Cataphract performance numbers

IF you guys go back to HotQ, BIG Havenite Defensive based missiles pulled(IIRC) 84,000???? G's for 150s or something like that to reach Honor's ships at ~8.5Mkm or equivalent. Been a long time since I read it.

So, if Haven can do it with BIG missiles 20 years ago, so should anyone else be able to do so.

Then we never saw such missiles again.

The problem is in SMALL missiles which seemed to all have ~45kGs 1/2 setting and Full 90kG's for 1/3 time which seemed to not be violated until recent books where it is violated left and right. <<Shrugs>> At which point, having ANY kind of rational discussion is fairly pointless as the limiting factor is not mass based apparently.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Now, the question is why the Cataphract doesn't run the second stage ERM in low-power mode. I think the answer is obvious: it can't, because otherwise they would be using it. Not only that, if they had a stage that could run 225 seconds at 47500 gravities instead of 180, they'd also be using that.

RFC mentioned once that one of the trade offs you get with a CM’s overpowered drive is that you can’t dial it down; it only has 100% power setting. And the Cataphract 2nd stage was said to use a CM drive.

So I’d agree, they’d step down it’s acceleration if they could; but with the tech they designed it with they can’t.

Jonathan_S wrote:RFC mentioned once that one of the trade offs you get with a CM’s overpowered drive is that you can’t dial it down; it only has 100% power setting. And the Cataphract 2nd stage was said to use a CM drive.

So I’d agree, they’d step down it’s acceleration if they could; but with the tech they designed it with they can’t.

Which of course begs the question of what the MAlign's next iteration will be capable of. We only know its name, the Ninurta.

At this point, I'd bet not even RFC knows. He's probably deciding it's a true 3-stage MDM, but unlikely to be FTL-capable.