Sidewalls?

I like the idea in Beginnings where they use a missile wedge as a sidewall. I always wondered if a Shrike Wedge couldn't be placed such that that wedge could be used as a side wedge on a large ship. Say a Nike with a full defense side wedge, just keep it flat so it doesn't have any acceleration effects. A Box sidewedge with minimal openings would be near invulnerable. Beams can't bend around a wedge and missiles would be absorbed. Keeping the nodes hot could let one raise and lower them to absorb in coming salvo's and then fire ones outgoing salvo's. With Keyhole, one could use the slightest gap to maintain fire control.

Lord Skimper wrote:I like the idea in Beginnings where they use a missile wedge as a sidewall. I always wondered if a Shrike Wedge couldn't be placed such that that wedge could be used as a side wedge on a large ship. Say a Nike with a full defense side wedge, just keep it flat so it doesn't have any acceleration effects. A Box sidewedge with minimal openings would be near invulnerable. Beams can't bend around a wedge and missiles would be absorbed. Keeping the nodes hot could let one raise and lower them to absorb in coming salvo's and then fire ones outgoing salvo's. With Keyhole, one could use the slightest gap to maintain fire control.

If you're asking if the Nike could mount a second set of impellers; Shrike beta-squared nodes, to generate a 2nd wedge -- no it couldn't. RFC's already covered that somewhere in the infodumps.

But even just thinking about it logically a LAC sized wedge is smaller and closer - activating it would destroy large parts of the hull (there's a reason you need to taper the hull towards the nodes -- they produce destructive gravitational effects in those zones during startup (and possibly shutdown). Oh, and because it's closer than the full up wedge it'd contact and blow out its nodes.

If you're talking about having a shrike, or roughtly shrike sized platform fly in formation beyond the edge of the Nike's wedge and interpose their own then yes it could work, but isn't usually worth it. Honor did something similar with her runabout to protect the queen's old yacht. The problem is that, unlike a sidewall, the nearby wedge blocks the Nike's hull mounted sensors, and it's missile fire. And while a sidewall gunport can be opened and shut in (seemingly) less than a second turning a ship's wedge on and off takes several minutes - so you can't drop it to fire and snap it back up like you were proposing.

If you were dealing with only a towed pod alpha strike it might still be useful to turtle up that way for it, but against sustained fire the painfully slow cycle time on the wedge prevents it from being a normally useful tactic.

Also you've got risk that laserhead will fly ahead or behind you and take shots at your still unprotected bow and starn.


Oh, and I think Keyholes need to stay roughtly broadside on to the ship - because IIRC their beamed power emitters and very high bandwidth data links are embedded in their docking cradles. If so you can't stick them ahead or astern of you because you'd mask their links to the ship. In which case you couldn't use them to look around wedges flying broadside on to you...


So overall, once you bother to think about it, you realize why almost nobody ever does this. It's only beneficially is a few very specific instances (hence why, to my recollection, we've only seen some variant of it used 3 times in all the stories)