The ultimate weapon

Besides, the Honorverse already has an ultimate weapon...

A bloodthirsty baseborn bitch with an attitude and a treecat.

I absolutely, positively, totally could not resist.

MAD-4A wrote:I am working on my own book (not HH but Robotech) but I was thinking of weapon systems and then started thinking in terms of HH Tech and this flashed into my head:

The W gun.

*SNIP*

just think what would happen on a direct hit - where one of the warheads drops back to N-space in the same space as the target - Nuke going off right inside the ship !!!!

Don't even need the nuke, a mass less than a kilo impacting with any solid, liquid or gas at an appreciable fraction of C is going to make a 10kt nuke (Hiroshima) seem like a small firecracker in terms of the energy released.

So if your glorified railgun can accelerate that mass to even 0.1C you've got something there. If it's massive enough to have a mini-hyper generator in the projectile as well as the equipment and power supply needed to generate a Warshawski type "sail" (or wedge) then you don't even need that kind of normal space velocity.

A projectile "appearing" inside of a ship with that kind of mass + velocity relative (M+V=E) to the ship WILL gut that ship like a stick of dynamite guts a trout. An explosive warhead would be superfluous IMHO.

Weapons fire would be very similar to WWI or early WWII Naval fire...
spot target, calculate expected future location (in 3D), Fire guns to intercept targets expected position, a few seconds flight time, then observe results/impacts/misses.
a projectile fired at the N-space equivalent of 10c would require 3 seconds to a target 30 light-seconds away. One fired at the equivalent of 100c would travel 300LS or 5 light minutes in the same time! The more advanced the weapon got, the more effective (and longer ranged – limited by available onboard power supply) it could be.

Actually there would be no appreciable warning to the target that its under fire, while the grav pulses move at FTL speeds, any other energy generated by firing your weapon is limited to light speed, your "projectile" would arrive concurrent with the grav pulse or perhaps a tiny fraction of a second later and well before any observable weapon "flash," I doubt if even Honorverse computers or even Dahak's AI are fast enough to react to the grav pulse detection, evaluate it, categorize it, select and activate appropriate countermeasures.

Depending upon where it hits him Dahak might survive 2 or 3 hits by such a weapon but a starship the size of the largest Honorverse SD won't.

robert132 wrote:

MAD-4A wrote:I am working on my own book (not HH but Robotech) but I was thinking of weapon systems and then started thinking in terms of HH Tech and this flashed into my head:

The W gun.

*SNIP*

just think what would happen on a direct hit - where one of the warheads drops back to N-space in the same space as the target - Nuke going off right inside the ship !!!!

Don't even need the nuke, a mass less than a kilo impacting with any solid, liquid or gas at an appreciable fraction of C is going to make a 10kt nuke (Hiroshima) seem like a small firecracker in terms of the energy released.

At least in the Honorverse it won't have an appreciable fraction of c by the time it reenters normal space.

It looses 92% of it's velocity entering hyper and then 92% of that residual velocity reentering normal space (assuming it goes no higher than the Alpha band). That means it retains just 0.64% of it's initial velocity.

So if the muzzle velocity was the 0.1c you specified your impact velocity would be 0.00064c. (Which is still quick, 192 kps; 25x faster than the shuttle would orbit but not the ship gutting relativistic impact you seemed to be talking of)


And to cover a million km of real space it would take 6.7 seconds through the alpha bands - which is actually slower than the 3.3 seconds it would take for the initial 0.1c projectile to cover that distance without entering hyper. You need a muzzle velocity above 0.201c in order for ballistic hyper transit in the Honorverse to be quicker.

Perhaps not as good as the

Ordered
Operations
Phase-alteration
System

ray, as demonstrated in an earlier book, which alters the laws of quantum mechanics and causes all warheads on the target to detonate. Simultaneously. With no time delay.

But it sounds impressive even if it is unlikely to work.

MaxxQ wrote:A GRASER doesn't fire a projectile. It's an energy weapon, like an upjumped LASER. I've seen "graser" listed two ways: Gamma Ray lASER, or Gamma Ray Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Either way, it doesn't fire a projectile.

The Books I read were specific that a Graser is similar to a Gauss Rifle/Rail Gun but uses gravity as the propellant force instead of electro magnetism, this the reason for 'rolling out' the guns, to clear the gravity pulse from inside the ships hull. It fires a large projectile using a powerful artificial gravity waive, more specific the description is a giant ship-size pulser rifle. At-least that's what I've always been reading them as.
Anyway, the weapon would not produce an actual sail, but a similar effect to pop the projectile into hyper.

Point about the LAC but that's why it would be a "development"! You know you can't communicate at FTL speeds, it's just impossible... until someone does.

You would simply have to develop a small one-use system. It doesn't have to do it repeatedly, just pop and done. It's much easier to make something small that's just going to self-destruct when it's used than it is to make something that can be used over-and-over-again. No redundancies or excessive shielding or insulation, so what if it fries at activation, as long as it activates first. It's just going to be nuked on the other side anyway.
As for using a Nuke - I was thinking in terms of initial accuracy issues as well, otherwise - if you miss the target completely you get nothing, a Proximity Nuke can still get a piece of them. but latter versions may be developed to kinetic strike weapons with greater accuracy, and if you get lucky and the nuke drops inside a shuttle hanger well...bonus!

The Books I read were specific that a Graser is similar to a Gauss Rifle/Rail Gun but uses gravity as the propellant force instead of electro magnetism, this the reason for 'rolling out' the guns, to clear the gravity pulse from inside the ships hull. It fires a large projectile using a powerful artificial gravity waive, more specific the description is a giant ship-size pulser rifle. At-least that's what I've always been reading them as.

That literally has never been the case. Grasers have always been described as energy weapons - the bigger, badder cousins of the laser.

That description sounds closer to a pulser or a missile tube, rather than a graser. IIRC, the reason grasers have to be run out is so the grav lens can be properly generated, though I don't know for sure.

And regarding how you probably wouldn't need nuclear warheads on the fired rounds-I *think* that the main damage from contact rounds actually came from pure kinetic damage most of the time.

19chickens wrote:That description sounds closer to a pulser or a missile tube, rather than a graser. IIRC, the reason grasers have to be run out is so the grav lens can be properly generated, though I don't know for sure.

And regarding how you probably wouldn't need nuclear warheads on the fired rounds-I *think* that the main damage from contact rounds actually came from pure kinetic damage most of the time.

No it was either the missile wedge shredding the ship or the nuke thermal pulse and/or X-ray irradiation.

Duckk wrote:

The Books I read were specific that a Graser is similar to a Gauss Rifle/Rail Gun but uses gravity as the propellant force instead of electro magnetism, this the reason for 'rolling out' the guns, to clear the gravity pulse from inside the ships hull. It fires a large projectile using a powerful artificial gravity waive, more specific the description is a giant ship-size pulser rifle. At-least that's what I've always been reading them as.

That literally has never been the case. Grasers have always been described as energy weapons - the bigger, badder cousins of the laser.

Though it wasn't until the appendix of SVW that it actually states Grasers are energy mounts like Lasers

Short Victorious War wrote:The energy weapons of choice are the laser and graser, of which the graser has both a longer range and greater effect. But grasers are considerably more massive than lasers, so most ships have mixed batteries, accepting the lower effectiveness of the laser in order to mount greater numbers of weapons (which let them engage greater numbers of targets) while retaining the "smashing" ability of the graser. Ships smaller than light cruisers are normally so cramped for weapons space that they have pure laser energy armaments.

And as 19chickens pointed out the pulsers are basically what he described - projectile weapons that use grav fields to throw bullets or shells at an enemy.

Of course pulsers are hand weapons, squad heavy weapons, or ground / air vehicle weapons - not ship to ship ordinance - at the half million km energy ranges sublight projectiles are just useless, and even the beefiest pinnace heavy pulser mount we've seen appears to have a muzzle velocity that's not even mildly relativistic.

The old style auto cannon are really big pulsers. I don't think it's at all clear what their MV is.