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Acceleration by ship mass Jun 2009
Effective speed by hyper band Jun 2009
Hyper Limits by stellar spectral class Jun 2009
Prolong effects Jun 2009
Capital missiles, multi-stage missiles, and missile pods Jun 2009
Counter-missile fire control issues Jun 2009
Hyper generator modes of operation Jun 2009
Safehold Map Jul 2009
How the Safehold series won't end (Thu Apr 18, 2013) Dec 2013

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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

Hardening shipkiller missile drives

  • Series: Honorverse
  • Date: June 10, 2005

A suggestion has been made that it would make sense to put drives into shipkiller missiles of sufficient power to make them immune to wedge kill by a counter-missile. Is this practical? Could it be done as the final stage of a MDM?

 

No, it isn't. And it won't be -- ever. I believe we've had this discussion before. You cannot -- not "it would be hard," not "only possible with great difficulty," but cannot -- build a missile drive sufficiently powerful to take out another missile (or counter-missile) drive without being taken out itself. End of story. The physical size constraints make it impossible. That's why counter-missiles have used their impeller wedges as their primary missile-killing weapon for so long.