Honorverse ramblings and musings

Potato wrote:In that engagement, the Cataphracts had already gone ballistic by the time they were intercepted. There was no trading one-to-one of MDMs for Cataphracts.

Indeed. A wedge against a ballistic missile is no contest. Hence, surviving Barricade missiles.

You do not need thrusters to turn. (Specifically to point your "nose" in a new direction.) I'm 100% sure you can turn without thrusters. You spin something around, and this imparts angular momentum on you, because angular momentum is a conserved quantity. To stop turning, you stop what ever you spun around. In addition if you are already spinning you can continue spinning until acted upon by something else.

Now I suppose its possible that a wedge dumps angular momentum into the hyperwall, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that. I'm unclear on if a Wedge can impart angular momentum.

Of course, its possible thrusters allow for much faster turning. Which could explain why missiles have thrusters even if its possible to turn without them.

quite possibly a cat wrote:You do not need thrusters to turn. (Specifically to point your "nose" in a new direction.) I'm 100% sure you can turn without thrusters. You spin something around, and this imparts angular momentum on you, because angular momentum is a conserved quantity. To stop turning, you stop what ever you spun around. In addition if you are already spinning you can continue spinning until acted upon by something else.

Now I suppose its possible that a wedge dumps angular momentum into the hyperwall, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that. I'm unclear on if a Wedge can impart angular momentum.

Of course, its possible thrusters allow for much faster turning. Which could explain why missiles have thrusters even if its possible to turn without them.

EXCEPT- there is no massive gyroscope assembly on the schematics of the missiles - there are thrusters though.

But, that does lend to the question, why grav plates are not used in place of thrusters. They are obviously used to both create and counteract gravity fields. Why not use them to create a 50 G field off the port bow to turn without throwing plasma everywhere?

Theemile wrote:

quite possibly a cat wrote:You do not need thrusters to turn. (Specifically to point your "nose" in a new direction.) I'm 100% sure you can turn without thrusters. You spin something around, and this imparts angular momentum on you, because angular momentum is a conserved quantity. To stop turning, you stop what ever you spun around. In addition if you are already spinning you can continue spinning until acted upon by something else.

Now I suppose its possible that a wedge dumps angular momentum into the hyperwall, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that. I'm unclear on if a Wedge can impart angular momentum.

Of course, its possible thrusters allow for much faster turning. Which could explain why missiles have thrusters even if its possible to turn without them.

EXCEPT- there is no massive gyroscope assembly on the schematics of the missiles - there are thrusters though.

But, that does lend to the question, why grav plates are not used in place of thrusters. They are obviously used to both create and counteract gravity fields. Why not use them to create a 50 G field off the port bow to turn without throwing plasma everywhere?

True, missiles don't have a large gyroscope. Although for "corkscrewing" they can still just spin off momentum.

Grav plates presumably have that pesky "equal and opposite" thing going.

Theemile wrote:But, that does lend to the question, why grav plates are not used in place of thrusters.

Grab hold of your bootstraps (shoelaces, ankles, whatever) and jank hard. If you can even upset yourself, you're doing better than grave plates would as thrusters.

Thrusters are a simple and well tested technology compared to gravity plates.

Weird Harold wrote:

Theemile wrote:But, that does lend to the question, why grav plates are not used in place of thrusters.

Grab hold of your bootstraps (shoelaces, ankles, whatever) and jank hard. If you can even upset yourself, you're doing better than grave plates would as thrusters.

Someone isn't thinking with portals. If both portals open downwards you can reach up into one portal, grab your bootstraps and pull yourself upwards. Its even easier than a pull up since not only are you pulling yourself up by your arms, but you are also pulling yourself up by your bootstraps!

Although since this is Honorverse we're talking about and they don't have portal guns I'm not sure why you would think with portals.

Another question regarding Barricade that I don't understand. Since the RMN had such control of their missiles and since the Solly's ballistic launches were held so tightly together, why didn't the RMN simply explode a few missiles within each closely packed launch? Wouldn't the standoff range of the explosions do more damage to the missiles?

cthia wrote:Another question regarding Barricade that I don't understand. Since the RMN had such control of their missiles and since the Solly's ballistic launches were held so tightly together, why didn't the RMN simply explode a few missiles within each closely packed launch? Wouldn't the standoff range of the explosions do more damage to the missiles?

I think it's two things, timing and effective area. They couldn't know precisely enough where and when the groups of missiles would meet so they couldn't time the arrival precisely enough to make a nuke warhead or even a laser warhead work and I don't know if a missile isn't too small for a laser warhead to target, without a huge amount of targeting parameter tweaking---this is during a battle you know, so time is somewhat limited.

Further, explosions (in the case of a nuke) dissipate in the vacuum of space and the lasers only can cover a certain volume. Without working out any numbers, just consider (since the Solly missiles are ballistic and thus unprotected by their own wedges) that the wedges of the Manticorian missiles could kill more than one missile each. The limit isn't in numbers of missiles, but in the volume of space the RMN missiles are sweeping through. If anything except another wedge is in that volume of space, it will be destroyed (due to the huge gravity stress caused by the impeller wedge, I think).

cthia wrote:Another question regarding Barricade that I don't understand. Since the RMN had such control of their missiles and since the Solly's ballistic launches were held so tightly together, why didn't the RMN simply explode a few missiles within each closely packed launch? Wouldn't the standoff range of the explosions do more damage to the missiles?

As ncwolf already noted, the potential damage a nuclear proximity blast can do is fairly limited. Remember the "Tripple Ripple"? That strategy didn't actually take out the attack missiles, it just disrupted their targeting sensors while they were getting into final acquisition; At the time where the Barricade launches intercepted their targets, the targets didn't have their sensors online (it is most likely that the sensors were still under the ablative shielding most missiles carry).