missiles

I was just wondering why missiles have laser heads or nukes.

Why not just have them accelerate to light speed?

They are gravity wedge powered and gravity can go faster than light speed.

Matter turns into energy and then hits the enemy ship, isn't that what you want to happen?

Simple reason - it would be boring!!!!

Let's just say that what your proposing would be very difficult to pull off - it would require a direct hit of some form. The laser head gives a stand-off capability which increases the likely hood of causing damage to the target.

Mike.

Gravity waves (in the Honorverse, not real life) are FTL, as they are ripples in extradimensional space. The manmade things that go with them in normal space aren't. Einstein is still the boss. Either the nodes burn out long before it hits lightspeed, or else it hits an molecule of H20 at 99% lightspeed and promptly vaporizes.

Michael Riddell wrote:Simple reason - it would be boring!!!!

Let's just say that what your proposing would be very difficult to pull off - it would require a direct hit of some form. The laser head gives a stand-off capability which increases the likely hood of causing damage to the target.

Mike.

It also requires an energy supply with sufficient juice to get the missiles that fast, impeller nodes durable enough to last long enough at high energy levels, and last but not least, enough room for your missiles to accelerate.

And all of that would result in a projectile that is ridiculously easy to see coming and very easy to evade and intercept.

A missile like that would combine the worst aspects of an old direct-contact nuke (the necessity to actually hit the target physically) with the worst aspects of an MDM (maneuverability at high speeds being effectively nil).

Lord Skimper wrote:I was just wondering why missiles have laser heads or nukes.

Why not just have them accelerate to light speed?

They are gravity wedge powered and gravity can go faster than light speed.

Matter turns into energy and then hits the enemy ship, isn't that what you want to happen?

Ever tried to maneuver something that is going .9c or faster? Also, the targeting sensors are going to be severely degraded at those speeds.

It takes time (and distance) to accelerate missiles to those speeds, and while the missile is accelerating the target has probably moved somewhere else so in my opinion it's not a very effective solution unless you are targeting a stationary target; a la KEW.

Lord Skimper wrote:I was just wondering why missiles have laser heads or nukes.

Why not just have them accelerate to light speed?

They are gravity wedge powered and gravity can go faster than light speed.

Matter turns into energy and then hits the enemy ship, isn't that what you want to happen?

To accelerate any object, like a ship or missle to light speed, it would require a hyper generator. As soon as one can be made small enough for a capital missle, your idea will be possible. Until then, the Honorverse will be stuck with grav drivers and impellers to push the missles along after launch.

The SEM has yet to reach the technological level of the Fourth Imperium, after all.

The whole reason for using 'contact' nukes initially, and more recently laser heads, is that scoring a physical hit at Honorverse velocities, and through Honorvers defences, is so difficult that trying to do so puts you at a serious disadvantage against an opponent using nukes or laser heads.

Two things are getting mashed together here. The reason why honorverse ships use warheads is because David Weber built the verse so they need them. A ~70t missile going ~.6c already has a kinetic energy edging into the terraton TNT range, 6 orders of magnitude higher than the megaton contact or laserhead nuke, and bremsstrahlung means even deflecting such a missile with your sidewall would turn it into a massive radiation source, besides that the difference between massive particles and light vanishes in the relativistic limit.

Accepting that kinetics don't work in the Honorverse, you can't accelerate missiles to light speed, as they would disintegrate. Maximum acceleration for a starship is given by its compensator, max accel for a missile is given by what acceleration the physical components can endure without a compensator.

Whitecold wrote:Two things are getting mashed together here. The reason why honorverse ships use warheads is because David Weber built the verse so they need them. A ~70t missile going ~.6c already has a kinetic energy edging into the terraton TNT range, 6 orders of magnitude higher than the megaton contact or laserhead nuke, and bremsstrahlung means even deflecting such a missile with your sidewall would turn it into a massive radiation source, besides that the difference between massive particles and light vanishes in the relativistic limit.

It's pretty clear from the text of HotQ that David didn't really understand the amount of energy that missiles moving that fast really have. You can see this in the discussion of using nuke warheads against Grayson without even mentioning the KE of the missiles at all.

kzt wrote:

Whitecold wrote:Two things are getting mashed together here. The reason why honorverse ships use warheads is because David Weber built the verse so they need them. A ~70t missile going ~.6c already has a kinetic energy edging into the terraton TNT range, 6 orders of magnitude higher than the megaton contact or laserhead nuke, and bremsstrahlung means even deflecting such a missile with your sidewall would turn it into a massive radiation source, besides that the difference between massive particles and light vanishes in the relativistic limit.

It's pretty clear from the text of HotQ that David didn't really understand the amount of energy that missiles moving that fast really have. You can see this in the discussion of using nuke warheads against Grayson without even mentioning the KE of the missiles at all.

Or the expectation was that nukes would be used because of the damage a kinetic strike could do.