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Galactic Sapper wrote:We also have to question exactly how effective a grazer torpedo would be against an SD with its wedge and sidewalls up. Odds are that they're only a minimal threat unless in vast numbers.

GTs have a cruiser-grade grazer. Not the capital-ship grade grazers on a Sag-C either; think more like the ones aboard a Star Knight. Or better yet, a Shrike. Yes, they're a threat but it's going to take scores if not hundreds of hits to take out an SD. It's in large part what SD armor is designed to resist. That sort of weapon is most effective when you can get dorsal or ventral hits on areas usually covered by the wedge.

No it won't. Close range a cruser graser will go through the sidewall of an SD. And through the armor and out the other side. 'But nobody could get that close!'

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But if you don't hit it before they can bring their sidewalls up, you're fighting a forewarned force that is looking for you, with a LAC defensive screen. It might not be possible to sneak a graser torpedo through that screen and it might be necessary if it is far enough ahead of the wall. Not to mention the expanding RD shell.

The conclusion in another thread is that a spider-driven graser torp has a very low acceleration, to the point that it's comparable to wedge ships' accelerations. So a graser torp may not be able to attack the relief force unless it prepositions assets and is ready to fire before they move out of range. And you can't know where the force will emerge from hyper, so you can't preposition assets.

I generally conceed to your points. But I think it's fair to think that if a force is sent through hyper to retake a captured wormhole that the one place you can count on them eventually moving towards is that terminus.
So if you park yourself nearby then sooner or later the enemy will bring themselves into your attack range.


Yes, Graser torps do have very low accel. I thought it was on the order of the spider ship's acceleration - so around 150 gees; way below any warship's. (The torps don't have to worry so much about accel affecting their internals; but they aren't big enough to mount the number of spider projectors needed for higher accel). But if the enemy is coming to you then you can fire your torps right down their throats (or depending on range right up their kilts after they flip over to slow).

And if their vector is almost entirely towards you then you can use the torps low accel just to overcome whatever slight lateral vector the enemy has - deploying them more like a mobile minefield that the enemy will run themselves into. And unlike a minefield these can undetectably repossition so all can achieve that perfect down the throat shot where sidewalls aren't a factor. Even if the approaching force has buckler walls up those only provide cover from fire within a few degrees of dead ahead. Climbing or diving a bit off their plane of advance allows you to fire past the rim of the buckler into the poorly armored dorsal or ventral surface of the ship.

(But this does presume that graser torps are actually hard enough to detect that you can sneak them through a RD / LAC screen. Even detecting them within moments of firing might let the ships bring up their 2nd stage full bow wall; would radically blunt the effectiveness of the torps grasers)

kzt wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:We also have to question exactly how effective a grazer torpedo would be against an SD with its wedge and sidewalls up. Odds are that they're only a minimal threat unless in vast numbers.

GTs have a cruiser-grade grazer. Not the capital-ship grade grazers on a Sag-C either; think more like the ones aboard a Star Knight. Or better yet, a Shrike. Yes, they're a threat but it's going to take scores if not hundreds of hits to take out an SD. It's in large part what SD armor is designed to resist. That sort of weapon is most effective when you can get dorsal or ventral hits on areas usually covered by the wedge.

No it won't. Close range a cruser graser will go through the sidewall of an SD. And through the armor and out the other side. 'But nobody could get that close!'

After all they're at least several times more powerful that a laserhead's laser - and going off from similar (if not closer) range. Plus they last longer, so once burning through the sidewall they can continue inflicting damage longer.

So talk of needing hundreds of hits is nonsense since 150-200 hits from the far lighter laserheads is expected to kill an SD. Maybe you might need a dozen or so torps to kill an SD with sidewall interposed (so around 10x as powerful as a laserhead) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was fewer.

And that's assuming they can't pull of a surprise down the throat shot; bypassing the sidewalls.

kzt wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:We also have to question exactly how effective a grazer torpedo would be against an SD with its wedge and sidewalls up. Odds are that they're only a minimal threat unless in vast numbers.

GTs have a cruiser-grade grazer. Not the capital-ship grade grazers on a Sag-C either; think more like the ones aboard a Star Knight. Or better yet, a Shrike. Yes, they're a threat but it's going to take scores if not hundreds of hits to take out an SD. It's in large part what SD armor is designed to resist. That sort of weapon is most effective when you can get dorsal or ventral hits on areas usually covered by the wedge.

No it won't. Close range a cruser graser will go through the sidewall of an SD. And through the armor and out the other side. 'But nobody could get that close!'

I'm thinking of Fourth Yeltsin, where Harrington takes SDs - Peep SDs, no less - into grazer range of battleships and mostly survives a few dozen hits to each ship. So no, even a capitol ship grazer is survivable at spitting distance. No nonsense about in one side and out the other with cruiser grade weapons.

Off hand, the Peeps would have had fewer casualties there if they'd just given up and rammed the SDs, suiciding 5 ships to assure destruction of the SDs instead of losing 6 of the 7 survivors and failing to destroy 5 of the 6 SDs (and the one kill they got being from missiles, not grazers).

Galactic Sapper wrote:Off hand, the Peeps would have had fewer casualties there if they'd just given up and rammed the SDs, suiciding 5 ships to assure destruction of the SDs instead of losing 6 of the 7 survivors and failing to destroy 5 of the 6 SDs (and the one kill they got being from missiles, not grazers).

I could be wrong, but I think ramming an impeller-drive ship with its wedge and sidewalls up with another impeller-drive ship with its wedge and sidewalls up is pretty much impossible. Your own wedge won't fit through the gaps in the other ship's, and in a wedge fratricide situation, it's the smaller ship that's always going to lose (well, the less powerful wedge, but barring tugs, that's the smaller ship).

Galactic Sapper wrote:I'm thinking of Fourth Yeltsin, where Harrington takes SDs - Peep SDs, no less - into grazer range of battleships and mostly survives a few dozen hits to each ship. So no, even a capitol ship grazer is survivable at spitting distance. No nonsense about in one side and out the other with cruiser grade weapons.

Off hand, the Peeps would have had fewer casualties there if they'd just given up and rammed the SDs, suiciding 5 ships to assure destruction of the SDs instead of losing 6 of the 7 survivors and failing to destroy 5 of the 6 SDs (and the one kill they got being from missiles, not grazers).

Energy range for shipboard weapons is around 500,000 km.
Laserheads are 30,000 - 50,000 km and graser torps against sidewalls should be engaging from at least that close.

For whatever reason Honorverse energy weapons suffer significant damage reduction with range. So the closer you are the harder they hit. A CL firing on an SD from 500,000 will barely scratch the paint. Somehow bushwhack it from 40,000 km and the SD's going to be hurt.


And yes, a wedge to wedge collision can kill both ships; but only when the wedges are of fairly similar power (ships fairly similar in size). I'm pretty sure an BB is sufficiently smaller than an SD the the result of such a collision would be vaporized BBs and minor drive damage to the SDs. (Plus BBs aren't that much livlier than SDs. I don't think they'd have the acceleration advantage to actually force a collision; not in the handful of moments between realizing they were charging SDs rather than BCs and being blown apart by those SDs.

kzt wrote:No it won't. Close range a cruser graser will go through the sidewall of an SD. And through the armor and out the other side. 'But nobody could get that close!'

Sure, but how close is that? Would it be close enough for the graser torpedoes to be detected in the first place? Those things are big. They'd have to go through the LAC screen in the first place to hit an SD with sufficient energy.

If it's far enough, the three-second firing time is also not very relevant if the ship is in constant evasion. The graser torpedo can't predict where the ship will be and can only react with light lag.

Jonathan_S wrote:I generally conceed to your points. But I think it's fair to think that if a force is sent through hyper to retake a captured wormhole that the one place you can count on them eventually moving towards is that terminus.
So if you park yourself nearby then sooner or later the enemy will bring themselves into your attack range.

If you're the MAN commodore or admiral, would you park the MAlign's most powerful warships and most heavily guarded state secret (the spider drive) in sphere two light-seconds in radius, and everyone knows you're there?

You know the relief force is going to advance on the terminus and will need to sit on it to retake it. The problem is that the relief force is going to saturate that region with RDs and active sensors, so it's going to find your pre-positioned graser torpedoes and Lenny Dets. And by the time they've swept the terminus of danger and are ready to sit on it, they'll be expanding the sphere they've cleared of danger. So those graser torpedoes must have been at least a million km away and will need to turn on their spider drives while the relief force is nearby. Remember: the spike of the spider coming up is currently the most detectable aspect of the drive.

Yes, Graser torps do have very low accel. I thought it was on the order of the spider ship's acceleration - so around 150 gees; way below any warship's. (The torps don't have to worry so much about accel affecting their internals; but they aren't big enough to mount the number of spider projectors needed for higher accel). But if the enemy is coming to you then you can fire your torps right down their throats (or depending on range right up their kilts after they flip over to slow).

That was indeed the conclusion, though I take it with a grain of salt. RFC will figure something out to explain why they have an acceleration in the range of 1000 to 2000 G.

And if their vector is almost entirely towards you then you can use the torps low accel just to overcome whatever slight lateral vector the enemy has - deploying them more like a mobile minefield that the enemy will run themselves into. And unlike a minefield these can undetectably repossition so all can achieve that perfect down the throat shot where sidewalls aren't a factor. Even if the approaching force has buckler walls up those only provide cover from fire within a few degrees of dead ahead. Climbing or diving a bit off their plane of advance allows you to fire past the rim of the buckler into the poorly armored dorsal or ventral surface of the ship.

I don't think a graser torpedo at that range is undetectable. From 40,000 km, the range at which it can penetrate an SD sidewall and armour, it must be detectable. Not even Ghost Riders can get much closer than this. The graser torp is most deadly if fired way in advance so it can achieve a high velocity and come in ballistically, before firing. If it's repositioning, it's going to be found by the Ghost Riders and LACs.

The kilt and throat angles aren't wide enough to allow for random chance firing. And if I were the Manty admiral commanding the relief force, knowing the MAlign is out there with stealth units and GTs, I'd come in with sternwalls up, so you're still decelerating towards the terminus. And constantly evading, yawing, pitching, and rolling.

(But this does presume that graser torps are actually hard enough to detect that you can sneak them through a RD / LAC screen. Even detecting them within moments of firing might let the ships bring up their 2nd stage full bow wall; would radically blunt the effectiveness of the torps grasers)

Indeed.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:I'm thinking of Fourth Yeltsin, where Harrington takes SDs - Peep SDs, no less - into grazer range of battleships and mostly survives a few dozen hits to each ship. So no, even a capitol ship grazer is survivable at spitting distance. No nonsense about in one side and out the other with cruiser grade weapons.

Off hand, the Peeps would have had fewer casualties there if they'd just given up and rammed the SDs, suiciding 5 ships to assure destruction of the SDs instead of losing 6 of the 7 survivors and failing to destroy 5 of the 6 SDs (and the one kill they got being from missiles, not grazers).

Energy range for shipboard weapons is around 500,000 km.
Laserheads are 30,000 - 50,000 km and graser torps against sidewalls should be engaging from at least that close.

For whatever reason Honorverse energy weapons suffer significant damage reduction with range. So the closer you are the harder they hit. A CL firing on an SD from 500,000 will barely scratch the paint. Somehow bushwhack it from 40,000 km and the SD's going to be hurt.


And yes, a wedge to wedge collision can kill both ships; but only when the wedges are of fairly similar power (ships fairly similar in size). I'm pretty sure an BB is sufficiently smaller than an SD the the result of such a collision would be vaporized BBs and minor drive damage to the SDs. (Plus BBs aren't that much livlier than SDs. I don't think they'd have the acceleration advantage to actually force a collision; not in the handful of moments between realizing they were charging SDs rather than BCs and being blown apart by those SDs.

That's all well and good, but the crossing range here was thousands of kilometers, not even tens of thousands. They were basically in range to poke each other with pointy sticks if they'd had them. And in that range envelope I'm pretty sure the BBs have the speed advantage enough to force a ram considering the SDs had a base velocity pointed directly at them. The formations didn't pass each other, they interpenetrated with enemy ships at times actually inside the other side's formation. They'd have had to be actively avoiding collisions at that point.

True, we've only seen a couple ship wedge collisions and they were of similarly-sized ships. The SDs only have about 4 to 1 mass advantage, though, so it's likely the SD's drives would be completely wrecked even if the ship survived. But more likely they'd be destroyed outright.

drothgery wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:Off hand, the Peeps would have had fewer casualties there if they'd just given up and rammed the SDs, suiciding 5 ships to assure destruction of the SDs instead of losing 6 of the 7 survivors and failing to destroy 5 of the 6 SDs (and the one kill they got being from missiles, not grazers).

I could be wrong, but I think ramming an impeller-drive ship with its wedge and sidewalls up with another impeller-drive ship with its wedge and sidewalls up is pretty much impossible. Your own wedge won't fit through the gaps in the other ship's, and in a wedge fratricide situation, it's the smaller ship that's always going to lose (well, the less powerful wedge, but barring tugs, that's the smaller ship).

The goal is wedge fratricide, not a hull-to-hull contact. And the fact is we don't know what level of wedge disparity is survivable. We know very small wedges do no damage, as in missile wedges hitting a ship's wedge. But the only instance we have of a larger ship running down a smaller ship resulted in both being destroyed. That would be the freighter running down the Peep BC in With One Stone.