FTL missiles

been rereading some of RFC's other non-honor works and in both the Fifth imperium and Path of the Fury universes Hyper/FTL missiles are common, a standard part of any warships arsenal.

now given what i understand of the science there is no way that is doable in the honorverse, right?

but if it was possible how do you think it would work? and how would it change tactics?

Eh ... not really no. Hyper drives are way too big and energy intensive for disposable use. So no missiles going through hyper. Plus, Hyper navigation on short jumps is very difficult.

In realspace, physics keeps you from reaching lightspeed.
Although ... the impeller drive seems to ignore some, but not all, relativistic effects.
However, the primary limiting factor that we've seen on maximum attainable velocity is the radiation and particle shielding you have, not drive capability.
It might be the case that with arbitrarily strong particle and radiation shielding, an impeller drive could function like some variant on an Alcubierre drive and effectively attain realspace FTL. However, I very much doubt that we would see that, even if it were theoretically doable.

How FTL missiles would change things? They'd probably function more or less like SLAMS in the Fury-verse. And be fairly useless except in mass numbers.

I'd see them more like SMBHAWKS from Starfire. FTL capable pods that would fire normal missles after dropping from hyper at point blank range or from an unexpected direction. That would let the tech deal with some of the softer obstacles of Honorverse FTL. Still not feasible even if possible though. Apollo can do something fairly similar even if it takes longer.

noblehunter wrote:I'd see them more like SMBHAWKS from Starfire. FTL capable pods that would fire normal missles after dropping from hyper at point blank range or from an unexpected direction. That would let the tech deal with some of the softer obstacles of Honorverse FTL. Still not feasible even if possible though. Apollo can do something fairly similar even if it takes longer.

SBMHAWK missiles were not FTL. The pods were sort of FTL in that they could be sent through warp points, but the location of warp points were generally known in a system that was surveyed (closed warp points being exceptions until you saw someone come through it from the open end). I'm not aware of any FTL capability in the Starfire universe that is not associated with warp points.

In the Honorverse, a small hyper generator is around 20-30,000 tons(inference from size of dispatch boats and frigates), whilst a missile pod is around 5,000.

Bottom line, nothing smaller than 50,000 tons is jumping in or out of hyperspace on its own. That pretty much rules out all hyper-missile possiblities, aside from the ship-sized planetkiller type.

Vince wrote:SBMHAWK missiles were not FTL. The pods were sort of FTL in that they could be sent through warp points, but the location of warp points were generally known in a system that was surveyed (closed warp points being exceptions until you saw someone come through it from the open end). I'm not aware of any FTL capability in the Starfire universe that is not associated with warp points.

Read "dropping from hyper" as "emerging from a warp point" and the analogy mostly works. The point is that any conceivable FTL weapon in the Honorverse would have to be standard weapons mounted on an FTL delivery system.

munroburton wrote:In the Honorverse, a small hyper generator is around 20-30,000 tons(inference from size of dispatch boats and frigates), whilst a missile pod is around 5,000.

Bottom line, nothing smaller than 50,000 tons is jumping in or out of hyperspace on its own. That pretty much rules out all hyper-missile possiblities, aside from the ship-sized planetkiller type.

You could cut mass for the lack of endurance, crew, and need to make only one translation up and one down. It'd still be bloody huge, but considering the mass of all the missile pods being thrown around it's not too unreasonable. The real kicker is that nothing big enough to carry them spends all that much time outside a hyper limit.

the problem when comparing Dahak & the Fifth Imperium or Alicia and the Path of Fury, is in Honoverse, you literally CANNOT use FTL too close to a star, and it's risky as all hell near the Manticoran Junction.

And there's a few references, I think in one of the side-stories regarding our favourite Solarian arms-dealer, that outside of fiction holo spy movies (updated James Bond 007 stuff Im figuring), fleets don't just happen to hang out way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. Ships and fleets always base out of planets and stars, and any ship stranded in the middle of nowhere between stars is pretty much 100% screwed if nobody had their course and schedule.

The two together, mean that there's nowhere an Honorverse FTL missile could even be used, even if you could possibly build one. As stated, dispatch boats and older destroyers were approximately 50,000 to 60,000 tons and most of that was the hyper generator. We know this because Shrikes are almost 20,000 tons themselves and dont have a hyper generator, and dispatch boats are literally the smallest hull they could cram a hyper generator into period. Even with Manticoran miniaturization tech changing from whatever else they work on to hyper generators, I doubt they'd manage more than a 5-10% reduction in size. Difference between DB and Shrikes is almost 30,000 tons let's call it 20 ktons so with Manticore reduction makes it 18 k-tons, or almost exactly the size of a Katana. Katana's are slightly smaller than Republican Cimeterre LACs, and an SD sized Aviary-class CLAC crams about 250 LACs in. So excluding the hyper not working close to stars, you get 250-300 missiles and then you just pretty much shot your bolt and don't contribute much else to a fight.

Dauntless wrote:been rereading some of RFC's other non-honor works and in both the Fifth imperium and Path of the Fury universes Hyper/FTL missiles are common, a standard part of any warships arsenal.

now given what i understand of the science there is no way that is doable in the honorverse, right?

but if it was possible how do you think it would work? and how would it change tactics?

The absolute minimum size of a military hyper generator appears to be somewhere between 5K tons and 10K tons.

Civilian hyper generators are smaller, I would guess possibly in the range of 2-5K tons.

based on information found in pearls of Weber, I am guessing that the flat pack missile pod is somewhere between 1.5-2K tons.

This means that a FTL missile would be at least twice the size of a missile pod, possibly 4 times bigger or more.

such a missile could be built, but that would be unlikely, as it would have very limited usefulness as it could only be used outside the hyper limit, and all inhabited planets are inside the limit. (sphinx is just barely, but is inside)

darrell wrote:
The absolute minimum size of a military hyper generator appears to be somewhere between 5K tons and 10K tons.

Civilian hyper generators are smaller, I would guess possibly in the range of 2-5K tons.

based on information found in pearls of Weber, I am guessing that the flat pack missile pod is somewhere between 1.5-2K tons.

This means that a FTL missile would be at least twice the size of a missile pod, possibly 4 times bigger or more.

such a missile could be built, but that would be unlikely, as it would have very limited usefulness as it could only be used outside the hyper limit, and all inhabited planets are inside the limit. (sphinx is just barely, but is inside)

Also there are a non-trivial number of system that are in the middle of a alpha-band grav-wave. So for those system even if there were targets outside the hyper limit, and you could microjump to within MDM range, the hyper missile (or hyper missile pod) would still be destroyed instantly when it jumped up and hit the 'wave.

(Sure you could fix that by providing them with a pair of alpha rings so they could use sails) but that just drives the minimum size up from insane to totally ludicrous.


Oh and don't forget than even a very small military hyper generator (such as a dispatch boat carries) takes something like 30 seconds to active from fully standby and at least 8x that amount from powered down. So your hyper missile (or pod) presumably has a minimum run time of close to 4 - 4.5 minutes until it reemerges and begins its terminal n-space run (assuming you pre-charged it to standby prior to combat) - 30 seconds to jump up then the better part of 4 minutes before you can recharge and jump down again.

This seems a real non-starter; even though it's likely technically possible given unlimited resources.

darrell wrote:
based on information found in pearls of Weber, I am guessing that the flat pack missile pod is somewhere between 1.5-2K tons.

Old fashioned cruiser missiles were about 100 tons, and capital missiles were even larger. Missile packs prior to Apollo had either 10 or 14 birds, which would be around 1.5-2 tons just for the missiles, since they used capital missiles in early pods. As the pods evolved, they became more and more weight, due to the ever increasing need for reactor power and fire control electronics.

Flatpack pods are probably a minimum of 5 tons because they also had to fit in the tractor emitter, and the even larger reactor to spin up the MDM's, even if it was all inside a smaller pod than previous iterations, or at least differently shaped pod which allowed them to stack more flatly.