Impeller wedge against ground target

aairfccha wrote:In CoG, a megaton yield kinetic strike is used to destroy a tower on Mesa, with considerable damage in the vicinity and underground. Couldn't this have been accomplished more precise using a pinnace or reconnaissance drone with active impeller wedge at zero thrust and hovering on countergrav or with thrusters?

Even if this also sends debris flying around, underground damage should be greatly reduced. Of course, suddenly losing altitude would be quite disastrous.

MaxxQ wrote:

aairfccha wrote:In CoG, a megaton yield kinetic strike is used to destroy a tower on Mesa, with considerable damage in the vicinity and underground. Couldn't this have been accomplished more precise using a pinnace or reconnaissance drone with active impeller wedge at zero thrust and hovering on countergrav or with thrusters?

Even if this also sends debris flying around, underground damage should be greatly reduced. Of course, suddenly losing altitude would be quite disastrous.

You do realize that even a pinnace wedge size is measured in kilometers, right?

aairfccha wrote:In CoG, a megaton yield kinetic strike is used to destroy a tower on Mesa, with considerable damage in the vicinity and underground. Couldn't this have been accomplished more precise using a pinnace or reconnaissance drone with active impeller wedge at zero thrust and hovering on countergrav or with thrusters?

kzt wrote:The AT and AA warheads discussed previously in books use wedges. They would be highly suited for dealing with these kind of structures, but you'd need more than a few.

Weird Harold wrote:

aairfccha wrote:In CoG, a megaton yield kinetic strike is used to destroy a tower on Mesa, with considerable damage in the vicinity and underground. Couldn't this have been accomplished more precise using a pinnace or reconnaissance drone with active impeller wedge at zero thrust and hovering on countergrav or with thrusters?

It could have been accomplished more precisely simply by programming the KEW differently -- at least if Mesan KEWs are comparable to the Manticoran system used in Shadow of Freedom.

It wasn't that a megaton yield was required, but that it was desired, including the "considerable damage in the vicinity and underground."

jtg452 wrote:I always assumed that they used the wedges to accelerate and just let the kinetic energy of that sort of speed to do the damage on the KEW weapons.

Shadow of Freedom
Chapter Thirty-One
wrote: The Mark 87 “Damocles” Kinetic Strike Package was a containerized weapon system designed to fit into any standard shipboard magazine and sized to deploy through a counter-missile launch tube. The KSP could be configured with several different types of payloads, but the most common variant—like the one which had been deployed from Quentin Saint-James number three CM tube shortly after she’d entered orbit—carried a rack of six of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps’ M412 kinetic penetrators. Each penetrator was a six hundred and fifty kilogram dart fitted with its own small, short-lived but powerful impeller drive, a capacitor ring for onboard power, and a guidance package. By controlling acceleration rates and times, the M412 could produce an effective yield of up to one megaton…but this particular application called for a slightly smaller sledgehammer than that.

The projectile impacted at barely one tenth of a percent of light speed. The tower was enormous, the projectile wasn’t all that huge, and its velocity might seem positively snail-like compared to the eighty percent of light speed a Mark 23 could attain, but it was sufficient. In fact, its produced an effective yield of just over sixty-seven kilotons as it struck dead center on the tower’s roof at an angle of exactly ninety degrees and punched straight down, pithing it with a spike of plasma that vaporized everything in its path.

Jonathan_S wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:You do realize that even a pinnace wedge size is measured in kilometers, right?

And the relativistic spray of matter thrown off by it hitting the insanely high grav field of the wedge probably doesn't do great things for the surrounding area.

Though we've seen far, far, smaller wedges on SAMs used endoatmospheric

jtg452 wrote:You really don't need to do anything else if you start throwing serious weights at those kinds of speeds. The energy transfer to the target when the projectile is going fast enough for it to be best to measure the velocity in fractions of the speed of light is going to be bad enough.