Hyper Torps? ...

Or hyperspace missiles? A "Fusion" of GA tech? A nasty "Mark 36" that drops hyper INSIDE the target? Any thoughts? Hee hee hee!.

Skimper beat you to thinking like that you old coot.

edit: and Dauntless, 5 pages for each topic anyways.

Hyper drives are very large. The smallest ships with hyper drives seem to be courier vessels which are around 10k tons. That is about a hundred times larger than a large MDM.
It isn't at all clear from the textev whether you could miniaturize a hyper drive very much.

There is also a question of how you would use such a weapon tactically. Most engagements are fought within the hyper limit. As you would guess from the name, you can't use a hyper drive inside the hyper limit. Even if you could or would fight outside the hyper limit, you have a hellacious target acquisition problem and also a quite substantial guidance problem.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:Hyper drives are very large. The smallest ships with hyper drives seem to be courier vessels which are around 10k tons. That is about a hundred times larger than a large MDM.
It isn't at all clear from the textev whether you could miniaturize a hyper drive very much.

There is also a question of how you would use such a weapon tactically. Most engagements are fought within the hyper limit. As you would guess from the name, you can't use a hyper drive inside the hyper limit. Even if you could or would fight outside the hyper limit, you have a hellacious target acquisition problem and also a quite substantial guidance problem.

DB's are considerably bigger than 10 ktons. Dispatch boats were pretty much the size of destroyers who cram in a few weapons and almost no magazines even before the first Haven War. Even the smallest DB is going to be a minimum 40 ktons.

Between the two other threads, since we don't have any official word from rfc or Maxx, most of us have basically come to the idea that the hyper drive + sails has to weigh in at around 10 ktons alone not counting the rest of the ship mass.

My Lord Skimper beat me too it? Rats! Good ideas are soossss difficult to keep down. Did anybody see that so-so British Sci Fi film 'Wing Commander'? The Bad guys had a nasty "hyper torp". That is what made me think about such.

Anyhow, what good evil could the two old ladies comes up with when placing their heads together along with a bunch of Old Tillman provided courtesy of Lady Harrington. The Hermes Buoys started out big also, but got smaller.

The problem seems to be getting out of Hyper while in the exclusion zone. A ship must survive such, a big hyper torp would be inclined not to. Targeting would be a problem, along with exact navigation. Restrict to the Alpha Bands?

How small or how big would or could the thing be made? How deadly would it be? How to control it? Could the existing FTL fire control leads be used? Would it be a kinetic device or a laser head or something else entirely?

Inquiring minds wonder. Inquiring minds with plenty of Old Tillman wonder more. Or less.

HB of CJ wrote:My Lord Skimper beat me too it? Rats! Good ideas are soossss difficult to keep down. Did anybody see that so-so British Sci Fi film 'Wing Commander'? The Bad guys had a nasty "hyper torp". That is what made me think about such.

There's no hyper torpedo in Wing Commander. You probably saw the Skipper Missile, which has a cloaking device. This cloak works both ways, so the Skipper has to decloak periodically to update its tracking data.

HB of CJ wrote:How small or how big would or could the thing be made? How deadly would it be? How to control it? Could the existing FTL fire control leads be used? Would it be a kinetic device or a laser head or something else entirely?

Somtaaw already told you. The smallest hyper generator is 10,000 tons or about a fifth of a small starship's mass. It's like upsizing a Tomahawk missile to a missile the size of a frigate.

FTL comms do not work through hyperspace bands. The author has also ruled out fully autonomous drone ships, so you would need a suicide crew.

Which creates another obstacle - you can no longer accelerate faster than 800 or 900 gravities, making the platform very easily intercepted compared to a standard missile or RD.

As for the weaponry - well, since the bare minimum is 40,000 tons, anyone building such a thing could equip it with conventional missile launchers or beam mounts.

Bear in mind, LACs are too small to have indigneous hyperspace capability. Your missile has to be larger than a LAC.

Ever since the hyper generator and impeller drive were invented, it's been possible for warships to drop out far out-system and start throwing missiles. The bombardment ship can leave - or shift position - before response arrives.

That isn't the hard part. The hard part is preventing defensive response from nullifying the attacker's efforts.

So we're back to your true inspiration - an invisible missile. There isn't a cloaking device in the Honorverse, true, but the Mesans' drive systems can duplicate the effect and without the Skipper's warning signs.

Operation Oyster Bay is basically how you would deploy such a weapons system in the Honorverse.

The other thing, to add to munro's good explanation is the hyper limit. Even if you could (in theory) design a viable unmanned missile capable of autonomous flight and travel through hyper on it's own is the mechanics of hyper

You're still blocked by solar, and possibly planetary hyper limits from large gas giants. You can still translate, I think the various appendixes and others list it as 20% of the hyperlimit and you'll get banged up a bit but come through intact. Anything further in, was described at firing a soft-boiled egg at a wall. Splat, in other words.

Now since this notional unmanned hyper missile would be unmanned, it literally cannot afford to come out within that 20% closer to the star from the actual hyper limit, because if it gets banged up too much, it cannot repair itself should damage happen to critical components.

So you have to drop out, much like conventional warships at the very edge of the hyper limit, although if unmanned you could translate at ridiculously high crash translation to bring stupidly high base velocity with you. But you won't have stealth, and since you can't translate out seconds from a target inside the hyper limit, and the hyper wall is impenetrable by sensors (at this time anyways) from both sides it's also nothing like the wormhole space of the Fury-verse and Alicia DeVries. Which means this autonomous missile cannot lurk in the Alpha bands until something is approaching the hyper limit and translating in their face.


It certainly appears that RFC thought out his hyper mechanics well and most of the possible abuses.

Somtaaw wrote:The other thing, to add to munro's good explanation is the hyper limit. Even if you could (in theory) design a viable unmanned missile capable of autonomous flight and travel through hyper on it's own is the mechanics of hyper

You're still blocked by solar, and possibly planetary hyper limits from large gas giants. You can still translate, I think the various appendixes and others list it as 20% of the hyperlimit and you'll get banged up a bit but come through intact. Anything further in, was described at firing a soft-boiled egg at a wall. Splat, in other words.

Now since this notional unmanned hyper missile would be unmanned, it literally cannot afford to come out within that 20% closer to the star from the actual hyper limit, because if it gets banged up too much, it cannot repair itself should damage happen to critical components.

So you have to drop out, much like conventional warships at the very edge of the hyper limit, although if unmanned you could translate at ridiculously high crash translation to bring stupidly high base velocity with you. But you won't have stealth, and since you can't translate out seconds from a target inside the hyper limit, and the hyper wall is impenetrable by sensors (at this time anyways) from both sides it's also nothing like the wormhole space of the Fury-verse and Alicia DeVries. Which means this autonomous missile cannot lurk in the Alpha bands until something is approaching the hyper limit and translating in their face.


It certainly appears that RFC thought out his hyper mechanics well and most of the possible abuses.

You can't translate from hyper to normal space inside a hyper limit. How far in you attempt to do so determines only whether you survive the attempt:

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 33 wrote:Karen Lowe was an excellent astrogator, but a hyper voyage this long provided a great deal of scope for minor astrogation errors to produce major results. Overshooting their intended n-space translation point wouldn't be all that terrible . . . unless, of course, they overshot it too badly. A ship which attempted to translate out of hyper inside a star's hyper limit couldn't. As long as it made the attempt within the outer twenty percent of the hyper limit, all that happened was that it couldn't get into n-space. If it made the attempt any further in than that, however, Bad Things happened. Someone had once described the result as using a pulse cannon to fire soft-boiled eggs at a stone wall to see if they would bounce. Lester Tourville rather doubted they would, and even if he was wrong, it was a proposition he had no desire at all to test firsthand.

Is the hyper limit an absolute line or dos it fluctuate enough for someone to have to scan for it?

Vince wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:The other thing, to add to munro's good explanation is the hyper limit. Even if you could (in theory) design a viable unmanned missile capable of autonomous flight and travel through hyper on it's own is the mechanics of hyper

You're still blocked by solar, and possibly planetary hyper limits from large gas giants. You can still translate, I think the various appendixes and others list it as 20% of the hyperlimit and you'll get banged up a bit but come through intact. Anything further in, was described at firing a soft-boiled egg at a wall. Splat, in other words.

Now since this notional unmanned hyper missile would be unmanned, it literally cannot afford to come out within that 20% closer to the star from the actual hyper limit, because if it gets banged up too much, it cannot repair itself should damage happen to critical components.

So you have to drop out, much like conventional warships at the very edge of the hyper limit, although if unmanned you could translate at ridiculously high crash translation to bring stupidly high base velocity with you. But you won't have stealth, and since you can't translate out seconds from a target inside the hyper limit, and the hyper wall is impenetrable by sensors (at this time anyways) from both sides it's also nothing like the wormhole space of the Fury-verse and Alicia DeVries. Which means this autonomous missile cannot lurk in the Alpha bands until something is approaching the hyper limit and translating in their face.


It certainly appears that RFC thought out his hyper mechanics well and most of the possible abuses.

You can't translate from hyper to normal space inside a hyper limit. How far in you attempt to do so determines only whether you survive the attempt:

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 33 wrote:Karen Lowe was an excellent astrogator, but a hyper voyage this long provided a great deal of scope for minor astrogation errors to produce major results. Overshooting their intended n-space translation point wouldn't be all that terrible . . . unless, of course, they overshot it too badly. A ship which attempted to translate out of hyper inside a star's hyper limit couldn't. As long as it made the attempt within the outer twenty percent of the hyper limit, all that happened was that it couldn't get into n-space. If it made the attempt any further in than that, however, Bad Things happened. Someone had once described the result as using a pulse cannon to fire soft-boiled eggs at a stone wall to see if they would bounce. Lester Tourville rather doubted they would, and even if he was wrong, it was a proposition he had no desire at all to test firsthand.

Good catch Vince, I stand corrected as I hadn't actually double checked before I posted. I was close though, I remembered the percentage range, and the soft-boiled egg hitting a wall things at least.