Jonathan_S wrote:kzt wrote:Nope.
The limit on the graser torps is due to overall length. There is no upper limit on the spider drive performance, but there is a correlation between overall length and maximum performance of a given platform.
That was my recollection as well. That if you made the spider torps bigger (mounting more spider projectors on them) their acceleration would then increase.
Their current acceleration is the result a tradeoff between size (and therefor cost & number you can carry) and accel; not a maximum value a suitable spider drive could generate.
The manned ships carry enough projectors to surpass the torps accel; if only it wouldn't squash the delicate humans that crew them.
I assume they mount more power than they can use for 2 reasons:
1) To allow battle damage without reducing acceleration
2) To tow significant tonnage without reducing acceleration
Is there a Pearl or Weber post I missed? The Graser Torp stats posted in here, don't seem to match MoH Chapter 28. Bolding added
Mission of Honor wrote:
For all its size, it was also a slow weapon. It was simply impossible to fit a spider drive capable of more than a few hundred gravities' acceleration into something small enough to make a practical weapon. As compensation, however, its drive had almost as much endurance as most of the galaxy's recon drones, which gave it an impressive absolute range. And a large percentage of the torpedo's volume had been reserved for systems which had nothing at all to do with propulsion. Whereas the Royal Manticoran Navy had concentrated on improving the efficiency of its standard laser heads, Daniel Detweiler's R&D staff had taken another approach. They'd figured out how to squeeze what amounted to a cruiser-grade graser projector into something small enough to deploy independently.
The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
The Spider Drive warships were built to a max combat efficient 210G (4 felt gravities) and a max emergency of 310G (9 felt gravities), so a "few hundred gravities" accel sounds to me like just as fast as a spider drive warship.
Now, about past statements by others on the effectiveness of the Graser Torp. I bring this up as Lenny Dets seem to be seen as targets rather than warships. I have the feeling that they are going to be more dangerous than some people seem to think. The burn through range on a cruiser grade graser on the torp is 50,000km. A light second is 300,000km, so the burn through range is 1/6 of a light second. Impeller attack missile routinely get to 150,000 to 200,000+ km per second speeds and nothing is stopping a graser torp from reaching those speeds either. It will just take much, much longer to reach those kinds of speeds. Luckily, a Graser Torp has the endurance for it.
The Oyster Bay attack was at 60,000km per second. Since, the Spider Drive is "effectively undetectable...at any range much beyond a single light-second" (see below) even at 60,000km per second only gives around 5 seconds to detect and kill it before it fires. If you want the max 3 seconds of beam power on the graser (vs sidewall), then you have to have the Graser Torp moving around 33,000km per second on the attack run; if the Graser Torp can pivot that fast and accurately to keep the beam on target during the 3 second flyby. So that gives you 8-9 seconds to localize and destroy the Graser Torp before it fires, if you are at battle stations.
If a ship is moving predictably, then getting the Graser Torp to hit shouldn't be much harder than a impeller missile, since you know about the impeller missile the moment it is launched, but can only detect the Graser Torp at much beyond a light second. For defense against the Graser Torp, Citizen Admiral Groenewold's tactics at Elric of zig-zagging course changes*, would complicate the Graser Torp solution, since it has so little accel to effect it's own course changes. But you need to have the discipline to zig-zag all the time as you necessarily won't know when a Graser Torp is coming your way.
Mission of Honor wrote:
But the spider also had one overwhelming advantage: it was effectively undetectable by any sensor system deployed by any navy (including the MAN itself) at any range much beyond a single light-second. Even for the MAN, it was damnably hard to detect; for someone who didn't even know what to look for, the task was about as close to outright impossible as challenges came. For all intents and purposes, a spider-drive ship's drive field was invisible, and it was actually the drive signature of a ship for which virtually all long-range passive sensors searched.
* Also a wet navy tactic to confuse the firing solution for a sub.
