Battle of Spindle

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Indeed, but battle geometry exposes the sidewall-protected broadside, not the fore or aft of the ship. Any ship that is facing 50 missiles with only its chase guns is not going to need any ramming in about 10 seconds anyway.

As Galactic Sapper said above, the missiles can't make the turn to enter the kilt or throat and still ram. We're talking about a 2-km wide gap that is 150 km long, on a missile that is speeding past its target at a speed better than 0.6 c. At that speed, it crosses the 2 km of the space between sidewalls in 11.1 microseconds. At 46000 gravities, the maximum deflection it can do in that time is 27 microns. Nowhere close to the 150 km.

Correction. The sidewalls are 10 km out from the broadsides so the gap between them is a hair over 20km. Still that'd only up the crossing time to 111 microseconds.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:The front of the wedge is open. It offers no protection from fire from the target.

Indeed, but battle geometry exposes the sidewall-protected broadside, not the fore or aft of the ship. Any ship that is facing 50 missiles with only its chase guns is not going to need any ramming in about 10 seconds anyway.

As Galactic Sapper said above, the missiles can't make the turn to enter the kilt or throat and still ram. We're talking about a 2-km wide gap that is 150 km long, on a missile that is speeding past its target at a speed better than 0.6 c. At that speed, it crosses the 2 km of the space between sidewalls in 11.1 microseconds. At 46000 gravities, the maximum deflection it can do in that time is 27 microns. Nowhere close to the 150 km.

The missile wedge is open too. So if the missile can see the target, which is kind of important against a vessel manuvering at several km/sec delta V, then the target can shoot at it.

kzt wrote:The missile wedge is open too. So if the missile can see the target, which is kind of important against a vessel manuvering at several km/sec delta V, then the target can shoot at it.

Of course, but the whole reason missiles work is by deceiving the defender as to what to shoot at.

Another question: how big is the missile's wedge? Could the missile even fit inside of the sidewalls without touching them? And if its wedge touched the sidewalls, what would happen?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:The missile wedge is open too. So if the missile can see the target, which is kind of important against a vessel manuvering at several km/sec delta V, then the target can shoot at it.

Of course, but the whole reason missiles work is by deceiving the defender as to what to shoot at.

Another question: how big is the missile's wedge? Could the missile even fit inside of the sidewalls without touching them? And if its wedge touched the sidewalls, what would happen?

10-15 km or so, IIRC. Possibly even larger for MDMs. Counter missile wedges are also bigger, in the 30 km range.

So no, they don't really fit inside the wedge of the target. As to what happens when the wedge touches a sidewall, that was basically what I was talking about when I said the penetrator seems to act a bit like a thing that shall not be named, in that it's an engineering system and not a weapons system and somehow uses the power of the missile's drive nodes to open a hole in the sidewall.

Presumably if you had a big enough interaction with a wedge and a sidewall that was geometrically possible - say, a missile going straight down the throat into a bow wall - the missile would vaporize from the interaction but the wall generator would also take severe interference damage or possibly burn out completely. That's entirely speculation on my part, of course, since something that unreasonable has never happened that we've seen.

Galactic Sapper wrote:10-15 km or so, IIRC. Possibly even larger for MDMs. Counter missile wedges are also bigger, in the 30 km range.

So no, they don't really fit inside the wedge of the target. As to what happens when the wedge touches a sidewall, that was basically what I was talking about when I said the penetrator seems to act a bit like a thing that shall not be named, in that it's an engineering system and not a weapons system and somehow uses the power of the missile's drive nodes to open a hole in the sidewall.

Presumably if you had a big enough interaction with a wedge and a sidewall that was geometrically possible - say, a missile going straight down the throat into a bow wall - the missile would vaporize from the interaction but the wall generator would also take severe interference damage or possibly burn out completely. That's entirely speculation on my part, of course, since something that unreasonable has never happened that we've seen.

Let's also not forget that the sidewall sits 50 or more km inside the port and starboard sides of the wedge, to hit the sidewalk, the missile would need to drive it's wedge down between the upper and lower wedges. This really narrows the angles of vulnerability.

Theemile wrote:Let's also not forget that the sidewall sits 50 or more km inside the port and starboard sides of the wedge, to hit the sidewalk, the missile would need to drive it's wedge down between the upper and lower wedges. This really narrows the angles of vulnerability.

Yep. About 65 km deep for an SD (150km wide wedge, so the ship is 75 km inside but the sidewalls sit 10 km out from the ship), and a bit less as the ships get smaller . However wedge sizes shrinks in volume far slower than the ships attached to them do. (I know the Jayne's books give the wedge size of a BC, but I don't have them handy to look it up. Still I want to say that it's still over 100 km despite the BC being about 1/10th the tonnage of the SD.)

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The energy of a missile ramming makes the beams from a standoff detonation look like a candle in an inferno--if the beam can do some good the ramming will do an awful lot more. I don't care if the sidewall somehow stops material objects--stopping something going that fast is going to produce extremely hot gamma rays and they'll go through same as the beam from the warhead.

The sidewall stops matter cold, unless it has a penetrator. Which, by what little we know about how they work, sound an awful lot like an incredibly short ranged thing that shall not be named which punches a warhead-sized hole in the sidewall.

But what happens when they stop that matter cold? I think the energy has to go somewhere--and that's either into the sidewall generators (which would destroy the ship) or into a burst of energy--but given the relativistic velocity of the missile that burst will be highly directional. I'm saying an MDM carries so much energy that that burst should be exceedingly harmful to the ship behind.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:The front of the wedge is open. It offers no protection from fire from the target.

Indeed, but battle geometry exposes the sidewall-protected broadside, not the fore or aft of the ship. Any ship that is facing 50 missiles with only its chase guns is not going to need any ramming in about 10 seconds anyway.

As Galactic Sapper said above, the missiles can't make the turn to enter the kilt or throat and still ram. We're talking about a 2-km wide gap that is 150 km long, on a missile that is speeding past its target at a speed better than 0.6 c. At that speed, it crosses the 2 km of the space between sidewalls in 11.1 microseconds. At 46000 gravities, the maximum deflection it can do in that time is 27 microns. Nowhere close to the 150 km.

Which is the objective of what I'm proposing--ensure they keep their wedge oriented to prevent this. If the missiles can't get in the point defense lasers can't get out and unless they can launch off-bore neither can the countermissiles.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Another question: how big is the missile's wedge? Could the missile even fit inside of the sidewalls without touching them? And if its wedge touched the sidewalls, what would happen?

The missile fits. If it didn't there never would have been a contact nuke nor a sidewall burner.

Loren Pechtel wrote:But what happens when they stop that matter cold? I think the energy has to go somewhere--and that's either into the sidewall generators (which would destroy the ship) or into a burst of energy--but given the relativistic velocity of the missile that burst will be highly directional. I'm saying an MDM carries so much energy that that burst should be exceedingly harmful to the ship behind.

There's a lot of things in universe that don't follow conventional physics. Conservation of energy is only a sometimes thing in the Honorverse.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The missile fits. If it didn't there never would have been a contact nuke nor a sidewall burner.

Or it could just cut the wedge a microsecond before making contact with the ship's wedge.