Mission of Honor: Retold

[Simon_Jester]

I just did reread and I have to question the logic that mass drivers are absolutely necessary when firing missiles and the fact that 60% of a missile's power comes from the launch.

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I don't recall hearing 60%.

The one thing is that because of the kinematic equations, getting even a modest velocity boost at the start of a long continuous-acceleration burn is going to make a surprisingly big difference in how far you get before the end of the burn, because that starting velocity is multiplied by the full duration of the burn.

If we really apply this logically to the Honorverse, the mass drivers are most important if you're planning on a long range missile engagement where your side spends as much time as possible with the enemy in the outer edges of its engagement envelope.

This actually kind of makes sense for pre-Haven War Manticore, because doctrinally they're doing a lot of combat against enemies that might like to run away (i.e. pirate and minor-nation light warships against their battlecruisers) and may sometimes find themselves doctrinally expecting to fight lone heavy opponents they have a strong incentive (the planetary defense force's one and only battleship, against a squadron of their battlecruisers). This leads to lots of long range engagements and situations where you can only generate a firing solution on the enemy for like fifteen minutes before they pull out of range, so you really want that long firing range to make the most and best of that.

It matters less to a navy that plans to bull right in to beam weapon range and zap the fuck out of things, because then you won't expect the enemy to be spending much time hovering around at the limits of your missile engagement envelope, nor will you plan to maneuver so that the enemy is forced to stay at that distance.

Why not have VLS like systems that charges the missile then cold launches while an initial reaction thruster boosts the missile away then activate the impeller?

I think this was the way it was done in the past? Or at least the wiki says it is.

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I think a big part of the reason is that the missiles have to be launched "out" through an impeller wedge. You want to get them on their way in a timely manner, so ideally they need to cross a pretty substantial volume of space in a hurry. Even before they used the gravity-tech mass drivers for this, they had some kind of electromagnetic railgun system for it. Relying on chemical rockets wouldn't be impossible, but there'd be a significant "boost phase" while the missile is moving away from the ship on chemical rocket power, long enough to be an annoyance.

 

[Effroyable]

I think the limitation of commlinks and low effectiveness of reaction thrusters may lead HH war theorists to favor reloading drivers.
Of course, we may find a scene that contradicts this somewhere in the series.

 

[SCDMR Aramatha]

I think the limitation of commlinks and low effectiveness of reaction thrusters may lead HH war theorists to favor reloading drivers.
Of course, we may find a scene that contradicts this somewhere in the series.

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This wiki page about an obsolete LAC mentions that it has launch cells.

https://honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Highlander_class

Such cells imply that missiles can be launched without mass drivers. So the question is why not have that system in pods to increase missile capacity?

 

[Simon_Jester]

Such cells imply that missiles can be launched without mass drivers. So the question is why not have that system in pods to increase missile capacity?

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Because given a choice between firing, say, 11 or 12 missiles that start out with velocity v=0, and firing 10 missiles that start out with velocity v="whatever the mass drivers can manage," they decided that the 10 missiles were more effective, I guess.

This is pretty explicitly in the text, though Weber never sits down and maths out the reasons. Missile pods and similar systems that did not have the equivalent of shipboard mass drivers for missile launch did exist as of the time of the novels starting. Missile pods were generally held to be ineffective or insufficiently effective without onboard launchers.

Honor's early-career LAC has the same problem, by the way, being as how it's an obsolescent craft of a type Manticore is on the brink of retiring (possibly before the war even begins). Because the Highlander LAC can achieve so little that it's not worth risking personnel's lives and generally wasting their time operating it when those same crew could be doing something more useful aboard a different kind of ship or defense platform.

 

[General Battuta]

If VLS systems worked in the Honorverse the whole thing would break even worse than it broke with missile pods, and missile pods were already a mistake.

If you weaken the analogy of "missile as broadside cannon" you weaken the fundamental metaphors of the whole setting. You decouple the means of combat from tall ships with charming staff, naive or corrupt middies, and steely captains. It'd be like introducing effective armor overmatch in Battletech, or smart bombs and air defense to Star Wars.

We know missiles need mass drivers because the setting says so, it's a brute fact. It's up to Weber as a writer and us as readers (and fanfic writers) to support that. Which Simon has done here very well!

 

[SCDMR Aramatha]

Cool, also question why Grasers in LACs? Why not Xray lasers that can apparently fire faster and has the same effective range as grasers?

Or energy torpedoes? If the LAC can just attack the throat/kilt why not use something that would do the most damage?

Also how come the LACs don't shoot their CMs at the exposed throat/kilt? Like surely a wedge impacting bare hull would do enormous damage?

 

[Effroyable]

I've read a pretty old discussion about energy-torpedo lac.
I think it was a valid proposition within the world, but by the time of this work, it's impractical because the two-stage bow wall has already been introduced.
Also, given the Solarian League Navy's 'Rush to the Enemy's heart' strategy, they're not going to pay much attention to LAC, which is not for missile defense. I think this was also mentioned indirectly in the words of General Batuta.

 

[SCDMR Aramatha]

I think it was a valid proposition within the world, but by the time of this work, it's impractical because the two-stage bow wall has already been introduced.

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Did Haven and the League have it? Also even with the bow sidewall why not put a xray laser mount? From what I know it doesn't have less range or destructive power but can shoot faster. Am I wrong?

 

[MJ12 Commando]

If VLS systems worked in the Honorverse the whole thing would break even worse than it broke with missile pods, and missile pods were already a mistake.

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I think the funny/funny problem is that Weber accidentally made VLS box launchers at least really practical for countermissiles, which ironically fixes the pod laying mistake by creating another, different, funnier mistake

The trick to this practicality is that countermissiles wedges are not big and also the secondary fusion thrusters on a warship can apparently propel things at 150 Gs while also being stealthy enough that they could be masked by the sun

Please do not ask about the mass flow problems there or the exhaust energy outputs needed to accelerate a million tons of warship at 1.5 kilometers per second per second

But this sort of fusion drive means you can get some pretty good separation by flinging countermissiles into the fray on these sorts of thrusters. If they're too impractical to miniaturize, the ability for battlesteel to survive close (and possibly even impact) nukes means you could use a H-Orion instead for CM separation.

Kick your countermissiles out of their silos with a .01 kt detonation it'll be very fun.

Incidentally the existence of these ultra torchdrives and the fact that the only FTL sensor is gravity wave means that RKKVs are super viable in Honorverse and this should make everyone sad.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Cool, also question why Grasers in LACs? Why not Xray lasers that can apparently fire faster and has the same effective range as grasers?

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Because that's not... a thing... in the Honorverse?

X-ray lasers are a bomb-pumped item (these are actually 'real' in that Edward Teller thought he could build one) powered by a thermonuclear explosion, which direct a disproportionate share of the explosion's energy into a single relatively straight 'beam' to be directed at a distant target. These are used specifically AND ONLY in missile warheads. They are not viable for use aboard any ship in the Honorverse. Because while Weber has several kinds of unobtainium bullshit going on, none of them are directly suitable for placing a multi-megaton atomic bomb aboard the ship and then metaphorically lighting the fuse. A weapon that blows up your own ship upon firing is not in demand.

Lasers are a real thing that work much better in the Honorverse than we expect them to work in real life (Honorverse is definitely soft science fiction) but are implied to be, essentially, "like" real lasers in the sense that the Incredible Hulk is "like" a real bodybuilder. Some of the basic parameters are recognizable even if the Hulk can go far beyond human limits in some ways while in other ways limited in ways a human might technically not be. Honorverse laser weapons are things you stick onto a ship that fire a very brief beam of coherent light; limitations on rate of fire seem to mostly be a function of keeping the laser cool so it doesn't melt itself, which is realistic given the ridiculous amount of energy these lasers put out. The laser beam doesn't behave entirely realistically, in that they have a fairly fixed maximum range limit or seem to; there's never said to be much point in firing them from ten times the range in hopes that putting 1/100th as much laser on target will accomplish something. Notably, these lasers are implied to be in optical or near-optical wavelengths (it could be 1000 nm infrared light and it wouldn't make a plot difference). They are used for both antimissile defense and light antiship weapons, but seem not to be favored for heavy antiship weapons. I have a theory about this inspired by a single line in Weber's book House of Steel, suggesting that modern warship armor may be made out of materials that have certain optical properties. While still being ablated and damaged by an antiship optical laser, they may be reflecting away much of the energy of the beam, which would make the lasers inefficient though not useless against any warship with actual armor plating.

Gamma-ray lasers or 'grasers' are NOT a real thing in the Honorverse and almost certainly work on some entirely handwavy physical principle, being called a 'laser' only in the sense that a railgun is a 'gun' despite bearing little resemblance to an actual, ah, gunpowder gun. Grasers project a beam of gamma rays. Notably this would entirely ignore the kind of optical properties I imagine near the end of the last paragraph. These seem to be designed for heavy antiship work, and notably seem to be quite over-engineered for the purpose, since they tend to overpenetrate target ships and it is not easy to do that with an energy weapon if its behavior is quasi-realistic, because the extra part of your beam keeps smacking into atoms that the front of your beam vaporized but that haven't had time to get out of the beam path yet.

Now, in practice, X-rays and gamma rays are effectively the same thing and the borderline between them is fairly arbitrary, because it's all ultra-high-frequency high-energy electromagnetic radiation. The same technology that is used in 'grasers' could probably be dialed down to something we might call an X-ray laser based on wavelengths or whatever. But there is no clear sign that doing this would provide any of the benefits you describe.

Or energy torpedoes? If the LAC can just attack the throat/kilt why not use something that would do the most damage?

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Reasons:

1) As noted by others, because the "LAC closes to point blank range and fires through gaps in the target's wedge" attack profile is actually a very short-lived thing and it seems like most of the Honorverse knows it. The original Shrikes only got away with what they did for a few years before Haven adapted their defensive systems to shoot back effectively, and so far as I can recall, we do not see massed Shrike attacks being particularly effective (or even attempted) much in the second round of the Manticore-Haven War. The 'mature' role for LACs seems to be as auxiliary antimissile defense craft and to threaten the lighter screening warships of an enemy task force.

2) Energy torpedo generators may have special structural requirements that it is impractical to fit on a LAC. They may be bigger than we think, they may require a direct connection to a fusion reactor's plasma, there may be other shenanigans in play.

Also how come the LACs don't shoot their CMs at the exposed throat/kilt? Like surely a wedge impacting bare hull would do enormous damage?

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Absolutely, but I suspect wedge geometry is the problem here. Like, you'd need a way to prevent the countermissile wedge from intersecting any part of the target ship's wedge, or the countermissile just gets atomized while hte target ship merely goes bong-what-the-hell-was-that and goes on about its business. Depending on the exact angles of wedges and the size of a countermissile wedge, it might be effectively impossible to do this.

Incidentally the existence of these ultra torchdrives and the fact that the only FTL sensor is gravity wave means that RKKVs are super viable in Honorverse and this should make everyone sad.

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I'm not so sure about this working out. "Just park a ship's impeller wedge in the path of the impactor" seems like a surprisingly viable countermeasure given that impeller wedges are deemed effectively invulnerable. The flare of high relativistic objects interacting with interstellar medium and the ongoing plasma reaction on the impactor's nosecone are likely to mean you at least have 30-60 minutes' warning no matter how fast the target is moving, unless it has destroyed itself and any terminal guidance it might have. And that's enough, if your options for stopping an impactor include "just put a fucking tugboat directly in its path and rotate the tugboat into the "I am INVEEENCIBLE" orientation."

 

[Effroyable]

X-ray lasers are a bomb-pumped item (these are actually 'real' in that Edward Teller thought he could build one) powered by a thermonuclear explosion, which direct a disproportionate share of the explosion's energy into a single relatively straight 'beam' to be directed at a distant target. These are used specifically AND ONLY in missile warheads. They are not viable for use aboard any ship in the Honorverse. Because while Weber has several kinds of unobtainium bullshit going on, none of them are directly suitable for placing a multi-megaton atomic bomb aboard the ship and then metaphorically lighting the fuse. A weapon that blows up your own ship upon firing is not in demand.

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This is explicitly contrary to the facts.
The last entry of fifth anthology 'In Fire Forged', An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design explains as follows.

Early space energy weapons used photons in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and even the radio range. These wavelengths are impractical to focus at contemporary combat ranges so modern weapons use shorter wavelength photons in the X-ray to gamma ray range. Indeed, modern space weapon lasers are so commonly X-ray lasers that the term "laser" is generally synonymous with "xraser" in naval parlance. Their rarer gamma emitting cousins are called "grasers." Both of these words have their obvious origin with the ancient "laser" though the fact that many such weapons do not operate on the principle of "stimulated emission" is generally forgotten.

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[BiopunkOtrera]

The basic unrealism of Honorverse missiles is like, obvious if you know about missiles, but is not reflected because you know, it's age of sail stuff. You have to be shooting vast waves of munitions at the enemy and that has to be necessary because that's how the setting works aesthetically.

In real life, you generally don't actually need to fire more than a few missiles at a target. If you fire say, 2 AshMs of the same type at a target from the same launch point, using the same guidance it's likely both will either hit or miss. You might fire two with diverse guidance, or two on slightly variant trajectories, or 2 because missiles sometimes fail for inexplicable reasons but they don't really roll seperately to hit.

The really big AEGIS cells are more to adress mass air attack and defend a whole task force than they are to saturate a target with multiple missiles.

So I think you can get to into worrying about the real life technical details of the Weberverse. To some extent you've just got to accept it's fairly internally consistant and that it has an age of sail aesthetic.

If you want to imagine an alternative way of doing missiles then I'd take it the other way. Rather than having unpowered VLS cells, have larger, more powerful mass drivers. You can't build MDMs, or your MDMs are bad, so you instead build much larger railguns on your ships to give the missile a much larger initial thrust, and then maybe the missile wedge only activates part way through its run on the target.

 

[Simon_Jester]

This is explicitly contrary to the facts.
The last entry of fifth anthology 'In Fire Forged', An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design explains as follows.

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Ah. Apologies. I didn't realize Weber had deliberately fucked around with misleading terminology and then 'explained' that he had done so by tucking a metaphorical footnote into a tech bible article he put in the back of a comparatively obscure anthology.

If, as you say, all the "lasers" being described have in fact been X-ray beams the entire time, then Weber has a funny way of showing it. Notice that the word "xraser" never appears in the main series, not even once, so far as I can determine, unless it shows up in one of the very last books that I never got around to reading. This note in In Fire Forged is the only reference I have ever heard to naval weapons-grade "laser" weapons in fact being X-ray weapons, as opposed to optical-wavelength weapons.

Missiles are repeatedly stated to be using "laser heads" that do indeed behave loosely like the "X-ray lasers" of Project Excalibur to behave, and are stated, as I recall, to be projecting beams of X-rays.

But the performance of shipboard anti-missile and anti-ship "lasers" (as distinct grom "grasers") are not stated to be using X-rays, until and unless one happens to trip over that specific factoid in that specific article in that specific anthology.

Thus, when Aramatha asked "why don't they just use X-ray lasers instead of grasers," I naturally assumed he(?) was referring to the weapons that actually get described as being X-ray weapons, namely laser heads, as opposed to just saying "oh yeah, all lasers not explicitly called a graser are firing X-rays too, and why not always use those and never use grasers?"

In real life, you generally don't actually need to fire more than a few missiles at a target. If you fire say, 2 AshMs of the same type at a target from the same launch point, using the same guidance it's likely both will either hit or miss. You might fire two with diverse guidance, or two on slightly variant trajectories, or 2 because missiles sometimes fail for inexplicable reasons but they don't really roll seperately to hit.

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In fairness, as active anti-missile technologies improve, it may become necessary to launch more shots to have a reasonable chance of overwhelming or at least slipping past enemy defenses. And Weber does put in the time and effort to "sell" the idea that missile defense has become a quite sophisticated technology.

But you're largely not wrong about either your identification of the problem, or about your suggested solution.

Though honestly, the "fire storms of munitions at enemy targets" stuff never really felt like an Age of Sail aesthetic so much as a World War era aesthetic where you have to put hundreds of artillery rounds on a target to be reasonably assured of scoring any direct hits. The whole thing feels to me more like the 1890-1960 period of naval warfare, with people starting out imagining that fights will be decided by big-ass blackpowder cannons firing practically over open sights, then realizing that modern technology has greatly increased effective ranges and that the whole paradigm of naval warfare is changing (in real life this started at Tsushima), and then having a second paradigm shift with the advent of all kinds of wacky asymmetric 20th century threats like torpedoes, submarines, and air attacks, and ultimately the rise of radar and the guided missile which make nearly everything everyone thought they knew obsolete.

 

[Effroyable]

Ah. Apologies. I didn't realize Weber had deliberately fucked around with misleading terminology and then 'explained' that he had done so by tucking a metaphorical footnote into a tech bible article he put in the back of a comparatively obscure anthology.

If, as you say, all the "lasers" being described have in fact been X-ray beams the entire time, then Weber has a funny way of showing it. Notice that the word "xraser" never appears in the main series, not even once, so far as I can determine, unless it shows up in one of the very last books that I never got around to reading. This note in In Fire Forged is the only reference I have ever heard to naval weapons-grade "laser" weapons in fact being X-ray weapons, as opposed to optical-wavelength weapons.

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Yep, It is never a problem at all not knowing what's hidden in the deep dumps.
But when making a point in such a strong tone, wouldn't it be better to check that your knowledge is intact?

X-ray lasers are a bomb-pumped item (these are actually 'real' in that Edward Teller thought he could build one) powered by a thermonuclear explosion, which direct a disproportionate share of the explosion's energy into a single relatively straight 'beam' to be directed at a distant target. These are used specifically AND ONLY in missile warheads. They are not viable for use aboard any ship in the Honorverse. Because while Weber has several kinds of unobtainium bullshit going on, none of them are directly suitable for placing a multi-megaton atomic bomb aboard the ship and then metaphorically lighting the fuse. A weapon that blows up your own ship upon firing is not in demand.

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Also, the content of the anthology I quoted is written on the HV wiki laser page as it is.
Actually, I've never read the original, I followed such pass and finded that quote.
HVWiki Space Weapons Technology page -> Laser page -> Google Search -> Full quote in HV Forum(where defends a full chapter copy... )

 

[Simon_Jester]

Yep, It is never a problem at all not knowing what's hidden in the deep dumps.
But when making a point in such a strong tone, wouldn't it be better to check that your knowledge is intact?

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Because it gets very tiresome doing deep dives on things over and over and over when 90-95% of the time you don't find a surprise and the other 5-10% of the time the surprise is from something obscure, and then once in a while, whether you've been doing those deep dives or not, someone tells you "THAT DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS THE FACTS" and you feel like you've just stepped on a rake, that's why.

Yes, I'm sure I could have confirmed each individual proposition in my earlier post using a separate Google search or combing a long wiki article each time. Noting, of course, that wiki articles themselves do not have a 100% hit rate; they are sometimes written by people who have misunderstood the facts themselves. But yes, I could have done that. As opposed to relying on a mix of "has MS-level knowledge of physics," "knows some nuclear weapon trivia," "has read most of the novels twice or more except for the last few," and "implicitly relies on the author to not pull bullshit that will fake him out for little or no reason."

I chose not to do the former, and to do the latter.

Just how badly do you want to bust my balls over this?

 

[Zero Gravitas]

but they don't really roll seperately to hit.

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From what I understand Weberverse missiles get 'close' enough - as in within a few hundred or thousand km to the target and then act as single use laser platforms. Essentially each missile is a suicide-drone that rolls to hit separately for their one use lasers (though I think fancy late series missile shot multiple lasers) whilst dodging the smaller anti-missile missiles and lasers that the defending ship uses.

Old missles were multi-hundred megaton to gigaton nukes that blew up when they got close enough with ranges being far shorter than the laser missiles and thus were essentially made obsolete when defenses got good enough to stop them from getting close-ish.


Overall I don't see this as a plot hole within the confines of the setting (aka if we accept the premise of bulky, underperforming computers and not great sensors).


Now a real question would be why they don't try to ram the ship with the missile's wedge.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Now a real question would be why they don't try to ram the ship with the missile's wedge.

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I'm pretty sure the answer is as I speculated a little while ago: because it wouldn't work against a ship whose own wedge is still functioning, because the geometry of the collision would almost always result in some part of the missile's wedge crossing some part of the ship's much larger and sturdier wedge, and then the missile gets fried, even if it wasn't already picked off by laser defenses on terminal approach as becomes quite likely.

 

[Vebyast]

These seem to be designed for heavy antiship work, and notably seem to be quite over-engineered for the purpose, since they tend to overpenetrate target ships and it is not easy to do that with an energy weapon if its behavior is quasi-realistic, because the extra part of your beam keeps smacking into atoms that the front of your beam vaporized but that haven't had time to get out of the beam path yet.

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I will note, if my understanding serves me correctly, that attenuation depth for high-energy gamma rays is fairly substantial and the traditional behavior of lasers only having thin surface effects stops applying. Cross-sections fall off a cliff around the transition from x-rays to gamma rays and only bottom out at the point where your gamma rays carry so much energy that you start losing energy to spontaneous pair production, and x-rays are already plenty penetrating. If I'm reading these charts right, a properly tuned gamma source might have an attenuation depth of somewhere between five and ten centimeters in structural steel? So getting explosive ablation to a depth of thirty centimeters would only require one order of magnitude more energy than would be required to get explosive ablation at the surface, hitting twenty centimeters of armor when you designed for thirty lets you go through ten one-centimeter internal walls past that, and armor thickness actually matters fairly substantially. Not like whipple shielding or ablative ceramics for optical laser defense at all.

IMO, the really unrealistic thing isn't that ships getting hit by grasers explode all the way through, it's that ships can sustain literally any graser fire whatsoever without the entire crew instantly dying of radiation poisoning.

 

[consequences]

Because it gets very tiresome doing deep dives on things over and over and over when 90-95% of the time you don't find a surprise and the other 5-10% of the time the surprise is from something obscure, and then once in a while, whether you've been doing those deep dives or not, someone tells you "THAT DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS THE FACTS" and you feel like you've just stepped on a rake, that's why.

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To echo this, there is a bit of dumbfuckery in I want to say Honor Among Enemies, where the Lords of the Admiralty are discussing their plans to finally take Trevor's Star. They arrive at a plan that is, to be polite, the dumbest thing to come before the Quest here that voted to commit actual suicide, one that gives away every element of surprise, against an enemy that would be on alert, relies on perfect coordination across interstellar distances, and is in fact probably physically impossible to achieve.

Now it turns out that there is a simple easy in universe fix that makes perfect sense in context, to whit, blow up the forts and send someone through from TS. Is it changed in a future printing of the book? Of course not. Does it get detailed in the specific infodump site that Weber maintains to make up dumb ass covering silliness that makes things worse clarify and expound on issues in the series? Hell no! The only place to find it as of however many years ago this last came up was in the back corner of a forum discussion in the ass crack of the internet.

 

[Simon_Jester]

I will note, if my understanding serves me correctly, that attenuation depth for high-energy gamma rays is fairly substantial and the traditional behavior of lasers only having thin surface effects stops applying. Cross-sections fall off a cliff around the transition from x-rays to gamma rays and only bottom out at the point where your gamma rays carry so much energy that you start losing energy to spontaneous pair production, and x-rays are already plenty penetrating. If I'm reading these charts right, a properly tuned gamma source might have an attenuation depth of somewhere between five and ten centimeters in structural steel? So getting explosive ablation to a depth of thirty centimeters would only require one order of magnitude more energy than would be required to get explosive ablation at the surface, hitting twenty centimeters of armor when you designed for thirty lets you go through ten one-centimeter internal walls past that, and armor thickness actually matters fairly substantially. Not like whipple shielding or ablative ceramics for optical laser defense at all.

IMO, the really unrealistic thing isn't that ships getting hit by grasers explode all the way through, it's that ships can sustain literally any graser fire whatsoever without the entire crew instantly dying of radiation poisoning.

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Yeah, if it was me, I'd be explicitly saying "yeah, the internal walls of the ship are basically just carriers for some kind of soft-SF force field that absorbs scattering levels of radiation but falls apart under the main beam because that kind of density burns out the underlying material substrate."

My own criticism has been restricted to "grasers seem to be so over-energetic that it seems like overkill." Regardless of the details of the physical damage mechanism, it seems like an issue.

My gut feeling is that Weber got a little frustrated when he realized early in the series that he'd kind of written beam weapons out of warfare to the point where ships would almost never actually get into beam range of each other on screen. And so he started feeling psychologically a little pent up about it, to the point where when he finally did get to represent capital ship energy weapons he'd mentally ramped them up into these "instantly fillet a ship, any ship, in one hit" nightmare guns.

But that then invites the question of why you even bother carrying more than two or three of the things per broadside, or why you don't just dial back the firepower by a factor of five so you have more tonnage to spare for other things.

I feel like the idea that the Graysons are supposed to be onto something with "all graser broadsides" for their ships is just silly in context, both because beam combat is increasingly obsolete in the series and the main function of the energy weapon broadside should be to supplement shipboard antimissile defense, and because it does a Grayson heavy cruiser very little good to have an energy broadside that can gut any given target of comparable tonnage ten times over with a single broadside as opposed to 'only' three times over.

 

[SCDMR Aramatha]

Absolutely, but I suspect wedge geometry is the problem here. Like, you'd need a way to prevent the countermissile wedge from intersecting any part of the target ship's wedge, or the countermissile just gets atomized while hte target ship merely goes bong-what-the-hell-was-that and goes on about its business. Depending on the exact angles of wedges and the size of a countermissile wedge, it might be effectively impossible to do this.

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Is a CM wedge really that big to impact an SD or BC wedge at the throat? I understand that at the throat the wedge is widely space apart. At least if the ship is accelerating.

I know that in the forums Weber said that wedges can be active without accelerating I don't know if when that happens the wedge is parallel at the spacing of the throat or kilt or something in between.

But yeah if it's impossible then it's impossible especially as you say that shrikes can't attack a target's throat or kilt.

If you want to imagine an alternative way of doing missiles then I'd take it the other way. Rather than having unpowered VLS cells, have larger, more powerful mass drivers. You can't build MDMs, or your MDMs are bad, so you instead build much larger railguns on your ships to give the missile a much larger initial thrust, and then maybe the missile wedge only activates part way through its run on the target.

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I think that missiles apparently lose energy/charge when they are idle. So it would have to be a short idling time. I could be wrong.

Thus, when Aramatha asked "why don't they just use X-ray lasers instead of grasers," I naturally assumed he(?) was referring to the weapons that actually get described as being X-ray weapons, namely laser heads, as opposed to just saying "oh yeah, all lasers not explicitly called a graser are firing X-rays too, and why not always use those and never use grasers?"

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Yeah sorry I should have clarified it a bit better and also I got the fact that ship board anti-ship lasers were actually Xrasers (how the hell do you pronounce it) from the battle scene in this fic.

 

[Tekomandor]

Yeah, if it was me, I'd be explicitly saying "yeah, the internal walls of the ship are basically just carriers for some kind of soft-SF force field that absorbs scattering levels of radiation but falls apart under the main beam because that kind of density burns out the underlying material substrate."

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They do have soft-sf shields too, by the way. They're just not really mentioned a bunch or done so in a way that you could assume that they're some kind of specialised armour or material.

 

[Jensaarai]

Xrasers (how the hell do you pronounce it)

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like "shraser," I think?

 

[SCDMR Aramatha]

Yeah, if it was me, I'd be explicitly saying "yeah, the internal walls of the ship are basically just carriers for some kind of soft-SF force field that absorbs scattering levels of radiation but falls apart under the main beam because that kind of density burns out the underlying material substrate."

My own criticism has been restricted to "grasers seem to be so over-energetic that it seems like overkill." Regardless of the details of the physical damage mechanism, it seems like an issue.

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They do have soft SF shields, Weber named them radiation shields which also helps attenuate beams. Those radiation shields are also apparently gravitic in nature according to In Fire Forged.

Yep, I agree with you that grasers are really overpowered and an SD having more than 5 of those things is questionable IMO. It's a standard trope Weber that beams/close range weapons are OHKO weapons. It's present in his previous mutineers moon and recent to challenge heaven book.

With beans this powerful it's a wonder why anyone even armors their ships to actually defend against them. Like armor for laser heads I understand but grasers? It's like armoring a sea battleship against direct nuke hits. It's dead anyway if it gets hit so why not use the mass for something else.

 

[Chloe Sullivan]

My understanding is that sidewalls don't so much absorb as deflect and attenuate energy fire. So at less than 400,000 (was it km or m?) Grasers will punch right through the sidewall, but at 750,000 most of the energy is expended on your sidewall, which will strain your capacitors, with eventual burnout if you keep getting hit.

So basically as long as you are fighting from say, 500,000 or more, you are basically doing the ST-style thing of "pound their shields until they collapse," for which having more guns makes it happen quicker.


Also the descriptions seem to be that grasers/lasers punch holes in your ship, meaning you may survive if they don't hit anything vital (if you are fighting above your weight, your small size and the large size of what's hitting you tends to guarantee that vital stuff gets hit).

Thus why energy torpedoes even exist, since them actually explode inside your ship instead of just punching a hole clean through.