Active antimissile defenses consist of countermissiles, laser clusters, and (in navies further from "state of the art" hardware) autocannon. Countermissiles are much smaller versions of shipkillers, with more limited endurance and no warheads but capable of even higher acceleration. Their weapon is their impeller wedge. If any portion of it impinges on an attacking missile's active wedge, both vaporize as their drives burn out; if the target's drive has already burned out, the "grav shear" of the counter missile's wedge is more than adequate to rip it apart. Because of their overpowered drives, however, maximum effective counter missile range is seldom more than 1,000,000 kilometers or so.

If the countermissiles miss their prey, stopping them is up to the computer-commanded laser clusters. Unlike missiles, these require direct hits, but by the time they come into play, their target is normally steadying down for its final attack run, which gives them much simpler fire solutions.

In some navies, the lasers were backed by a last-ditch autocannon defense. The theory was simple: throw so many shells that they built a wall of metal in the missiles' paths. Given missiles' closing velocities, any hit could be counted on to vaporize them, but the development of laser heads made autocannon largely irrelevant. When a missile can attack from 20,000 or 30,000 kilometers, no last-ditch ballistic projectile can reach it in time.

Note that all of the above comments apply only to engagements under impeller drive. All normal space combats are, of course, fought out under impeller drive, as are those in hyper-space but outside the boundaries of a grav wave. Within a grav wave, however, where movement is possible only under Warshawski sail, missiles cannot be used. Only energy weapons are effective there, and combat under those conditions tends to be very close and extremely brutal.

The energy weapons of choice are the laser and graser, of which the graser has both a longer range and greater effect. But grasers are considerably more massive than lasers, so most ships have mixed batteries, accepting the lower effectiveness of the laser in order to mount greater numbers of weapons (which let them engage greater numbers of targets) while retaining the "smashing" ability of the graser. Ships smaller than light cruisers are normally so cramped for weapons space that they have pure laser energy armaments.

Another energy weapon, though seldom used at this period, was the energy torpedo, which fired what were for all intents and purposes packets of plasma confined in electromagnetic bottles. Energy torpedoes moved at near-light speeds, which made them very difficult for point defense to engage, but the energy torpedo had no homing capability. This made it a purely ballistic weapon, so the initial (and only) fire control solution was far more critical than for missiles, and the endurance of its "bottle" was barely more than one second, limiting absolute energy torpedo range to 300,000 kilometers or so. In addition, the fact that they were totally ineffective against an intact sidewall restricted them to down the throat or up the kilt shots, which made them of strictly limited utility. Despite this, some navies' capital ships (the RMNs among them) incorporated light torpedo batteries for use if the enemy's T" could be crossed or if his sidewall failed due to other battle damage.

A new development, the grav lance, offered the ability to burn out a sidewall by hitting it with a disrupting burst of focused gravitic energy, but this weapon had a maximum effective range of little more than 100,000 kilometers. It was also extremely slow firing, mass intensive, and temperamental, and very few captains were willing to sacrifice displacement which could be used for tried and proven weapons to squeeze in something that might work... if they could survive to get into its range of the enemy.

THE BALANCE OF NAVAL POWER

The pre-war naval balance between Manticore and Haven was the result of an arms race which had lasted for almost fifty years. Despite the Star Kingdom of Manticore's wealth and the Peoples Republic of Haven's ramshackle financial structure, the PRH was so much bigger that the smaller percentage of total income it could devote to its military budget was larger in absolute terms. Moreover, the Star Kingdom, the core of the Manticoran Alliance, possessed only three inhabited planets; the PRH contained over a hundred, which provided a far larger pool from which to draw starship crews and support personnel, and it had begun its initial buildup well before Manticore.

The actual strengths of the two sides in 282 A.L. (1904 P.D.) broke down as below:

The Peoples Navy thus had a tonnage advantage of almost exactly two to one, yet its overall advantage in hulls was only 1.2 to 1, despite the fact that the RMN's ships were almost uniformly more massive on a per-class basis. This apparent discrepancy resulted from the composition of the two forces. The People's Navy was designed not only for wars of conquest but to police the enormous sphere the PRH had already conquered. The large number of battleships in its order of battle were intended not for the wall of battle, where their smaller size would place them at a grievous disadvantage against "proper" ships of the wall, but to cover occupied systems against anything smaller than a wall of battle ship. (This was of particular importance against Manticore, which had always favored the battiecruiser. The BC's combination of acceleration and firepower made it ideal for raids on the orbital industrial infrastructure of enemy star systems, and the RMN had refined these tactics to a fine art over the centuries.)

The same internal policing requirements explain the greater numbers of destroyers in the PN fleet mix. In addition, both navies had large numbers of LACs (light attack craft) which do not appear in the figures above, since their individual combat power was slight and they were not hyper capable, being intended purely for local defense.

It should also be noted that, once again despite the greater mass of most classes in the RMN, Haven's total wall of battle (superdreadnoughts and dreadnoughts) contained forty-nine percent more units than Manticore's but held a tonnage advantage of over fifty-two percent. This reflected the RMN's need to build a higher percentage of smaller and less capable dreadnoughts. Not only did each dreadnought use up less of its smaller budget and require a shorter building time, but Manticore needed numbers, as well as sheer tonnage, for tactical flexibility. Despite this, however, the Manticoran Admiralty steadfastly rejected all suggestions that it should build still smaller and cheaper battleships as Haven had done. The RMN's view was that while some concessions had to be made to bring numbers up, battleships were simply too small and weak to lie in the wall of battle, and Manticore, unlike Haven, could not afford to tie up millions of tons in "capital ships" unable to bear the brunt of fleet combat.

The table below shows the relative average displacements of the latest generation ships of the two navies, but it should be borne in mind that these are only averages.

The disparity in average hull sizes is evident, but what it actually meant in fighting power can be best illustrated by comparing two ships of nominally equivalent classes: HMS Nike and PNS Sultan. Both were battlecruisers of the latest generation, but Nike massed 879,000 tons with a crew of 2,105 (including Marines) as opposed to Sultan's 858,000 tons and crew of 1,695. Although she was less than three percent more massive overall, Nike's sidewalls were ten percent tougher than Sultan's, and her energy weapons were fifteen percent more massive (and much more powerful) on a mount-for-mount basis.