A new idea for sandcasters...

Theemile wrote:But, being a grav wave, will there be a grav current to pull the sand in a particuliar direction (i.e. away form protecting the invading ship)? And as mentioned above - will there be enough to absorb/ deflect the graser without becoming the universe's biggest sandblaster?

Just start firing missiles and CMs. Or launching LACs.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:But, being a grav wave, will there be a grav current to pull the sand in a particuliar direction (i.e. away form protecting the invading ship)? And as mentioned above - will there be enough to absorb/ deflect the graser without becoming the universe's biggest sandblaster?

Just start firing missiles and CMs. Or launching LACs.

That's kinda hard on the LAC crews

Theemile wrote::twisted:

kzt wrote:Just start firing missiles and CMs. Or launching LACs.

That's kinda hard on the LAC crews

Well, you could skip the crews. They don't really need to be on board.

Theemile wrote:That's kinda hard on the LAC crews

kzt wrote:Well, you could skip the crews. They don't really need to be on board.

But that's 1200 Kilos fewer of sand per LAC....

Theemile wrote:

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:
Re: Use of Sandcasters in wormhole transits

You can't use the Sandcaster until you have finished the transit of the wormhole, by which time it is too late. A bubble sidewall (I believe that Weber has at least implied that they can be used with sails) would be much better. I don't know if anybody (other than possibly the Solarian League) would try to build squadrons of superdreadnought- sized wormhole assault ships.

No sidewalls cannot be used in the emergence lane. Bubble sidewalls can be used in Hyperspace with sails, but not in wormholes
.
.
.

Where was it stated that you can't use bubble sidewalls in wormholes?

Theemile wrote:
No sidewalls cannot be used in the emergence lane. Bubble sidewalls can be used in Hyperspace with sails, but not in wormholes

They should be usable there. The grav forces there are weaker than a hyperspace grav wave; where we know bubble sails can be used.

But I could totally believe that it wasn't possible to transit the wormhole with the bubble up. So you might need several seconds to raise it upon emergence. But I don't know of anyplace saying it can't be used (it's just that it isn't worth the tradeoffs to actually install bubble sidewalls on warships)


And I guess if building a custom wormhole assault ship you'd add equal armor to the top and bottom because they're now equally vulnerable to sidewall penetrating fire as the broadsides are

But as for sandcasting the grav forces of the emergence zone is going to further tear apart, and scatter, the sand pretty quickly. You'd probably need gigatons of it to significantly degrade the energy fire, and that's before it's getting really dispersed.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:
No sidewalls cannot be used in the emergence lane. Bubble sidewalls can be used in Hyperspace with sails, but not in wormholes

They should be usable there. The grav forces there are weaker than a hyperspace grav wave; where we know bubble sails can be used.

But I could totally believe that it wasn't possible to transit the wormhole with the bubble up. So you might need several seconds to raise it upon emergence. But I don't know of anyplace saying it can't be used (it's just that it isn't worth the tradeoffs to actually install bubble sidewalls on warships)


And I guess if building a custom wormhole assault ship you'd add equal armor to the top and bottom because they're now equally vulnerable to sidewall penetrating fire as the broadsides are

But as for sandcasting the grav forces of the emergence zone is going to further tear apart, and scatter, the sand pretty quickly. You'd probably need gigatons of it to significantly degrade the energy fire, and that's before it's getting really dispersed.

About 2-3 years ago David spoke on here about wormhole assaults and the time spent in the emergence lane- a post which cleared up a lot of misconceptions I can't seem to find it at the moment....

Theemile wrote:

Theemile wrote:
No sidewalls cannot be used in the emergence lane. Bubble sidewalls can be used in Hyperspace with sails, but not in wormholes

Jonathan_S wrote:They should be usable there. The grav forces there are weaker than a hyperspace grav wave; where we know bubble sails can be used.

But I could totally believe that it wasn't possible to transit the wormhole with the bubble up. So you might need several seconds to raise it upon emergence. But I don't know of anyplace saying it can't be used (it's just that it isn't worth the tradeoffs to actually install bubble sidewalls on warships)


And I guess if building a custom wormhole assault ship you'd add equal armor to the top and bottom because they're now equally vulnerable to sidewall penetrating fire as the broadsides are

But as for sandcasting the grav forces of the emergence zone is going to further tear apart, and scatter, the sand pretty quickly. You'd probably need gigatons of it to significantly degrade the energy fire, and that's before it's getting really dispersed.

About 2-3 years ago David spoke on here about wormhole assaults and the time spent in the emergence lane- a post which cleared up a lot of misconceptions I can't seem to find it at the moment....

I know he posted a bunch about opposed wormhole transits in the "SPOILER - finding the torch wormhole's destination" thread of 2012. But I just looked back through my copies of his posts and didn't find anything about bubble sidewalls; and I can't find wormhole assault/defense posts newer than about 2012.


He did post a very definitive

runsforcelery wrote:take my word for it, please. Nothing coming through that terminus is going to survive long enough to achieve squat, and no one --- NO ONE --- in the Honorverse is sending an assault through a terminus blind.
[...]
("barring some fresh technological game-changer")

But that isn't a statement that bubble sidewalls are physically impossible. Just that they, like every other known technology, wouldn't help enough to make the assault survivable against likely defenses.


He did say (talking about the Manticoran junction

runsforcelery wrote:This means each SD will be forced to leave its wedge and sidewalls down for the better part of 5 minutes, during which it must maintain a steady course and cannot fire impeller drive missiles, and is confined within a 9,000 km-wide “tube.”

But he appears to be discussing normal sidewalls which would be down because the wedge was down; I don't read that as a statement on bubble sidewalls that are only ever installed in forts/stations.

<tangent>
(In a later post he says that at the Trevor's Star terminus, because it's only a single terminus, you can clear the transit lane quicker)

runsforcelery wrote:An attacker coming through from the Manticore side finds himself in a transit lane which is about 12,000 kilometers across (not 9,000) and which extends only about 10,000 kilometers from the terminus itself. This means that a Manticoran superdreadnought with a 1910 compensator would spend only about 90 seconds trapped in the transit lane inbound to Trevor's Star, as opposed to the 4.5 minutes of an assault into the Junction.

</tangent>

In fact I was only able to find one post from him (12-Apr-2012) in my file specifically about bubble sidewalls - and that was discussion fort designs; though it was in the thread "Defending a Wormhole Junction/Terminus"


So I remain unconvinced that if someone chose to devote the significant space it would take to include a bubble sidewall that it wouldn't be possible to activate that bubble while in a terminus's transit lane.

It's been stated that bubble sidewalls are usable in grav waves. It's also been stated that nobody has actually ever (at least recently) built ships that had this as the mass/space penalty required you cut too much other stuff.

So I'd guess it would work in a WH transit, but the mass/space penalty is so large as to make it a one-trick pony.

I wonder if anyone has suggested using a gazillion tiny radar corners tuned to the frequencies in a graser?

If it worked, it would shoot a fairly large proportion of the graser's energy right back at the source.