long range laser

Bill Woods wrote: A laser head's range isn't anything like a light-second.

So? You are still predicting the location of an actively evading ship travelling at thousands of KMs per second.

The only thing you are spending when you fire your system based grasers is fusion plant fuel. If you use fission piles, much cheaper. So what if your prediction is wrong?

If you guessed right; for each missile pod you take out, you reduce the amount of missiles your ships have to defend against. For every LAC you damage, there is a big chance that it will reveal/confirm where the enemy's LAC group are.

All for the price of a couple of tons of hydrogen fuel or a couple of kilos of fissionable material.

With a throughput of something like an HV Graser, the emitter has got to wear out pretty darned fast. Same goes for all of the Bragg Filters etc. Assuming they even use such a thing in 2k years. We are talking insane power levels here. Worse yet is the hysteresis involved. Going from no power to Quadzillion billion watts is no walk in the park and I could easily see many components having to be completely replaced due to the stress fractures alone created by such shock.

If only price of Graser shot is the energy, then sure. Fire away. Somehow I doubt it in the extreme.

Besides with tractors being put in pods and on donkey rails, said pods will not be vulnerable all that long as they are very quickly depoloyed in RHN's case and near instantly in the RMN's case. It doesn't take a genius to figure out and copy what the two premier navies in the universe are doing. No sense reinventing the wheel.

PS. Tieing to real world. I would not be surprised in the slightest if the only true use for a laser on a ship or land is to illuminate the nose of the missile(s)/Bombs to such an extent that anti missile/bomb weaponry can easily lock on and be completely unjammable or blind them. IE use IR sensors only instead of relying on RADAR and radio frequencies which certainly can be spoofed and jammed. IR on the other hand...

Relax wrote:With a throughput of something like an HV Graser, the emitter has got to wear out pretty darned fast. Same goes for all of the Bragg Filters etc. Assuming they even use such a thing in 2k years. We are talking insane power levels here. Worse yet is the hysteresis involved. Going from no power to Quadzillion billion watts is no walk in the park and I could easily see many components having to be completely replaced due to the stress fractures alone created by such shock.

If only price of Graser shot is the energy, then sure. Fire away. Somehow I doubt it in the extreme.

Besides with tractors being put in pods and on donkey rails, said pods will not be vulnerable all that long as they are very quickly depoloyed in RHN's case and near instantly in the RMN's case. It doesn't take a genius to figure out and copy what the two premier navies in the universe are doing. No sense reinventing the wheel.

PS. Tieing to real world. I would not be surprised in the slightest if the only true use for a laser on a ship or land is to illuminate the nose of the missile(s)/Bombs to such an extent that anti missile/bomb weaponry can easily lock on and be completely unjammable or blind them. IE use IR sensors only instead of relying on RADAR and radio frequencies which certainly can be spoofed and jammed. IR on the other hand...

Dump all your old/refurbished grasers from old style dreadnoughts into your graser base... Add/replace from new victims of the salvage yards.

Rakhmamort wrote:

Bill Woods wrote: A laser head's range isn't anything like a light-second.

So? You are still predicting the location of an actively evading ship travelling at thousands of KMs per second.

The only thing you are spending when you fire your system based grasers is fusion plant fuel. If you use fission piles, much cheaper. So what if your prediction is wrong?

If you guessed right; for each missile pod you take out, you reduce the amount of missiles your ships have to defend against. For every LAC you damage, there is a big chance that it will reveal/confirm where the enemy's LAC group are.

All for the price of a couple of tons of hydrogen fuel or a couple of kilos of fissionable material.

First, for predicting location the important thing isn't the ship's speed, it's its acceleration (how much it can alter it's speed since you looked), and how accurately you knew it's location/trajectory in the first place.

A ship may be moving at many thousands of km per second. But even the quickest ship with a Manticoran compensator can barely alter that velocity by 7km/s in a second; and alter their pre-calculated position by roughly 3km. (And that's if they just accelerate in the direction they're already facing; turning takes much longer)

That said, a laserhead detonating at 50,000 km has a lightspeed sensor view of the target that's only 0.166 seconds old; and only has to predict it location another 0.166 seconds into the future. (And older laser-heads only stood off at 30,000 km; so cut those numbers to 0.1 seconds)

Way back at 1 light-second (~300,000 km) that's 6 to 10 times the delay; giving the ship far more time to displace from it's calculated trajectory. (And unless you have nearby FTL recon drones feeding you info, you also had a much less clear idea of exactly where it was, where it was pointed, to begin with)

cthia wrote:No need for anyone to throw me a bone. I was taught to build dinosaurs without them, with paper - remembering that paper is just wood.

I am not making this clear. I see no limits in the materials, only a limit in our minds, therefore in our "methods." Materials and methods. Materials and methods.

The problem is that the energy levels we are talking about are enough to completely strip any atom of all its electrons.

If you can actually imagine a physical material that can be used as a graser lens when all the electrons are removed and the temperature is raised to millions of degrees, then you might have a point. And perhaps you can imagine such a material, though it seems to me it would have to be more force field than anything we would call material. But the Honorverse does not have any such physical material. If they did, they would have armor that was impervious to grasers.

Honorverse uses non-material gravitic lenses on its grasers. Which sounds a lot like the force field I just suggested.

Bill Woods wrote: A laser head's range isn't anything like a light-second.

Rakhmamort wrote:
So? You are still predicting the location of an actively evading ship travelling at thousands of KMs per second.

The only thing you are spending when you fire your system based grasers is fusion plant fuel. If you use fission piles, much cheaper. So what if your prediction is wrong?

If you guessed right; for each missile pod you take out, you reduce the amount of missiles your ships have to defend against. For every LAC you damage, there is a big chance that it will reveal/confirm where the enemy's LAC group are.

All for the price of a couple of tons of hydrogen fuel or a couple of kilos of fissionable material.

Jonathan_S wrote:First, for predicting location the important thing isn't the ship's speed, it's its acceleration (how much it can alter it's speed since you looked), and how accurately you knew it's location/trajectory in the first place.

A ship may be moving at many thousands of km per second. But even the quickest ship with a Manticoran compensator can barely alter that velocity by 7km/s in a second; and alter their pre-calculated position by roughly 3km. (And that's if they just accelerate in the direction they're already facing; turning takes much longer)

That said, a laserhead detonating at 50,000 km has a lightspeed sensor view of the target that's only 0.166 seconds old; and only has to predict it location another 0.166 seconds into the future. (And older laser-heads only stood off at 30,000 km; so cut those numbers to 0.1 seconds)

Way back at 1 light-second (~300,000 km) that's 6 to 10 times the delay; giving the ship far more time to displace from it's calculated trajectory. (And unless you have nearby FTL recon drones feeding you info, you also had a much less clear idea of exactly where it was, where it was pointed, to begin with)

Eh ... speed sort of matters. But it's mainly the velocity of the missiles - more than fast enough to get into significant amounts of time dilation and other such fun relativistic effects.

Jonathan_S wrote: That said, a laserhead detonating at 50,000 km has a lightspeed sensor view of the target that's only 0.166 seconds old; and only has to predict it location another 0.166 seconds into the future. (And older laser-heads only stood off at 30,000 km; so cut those numbers to 0.1 seconds)

Way back at 1 light-second (~300,000 km) that's 6 to 10 times the delay; giving the ship far more time to displace from it's calculated trajectory. (And unless you have nearby FTL recon drones feeding you info, you also had a much less clear idea of exactly where it was, where it was pointed, to begin with)

Meaning 30–100 times the solid angle to cover. And within that, a group of pods is a lot smaller target than a ship.

Jonathan_S wrote:First, for predicting location the important thing isn't the ship's speed, it's its acceleration (how much it can alter it's speed since you looked), and how accurately you knew it's location/trajectory in the first place.

A ship may be moving at many thousands of km per second. But even the quickest ship with a Manticoran compensator can barely alter that velocity by 7km/s in a second; and alter their pre-calculated position by roughly 3km. (And that's if they just accelerate in the direction they're already facing; turning takes much longer)

That said, a laserhead detonating at 50,000 km has a lightspeed sensor view of the target that's only 0.166 seconds old; and only has to predict it location another 0.166 seconds into the future. (And older laser-heads only stood off at 30,000 km; so cut those numbers to 0.1 seconds)

Way back at 1 light-second (~300,000 km) that's 6 to 10 times the delay; giving the ship far more time to displace from it's calculated trajectory. (And unless you have nearby FTL recon drones feeding you info, you also had a much less clear idea of exactly where it was, where it was pointed, to begin with)

have you really thought about how fast the sequence of events happen at the end of a missile run? because of the terminal velocity the missiles have, the missiles have to 'guess' where the target ship is before it clears the enemy's wedges... it aligns itself before it releases the lasing rods because once those lasing rods are released there is no time to adjust them anymore...

the prediction happens way way before the explosion of the bomb that powers the x-ray lasers, physically turning the missiles so they align with their targets will take time...

counter missile targeting is also tougher since we are speaking about relative speeds that can be over light speed...

yes the lasers will take time to reach the target area, yes they might not do much... but they can do something and with ftl drones giving exact readings on enemy movement, guessing where the ships are and thus, where their pods are going to be place would be easier...

with the amount of old energy based DNs and SDs that went to the breakers, there are probably thousands of SD level energy weapons scattered around... nothing to do with them other than scrap or put the to some use...

You have almost 50 milliseconds to acquire, aim and fire. What could go wrong?

Rakhmamort wrote:have you really thought about how fast the sequence of events happen at the end of a missile run? because of the terminal velocity the missiles have, the missiles have to 'guess' where the target ship is before it clears the enemy's wedges... it aligns itself before it releases the lasing rods because once those lasing rods are released there is no time to adjust them anymore...

Laserheads *do* have miniature RCS thrusters (and internal gyros) for final minute adjustments and for damping any vibration caused by release. It all happens pretty quickly, as you stated, but it still takes a little time for the laserheads to get 150 meters or so ahead of the missile warhead prior to detonation (using said RCS).

You can see them in this image: http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/M ... -465724314

The RCS ports are the silver rectangular bits with the oval holes on the black bands.