Brigade XO wrote:One interesting piece mentioned is the improved gravitational lazing in the laser rods ejected from the warhead-?as opposed to the missile body? just prior to detonation - to focus the energy from the detonation on a target- which implies that probably EACH lazing rod has it's own gravitational focusing system probably powered by a capacitor because if you cut off the power from the device you are going to loose the focus and concentration on the target.
tlb wrote:I do not think that is correct. It is true that there has to be something with the rods to aim them in the correct direction after ejection. But the big gravitational focusing acts on the nuclear explosion, to shape from being spherical to being more directed at the rods and so increasing the amount of power that they receive.
Jonathan_S wrote:I think you're right. I'd assume that the grav lensing for laserheads is a outgrowth of the advanced versions of the old "burn" modes on pre-laserhead missiles. IFF described the those later ones asAnd (since those missiles lacked lasing rods) those grav lenses were definitely on the missile itself.In Fire Forged wrote:The development of another generation of powerful practical micronized grav generators marked the next evolutionary step in missile warfare in 1806 with the introduction of the first nuclear gravitically directed energy weapon (NGDEW). The key components were grav lens arrays derived from those that had dramatically increased shipboard laser/graser effectiveness roughly fifty years earlier. The very first of these arrays was called a “plate array” and simply reflected the bomb’s energy off a flat artificial grav wave similar to an impeller or sidewall behind the warhead. Research continually tightened the focus of the grav arrays as impeller missile standoff ranges grew from tens of hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers over the ensuing decades. The early grav lens arrays were quite large, however, and frequently displaced the sidewall penetrators until further refinements could reduce their sizes.
And yes, they'd probably be overwhelmed quite quickly and be vaporized with the rest of the missile body. But as long as they increase the effectiveness of the attack some before failing they've done their job.
The is what the Honorverse Fan-wiki had to say about Laser warheads:
Note the laser rods do not have mirrors (although I expect the back end is blocked to force the radiation to only come out the front. The action is called superluminescent.The nuclear warhead was superseded as a ship-killer by the laser head. Originally conceived in pre-Diaspora days, the concept of a laser head was simple. A cylindrical rod, or "medium" focused the x-ray pulse of a nuclear detonation into a high-energy gamma-ray laser beam, which would continue to fire until the medium was destroyed by the thermal pulse of the explosion. The problem was that the process was inefficient, since an explosion was spherical, and each rod would only capture a small percentage of the energy of the detonation. Since such a small amount of energy was unlikely to be sufficient to blast through a warship's sidewalls, anti-radiation shielding, and armor, laser warheads were considered too cost-inefficient to use.
Around 1800 PD, developments in fusion plants meant that the technology needed to focus the blast could be fit into a capital missile. A ring of gravity generators, placed behind the warhead, and activated prior to detonation, used gravatic lenses to focus the blast in a Gaussian shape, "aimed" at the lasing rods. By 1860 PD, refinements had been made to the point that even the most heavily armored of ships were no longer immune to an attack from a laser head. The laser rods were mounted in bays on the sides of the missile, would eject when the missile settled on its final attack bearing. Each mounted its own thrusters and sensors, allowing it to align itself with its target, and position itself about a hundred meters in front of the missile's nuclear warhead, in between it and its intended target.
Unlike a pure fusion warhead, meaningful damage could be dealt to anything within 25,000 kilometers of the detonation. It was more effective at penetrating sidewalls than a pure fusion explosive.
Both lasing rod dimensions, warhead yield, and grav lens amplification were critical factors in determining laser head power. This meant that larger capital ship missiles were much more powerful than smaller ones. Larger missiles were able to carry more powerful grav lensing assemblies, increasing the total percentage of the blast that was focused onto the lasing rods, a larger fusion warhead, which increased total energy released, as well longer lasing rods, which allowed for longer stand-off range, since the beam divergence was smaller on longer rods.