Energy torpedoes against spider drive ships?

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 that OBS indicates energy torp range is about a light second. And that's probably limited by plasma packet containment, so if you made an effort to push the technology, you could doubtlessly up the range, but since sidewalls make energy torps useless, there probably hasn't been a whole lot of dedicated research into making them longer ranged for a while.

You don't need contact nukes or missile bodies as KEWs - you program them for a wedge-on-target-hull intercept, and make like cutting butter with a plasma torch.

BrigadeΔ wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote: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.

Yes that was a typo it should have been 300,000km and I found references for 400,000km at a couple of sites for the energy torpedoes.

Jeroswen wrote:

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

Yes that was a typo it should have been 300,000km and I found references for 400,000km at a couple of sites for the energy torpedoes.

Thanks, I'd mostly assumed it was a typo like that. But I went though OBS and looked at every single use of "kilometer" and there were no direct references to the range of the energy torpedo.
I agree I'd expect it to have 300k-400k km range; but I want able to find any text-ev that stated that.

It may be hiding in one of the Jaynes or SITS books; wouldn't expect it in any of the other novels as I don't recall them being used after OBS. Or people may have just been inferring the range and posting that inference as fact on their sites. <shrug>

Edit. I just thought of where it could be and sure enough it was. The appendix to SVW where it talks about the naval tech has a brief bit on energy torps and it says; in part

Short Victorious War wrote:Another energy weapon, though seldom used at this period, was the energy torpedo, which fired what were for all intents and purposes packets of plasma confined in electromagnetic bottles. Energy torpedoes moved at near-light speeds, which made them very difficult for point defense to engage, but the energy torpedo had no homing capability. This made it a purely ballistic weapon, so the initial (and only) fire control solution was far more critical than for missiles, and the endurance of its "bottle" was barely more than one second, limiting absolute energy torpedo range to 300,000 kilometers or so.

Short Victorious War wrote:
Another energy weapon, though seldom used at this period, was the energy torpedo, which fired what were for all intents and purposes packets of plasma confined in electromagnetic bottles. Energy torpedoes moved at near-light speeds, which made them very difficult for point defense to engage, but the energy torpedo had no homing capability. This made it a purely ballistic weapon, so the initial (and only) fire control solution was far more critical than for missiles, and the endurance of its "bottle" was barely more than one second, limiting absolute energy torpedo range to 300,000 kilometers or so.

What happens when the endurance limit is reached?

Does it explode or just dissipate?

If it explodes then couldn't an energy torpedo be used as a defensive weapon against incoming missiles, or is the stand-off range of a laser head missile greater than the endurance range of the energy torpedo?

George J. Smith wrote:Does it explode or just dissipate?

If it explodes then couldn't an energy torpedo be used as a defensive weapon against incoming missiles, or is the stand-off range of a laser head missile greater than the endurance range of the energy torpedo?

It dissipates. Even if it were to explode, the particle density is likely not large enough to pose a challenge for missile particle shielding (and the fact that ETs are unguided makes them ill-suited for intercepting things a light-second out).

The E wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:Does it explode or just dissipate?

If it explodes then couldn't an energy torpedo be used as a defensive weapon against incoming missiles, or is the stand-off range of a laser head missile greater than the endurance range of the energy torpedo?

It dissipates. Even if it were to explode, the particle density is likely not large enough to pose a challenge for missile particle shielding (and the fact that ETs are unguided makes them ill-suited for intercepting things a light-second out).

I found a post on this subject in the pearls from 2004. Here it is.

Energy torpedo launchers are much less massive than anti-shipping energy weapons; they are much more massive than point defense laser clusters. Point defense clusters have different numbers of emitters, depending on the size of the ship which mounts them. In the Royal Manticoran Navy, for example, heavy cruisers have (on average) eight emitters per cluster. If I remember correctly (and I'm speaking from memory here) light cruisers and destroyers have six emitters and wallers have up to twelve emitters per cluster. The greater the number of emitters, the more rapid the cluster's combined rate of fire becomes, and a point defense laser, which is much lighter than an anti-shipping energy weapon, already has a very high rate of fire compared to the aforesaid anti-shipping weapon.

Now, an energy torpedo launcher also has a very high rate of fire… compared to a standard antishipping energy weapon. It does not have a particularly high rate of fire compared to a point defense laser, and is certainly far less rapid-firing than an entire cluster of them. You will get many more shots from a laser cluster, even aboard a smaller warship, then you will from an energy torpedo launcher. This has many implications, of course, but one particularly significant one stems from the fact that, unlike counter-missiles, neither energy torpedoes nor lasers are guided weapons. The higher rate of fire of a point defense laser and the fact that a laser travels at the speed of light whereas an energy torpedo moves appreciably slower than the speed of light, makes a laser inherently more accurate and allows it more shots at a target in a given time window.

I suppose that under some circumstances a sort of "barrage" defense, firing timed-detonation energy torpedoes, might be thrown up as some sort of last-ditch interdiction defense, sort of a "wall of fire" in space. I do not think it would be incredibly effective, however, and I suspect it would create all sorts of fire control problems, not to mention interference with the firing ship's sensor capabilities. The greater objection to a defense of this sort, however, would be that the probability of the kill at the ranges at which laser heads need to be stopped would be significantly lower on a per-shot basis for an energy torpedo launcher as compared to even the smallest point defense cluster, and you could fit many fewer of them into the same tonnage and volume. The very rare circumstances under which the energy torpedo point defense concept might prove more valuable than the existing laser cluster concept, combined with the lower number of targets you would be able to engage, would combined to make the energy torpedo system unacceptable on a cost-benefit basis to almost any admiralty I can think of. That's not to say that a ship which mounted energy torpedo launchers anyway might not try to use them in a point defense role in a moment of maximum desperation, but it is not something which anyone will adopt as standard doctrine.