Proximity kills of incoming missiles via dirty nukes?

Obvious point time:

Missiles have radiation shielding with their wedges up.

Nukes do jack all to them or their sensors other than record a nice bright flash.

Also known as Triple ripple is a gigantic laugh.

wastedfly wrote:Obvious point time:

Missiles have radiation shielding with their wedges up.

Nukes do jack all to them or their sensors other than record a nice bright flash.

Also known as Triple ripple is a gigantic laugh.

Any shielding can be overwhelmed. Normal nukes won't bother a missile, except at VERY close range. The Triple Ripple warheads were purpose built for burning out sensors and useless for any other purpose.

wastedfly wrote:Obvious point time:

Missiles have radiation shielding with their wedges up.

Nukes do jack all to them or their sensors other than record a nice bright flash.

Also known as Triple ripple is a gigantic laugh.

Overloading the Rad Shielding so it turns opaque or fails, would be a useful counter-measure. Doing it three times would be even more useful if timed to break lock after the launcher breaks off the control link.

Under normal circumstances huge swarms of missiles operate with thousands of nukes going off in front of the missiles at much closer range than the triple ripple. For example the destruction of home fleet in AAC.

David clarified a few months ago that missile salvos are spread out in a large 3D array, so the lead warheads are going off while the trail warheads are still in target acquisition mode.

kzt wrote:Under normal circumstances huge swarms of missiles operate with thousands of nukes going off in front of the missiles at much closer range than the triple ripple.

Not all "nukes" are equal:

War of Honor
Chapter Twenty wrote:Like the missiles which suddenly detonated long before any Manticoran would have expected them to. Missiles which contained absolutely no seeking systems, no penetration aides, no standoff laser heads—only the biggest, nastiest, dirtiest nuclear warheads Mitchell Clapp or anyone he could recruit had been able to design. Those warheads weren't designed to destroy enemy LACs; they were designed to strip away the enemy's EW advantages, and it was evident from the plot that they'd done just that.

Normal "clean" nuclear warheads won't disrupt anything, it takes specifically designed warheads designed to disrupt rad shielding and sensors.

Weird Harold wrote:Normal "clean" nuclear warheads won't disrupt anything, it takes specifically designed warheads designed to disrupt rad shielding and sensors.

Nope. Xrays are xrays. 50,000 10 mt weapons going off directly in front of and around you during the final 2 seconds of laser head target acquisition process is going to cause a lot more damage to the sensors than having a few dozen 250 Mt nukes going off when the laser heads are still inside the opaque missile shroud.

Not to mention that long range guidance for missiles is all based on gravity signatures. Really bright xray sources are invisible to grav sensors, just like smoke is invisible to radar.

kzt wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Normal "clean" nuclear warheads won't disrupt anything, it takes specifically designed warheads designed to disrupt rad shielding and sensors.

Nope. Xrays are xrays.

What p[art of "specifically Designed to disrupt sensors" are you having trouble with?

I have no idea how Honorverse physics allows disruption of LAC, drone and Missile sensors, but I trust that the people who designed those dirty nukes do have an idea of what they're doing. Obviously they're emitting more than x-rays.

Hi KZT,

X-rays are x-rays and gravity remains gravity, so where does unified or string theory say they'll meet?

But then I've always wondered how the 'dragon's teeth' can simulate so many hundreds of false impeller missile gravitic signatures with a single mini fusion power source, when the original FTL signal rate was so slow etc.

Quite aside from our understanding of physics being different from that of the Honorverse, as you pointed out [including the location of Beowulf being off], the missile impeller wedges are around 10 km wide requiring considerable spacing, so even the obvious 3D array for missile storms they're rather spread out, considerably limiting any blinding effects.

If you'll check, you'll find the 'triple ripple' and Zizka was used on missile launches that were rather small compared to the missile storms of Cutworm, Sanskrit and Beatrice/BoMA.

Presumably in the Honorverse the complexity of trying to 'jam' such huge missile storms isn't or wasn't possible within the RHN's tech and launcher [number of ships?] capabilities.

Given Haven knew the FTL.com was created by mini-fusion powered gravitic pulses, nuclear powered or laser fused pulse type jammers might be part of what was involved.

L

kzt wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Normal "clean" nuclear warheads won't disrupt anything, it takes specifically designed warheads designed to disrupt rad shielding and sensors.

Nope. Xrays are xrays. 50,000 10 mt weapons going off directly in front of and around you during the final 2 seconds of laser head target acquisition process is going to cause a lot more damage to the sensors than having a few dozen 250 Mt nukes going off when the laser heads are still inside the opaque missile shroud.

Not to mention that long range guidance for missiles is all based on gravity signatures. Really bright xray sources are invisible to grav sensors, just like smoke is invisible to radar.

lyonheart wrote:Quite aside from our understanding of physics being different from that of the Honorverse, as you pointed out [including the location of Beowulf being off], the missile impeller wedges are around 10 km wide requiring considerable spacing, so even the obvious 3D array for missile storms they're rather spread out, considerably limiting any blinding effects.

If you'll check, you'll find the 'triple ripple' and Zizka was used on missile launches that were rather small compared to the missile storms of Cutworm, Sanskrit and Beatrice/BoMA.

If "dirty nukes" worked, you'd expect that every ship would be firing them off off as a missile salvo approached. It's not like the missile sensors can look away from their target during the last 3 seconds of flight, so that should fry those sensors real good....

kzt wrote:If "dirty nukes" worked, you'd expect that every ship would be firing them off off as a missile salvo approached. It's not like the missile sensors can look away from their target during the last 3 seconds of flight, so that should fry those sensors real good....

It probably would work very effectively. It would also dazzle your own shipboard sensors and require you to use your broadside tubes for defensive fire, since the dirty nuke warheads seem to be too big for a CM.