Close, but there's also the simple fact of the matter that grav-shear weapons put far more energy on target in far less time than a missile swarm ever can. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the easiest one is down to the fact that you'll never be able make a single missile capable of inflicting as much damage as a grav-shear weapon. Or more correctly, you could, but it's not going to be anything close to efficient.
The sorts of missiles you're using
aren't the sorts of missiles I'm thinking of. Missiles are by design one-shot weapons, they aren't intended to
last beyond that single shot. So you can design them to generate energy levels that you simply
can't put into a turreted mount or a spinal weapon. It
is that simple. Sure, they're not
cheap, but neither is a starship, and you can feasibly build automated factories for missiles, even without Sixth Secret tech.
Furthermore, I was essentially referring to overcharging a grav-shear weapon and putting it into a missile. No need for cooling, charge times, none of that; just
boom. However, there are other devices that could be put into one. Shieldbreakers, as you said. Devices that basically amount to 'Tractor-Beam implosion devices', which grab all the nearby matter and compress it as small as possible before their generators fail. Black Hole generators, which generate a black hole
in the enemy ship, because the Fifth Secret ignores mass.
I think we had this worked out in technical somewhere, but I can't find it. I'll poke around. In general, grav-shields use a scale-mail paradigm, where large numbers of emitters are used to create an overlapping series of sections. You overload emitters to break the shield, but that doesn't drop the entire thing, just parts of it.
Hm. I
think they're a
re-active defense as opposed to a passive defense. You keep them turned 'on' and they run through the amount of power in their capacitors
really fast, as they need to keep the field up to deflect/crunch/whatever bullets, lasers, and missiles, while also doing better against Grav Shear weapons than other defenses, so they flicker on-and-off as frequently as possible to keep at peak efficiency and to recharge their capacitors a little bit. You'd want an AI running that as opposed to an expert system.
Because it's not like a 'Grav Shield' is an actual solid or semi-solid, it's a field of acceleration. Or more specifically, it's a series of overlapping fields that alter the acceleration of the target. Basically a 'Grav Shield' is a standing 'Grav Shear', projected from a given point, and overwhelming them involves them running out of power.
The problem here is that you're committing to building a ship around a massive gun, with the intent of (I assume) using it at range, which is where the entire idea falls down the same way trying to use Sol as a giant laser does. Because the Shiplords will see you fire before the weapon hits, and be able to dodge because their drives are outright capable of going from .3c in one direction to .3c in another in a second flat. Even if the 'shells' are self-guiding, they're going be appreciable portions of the size of their target, making them child's play to shoot down. Unless you're firing them at close ranges, at which point you need a ship capable of fitting in all that gun and not being a massive target. Combat tech in the PW actually drives towards smaller ships, because there's less surface area for your opponent to target. Larger ships like the Collectors aren't really smart once both sides have effective disruptor technology.
If you're firing at .9c and they're evading at .3c, you 'simply' need enough tubes to 'bracket fire' where they could be with overlapping fields of detonations. With ship sizes scaling
down as technology advances, a device that generates a black hole or similar 'super-tractor device' is
probably large enough that you can shield it in IM - which
would require the breakthrough for the 'artificial energy structures within matter' secret - and the spinal mount to launch it can probably be crammed into something a klick or so in length.
The thing about bigger ships is that they can carry
more. More armor, more weapons, more shields, more strikecraft, more ammunition, more, more, more; if your weapons scale
down in size that effectively and efficiently that just means you can put
more on board. It's not like engines are a problem, inertia-less drives probably only care about volume. A ship twice the length could easily have three to four times the number of shield projectors per unit of surface area, for example, making it both a larger target but also a
tougher target to kill, and mount more and more powerful weapons.
This
really makes me want to work around to hollowing out Pluto or something and turning it into a Battle Moon... should only take a few decades of steady work to make it hollow, then another few decades to outfit it... plenty of time to design FTL exclusion zone devices that cover
light years. Should be big enough - and tough enough - to hold onto those. A few dozen clicks of armor should work fine, right?
Collectors vary somewhat between 8-10km. Regular Fleet craft top out at three to four. War Fleet ships rarely measure more than a kilometre on their longest side.
Huh, interesting. Collectors need to be that large for the amount of 'material' they take back for processing?
I'd rather not get into it, but I think it would be fair to say that PW and 40K have different definitions of impossibly quick.
I don't think so; canon Necrons have BS FTL and inertia-less drives, much like War Fleets.
With respect, if there was a better weapon, the Shiplords would be using it. They've had millions of years to refine their doctrine.
How many millions of those years has it been since they had something truly groundbreaking? Since they uncovered the last secret they've ever figured out? Practice proves that they don't understand everything. How much is left? What Secrets do they know that we haven't even scraped the surface of? We know they're highly advanced in the following: First Secret, Second Secret, Fifth Secret, Sixth Secret, have advanced down the 'hybrid' Second+Sixth secret tree. They may or may not make use of the secret behind 'artifical energy structures', which
might be Third Secret, but it might
also be something else; they may also have moved down First+Fifth secret 'hybrid' tech.
How long since they genuinely
innovated something
new and not a minor refinement of their doctrine? Because you don't get a society that lasts for millions of years, doing the sorts of things this one does, without cultural stasis on some level or another.
Applications of quantum principles on a macro scale could readily result in dozens of new weapons or defenses. Forcibly linking your opponents ships together such that whatever damages one of them damages all of them. The uncertainty principle could be used to have a ship 'split' into two, and whichever one is destroyed is the one that
wasn't real, but damn if both ship's weapons weren't firing full power. High level gravitational manipulation says 'fuck you' to little things like your opponents
getting into range, leaving you free to poke away at them until they die. First Secret tech may well allow for destructive teleportation, meaning that random rocks can be used to blow things up. The combination of Third Secret and Fifth Secret tech may result in shields sturdier and hardier than current tech allows, allowing for layered shields of both pure energy and gravity. Sixth Secret and Fifth Secret tech combined may result in the utilization of micro black holes within ship armor, resulting in a method of increasing the density of the defense, provide for some measure of protection against gravitic weapons, and provide for the lossless transference of power throughout the ship, reducing requirements on power generators and completely removing the standard need for pesky things like
cables.
Maybe none of it works. Maybe it's impractical as fuck. Maybe it's obscenely expensive, and would require the sort of logistics support that turns mining all of Mercury from 'overkill' to 'should we start on Jupiter next?' Maybe, maybe, maybe. But we
aren't playing as the Shiplords, we aren't using the Shiplords to base our fleets off of (they're the goal we need to defeat, not the definitive benchmark for how to go about defeating them, because nobody's actually
defeated a War Fleet yet), and we've got
magic Bullshitium Practice on our side.
Sorry if poking holes is irritating you; if it is I'll stop.
I'm going to a LAN party anyway.
