Graser replacement

MaxxQ wrote:

munroburton wrote:The highest acceleration record in the Honorverse hasn't exceeded 100,000g yet. No warhead available is going to survive the huge accelerations implied by such a weapon.

Minor nit: IIRC, the Viper and Mk31 CMs hit 130,000 g's at max setting. Just going by memory, but I definitely recall *something* hitting that number.

D'oh. I was thinking of the MK23's 92(or was it 96?) thousand gees.

Well, an error of ~40,000 isn't much considering the size of the other numbers in my previous post.

munroburton wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:Minor nit: IIRC, the Viper and Mk31 CMs hit 130,000 g's at max setting. Just going by memory, but I definitely recall *something* hitting that number.

D'oh. I was thinking of the MK23's 92(or was it 96?) thousand gees.

Well, an error of ~40,000 isn't much considering the size of the other numbers in my previous post.

Oh, I know it doesn't matter to the point you were making... I just wanted to be nitpicky about one particular number.

Also do we know how a sidewall would effect a KEW? If memory serves a sidewall involves gravitic distortions of some kind. That sounds like it would have massive negative effects on a KEW's damage potential and accuracy unless they add sidewall penetrators to every bullet.

Roguevictory wrote:Also do we know how a sidewall would effect a KEW? If memory serves a sidewall involves gravitic distortions of some kind. That sounds like it would have massive negative effects on a KEW's damage potential and accuracy unless they add sidewall penetrators to every bullet.

I figure that if the grav gradient is high enough to bend light (lasers and grasers), then it's surely high enough to pretty much destroy anything physical (unless using penaids, as you mentioned). It's mentioned quite often in battle scenes that incoming energy fire, whether from shipboard grasers/lasers, or x-ray lasers from missile laserheads, get bent and/or weakened by the sidewalls.

I suspect that most of those that miss are due to impacting the sidewall at some angle or other - the ones that make it through to cause damage probably hit more or less perpendicular to the sidewall*. Another possibility is that those deflected/bent beams were going to miss anyway, had there been *no* sidewall, and the bending of the incoming fire actually bent it in a direction to hit the ship and cause damage.

*Kinda like how the Wolter mirrors work for the lasing rod on the laserhead - x-rays normally go through the mirror material when they hit it at a little beyond parallel up through perpendicular, but at *very* shallow angles (like those you would get from detonating a warhead aft of the laserheads) the Wolter mirrors actually deflect/reflect the x-rays into the lasing rod.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_mi ... ter_mirror

The idea appears to be a slug of metal, not a warhead.
However, the aim issue is the same for a graser as for a slug, except you could defocus the graser to hit a broader area.

munroburton wrote:According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle, "to reach 1% of light speed over the length of a one-meter accelerator would require 4.5 * 10^12 m/s^2 (or over 450 billion g) of acceleration."

Ok, call it a 10 metre long accelerator: 1% of lightspeed would still need 45,000,000,000g of acceleration. Ok, let's go to the stupid waste of resources example: Using the 1395 metre length(of the HV's longest warship) as an accelerator: 322,580,645g.

1% of light speed. Assuming .9c is the objective, the SD-length accelerator would need "only" 29,032,258,064g of acceleration. For the ten-metre accelerator, 4.05 trillion gravities of acceleration is required.

The highest acceleration record in the Honorverse hasn't exceeded 100,000g yet. No warhead available is going to survive the huge accelerations implied by such a weapon.

Accuracy is also going to be problematic. The graser's maximum effective range is limited because targets under full power can make all sorts of evasive maneuvers, never mind simply rolling their wedge. The further away they are, the earlier you are going to have to predict their movements and using a cee-fractional weapon instead of a lightspeed weapon will only shrink that effective range, producing an inferior result.

MaxxQ wrote:

I figure that if the grav gradient is high enough to bend light (lasers and grasers), then it's surely high enough to pretty much destroy anything physical (unless using penaids, as you mentioned). It's mentioned quite often in battle scenes that incoming energy fire, whether from shipboard grasers/lasers, or x-ray lasers from missile laserheads, get bent and/or weakened by the sidewalls.

I suspect that most of those that miss are due to impacting the sidewall at some angle or other - the ones that make it through to cause damage probably hit more or less perpendicular to the sidewall*. Another possibility is that those deflected/bent beams were going to miss anyway, had there been *no* sidewall, and the bending of the incoming fire actually bent it in a direction to hit the ship and cause damage.

*Kinda like how the Wolter mirrors work for the lasing rod on the laserhead - x-rays normally go through the mirror material when they hit it at a little beyond parallel up through perpendicular, but at *very* shallow angles (like those you would get from detonating a warhead aft of the laserheads) the Wolter mirrors actually deflect/reflect the x-rays into the lasing rod.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_mi ... ter_mirror

What I am thinking about with respect to hypervelocity "slugs" is their use against Spider Drive ships. With their extreme stealth, it may be possible to localize Spider drive ships but not to acquire sufficient return from LIDAR to attack them with laser heads. In that case, using an area weapon of 1 kg slugs carried as payload on a standard missile could disperse over a wide area, and the impact of a single slug would release similar energy to a 1 MTon blast. This obviously presumes that Spider-drive ships do not have sidewalls or other deflection technology. I doubt that a PDC would have a good chance of hitting a 1 kg slug at relativistic speeds.

An analogy might be the WW II Hedgehog ASW weapon.

-- Bob G

1. Any physical object that hits a sidewall will get ripped to atoms. Useless against impeller-drive ships unless you get it up kilt/down throat, in which case the graser would be better.

2. Using them as canister shot against spider-drive ships has possibilities. At least you can present the spider ship with a real pickle: hope to not get hit by dumb luck, or raise a sidewall that shows up on gravitic sensors. A moderate salvo of missiles could deliver an awful lot of 1 or 2 kilogram projectiles.

[afterthought: if each missile tracked its projectiles, and noted the exact location of any that mysteriously disappeared, it could generate a pretty good fix on the spider-sneak even if it didn't do any damage]

Had a thought about The Stars At War - instead of using whole fortified asteroids, break each one up into a few billion 10 to 20 kilogram chunks and shoot them all at the Bug planet at 20% C or so on different vectors. I don't care how many Bugs and how many gunboats, they can only stop a tiny fraction of that.
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At my house, the "things that go bump in the night" are called cats.

The cluster warhead.

Might not this work on missiles as well?

As you all know I'm no physicist, I figured a gigawatt laser must use a lot of power, enough to power a country at current era for a while?

Given we can accelerate with a rail or guass gun a projectile to 8kms now, in 2000+ years making it go 100,000 times that shouldn't be out of the question. Just requires power.

Also couldn't the wedge just spit the projectile out at near light speed? Plus the build up would be, for a SD 280+km.

Also it depends how fast the enemy ship is going, if they are going 0.3c and you are going 0.2c you only need 0.5c any more wouldn't make any difference. Can't go faster than 1c.

Didn't consider sidewalls. Do ships flying into a system jig and jog or just fly in throat wide open? Jigging and jogging would slow them down, no?

I always read the books as having them come blazing right in.

I can see a slug that isn't right in front of a ship having an even harder time avoiding a sidewall, a slight angle off and the sidewall kills the idea. Unless you use a laser head or have this as an aft firing chase launcher, while running away. Some kind of wedge accelerated KEW launcher on a freighter might give a pirate second thoughts.

BobG wrote:What I am thinking about with respect to hypervelocity "slugs" is their use against Spider Drive ships. With their extreme stealth, it may be possible to localize Spider drive ships but not to acquire sufficient return from LIDAR to attack them with laser heads. In that case, using an area weapon of 1 kg slugs carried as payload on a standard missile could disperse over a wide area, and the impact of a single slug would release similar energy to a 1 MTon blast. This obviously presumes that Spider-drive ships do not have sidewalls or other deflection technology. I doubt that a PDC would have a good chance of hitting a 1 kg slug at relativistic speeds.

An analogy might be the WW II Hedgehog ASW weapon.

-- Bob G

How wide an area do you intend to scatter these slugs over?

Let's assume you have the spider ship localized to a cube a mere light-second across. Let us further assume that the spider ship is 1 kilometer in diameter. Let's scatter high velocity slugs on a trajectory such that they form a 1 light-second by 1 light-second array moving across the target volume. In order to hit the enemy ship, the slugs will have to be no more than 1 km apart. So you will need an array of 300,000 by 300,000 slugs, spaced 1 km apart. That is 90,000,000,000 slugs. If each missile has a payload of 1000 kilograms, and each slug is 1 kg, you will need 90,000,000 missiles.

Lord Skimper wrote:The cluster warhead.

Might not this work on missiles as well?

As you all know I'm no physicist, I figured a gigawatt laser must use a lot of power, enough to power a country at current era for a while?

Given we can accelerate with a rail or guass gun a projectile to 8kms now, in 2000+ years making it go 100,000 times that shouldn't be out of the question. Just requires power.

Also couldn't the wedge just spit the projectile out at near light speed? Plus the build up would be, for a SD 280+km.

Also it depends how fast the enemy ship is going, if they are going 0.3c and you are going 0.2c you only need 0.5c any more wouldn't make any difference. Can't go faster than 1c.

Didn't consider sidewalls. Do ships flying into a system jig and jog or just fly in throat wide open? Jigging and jogging would slow them down, no?

I always read the books as having them come blazing right in.

I can see a slug that isn't right in front of a ship having an even harder time avoiding a sidewall, a slight angle off and the sidewall kills the idea. Unless you use a laser head or have this as an aft firing chase launcher, while running away. Some kind of wedge accelerated KEW launcher on a freighter might give a pirate second thoughts.

Skimper, you are misunderstanding the basic problem.

Suppose a graser has a power of 1 gigajoules. To produce the same amount of damage with a kinetic energy weapon, you have to have a kinetic energy of about 1 gigajoules. That means you have to expend more than 1 gigajoule accelerating that KEW.

So whether it is a beam weapon or a KEW, you have to somehow generate the about same amount of energy in order to produce a given amount of damage. This is a rough approximation, because certain types of armor work better against particular types of damage, so it depends somewhat on the armor. But at the energy ranges of Honorverse grasers, the type of damage damage is nearly identical to a kinetic impact, anyway.

Using less energy on your weapon just means that you will cause less damage. In order to cause the same amount of damage as a graser, you will have to use about the same amount of energy accelerating a KEW.