Battle of Spindle

Loren Pechtel wrote:

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.

Also remember,they rarely worked; prior to the laserhead, defenses were winning. The "burn" setting actually had a few hundred ( then thousand) km of standoff range, and sent the focused plasma wave to (hopefully) burn out the sidewalls.

All missile activity was preamble to the energy battle. It was the big show prior to 1870 pd.

With Laserhead missiles, as soon (having been able to calculate when it will clear the wedge and have a shot into the throat) as the missile has reached a point where the lasing rods will be able to direct the energy into the body of the targert, the warhead goes off and the energy is going in through the bow or up into the stern of the target. The SLN ships have no bucklers or anything close to them.
Essentialy it's a stab in through an essentialy unproteced (except for the armor) hull and once the bow/stern armer is defeated, it is just like what is described with 18th and most 19th century sailing ships that have had somebody get to fire into the stern of another ship. Interior bulkheads from bow to stern arn't going to have as much resistance. What we typicaly see in down the throat or up the kilt hits is catastrophic damage, often leading to the ship blowing up from things like loseing containment on a reactor.,

Loren Pechtel wrote:

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.

Word of god, missile wedges are 10km wide. You could in theory get through the sidewalls. In practice, anything not manuvering (which is needed to allow that) probably doesn’t have sidewalls. The gap between the wedge is what is being targeted. And word of god is that the missile wedge is harnessed by the sidewall penetrator to allow the warhead to get through the sidewall.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

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.

It fits between the floor and the roof of the wedge, but not between the sidewalls. The penetrator and burn mode force the sidewalls down. After that, the boom mode explodes inside the wedge, close to the ship.

At no point is there a missile trying to fly inside of the sidewalls with its wedge up.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:It fits between the floor and the roof of the wedge, but not between the sidewalls. The penetrator and burn mode force the sidewalls down. After that, the boom mode explodes inside the wedge, close to the ship.

At no point is there a missile trying to fly inside of the sidewalls with its wedge up.

No, burn and boom are separate modes. In boom ( nuke explosive contact) a Grav generator spools up and attempts to synchronize with the sidewall and create a window ( of sorts) for the warhead to pass through the sidewall. The sidewall is not harmed, whether or not the penaide worked. The wedge of the missile drops some distance prior to the wedge to avoid interference, and definitely prior to the sidewall to avoid smacking into the sidewall 10 km early and exploding before it can try to penetrate the sidewall.

The burn mode explodes the warhead several hundred to several thousand km from the target and using a Grav generator focuses a jet of plasma at the sidewall to overload the generator. The wedge drops and the warhead fires hundreds or thousands of miles from the Target's wedge.

The sidewall was specifically designed to stop missile wedges. It just does. Authorial fiat

This is all covered in the armor treatise in "In Fire Forged", the 5th anthology.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

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.

Only the earliest sidewall burners (which were just unidirectional nuclear warheads detonated near the sidewall) had to fly into the wedge gap. IFF says that starting in 1806 sidewall burners were built as "nuclear gravitically directed energy weapon (NGDEW)" and "standoff ranges grew from tens of hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers over the ensu-ing decades". So even the initial ones were at least 1000 km standoff range -- far further than the edge of the wedge.

So for the last 100+ years it was only the contact nukes that had to travel into the wedge gap. And those missiles didn't normally need to fly between the sidewalls. They fly at the sidewall and penetrate it.

In Fire Forged wrote:Research has uncovered at least seven unique “inventors” of the sidewall penetrator. Whoever invented it, the consensus among historians is that the first widely employed devices used a precisely timed reshaping of the missile’s own impeller wedge in the fraction of a second be-fore contact to temporarily “flicker” the target’s sidewall and allow the weapon to pass through unimpeded. This approach had the downside of destroying the attacking missile’s own drive (and much of its afterbody) rendering it both unable to maneuver inside the target’s wedge and removing its primary means of killing the target. The answer was to merge the standoff nuclear weapon with the sidewall penetrator and use the inert missile front end to carry a nuclear charge into the sidewall perimeter.

(IFF also notes in passing that when sidewalls first came into play "The open ends of the wedge presented too small a target to incoming missiles" - though I guess if the enemy was foolish enough to point their bow or stern directly at you a missile of that era might be lucky enough to make a 0 deflection run down the 20km wide gap)