Armor in the Honorverse

How damage resistant are Honorverse armor materials, really? There's a comment in one of the novels about a warship's viewing port's materials being several times tougher than the toughest pre-diaspora armor. And that wasn't even the warship's armor.



Honorverse has antigrav technology and Honorverse materials are ceramics and carbon composites rather than metal alloys. Imagine a tank with 6 feet of external armor from Honorverse materials. Would it stand up to tactical nukes?

Belial666 wrote:How damage resistant are Honorverse armor materials, really? There's a comment in one of the novels about a warship's viewing port's materials being several times tougher than the toughest pre-diaspora armor. And that wasn't even the warship's armor.



Honorverse has antigrav technology and Honorverse materials are ceramics and carbon composites rather than metal alloys. Imagine a tank with 6 feet of external armor from Honorverse materials. Would it stand up to tactical nukes?

You must define what you mean by damage. Damage is a vary vague term. Are we talking specific damage, or concentrated?

Specific is used for say modern tank armor or body armor vests. A set damage tolerance level for a specific weight. Once one goes past an energy density, this exact specification for said armor will once again not be optimum. Or if say a different type of energy is trying to be stopped. Ultimately, all armor must adhere to specific damage tolerance otherwise the tanks can't cross bridges, people cannot move, ships sink, airplanes cannot fly, spaceships require vastly more power etc.

Concentrated is more akin to an immovable object that will not be penetrated. Most think of this as steel, whereas specific damage assessment is generally give, but do not break. A simple example of this is spalling. Early tanks were made from steel. To kill the people inside all you had to do was shoot 50 cal against the side of the tank. While the bullets did not go through the armor, the energy transferred in stopping the bullet cold caused the INSIDE face of the armor to spall(blister), sending large pieces of steel flying around on the INSIDE of the tank, killing the crew.

In regards to damage, you must be fairly specific when designing to certain standards for energy disbursement for electrical spindrift, propagation, magnetization, ionization, welding etc. Some materials are wonderful for impact damage but piss poor for say, electrical, EMP. This is especially true when we are talking about Extremely high energy intensities as ultimately physical armor will turn into a plasma that now must be dealt with.

Tactical nukes... Sheesh, can ya be more vague? Is that 20kt? 5Mt? The answer is already yes/no. All depends on power level on how much physical material can be turned into a plasma instantly.

Shake off tactical nukes? heck yes, though maybe not if you put one right on an unarmored hull. [a la the 200Kton bomb that blew up the repair ship in HoE] One of the handwavium elements in the Honorverse has to do with that armoring, in fact. Considering that a fairly small atomic weapon (10Ktons) would put any current aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz is 333 meters) on the bottom of the ocean in one hit, and the warheads in the Honorverse are megaton range. That's a fireball 2-5 km in diameter, except focused into lasers that target the ships. Boom mode is even higher. So that's a 1000-4000x bigger bang.

By comparison, HMS Fearless CL-56 is 389 meters, and took several hits before it was mostly disabled-- and that's an "unarmored" early PD18XX built cruiser mission killed in PD1901. To take out an SD is supposed to require take hits from around 200 capital missiles (likely +45 megaton) [with the SD massing 100x more then CL-56, and carrying the thickest armoring in space], being targetted by something on the order of 9 Gigatons of energy, and yet the ship may not be vaporized as much as hulked.

Nukes in space are not nearly as effective as they are in an atmosphere. There is no fireball, there is no shockwave, there is no EMP (as usually thought of). There is a hell of a lot of xrays and a decent amount of gammas, so damage is mostly via xray/gamma irradiation, and impulsive thermal shock if you are REALLY close.

Damage radius is much smaller than you would expect, particularly given that the Honorverse has absurdly effective radiation screening.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... sive_Shock

SharkHunter wrote:Shake off tactical nukes? heck yes, though maybe not if you put one right on an unarmored hull. [a la the 200Kton bomb that blew up the repair ship in HoE] One of the handwavium elements in the Honorverse has to do with that armoring, in fact. Considering that a fairly small atomic weapon (10Ktons) would put any current aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz is 333 meters) on the bottom of the ocean in one hit, and the warheads in the Honorverse are megaton range. That's a fireball 2-5 km in diameter, except focused into lasers that target the ships. Boom mode is even higher. So that's a 1000-4000x bigger bang.

By comparison, HMS Fearless CL-56 is 389 meters, and took several hits before it was mostly disabled-- and that's an "unarmored" early PD18XX built cruiser mission killed in PD1901. To take out an SD is supposed to require take hits from around 200 capital missiles (likely +45 megaton) [with the SD massing 100x more then CL-56, and carrying the thickest armoring in space], being targetted by something on the order of 9 Gigatons of energy, and yet the ship may not be vaporized as much as hulked.

Sharky what is the distance from the first nuclear explosion where the steel structure holding said bomb was still intact... Then do yourself a favor and look up nuclear bombs at Bikini atol Bravo, charlie etc. Battleships and cruisers from WWII are just fine. The air shock wave on the other hand did the damage. It wasn't until someone had the bright idea to detonate a nuclear warhead underwater under the ships that nuclear warheads came into the fore for sinking ships. You will note then that while the ships were literally blown into the air a thousand feet, they were still intact and it was not until they "dived" into the sea that the damage occurred. You can even see it on youtube. Enjoy the search.

Honorverse ships currently are not hit with nuclear warheads. That part happened about 200+ years ago. A laser is an entirely different animal. Read In Fire Forged to get a handle of what happens in high energy physics. Xray and higher is required and even then, it must be very high band Xray at that otherwise said lasers ain't doing squat.

The best analysis of the damage resistance of Honorverse armor is in An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design, published in In Fire Forged.

wastedfly wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Shake off tactical nukes? heck yes, though maybe not if you put one right on an unarmored hull. [a la the 200Kton bomb that blew up the repair ship in HoE] One of the handwavium elements in the Honorverse has to do with that armoring, in fact. Considering that a fairly small atomic weapon (10Ktons) would put any current aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz is 333 meters) on the bottom of the ocean in one hit, and the warheads in the Honorverse are megaton range. That's a fireball 2-5 km in diameter, except focused into lasers that target the ships. Boom mode is even higher. So that's a 1000-4000x bigger bang.

By comparison, HMS Fearless CL-56 is 389 meters, and took several hits before it was mostly disabled-- and that's an "unarmored" early PD18XX built cruiser mission killed in PD1901. To take out an SD is supposed to require take hits from around 200 capital missiles (likely +45 megaton) [with the SD massing 100x more then CL-56, and carrying the thickest armoring in space], being targetted by something on the order of 9 Gigatons of energy, and yet the ship may not be vaporized as much as hulked.

Sharky what is the distance from the first nuclear explosion where the steel structure holding said bomb was still intact... Then do yourself a favor and look up nuclear bombs at Bikini atol Bravo, charlie etc. Battleships and cruisers from WWII are just fine. The air shock wave on the other hand did the damage. It wasn't until someone had the bright idea to detonate a nuclear warhead underwater under the ships that nuclear warheads came into the fore for sinking ships. You will note then that while the ships were literally blown into the air a thousand feet, they were still intact and it was not until they "dived" into the sea that the damage occurred. You can even see it on youtube. Enjoy the search.

Honorverse ships currently are not hit with nuclear warheads. That part happened about 200+ years ago. A laser is an entirely different animal. Read In Fire Forged to get a handle of what happens in high energy physics. Xray and higher is required and even then, it must be very high band Xray at that otherwise said lasers ain't doing squat.

Y'all I am acknowledging all those elements, relative to atmospheric shock wave being a major source of the destruction in atomic bursts, etc. in the smaller weapons. The Handavium part is that if a multimegaton blast were focused into an area that small, there's any shielding that wouldn't explode (the spalling problem). In fact, the major source of deaths other than IC failure or the fusion bottles letting go is the spalling of that armor putting fragments of the ship through vulnerable areas like the bridge (SVW, HoE, AAC). Very realistic.

That said, I've never had trouble with RFC/MMW's descriptions of the armoring and his giving the folks of the future survivable warships based on complex spaced based metallurgy and composites, or with "grav lensing" warheads that can focus a multimegaton blast to generate the X-Ray lasers to overcome both that armoring and the distance limitations that would otherwise be in play.

A good author, especially in the military/sci fi arena has both problems and solutions in opposition to each other, and one reason we like these books and playing in this universe/forum, is that David is consistent with his tech.

wastedfly wrote:You must define what you mean by damage.

Damage not covered by a manufacturer's warranty ?

Also what is important is that the crew survive the encounter. It does little or no good if the ship is racked, stabbed, zapped, burned, punched, and shaken, (not stired) like a rat in the teeth of a good ... well ... a good hungry rat terrier dog and can actually survive such harsh treatment if the human crew all get pulped into red jam. Yucko.

HB of CJ (old coot) Junior Captain now sosss all of you underlings better salute! They will promote ANYBODY is this here outfit! Yikes!

SharkHunter wrote:The Handavium part is that if a multimegaton blast were focused into an area that small, there's any shielding that wouldn't explode (the spalling problem). In fact, the major source of deaths other than IC failure or the fusion bottles letting go is the spalling of that armor putting fragments of the ship through vulnerable areas like the bridge (SVW, HoE, AAC). Very realistic.

The blasts from the warhead isn't focused onto a particularly small area, even for an 'contact' nuke working in burn mode. Redirecting the blast from a 50 megaton bomb so that it all goes even vaguely forwards isn't easily done, even with Honorverse tech. If they could focus the entire output of the bomb into a single laser-like beam then it would be enormously destructive, though I suspect a lot of the energy would be wasted as it punched right through the target and into open space beyond. However, even with the latest-generation of Manticoran grav lenses, a laser-head missile still wastes an enormous amount of the energy produced by the nuke, simply because the lasing rods are tiny compared to the area exposed to the bomb energy.