AAMOF, 'optimising' doesn't actually mean making it perfect. Only as good as possible in the circumstances.
In any case, other than missile warheads, Honorverse energy weapons are not solid-state lasers - if they were, the rods would have to be replaced after every shot, since they _would_ self-destruct. That's fundamental physics, not engineering, so no weaseling out of it.
If [note that word, it's significant] my assumptions about the design and construction of the weapons are approximately correct, I can see ways of designing dual-mode systems. What it comes down to is getting enough energy into a missile to kill it. There are 3 problems: the emission itself, beam steering, and fire-control. Fire-control is relatively simple - even if you don't just hand main battery control off to your existing defensive systems, reconfiguration would be 90% control systems, and little or nothing would need to be tweaked in the physical plant to permit it. Emitter design would probably need some pre-planning. Not actually in the emitters themselves, but in the accelerators feeding them, which I believe would need some extra switching gear for reconfiguration, but a 2-4x increase in PRF, with commensurate decrease in peak energy, is conceivable - and if that's still more than enough energy for a kill, that's all that's needed. The real trick would be in beam steering - again, physics puts limits on how fast you can move a large emitter head, so you'd have to do much of it using the gravitic lens system. That's probably where much of the beam steering is already being done anyway, but you would certainly need a more complex system if you were going to try to do it fast enough for counter-missile use, and that would be where most of the mass penalty would lie.
Somtaaw wrote:Interesting, that Highlander LAC description is really terrible for making you think it's possible to optimize a laser for two incredibly different things.
I knew both Manticore and Haven use broadside beams to assist in point defense, Haven relies far more heavily on it than Manticore does. And that when Grayson, followed by Manticore started using "less but heavier" they were willing to accept to point defense degradation in favor of being able to slam harder hits.
But a anti-shipping laser, in my mind, still cannot be "optimized" for both anti-shipping (which requires larger pulses for bigger & harder hits) and anti-missile (which requires many small pulses to hit many missiles). Those are opposite roles for the laser, and to "optimize" one way will degrade your performance the other.
Example, when Hexapuma used her PDLC's for force neutralization over Montana, she accepted that each independent hit would do vastly less damage, than her main grasers which would have vaporized the whole ship. Of course, there was still crippling damage, but the PDLC's pulsed one beam per mount every 2 seconds versus 1 graser per mount every X,since we don't actually know how fast the laser or grasers cycle. We do know that during Terekhov dreaming of his final battle in Hyacinth that Defiant went to "rapid fire" and actually blew one of her chasers up in an overloard but we never actually got the cycle time. I imagine it has to be longer than PDLC's, which have anywhere between 12 and 30 lasing rods and each one has a 16 second cycle time (I'd have to recheck Shadows of Saganami to be sure)
Edit addendum: I put such a wide range of lasing rods on PDLCs, because I figured that smaller destroyer PDLC's will have less rods than a cruiser (like Hexapuma), which will have less rods than a superdreadnought PDLC (which is supposed to have pretty much the most of anything in space)
Edit: checking SoS, Hexapuma's PDLCs had dozens of PDLC's with each mount having 8 lasing rods. Each of those PDLC lasers cycle every 16 seconds, so a laser or graser would likely be somewhere between 12 and 20 seconds per shot.
