The ultimate weapon

Well, as far as I could recall, Spider Drive "legs" could partially penetrate Alpha Wall even inside the hyperlimit. So, in theory, far future development of said technology could led to the ability to penetrate Alpha Wall within hyperlimit.

They latch onto the wall. They do not breach the wall.

Jonathan_S wrote:Though it wasn't until the appendix of SVW that it actually states Grasers are energy mounts like Lasers

Don't recall seeing this, I read "energy mounts" as a generic slang term for 'direct fire' weapons, as a gravitic accelerator would require 'energy' to fire, and prior to their development the LASER would be the primary weapon.

Jonathan_S wrote:Little things like it couldn't generate Warshawski sails, which doesn't matter if it could because that doesn't get you into hyper, which doesn't mater because it wouldn't get you back out of hyper, which doesn't mater because entry or exit from hyper is impossible within the hyper limit (where virtually all combat happens), etc., etc.

MaxxQ wrote:Edit: Also, you need a hyper generator to get into and out of hyper, and if those and Warshawski Sails (which require Alpha nodes, which in most cases are bigger than the missiles) were small enough to fit in a missile, then they would also be on LACs, pinnaces, and other non-hyper-capable craft.

Actually, there is no actual size limit on what can or can't pass through the hyper limit. There is a 'current' practical limit. As for LACs - they can have Hyper capability, it's called a frigate, the hyper-generator just takes up much of the weapons space, making them very lightly armed.
Unlike a ship-born Hyper-generator, a missile born generator would not have to make multiple jumps and still be functional. A projectile born generator would (as detailed earlier) only be needed once. As long as it could generate the necessary field for the fraction of a second required, who cares what happens to it then? As stated, a one-shot 'pop' and then it fries itself into slag, oh, well, who cares? It gets nuked a fraction of a second later. such a device could be made much smaller than a reusable one with the shielding and insulation to not fry itself.
The "hyper limit" is a navigational issue. there is no 'magic shield' around a star preventing things from passing between N-space and Hyper-space. What there is, is an interference (created for the sole purpose of plot, otherwise there would be no need to speed 'in or out' of a system, just drop out of hyper in orbit) between the gravity produced by a high-mass object (like a star) and that of a hyper-generator. This interference makes it difficult to 'pull open' 'holes' large enough for a starship to lumber through "before a vessel could enter hyperspace." That does not mean that a comparatively tiny hole can't be opened for a small fast object to race through (otherwise, how was the technology developed? some explorer in cryogenic sleep woke up and had an epiphany? No ... it was on a planet (probably Earth), experimenting in some lab, INSIDE the 'limit').

Again, this isn't how any of it works in the Honorverse. You cannot translate inside the hyper limit, period. In Lester Tourville's own words:

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 softboiled 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.

MAD-4A wrote:Unlike a ship-born Hyper-generator, a missile born generator would not have to make multiple jumps and still be functional. A projectile born generator would (as detailed earlier) only be needed once.

Actually it would need to operate twice. Exiting hyper is a completely separate event that requires a separate activation of the hyper generator. You don't need a hyper generator to remain in hyper -- see the LACs and shuttles moving back and forth between Wayfarer and Artemis during HAE. You just need a working one, fully powered, to change bands, enter, or exit.

MAD-4A wrote:As long as it could generate the necessary field for the fraction of a second required, who cares what happens to it then? As stated, a one-shot 'pop' and then it fries itself into slag, oh, well, who cares? It gets nuked a fraction of a second later. such a device could be made much smaller than a reusable one with the shielding and insulation to not fry itself.

Which is another problem. It takes time to power it back up after use and even some time to activate after you hit the 'go' button on a fully powered up generator. It's unlikely even if you could make the massive engineering breakthroughs necessary to squeeze a 2-use generator into something of just 100 tons or so that it could recharge and activate fast enough to pop out 3-4 seconds later.

Also ships have trouble managing emergence withing 100,000 km and we're told shorter jumps have bigger accuracy problems - so you need yet another miraculous engineering breakthrough (the 3rd, right?) to get the accuracy to the point you can emerge within even laserhead range of a target, much less nuke or impact range.

MAD-4A wrote:The "hyper limit" is a navigational issue. there is no 'magic shield' around a star preventing things from passing between N-space and Hyper-space. What there is, is an interference (created for the sole purpose of plot, otherwise there would be no need to speed 'in or out' of a system, just drop out of hyper in orbit) between the gravity produced by a high-mass object (like a star) and that of a hyper-generator. This interference makes it difficult to 'pull open' 'holes' large enough for a starship to lumber through "before a vessel could enter hyperspace." That does not mean that a comparatively tiny hole can't be opened for a small fast object to race through (otherwise, how was the technology developed? some explorer in cryogenic sleep woke up and had an epiphany? No ... it was on a planet (probably Earth), experimenting in some lab, INSIDE the 'limit').

And Duckk already addressed this, but I'd add that if your theory that smaller objects should be able to emerge closer then we'd expect to see a dispatch boat ~210 times less mass than an SD (40,000 tons vs 8,500,000 tons) able to emerge at least a couple LM closer to the star. But there's never any hint of that. The no-go hyper limit is controlled entirely by the mass of the star (or planet); the size of object (ship) appears to matter not at all.

David has also said you can't have two active hyper generators at the same time. So no.

MAD-4A wrote:Actually, there is no actual size limit on what can or can't pass through the hyper limit. There is a 'current' practical limit. As for LACs - they can have Hyper capability, it's called a frigate, the hyper-generator just takes up much of the weapons space, making them very lightly armed.

Then it isn't a LAC, is it? LACs mass 20ktons and up, frigates mass at least double, and most likely triple that (I don't have the numbers at the moment). Dispatch boats mass less, but they're nothing but a shell around a hyper generator.

MAD-4A wrote:Unlike a ship-born Hyper-generator, a missile born generator would not have to make multiple jumps and still be functional. A projectile born generator would (as detailed earlier) only be needed once. As long as it could generate the necessary field for the fraction of a second required, who cares what happens to it then? As stated, a one-shot 'pop' and then it fries itself into slag, oh, well, who cares? It gets nuked a fraction of a second later. such a device could be made much smaller than a reusable one with the shielding and insulation to not fry itself.
The "hyper limit" is a navigational issue. there is no 'magic shield' around a star preventing things from passing between N-space and Hyper-space. What there is, is an interference (created for the sole purpose of plot, otherwise there would be no need to speed 'in or out' of a system, just drop out of hyper in orbit) between the gravity produced by a high-mass object (like a star) and that of a hyper-generator. This interference makes it difficult to 'pull open' 'holes' large enough for a starship to lumber through "before a vessel could enter hyperspace." That does not mean that a comparatively tiny hole can't be opened for a small fast object to race through (otherwise, how was the technology developed? some explorer in cryogenic sleep woke up and had an epiphany? No ... it was on a planet (probably Earth), experimenting in some lab, INSIDE the 'limit').

In the Honorverse, at least not for a LONG time, hyper generaotors are NOT going to be shrunk down enough to fit into a missile the size of what is currently used. Now if size creep continues over the next few hundred - or thousand - years, you MAY end up with ships large enough to fire dispatch boat-sized missile at one another, in which case your idea MAY have some merit.

OTOH, you're writing your own story, said by you NOT to be in the Honorverse, so frankly, you can do whatever the hell you want in YOUR universe. Just don't try to convince me or anyone else that it (your idea) will work in the Honorverse, because it won't. Period.

And if you're going to argue about what is and isn't possible in the Honorverse, you better make sure you know what you're talking about. Energy weapons aren't called energy weapons because it takes energy to fire them - if that were the case, a baseball bat can be considered an energy weapon, because you're using your bodys own energy to make it effective.

Energy weapons are called that because they fire a beam of energy, like a laser. Anything that launches a PHYSICAL (key word here) object, either through gravity, electromagnetism, or gunpowder, is a PROJECTILE weapon. Because it fires PROJECTILES, physical objects with motion imparted to them from an external source.

Thus endeth today's lesson in semantics.

MaxxQ wrote:

MAD-4A wrote:Actually, there is no actual size limit on what can or can't pass through the hyper limit. There is a 'current' practical limit. As for LACs - they can have Hyper capability, it's called a frigate, the hyper-generator just takes up much of the weapons space, making them very lightly armed.

Then it isn't a LAC, is it? LACs mass 20ktons and up, frigates mass at least double, and most likely triple that (I don't have the numbers at the moment). Dispatch boats mass less, but they're nothing but a shell around a hyper generator.

Your buried notes might have more modern or widespread info, but the one frigate data-point we have from the old (semi-canonical) SITS books.
Silesian Navy
Gryf-class - Frigate 53,500 tons
and for comparison that same Navy's LAC
Mazur-class - LAC 12,250 tons

In contrast Jayne's tells us that the Peep's Facteur-class Courier Boat massed 38,000 tons.

So the extra 15,500 tons of Frigate over DB gave it a broadside of 6 small missile launchers and 1 laser, 1 or 2 CM tubes and a couple PDLCs. Which, honestly, is probably an overgunned crap design; like many of the SCN's ships are. That's more tubes than many destroyers carry and they're another 15-20 ktons heavier -- though admittedly also carry more than one pop-gun laser.

It wasn't until the super-LACs Wayfarer carried that we started seeing LACs much over 12,000 tons.

So yeah, adding the hyper generator to a conventional LAC appears to bumps up it's tonnage by 4-5x (though some of that tonnage is that the 1 frigate design we've seen eschews the one-shot box launchers of old LACs)

At least in the Honorverse you can't take a ship into hyper and then drop out of hyper about a 500yds above the surface of a planet (and effectivly still relative to the surface of said planet) like the Falcon in the last SW movie.