cthia wrote:Textev always states that energy battles are never expected to be prolonged. Therefore, energy fire is likewise not expected to be prolonged. Against an enemy whose stealth is total, prolonged energy fire might be a must.
I don't think the conclusion follows from the premise. A stealth ship wants any source of fire, be it missile or energy, to originate as far away from it as possible. Firing its own energy mounts is the second worst thing it could do, only after bringing up a gravitic footprint like a wedge or a bubblewall. So a stealth ship does not want to fire energy mounts, much less a prolonged battle of one.
However, as a last-ditch survival attempt, it may need that many mounts. It may need to overwhelm any enemy that comes close enough to sniff it before its own weaknesses allow this enemy to take it down. So LD design may include a lot of energy mounts. But they may be for a short (and victorious) energy battle.
Certainly if some of the tactical recommendations encountered in the forum are employed. Like firing in the dark hoping for potluck. I would certainly expect that extended energy battles would not be possible with one reactor down.
If you lose your redundant reactor, then your remaining ones will power your ship to 100% of battle power requirements. If you lose two reactors, then you're going to have to start making trade-off choices. for an SD mounting 5 reactors, losing 2 means you're operating at 75% power budget.
But we're talking about power, not total energy. It will just take longer to charge the same number of graser and laser capacitors. That means the number of shots fired per unit of time goes down, either by firing the same number of weapon mounts at a reduced frequency, or by firing fewer of them at max fire rate.
But anyway, the reason why textev said that energy battles were short were that usually the two opponents passed one another at a significant fraction of c in opposing directions. That is, the battles were short because the ships would enter and leave energy weapon range that quickly. That wouldn't be the case in a chase fight, where one side has a higher acceleration and longer range than the other, of course.
At any rate, these design considerations might just fortuitously turn out to be favorable to the LD, because of its unusual shape. Running sidewalls the length of the elongated shapes of conventional warships might be more challenging than the shape of the LD. Perhaps.
Indeed, no answering this one until RFC tells us.
Also, if you cannot effectively localize the warship that you are attacking, can your missiles concentrate on one area? Can an LD get away with weaker sidewalls in certain "areas" of the ship.
GA missiles can fire very accurately, but it's all limited by the target ship's evasive manoeuvres. The shot is taken from 20 to 30 thousand km away, so the sensors are already lagged by nearly 100 ms. They're looking through the sidewalls, which we know were opaque as of 1546 PD, so they can't be completely transparent today. That's why it takes dozens to hundreds of missiles firing at the same time to kill a ship: each one has a less-than-1 chance of hitting anything vital (even assuming they all fired), so you need more than a few to average out sufficient number of shots landing.
Against an LD? That's an unknown. On one hand, it has very low acceleration and a very high mass, so it evades like a turtle. It has no wedge, so all angles of attack are open, so potentially more missiles can acquire a firing solution. On the other hand, those two aspects also work in its favour: in a bigger ship, each equivalent shot is less lethal, so more shots are required. And because it has no wedge, homing in on the ship before final acquisition may not be easy.
The last point is likely a problem for almost every missile, since they are pretty dumb and blind and could confuse a ship for a planet. Except for Apollo broods, because those are receiving targetting instructions from ships that presumably are less dumb and blind.
BTW, I always thought of the wedge like a car engine, it only needs an enormous amount of energy to start. Then it runs totally on its own perpetual energy; its "alternator" as it were.
Good analogy. Not perpetual energy, but simply a different energy source which isn't available until the starter starts the engine.
