Planetary defense impeller arrays

I was wondering a bit; why no one ever tried to use the invunerability of impeller's wedge (tm) to protect static objects - like shipyards, large orbital stations, or even planets! - from the threat of long-range missile attacks?

Yeah, I knew; "impeller wedge could not be made too big". So what? We could use a lot of average-size impellers on the simple, sattelite-like units, which only function is to mantain their position in orbital array and project the impeller wedge around.

How costly would be such an array? Let's assume that we are trying to cover the average (not too dense, not too big) Earth-like planet with an array of impeller sattelites. For simplification let's make some assumption:

* Sattelites formed a sphere 15000 km in diameter (counting the planet inside)

* Each sattelite could project the impeller wedge 100 x 100 km in size.

* To avoid interlocking, and still mantain full defense, we might need to put the sattelites in two overlapping layers.

So, how many of those things we would need?

The total surface area of our 15000 km sphere is (S=4πR2) 706858347 km. The single sattelite could cover 10000 km. So, to cover the whole surface of our defense sphere, we would need 70686 sattelites.

This numbers looks tremendous, but let's not forget, that impellers are dirt-cheap in Honorverse. Each single superdreadnought usually carry several THOUSANDS of impeller-equipped missiles in her magazines. Considering that our shield sattelites does not need to even move around, we could safely assume that cost of planet-covering shields could be comparable with one single missile load of 10-20 SD's.

Impeller block ships do exist, the problem is knowing when you need them. The shipyards in Manticore, for example, had block ships, but no one knew they needed them online when Oyster Bay went in.

Duckk wrote:Impeller block ships do exist, the problem is knowing when you need them. The shipyards in Manticore, for example, had block ships, but no one knew they needed them online when Oyster Bay went in.

David mentioned it (briefly) here:

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/126/1

Duckk wrote:Impeller block ships do exist, the problem is knowing when you need them. The shipyards in Manticore, for example, had block ships, but no one knew they needed them online when Oyster Bay went in.

Well, what about having array constantly online? With some open holes for ships (of course, holes are constantly relocated by switching on/off parts of the shield in random order every several hours).

Because this is not magical fairly land where things can run forever without consequence. Such an array would be stupidly expensive running 24/7/365. There are also the little things, like people wanting to actually see their sun in the sky.

Potato wrote:Because this is not magical fairly land where things can run forever without consequence. Such an array would be stupidly expensive running 24/7/365. There are also the little things, like people wanting to actually see their sun in the sky.

The quote from David said that even with just hot nodes, they require yearly maintenance.