Do we actually need SD(P)s?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:If memory serves, Honor had left 8 hours remaining on the BCs and 6 for the CAs. Enough for a fight, but no way to run.

And yet they still accelerated hundreds of thousands of tons of warships at hundreds of gravities using nothing but old-fashioned rockets. The Physics of this battle must be glossed over.

Fusion Thrusters, not exactly old fashioned rockets, but yeah - still Newtonian Reaction thrust. once again - the Power of Plot.

Loren Pechtel wrote:You're still missing my point. Yes, pod ships defeat current designs. What I'm saying is that adding enough PD to those Scientists to let them defend against podlayers will take less away from them than was taken from the pod layers. A force of uprated Scientists will generally survive closing on a force of podlayers and will then blow it to bits when they reach energy range.

I don't think so. First of all, the pod layers didn't give up their energy weapons, only their launch tubes. So if the two forces reach energy range, the one with more units wins.

And the one with more units will be the pod-laying force. Assuming comparable technology levels, a pod-laying force puts out more missiles in some salvos (if not in all of them) than the broadside-launching one, even double double-broadside salvos. Therefore, statistically, the missiles launched from pods have a higher probability of hitting and killing enemy units than the ones launched from tubes. That's true even if a continuous pod-laying rate is smaller than tube-launching rate: the pod-laying force can muster a couple of massive salvos before any enemy missiles come into range to destroy the pods.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Though if you hit a large water tank with a giga- to exawatt energy beam you'll probably get an impressive steam "explosion" from it.

How long do the regular graser beams last? A millisecond? An exawatt graser beam would deliver a petajoule of energy. 1 kg (1 L) of water needs roughly 4.2 kJ of energy to increase 1 K in temperature. So to go from room temperature to boiling (some 80 K), you need 336 kJ/kg. One PJ of energy could (literally) vapourise 2.97 billion kg of water = 2.97 million tonnes.

But not all of the energy is delivered to the water. First, it's dissipated before even reaching the hull. Second, it dissipates sublimating the hull itself. Third, water is a more or less poor heat conductor, so the beam would flash-boil only the water immediately surrounding the beam. And fourth, the beam would continue to heat the steam itself, which is an even poorer heat conductor. It would probably go all the way to plasma, at which point it becomes a good heat conductor.

But yes, such a steam would explosively expand. The only thing is that it would follow the path of least resistance and expand mostly through the holes created by the beam (axially), instead of through the rest of the water tank.

Then again, what we described for water is pretty much true for any solid or liquid part of the ship. The biggest damage of a graser beam is to turn the matter it hits into a beam of plasma that will continue to do damage.

Yeah, energy beams turn almost anything into a minor bomb.

Though I get the impression that normal ship grasers last for far longer than milliseconds. Aren't warheads of the graser torps are basically non-durably build CL-class grasers and those last for a few seconds! (Admittedly then destructively failing - but I'm not sure how much of that is that they're engineered not to last and how much is possibly running them longer than normal. Still I'd be a bit surprised if a warship's graser mount didn't fire for at least 100 ms.

Jonathan_S wrote:Aren't warheads of the graser torps are basically non-durably build CL-class grasers and those last for a few seconds! (Admittedly then destructively failing - but I'm not sure how much of that is that they're engineered not to last and how much is possibly running them longer than normal. Still I'd be a bit surprised if a warship's graser mount didn't fire for at least 100 ms.

No, it was remarked on how the 3 second beak from graser torps was so unusual because of this.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Aren't warheads of the graser torps are basically non-durably build CL-class grasers and those last for a few seconds! (Admittedly then destructively failing - but I'm not sure how much of that is that they're engineered not to last and how much is possibly running them longer than normal. Still I'd be a bit surprised if a warship's graser mount didn't fire for at least 100 ms.

No, it was remarked on how the 3 second beak from graser torps was so unusual because of this.

That would still be 30x the 100 ms mark that kzt suggested. And you can read that from the point of view of a disposable weapon: we know missiles fire in the tiny-fraction-of-a-second range. 3 seconds is huge compared to that.

I don't remember seeing any numbers on the time the shipboard grasers fire.

Don't ship mounted grasers fire in pulses? I'm thinking look at Service of the Sword, where Abigail is supervising a graser mount in a competition.

jchilds wrote:Don't ship mounted grasers fire in pulses? I'm thinking look at Service of the Sword, where Abigail is supervising a graser mount in a competition.

Yes. How long seems vague.

They are 18th century cannon analogs.

--snipping--

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't think so. First of all, the pod layers didn't give up their energy weapons, only their launch tubes. So if the two forces reach energy range, the one with more units wins.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but my impression is that you've got it backwards, i.e. I think that the BC(P)s and SD(P)s do not have extensive energy weapons, but are copiously equipped with many more PDCLs, which are much smaller.

Anyway -- let's shift to 21st century navies to answer the question of "if a wet-navy battleship is able to close with a wet navy aircraft carrier, who wins"... or even the battleship vs. a Ticonderoga or equivalent is... the battleship wins... Except that there aren't any existing battleships that are fast enough to close the range... unless all of the capital ships are partially disabled and mostly shot dry. Even the current carriers can all outrun existing battleships. So only missile ships, AC, and ground-launched are all that dangerous to first world navies.

The equivalent in the Honorverse is that the SD(P)s, BC(P)s etc. can never be brought to action by a current non-GA ship except in a Hypatia like scenarios. That doesn't even count the addition of any Sag-Cs, Nikes, Rolands... or LACs. Look at what Lessem did with his ships in UH as an example. The SLN could have had SDs instead of BCs in that battle and still suffered the exact same fates.

SharkHunter wrote:Please correct me if I'm wrong but my impression is that you've got it backwards, i.e. I think that the BC(P)s and SD(P)s do not have extensive energy weapons, but are copiously equipped with many more PDCLs, which are much smaller.

They are copiously equipped with PDLCs and CM launchers indeed, but they still have plenty of grasers. An Invictus mounts 18 grasers on the broadside and 10 in the chase aspects, both of them. See [url="https://honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Invictus_class"]the wiki page[/url] (information comes from House of Steel). Compare that to a Scientist, with 28 grasers and 24 lasers, and a Gryphon with 22G + 19L on the broadside and 5G + 10L on the chase. So the traditional SDs have more mounts, but not massively so more, and fewer in the chase. Also remember that the Invictus mount Grayson-style grasers, which are heavier (which is why they have no lasers).

The equivalent in the Honorverse is that the SD(P)s, BC(P)s etc. can never be brought to action by a current non-GA ship except in a Hypatia like scenarios. That doesn't even count the addition of any Sag-Cs, Nikes, Rolands... or LACs. Look at what Lessem did with his ships in UH as an example. The SLN could have had SDs instead of BCs in that battle and still suffered the exact same fates.

And even if you can close the range, the opposing force can still deny battle by turning their wedges.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Also remember that the Invictus mount Grayson-style grasers, which are heavier (which is why they have no lasers).

Mounting beam weapons "Grayson-style" only applies to below the wall, because Grayson heavy cruisers and Grayson battlecruisers mount dreadnought-sized grasers. All DNs and SD's still only carry dreadnought-sized weapons, they're simply so much larger than cruisers they can mount considerably more graser mounts overall, and fortresses carry even more beams than SD's do but are also still only dreadnought beams.

I tried to find the exact text-ev when Honor discovered the difference in Grayson shipbuilding but couldn't find it. I seem to recall it was mentioned Grayson battlecruisers gave up almost a full third of their possible energy weapons to mount the pure graser mix.

Presumably Grayson wallers (pre-podlayer era) followed the same reduction, giving up almost 1/3 of the total mounts they might have had. But every single one would be a dreadnought graser which is something like 50% more damage compared to a laser due to the gravitic lens focusing & amplifying the beam.


Once the podlayer designs were started, the joint Manticoran-Grayson design teams followed that same Grayson doctrine, and suppressed all lasers for a pure graser mixture. Reducing total energy weapon mounts by 33% undoubtedly helped free the tonnage for a sufficiently large podbay without unacceptably weakening an SD(P)'s energy threat.