Been thinking about MANPADs and other shoulder-fired missile (specifically missile, rather than RPGs and such) systems in the ‘verse, ending with a rather different conclusion about how they’d work.
The launcher, in these systems, has a few purposes:
arming/programming the missile
protecting the user from backblast, and
providing a barrel to let the missile get up to some speed (possibly with the aid of a compressed-gas charge), preventing it from flopping ignominiously on the ground.
But here’s the thing:
Everyone in the Legions down to the light infantry is wearing sealed, power-assisted battle armor. Which means that:
they can run the missile programming software on the tactical mesh
sealed battle armor says “what backblast?”
power-assisted battle armor greatly enhances strength and speed
So, where man-portable missiles are concerned, why cannot our legionary simply pull the missile from his bandolier/missile-quiver/ammo mule, direct a brief arming thought at it, and then simply yeet the ruddy thing? (Engine ignites once the internal accelerometer confirms yeetage and safe ignition distance.)
Saves mass carrying around the launcher, which is always a logistic consideration, and is certainly much less wasteful than a disposable launcher.
Initial thoughts are that it wouldn’t work as well as hoped, because the optimal motion to throw “bare handed” is a combination of motions that armour joints struggle with. They have very good power armour, but a suitable launching tool still seems mechanically simpler than “you want to do what to the shoulder joint?”
However, using something like a woomera (spear-thrower) increases the power and accuracy while also reducing the range of shoulder flexion required, and I don’t think it’d be too difficult to apply those principals to something in the Legions.
Honestly I’m surprised the missiles can’t handle this themselves. Propulsion in the Eldraeverse should be robust enough that you could lay out your deployable missiles on a tarp, and they’ll stand themselves up with their attitude control thrusters, hop off the ground and then blast to wherever they need to go as and when the squad demands it.
You could take this further by just leaving them lying around as missile mines, since no launcher needs to be recovered. Also reduces the risk that counter-battery sensors trace the plume / propulsion signature back to your squad, which may have long since vacated the area.
Note this doesn’t stop particularly zealous legionnaires from attempting to give their missiles a kick with their throwing arm, even if just for dramatic effect, which I will not discount. Or perhaps they have taken a liking to the particular missile-quiver they carry, who am I to judge?
It’s just the end result, rather than a full-on javelin throw, plays more like the light toss a falconer gives to their bird or a modern-day infantryman gives to their kamikaze drone when setting them loose.
How much backblast is there is contemporary Imperial SOPADs (and anti-armour equivalents)? I would have assumed vector control or related technologies for at least some of he flight if for no other reason that there is no smoke or IR flare for the bad guys to spot. Also, you don’t want to have to keep wiping down the sensor clusters.
For air defense, I would probably launch the missiles straight juup from a mule or from a dorsal Y-rack (eg. as in Starship Troopers), with initial targeting data coming from the armour. That way the soldiers hands can be doing other things, and they don’t have to be exposed. Maximillian’s thought about laying them down and making them very independent is reasonable, but that depends of the mass/volume/capability tradeoffs and how the Imperials feel about disposable things.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they did something along the theoretical lines of the US’s Avenger, whose missiles are actually the standard man-portable Stinger launchers loaded into a box and plugged into the much better tactical system of the vehicle. This has obvious flexibility advantages, and provides an emergency capability if the vehicle breaks.
Ah, a great many thoughts. Herewith some disjoint responses and musings:
The late-era missiles of this kind (meaning, in this case, small enough to be soph-portable) are - in the general case - almost certainly using metastable metallic hydrogen propellant and some hideous nitrogen compound as a warhead.
Backblast-wise, the heat is nasty (MMH decomposing to H₂ is good for 6000K before hydrogen burning¹) as is the resulting IR flare - no smoke, though - but on the other hand, getting a tad over three times the specific impulse the best chemical fuels could provide is worth it. Zoomies don’t precisely substitute for stealth in avoiding countermissile fire, but they have a virtue of their own.
And water, fortunately, is not a significant issue when it comes to sensor cluster contamination.
(Also, using propellant quite this vigorous lets them build nice small missiles, which is convenient in all sorts of ways.)
Vector-control cores are not a common component of missiles, for reasons that boil down to being expensive, sophisticated pieces of exotic-matter hardware, and thus best not used in disposable hardware. (And don’t forget that they’re useless on their own; they’re drive enhancers, not drives.) You do tend to find them on drones², which occupy the other end of the “speed vs. sneakiness” curve.
The standard light infantry armor (for those who may not recall) is a sealed core suit covered in a middle layer of scale-pattern cerametal-composite lamellar, and an upper layer of heavy titanium nanolaminate plates (helmet, cuirass, pauldrons, vambraces, cuisses, and greaves). Both outer layers are very refractory and aren’t going to complain about the backblast unless you’re standing in the drive plume.
It’s a fair point, but I make two notes. One is that - in keeping with their general military doctrine of blitzenmaxing - the power-assisted and vector-controlled nature of the light armor is designed to enable full-on Titanfall-pilot-style combat parkour, so they’ve necessarily had to work on the joints a lot.
The other one’s that I didn’t have a baseball-pitching or full-handed throw in mind so much as yeeting it like a javelin or the lawn dart from hell (see comment on size above). Not all that much accuracy required, either. Roughly the right direction is nice, but the main point is to give it some air and enough distance to safely ignite.
I kind of like the woomera/atlatl concept, though. I may not use it at exactly this point, but I think I’ll be using it somewhere.
…and set on fire whatever it’s launching from or nearby. (I mean, you could build a cold first stage and launch intelligence into the missile to avoid this, but it all adds complexity and cost into a thing which you’re about to throw away.)
There’s a cheap box launcher for this scenario. Looks like a honeycomb; six missiles in membrane-covered cells around a powercell, gas cylinder for initial launch, and tac-mesh relay. Bury it under a thin layer of dirt, and you’ve got a missile(s) mine. Lego a few of them together and sling them in the back of the nearest Toyota Hilux for a quick missile warbuggy, Reusable if you have time to pick it up, but contains nothing of real value if you don’t.
That’s how the heavy infantry (the ones in combat exoskeletons closer to the suits we see in Starship Troopers) do it; fit missiles into the modular weapons pod bolted on the back, often with a pop-out vertical launch mechanism. The light infantry suit’s just power-assisted armor, though, not a full exoskeleton, so there’s not room. (Well, you could maybe fit a minimissile launcher to a pauldron hardpoint.)
Of course, your choice of personal support drones can also have missile launchers, depending on model. And in modularity terms, knowing Imperial design doctrine, there is likely to be very broad cross-compatibility of missiles; so, yeah, like the Avenger in the sense that the same missile you can launch personally will also fit in a weapons pod, pack launcher, a drone launcher, a vehicle launcher, etc., etc., unless there’s some special feature that necessarily limits it.
Fuel that burns to water and a warhead that releases naught but N₂. You can read the “most environmentally-friendly military force ever” press release now. Bombs make the grass-analogs grow!
For the purposes of IMS nomenclature, an intentional³ “kamikaze drone” is a slow missile with a silly name. They draw the drone/missile distinction at “do I intend to get this piece of hardware back”.
An AKV, for example, which is an ur-example of dronehood, can pull a “ramming speed” moment if it needs to, but is intended to carry weapons, not be one.
As another note on paradigms, having been through many generations of warfare the IL have learned the lesson we will hopefully learn from operation DECLARING VICTORY PROSPERITY GUARDIAN - namely, that there’s an economic issue if you are likely to end up in situations where you have to use your elegant, sophisticated, expensive weapons systems to shoot at their shitty-but-cheap ones.
So while they are willing to put these things in missiles when necessary, there’s a distinct preference for rather dumb missiles that borrow as much of their intelligence, sensory capability, etc. from the tactical mesh rather than having internal dedicated systems.
To pick a rather bigger type of missile, for example, where we might use a cruise missile with completely onboard smarts, their doctrine might prefer the use of stealthy drones to provide terminal guidance, or a UAV capable of launching its warhead to the target close up and personal and returning to base.
