SWM wrote:Lord Skimper wrote:The cluster warhead.
Might not this work on missiles as well?
As you all know I'm no physicist, I figured a gigawatt laser must use a lot of power, enough to power a country at current era for a while?
Given we can accelerate with a rail or guass gun a projectile to 8kms now, in 2000+ years making it go 100,000 times that shouldn't be out of the question. Just requires power.
Also couldn't the wedge just spit the projectile out at near light speed? Plus the build up would be, for a SD 280+km.
Also it depends how fast the enemy ship is going, if they are going 0.3c and you are going 0.2c you only need 0.5c any more wouldn't make any difference. Can't go faster than 1c.
Didn't consider sidewalls. Do ships flying into a system jig and jog or just fly in throat wide open? Jigging and jogging would slow them down, no?
I always read the books as having them come blazing right in.
I can see a slug that isn't right in front of a ship having an even harder time avoiding a sidewall, a slight angle off and the sidewall kills the idea. Unless you use a laser head or have this as an aft firing chase launcher, while running away. Some kind of wedge accelerated KEW launcher on a freighter might give a pirate second thoughts.
Skimper, you are misunderstanding the basic problem.
Suppose a graser has a power of 1 gigajoules. To produce the same amount of damage with a kinetic energy weapon, you have to have a kinetic energy of about 1 gigajoules. That means you have to expend more than 1 gigajoule accelerating that KEW.
So whether it is a beam weapon or a KEW, you have to somehow generate the about same amount of energy in order to produce a given amount of damage. This is a rough approximation, because certain types of armor work better against particular types of damage, so it depends somewhat on the armor. But at the energy ranges of Honorverse grasers, the type of damage damage is nearly identical to a kinetic impact, anyway.
Using less energy on your weapon just means that you will cause less damage. In order to cause the same amount of damage as a graser, you will have to use about the same amount of energy accelerating a KEW.
Issac Newton:
First law: When viewed in an inertial reference frame, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force.
Second law: F = ma. The vector sum of the forces F on an object is equal to the mass m of that object multiplied by the acceleration vector a of the object.
Third law: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.
Has anyone calculated how much recoil the ship that mounts this KEW experiences when it fires it? One of the nice things about lasers and grasers is they have practically no recoil. (They do have some - see the problems that satellites with very high precision pointing requirements have with the momentum imparted by sunlight striking their solar panels <an example of this is the Kepler telescope in its current degraded state with only 2 gyroscopic wheels operational> - but the recoil of a laser or graser is extremely small compared to accelerating a normal mass to incredibly high speeds.)
Would it exceed the capacity of the inertial compensator (instant anchovy paste for the crew)? (We have textev of the crew feeling the recoil of the broadside missiles when they are fired from the tubes. Might not be realistic from a technical point of view, but it's there.)
Would the recoil exceed even the ability of Honorverse materials to stand up to the forces involved?
