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Tech they ought to have.

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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by kzt   » Sat Sep 24, 2016 3:58 pm

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Putting huge amounts of work into a technology to get very minor improvements is the definition of a mature technology. It's the long tail on the graph. You can eventually get significant improvements, but it will take a long time and cost a whole lot of time, money and effort of experts.
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by Maldorian   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 4:58 am

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Is there any explaination why they use Plasma rifles in Honorverse, but not as Shipweapons?

I wonder, why no one has defense satellites. I you remember: As they thinking about the "Star Wars System" in the Reagan era there were armed satellites part of the System, so armed satellites are a very old idea. The Manticorians were the firt who has Multi engine missles at their ships, because they are very good in micro tecnology. But for System defense size doesn´t matter. even the solarians or others should be able to create a kind of missle withe more engines, in a bigger size. Defense satellites means also, that the structure is strong enough armored that Lasercluster couldn´t destroy it, and more important, a defense satellite should have defense weapons, not only to defend themself, to defend the planet were they in Orbit against incomming missles. What use have all your defense missles, if your planet will be still destroyed?
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by kzt   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 5:05 am

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Energy torpedoes are plasma weapons.
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by munroburton   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 5:12 am

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Maldorian wrote:Is there any explaination why they use Plasma rifles in Honorverse, but not as Shipweapons?


They call the shipboard version of the plasma weapon 'energy torpedoes'.

They also call your "defense satellites" forts.
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by pnakasone   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 5:25 am

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Maldorian wrote:Is there any explaination why they use Plasma rifles in Honorverse, but not as Shipweapons?


They do have a space based plasma weapon but it has a very limited range compared to everything else they have. It is called an Energy torpedo has only a range 300,000 km and is completely stopped by sidewalls.
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by Somtaaw   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 12:04 pm

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Maldorian wrote:Is there any explaination why they use Plasma rifles in Honorverse, but not as Shipweapons?


kzt wrote:Energy torpedoes are plasma weapons.


pnakasone wrote:
Maldorian wrote:Is there any explaination why they use Plasma rifles in Honorverse, but not as Shipweapons?


They do have a space based plasma weapon but it has a very limited range compared to everything else they have. It is called an Energy torpedo has only a range 300,000 km and is completely stopped by sidewalls.


The current infatry plasma "rifle" is closer to something we would regard as a plasma grenade launcher, which functions mostly as the plasma torpedo's have been described. Namely, very small 'packets' of plasma that travels at incredibly high speed but has a limited duration. Given the typical ranges infantry would engage, even with pulsers and pulse rifles and plasma rifle the plasma packets travel nearly instantaneously. The plasma torpedo packets travel their entire 300,000 km maximum range in little more than a second or two.


Some form of plasma based direct fire, rather than torpedo, might be possible but that's outside of my knowledge base. IIRC, other sci-fi's such as Star Trek gave plasma-based direct fire to Romulans but I don't remember if that was due to them having plasma torpedos in addition to plasma direct fire, or I'm just crossing their weapons.

A plasma beam weapon would be incredibly devastating, but also also something that would be just as short ranged as the plasma torpedo packets. Think the... Pyrians from Andromeda? I think they had plasma beam weapons, using mass singularity packets to slow hostiles down enough for the Torchship to get in range and open up with the plasma beams to, quite literally carve up their target.


The short range is the achilles heel, which might actually make it a weapon used by the MAlign, rather than any other navy that relies on ships capable of stand-up combat that generally fights at the multi-million km range rather than sneak attacks from sub-million km ranges.
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by Tenshinai   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 12:52 pm

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kzt wrote:Putting huge amounts of work into a technology to get very minor improvements is the definition of a mature technology. It's the long tail on the graph. You can eventually get significant improvements, but it will take a long time and cost a whole lot of time, money and effort of experts.


"mature tech" is not the same as development having plateaued.
And there are big questionmarks about whether those techs ARE mature yet or not.

It´s not because we know so amazingly much that they take such effort to improve further, but because to figure out more is just EXTREMELY complex.

Consider when the current bigwig particle collider was opened for business, on the first day it already had a backlog of over 25 years worth of experiments which there was no other equipment big enough to run.

Both USA, Russia, China and Japan at the very least have all considered building a "next generation" wind tunnel, because all current ones are simply not good enough or big enough or powerful enough to go further with testing.
So instead, supercomputer simulations are used, which in theory is cheaper, but instead takes weeks, months or even years worth of computer time to investigate even small stuff.

No, there´s definitely no plateau in the technology, there is a plateau in our ability to figure things out as fast as we could while we were still playing with the easy stuff.
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by kzt   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 2:06 pm

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Tenshinai wrote:Consider when the current bigwig particle collider was opened for business, on the first day it already had a backlog of over 25 years worth of experiments which there was no other equipment big enough to run.

When you need a 200 billion dollar, 10 square mile system to possibly allow further investigation, then yes, that is definitely a mature technology. Essentially you are in the "bigger rocket" stage, where you are using brute force to accomplish things.

Compare what was done with accelerators in the first 20 years and the cost per discovery and the average number of discoveries per 10 years to what is going on now.
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by GabrialSagan   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 7:06 pm

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Holodeck technology and creating hard light always seemed like something that is well above and beyond the capabilities of the Honorverse tech-base.

When it came to the computers issue I always chocked it up to the fact that flinging a laser warhead across the vastness of space and detonating it to strike the offending ship with a series of laser beams with the power of a nuclear bomb no small feat of computing.
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Re: Tech they ought to have.
Post by Weird Harold   » Sun Sep 25, 2016 10:14 pm

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GabrialSagan wrote:When it came to the computers issue I always chocked it up to the fact that flinging a laser warhead across the vastness of space and detonating it to strike the offending ship with a series of laser beams with the power of a nuclear bomb no small feat of computing.


It is not a small feat. However...

My $9.95 cell phone has more memory and computing power than the Apollo moon landing required -- probably more memory and computing power than the entire Apollo program! :shock:
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

(Now if I could just find the right questions.)
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