Warshawsky sail question

First time post, and I apologize if the idea has been put forward before or already discredited, but I haven't seen it on the forums while I lurked.

Not knowing the minimum dimensions necessary for a craft/platform to generate a warshawsky sail, I keep wondering why counter-missiles use wedges and not overpowered sails to swat other missiles. I know they add no propulsion in normal space but there is always mention of how big they are, and they are as impenetrable as wedges. Think of them as bucklers, or possibly scaled armor. Or throw a few of them on ship killers as the trailers, since there are several instances of missile swarms interpenetrating.

Now, let the noob trashing begin. ~Patiently waits for a beating~

sdwoodwa wrote:First time post, and I apologize if the idea has been put forward before or already discredited, but I haven't seen it on the forums while I lurked.

Not knowing the minimum dimensions necessary for a craft/platform to generate a warshawsky sail, I keep wondering why counter-missiles use wedges and not overpowered sails to swat other missiles. I know they add no propulsion in normal space but there is always mention of how big they are, and they are as impenetrable as wedges. Think of them as bucklers, or possibly scaled armor. Or throw a few of them on ship killers as the trailers, since there are several instances of missile swarms interpenetrating.

Now, let the noob trashing begin. ~Patiently waits for a beating~

Welcome to the forums, or at least welcome to posting at the forums.

Unfortunately your suspicion is correct, this is discredited. Generating an sail required Alpha nodes, which are much larger, expensive, and complex than Beta impeller nodes. Nothing smaller than a starship mounts, or can mount Alpha nodes. So a missile can't physically fit the type of nodes required to generate a sail. (David Weber, also known here as RFC, shot that variend down when people wanted sail powered missiles for combat within grav waves. You can have one as long as you're willing to fire, IIRC, roughly 20,000 ton missiles )

[edited to add]
However even if you could there doesn't seem to be a big advantage. Honor of the Queen tells us that the CL Fearless's Warshawski sail was a three-hundred-kilometer disk; which is definitely big. But her wedge is roughly 300 km across, and the front opening is roughly 190 km high. So her sail has a frontal area of about 70,685 km^2; while her wedge has about 57,000 km^2. (I'm using the height of the opening because if she was a CM anything trying to fly down that opening would suffer destruction from touching one or the other of the wedge planes)

So on a given hull the sail only has about 20% more area, but to get that you give up 100% of your terminal acceleration. And because it takes several seconds for an alpha node to switch from wedge to sail you're giving up critical terminal maneuvering time for a marginally larger impact zone. I don't think it's worth it even if you could cram an alpha node ring into a missile.


But don't worry. We all have ideas that get shot down from time to time. I hope this doesn't discourage you from continuing to participate here.[end edit]

[edit 2: I see while I was checking sizes for my edit that SWM beat me to it on the relative size issue]

sdwoodwa wrote:First time post, and I apologize if the idea has been put forward before or already discredited, but I haven't seen it on the forums while I lurked.

Not knowing the minimum dimensions necessary for a craft/platform to generate a warshawsky sail, I keep wondering why counter-missiles use wedges and not overpowered sails to swat other missiles. I know they add no propulsion in normal space but there is always mention of how big they are, and they are as impenetrable as wedges. Think of them as bucklers, or possibly scaled armor. Or throw a few of them on ship killers as the trailers, since there are several instances of missile swarms interpenetrating.

Now, let the noob trashing begin. ~Patiently waits for a beating~

Warshawski sails on ships are about as big as impeller wedges on the same ships. So using sails would not be any better than simply using wedges. In addition, you can't make Warshawski sail missiles. Warshawski sails require alpha nodes, which are far too big for missiles. see: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/97/1.

As for why they don't use wedges to hit ships, there are several problems. One is that if a missile wedge hits a ship wedge, the missile will be destroyed--the stronger wedge will destroy the smaller wedge, and whatever vehicle generated it. See: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/178/1.

If a missile tries manages to get through the point defense and tries to thread its way between the impeller bands, it will hit the sidewall. The sidewall is designed to destroy the missile if that happens. Contact nuke missiles carry penaids, or penetration aids, which attempt to allow the missile to penetrate the sidewall. Current technology favors the point defense and sidewalls--missiles almost never manage to penetrate the sidewall. If one does manage it, a contact nuke will explode on the other side of the sidewall, hopefully near the ship. But contact nukes are almost never used in modern warfare because of the extremely low probability of penetration.

If a missile tried to go up the kilt or down the throat to hit the ship, it would have a really narrow gap. The sidewalls are only 20 km apart, and the missile wedge is believed to be at least 10 km wide. Threading this needle while the ship is dodging would be nearly impossible.

At one time, it actually was standard practice to use missile wedges against ships. But that was before modern point defense and sidewalls.

Welcome to the forums!

The biggest single reason is that there are no grav waves in normal space for a sail to use.

That being the case, a missile equipped with sails instead of impellers would only be useful for a battle in hyper within a grav wave. It isn't a good idea for ships to carry the things around when they're very unlikely to ever use them - as well as taking up space that could be occupied by missiles that they could use.

JohnRoth wrote:The biggest single reason is that there are no grav waves in normal space for a sail to use.

That being the case, a missile equipped with sails instead of impellers would only be useful for a battle in hyper within a grav wave. It isn't a good idea for ships to carry the things around when they're very unlikely to ever use them - as well as taking up space that could be occupied by missiles that they could use.

The original poster was essentially suggesting that the missile use an impeller wedge to get up to speed and switch to sail just before ramming.

Jonathan_S wrote:

sdwoodwa wrote:First time post, and I apologize if the idea has been put forward before or already discredited, but I haven't seen it on the forums while I lurked.

Not knowing the minimum dimensions necessary for a craft/platform to generate a warshawsky sail, I keep wondering why counter-missiles use wedges and not overpowered sails to swat other missiles. I know they add no propulsion in normal space but there is always mention of how big they are, and they are as impenetrable as wedges. Think of them as bucklers, or possibly scaled armor. Or throw a few of them on ship killers as the trailers, since there are several instances of missile swarms interpenetrating.

Now, let the noob trashing begin. ~Patiently waits for a beating~

Welcome to the forums, or at least welcome to posting at the forums.

Unfortunately your suspicion is correct, this is discredited. Generating an sail required Alpha nodes, which are much larger, expensive, and complex than Beta impeller nodes. Nothing smaller than a starship mounts, or can mount Alpha nodes. So a missile can't physically fit the type of nodes required to generate a sail. (David Weber, also known here as RFC, shot that variend down when people wanted sail powered missiles for combat within grav waves. You can have one as long as you're willing to fire, IIRC, roughly 20,000 ton missiles )

[edited to add]
However even if you could there doesn't seem to be a big advantage. Honor of the Queen tells us that the CL Fearless's Warshawski sail was a three-hundred-kilometer disk; which is definitely big. But her wedge is roughly 300 km across, and the front opening is roughly 190 km high. So her sail has a frontal area of about 70,685 km^2; while her wedge has about 57,000 km^2. (I'm using the height of the opening because if she was a CM anything trying to fly down that opening would suffer destruction from touching one or the other of the wedge planes)

So on a given hull the sail only has about 20% more area, but to get that you give up 100% of your terminal acceleration. And because it takes several seconds for an alpha node to switch from wedge to sail you're giving up critical terminal maneuvering time for a marginally larger impact zone. I don't think it's worth it even if you could cram an alpha node ring into a missile.


But don't worry. We all have ideas that get shot down from time to time. I hope this doesn't discourage you from continuing to participate here.[end edit]

[edit 2: I see while I was checking sizes for my edit that SWM beat me to it on the relative size issue]

Jonathan...

Minor nit, but your dimensions are a bit off, probably due to being taken from a book written before The Great Resizing™. The wedge size for the CA Fearless* is now at about 150km on a side, so for the CL Fearless, it's probably much smaller, maybe around 100-125km/side.

*I mention the CA Fearless (Star Knight class) because that ship/class is the baseline ship we use in BuNine for working out things like this and for details on my models. In fact, I will probably be adding some new renders (and updating the old ones) to my Deviant Art page over the next few weeks because we're starting to flesh out some more detailed bits and pieces, and I now have enough information from Tom Pope to "finish" my Highlander LAC that's been languishing on my hard drive since October

MaxxQ wrote:Jonathan...

Minor nit, but your dimensions are a bit off, probably due to being taken from a book written before The Great Resizing™. The wedge size for the CA Fearless* is now at about 150km on a side, so for the CL Fearless, it's probably much smaller, maybe around 100-125km/side.

*I mention the CA Fearless (Star Knight class) because that ship/class is the baseline ship we use in BuNine for working out things like this and for details on my models. In fact, I will probably be adding some new renders (and updating the old ones) to my Deviant Art page over the next few weeks because we're starting to flesh out some more detailed bits and pieces, and I now have enough information from Tom Pope to "finish" my Highlander LAC that's been languishing on my hard drive since October

Maxxq, what about the Warshawski sail? Is the size of the sail on the Fearless also changed? The point that was being made is the ratio of size between sail and wedge. (Although we've already discussed the difficulties in getting a sail or wedge into contact with a ship.)

MaxxQ wrote:Jonathan...

Minor nit, but your dimensions are a bit off, probably due to being taken from a book written before The Great Resizing™. The wedge size for the CA Fearless* is now at about 150km on a side, so for the CL Fearless, it's probably much smaller, maybe around 100-125km/side.

*I mention the CA Fearless (Star Knight class) because that ship/class is the baseline ship we use in BuNine for working out things like this and for details on my models. In fact, I will probably be adding some new renders (and updating the old ones) to my Deviant Art page over the next few weeks because we're starting to flesh out some more detailed bits and pieces, and I now have enough information from Tom Pope to "finish" my Highlander LAC that's been languishing on my hard drive since October

Thanks. The 'Sail size was obviously taken from a pre-resizing book. The wedge size was even worse; because I didn't know how wedges scaled I simply went with the wedge size numbers from RFC's '98 infodump on wedge geometry (which were for an SD); because they were the only numbers I was aware of that had width and the heights of both openings.

Thanks for providing a better numbers.
BTW Did you guys work out the rest of the wedge dimensions for CA Fearless? Do they just scale linearly with the width? (if it's 50% the dimensions that'd make the forward opening 95km high, and the aft a mere 20km high. And even the wedge geometry infodump didn't say the length; though I've assumed the wedge is roughly square, since the ship length is pretty trivial compared to the wedge length)


Looking forward to the new renders!

SWM wrote:Maxxq, what about the Warshawski sail? Is the size of the sail on the Fearless also changed? The point that was being made is the ratio of size between sail and wedge. (Although we've already discussed the difficulties in getting a sail or wedge into contact with a ship.)

Yeah, the sail stays roughly the same size as the wedge.

Jonathan_S wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:Jonathan...

Minor nit, but your dimensions are a bit off, probably due to being taken from a book written before The Great Resizing™. The wedge size for the CA Fearless* is now at about 150km on a side, so for the CL Fearless, it's probably much smaller, maybe around 100-125km/side.

*I mention the CA Fearless (Star Knight class) because that ship/class is the baseline ship we use in BuNine for working out things like this and for details on my models. In fact, I will probably be adding some new renders (and updating the old ones) to my Deviant Art page over the next few weeks because we're starting to flesh out some more detailed bits and pieces, and I now have enough information from Tom Pope to "finish" my Highlander LAC that's been languishing on my hard drive since October

Thanks. The 'Sail size was obviously taken from a pre-resizing book. The wedge size was even worse; because I didn't know how wedges scaled I simply went with the wedge size numbers from RFC's '98 infodump on wedge geometry (which were for an SD); because they were the only numbers I was aware of that had width and the heights of both openings.

Thanks for providing a better numbers.
BTW Did you guys work out the rest of the wedge dimensions for CA Fearless? Do they just scale linearly with the width? (if it's 50% the dimensions that'd make the forward opening 95km high, and the aft a mere 20km high. And even the wedge geometry infodump didn't say the length; though I've assumed the wedge is roughly square, since the ship length is pretty trivial compared to the wedge length)


Looking forward to the new renders!

Yeah, we worked all those dimensions out awhile ago (for the CA Fearless), but I can't recall what the numbers came out to, and I can't seem to find our discussion about it. The numbers you just stated sound about right, though. And yes, the wedge is pretty much a square.

OP here, I was never thinking of the concept as a ship killer. only as a defensive measure, kind of like a shield or broom in space to try to interdict incoming fire.