MDM's Improving Laserheads?

Weird Harold wrote:In the most extreme case, a laser-head passing the throat or kilt has only a very fraction of a second to get a shot off at up to 90 degrees (or more) from its line of travel.

Actually, the attack on the flank of a rolled ship is significantly more complex than an attack on the throat, as your exposure time is much less.

The logical way you attack a wall is from front to back, as the throat is the best target, and since Honorverse wallers maneuver almost as well a garbage scow, they can't really maneuver to avoid this.

The beam from a laserhead can't be shifted into gamma rays because it's already gamma rays, at least on modern Manticoran weapons. I just checked the 'Jaynes' excerpt in the back of my copy of Storm from the Shadows, and step 7 in the Mk 16 Terminal Sequence reads:

"The shaped-charge warhead detonates. All Laserheads receive the X-ray wavefront from the detonation, generating a 5000 microsecond Gamma-ray laser pulse before the thermal wavefront destroys the Laserheads." (bolding mine).

Dafmeister wrote:The beam from a laserhead can't be shifted into gamma rays because it's already gamma rays, at least on modern Manticoran weapons. I just checked the 'Jaynes' excerpt in the back of my copy of Storm from the Shadows, and step 7 in the Mk 16 Terminal Sequence reads:

"The shaped-charge warhead detonates. All Laserheads receive the X-ray wavefront from the detonation, generating a 5000 microsecond Gamma-ray laser pulse before the thermal wavefront destroys the Laserheads." (bolding mine).

That conflicts with every other piece of text in the Honorverse, including explicit text within Storm from the Shadows. The author has made it abundantly clear that the beams from a laserhead are x-ray lasers, not gamma ray. I think we have to consider that a typo.

SWM wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:The beam from a laserhead can't be shifted into gamma rays because it's already gamma rays, at least on modern Manticoran weapons. I just checked the 'Jaynes' excerpt in the back of my copy of Storm from the Shadows, and step 7 in the Mk 16 Terminal Sequence reads:

"The shaped-charge warhead detonates. All Laserheads receive the X-ray wavefront from the detonation, generating a 5000 microsecond Gamma-ray laser pulse before the thermal wavefront destroys the Laserheads." (bolding mine).

That conflicts with every other piece of text in the Honorverse, including explicit text within Storm from the Shadows. The author has made it abundantly clear that the beams from a laserhead are x-ray lasers, not gamma ray. I think we have to consider that a typo.

Agreed. ISTR a discussion a few months back where someone called the laserhead beams grasers and I corrected him to X-Ray lasers.

Anyway, as mentioned elsewhere, the doppler shift isn't enough to do any kind of conversion, and as it is, the lasing rod is made of a material (can't recall ATM and too lazy to look it up) designed to work with x-rays and emit an x-ray laser beam.

MaxxQ wrote:Agreed. ISTR a discussion a few months back where someone called the laserhead beams grasers and I corrected him to X-Ray lasers.

Anyway, as mentioned elsewhere, the doppler shift isn't enough to do any kind of conversion, and as it is, the lasing rod is made of a material (can't recall ATM and too lazy to look it up) designed to work with x-rays and emit an x-ray laser beam.

However the rods are almost at rest compared to the missile, so there is no Doppler shift. Also there is no fundamental difference between X-rays and Gamma rays, so it doesn't matter if the factor 5 manages to shift the frequency to Gamma rays or not, which would be possible for very hard X-rays.

Whitecold wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:Agreed. ISTR a discussion a few months back where someone called the laserhead beams grasers and I corrected him to X-Ray lasers.

Anyway, as mentioned elsewhere, the doppler shift isn't enough to do any kind of conversion, and as it is, the lasing rod is made of a material (can't recall ATM and too lazy to look it up) designed to work with x-rays and emit an x-ray laser beam.

However the rods are almost at rest compared to the missile, so there is no Doppler shift. Also there is no fundamental difference between X-rays and Gamma rays, so it doesn't matter if the factor 5 manages to shift the frequency to Gamma rays or not, which would be possible for very hard X-rays.

The rods are at rest compared with the missile, but the missile and rods are moving rapidly with respect to their target. The question was not whether the beam emitted by the laserhead was Doppler-shifted, but whether the beam observed by the target was Doppler-shifted into gamma range.

I don't think ANY laser heads detonate in the same direction as the missile is traveling, I think it's pretty much a maybe 60-120 degree firing arc. Most of the time the missile fire from a "spotted" will arrive with the forces in parallel (line of attack), or at a factor of 0 or 180 degrees relative to the attack force when it arrives. That's not true "per boat".

Given that the ideal detonation point for a set of laser heads being unopposed" "up the kilt" or "down the throat" shots, most of a missile shots will hit either hit wedge or sidewalls. We even read that in HotQ that the missile heads fired by Hamish Alexander's ships could still rotate to fire on Saladin/Thunder of God even at the end of their long ballistic flight.

We're told that it takes a whole lot of missiles to kill an SD, but not that every missile head in a 250-500 missile salvo launched actually hits the ship. Wedge = no damage, so the way you attack is to try to put a ball of missile heads around any opposing ship, so that no matter what angle, some of your x-ray lasers get through the sidewalls and maybe a couple percent are lucky shots go bow or stern.

Now then, defensively, we know that spinning a small ship helps, and making a "wall in space" makes it harder to get missile head fire to a ship's sidewalls. That didn't help Home Fleet or Second Fleet a damn bit with the massive number of missiles being tossed because that many MILLION laser rods aimed at less than 500 ships TOTAL were going to golden BB the hell out of both Fleets, aka there's enough x-ray laser fire flying around that even the .03 space inside most of the ships' the wedge/sidewalls where the starship is actually located is going to be lit up and taking damage.

RFC even says that no amount of post-battle analysis would EVER figure out which "missiles destroyed who" in that maelstrom. After which Eighth fleet tossed something like 77K MDMs at Chin's ships, same effect. Spindle? 180 degrees, eleven thousand missiles aimed at 23 ships out of 71 which were already formed into a wedge-forward wall of battle before they ever headed in. AKA 23 globes of fire.

One salvo, ka-boom. Buh bye.