New LAC's

darrell wrote:That post needs to be added to the infodump.

Duckk wrote:

we actually do see grasers on older light cruisers. In "On Basilisk Station" when discussing the modification of the fearless, we find that the light cruiser lost "All four graser mounts," but kept both lasers in each broadside.

I know. That's why I said "As for light cruisers, the Courageous was noted for being needlessly overgunned." The Courageous-class is the class of CLs that old Fearless belonged to. The point was that the Courageouses were heavily compromised to cram in those grasers.

Roland-class destroyer
Chase energy armament: 4 "CA-scale" grasers; 2 each forward & aft

That is hard proof that there is both CA and CL scale grasers, which kills your belief that a graser 1/3 the size of the shrike can't exist.

I know there are CA sized grasers. The whole argument is that they aren't as small as you think they are. To fit them in, the Rolands had to go with ridiculously oversized hammerheads, and had to go with spinal mounts which extend the weapons past the impeller rings, deeper into the core hull.

kzt wrote:David mentioned, when discussing the Graser torpedo, that a cruser scale graser (just the actual weapon itself - not tracking, power, etc) massed about 3000 tons.

kzt wrote:As I said there is a lot of magic in the shrikes. The BC graser is most of the length of the entire 20,000 ton shrike, so I suspect it is LOT more than 4000 tons, and even more then that when you include the power systems and other essential pieces other then the bare graser.

kzt wrote:David mentioned, when discussing the Graser torpedo, that a cruser scale graser (just the actual weapon itself - not tracking, power, etc) massed about 3000 tons.

Whereas the Royal Manticoran Navy had concentrated on improving the efficiency of its standard laser heads, Daniel Detweiler's R&D staff had taken another approach. They'd figured out how to squeeze what amounted to a cruiser-grade graser projector into something small enough to deploy independently.
The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there'd never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN's designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren't looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.

Kizarvexis wrote:

kzt wrote:David mentioned, when discussing the Graser torpedo, that a cruser scale graser (just the actual weapon itself - not tracking, power, etc) massed about 3000 tons.

3,000 tons after the miniaturization? If so, then this quote from Mission of Honor would mean that a regular graser is larger and a 3,000 ton graser would not survive firing the first shot.

Whereas the Royal Manticoran Navy had concentrated on improving the efficiency of its standard laser heads, Daniel Detweiler's R&D staff had taken another approach. They'd figured out how to squeeze what amounted to a cruiser-grade graser projector into something small enough to deploy independently.
The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there'd never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN's designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren't looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.

darrell wrote:You can't use the graser torpedo as a basis for size, there is too many differences.

First, the duration of fire is a full three seconds vs a fraction of a second for a shipboard unit.

Second, the entire graser torpedo is 3,000 tons, the graser head is just a fraction of that.

darrell wrote:You can't use the graser torpedo as a basis for size, there is too many differences.

First, the duration of fire is a full three seconds vs a fraction of a second for a shipboard unit.

Second, the entire graser torpedo is 3,000 tons, the graser head is just a fraction of that.