Making a permanent "Well Flogged and Dead Horses" thread

It has been an interesting thread.
Sorry about the red herring. I should have realised that when I alluded to sex in a joke, that FLY and cthia couldn't help themselves.
Suggest that you persevere, but on track.

Theemile wrote:Back to the original thread intention - is this dead, or should we move forward?

Taking a stab on a un-controversal topic.

Conversation Topic: Fighter Craft in the Honorverse

Common Post: Posters wonder why the Honorverse doesn’t have Fighter craft and what their capabilities would be if they did exist.

Discussion Outcome: Fighter analogues do exist in the Honorverse. They are commonly known by the title of sting ship, pinnance and assault shuttle. The term “sting ship” covers a wide array of armed aero combat types from helicopters, to trans-atmospheric attack craft. Pinnances and assault shuttles are armed small craft designed for deep space and atmospheric travel. However, all small craft have no place in combat with purpose built warships.

All of these types suffer from 3 detriments in Honorverse combat with Space warships.
1) The weapons they carry are insufficient to penetrate warship defenses, and unable to penetrate warships armor. A pinnance masses 2-300 Tons, where a small Destroyer laser masses 5-600 tons alone. The small lasers on a “fighter”, which may mass 1-2 tons each, are just not in the same class as warship weapons. Similarly, a small destroyer ship-killer missile masses ~70 tons, or as much as a small sting ship. The small missiles an assault shuttle might carry are not close to the capability of a warship missile. Small craft weapons can damage un-protected merchant ships of all sizes, but at best can do surface damage to warships.
2) In space, the acceleration of a Honorverse small craft is roughly the same as a warship – if it has any advantage, it is only a handful of Gs worth of advantage over a destroyer or frigate of the same technology. In addition, most small craft have a limited top speed due to their particle screens, making them ultimately slower than a warship in deep space. Most importantly, space fighters do not have an extra dimension or other media to maneuver in which gives them an advantage over “surface ships” like aero fighters do; the same rules and limitations which are used for warships are applicable to space fighters.
3) Stingships, pinnances are shuttles are vulnerable to anti-missile defenses. Laser clusters and counter missiles capable of interdicting dozens of missiles maneuvering at 10 of thousands of Gs are easily capable of mowing down a squadron or 2 of small craft maneuvering at 500 Gs. The main arsenal of a warship isn’t even needed to deal with small craft, though is more than capable to do so.
Ultimately it may be possible for small craft to do mission-killable damage to a warship or cripple it by destroying it’s exposed drive nodes, but it would take hundreds of small craft on essentially a suicide mission to overwhelm and damage a single destroyer or light cruiser.

Books Discussed in:
Echoes of Honor
Shaddow of Saganami
House of Steel

Links to David’s Wisdom:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/138/1

Question: How come Grasers can't blow up space stations from the hyperlimit?


Elaboration: If you assume a graser is in fact a laser in the gamma ray frequency then a SD class graser should have an effective range of essentially infinity against a large target in a predictable orbit from the equations on how a Gaussian Beam behaves.

Answer: Because it is so written. So no, it doesn't work that way.

Theemile wrote:Taking a stab on a un-controversal topic.

Conversation Topic: Fighter Craft in the Honorverse

Common Post: Posters wonder why the Honorverse doesn’t have Fighter craft and what their capabilities would be if they did exist.

Discussion Outcome: Fighter analogues do exist in the Honorverse. They are commonly known by the title of sting ship, pinnance and assault shuttle. The term “sting ship” covers a wide array of armed aero combat types from helicopters, to trans-atmospheric attack craft. Pinnances and assault shuttles are armed small craft designed for deep space and atmospheric travel. However, all small craft have no place in combat with purpose built warships.

All of these types suffer from 3 detriments in Honorverse combat with Space warships.
1) The weapons they carry are insufficient to penetrate warship defenses, and unable to penetrate warships armor. A pinnance masses 2-300 Tons, where a small Destroyer laser masses 5-600 tons alone. The small lasers on a “fighter”, which may mass 1-2 tons each, are just not in the same class as warship weapons. Similarly, a small destroyer ship-killer missile masses ~70 tons, or as much as a small sting ship. The small missiles an assault shuttle might carry are not close to the capability of a warship missile. Small craft weapons can damage un-protected merchant ships of all sizes, but at best can do surface damage to warships.
2) In space, the acceleration of a Honorverse small craft is roughly the same as a warship – if it has any advantage, it is only a handful of Gs worth of advantage over a destroyer or frigate of the same technology. In addition, most small craft have a limited top speed due to their particle screens, making them ultimately slower than a warship in deep space. Most importantly, space fighters do not have an extra dimension or other media to maneuver in which gives them an advantage over “surface ships” like aero fighters do; the same rules and limitations which are used for warships are applicable to space fighters.
3) Stingships, pinnances are shuttles are vulnerable to anti-missile defenses. Laser clusters and counter missiles capable of interdicting dozens of missiles maneuvering at 10 of thousands of Gs are easily capable of mowing down a squadron or 2 of small craft maneuvering at 500 Gs. The main arsenal of a warship isn’t even needed to deal with small craft, though is more than capable to do so.
Ultimately it may be possible for small craft to do mission-killable damage to a warship or cripple it by destroying it’s exposed drive nodes, but it would take hundreds of small craft on essentially a suicide mission to overwhelm and damage a single destroyer or light cruiser.

Books Discussed in:
Echoes of Honor
Shaddow of Saganami
House of Steel

Links to David’s Wisdom:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/138/1

Do not forget that the small diameter of the optics of any weapons on a small craft results in severe beam spread do to diffraction. This severely limits effective range.

kzt wrote:Question: How come Grasers can't blow up space stations from the hyperlimit?


Elaboration: If you assume a graser is in fact a laser in the gamma ray frequency then a SD class graser should have an effective range of essentially infinity against a large target in a predictable orbit from the equations on how a Gaussian Beam behaves.

Answer: Because it is so written. So no, it doesn't work that way.

Perhaps the optical systems for grasers fail to perform to the diffraction limit?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

kzt wrote:Question: How come Grasers can't blow up space stations from the hyperlimit?


Elaboration: If you assume a graser is in fact a laser in the gamma ray frequency then a SD class graser should have an effective range of essentially infinity against a large target in a predictable orbit from the equations on how a Gaussian Beam behaves.

Answer: Because it is so written. So no, it doesn't work that way.

Perhaps the optical systems for grasers fail to perform to the diffraction limit?

There is no optical system. You are taking exawatt power levels of photons that can penetrate meters into solids. It’s all grav fields.
typo

Theemile wrote:Modern Frigates

The Nat Turner class and John Brown class would like to discuss this belief with you.

kzt wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:


Perhaps the optical systems for grasers fail to perform to the diffraction limit?

There is no optical system. You are taking exawatt power levels of photons that can penetrate meters into solids. It’s all grav fields.
typo

The gravity lensing is the optical system. No reason to presume that even Honorverse gravitic technology can create a perfect focus.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The gravity lensing is the optical system. No reason to presume that even Honorverse gravitic technology can create a perfect focus.

What the Gaussian beam equations say is that you don't need any focusing if the graser is emitted perpendicular to the emitter face, like other lasers are.

With the absurdly short wavelength and absurdly large emitter size you get doubling of the spot size at several light hours IIRC.

Basically it doesn't work that way because it is so written that it doesn't work like that.

Theemile wrote:Modern Frigates

Roguevictory wrote:The Nat Turner class and John Brown class would like to discuss this belief with you.

This is a dead horse for any moderate to large navy. Only a nation like Torch will find them useful, since they cannot afford more; they barely can afford these, because of the price break on construction costs.

If you (or they) disagree, then you need to take it up with RFC - whose views on the subject are well known. I could not find anything from him, but a brief search did find the following on specifications.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8119