A couple of queries about The Weapon That Shall Not Be Named

Don't worry; this isn't trying variation 13,886,995 of "the grav lance would be amazing if only you did XYZ!". I get that it's not especially useful. And that was before multidrive missiles, FTL guidance, and missile pods made even reaching laser range something of an achievement.

Rather, a couple of questions, more for my own curiousity which I can't find answers to:

1) A grav lance has a (very) short range (compared to the other options for making the bad people go ka-foom, anyway), and can only be 'fired' from a starship wedge. What is it that causes the range limit? Power, accuracy, or some fundamental limitation of gravetic physics?

2) What does a lance shot actually look like (on gravetics, obviously) from the perspective of (a) the target and (b) a third party?

I believe it is the ability to project a grav effect away from the grav generator that is the limit.

One wonders if the miniaturization push would make it smaller. It already fits in a CL with a bunch of ET and crew etc. A Grav Torpedo might be made LAC sized. I still like the Crippler better.

#2. "Holy Sh!t!, Sir, the starboard sidewall just disappeared. One moment it was at full strength, the next, all the generators are in an overload reset state. I'm trying to bring them back up now. Port is still up but all the generators reported a spike that coincides with the loss of the starboard wall."

Pretty much, the above is the only reaction we've seen from a grav Lance target. The only thing reported was the loss of one, or both, sidewalls due to a generator overload before the Energy Torps tore them up. To a 3rd party, the "shooter" should be seen giving a massive gravatic pulse (or series of them) on grav sensors but that has never been mentioned.

locarno24 wrote:Don't worry; this isn't trying variation 13,886,995 of "the grav lance would be amazing if only you did XYZ!". I get that it's not especially useful. And that was before multidrive missiles, FTL guidance, and missile pods made even reaching laser range something of an achievement.

Rather, a couple of questions, more for my own curiousity which I can't find answers to:

1) A grav lance has a (very) short range (compared to the other options for making the bad people go ka-foom, anyway), and can only be 'fired' from a starship wedge. What is it that causes the range limit? Power, accuracy, or some fundamental limitation of gravetic physics?

2) What does a lance shot actually look like (on gravetics, obviously) from the perspective of (a) the target and (b) a third party?

If I recall correctly the GL basically refocuses part of the ship's wedge into a gravity "spike" that hits the target's sidewall. That spike is only a tiny fraction of the power of the wedge; since it's not even strong enough to directly burn out the sidewall generators. On Basilisk Station mentioned that "With only a very little luck, a direct hit could set up a harmonic fit to burn out any sidewall generator".

That said, since those same sidewalls will eat up a missile's wedge without flinching the GL logically seems like it would be a stronger gravity phenomenon that that.


I imagine the short range is from trying to induce a wedge's nodes to stretch even some power to something like 650ish times their normal range. The impressive thing isn't their range, it's that the thing can be done at all.


As far as I know nothing has ever addresses what the signature of a GL would be. I think it would depend on how long the GL "beam" lasted. As a gravitimetric phenomenon the beam itself will cover the 100,000 km gap between the attacker and the target is a blistering 0.0052 seconds.
That said the GL is said to be "slow firing" so it's possible the target, or other observing ships, can see precursor changes to the firing ship's wedge in the seconds before the "spike" zaps across. And/or it's possible that "slow firing" means it has to dwell on the target for a second or two before the harmonics blow the sidewall.

So if the GL's "spike" lasts long enough to be seen I'd expect it would show up like solid bar between the two ships that's 'brighter' than a missile's wedge signal (again because it seems it would have to be more powerful than that to have any effect) but weaker than the signals from their wedges.



Hope that speculation helps.

Lord Skimper wrote:One wonders if the miniaturization push would make it smaller. It already fits in a CL with a bunch of ET and crew etc. A Grav Torpedo might be made LAC sized. I still like the Crippler better.

The answer to this is a resounding no, it cannot be miniaturized past it's current size and still effect larger ships. The issue is not the size of the hardware, it is the power of the wedge it is connected to.

Like a counter missile requiring a similar sized wedge to take out a shipkiller missile's wedge, the grav Lance requires a wedge of a certain size to be able to effect the systems on a ship the size of an SD, and that size is a small CL wedge.

Even if you could miniaturize the hardware so it would fit in a LAC, you probably could only effect the sidewalls on ships the size of a CA or CL, definitely not BCs or SDs.

Lord Skimper wrote:One wonders if the miniaturization push would make it smaller. It already fits in a CL with a bunch of ET and crew etc. A Grav Torpedo might be made LAC sized. I still like the Crippler better.

....Did you actually stop reading the story in which the Crippler was introduced after the salesman character stopped showing it off? Because it was made very, VERY clear that a) all you need to defeat it is a circuit breaker and b) it is utterly useless against military targets.

The E wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:One wonders if the miniaturization push would make it smaller. It already fits in a CL with a bunch of ET and crew etc. A Grav Torpedo might be made LAC sized. I still like the Crippler better.

....Did you actually stop reading the story in which the Crippler was introduced after the salesman character stopped showing it off? Because it was made very, VERY clear that a) all you need to defeat it is a circuit breaker and b) it is utterly useless against military targets.

We should all know by now that reading comprehension isn't exactly Skimper's strong suit. Or reading in general, for that matter.

I recall correctly the GL basically refocuses part of the ship's wedge into a gravity "spike" that hits the target's sidewall. That spike is only a tiny fraction of the power of the wedge; since it's not even strong enough to directly burn out the sidewall generators. On Basilisk Station mentioned that "With only a very little luck, a direct hit could set up a harmonic fit to burn out any sidewall generator".

That said, since those same sidewalls will eat up a missile's wedge without flinching the GL logically seems like it would be a stronger gravity phenomenon that that.


I imagine the short range is from trying to induce a wedge's nodes to stretch even some power to something like 650ish times their normal range. The impressive thing isn't their range, it's that the thing can be done at all.


As far as I know nothing has ever addresses what the signature of a GL would be. I think it would depend on how long the GL "beam" lasted. As a gravitimetric phenomenon the beam itself will cover the 100,000 km gap between the attacker and the target is a blistering 0.0052 seconds.
That said the GL is said to be "slow firing" so it's possible the target, or other observing ships, can see precursor changes to the firing ship's wedge in the seconds before the "spike" zaps across. And/or it's possible that "slow firing" means it has to dwell on the target for a second or two before the harmonics blow the sidewall.

So if the GL's "spike" lasts long enough to be seen I'd expect it would show up like solid bar between the two ships that's 'brighter' than a missile's wedge signal (again because it seems it would have to be more powerful than that to have any effect) but weaker than the signals from their wedges.

That makes sense. Huge as starship wedges are, put like that you're talking an order(s) of magnitude change of size, which is going to hit some hard engineering limits fast.

And sort of a gravetic version of a lightning discharge. Thanks.

The E wrote:....Did you actually stop reading the story in which the Crippler was introduced after the salesman character stopped showing it off? Because it was made very, VERY clear that a) all you need to defeat it is a circuit breaker and b) it is utterly useless against military targets.

Yeah, it wouldn't possibly be effective if it blew the wedges down on a wave of incoming missiles in their last 10 seconds of flight and hence pulled them a few tens of thousand km from where there tiny little computers were planning them to be.