?

cthia wrote:Thanks for textev tlb, but that was my point.

What is your point? A LAC mounts a graser, the Trojan class Q-ship had 8 grasers in the broadside, the Invictus class superdreadnought had 18 grasers in the broadside, the Bellerophon class dreadnought had 18 grasers in the broadside, the Nike class battlecruiser had 12 grasers in the broadside, the Saganami-B class heavy cruiser had 10 grasers in the broadside and you have to go to light cruisers in House of Steel before you generally find fewer grasers in the broadside than Wayfarer had.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Thanks for textev tlb, but that was my point.

What is your point? A LAC mounts a graser, the Trojan class Q-ship had 8 grasers in the broadside, the Invictus class superdreadnought had 18 grasers in the broadside, the Bellerophon class dreadnought had 18 grasers in the broadside, the Nike class battlecruiser had 12 grasers in the broadside, the Saganami-B class heavy cruiser had 10 grasers in the broadside and you have to go to light cruisers in House of Steel before you generally find fewer grasers in the broadside than Wayfarer had.

My point is that an LD's massive size should account for many more grasers, or more powerful grasers, or both. Simultaneously enquiring from ThinksMarkedly whether he is positing a 5M-km graser aboard the LD because of it's size. IOW, what makes the tech possible for the MAlign and the GA hasn't come up with it?

BTW, if a 5M-km graser, could it have been influenced by TWTSNBN? I thought someone would learn something from the nameless one.

cthia wrote:My point is that an LD's massive size should account for many more grasers, or more powerful grasers, or both. Simultaneously enquiring from ThinksMarkedly whether he is positing a 5M-km graser aboard the LD because of it's size. IOW, what makes the tech possible for the MAlign and the GA hasn't ome up with it?

Since I said "A bigger ship can hold and power a bigger graser (a LAC is an exception, since its single graser is bigger than any on a destroyer - I believe)", I was already in agreement on that part. What I did not understand is what Wayfarer proved, since we knew it was mounting SD grasers.

I cannot find where Thinksmarkerly was positing such a graser; I believe that he was talking about a humongous railgun (which would probably use a mass driver in the Honorverse).

PS. Wayfarer's statistics are in House of Steel.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:
Let's talk more about this graser. First, another question about GA grasers. During battle, I always got the feeling that even an SD targeted an enemy ship with just one graser. If this is true, I never understood why several grasers weren't trained on the enemy simultaneously. Is that a technical limitation, an orientation limitation or an error on my part?

Pretty sure that's a misinterpretation on your part (though to be fair we rarely see warships in energy range of each other - so there aren't a lot of times to have seen this) and I see tlb already provided one bit of text-ev showing multiple grasers targeting a single ship.


The Honorverse ships were initially modeled, loosely, on age of sail ships of the line and like them would be blazing away with every gun that will bear once they reach cannon (err, graser) range. So a warship would aim and fire every laser and graser on its broadside at its target.

The one exception I can think of might be anti-LAC defense where the large number of smaller ships might encourage a warship to split its energy fire across multiple LACs.

Theemile wrote:Adding to the above, Grasers already come in multiple sizes - the smallest we're seen is about 40 cm aperture, all the way up to 650 CM aperture as a spinal weapon on the newest SDs, with the original Shrike Graser being the 150CM spinal Graser on a Homer class BC.

Since it is difficult to actually "See" where a ship is inside it's wedge, ships usually carry multiple energy weapons to bracket the entire probable volume where the ship could be.

I one time did a comparision for a generic SD. You are standing on the Moon firing a weapon with a beam the size of a SUV to a midsized house. It's wedge is 1/2 the size of New York state, the sidewall is the size of New York City, the place the ship could be is the size of Cental Park, and the ship is the size of the New Your Zoo.

so to make sure you hit the ship , you fire multiple weapons to bracket the area. Ship designers can only fit in so much so they gird the line - more smaller weapons or a handful of bigger ones.

Targeting has gotten better for a number of reasons, so designers (Manty and Grayson ones, at least) are now opting for fewer, larger Grasers in their broadside.

Thank you for that very enlightening visual-induced memo! Another memo that should be in the glossary at the end of each book.

.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:My point is that an LD's massive size should account for many more grasers, or more powerful grasers, or both. Simultaneously enquiring from ThinksMarkedly whether he is positing a 5M-km graser aboard the LD because of it's size. IOW, what makes the tech possible for the MAlign and the GA hasn't ome up with it?

Since I said "A bigger ship can hold and power a bigger graser (a LAC is an exception, since its single graser is bigger than any on a destroyer - I believe)", I was already in agreement on that part. What I did not understand is what Wayfarer proved, since we knew it was mounting SD grasers.

I cannot find where Thinksmarkerly was positing such a graser; I believe that he was talking about a humongous railgun (which would probably use a mass driver in the Honorverse).

PS. Wayfarer's statistics are in House of Steel.

Wayfarer didn't prove anything. I yielded to that. I even said her only advantage was her Trojan Horse nature.

See page 74 for ThinksMarkedly's post which I transplanted from another thread, seven posts down.

cthia wrote:My point is that an LD's massive size should account for many more grasers, or more powerful grasers, or both. Simultaneously enquiring from ThinksMarkedly whether he is positing a 5M-km graser aboard the LD because of it's size. IOW, what makes the tech possible for the MAlign and the GA hasn't ome up with it?

BTW, if a 5M-km graser, could it have been influenced by TWTSNBN? I thought someone would learn something from the nameless one.

The problem with aiming grasers over 1M KM is not lensing, it's aiming at your target. due to the speed of light, at 1 m KM you have to lead your target by over 6 Seconds - that's 6 seconds where the target can do whatever it wants. Ships regularly move inside their wedges like an old kid's pony riding toy on springs, and have a random pattern inside the wedge - military movements also usually have a "random walk" - a synchronized version of the old convoy zig zag patterns, except finer and in 3d with speed changes as well.

So aiming at a ship 5 M KM away, is aiming at an image of where the ship was 17 seconds ago , and calculating where it will be 17 seconds after where it is now, all the while guessing what the ship would do in the 34 seconds between when the ship projected the image you saw and when the beam COULD reach the target.

A lot could happen in that time - not to mention other objects could be in the beam path.

Yes, lots of people have done the math to show that you COULD hit a space station from the hyper limit with a beam - even the beam weapons currently in use should work - the variance of what could happen in that time period (20+ light minutes) is enough to make the shot difficult.

And graser size doesn't matter, we've seen grasers from 40cm up to 650 cm and that all have the same range limits. Range (and timing) is the factor.

David has set the rules so shot over 1M Km cannot happen. so until he changes them - we will not see beams dualing over 1M KM.

tlb wrote:I cannot find where Thinksmarkerly was positing such a graser; I believe that he was talking about a humongous railgun (which would probably use a mass driver in the Honorverse).

PS. Wayfarer's statistics are in House of Steel.

cthia wrote:Wayfarer didn't prove anything. I yielded to that. I even said her only advantage was her Trojan Horse nature.

See page 74 for ThinksMarkedly's post which I transplanted from another thread, seven posts down.

Thank you for the explanation, I was reading that as a 5 meter wide and 1 kilometer long graser from the way you wrote it (5M-km graser); whereas his question was actually about a graser with a range of 5 million kilometers. We have discussed before that the Rayleigh length of a meter wide graser is far beyond the effective ranges that RFC suggests, to the point that a ship has a chance to move a significant distance before the pulse propagates to where it had been.

cthia wrote:Thanks for the stats on a Q-ship Jonathan. I'm shocked. I guess it's only advantage over an SD is it's Trojan Horse status.

You're welcome. To be fair, I did leave off that Q-ship's Sunday punch because it's not a broadside weapon. But it does have one signicant advantage over a "classic" pre-pod SD like a Gryphon - the Trojan-class was the universe's first pod layer and so it can slings a lot more missiles that the older SD can. (OTOH the SD is far more capable of surviving all those missiles - even if you add the LACs to the Trojan's missile defense. A missile range fight would likely end with moderate damage to the Gryphon and a scattered debris field that used to be a Trojan and 12 LACs.

tlb wrote:Thank you for the explanation, I was reading that as a 5 meter wide and 1 kilometer long graser from the way you wrote it (5M-km graser); whereas his question was actually about a graser with a range of 5 million kilometers. We have discussed before that the Rayleigh length of a meter wide graser is far beyond the effective ranges that RFC suggests, to the point that a ship has a chance to move a significant distance before the pulse propagates to where it had been.

Indeed. A quick calculation shows a ship that can accelerate at 500 gravities can move 700 km in any direction in the time it takes the beam to leave the graser mount and arrive at the intended target. You have to quadruple that because of the double time if you need to account for light-speed sensors, but we know FTL sensors already exist.

Anyway, this was pure speculation on my part because the LDs look fatally designed to me.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:Thank you for the explanation, I was reading that as a 5 meter wide and 1 kilometer long graser from the way you wrote it (5M-km graser); whereas his question was actually about a graser with a range of 5 million kilometers. We have discussed before that the Rayleigh length of a meter wide graser is far beyond the effective ranges that RFC suggests, to the point that a ship has a chance to move a significant distance before the pulse propagates to where it had been.

Indeed. A quick calculation shows a ship that can accelerate at 500 gravities can move 700 km in any direction in the time it takes the beam to leave the graser mount and arrive at the intended target. You have to quadruple that because of the double time if you need to account for light-speed sensors, but we know FTL sensors already exist.

Anyway, this was pure speculation on my part because the LDs look fatally designed to me.

NSA! No slipsticks allowed. I will not allow you guys to turn me into my sister!

Translation: I would expect point defense to have a much harder time hitting much smaller targets exceeding 0.9c.