cralkhi wrote:OK so ship sidewalls destroy missile wedges (and thus are stronger than missile wedges), but are clearly weaker than ship wedges.
So what distinguishes a sidewall from a wedge? Forts have spherical sidewalls so a sidewall isn't necessarily connected to an active wedge. Is it just wedge = used for propulsion, sidewall = defense only, or are they actually different things?
Biggest difference is that a wedge is so powerful, nothing gets through, not even energy weapons, whereas a sidewall only "bends" incoming energy weapons fire. Sometimes it bends the beam enough to generate a miss. Almost always, it diffuses the incoming energy, so that even if it *does* hit, it's not quite as powerful as a hit through no sidewall would be.
OTOH, if the sidewall is strong enough, and the incoming fire is weak enough, say cruiser-weight missiles against SD-power sidewalls, the beam might not get through at all. Uprated Mk16s would be an exception, as their laserheads are pretty much as powerful as Mk23 laserheads, only differences being the power of the nuke generating the x-rays, and the number of actual laserheads (six for the Mk16 and ten for the Mk23).
They're generated differently as well (impeller nodes have nothing to do with sidewall generation), so I wouldn't really equate a sidewall with a wedge, other than the fact that both are gravitically-based
cralkhi wrote:Also... countermissiles destroy missiles by mutual wedge interaction. So now as missile ranges get longer and thus countermissiles become more and more important... could you get an edge by making missiles bigger and with stronger wedges, so existing countermissiles' wedges were insufficient to destroy them?
(Yes, the other side would figure it out quickly and build bigger countermissiles. But you might have a window of opportunity while they designed, built, and got the new countermissiles to all their ships.)
Or would the smaller number you could carry and potentially increased vulnerability to point defense lasers outweigh the benefit of being immune to existing countermissiles?
You probably *could* do that, but as you mention in your last paragraph, you would end up carrying fewer missiles. To generate a larger wedge, you would need to increase the power available, which means a larger reactor or larger (or more, or both) capacitors, probably larger impeller nodes (which creates their own problems since the impeller nodes can't project beyond the widest point on the main body of a missile - launch tube clearance), and so on.
Of course, because you now have larger missiles, you will also need larger launch tubes and handling and storage spaces, further cutting down on the total number carried.
The same drawbacks also apply to CMs that may be upgraded. Although in some ways, I have my doubts that CMs *would* need to be upgraded much, if at all. IMO, it's not so much that the wedges of both CMs and missiles are the same size (or that the CM wedge is larger), but just that within a certain percentage either way, it generates mutual destruction.
IOW, it may be that a CM wedge can be as much as 25% smaller than a missile wedge, and still kill it. I have nothing to back that up, and as far as I know, we haven't discussed that within BuNine or with David - it's just my own impression based mostly on the fact that pretty much *any* CM can take out any regular missile, regardless of which missile it is.
What that means is that in order to do what you are asking about, you may need to increase missile size by as much as 50-100% (if not more), and that would reduce the number carried by 25-50%. I don't think any ship commander would want to decrease his missile load by that much, even if he was sure he could get most (if not all) of his missiles through the CM screen. After all, there's still point defense and ECM. Sure, there would be more missiles making it through, but not much more, and reducing your complement by up to half means you still might not have enough to take out the ship(s) you're shooting at.
