Impeller wedge against ground target

munroburton wrote:It wouldn't shred the planet, but even if the wedge only flashed for a few seconds and the crust is thin enough, there could be a volcanic eruption(provided the planet also has a liquid core), with a crater measuring tens or hundreds of kilometres in diameter. Definitely on the scale of the Yellowstone Supervolcano.

If the wedge is moving relative to the planetary surface, it's going to cut a trench. What if a wedge moving at a high velocity(.6-.8c) sideswiped a planet? Even if the ship didn't come close enough for the wedge to contact the ground, it'd still do quite nasty things to the atmosphere.

MaxxQ wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I started thinking about the standoff distance as a side effect of playing with the geometry of the new buckler sidewalls. It turns out that that 10 km standoff makes a big difference for them because it generates a much narrower 'cone' of protected angles than if they could work from 5 km away.


Enemies or laserheads within that notional cone can't hit your ship without first going through the buckler; enemies or missiles outside the cone can hit some of your ship without encountering any sidewall. Then, much wider out, they start encountering the ends of you side-sidewalls. So if you drew it you'd have an odd looking vulnerability map; much taller than it is wide.[1]

[snip]
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[1] I've occasionally thought about trying to make such a diagram. Learn to use a 3D modeling tool, model the ship, wedge, bucklers, and sidewalls; from say an 8-10,000 km out viewpoint. Use it to generate different colored zones showing where it's 1) protected by wedge; 2) by sidewall and armor; 3) by only one or the other; 4) unprotected.)

Quoted the whole thing because I agree with it, but I'm only addressing your "fine print".

We've kinda/sorta done that at BuNine. The only difference is that my 3D model doesn't include bucklers. Not that that's difficult to add to the existing mesh. Andrew needed it to do some figuring for one of his talks at HonorCon last year, except he showed it from attack missile range.

(I just didn't want to enough to actually do it yet )

Commodore Oakius wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:OTOH, we've seen people carving wood and ice with chainsaws, and using explosives to carve mountains... who's to say that some oddball artist 2000 years from now wouldn't be using spare moons or asteroids as his sculpting material, using a wedge to do the carving?

Hey art is art. Who are we to question, just no people on the moons, give a bad though to the idea of San Jus face on the moon over Nouvo Pari.
"State Sec. is your friend!"

Commodore Oakius wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:OTOH, we've seen people carving wood and ice with chainsaws, and using explosives to carve mountains... who's to say that some oddball artist 2000 years from now wouldn't be using spare moons or asteroids as his sculpting material, using a wedge to do the carving?

Hey art is art. Who are we to question, just no people on the moons, give a bad though to the idea of San Jus face on the moon over Nouvo Pari.
"State Sec. is your friend!"

Theemile wrote:About 6-7 years ago there was some young man driving around state to state in the mid US placing pipe bombs in people's mailboxes

when plotted on a map, he drew a smiley face.....

He also called it art...

MaxxQ wrote:

Theemile wrote:About 6-7 years ago there was some young man driving around state to state in the mid US placing pipe bombs in people's mailboxes

when plotted on a map, he drew a smiley face.....

He also called it art...

Way to kill a humorous thread derailing...

Theemile wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:
Way to kill a humorous thread derailing...

What can I say - I'm a Buzz kill

MaxxQ wrote:

SCC wrote:I see three problems with this idea.
1) We have never seen an Impellar wedge of the right size (100 meters across)

Although size is never mentioned, there are two instances where we've seen smallish surface to air missiles used to take out targets. I would guess that the wedge size for those are *at most* 100 meters across, but most likely it's somewhat smaller.

SCC wrote:2) It may not be possible to get it working in an atmosphere, I think there are some sort of limits on how close a wedge of a given size can be operated in an atmosphere

Oh, a wedge can definitely work in an atmosphere. It's just that there are *so* many problems when you do. Even on a pinnace, disregarding the size of the wedge (over 10km on a side, most likely), there's also the issue of how far the wedge is from the pinnace. The center of each wedge plane is probably going to be somewhere around 2-3km away from the pinnace, which would place the leading edges at around 4km above *and* below the plane of the pinnace.

Safety (all other considerations aside) would require that a pinnace approach no closer than 6-7km from the surface. Any closer than that, and you start tearing up rocks, dirt, trees, people, buildings, near-dogs and pseudo-cats, mountains, and so on.

SCC wrote:3) There's the issue of the rest of the planet exploding, remember when Harkness made Randsom's BC blow up the BC was a lot bigger then the pinace he had bring up the wedge

That would only happen if the wedge was lit up underground, and even then, I doubt it would tear the planet to shreds like that. The largest wedges are those attached to SDs and they're only 300km on a side. A livable planet would be roughly 10,000km diameter or so. That's a big difference in ratio from that of a pinnace wedge inside a BC - the pinnace wedge is still *larger* than the size of the BC, whereas in the planetary scenario, the *planet* is orders of magnitude larger than the wedge.

At All Costs, Chapter 13 wrote:"A pinnace has a far weaker wedge than any regular warship or merchantman. It's enormously smaller, for one thing, not more than a kilometer in width, and less powerful. The little hip-pocket fusion plants we put into small craft couldn't even begin to power an all-up wedge for a ship the size of a LAC. Which is just as well, because they use old-fashioned mag bottle technology and laser-fired fusing that's not a lot more advanced than they were using back on Old Earth Ante Diaspora. We've made a hell of a lot of advances since then, of course, in order to shoehorn the plants down to fit into pinnaces, but the way they're built puts a low absolute ceiling on their output.

Vince wrote:Regarding the size of a pinnace's wedge:

At All Costs, Chapter 13 wrote:"A pinnace has a far weaker wedge than any regular warship or merchantman. It's enormously smaller, for one thing, not more than a kilometer in width, and less powerful. The little hip-pocket fusion plants we put into small craft couldn't even begin to power an all-up wedge for a ship the size of a LAC. Which is just as well, because they use old-fashioned mag bottle technology and laser-fired fusing that's not a lot more advanced than they were using back on Old Earth Ante Diaspora. We've made a hell of a lot of advances since then, of course, in order to shoehorn the plants down to fit into pinnaces, but the way they're built puts a low absolute ceiling on their output.

Boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.