attacking missiles or small salvos.

Answer 4

Decoys and electronic warfare.

You've been tracking that battleship as it closed to engagement range (yes, you have engagement ranges in space. Fire your missiles from too far out, your enemy lets them burn then zigs out of the way.) You fire off 100 missiles and your target release a dozen decoys. Decoys don't have the resources to pretend to be a battleship for too long and they are trivial to kill. Your missiles split up, each target has about 8 missiles going for it. Your 100 missile salvo is degraded to 8.

What you have to do is fire some missiles and see what happens, followup birds have their targeting adjusted based on what the first birds learned.

There's also the issue that if you fire too dense a group of missiles that the enemy will fire a missile at your missiles. Even a nuke doesn't have much punch at any distance in space but all you need is a mission-kill and frying their seeker does that. So long as you can avoid running into a fried missile it's harmless.

A dense group of missiles also causes communications issues--you're trying to punch a signal through all that exhaust which will contain some very energetic chemicals.

Answer 5

Here are a few possible answers that come to mind:

Sure lasers can't punch through the armor of the enemy ship, but if the enemy was to deploy a large missile loadout out one of their hatches, the laser could destroy that. In addition to instantly wiping out most of the enemy ship's missiles, the explosion created by shooting the loadout would heavily damage the ship itself. That is why the ships would choose to deploy smaller loadouts one at a time- if a laser shot the loadout, the explosion would be smaller and the ship would still have missiles to use.

Maybe the ships are fighting near an object that neither of them want to destroy. It could be a planet, or a field of explosives (space mines) that will explode in a chain reaction if hit. If any of the missiles miss their target and hit the object, something bad will happen. If both sides want the planet intact or both have ships within the minefield, they will use precision strikes instead of carpeting the enemy with missiles.

@o.m. brought up the idea of sensor interference messing with targeting. Building on that, having large salvos of rockets fire at once blinds sensors, resulting in a lot of wasted missiles that miss their target. The rocket engines on the missiles and the flashes of light missiles create when they explode could both interfere with sensors.

The shielding on the ships might be thick enough to sustain several blasts from rockets. If the ship has a limited number of rockets, they will focus on one spot on the enemy ship to try and punch through the armor. Salvos would be single shots with a few seconds in between, with all of the shots focused on a single spot on the enemy ship.

As @G0BLiN suggested, missiles themselves are limited. Launching large salvos is wasteful if a few missiles might take out an enemy ship. Ships would deploy only a few missiles at once, then wait for the explosion to clear before determining whether to fire again.

Unlike on Earth, where reinforcements are nearby, reinforcements in space are far away. They need to be out of the line of fire- behind an asteroid or planet where the enemy can't shoot them. Missile or ship resupplies might take hours or days, so rationing of missiles is a must.

Answer 6

Fratricide

Chronicidal and Alexander's answers combine to be the winner.

In the back and forth of nuclear war, one thing the US tried was the tight-pack. Earlier, they had tried spreading silos far apart, forcing the enemy to counter with 1 missile per silo, which the enemy promptly did, set up to arrive time-on-target, or all together to overwhelm any ABM systems.

So the US threw the "Time on Target" strategy right back in their face. With the tight-pack, the US put them close together - hardened enough that all but the direct-hit target would survive. But close enough, that a time-on-target attack would ensure that the first missile would cause fratricide -- all the subsequent missiles would slam into the shockwave of the first missile, and be damaged sufficiently to not detonate.

So in your case, it wouldn't be shockwave, it would be something like shrapnel - suppose you had interceptor missiles of roughly equal warhead velocity x mass to the attacking missiles, so their collision would cancel each other's velocity before causing a massive explosion of sharpnel to occur relatively stationary in space. This creates a localized Kessler Syndrome between attacker and defender, then causing fratricide of a salvo of any size -- the bigger the salvo, the bigger the Kessler Syndrome.

The ship would stock two kinds of interceptors.

• small, designed to break an incoming missile so its attack would be ineffective, but it would do little to change the velocity vector of the incoming missile and its soon to be shrapnel bits; those would continue on past the defender at roughly equivalent speed, and be dealt with by the defender's normal micrometeorite shield. These were numerous but its launch rails or targeting could be overwhelmed by a salvo. So... they also have
• Large, designed to match the mass x velocity of an attacking missile, and create this "Kessler syndrome" field of debris. These missiles are more precious, and would be reserved for salvos large enough to overwhelm the first defense.

As such, attackers find that the most effective attack is a "happy medium" - too small a salvo to justify trotting out the Kessler defense weapon, yet large enough to get a couple past the single defenses if you get lucky. So you have numbers of such salvos until you get lucky.

See also Hellfire vs Arena. Too small a salvo (1) is efficiently dealt with by the Arena defense system. Too big a salvo, well, it would certainly squish the tank, but would be totally unmanageable from the attacker's end, and would run you out of ammo, leaving you unable to attack other tanks. Generally it's a lose if the ammo you throw at the tank costs more than the tank.

Answer 7

Space is big. So, solutions that rely on area effect weapons or fratricide probably won't work. The attacker would want the missiles to spread out anyway. This allows the missile swarm to get some of the missiles to the target even through debris and extreme maneuvering of the target.

If you aren't looking for a super science answer like a limited time shield (stops everything for x amount of time from, for example: Macross), then look at the "wild weasel" (WW) electronic decoy from Star Fleet Battles. A similar tech was used in the Honor Harrington novels. If every large ship has one or more of these, they can divert all or the majority of a single wave of missiles.

In that case, the missile cruiser would either want to plink away with small groups to avoid the deployment of the WW or fire groups just big enough that they need to deploy the WW and hope that you have more groups than they do WWs.

Anti missile swarms. Small missiles that target incoming missiles. If it takes 2 anti missiles to take out a missile but the anti missiles are 1/4 the size of the attacking missile, you can wipe the alpha strike and till have room for offensive weapons. This works even better with fleet antimissile ships.

Layered missile defense would work too. Anti missiles, lasers and short range gatling guns. Thin them out in each band. If multiple ships can coordinate, they can block for everyone.

The best case for solving the problem is to not make the missile swarm the best or the worst but come up with rock-paper-scissors strategies.

Answer 8

Guided Point Defense

Point defense can, in theory be very effective in space. Given the speed at which objects are traveling, it doesn't really make sense to include a "warhead" on a missile to be honest. The missile IS the warhead, since a collision at several thousand meters per second will likely destroy the enemy ship on it's own. The only reason to make it a missile is to give it extra speed for said collision, and to re-direct itself to keep the enemy from dodging.

Using this same logic, you could conceive of a point defense system that essentially acts like a smaller version of the above. It would simply be small bullets with cold gas thrusters on the sides for maneuvering. These would then attempt to collide with the incoming missile.

A collision at those speeds would disable the missile's guidance systems. It would still be hurtling towards your ship at speeds great enough to vaporize you if it hit, but without guidance a simple maneuver would allow your ship to dodge out of the way.

Answer 9

You're firing unstable high-yield devices

The missiles are sort-of stable when in storage, but as soon as the rocket engine starts firing, the thing heats up, which primes the explosive. When hot, a tiny nudge will cause them to explode, detonating any other missiles near it.

These things are so high-yield that they don't even need to hit the ship, they just need to get near it. If you fire a big salvo, at maximum you have a single near-hit since the defenses take out one, and a huge shockwave from the resulting explosion makes the other missiles obsolete.

The missiles are on erratic courses to avoid being hit by defenses, but throwing out a bunch at a time increases the chance one missile will get hit, and one is enough to ruin an entire salvo. As a result, a usual attack is one missile at a time. Launching many missiles is only done in utter desperation up close, and will likely obliterate both ships.

Answer 10

Missiles explode. If you launch them all as a single dense cluster salvo, then my Point Defense only needs to detonate 1 of your missiles to trigger a chain reaction. If you spread them out to prevent that, then you are either launching a bombardment of continuous waves, or launching less missiles.

Of course, by dropping missiles as you travel, you can also increase your angle of attack - but that takes time, and your target can move.

Answer 11

If you desire multiple missile volleys to be the standard, then you need to have some active degradation of the defensive systems. This could be achieved by having specific payloads in your primary volley that cause this degradation. Any active defense requires high speed, high precision sensors. They need to be looking in every direction, all the time, across a number of RF bands.

So sending all of your highest yield at once against the enemy isn't as likely to produce results against a pristine sensor array. Sending an initial wave to obscure, overwhelm, damage, or destroy those sensors will then let your killshots get through.

So lets say you launch 100 missiles at once, with 10% of them designed to locate enemy sensor arrays and relay that info to the rest. Another 10% of them are designed to target those sensors with a dense, shot gun like blast of small inert projectiles. Another 10% are designed to intentionally fracture into millions of pieces to overwhelm radars. Another 10% have their own laser systems integrated and try to fry the sensors/ point defenses from range. The remaining missiles could have smaller payloads or just be inert decoys.

The point is that after a primary volley, the enemies sensors and point defenses have been partially damaged. This process can be repeated until they are blind or helpless enough to finish them off as you please. This approach will be expensive, but hopefully less so that using your rarest, heaviest, most expensive weapons in a single massive assault that could very easily be overkill, or could also leave you a sitting duck.

Answer 12

One fairly obvious solution:

Kessler Syndrome is undesired.

Explosions in orbit can render a planet unable to attempt space travel. If it's groups fighting over territory, you'd need to make sure that each volley doesn't cause a chain reaction. In a stable orbit, this could mean generations waiting for debris to fall. However, ships in approach and not in a standard orbit may expect most of the material to fall into decay and burn up IF it stays inside an appropriate window (still very risky).

In other words, if they blow up too much too fast, they blow up everything, and nobody wants that.

It's the same reason most current militaries build weapons more about efficiency than raw power. It's easy to build a weapon that will wipe your opponent off the face of the planet at the push of a button. It's hard to design one that will do that AND leave you in one piece too.

Edit: Additional notes In general, due to a lack of friction to slow down the shrapnel, missiles in space are a bad idea overall, and are just as like to destroy the ship firing the missiles as the ship hit. Equal and opposite reactions with a friction-less environment mean there's a good chance shrapnel from the missile will go flying back towards the ship that fired, shredding it. Not only does this apply to missiles, this applies to ALL explosive and projectile weapons. In space, the best weapons will be capture weapons and weapons for close combat, and shrapnel-less energy weapons like gamma bursts and EMPs and microwave weapons.

Answer 13

The firing ship can only control so many

Missiles go fast. This causes some Doppler shift in... Most things. So, the launching ship is in control of the missiles from launch to hit. Bigger, better sensors and bigger, better computers. While the missiles have some on board targeting systems and computers (In case of effective jamming), the ships are better.

But a ship can only effectively target, track, update, and communicate with so many missiles. So while they could fire everything, it's less effective.

Similarly, fewer missiles means if the enemy can coopt the command and control mechanisms, fewer missiles are lost. Each salvo would have different, generated encryption keys, so while the enemy might manage to divert one salvo (Highly unlikely that there would be enough delta-v to get back to the launching ship), it'll be more difficult to do so for the second one since they have to start back at square one. If they are launched in one wave, they all have the same keys and can potentially all be messed with.

Answer 14

One "solution" to your question would be missile launchers that impart a significant velocity to the missile in the "launch" sequence - if I remember correctly Tomahawk missiles have very low velocity upon launch i.e. when exiting the launch canister - while rocket-assisted artillery rounds have a lot of velocity at the start.
The "explanation" for this feature (forced launch) would be that the missiles accelerate slowly at low speed, so launch at high speed lowers (by a lot) their time-to-target (also, "fuel" used for early start acceleration can't be used later for maneuvers).
On reverse, the missile launchers are limited in energy used per minute either by cooling issues, or by energy generation issues.
These being said, the "large EMP defense" mentioned above is a very valid answer.

Another possible answer would be that the total surface of the ship is limited (for real or handwavium reasons) so it simply doesn't have the surface area to launch everything in one go.
Yet another possible answer would be that the missiles can only survive behind a lot of plating, and creating a lot of tunnels through that plating makes the armor too weak (this you could "support" with stories of battleships lost by "lasers through the missile tubes" phenomenons).
And yet another possible answer would be to have shields that can only have very small and temporary "holes" - if you try to open "windows" for a full salvo, the entire shield will fail - and even a small hole opened more than a couple of seconds will propagate outwardly and lead to instabilities.

Well, plenty of ways for a technologically oriented party in a war to introduce "overpowered" technologies and win against a brutal opponent...

Answer 15

No one answered with current doctrine?

You dont send a destroyer across the atlantic to unload it's entire missile rack on a single target. It's expensive overkill and leaves you vulnerable to future attack while you try to make it back to port for a reload. Especially when the defender can signal others to your location, and those others could attempt to catch you as you try to flee.

Another option: most of the missiles will likely be kinetic, meant to slam into the space ship and tear through. This means they cant be detonated easily and destruction of the missile means the debris will still be able to tear through you. Solution? If the enemy sends a single giant wave, you can predict their course and put a big bomb in their way a distance away from you. This bomb will disable the guidingsystems of the missiles (if not destroy them) and blow the debris and damaged missiles off-course from your ship. At the very least it'll reduce the total damage received.

Answer 16

The missiles have Fission devices as their warheads

In addition to fireball and debris cloud effects, fission weapons have a unique problem: chain fizzling. When a nuclear fission weapon detonates, the chain reaction inside it's core generates a large number of high energy neutrons, such a high neutron flux will cause fission reactions in nearby cores , even if they are subcritical.

The result of such fission reactions is that, due to the large amount of heat generated by the secondary reactions, the internal components of any fission weapon would experience thermal shocking and decomposition, which would disrupt the precise geometry that is needed for implosion type weapons to properly implode and assembling a critical mass.

Essentially, one detonated fission device causes other devices nearby to deactivate, therefore, the missiles have to be spaced separately enough from each other, which would stretch a salvo into a more continuous flow, instead of a short burst.

Also, the enemy can employ a neutron bomb based point defense system, by launching a neutron generating device on a missile into the enemy salvo and detonating the device inside the swarm, one shot of a slightly larger missile can easily disable an entire salvo. Since neutron bombs or other area effect weapons in space would be quite large and heavy, they will be also slow reloading and one ship won't have too many of such devices. Therefore it will be much more wiser to spread out the shots instead of clustering them, and hope that the enemy will not be able to take out the entire salvo within one or two reloaded they have before some of the missiles reaches target.