Graser replacement

Grasers use a lot of power a deliver over a relatively short range a massive energy blast. One would think that a fraction of the energy could accelerate a KEW based cannon to very high fractional C speeds over very long ranges. Such a warhead could be a standard slug or a nuke head or a laser head. It would give little to no signature and hit for a great deal of damage. A 3-5 metre diameter slug of rolled homogenous armour travelling at 0.9c would hit very hard. With a laser head could fly at or past a target and fire at the target without the target knowing where the KEW laser head is.

With no wedge it would be almost as accurate as a Graser without the range limitation. And multiple shots could be grouped machine gun close. Smaller denser diameters keep the KEW damage high but limit the firing apparatus size.

0.9c or less added to the approaching speed would make the flight closing speed 1c. Same as a graser invisible undetectable. You only know it has fired at you when it hits or misses you.

Mount a 50 cm KEW on a shrike in place of the graser. And you have a fast machine gun KEW weapon able to take out any light to medium armoured vessel quickly invisibly and at extreme range.

Lord Skimper wrote:Grasers use a lot of power a deliver over a relatively short range a massive energy blast. One would think that a fraction of the energy could accelerate a KEW based cannon to very high fractional C speeds over very long ranges. Such a warhead could be a standard slug or a nuke head or a laser head. It would give little to no signature and hit for a great deal of damage. A 3-5 metre diameter slug of rolled homogenous armour travelling at 0.9c would hit very hard. With a laser head could fly at or past a target and fire at the target without the target knowing where the KEW laser head is.

With no wedge it would be almost as accurate as a Graser without the range limitation. And multiple shots could be grouped machine gun close. Smaller denser diameters keep the KEW damage high but limit the firing apparatus size.

0.9c or less added to the approaching speed would make the flight closing speed 1c. Same as a graser invisible undetectable. You only know it has fired at you when it hits or misses you.

Mount a 50 cm KEW on a shrike in place of the graser. And you have a fast machine gun KEW weapon able to take out any light to medium armoured vessel quickly invisibly and at extreme range.

Actually, the energy necessary to accelerate a projectile to those speeds would probably be far higher than a graser. In addition, David has already noted that the primary limitation on the range of Honorverse energy beams is aiming and target location uncertainty. That will be just as true for your KEWs as for beams, so they will have the same limitation on range.

In addition, how exactly do you think you can accelerate these KEWs in the short distance of a ship-mounted weapon? Missiles don't even get that high, and they are accelerating for up to minutes at enormous accelerations and over distances of up to light-minutes. There is no way you could get a KEW up to 0.9 c in a just few hundred meters, or in just tens of meters for a LAC.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle, "to reach 1% of light speed over the length of a one-meter accelerator would require 4.5 * 10^12 m/s^2 (or over 450 billion g) of acceleration."

Ok, call it a 10 metre long accelerator: 1% of lightspeed would still need 45,000,000,000g of acceleration. Ok, let's go to the stupid waste of resources example: Using the 1395 metre length(of the HV's longest warship) as an accelerator: 322,580,645g.

1% of light speed. Assuming .9c is the objective, the SD-length accelerator would need "only" 29,032,258,064g of acceleration. For the ten-metre accelerator, 4.05 trillion gravities of acceleration is required.

The highest acceleration record in the Honorverse hasn't exceeded 100,000g yet. No warhead available is going to survive the huge accelerations implied by such a weapon.

Accuracy is also going to be problematic. The graser's maximum effective range is limited because targets under full power can make all sorts of evasive maneuvers, never mind simply rolling their wedge. The further away they are, the earlier you are going to have to predict their movements and using a cee-fractional weapon instead of a lightspeed weapon will only shrink that effective range, producing an inferior result.

I follow all your logics, and I agree. But I have another question: has it ever been discussed about the power requirements needed to fire a grazer, or lazer, continueously for, say, 10 seconds? This would allow limited tracking capability, presuming the mounts was capable of moving to do the tracking.

munroburton wrote:The highest acceleration record in the Honorverse hasn't exceeded 100,000g yet. No warhead available is going to survive the huge accelerations implied by such a weapon.

Minor nit: IIRC, the Viper and Mk31 CMs hit 130,000 g's at max setting. Just going by memory, but I definitely recall *something* hitting that number.

Commodore Oakius wrote:I follow all your logics, and I agree. But I have another question: has it ever been discussed about the power requirements needed to fire a grazer, or lazer, continueously for, say, 10 seconds? This would allow limited tracking capability, presuming the mounts was capable of moving to do the tracking.

Not possible. Unless you use the graser torpedo from the MAlign, and then it self-destructs due to overloading. Shipboard grasers are fed power from capacitors, which release their energy in a single burst, then need to be recharged.

munroburton wrote:The highest acceleration record in the Honorverse hasn't exceeded 100,000g yet. No warhead available is going to survive the huge accelerations implied by such a weapon.

In theory, an impeller drive can accelerate instantaneously to light speed. No warhead would be needed, just a drive that could come close to theory.

With that theoretically available why go to the trouble and expense of developing a rail-gun (aka KEW launcher) that can't do 1% of what an impeller drive KEW could (can) do.

MaxxQ wrote:

Commodore Oakius wrote:I follow all your logics, and I agree. But I have another question: has it ever been discussed about the power requirements needed to fire a grazer, or lazer, continueously for, say, 10 seconds? This would allow limited tracking capability, presuming the mounts was capable of moving to do the tracking.

Not possible. Unless you use the graser torpedo from the MAlign, and then it self-destructs due to overloading. Shipboard grasers are fed power from capacitors, which release their energy in a single burst, then need to be recharged.

First (from the bit I snipped), you remembered the Mk13/Viper accel correctly. AAC, ch 19 confirmed it's 130,000g for 75 sec.

Second even if you could step down the power or otherwise lengthen the firing time of an energy mount it wouldn't really help for tracking. At energy range you're over half a light-second away. So you're already having to lead the ship and fire where you think it'll be. Attempting to correct a continous beam based on how far wide it missed means you're making a correction based on 0.5+ sec old data to attempt to hit in another 0.5+ seconds.

That might tell you if your emitter was somehow misaligned, so you aren't hitting the point in space you were targeting. But it does nothing to help you know exactly which point in space their ship will be in another half-second from now. (And assuming your sensors or remote platforms are use to seeing how far you missed your aim point I'm not sure why they'd have an easier time doing that to a continuous beam that's waving around rather than a pulsed burst)

Commodore Oakius wrote:I follow all your logics, and I agree. But I have another question: has it ever been discussed about the power requirements needed to fire a grazer, or lazer, continueously for, say, 10 seconds? This would allow limited tracking capability, presuming the mounts was capable of moving to do the tracking.

MaxxQ wrote:Not possible. Unless you use the graser torpedo from the MAlign, and then it self-destructs due to overloading. Shipboard grasers are fed power from capacitors, which release their energy in a single burst, then need to be recharged.

Jonathan_S wrote:First (from the bit I snipped), you remembered the Mk13/Viper accel correctly. AAC, ch 19 confirmed it's 130,000g for 75 sec.

Second even if you could step down the power or otherwise lengthen the firing time of an energy mount it wouldn't really help for tracking. At energy range you're over half a light-second away. So you're already having to lead the ship and fire where you think it'll be. Attempting to correct a continous beam based on how far wide it missed means you're making a correction based on 0.5+ sec old data to attempt to hit in another 0.5+ seconds.

That might tell you if your emitter was somehow misaligned, so you aren't hitting the point in space you were targeting. But it does nothing to help you know exactly which point in space their ship will be in another half-second from now. (And assuming your sensors or remote platforms are use to seeing how far you missed your aim point I'm not sure why they'd have an easier time doing that to a continuous beam that's waving around rather than a pulsed burst)

(Stupid nested quote rule. . . [grumble, grumble, grumble] What idiot designed this site?! I mean ---- What? Oh. Oh, yeah, that's right. Forget I said anything. )

In fairness, and while all the reasons which have been adduced for why you can't generate very long "bursts" from weapons as powerful as grasers in the HV are completely correct, the ability to do so (if possible) would have some advantages for fire control. In essence, it would let you create a larger version of what the USN called the "danger zone" for BB gunnery. If you have a projected volume in which your target might be, the ability to sweep clear across that volume (or a largish chunk of it) with a single shot would increase your chance of scoring a hit as opposed to using a weapon which can target only a single point within that volume.

The notion of doing that with a KEW is fairly ludicrous, however, and using a weapon even 10% lower than the speed of light will cause a decrease in hit probability vis-à-vis a beam weapon unless the KEW has the ability to maneuver to track its target. This is, essentially, the description of a missile except that laserheads have the ability to engage targets at range without needing to score a direct hit.

And the notion that even HV tech could accelerate to "near light-speed" in any conceivable internally or pod-mounted launcher is . . . ill conceived, to say the very least. If the HV did go for ship-to-ship kinetic weapons, they would indeed have to be an adaptation of existing missile as Weird Harold has suggested. The problems in getting through the defensive zone and actually hitting the target would remain, but it would at least let you accelerate to higher cee-fractional speeds . . . depending on the range. And, of course, the longer the range (and hence the acceleration time), the poorer the firing solution at launch.

There's a reason I use KEWs for planetary combat and against very short-range targets in space but not at anything approaching normal fleet combat ranges or true cee-fractional velocities.

Did someone say "danger zone?"





(Sorry, I just like Archer a lot. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.)