long ranged CM

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:But the Havenite Triple Ripple, you're already using bigger and dirtier nukes than conventional shipkillers, and somehow detonating your first salvo without harming your second and third waves which are mere seconds behind, and probably flying directly through the nuclear fire to attack "from out of the fury of a star".

Considering that missiles use grav sensors, the triple ripple is roughly akin to laying smoke at night against radar directed gunnery. They won't even notice it. Plus nukes in space are just bright flashes, there is no fireball as that is the X-rays in the warhead acting on the atmosphere around the warhead.

Not quite. The triple ripple isn't optically blinding the grav sensors; it's trying to throw enough EM noise at them to damage or temporarily overload them.

The sensors are designed to look at grav ripples along the alpha wall; but I'd be surprised if they didn't also act an unintentional antenna and were subject to malfunction (temporary or permanent) when hit with big EM pulses.


Now whether any plausible collection of long range space-borne nuclear explosions could generate enough EMP is a different question; but at least there's some mechanism by which nukes could hope to affect grav sensors; while there's really no mechanism by which plain smoke could hope to affect radar.

Jonathan_S wrote:Now whether any plausible collection of long range space-borne nuclear explosions could generate enough EMP is a different question; but at least there's some mechanism by which nukes could hope to affect grav sensors; while there's really no mechanism by which plain smoke could hope to affect radar.

Nukes in deep space don't generate EMP either. They just are really bright flashes. Without an atmosphere or a planetary magnetic field to work off of there is no EMP. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_e ... uclear_EMP

If you get very, very close you can get effects from the high intensity xray but you are talking about ranges in one or two digit kilometers. And given that missiles in the Honroverse have radiation screens, even that won't work in the Honorverse.

It's all plot.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Now whether any plausible collection of long range space-borne nuclear explosions could generate enough EMP is a different question; but at least there's some mechanism by which nukes could hope to affect grav sensors; while there's really no mechanism by which plain smoke could hope to affect radar.

Nukes in deep space don't generate EMP either. They just are really bright flashes. Without an atmosphere or a planetary magnetic field to work off of there is no EMP. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_e ... uclear_EMP

If you get very, very close you can get effects from the high intensity xray but you are talking about ranges in one or two digit kilometers. And given that missiles in the Honroverse have radiation screens, even that won't work in the Honorverse.

It's all plot.

<tongue in cheek> No, it's space opera. </tongue in cheek>

.... not just a bright flash, otherwise the triple ripple wouldn't have worked at all, ....

It's a bright flash nuke driven particle wave [incuding all those bits of vaporized CM], which ought to be rather ruinous to any sensors it can reach, and properly timed, the attack missiles will hit that particle wave no matter what. So here's my thinking. We're told that the particle shields on the Mark-23 are good until about .8C, right? By the time said missils get to "extended CM range [say 5-6 million km) they've already got most of that speed, but the CM is also headed towards it like a bat out of hell. So our little chip calculates that the CM is going to miss, so it flash bangs and cends a full 1-C (speed of light) particle burst upstream towards the shipkiler. You've now got those particles hitting at 1C plus the fractional-C of the attack missile which is looking downrange towards it's targets.

Question is... enough particles or not, most likely, or even just enough to screw up the terminal guidance a bit more.
Thoughts?

Typical particle velocity is very high in open space, and the missiles are designed to operate in very intense radiation environments. Like having tens of thousands of warheads go off in a second or so during a missile wave during BoM.

Also, at relativistic velocity you are not directly adding the vectors together, as anything that results in a velocity exceeding C is not allowed.

Then there is the inverse cube problem. Your energy density drops dramatically as the range increases. At 1000 km (which is really, really close in Honorverse combat) the energy a given target will take is 1 billionth of the energy it would have received at 1km.


And also, if this works so great, why doesn't every single navy have a tactic where they kick out huge honking fusion bombs at rapid intervals right as hostile missiles close in? Clearly it would be better than the triple ripple as the missile laser head guidance units will be effectively looking right at the nuke and the radiation shields are already down during the laser head target acquisition process.

How come nobody ever came up with this idea?

SharkHunter wrote:.... not just a bright flash, otherwise the triple ripple wouldn't have worked at all, ....

It's a bright flash nuke driven particle wave [incuding all those bits of vaporized CM], which ought to be rather ruinous to any sensors it can reach, and properly timed, the attack missiles will hit that particle wave no matter what. So here's my thinking. We're told that the particle shields on the Mark-23 are good until about .8C, right? By the time said missils get to "extended CM range [say 5-6 million km) they've already got most of that speed, but the CM is also headed towards it like a bat out of hell. So our little chip calculates that the CM is going to miss, so it flash bangs and cends a full 1-C (speed of light) particle burst upstream towards the shipkiler. You've now got those particles hitting at 1C plus the fractional-C of the attack missile which is looking downrange towards it's targets.

Question is... enough particles or not, most likely, or even just enough to screw up the terminal guidance a bit more.
Thoughts?

relativity dosen't work that way. send a light beam to a target that is coming to you, it is still traveling at the speed of light, it just has a frequency shift.

In other words, the ruby laser beam still travels at the speed of, but instead of it being red light, it might be orange or yellow. Don't ask why it works, but every astronomer knows that the red shift is how to determine how fast a steller or interplanetary object is traveling.

Particles going the speed of light are Energy. Nothing goes faster than the speed of light, in a straight line.

pnakasone wrote:

kzt wrote:Considering that missiles use grav sensors, the triple ripple is roughly akin to laying smoke at night against radar directed gunnery. They won't even notice it. Plus nukes in space are just bright flashes, there is no fireball as that is the X-rays in the warhead acting on the atmosphere around the warhead.

As I understand it the the Triple Ripple is primarily an anti-lac measure not anti-missile one.

The Triple Ripple is only an anti-LAC technique, because Manticoran/Grayson LACs operated behind their higher efficiency EW drones. To "even out the playing field" so to speak, since Havenite LACs couldn't generate as much EW, they use the nukes to remove the Alliance LAC's EW, which just happens to have the incidential effect of simultaneously blinding them AND allowing your attack missiles to get to pinpoint range "attacking out of the sun".

But, if like kzt observed, that grav sensors shouldn't be blinded at all, then the Triple Ripple shouldn't have done anything to Alliance LACs sensors, and by the second salvo they'd be firing counter-missiles. Because remember, the Triple Ripple fires three salvo's, the first detonates short of normal attack range, reducing sensor effectiveness, the second detonates somewhere between the first salvo and real attack range, and the third salvo comes screaming in and blows the crap out of you.


... Except LAC sensors ARE blinded by the Triple Ripple, which indicates that they can be overloaded. And LAC's have got to have better particle screens, and hardened sensors than missiles can possibly have, if the missile wants to carry a meaningful warhead anyways. So if LAC sensors can be blinded by a singular nuke, or multiple waves of nukes detonating well beyond the ranges normal laserheads detonate, then missiles can DEFINITELY be blinded by popping off a salvo of nukes in front of them.

If you caught them right after the launching ship cut its control links, those missiles would lose all sight of their targets, be forced to fly through the EM 'cloud', and then try to figure out which targets in its way are decoys, EW, and genuine ships. All at what amounts to point blank range, that even Apollo FTL control missiles with their upgraded targetting AI would be hard pressed to sort the information before they had to detonate or overfly and be useless.

So why don't ships protect themselves by throwing out large fusion bombs that detonate just outside the sidewalks and blind incoming missiles?

And how come the first nuke that went off at BOM against Home fleet didn't blind the other 50,000 or so behind it in that salvo?

David and the good idea fairy....

kzt wrote:So why don't ships protect themselves by throwing out large fusion bombs that detonate just outside the sidewalks and blind incoming missiles?

And how come the first nuke that went off at BOM against Home fleet didn't blind the other 50,000 or so behind it in that salvo?

David and the good idea fairy....

Never said it has to be just outside the sidewalls, but using nukes against incoming missiles was used at least once. Zizka, the LAC missile defense variant of the Triple Ripple, during one of the battles of Zanzibar right in the opening chapters of At All Costs. 600 Cimeterre's versus something like 1500 incoming MDM's.

Cimeterre's use Zizka.... it's wasn't very effective.

However, Zizka was specifically countered by the incoming MDM's suddenly diving and rising, immediately prior to the nuke detonations and went through an "evasion" maneuver of at least 45 degrees, possibly as many as 90 degrees. This evasion took their sensors completely away from the defensive Triple Ripple (aka Zizka), which in turn caused every single missile to lose its internal target lock.

But Zizka's primary intent, is to break the back of incoming missile's EW cover, which is identical to the reason you use the Triple Ripple offensively, again to break EW. Haven no longer requires such brute force tactic, because they started catching upto Manticoran EW and counter-EW faster than Manticore was pulling away from them, before they allied together. BUT the Solarian Navy might start using such brute force tactics, because they can't do anything else and their CMs are so bad that using nukes in a brute force solution might actually achieve something beyond the sub-10% missile kills they can do now.