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He'd started out by accepting a life support endurance of only ninety-six hours rather than the weeks and months which most LAC designers insisted upon. Next, he'd eliminated all energy armament, aside from an extremely austere outfit of point defense laser clusters. It was pretty clear to NavInt that the Manties had adopted radical i
Of course, it had also been effectively unarmed compared to the Manticoran designs, but that was the point at which Clapp had recruited others to his project. In the absence of energy weapons, the Cimeterre carried a pure missile armament, and the R&D teams had made enormous advances in marrying reverse-engineered Solarian technology with their own indigenous design concepts. The missiles they'd come up with, like the LACs which would carry them, weren't up to Manticoran standards, but they were much, much better than anything any previous Havenite LAC had ever boasted. Unless NavInt was entirely wrong about the performance parameters of the Manticoran weapons, the Cimeterre's birds could approximately match their range and acceleration in a package which was only a very little larger. Once again, sacrifices had had to be made to cram that performance into something the Republic could produce, and in this instance that something had been the sophisticated seeking systems and penetration aids built into the Manticoran missiles. But when Clapp and his colleagues were done, they'd produced a ship which was faster on the helm, had almost as good an acceleration rate, and was armed with weapons which were almost as long-ranged as anything the Manticorans had yet demonstrated.
And because Clapp had been so ruthless in suppressing every single system which wasn't absolutely essential to the Cimeterre's mission as he visualized it, each LAC could cram a truly amazing number of missiles into its sophisticated rotary-magazine launchers.
Like the missiles which suddenly detonated long before any Manticoran would have expected them to. Missiles which contained absolutely no seeking systems, no penetration aides, no standoff laser heads—only the biggest, nastiest, dirtiest nuclear warheads Mitchell Clapp or anyone he could recruit had been able to design. Those warheads weren't designed to destroy enemy LACs; they were designed to strip away the enemy's EW advantages, and it was evident from the plot that they'd done just that.
The brutal wavefronts of plasma and radiation lashed out from the tsunami of missiles. No one had adopted such a brute force application to clearing away decoys and jammers in centuries. Even after the missile pod had reemerged, with its vulnerability to proximity "soft kills," no one had ever attempted to apply the same technique to electronic warfare drones and remote platforms. But that was because of the ranges at which deep space engagements were fought, and the dispersal which warships with impeller wedges hundreds of kilometers across were forced to maintain. Neither of those factors applied to the overgrown pi
The initial detonations ripped a thermonuclear hole straight through the electronic shield which had sheltered the Manticoran LACs, and a second echelon of the same massive salvo raced through the opening. Its birds detonated ten thousand kilometers closer to the Manties, ripping the hole even deeper and wider, and the next echelon exploited the opening the second had created. The third echelon closed to within as little as two or three thousand kilometers of the Manticoran LACs before it detonated in a final wavefront of blast, heat, and hard radiation.
The cumulative effect was devastating. The "triple ripple," as Clapp had dubbed it, not only irradiated and seriously degraded the remote platforms (those it didn't destroy outright), but also wreaked grievous carnage, however briefly, on the Manticorans' onboard fire control systems and sensors. Like all warship sensors, they were hardened against EMP, but nothing had prepared them for the precisely synchronized and timed detonations of that many multi-megaton warheads in so small a volume of space and time. Indeed, it was unlikely that anything could have prepared them. It was as if they'd suddenly found themselves staring directly into the belly of a star, and for precious seconds they were dazzled and confused by the sheer, unimaginable ferocity of the event.
And while they were still dazzled, the Cimeterres' second salvo came slashing in. Inferior as the seekers and penetration aids of that salvo's missiles undoubtedly were, they were more than sufficiently effective against defensive systems which could barely even see them coming. They roared down on their targets, homing ruthlessly, following their intended victims through the last-minute, desperate evasion attempts which were all their half-blinded state allowed, and then they detonated at ranges as low as five thousand kilometers.
This time, they were standoff weapons, and the crimson icons of the Manticoran "super-LACs" which had mangled one Havenite fleet after another during Eighth Fleet's offensive, began to vanish with dreadful speed.
"Eighty-two percent kills, by God!" Commander Lampert a
"Eighty-two percent so far," Foraker corrected quietly, and Lampert nodded in acknowledgment as the Cimeterres continued to charge down upon the broken and harrowed ranks of their Manticoran opponents.
The massive energy mounts of the Manticoran Shrike —class LACs came into their own, even with targeting systems that remained partially degraded, and Republican LACs disappeared from the plot as the powerful grasers harvested them. But there weren't very many of the Shrikes left, and those which remained found themselves targeted by storms of individually less capable but numerically overwhelming short-range missiles. The first four, or five, or six missiles might be evaded or picked off by active defenses, but the seventh, or eighth, or ninth got through. The Cimeterres lost perhaps ten percent of their total number, but in return, they destroyed every single one of the Manticoran LACs. The absolute to
"Simulation concluded," a voice a