Relativity

Loren Pechtel wrote:A clean miss and it can self destruct. Even tiny debris will vaporize it--it's hitting with antimatter-level energy.

A glancing blow on debris can make it vaporise incompletely and disable the missile's self-destruct or electronic brain, leaving sufficient samples for reverse engineering.

So why risk it?

Against ships that get overwhelmed by the missile exchange, there's no need to ram: just fire. Against ships that can defend themselves, like RHN or RMN-level technology, you have to fire as soon as you can get a targetting solution. And you don't want to telegraph which missiles are shipkillers and which ones aren't by their attitude. All missiles must pretend to manoeuvre to fire until they actually do or they execute their pen-aid purpose.

The ACM is also behind all of the others: can it see through the hash created by the Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth to find the target ship in the first place to ram it?

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Except that the chance of getting stopped cold by the wedge of a CM goes up exponentially as you get closer to the ship. The whole reason missiles moved from "burn" mode warheads, with a standoff range of 5,000 km, to laserheads, with a standoff range of 30,000 km (later 50,000), was the extra 25,000 km distance drastically improved the percent that survived long enough to detonate.

In the old days I would agree. Now, though, I don't think the missile will face any defensive fire in that last tenth of a second of flight. Missiles crash through the defense zone fast enough every defensive unit gets only one shot, and since the missiles are arriving as a salvo all the defenses will have already engaged and be reloading/recharging. You can't make every missile ram because then the defenders will hold their lasers until the missiles are closer, but having a reasonable percentage try for it if the geometry permits would be a good idea.

It'd also be hard to get all missiles to ram without wedge fratricide. They'd have been really careful dropping wedges since they're aiming for a target that's at least 5 times narrower that their wedge. (Though rotation can help since both ship and missile wedge are far wider than they are tall - so roll the missile 90 degrees clockwise without changing heading and possible stack 2 into the length of the ship).

Of course if they do drop their wedges there's a chance for a CM's wedge to sweep a bunch of them.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:A clean miss and it can self destruct. Even tiny debris will vaporize it--it's hitting with antimatter-level energy.

A glancing blow on debris can make it vaporise incompletely and disable the missile's self-destruct or electronic brain, leaving sufficient samples for reverse engineering.

A hit with a piece of antimatter won't vaporize it?!?! Because the debris might as well be antimatter for the damage it will do.

Against ships that get overwhelmed by the missile exchange, there's no need to ram: just fire. Against ships that can defend themselves, like RHN or RMN-level technology, you have to fire as soon as you can get a targetting solution. And you don't want to telegraph which missiles are shipkillers and which ones aren't by their attitude. All missiles must pretend to manoeuvre to fire until they actually do or they execute their pen-aid purpose.

Of course. The shipkillers would deploy normally. It's just if they have clear sailing the might decide to ram. I've already pointed out that it's very unlikely they will face any defensive fire as they close.

The ACM is also behind all of the others: can it see through the hash created by the Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth to find the target ship in the first place to ram it?

Of course it can't--but it doesn't need to. It's got the feed from those other missiles, it knows where the target is.

Loren Pechtel wrote:A hit with a piece of antimatter won't vaporize it?!?! Because the debris might as well be antimatter for the damage it will do.

Where would the antimatter come from? This is not Starfire, there are no AMBAMMs in the Honorverse. I'm sure they have the technology for it, but it is probably still expensive enough to make antimatter that it's not economically viable. Energy is cheap and plentiful via fusion and hyperspace.

Antimatter or AQS power generators would be necessary if you needed a huge amount of concentrated energy, for example for a ship that wouldn't need refueling for years or which had a huge power need that couldn't be supplied by capacitors.

Anyway, just touching antimatter might not be sufficient. Depending on the amount of it and where it hit, the energy release could fail to vaporise completely and just scatter pieces of the missile.

Of course. The shipkillers would deploy normally. It's just if they have clear sailing the might decide to ram. I've already pointed out that it's very unlikely they will face any defensive fire as they close.

I disagree with that. The defence systems will prioritise any missiles that are close enough and have a free shot, which is required for ramming. A missile that fails to shoot at 24,000 km but instead continues to approach at 0.8c would still need 0.3 seconds before it could ram. That's a lot of time. A PDLC cluster with 16 lasers can fire each one every 2 seconds, which means it fires every 0.125s. So in the time it takes the missile to close the distance for ramming, the PDLC can fire twice. And there are multiple PDLCs.

More importantly, the missiile can miss an opportunity that won't come again. If it has a clear shot at the hull, it has to take it. It won't know whata jinks the ship will take in the next two or three hundred milliseconds. If the flight line was already not perfect, like coming close to the edge of the wedge, it can become impossible if the ship executes an evasive manoeuvre. The missiles more likely to be able to execute the ramming are also those that have the best shot for their payload.

Why would they waste the opportunity?

Of course it can't--but it doesn't need to. It's got the feed from those other missiles, it knows where the target is.

Up until the moment that the shipkillers fire and stop existing. From that point on, the ACM is on its own. Since it's behind the others, the position of the ship becomes uncertain, though I'll grant you it's minimal (the ACM is probably in the order of 200 km away, which means only 0.83 ms).

It’s worse than you think. To deploy the laser rods and warhead requires that the wedge be dropped. Once it is off it doesn’t come back on. This also takes some time, estimated to be on the order of at least a quarter second if the missile doesn’t have to spin to target something other that the ship wedge. So a missile attempting a ramming attack behaves totally differently than a normal attack missile.

And the missiles don’t all explode at the same time, David has stated that they deliberately arrange it so they arrive over a period of a few seconds.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:A hit with a piece of antimatter won't vaporize it?!?! Because the debris might as well be antimatter for the damage it will do.

Where would the antimatter come from?

There isn't any antimatter, I believe what Loren is saying is that at relativistic speed a missile hitting a piece of debris would act as though it is hitting antimatter.

Which is my point in the debris thread. Missiles routinely operate in a veritable minefield of debris.

—Me Shrugsalot.

cthia wrote:Which is my point in the debris thread. Missiles routinely operate in a veritable minefield of debris.

But they also have active particle shielding, which I think is like a repulsion beam directed straight ahead that deflects objects from contact with the missile body.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Which is my point in the debris thread. Missiles routinely operate in a veritable minefield of debris.

But they also have active particle shielding, which I think is like a repulsion beam directed straight ahead that deflects objects from contact with the missile body.

It requires a lot of energy that a missile doesn't have access to to deflect an object traveling at a significant fraction of light, or if the missile is traveling at a significant fraction of light.

In fact, have you ever tried to alter the plane of a gyroscope? It's a hard pill to swallow that missiles can alter their vector even a little, once at speed. Let alone warships "crabbing away" from their original vector, once maximum militarily velocities are achieved.

—Sir Shrugsalot

cthia wrote:Which is my point in the debris thread. Missiles routinely operate in a veritable minefield of debris.

tlb wrote:But they also have active particle shielding, which I think is like a repulsion beam directed straight ahead that deflects objects from contact with the missile body.

cthia wrote:It requires a lot of energy that a missile doesn't have access to to deflect an object traveling at a significant fraction of light, or if the missile is traveling at a significant fraction of light.

In fact, have you ever tried to alter the plane of a gyroscope? It's a hard pill to swallow that missiles can alter their vector even a little, once at speed. Let alone warships "crabbing away" from their original vector, once maximum militarily velocities are achieved.

But we are told that can happen, aren't we? As for warships crabbing away, it is easy to just direct their acceleration in a different direction; the hard point is that it will take awhile before the velocity component perpendicular to the original velocity has an appreciable magnitude compared to that original magnitude.