1924 PD - Rebuilding the Solarian League Navy

Jonathan_S wrote:Because I wasn't saying that a nuke was a good counter missile.

You initially responded to a post where I was saying that when a missile's warhead goes off -- many hundred of megatons, basically in contact with the rest of the missile body -- that missile get vaporized by its own warhead.

(And thus turned into some tons of plasma)

So, yeah, that missile is that close. It's closer than 'that close'. It's essentially still bolted onto its warhead at 0 meters away. (Heck your original post seemed to recognize that as it was talking about the warhead going off in contact -- so why are you now seeming to claim it's too far away from its own missile to damage it?)

Now we can debate what might happen if an incoming missile at >0.6c hit that plasma moments later. (And with the triple-ripple there's not just the remnants of one exploded missile ahead of you -- the Zizka anti-missile variant of the triple-ripple was designed to put 6,000 LAC missiles exploding into the face of the incoming MDMs, inside CM range of the fleet screen)

Sure, the primary aim of Zizka was to blind the sensors of the MDMs by hitting them with a solid wall of blast fronts and EMP which was supposed to blind and burn out the Manticoran missiles' seekers" [AAC].

But with what's left of 6,000 nuclear missiles, even the little ones LACs can throw, directly in the path of 1,400 MDMs less than 2 million km (less than 8 seconds) at about 0.7c -- well, there's likely to be some losses from plowing into too high a particle density for the MDMs' particle shields to push aside.


But yeah, the primarily reason the MDMs climbed and dove sharply was their pre-programmed maneuver to save their sensors. The fact it would tend to move their flight path above and below the detonation zone is probably more along the lines of a bonus.

Jonathan_S wrote:
Now we can debate what might happen if an incoming missile at >0.6c hit that plasma moments later. (And with the triple-ripple there's not just the remnants of one exploded missile ahead of you -- the Zizka anti-missile variant of the triple-ripple was designed to put 6,000 LAC missiles exploding into the face of the incoming MDMs, inside CM range of the fleet screen)

It's a charged and extremely low density plasma. The missile particle screen blows it out of the way without noticing it. The x-rays from the warhead might be problem, but it needs to be quite close, in honorverse terms, the inverse cube law is a bitch.

And the example of a ship blowing up and melting the hull had the reactors releasing something on the order of >20,000 gigatons. (I did the work and posted it on here years ago, it's an absurd amount of energy.) It's so much energy that when Hephaestus exploded it would have set half of Manticore on fire, since the energy to set a leaves or grass on fire is many orders of magnitude less than that needed to vaporize several cm of warship hull material.

You might have noticed that half of Manticore didn't catch fire. Nor did Sphinx or Gryphon.

Jonathan_S wrote:Now we can debate what might happen if an incoming missile at >0.6c hit that plasma moments later. (And with the triple-ripple there's not just the remnants of one exploded missile ahead of you -- the Zizka anti-missile variant of the triple-ripple was designed to put 6,000 LAC missiles exploding into the face of the incoming MDMs, inside CM range of the fleet screen)

kzt wrote:It's a charged and extremely low density plasma. The missile particle screen blows it out of the way without noticing it. The x-rays from the warhead might be problem, but it needs to be quite close, in honorverse terms, the inverse cube law is a bitch.

Does the missile body turn completely into "a charged and extremely low density plasma" after a warhead explosion, or are there chunks in the plasma?

tlb wrote:Does the missile body turn completely into "a charged and extremely low density plasma" after a warhead explosion, or are there chunks in the plasma?

Well, the missile body is behind the warhead (so he pieces go away from the other missiles), and the pieces are probably either small enough that the particle screen will deal with it or the larger extremely hot pieces will be large enough to be tracked and evaded by the missile.

Unless the missiles need to be beaten to death by the plot hammer because 'bored now'.

kzt wrote:

tlb wrote:Does the missile body turn completely into "a charged and extremely low density plasma" after a warhead explosion, or are there chunks in the plasma?

Well, the missile body is behind the warhead (so he pieces go away from the other missiles), and the pieces are probably either small enough that the particle screen will deal with it or the larger extremely hot pieces will be large enough to be tracked and evaded by the missile.

Unless the missiles need to be beaten to death by the plot hammer because 'bored now'.

The grav lensing only lasts a few seconds, just long enough to reflect much of the blast forward, but the grav lens generators look like they're relatively close so the whole missile should go up in plasma in the end with little to no remains in the end.


As for the nukes in space, we also gotta remember than Triple Ripple and Zizka were specially built "dirty" nukes, and not the standard (relatively clean) versions everybody else builds into missiles. Surely there must be ways to get those specially dirty nukes to propagate through space without significant tonnage increases.

I don't think it can be entirely plot that the Ripple can blind sensors at ranges that can generally be described as a few million km. Particularly since nukes don't have a gravitic element to them, and the primary sensors for attack missiles and LAC's alike are gravitic in nature with only a small amount of visual. And normal attack missiles have never been described as "blinding" a target ship when their nukes detonate, so it's adding in some kind of element(s) to the Ripple specifically.


Which also makes me feel really bad for any poor Havenite suckers who were responsible for handling the warheads meant for the Ripple. Being built especially dirty, at a time when most nukes in HV are no longer relying on pure fissionables anymore, you'd pick up a lot of rads. More so than anybody except neo-barbs who like Grayson backslid so far they had no choice but to use fission instead of fusion. They must have had a huge sigh of relief when Haven and Manticore formed the Grand Alliance, and the "tech sharing" got announced; they could finally get away from Ripple warheads and not glow in the dark.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:? Yea, I was a bit hyperbolic, but the point stands.

Except now we seem to be talking past each other

Because I wasn't saying that a nuke was a good counter missile.

No we are not talking past each other. You are pretending the world is a 0 or a 1 and frankly it gets old dealing with someone purposefully, knowingly being pedantic/hairsplitting when we all know Ziska is not a contact weapon. But due to how space works... it in effect MUST be as kzt showed and as my logic train showed. But yes, lets try this again

And yes, YOU/Ziska/Author ARE using this as a counter missile.... OTHERWISE RFC would NEVER introduce it!!! I mean come on man, basic logic here.

Which means, if you can use ZISKA ~??? I forget how many Mkm out from a LAC as seen in AAC prologue, you sure as Hell can do so ~100,000-->500,000km from a Ship where YOU know 100% missiles cannot dodge and would already have their wedge down losing even THAT protection from particles. Then we have the little problem of THOUSANDS of OTHER missiles EXPLODING THEIR ~50Mton Fusion bombs to pump out a laser beam particles to run through... ERGO,according to Ziska/Your/RFC logic, ZERO offensive missiles should EVER be able to attack a ship as their OWN fusion bombs would blow away their OWN missiles.

Not to mention a chase scenario without at minimum a dodge around the space previous attack waves exploded. Ziska destroys the sensors after all... and is BETTER than a counter missile as YOU/Author are saying the BLAST radius of particles of said nuclear Fusion bomb is GREATER than that of wedge width of a CM with ability to at least knock out one missile at a superior rate if not several missiles, not just ONE, otherwise this tactic would NEVER be used to begin with...

Shakes head... I do believe someone pointed out this MAJOR logical fallacy to RFC when proof reading his book, but since it was already written... he left it in, and promptly wrote the counter and forget that entire embarrassing episode as it has NEVER been seen since.

If big nukes are so effective at blinding missiles why don't ships just throw 1GT nukes overboard as anti-missile defense? Just fire them out of the missile mass drivers. The attacking missiles HAVE to be looking at the ship, so logically you'd fry all their little brains for those critical few seconds.

But nobody does this.

Why not?

kzt wrote:If big nukes are so effective at blinding missiles why don't ships just throw 1GT nukes overboard as anti-missile defense? Just fire them out of the missile mass drivers. The attacking missiles HAVE to be looking at the ship, so logically you'd fry all their little brains for those critical few seconds.

But nobody does this.

Why not?

Well it was written into the AAC use of Zizka to begin with. Even if Zizka had performed successsfully and blinded the incoming missiles (not destroy them outright), it also blinds the ships firing Zizka too. Any missile that isn't 100% blinded, even only temporarily, is now attacking from 'out of the sun' so to speak. And even with Ghost Rider, you may not get the signals telling you where to fire counter-missiles or your energy battery & PDLs in time, before you've gotten the bad news delivered express via laserhead.


Until recently, Weber hasn't specifically mentioned Dazzlers being launched defensively. Despite the logic if you can blind a hostile ship despite having more redundant & shielded sensors, you could employ Dazzlers to blind attack missiles with their far less capable sensors. And the massive benefit of a Dazzler over a Zizka nuke is you can do it without blinding yourself at the same time, so that's a huge win-win to me.

All of the members of the Grand Alliance, including Haven who conceived Zizka, are much more likely to rely on defensively launched Dazzlers. At least for wedge-powered missiles, a Dazzler is much more reliable and no downsides. Now against the MAlign and spider-driven graser torps, firing huge frelling nukes might actually be viable again because they're slow as hell and you'll have plenty of time to roll ship after launching the nukes before detonation to avoid self-blinding.

kzt wrote:If big nukes are so effective at blinding missiles why don't ships just throw 1GT nukes overboard as anti-missile defense? Just fire them out of the missile mass drivers. The attacking missiles HAVE to be looking at the ship, so logically you'd fry all their little brains for those critical few seconds.

But nobody does this.

Why not?

One possible rational is that Zizka isn't great -- its just those crappy 1st gen Cimeterre had no better way to contribute to fleet missile defense.

Another is that if both side have similar sustained throw weights you're better off using your big missiles to hit back and attrite the enemy force rather than using them one the defensive to try to somewhat up your own survivability. Every missile you use against the inbound salvo is one that your enemy isn't going to have to deal with fending off themselves.

And maybe 6,000 distributed nukes (especially ones optimized for EM and energetic particle creation) mess up sensors more than a smaller number of individually far more powerful nukes.


Or maybe there is no good in-universe explanation.

You misunderstand. I’m not suggesting missiles, just really big bombs that fit in the missile mass drivers that mysteriously give it that many thousands of km/sec velocity. You ripple off a dozen or so as the missiles reach 100k km, until the last part of the volley passes 30k km and poof, no hits.

And since you ate tracking the incoming missiles via their grav signatures that should have no impact on you defensive fir as the bombs go off outside the sidewalls. It’s almost as perfect a defense as using Charles device to blow down all the missile wedges.