Energy torpedoes against spider drive ships?

Kytheros wrote:

kzt wrote:http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/116/0

And why this doesn't work on ships:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/127/0

"I'd have to run the numbers, but the particle shielding is basically designed to handle collisions with solid objects massing up to about two metric tons at velocities of up to 60% of light-speed. More massive objects can be dealt with it lower velocities, and as the velocity rises above .6c, the size of the object the system can handle goes down. There is, however, a reason warships mount massively redundant point defense to cover the bow-aspect of their wedges, and a reason besides the need to engage an enemy vessel for mounting the most powerful chase weapons possible and mounting them in multiple numbers, instead of simply settling for the biggest, nastiest spinal mount weapon you can cram in. When an object too large for the particle shielding to deal with turns up, it is automatically engaged by the ship's point defense and -- if the ship has been cleared for action -- its chase energy weapons, as well. And the fire control on those systems is designed to engage targets coming in at better than 80% of light-speed. and they're also designed to begin engaging them at ranges in excess of 200,000 kilometers. "

I believe every instance where we've seen particle screens being up has also been when the wedge has been active.
I know it was explicitly mentioned that missile wedges incorporate radiation and particle shielding, but when MDMs are ballistic, those shields are down.
How much of that can be carried over to ship particle and radiation shields is unclear.

At any rate, my impression was that the idea was to chuck loads of crap out, and look for it interacting with particle shields. Just because the particle shields can take it doesn't mean nothing happens when there's a lot hitting the shields at once.

It is also possible that the idea is to chuck loads of crap out and look for voids where there shouldn't be any.

You are talking about an incredible amount of particles.

The problem, As always with sandcaster defenses is how much sand can you carry ? W've slready estavlished that such a system for ship defense just leaves a trail of sand behind you, and in order to have any use, will go through 10s of kilotons every second. ( A CA's 150 Km wedge has a constrained volume of ~2,250,000 km^3. That's an insane amount of sand needed to mount a particle detection system inside an area we know is safe. Beyond that is even tougher.)

Just a thin barrier at the 22 light minute hyper limit is an insane amount of sand to place and keep up. A usable barrier between 10 light minutes (where Earth is) an the ~22 light minute hyper limit is completely infeasable.

Spider detection via "sandcasting"? meh... never thought that would come up as a mechanism though in Star Treck they made it seem like a number of ships could flood a section of space with whatever uber-cool sounding TV writer's pet particle name, and make the ships trying to be holes in space more visible. In theory it's the crossover and gaps in that energy field from the angles that take away the stealth yada yada yada.

So let's someone guesses correctly about where a spider ship has been operating, and "sand casts" out there with cool particle X...(and could do it with a reasonable amount of particulate). Spider goes cold and turns off any drive, leaving only the shields facing you in operation, and what, you don't think those shields will handle accelerated grains of sand? aka shields designed by folks with 24 CENTURIES more science than we have now? Hmmm...

Now then, bracket said spider with a number of rc drones that can go kerfluey without blinding each other, and the ship receiving the take will likely get some kind of a hit from a distortion in the explosion field. But that assumes finding the Spider ship to begin with, which is NOT a simple proposition except perhaps shortly after it sneak-hypers in.

As KZT and other would say, the problem is SPACE IS BIG.

Compounded in any star system with lots of "said space is not empty". Detection is nasty difficult, which is why manticore's "pick up a hyper footprint" is so dang big. My impression is that only key systems are similarly guarded.

It would be rather more effective to have a network of platforms out and broadcasting omnidirectionally. No matter how good a stealth system is it'd disrupt the broadcast, and delay it a small, although, detectable amount.

Of course, you would still need a downright ludicrous number of platforms to do this around an entire system.


Of course, if the theory that an active spider drive disrupts the pulses used in FTL comms is true, you could just use them instead. You still need loads, just not quite so many of them.



As for the particle shields vs sandcaster detection idea. I don't think anybody is suggesting it'd overwhelm the shields, but enough particles hitting a particle shield in a short period of time might well cause some sort of detectable energy signature. Plus, if you can track the particles themselves or have evenly distributed something you can track , you then also know that there it a void produced in the pattern.

Kytheros wrote:

kzt wrote:http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/116/0

And why this doesn't work on ships:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/127/0

"I'd have to run the numbers, but the particle shielding is basically designed to handle collisions with solid objects massing up to about two metric tons at velocities of up to 60% of light-speed. More massive objects can be dealt with it lower velocities, and as the velocity rises above .6c, the size of the object the system can handle goes down. There is, however, a reason warships mount massively redundant point defense to cover the bow-aspect of their wedges, and a reason besides the need to engage an enemy vessel for mounting the most powerful chase weapons possible and mounting them in multiple numbers, instead of simply settling for the biggest, nastiest spinal mount weapon you can cram in. When an object too large for the particle shielding to deal with turns up, it is automatically engaged by the ship's point defense and -- if the ship has been cleared for action -- its chase energy weapons, as well. And the fire control on those systems is designed to engage targets coming in at better than 80% of light-speed. and they're also designed to begin engaging them at ranges in excess of 200,000 kilometers. "

I believe every instance where we've seen particle screens being up has also been when the wedge has been active.
I know it was explicitly mentioned that missile wedges incorporate radiation and particle shielding, but when MDMs are ballistic, those shields are down.
How much of that can be carried over to ship particle and radiation shields is unclear.

At any rate, my impression was that the idea was to chuck loads of crap out, and look for it interacting with particle shields. Just because the particle shields can take it doesn't mean nothing happens when there's a lot hitting the shields at once.

It is also possible that the idea is to chuck loads of crap out and look for voids where there shouldn't be any.

Quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_medium

The density of the interplanetary medium is very low, about 5 particles per cubic centimeter in the vicinity of the Earth[citation needed]; it decreases with increasing distance from the Sun, in inverse proportion to the square of the distance.

at 80% light speed, each square centimeter of hull would come across 2.4*10^10 molecules of hydrogen

At standard atmospheric pressure, there is on the order of 2.75*10^19 molecules of gas.

That means that a military ship must push aside an effective gas density just over one billionth the density at sea level. (1/872,000,000) This is a density orders of magnitude lower than the density at the world record for the highest baloon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_balloon The altitude record for an unmanned balloon is 53.0 kilometers.

The idea would probably work but why bother? Once you see a spider drive ship literally ANYTHING (including a fleet pinnace) with an impeller wedge can just ram it and take no damage killing it, CMs will do it, energy weapons will have no trouble, real kinetic energy missiles will just be overkill and laserheads will be un-needed if not less effective; Shannon Foraker's triple ripple would be an easy way to do it as those are big warheads, even if the missile impeller wedges don't kill the ship (which can probably not turn fast and only goes 150 Gs). The problem is finding the spider drive ship. The hole in space method could work but the spider drive ships imitate the surrounding radiation if memory serves. Maybe active gravitic sensors would be able to spot the interference between the tractor beams and the alpha wall though.

Silverwall wrote:I see no use for energy torps against spider ships. If you are close enough for the torps then you can probably get as good results by seeding your missile salvos with good old fashoned contact nukes. No matter how tough the armour a contact nuke is really going to ruin the spider ships day.

Of course finding the spiders in the first place is the challenge but once you know roughly where it is from it's fire you flood the proximity with recon drones and lacs and bombard it from exteme range.

Nothing we have seen in regards the graser torps suggest that they will be that effective against a sidewall.

Actually, the contact nuke has had it's day. The hottest nuke ever fired is small compared to the energy of even one missile stage, let alone all three.

You actually do want to fire the warhead, though, not for the purpose of damaging the ship but for the purpose of spreading the damage out. You want the target ship absorbing the energy rather than simply punching a hole through the ship and going out the other side.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Silverwall wrote:I see no use for energy torps against spider ships. If you are close enough for the torps then you can probably get as good results by seeding your missile salvos with good old fashoned contact nukes. No matter how tough the armour a contact nuke is really going to ruin the spider ships day.

Of course finding the spiders in the first place is the challenge but once you know roughly where it is from it's fire you flood the proximity with recon drones and lacs and bombard it from exteme range.

Nothing we have seen in regards the graser torps suggest that they will be that effective against a sidewall.

Actually, the contact nuke has had it's day. The hottest nuke ever fired is small compared to the energy of even one missile stage, let alone all three.

You actually do want to fire the warhead, though, not for the purpose of damaging the ship but for the purpose of spreading the damage out. You want the target ship absorbing the energy rather than simply punching a hole through the ship and going out the other side.

Well after looking up the information in On Basylisk Station I found:

Energy Torpedoes have a 300km range.
They travel at near light speed
They are simply bottled plasma which explains the range limitations.
They are direct fire.
They have a very high rate of fire.
While extremely destructive they cannot pierce a sidewall.

So I don't think this will work for detection, range is too limited, but for fighting a spider ship it seems a very good option at close range.

If a light cruiser with just a few launchers can mission kill a DN before it can be targeted for return fire. That speaks of a very high rate of damage once in range.

Jeroswen wrote:Well after looking up the information in On Basylisk Station I found:

Energy Torpedoes have a 300km range.
They travel at near light speed
They are simply bottled plasma which explains the range limitations.
They are direct fire.
They have a very high rate of fire.
While extremely destructive they cannot pierce a sidewall.
.

Can you provide the quote for the 300km range? Because I can't find it (and I did searches for "three hundred", "300", and then finally "kilometer"). Also that would be insanely close range.


If an energy torp could only fire 300km then SD's would never mount them because the wedges would be in physical contact as the etorp finally entered range. SD wedges sticking 150km out to either side of the ship. But we know SDs used to mount them just in case an enemy's sidewall got knocked offline in an energy range slugging match. Which also implies that they should have similar range to lasers and grasers (or at least the 400,000 km range at which SDs would slug it out to penetrate the opponent's sidewalls. Because if you have to close the range to exploit knocking out s sidewall the enemy will just roll behind their wedge and escape. Which again would make mounting the etorp fairly pointless even when you expect to have to slug it out in energy range.

Also in OBS they seemed to show that the limiting factor on using etorps was the 100,000 km range of the grav lance; itself already alarmingly close range...

Jonathan_S wrote:

Jeroswen wrote:Well after looking up the information in On Basylisk Station I found:

Energy Torpedoes have a 300km range.
They travel at near light speed
They are simply bottled plasma which explains the range limitations.
They are direct fire.
They have a very high rate of fire.
While extremely destructive they cannot pierce a sidewall.
.

Can you provide the quote for the 300km range? Because I can't find it (and I did searches for "three hundred", "300", and then finally "kilometer"). Also that would be insanely close range.


If an energy torp could only fire 300km then SD's would never mount them because the wedges would be in physical contact as the etorp finally entered range. SD wedges sticking 150km out to either side of the ship. But we know SDs used to mount them just in case an enemy's sidewall got knocked offline in an energy range slugging match. Which also implies that they should have similar range to lasers and grasers (or at least the 400,000 km range at which SDs would slug it out to penetrate the opponent's sidewalls. Because if you have to close the range to exploit knocking out s sidewall the enemy will just roll behind their wedge and escape. Which again would make mounting the etorp fairly pointless even when you expect to have to slug it out in energy range.

Also in OBS they seemed to show that the limiting factor on using etorps was the 100,000 km range of the grav lance; itself already alarmingly close range...

I think he means 300k km, it is probably a typo though that seems a bit short ranged as well.

Silverwall wrote:I see no use for energy torps against spider ships. If you are close enough for the torps then you can probably get as good results by seeding your missile salvos with good old fashoned contact nukes. No matter how tough the armour a contact nuke is really going to ruin the spider ships day.

Why do you need contact nukes? Just use the the missiles as KEWs. More destructive that way.