Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Zendikarofthewest wrote:

tlb wrote:If you are just making these suggestions for laughs, then put them in the Honorverse Humor thread where the rest of us do not have to see them.

Most of it isnt - I genuinely think some of their R&D divisions would look into miniaturizing grasers - but its overall impractical. Doesnt mean it might not be developed, especially by smaller powers eager to find some sort of level playing field.

Most of the miniaturization we've been told of to date on the Graser torp's graser involves removing the cooling and safety hardware, and the equivalent of connecting a cruiser weight graser to a SD weight's power supply - then standing back and letting the parts fly.

The RMN on the other hand developed better gravity generators (the fallout of MDM, micro fusion reactor, and ftl com research), allowing their standard devices to have 4x the capabilities of their predecessors due to better grav pinching and better grav lensing. One would assume that you can build a significantly smaller device with the same power as the 1905 equivalent, but how well that would scale down is an unknown (sometimes a device component (like a Laser head) is as small as you can engineer it to get x power out of it)

Zendikarofthewest wrote:Maybe a graser torpedo on crack then, stuffing as powerful an impeller and warhead onto it. I know it aint practical, but haha funny torpedo bomber

All the graser torpedoes we've seen were spider powered; not impellers at all.

Though Galton did have graser-head missiles which of course do have impellers.

To End In Fire wrote:Galton’s multidrive missiles were also big and a bit crude by the Grand Alliance’s standards. The Alignment remained unable to match the capabilities of even the Republic of Haven Navy’s current-generation MDMs, far less those of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s FTL-commanded Mark 23. On the other hand, the Alignment had been able to engineer its graserhead down to something that could be stuffed into a really, really big MDM. Those graserheads couldn’t match the multi-targeting capacity of a conventional laserhead, but each hit they did achieve would be devastating.

To End In Fire wrote:Galton’s R&D had engineered the original graserhead down into something it could cram into an outsized conventional missile just small enough to fit into a Hasta III pod. It wasn’t as powerful as the graser torpedoes which had savaged Manticore’s industrial infrastructure in the Yawata Strike, but it was far more destructive than any X-ray laser, because its duration was measured in seconds, not milliseconds.

So they had shrunk the graser some, but only by sacrificing its power output.

Also, it's unclear to me how good the impellers on those outsized missiles were; though in other cases we've seen the SLN and even more-so the MAlign have missile acceleration advantages over the RMN's MDMs. (The RMN focused on more drives, the other two focused more of bettering the one or two drives they had)

In this case the graserheads accelerated n at "over seven hundred KPS" and "next best thing to seventy thousand gravities" (call it 69,000g)
If that's half-power setting that's quite impressive as the RMN's half-power is still 46,000g.
If that's full-power that's pretty anemic as the RMN's is 92,000g.

But, despite going down a rabbit hole of number crunching, there just aren't enough variables provided to determine which it is. All we have is launch range (20 million km) and acceleration. We know they have some base velocity from the Hasta III, but not how much, we don't know how many drives/stages they have left, nor do we know their flight time.

All I can say is that if they had only one drive/stage left, even if it had ERM endurance, they couldn't have covered that 20 million km at full-power settings; not without reaching the speed of light

Theemile wrote:The initial beam will reflect off the outer armor, and each type of beam does have specific frequencies which should identify it. Whether the reflected beam is obscured by the larger explosion or is strong enough to be visible at a distance is a different question.

And at this range, the graser mount would have shone brighter than the star for a fraction of a second. The graser is hair-thin, but there is some spillage that one could see, including waste heat. I happen to think those effects could be seen at quite some distance (several million km), but I can't prove that.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:The initial beam will reflect off the outer armor, and each type of beam does have specific frequencies which should identify it. Whether the reflected beam is obscured by the larger explosion or is strong enough to be visible at a distance is a different question.

And at this range, the graser mount would have shone brighter than the star for a fraction of a second. The graser is hair-thin, but there is some spillage that one could see, including waste heat. I happen to think those effects could be seen at quite some distance (several million km), but I can't prove that.

Well, I can't let you guys let me off the hook so easily. I was actually thinking the beam itself might be visible. At least in segments since I posited a firing duration of 3 seconds giving enough time for the solar wind to blow dust, micrometeorites, etc. into the field. And of course, I thought the assembly, housing such a massive and powerful graser, would get very hot too; aligning with Thinksmarkedly's thinking. And the outspalling and reflectivity that Theemile speaks of, I can see being magnified bouncing off back and forth on the shattered debris illuminating it as well. At any rate, I thought the Captain of an LD wouldn't want to take a chance at any tell tale signs of using an energy weapon as opposed to the destruction of the RDs via "slamming into a wall."

Back to radiating waste heat into hyper. Jonathan's post about an LD's tractors being more plentiful instead of bigger resonates well. Of course they could turn out to be bigger. Anyway, the author could easily retcon it and add that the symbiotic phenomena making it possible was not noticed until after Oyster Bay. Authors wield so much power of the pen.

I don't think that would give the LD too much of an advantage, rather than making the MAN more than a mere paper tiger or obese gorilla. At least until a spider drive detector is devised. I'm all for letting the MAN run amuck for a few chapters / books just to keep the finale interesting. Go out with a bang.

Theemile wrote:The initial beam will reflect off the outer armor, and each type of beam does have specific frequencies which should identify it. Whether the reflected beam is obscured by the larger explosion or is strong enough to be visible at a distance is a different question.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And at this range, the graser mount would have shone brighter than the star for a fraction of a second. The graser is hair-thin, but there is some spillage that one could see, including waste heat. I happen to think those effects could be seen at quite some distance (several million km), but I can't prove that.

Why do you think the graser beam is hair-thin, when the graser output area is a meter or more in diameter (Thomas Bachfisch's ships had 80 centimeter grasers)?

Byng was never portrayed as a tactical genius, just a well politically connected position after longish service with not screwing up sufficiently to force higher commands to be able to remove him for incompetence even in the SLN at the time. He was maneuvered into his last command by the Alignments agents in the SL/SLN and used as dupe to cause trouble with a FF fleet which was guaranteed to cause in-service problems and that he was expected to be dangerous to all concerned and hopefully do some damage to RMN in Talbot....that was successful and cost FF not only that fleet but it was a great goad to make that other stellar SLN Admiral Crandall make what ended up being a suicidal call. But I digress......

We know a Spider Drive can operate inside a hyper limit as the G-Torps were using Spider Drive to maneuver into position to attack the various orbital stations in the Manticore Binary System.

Since we don't know HOW a Spider Drive ship can enter, travel and exit hyperspace there are sort of two options. One is that the Spider Drive itself can be reconfigured -with using other equipment something -like an impeller wedge being rigged Sails. The other general option being that a Spider needs to cary the normal impeller/sail equipment or some equivalent and probably have to take the Spider drive off-line to go into hyper using the impeller drive.

Ability to generate enough power to have both systems -even with one needing to be warmed up and held on standby before engaging is going to require a significant amount of power generation (and the equipment and its space to do that).

That brings up an interesting question. How exactly did the Sharks "link up" to effectively appear as one object to go into hyperspace and then appear as one ghost of sensor reading all that distance from the MBS.........and that transition was still enough to be picked by the MBS long range scanners looking for things dropping out of hyperspace?

It gets mentioned from time to time that system scanners looking for impellers note when an impeller vanishes from their screens when an impeller ship goes into hyper- because the impeller signal can't been seen in n-space from a ship in hyper. When a ship exits hyperdrive in the Honorverse, the bleed off of every ship from even a very "low "speed in hyperspace creates a massive energy flair....possibly reads as some sort of point source even if a sensor net is only getting a read on ship numbers from the ships wedge drives as they engage.

But the Sharks were using Spider drive and they DID produce an effect that looked like a sensor ghost at....was it a light month? So is there more happening to anything that is exiting hyperspace that creates a detectable event in emissions?

I suspect the Sharks would have had to had to have been "linked" together quite a bit closer than any ships with Impeller/Sail based systems could be and avoid drive caused fratricide. And they all entered and exited out of hyper LINKED TOGETHER at the same places in a tight group that did NOT look like a multi-ship transition.

Is it possible that the Tractor fields that the Spiders use can be used to hold ships together as a group entering and exiting hyper? That raises the question of what happens when any Spider Tractor Beam from one ship either touched a second ship or a tractor of another ship.
I would expect some spectacular energy or "gravitational" event with one of both of the ships.
You know, caused by a tractor beam powerful to apparently move a ship by grabbing onto hyperspace and haul its ship along in n-space (if I recall the proper description). Just wondering.

penny wrote:I don't think that would give the LD too much of an advantage, rather than making the MAN more than a mere paper tiger or obese gorilla. At least until a spider drive detector is devised. I'm all for letting the MAN run amuck for a few chapters / books just to keep the finale interesting. Go out with a bang.

The things that you want, such a a three second graser that does not explode or waste heat dumped into hyper-space, are not things that exist now. So it all depends on how many more books the author expects are needed to wrap up his story.

Both the X-ray and graser beams will cause matter in the path to fluoresce and result in some beam scatter. That depends on how clean or dirty the space is when action takes place. So there is a potential for a line pointing back to the source.

However the destruction of an RD from "slamming into a wall" is going to produce a major light display, right at the site of the spider drive ship. There is every expectation that the damage will extend to spider drive ship itself.

Brigade XO wrote:Since we don't know HOW a Spider Drive ship can enter, travel and exit hyperspace there are sort of two options. One is that the Spider Drive itself can be reconfigured -with using other equipment something -like an impeller wedge being rigged Sails. The other general option being that a Spider needs to cary the normal impeller/sail equipment or some equivalent and probably have to take the Spider drive off-line to go into hyper using the impeller drive.

Ability to generate enough power to have both systems -even with one needing to be warmed up and held on standby before engaging is going to require a significant amount of power generation (and the equipment and its space to do that).

That brings up an interesting question. How exactly did the Sharks "link up" to effectively appear as one object to go into hyperspace and then appear as one ghost of sensor reading all that distance from the MBS.........and that transition was still enough to be picked by the MBS long range scanners looking for things dropping out of hyperspace?

It gets mentioned from time to time that system scanners looking for impellers note when an impeller vanishes from their screens when an impeller ship goes into hyper- because the impeller signal can't been seen in n-space from a ship in hyper. When a ship exits hyperdrive in the Honorverse, the bleed off of every ship from even a very "low "speed in hyperspace creates a massive energy flair....possibly reads as some sort of point source even if a sensor net is only getting a read on ship numbers from the ships wedge drives as they engage.

But the Sharks were using Spider drive and they DID produce an effect that looked like a sensor ghost at....was it a light month? So is there more happening to anything that is exiting hyperspace that creates a detectable event in emissions?

All that is needed to make a transition is a hyper-generator and that transition creates an energy spike in the wall that can be detected by a gravitic array within the region that is receiving the ship. Now if a gravity wave exists on either side of the wall, then that ship has to have sails set (so far as we know at this point).

The Sharks were motionless in the Alpha band and linked into two groups to cause a double spike in transition into normal space that is somehow identified with a ghost blip in the array.

There are two major connected questions about the spider drive ships: how do they move through a wormhole and how do they move through a gravity wave in hyper-space. Turning off the spider drive and setting sails is not a problem when transiting a wormhole, because that only occurs for the wormholes controlled by the Malign. But if it really requires 40 minutes to accomplish, that might be a problem when encountering a gravity wave.

Jonathan_S wrote:All the graser torpedoes we've seen were spider powered; not impellers at all.

Though Galton did have graser-head missiles which of course do have impellers.

I would call that a graser torpedo also.

Brigade XO wrote:Since we don't know HOW a Spider Drive ship can enter, travel and exit hyperspace there are sort of two options. One is that the Spider Drive itself can be reconfigured -with using other equipment something -like an impeller wedge being rigged Sails. The other general option being that a Spider needs to cary the normal impeller/sail equipment or some equivalent and probably have to take the Spider drive off-line to go into hyper using the impeller drive.

Minor reminder -- sails aren't needed to enter (or leave) hyper unless the system lies within a grav wave.

As RFC has noted even reaction thrust ships were able to enter as use hyper. (That's how the hyper-scouts, like Suffren which explored the MBS, surveyed systems in the roughly 500 years between the invention of the hyper-drive and the twin inventions of the impeller wedge and the warshaski sail.)

So the real question is how Spider ships handle grav waves. 'Course we also don't know the answer to that.

Brigade XO wrote: Ability to generate enough power to have both systems -even with one needing to be warmed up and held on standby before engaging is going to require a significant amount of power generation (and the equipment and its space to do that).

That brings up an interesting question. How exactly did the Sharks "link up" to effectively appear as one object to go into hyperspace and then appear as one ghost of sensor reading all that distance from the MBS.........and that transition was still enough to be picked by the MBS long range scanners looking for things dropping out of hyperspace?

It gets mentioned from time to time that system scanners looking for impellers note when an impeller vanishes from their screens when an impeller ship goes into hyper- because the impeller signal can't been seen in n-space from a ship in hyper. When a ship exits hyperdrive in the Honorverse, the bleed off of every ship from even a very "low "speed in hyperspace creates a massive energy flair....possibly reads as some sort of point source even if a sensor net is only getting a read on ship numbers from the ships wedge drives as they engage.

But the Sharks were using Spider drive and they DID produce an effect that looked like a sensor ghost at....was it a light month? So is there more happening to anything that is exiting hyperspace that creates a detectable event in emissions?

I suspect the Sharks would have had to had to have been "linked" together quite a bit closer than any ships with Impeller/Sail based systems could be and avoid drive caused fratricide. And they all entered and exited out of hyper LINKED TOGETHER at the same places in a tight group that did NOT look like a multi-ship transition.

Is it possible that the Tractor fields that the Spiders use can be used to hold ships together as a group entering and exiting hyper? That raises the question of what happens when any Spider Tractor Beam from one ship either touched a second ship or a tractor of another ship.
I would expect some spectacular energy or "gravitational" event with one of both of the ships.
You know, caused by a tractor beam powerful to apparently move a ship by grabbing onto hyperspace and haul its ship along in n-space (if I recall the proper description). Just wondering.

Yes, echoing what tlb said, RFC has confirmed that anything exiting hyperspace causes a signal, regardless of its drive type (or even whether or not it has a drive active at the time). FWIW that single strength appears to be more strongly related to the velocity of the emerging ship(s) than their mass -- a dispatch boat making a crash translation seems to make a stronger emergence signal than an SD over 200x its mass making a slow speed translation.

Here's some more from the 2012 post in Obstacles that I mentioned earlier

runsforcelery wrote:The reason they were tractored together was to make sure that they radiated only one hyper footprint rather than several with sufficient separation to create multiple "ghosts." They couldn't hide the translation whatever they did; they could only minimize it and attempt to convince the Manties that it was one of the ghosts --- one of the "false positives" --- which turn up frequently enough to be more or less commonplace. So several relatively small ships, tractored together, making transition at a velocity of zero compared to the local star system one a very slow, gradual, and "gentle" gradient across the alpha wall, were detected as a single point source faint enough to appear to be a sensor ghost. Multuiple sensor ghosts are not a known/acceptable/routine phenomenon, so it was far better to risk a somewhat "larger" footprint that was in one place than to risk other, additional footprints. When the Manties --- as expected --- sent out scout ships to be sure the "ghosty" really was a ghost, the spider drive's undetectable nature convince them that it was, exactly as planned.

For future reference, I should perhaps also point out that each footprint is an individual event. If three 1,000,000-ton ships make transit, they do not radiate (individually) the same signature as a single 3,000,000-ton ship, and it is the strength of the individual signature source which really matters for long-range translations, which are looking for sudden "spikes" of gravitic disturbance.

We know the Sharks tractored themselves together as part of the linked translation -- but I don't think that can't be the whole story. (Though we do know that the RMN has as least planned on combat-emergency LAC retrievals by having them tractor themselves to the hull of an SD and stretching its hyper generator to take the whole mess into hyper in go one -- but I don't think the Sharks could have packed themselves closely enough for a single hyper generator to cover the whole group)

I do wonder if the mechanism they used to translate together is related to the (unspecified) mechanism used for a simultaneous wormhole transit.
In both cases you'd seem to need to do something special to make all the hyper generators act as one to move the entire group in one linked translation. (That's especially obvious with the wormhole transit, because if one ship lagged even slightly the earlier ship(s) would have already locked the wormhole down for some period of time)