A lot of the space battles in the Honor Harrington series had this kind of thing, both offensive decoys to use up anti-missile fire and defensive decoys to draw ‘real’ enemy missiles to them.

The *literal* “ships of the line” battle tactics never made any sense whatsoever, but since the whole series was Horatio Hornblower in Spaaaacccccceeee!!!  I can see why it was there. 

I could see massed decoy/counterdecoy systems employed in major combat ops in Traveller, unless there are sensors that can easily distinguish the *mass* of incoming targets, but masses of cheap disposible decoy munitions that swallow up counter missile fire and draw off actual missiles towards decoys rather than the ship (like the old ‘Quail’ decoy on cold war B52’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-20_Quail or their modern equivalent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-160_MALD ) 


On Jan 13, 2020, at 12:17 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <xxxxxx@thepaw.org> wrote:

On 1/13/2020 9:40 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz wrote:
Quick Google of "size of an ICBM" gives 31m long by 3m diameter.
Works out to about 16 d-tons

I'd design the ASMs using a mix of MT small craft and COACC's rules
for RPV fighter planes. Use the COACC external ordinance rules and
bomb bay rules to carry the submunitions and decoys.

I'm not really worried about designing or rules to carry them, I'm interested in how they would apply to combat situations.  It's one thing for a barrage of 30 missiles to be incoming, but quite another if that same barrage had 300+ targets.

--
Kurt Feltenberger
xxxxxx@thepaw.org/xxxxxx@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me

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