Mistletoe 2

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm still having trouble seeing this as a viable weapon.

If the missile is pointing towards the ship then, by definition the open face of it's wedge it pointed towards the ship's point defense. So the mini-missile's wedges can't shield them from point defense. The wedge opening at the front gives visibility to the missile body from about a 120 degree vertical arc - so if you're pointed even vaguely towards the ship it has a shot at you.

Also miniature wedges seem to have far less accel than full up anti-ship missiles. I'd guestimate the SAM that hit Honor's pinnace at closer to 1000g than the 92000g a shipkiller at full accel can pull. So if it's only good for 1000g then for the couple second run you wanted it has to start within 20km of the ship. That's roughly 130km inside the throat of the wedge. If you can get a ship to literally run over your missile then yeah it could do damage. But a RMN laserhead lying doggo and overrun by the ship could have done the same from 50,000 km out, or a contact nuke would be totally devastating from over 1000 km out....

There is no missile. It is a stationary gravitation field the enemy ship runs into. Think mine field with no explosives. The gravitational gradient of the field rips the ship to shreds as it passes. Same concept as anti-missiles. Killing with a wedge only but no locomotion.

Stealth is not magic invisibility. If it's stationary, I will have detected it long before I threaten to run over it. Second, the gravitics it generates must either be a wedge or some variant of a sidewall. If it's a wedge, then it must have multiple open aspects. If it's a sidewall, then I can shoot through it. And in either case, I can use a sidewall or bowwall to just run over the dang things even if I don't shoot them.

Well that idea just hit a brick wall since any kind of wedge/plate takes too long to come up and the target ship is traveling towards it at 50,000+ kilometers a second.


On second thought how did the shoulder fired impeller missile gets it's wedge up so quickly? Two have been fired in atmosphere at an aircar and a shuttle. You certainly can't stand there with a hundred meter wide active impeller on your shoulder.

Apparently smaller wedges come up faster the smaller they are so maybe we can get the single gravitic plane up in a fraction of a second from a capacitor. Since the shoulder launched item did it.

JPMorgan wrote:Well that idea just hit a brick wall since any kind of wedge/plate takes too long to come up and the target ship is traveling towards it at 50,000+ kilometers a second.


On second thought how did the shoulder fired impeller missile gets it's wedge up so quickly? Two have been fired in atmosphere at an aircar and a shuttle. You certainly can't stand there with a hundred meter wide active impeller on your shoulder.

Apparently smaller wedges come up faster the smaller they are so maybe we can get the single gravitic plane up in a fraction of a second from a capacitor. Since the shoulder launched item did it.

What you are ignoring is that any anti-tank or anti-atmospheric impeller missile is going to have an incredibly small endurance. Now, that may well be 100 or even 200 Km, but in terms of space that is absolutely nothing.

No missile the size you are thinking of is going to have any useful range for naval combat. And, even if it did, it would be so incredible light in terms of explosives that it would have to hit in the exact right spot to vent more than 1 or 2 compartments on a ship (which is practically nothing).

JPMorgan wrote:Well that idea just hit a brick wall since any kind of wedge/plate takes too long to come up and the target ship is traveling towards it at 50,000+ kilometers a second.


On second thought how did the shoulder fired impeller missile gets it's wedge up so quickly? Two have been fired in atmosphere at an aircar and a shuttle. You certainly can't stand there with a hundred meter wide active impeller on your shoulder.

Apparently smaller wedges come up faster the smaller they are so maybe we can get the single gravitic plane up in a fraction of a second from a capacitor. Since the shoulder launched item did it.

Ok, I'd been mislead by your previous description of them as "shoulder launch sized impeller missiles". A missile wedge hardwired for 0 accel should be possible; and with reaction thrusters you could orient it with the wedge face toward the target before activation.

And now your targeting constraints are even tighter, because with no manouverablity the target ship has to literally run into this small wedge.

Of course now the only closing speed is the one generated by the target, so the ship might have more time to react - the wedge activation would be noticed instantly on the grav sensors; but the mine/missile body is likely detectable by radar before it gets within the wedge mouth; and certainly once the reaction thrusters start orienting it. And until the wedge pops up it's vulnerable to PDLCs. Once the wedge pops it's vulnerable to CM fire. Actually, given the vastly weaker wedge a CM could probably destroy one of these, wedge to wedge, without suffering catastrophic wedge failure of it's own. So a couple CMs could sweep the path in front of the ship...


But mainly, even if it could work, the same exact attack profile (positioning a deadly device directly in the path of a ship) would be basically as effective using a laserhead or nuke; with the bonus that you don't have to guess quite as accurately about exactly where it's going to go...

Erls wrote:

JPMorgan wrote:
What you are ignoring is that any anti-tank or anti-atmospheric impeller missile is going to have an incredibly small endurance. Now, that may well be 100 or even 200 Km, but in terms of space that is absolutely nothing.

No missile the size you are thinking of is going to have any useful range for naval combat. And, even if it did, it would be so incredible light in terms of explosives that it would have to hit in the exact right spot to vent more than 1 or 2 compartments on a ship (which is practically nothing).

Why is everyone stuck on "missile". This is a non-mobile item.
Anything that hits the gravitational gradiant of the plane is destroyed hence rolling ship and sidewalls as defenses.
It takes 2 of these fields to produce "thrust". We call it a wedge. It produces movement but not actual newtonian thrust.
The gravitic field itself was invented before it was used for ships propulsion.
Say a ghostrider platform travels in front of a solarian warship at 10 million kilometer range. It is not seen at all. It drops items the size of suitcases with a radio receiver, a capacitor and half a wedge generator. One plane only so no movement when it activates just a hundred meter wide wall of death in space. The ship it traveling at 50,000 kilometers per second and doesn't see any neutrinos(no fusion plant), no heat, no radar return until it is way to close. The unit snaps on when the ship is 200 kilometers away. NOTHING is fast enough to stop it! We are talking .004 seconds of time. Even if the unit snaps on 1000 kilometers in front it is still only .02 seconds before the ship gets there. There are suddenly hundreds of these items in front of the ship. Impeller wedges trump particle shields so this half wedge item is not pushed aside unless the item has turned on with the gravitic plane in a bad position(50-50 chance since it is non-directional and can't move). This is why so many are used. They are small, cheap and only need to powered on for a couple of seconds at most. They do not move themselves. The ship plows over them. A single hit will go all the through a ship from stem to stern in a 100th of a second leaving a trail of sub-atomic particles behind. The hole can be anywhere from a thin line a few meters across to the full size of 100 meters as luck would have it. As long as the generator is on the opposite side from the ship the ship is screwed.
Just trying to think outside the box.

JPMorgan wrote:
Why is everyone stuck on "missile". This is a non-mobile item.
Anything that hits the gravitational gradiant of the plane is destroyed hence rolling ship and sidewalls as defenses.
It takes 2 of these fields to produce "thrust". We call it a wedge. It produces movement but not actual newtonian thrust.
The gravitic field itself was invented before it was used for ships propulsion.
Say a ghostrider platform travels in front of a solarian warship at 10 million kilometer range. It is not seen at all. It drops items the size of suitcases with a radio receiver, a capacitor and half a wedge generator. One plane only so no movement when it activates just a hundred meter wide wall of death in space. The ship it traveling at 50,000 kilometers per second and doesn't see any neutrinos(no fusion plant), no heat, no radar return until it is way to close. The unit snaps on when the ship is 200 kilometers away. NOTHING is fast enough to stop it! We are talking .004 seconds of time. Even if the unit snaps on 1000 kilometers in front it is still only .02 seconds before the ship gets there. There are suddenly hundreds of these items in front of the ship. Impeller wedges trump particle shields so this half wedge item is not pushed aside unless the item has turned on with the gravitic plane in a bad position(50-50 chance since it is non-directional and can't move). This is why so many are used. They are small, cheap and only need to powered on for a couple of seconds at most. They do not move themselves. The ship plows over them. A single hit will go all the through a ship from stem to stern in a 100th of a second leaving a trail of sub-atomic particles behind. The hole can be anywhere from a thin line a few meters across to the full size of 100 meters as luck would have it. As long as the generator is on the opposite side from the ship the ship is screwed.
Just trying to think outside the box.

You do know that warships make small, almost random movement changes constantly as part of their maneuvers (fleets actually have canned programs to coordinate this without the people focusing on it) to help avoid mine fields laid like this and long range laser/graser hits. So while the fleet is traveling generally straight towards a point, it might change it's path of travel so it is a few thousand KM one way or another in the time it travel those 10 million KM. you would need to drop thousands or even millions of said small bombs to cover the area the ship could maneuver through just to get a handful of hits.

Theemile wrote:You do know that warships make small, almost random movement changes constantly as part of their maneuvers (fleets actually have canned programs to coordinate this without the people focusing on it) to help avoid mine fields laid like this and long range laser/graser hits. So while the fleet is traveling generally straight towards a point, it might change it's path of travel so it is a few thousand KM one way or another in the time it travel those 10 million KM. you would need to drop thousands or even millions of said small bombs to cover the area the ship could maneuver through just to get a handful of hits.

So how close were the ghostrider platforms to the Sollie battlecruisers in Monica? Pretty damned close from what I read. 10 million kilometers was just a random number.

Your shipyards are gone. Your ships of the wall have been trimmed by hundreds of units. You can't build more multistage missiles. Your nation is at deaths door and you need something cheap and easy to use on your enemies. Do you dismiss this idea out of hand or do you kick it around and try to make it work. It might not work more than a few times but the reward could mean life for your nation. You obviously wouldn't use it to conquer your enemies home world but as a surprise against an unknown aggressor who knows.

As the saying goes: simple solutions, aren't.

This is a fundamentally solved problem in the Honorverse. People aren't worried about direct contact mines because sensors are sufficiently capable of seeing them before they become a threat. Think about First Hancock. Despite being:

1. Tiny,
2. Made of the beast stealthy materials available,
3. Having no active emissions, and
4. Caught completely unaware that a minefield was laid in the middle of nowhere,

Admiral Chin's dreadnoughts still detected them early enough to blunt their effect. The mines still worked because they have a threat bubble thanks to the laser heads, which yours do not. One would have to completely ignore them in order for them to work. That is not the basis of any effective weapons system.

Duckk wrote:As the saying goes: simple solutions, aren't.

This is a fundamentally solved problem in the Honorverse. People aren't worried about direct contact mines because sensors are sufficiently capable of seeing them before they become a threat. Think about First Hancock. Despite being:

1. Tiny,
2. Made of the beast stealthy materials available,
3. Having no active emissions, and
4. Caught completely unaware that a minefield was laid in the middle of nowhere,

Admiral Chin's dreadnoughts still detected them early enough to blunt their effect. The mines still worked because they have a threat bubble thanks to the laser heads, which yours do not. One would have to completely ignore them in order for them to work. That is not the basis of any effective weapons system.

A couple of holes there.

They were not tiny. They weighed tons and were several meters in length at a minimum.
They did have some emissions. They spew neutrinos from their fusion bottles. They are highly radioactive. We are talking about trans-uranic elements. They transmit friend or foe signals like all mines in sci-fi and they must be able to sense something nearby. Leaving it to optical senors only allows flumoxing of the system or serious errors in targeting.