?

penny wrote:

Theemile wrote:Now the one advantage of the 3 sec beam is you could automatically program a pattern which will paint the entire probably volume the target ship can possibly inhabit withthe graser - the downside is while you get hits - probably a lot of them in that period - you don't achieve that lingering burn through because the beam is always sweeping across the volume, needing to burn through new armor and sidewall every microsecond. given the smaller size of the weapon; against SDs, this may just do a lot of superficial damage, but little to no critical damage.

Exactly what I was thinking.

At any rate, I don't understand this idea of superficial damage. Conventional energy weapons only fire for microseconds and destroy a ship with sidewalls down. A 3-second firing graser executing a sweep pattern will certainly be on target for more than microseconds. It will be like hitting the target several times with conventional energy weapons. It will go boom.

I also suggested upstream that these scaled up grasers will be as powerful as any SD energy weapon.

BTW, that is the strafe mode that I suggested eons ago.

Remember, the Gtorp graser design started with a Light Cruiser graser core - a 40CM (diameter) weapon. This was designed to damage CAs and CLs. It can threaten BCs, but the Armor (and sidewalls) on SDs will just shrug this off. Remember, the 150CM Graser on a Shrike couldn't penetrate DN/SD broadside armor before the lensing upgrade.

Without lingering for a period on a specific spot, the Gtorp can't penetrate SD armor any more than the Shrike Graser could - even less so.

That BC scale Graser masses ~5Ktons by itself- about 15 tons of the ~20 Ton Shrike LAC is dedicated to the Graser, power generation, targeting, and drive systems - and gave it just 6-7 shots of power at a time (before it had to break off and recharge for an unspecified period of time).

An SD scale Graser Masses >>10K tons on it's own, and would require power systems (and drives) that would make a ship of at least 40-50 tons. This isn't a missile or a even a LAC - it's a wedge powered Destroyer with a single shot gun. And that's hard to hide at 500K Km, and expensive to fire.

If we're talking spider drive, remember, the weaponless Spider Drive Ghost is 45-55 tons or so (Frigate sized) - removing the Hyper drive and adding the SD Graser and extra power handling would make a spider ship that masses in the 60-75 Ton range - again, for a single shot "weapon".

Theemile wrote:
Remember, the Gtorp graser design started with a Light Cruiser graser core - a 40CM (diameter) weapon. This was designed to damage CAs and CLs. It can threaten BCs, but the Armor (and sidewalls) on SDs will just shrug this off. Remember, the 150CM Graser on a Shrike couldn't penetrate DN/SD broadside armor before the lensing upgrade.

Without lingering for a period on a specific spot, the Gtorp can't penetrate SD armor any more than the Shrike Graser could - even less so.

That BC scale Graser masses ~5Ktons by itself- about 15 tons of the ~20 Ton Shrike LAC is dedicated to the Graser, power generation, targeting, and drive systems - and gave it just 6-7 shots of power at a time (before it had to break off and recharge for an unspecified period of time).

An SD scale Graser Masses >>10K tons on it's own, and would require power systems (and drives) that would make a ship of at least 40-50 tons. This isn't a missile or a even a LAC - it's a wedge powered Destroyer with a single shot gun. And that's hard to hide at 500K Km, and expensive to fire.

If we're talking spider drive, remember, the weaponless Spider Drive Ghost is 45-55 tons or so (Frigate sized) - removing the Hyper drive and adding the SD Graser and extra power handling would make a spider ship that masses in the 60-75 Ton range - again, for a single shot "weapon".

Side thought....

It just occurred to me that the Shrike is an A-10 Warthog analog - A massive gun, with a flying craft build around it. Or another way - It's no so much a Space Ship (or plane), it's a flying massive Gun with missile launchers bolted on.

tlb wrote:Yes, they will certainly try to scale the graser up to SD level or more; that depends on whether the author allows it. For instance, the increase in power might decrease the lifetime.

It is strictly a matter of chance whether the beam is hitting the wedge, the sidewall, the target or empty space between them all. Between the movement of the beam and that of the ship, there is no guarantee of even hundredths of a microsecond; therefore superficial damage.

When a missile does it, it's at a few to many thousand km from the ship. In the worst case, 50,000 km. That's a light speed lag of 1/6th of a second, and those 50,000-away missiles have very poor hit ratio. It's the ones under 10,000, with a light lag of just 1/30th of a second, that have a better chance of scoring a hit. Once they've cleared the lip of the wedge and can see the ship inside of it, the ship has very little evasion opportunity left: the ship can move 4 metres @ 750 gravities. The biggest difficulty here is the missile's own velocity: in that 1/30th of a second, it will itself cover 8,000 km, so depending on the vector it's approaching its target, it may not have sufficient time to locate the target inside the wedge before the other lip of the wedge obscures it again.

And missiles are arriving en masse on the target. A single missile arriving to shoot at the ship, even if it does score a hit, does not guarantee a kill. Every missile action in the later books described how many missiles arrived to fire without being intercepted, and that's usually in the hundred or more per capital ship, depending on whose capital ship it is.