Mistletoe 2

Relax wrote:

SWM wrote:I don't think the standoff range of the graser torpedo is that much more than the standoff range of a laserhead.

Range is completely subjective on this one. It is "cruiser" graser strength. Whatever that means.

How close one needs to get is determined by how strong the sidewall interdicting the fire is along with how much armor you wish to penetrate. Same goes for laser warheads. A destroyer grade laser warhead can get through a SD sidewall. It just has to be VERY vERY VERY VERY close to the ship where the PDLC's obtain nearly 100% kill ratios.

Cruiser graser strength does not necessarily mean cruiser graser range. It is possible, for instance, that they have a worse focus problem than cruiser-mounted grasers, and thus a shorter useful range.

OrlandoNative wrote:

SWM wrote:I believe the text states that the mines are mobile. Just not as mobile as drones. You shouldn't need mines as mobile as drones. You shouldn't need mines as mobile as drones. And mines are designed to last for months at a time. Drones are not.

The mines here-to-fore mentioned are basically planetary defense constellations, intended to protect near space from enemy vessels assuming planetary orbit to demand surrender prior to orbital bombardment; or assault. They also weren't said to be stealthed. Of course, they probably wouldn't need to be; the only really effective offense against them would be a proximity nuke explosion; which would happen immediately after the first one blew anyway. I don't see them having (or needing) much in the way of mobility, other than possibly being able to change their orientation in order to focus their energy on whatever enemy vessel they're engaging, which could be done via gyroscopes anyway, with no tell-tale emissions.

The mistletoe 2 platforms, however, need not be orbital, they could have pre-programed courses for the entire minefield to follow throughout a large area of an entire star system.

Also, the drones apparently *do* have extended endurance, since the ones left in New Tuscany by Chatterlee's ships were still functional when Michelle's squadron arrived later. We don't know the exact amount of "travel time" from Spindle to New Tuscany, but they lasted at least twice that, plus the time spent between Chatterlee's force hypering in and his watching destroyer leaving to inform Spindle about what happened.

With micro fusion power sources, and assuming no active sensors to suck power, they could probably last for quite a while, compared to the older, capacitor-powered versions.

Honorverse mines do not have to be orbital, either. They have mine fields around the Wormhole Junction. And the mines are indeed stealthed. And they maneuver around so that they do not always keep the same arrangement, to avoid anyone mapping them out.

Relax wrote:

OrlandoNative wrote:
It would depend on available power. The grasers on SD's are much generally much more powerful than those on destroyers or cruisers. The Q-ships had more powerful ones, but those were purpose built/installed.

Power throughput is not the same thing as power density now is it?

No, but you can't get something for nothing. Power output is going to depend on power input for any weapon designed for multiple usage. No matter what the output energy density is, the energy had to come from somewhere. Normally, there are two ways of increasing energy density - either pouring more in to the same size beam, or else pouring in the *same* amount and tightening up the beam size.

That said, from notes in the books it would *appear* that SD unit graser beams are actually *larger* than those of smaller craft, which would imply much higher power *input* to maintain the same (or greater) destructive capability.

A laser head is different. It's not a beam weapon in the "normal" sense, it's a fusion warhead whose energy output is "focused" by gravitational lenses into narrow beams rather than allowing a normal spherically expanding explosion front. Single use. It actually powers itself through it's own destruction.

Pulled nested quotes to get around stack limit.

SWM wrote:I don't think the standoff range of the graser torpedo is that much more than the standoff range of a laserhead.

True

Relax wrote:Range is completely subjective on this one. It is "cruiser" graser strength. Whatever that means.

How close one needs to get is determined by how strong the sidewall interdicting the fire is along with how much armor you wish to penetrate. Same goes for laser warheads. A destroyer grade laser warhead can get through a SD sidewall. It just has to be VERY vERY VERY VERY close to the ship where the PDLC's obtain nearly 100% kill ratios.

50,000km for a Graser Torpedo to burn through any sidewall. The range will surely go up as sidewall strength goes down.

SWM wrote:Cruiser graser strength does not necessarily mean cruiser graser range. It is possible, for instance, that they have a worse focus problem than cruiser-mounted grasers, and thus a shorter useful range.

Without a sidewall, the Graser Torpedoes attacked the Manty space stations at a range of 500,000km. A Spider Drive unit is not detectable at much more than a light second, which is 300,000km. Since 500,000km is 1.67 light seconds, that sounds to me as longer than not much more than a light second, so sidewallless (I decided to keep that) ships could very well be attacked by a Graser Torpedo before they could detect it.

Kizarvexis wrote:Without a sidewall, the Graser Torpedoes attacked the Manty space stations at a range of 500,000km. A Spider Drive unit is not detectable at much more than a light second, which is 300,000km. Since 500,000km is 1.67 light seconds, that sounds to me as longer than not much more than a light second, so sidewallless (I decided to keep that) ships could very well be attacked by a Graser Torpedo before they could detect it.

A very interesting point.

Nukes and lasers are brute force weapons.
Wedges do more damage. Bring up an impeller wedge in a boat bay and see what happens.
The ghost rider platforms chould be used to drop tens of thousands of shoulder launch sized impeller missiles that are stealthed and can be activated once they are scooped up by a ships wedge. Imagine the fun.

JPMorgan wrote:Nukes and lasers are brute force weapons.
Wedges do more damage. Bring up an impeller wedge in a boat bay and see what happens.
The ghost rider platforms chould be used to drop tens of thousands of shoulder launch sized impeller missiles that are stealthed and can be activated once they are scooped up by a ships wedge. Imagine the fun.

Unfortunately, particle screens are designed to handle most objects floating in space before they get sucked up by a moving ship. So if the idea was for them to float into the open wedge and fire up their wedge while they float past/bump into the hull, the particle screens will take care of them wellbefore they can activate their wedge.

Theemile wrote:

JPMorgan wrote:Nukes and lasers are brute force weapons.
Wedges do more damage. Bring up an impeller wedge in a boat bay and see what happens.
The ghost rider platforms chould be used to drop tens of thousands of shoulder launch sized impeller missiles that are stealthed and can be activated once they are scooped up by a ships wedge. Imagine the fun.

Unfortunately, particle screens are designed to handle most objects floating in space before they get sucked up by a moving ship. So if the idea was for them to float into the open wedge and fire up their wedge while they float past/bump into the hull, the particle screens will take care of them wellbefore they can activate their wedge.

Also an missile impeller wedge is destroyed if it touches a sidewall or another wedge - so there's a relatively narrow angle at which an impeller head missile can even reach a warship (basically down the throat or up the kilt through a 20km wide corridor formed by it's sidewalls - not coincidentally those vulnerable aspects are exactly where all its chase point-defense is aimed.

Sidewalls are the reason antiship missiles stopped trying for wedge impact and first gained nuclear warheads (see the armor essay in the anthology In Fire Forged)

Now if JPMorgan is proposing to use them against dispersed missile pods, as Mistletoe has been, you don't need to worry about sidewalls or point defense. On the other hand, the nuclear warheads seem to be able to proximity kill pods out to a radius of around 30,000 km (because any unused towed pods are apparently destroyed when the enemy's first salvo of laserheads detonates; and that's their standoff range)
The wedge on a SAM (as an example of a tiny impeller head missile) probably only has a danger area of, to be quite generous, 6,500 square km (1/2 km wide wedge, and a 13,000 km range (about the range the shuttle ground attack missiles used against the courier ship in EoH had). So against targets vulnerable to proximity kills a big nuke seems more effective.

(However amusing the thought of a swarm of impellers chewing their way through everything in their path is)

SharkHunter wrote:Keep in mind that Thomas Theisman figured out almost instantly what the Mistletoe drones did and how to counter them; it was Apollo's range and accuracy that he couldn't deal with.

Theisman also figured it out so fast, because he probably gave Sonja the idea.

If you'll recall during the very opening night of Operation Buttercup and the Manticoran strike against Barnett. The Havenite forces, operating under Theisman's battleplans (before he'd been recalled by OSJ to command Capital Fleet) had attached mines to their RD's. Which were then wiped out by Hamish Alexander, firing the first full powered MDM attacks ever seen.


And the only reason they used mines, was because mines are more or less immobile, only capable of station keeping. Which is why during the First Battle of Hancock, Honor and Sarnow schemed ways to deploy mines in an irregular method. The Peeps would have been looking for mines when they closed on the base, which led to Honor suggesting kicking them out during the chase, which led to the final battle plan of using FTL pulse and build the minefield where it was.

Ashes of Victory, Chapter Thirty wrote:"At least a couple of more squadrons of the wall," McQueen said, and the citizen admiral winced. "I don't like it either, but he's got almost all the fixed defenses back up and running, and we've shipped in over three hundred additional LACs. They may not be all that nasty compared to Manty LACs—" she and Bukato met one another's eyes with matching humorless smiles "—but they're a hell of a lot better than nothing for inner system defense. And, frankly, I was impressed by what he's managed with the mines and pods."

"Me, too," Bukato agreed, and he meant it. Minefields were a part of almost any area defense plan, but traditional mines were little more than floating, bomb-pumped laser buoys designed to lurk until some unfortunate entered their range. Theisman had taken them a bit further, using Barnett's local yard capacity to field-modify the mines by strapping the buoys onto the noses of stealthed recon drones. They weren't very fast, and they weren't very accurate, but they had a lot of endurance and they would be hard to detect. McQueen wasn't certain that they would prove effective at sneaking into attack range, but there was always a chance, and it was the sort of innovative adaptation the People's Navy needed badly.

Longer-ranged missiles, deployed in orbit around key planets, were also a common defense. Those missiles were subject to proximity soft kills and always had marginally shorter powered ranges than those launched from proper shipboard launchers, and arranging fire control for them had always been a problem, yet they were a useful adjunct to proper orbital fortresses or launchers on moons and asteroids.

Granted, that's all pre-Buttercup, but that was both the start of mass-produced system defense missile pods, giving RD's some form of offensive punch (whether boot-strapped mines, or purpose-built Mistletoe quasi-missiles), and a good hard look at mines being pretty useless without being en mass.


Second generation Mistletoe drones, would probably just start getting better lasing rods, possibly the Mk 16-G warhead, instead of whatever they have now. Either in boom or burn, a Mark 16G is going to increase their effectiveness in taking out larger amounts of hostile pods, or burning through the sidewalls of ever tougher mobile units.

With the addition of the quad-drive system defense pods, with or without Moriarty or Mycroft, and LAC swarms, suddenly defense is almost laughably easy and very low requirements of warm bodies (LAC crews, between three and six sets of crews for the Mycroft platforms, and a maintenance crew that can rotate through servicing the deployed pods)

Theemile wrote:Unfortunately, particle screens are designed to handle most objects floating in space before they get sucked up by a moving ship. So if the idea was for them to float into the open wedge and fire up their wedge while they float past/bump into the hull, the particle screens will take care of them wellbefore they can activate their wedge.

Particle screens are only designed to stop atoms, molecules and dust. These screens only work up to .8 C hence the speed limit for all ships. While the throat of an impeller wedge is many kilometers across the ship itself is only several hundred meters across. Point defense lasers are used to protect against larger pieces of debris if the debris is not hidden by some sort of RAM. Railguns were mentioned as being used long ago in the Honorverse for exactly this purpose. Running headlong into thousands of steel slugs caused significant damage at any fraction of C.