Sidearm standoff guided weapon

Overview:

Along with the development of the Crecy class missile destroyer, Project Sidearm was initiated by Prince John Davion in order to adress the percieved proliferation of the adcap standoff guided weapon and the so called "missile gap" this allegedly created between the Federated Suns and the Capellan Confederation. 

When John Davion authorised project sidearm, he requested a weapon that would bring the capabilities of the Adcap to the Federation navy while at the same time providing superior flexibility. Furthermore he wanted it quickly. Though privately not much of a believer in the "missile gap" theory, Prince Davion did see the writing on the wall. If anything, the Star League's inability to unite in standing up to a petty dictator like Stephen Amaris during the Coup had proven that the League's days were numbered, and this almost certainly meant a war would follow. This meant Davion would need weapons to revitalize its somewhat neglected military.

In 2778, after a rushed development program totalling roughly four months, Davion engineers unveiled the fruits of their labor, the first Sidearm standoff guided weapon. After a number of reasonably successful demonstrations, Prince Davion authorized the weapon for full production.

Capabilities:

The one thing that truly stands out about the Sidearm is that it certainly is no Adcap. It is only a quarter of the size of the SLDF weapon, and has a relatively small one ton warhead. Futhermore its smaller fuel capacity gave it a shorter range, and unlike the Adcap, the Sidearm completely lacked armor protection, this meant that while the Adcap could survive some light weapons fire and still close in on its target, the Sidearm was substantially easier to destroy.

Where the Sidearm outshines the Adcap however is in its flexibility. Unlike the Adcap, which requires a special fire control system installed in its launching platform and can only be launched from an AR10, the Sidearm can be launched from any standard naval missile launcher. More importantly, however, the missile can also be carried and launched by aerospace fighters, though the shear size of the weapon limits the number a fighter can carry.

The Sidearm's biggest weakness is in its internal guidance system. In order to make the missile more flexible, the designers decided to foregoe the semi-guided system used on the Adcap in favor of a pure internal guidance package. The Sidearm uses a modfied version of the guidance system used on the Killer Whale, however, since the Killer Whale was never designed to seek new targets should the old ones be destroyed (the missile is so fast that the need was never seen to give it retargeting capability), designers had to create one on the fly for the Sidearm. Though they produced a somewhat workable system, the rush to deploy the missile didn't allow them to quite work the bugs out of it. The difficulty in recoginizing a dead target as opposed to a live one means that a Sidearm can be easily spoofed into believing its target destroyed, and continuing problems with the IFF recogintion system meant that often if the Sidearm lost its target it would target a freindly vessel.

[editor's note: This same problem plagued the Adcap during its testing as well. The SLDF designers were unable to resolve the problem and ultimately just removed all autonomous retargeting capability from the Adcap.]

Despite this flaw, the Sidearm still made it into full production.

Deployment:

It is not known just how many Sidearms were employed by House Davion during the First Succession War. Estimates run somewhere into the thousands, with most of these given to Furious class carriers and Crecy class missile destroyers. The sudden appearance of the weapons, however, inspired other great houses into action. Kurita captured several hundred Sidearms during their invasion, and shortly after the massive battle of Cholame, the Free Worlds League launched a deep raid against supply depots on Marlette, siezing numerous Sidearms meant for the carrier Glorious. They used these weapons to great effect against the Lyran Commonwealth.

However, by the end of the First Succession War all of the production facilities for the Sidearm were little more than slag. The handful of remaining Sidearms were used only sparingly after that, but their number steadily diminished. It is believed the last Sidearm was used during the early Third Succesion War.





Designer's notes: Constructed using battlespace's small craft rules, with a 
handful of modifications. Use at your own risk :)


Mass: 10 tons
Thrust: 8/12
Fuel: 3 tons
Structural Integrity: 12
Armor: none


Warhead weight: 1 ton
Warhead yield: 10 capital scale damage points



Use in game: Like the Adcap, the Sidearm is a small craft, and as a result is treated as such for movement purposes (which means it always moves after warships and dropships). Also like the Adcap the Sidearm opperates by homing in on the target dropship, jumpship, station, or warship, and ramming it, inflicting the listed number of capital scale damage points.

Unlike the Adcap the Sidearm has a variety of launch methods. It may be launched from any capital missile launcher and requires no modification to the launching platform (as it is purely internally guided). In addition to this, the weapon can be carried by fighters. However, carrying bombloads in space works differently than in an atmosphere.

For simplicity's sake, carrying one sidearm outside of the atmosphere reduces the thrust capability of light fighters by one quarter (rounded down), while carrying two reduces it by one half.

Medium fighters suffer a -1 penalty to their safe thrust when carrying one sidearm, however they loose one third of their thrust capability when carrying two.

Heavy fighters lose one quarter of their thrust capability when carrying two sidearms and nothing for carrying one.

The shear size of the Sidearm means that no fighter can carry more than two missiles. There simply isn't any room on the craft to carry more.

Sidearms cannot be used in an atmosphere, so don't think too hard about the number of bombslots they take up.

As was said before, the Sidearm is purely internally guided. This means that it cannot switch targets unless its initial target is destroyed, and even then it might not.

If the initial target is destroyed, role 2d6 for each sidearm targeted on it, whether freindly or enemy. On a role of 2 to 4 the missile does not switch targets, continuing to home in on the dead hulk. On a role of 5 to 8, the missile does switch targets, and will take the nearest valid ship (whether friendly or enemy) as its next target. On a role of 9 or better, not only does the missile switch targets, but its IFF discriminator actually works properly. In this case the weapon takes the nearest valid enemy ship as its next target. If there are no other valid targets the missile will default back to its original target.

Ships under attack by a sidearm can attempt to spoof the weapon by declaring that their ship powers down in the end phase of any turn, ceasing acceleration and switching off all nonessential systems (in short, playing dead). This forces the missile to make a role to switch targets as described above, however it will take a full turn for the ship to recover from the manuever, leaving it dead in space for that amount of time and easy meat for any hostile craft.