Portable Defense System - Missile

phavoc

Emperor Mongoose
This is part of my ongoing effort to flesh out my little adventure hub setting. I haven't quite finished costing it out. I just finally put pencil to paper on the design and drew up a quick image in paint and thought I would share.

Davosi Armaments Portable Defense System - Missile

Utilizing a standard C-1 container, the Portable Defense System - Missile (PDS-M) is designed to provide an installation a quckly deployed defense against enemies. The PDS family is also designed to blend into any starport or industrial area, and casual observations will not detect that the ubiqitious cargo container is, in fact, a potent area defense installation.

The DPS-M contains 32 standard missiles in boxed launchers (4 tons). One ton is set aside for fire control and there is a one-ton set aside for a weapons control / operator station. The DPS-M contains a very basic short-range (10km) active/passive sensor and target tracking system. To engage targets beyond 10km requires that the DPS-M be tied into a more robust sensor system.

A DPS-M may be used in either a totally automated fashion, by the onboard weapons operator, or it may be linked or tied into a weapons control system and operated remotely. Missiles are stored vertically and launched through the sealed openings in the roof of the container.

The container has reinforced armor and is immune to most small-arms fire (such as gauss rifles and ACR's). The weapon control operator station is envrionmentally sealed and the contains a basic NBC system that can provide 48hrs of air for the operator. Power is supplied through an on-board battery system. When installed as a semi-permanent facility, it needs to be connected to an external power system

Each boxed launcher displaces 1/8th of a Dton, and costs Cr 2,500 ea. They are designed to store missiles in a sealed, maintenance free environment for long periods. Small explosive charges blow off a hidden, reinforced panel on the roof of the container before the missile is launched.

Maintenance access to the boxed missile launchers is rather cumbersome. The lid of the container section is hinged and may be opened through the controls located in the weapons operator station area. After the roof is opened, technicians can access the individual missile launchers. To replace one boxed missile launchers takes about 10 minutes (removal of old launcher, inserting the new launcher, running diagnostics). Each boxed launcher simply slides into place and is automatically connected to the onboard fire control system.

Used/defective boxed launchers may be reloaded or serviced by a technician. Refurbishment and replacement of parts costs approximately Cr500 ea (plus the cost of the missile). This includes fitting new seals and launcher caps as well as replacing the blow-away panels on the top of the container.

Let me know what you guys think. I plan on making a few other variations, as well as making torpedo and other weapons variants.
 

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Oh yeah, just picture after players become aware of this...

  • Pilot Player: "Okay, while I'm prepping the ship, Joey and Betty run around the docks and lob grenades atop all the cargo containers"

    Ref: "There's 208 of them!"

    Pilot Player: "Okay, Joey takes an extra bag of 'nades..."
:lol:

Seriously, though, while the concept is nice, a stationary box with 32 missiles is gonna be quite the target after its first launch... wouldn't want to be nearby, much less the 'onboard' operator. Even with passive sensors, it may standout due to power - and will definitely be a spotted heat source after first launch.
 
BP said:
Oh yeah, just picture after players become aware of this...

  • Pilot Player: "Okay, while I'm prepping the ship, Joey and Betty run around the docks and lob grenades atop all the cargo containers"

    Ref: "There's 208 of them!"

    Pilot Player: "Okay, Joey takes an extra bag of 'nades..."
:lol:

Seriously, though, while the concept is nice, a stationary box with 32 missiles is gonna be quite the target after its first launch... wouldn't want to be nearby, much less the 'onboard' operator. Even with passive sensors, it may standout due to power - and will definitely be a spotted heat source after first launch.

Lol... Sure, there's always something for players to do. But don't forget it's easy to put up anti-personnel stuff around these. Or even put berms around them to provide additional protection.

Any sort of defensive mechanism is going to be a nice juicy target. Like say a deep-site meson gun that will eat your ship's lunch as it tries to depart, etc. In passive mode it would be pretty easy to disguise the container. The walls are thick enough to stop any sort of minor heat leakage, and even then, ambient heat from the surrounding area is going to make thermal scans useless for many environments. And since some are supposed to be 'blending in'... you could add dummy power sources to other more 'obvious' targets, or add in ducted cooling devices to channel all heat from the area. Lots of ways to hide this (and I didn't even get to the variant that has a starship armor factor of 1... gonna take a lot of grenades to get through that!)

It's not my fault that a standard missile is only 1/12 Dton! I tried to make it less 'deadly' by adding more mass to enclose the missiles in their box launchers. :o I'm doing my part to keep the players from being shot down (too soon perhaps?).
 

  • Pilot Player: "Joey, stop smiling... I don't think those things are cameras..."

Yeah, missiles are pretty small, though one could always go with heavy missiles (torps)... besides, if there's nothing left to shoot back, things are good :lol:
 
I think you are a little too generous when it comes to the
number of missiles, because a missile plus launcher nor-
mally needs more space than a missile alone. However,
since the core rules insist that a fixed missile launcher re-
quires "0 dtons", your concept is obviously within the ru-
les as written.
 
Oh, don't worry... there's a torpedo variant as well... :)

Joey better keep his eye's sharp!

rust said:
I think you are a little too generous when it comes to the
number of missiles, because a missile plus launcher nor-
mally needs more space than a missile alone. However,
since the core rules insist that a fixed missile launcher re-
quires "0 dtons", your concept is obviously within the ru-
les as written.

Well, I can't disagree with you there. At first I thought about adding 50% to the bulk for the launch cannister, but then, having been around boxed launchers in reality, I realized that this wasn't very real. So I opted for a 33% increase in displacement, which is why you get 8 boxed vs 12 loose per Dton.

The other thing that I was doing with this was trying to keep it 'realistic'. Today Russia has a cruise missile variant, called Club-K, also stored in containers. And Iran has deployed a cruise missile also hidden within a container. When you look at the launchers today deployed by the various armies and navies, the container itself does not add a lot of bulk. And rather than muck up the comparisons, I just opted to try to resolve it upfront so if someone else wants to use this, they don't try to rulemonger the ref on what it should, or shouldn't be.
 
I think the problem would be less the "missile box" itself,
from what I have seen the storage boxes are identical in
size to the launch boxes (if there are different boxes at
all). However, a launcher normally consists of more than
the "missile box", it usually includes some device to sta-
bilize that "box".

For example, in the case of your container concept I am
not sure whether it would remain a stable launch platform
once half of the missiles have been launched and it there-
fore has lost a considerable part of its weight, I could ima-
gine that each of the following launches could tend to mo-
ve the entire container in an unpredictable way.

I think if it were my design I would include some way to
"anchor" the container to the ground and to absorb the
(certainly small) impact of each launch, or would use a
small negative modifier for firing missiles from an "unan-
chored" container.

But this is of course another and probably unnecessary
level of detail, it just came to my mind when thinking
about your concept.
 
Not a bad bit of detailing to add.

When I did a more 'formal' writeup, with costs and such, I was going to add in additional notes like putting up earth berms, how it's affected if part of a container stack, fire rates, etc

Though if the container is sitting on the a firm base, like pavement or just packed dirt, launching the missiles should be an issue at all. They are launched vertical and present no real rocking back and forth. But, as you pointed out, some situations might cause them to be more unstable.

For the missile variant, I don't think its an issue. But when I do the torpedo one, that's going to have an erector/launcher inside, so it will need more thought process when placing it.

Here's a neat Youtube video of the Russian cruise missile variant - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS-WIGj_Bpg
 
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