long range laser

kzt wrote:Effectitive range of perfect lasers is directly related to the radius of the beam and inversely related to the wavelength. DW has stated that it's a HUGE emitter and a really, really short wavelength.

To steal a post of mine for the bar:

"You get a Rayleigh length of 5 billion KMs with a 10 picometer soft gama rays. So nominally at 5 billion kms a 8 meter diameter terawatt 10 picometer beam is an 11.4 meter diameter terawatt beam. So instead of a huge 17.3 Gw/m^2 average energy density at few thousand KMs at it's dropped to a measly 8.6 Gw/m^2 at about 4 light hours range."

If you assume that it's 1 picometer wavelength it has LOT more range.

My point is the mirror would act somewhat like a forward observer for artillery. able to redirect the very overpowered laser at very small widths (so its less attenuated by sidewalls) at more reasonable ranges.

additionally if you can get a recon drone with a wedge up to still be sneaky while moving around (granted it does turn it off alot for close range work) a shut down gravity mirror satellite then should be able to get close enough that the overpowered small width laser could go through sidewalls like butter and punch HARD at the ship.

a quick surgical high power strike that a capitalship class missile can't rival.

right now until someone shows how its unpractical. i'm imagining a laser pulse that is something like 20 times more powerful then a standard grasermount on a SD.
and this power is hitting the ship at as close a range as a ghost rider recon drone can get while ballistic without being detected (and therefore destroyed)


Please forgive the fragmented thought process. I have an excuse, but its a lousy one.

A graser that will go through a sidewall at a few thousand kms will go thorough the sidewall at 4 light hours.

The problem is hitting the target at 4 light hours.

Oh, and the fact that this makes the entire idea of defending a system completely impractical (as you can predict the future location of multi-km wide orbital platform with a lot more accuracy than you need to blow it up from 4 light hours away), so none of these idea will ever happen in the Honorverse.

kzt wrote:A graser that will go through a sidewall at a few thousand kms will go thorough the sidewall at 4 light hours.

The problem is hitting the target at 4 light hours.

Oh, and the fact that this makes the entire idea of defending a system completely impractical (as you can predict the future location of multi-km wide orbital platform with a lot more accuracy than you need to blow it up from 4 light hours away), so none of these idea will ever happen in the Honorverse.

I wasn't really intending this idea to be in the honorverse really. I don't think DW reads these posts much as he might accidentally get an idea from it. same problem with Fan fiction.

"A graser that will go through a sidewall at a few thousand kms will go thorough the sidewall at 4 light hours."
(Is the ability of a laser to go through a sidewall only its strength and angle of attack or also how thin it is so it is deflected less?)
I agree with the part about not hitting a target 4 light hours away. but this idea is more of an ability to hit a target at sub light second ranges. and i don't think you would need a big platform. probably one about the same size as a ghost rider platform. "and this power is hitting the ship at as close a range as a ghost rider recon drone can get while ballistic without being detected (and therefore destroyed)"
means that a laser that is FAR more powerful then a laser-head on a nuke powered system defense mine (the power is supplied by the laser base elsewhere0.

basically this is a system defense laser-head mine with out the laser-head and nuke. but a laser that is powerful enough that it could 1-shot anything out there (any tech-heads out there willing to figure out how powerful a laser would have to be to 1-shot a DN or SD? and then how feasible that would be?


in the end the idea is relatively simple. (dunno about FEASIBLE). a laser cannon base somewhere, a regular ship could be one. but a dedicated POWERFUL laser base would work better (if the base is destroyed regular ships could take over)
the base then fires a laser at a small, hard to see platform that is very close to the enemy ship. the platform then reflects and aims the laser with accuracy given because its so close. the laser is much more powerful then any standard mine and the platform doesn't have to carry power to generate the laser so it can be small and hard to see so enemy ships can't take them out from range.

Gama ray mirrors seem difficult.

And just hitting your "reflector" seems about as hard as hitting the target directly. If you can tell someone how to shoot at a really far away recon drone that is next to a target, wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just shoot the target?

You don't need a multikilometer diameter platform for the graser. A few meters in diamter will suffice.

kzt wrote:A graser that will go through a sidewall at a few thousand kms will go thorough the sidewall at 4 light hours.

The problem is hitting the target at 4 light hours.

Oh, and the fact that this makes the entire idea of defending a system completely impractical (as you can predict the future location of multi-km wide orbital platform with a lot more accuracy than you need to blow it up from 4 light hours away), so none of these idea will ever happen in the Honorverse.

namelessfly wrote:You don't need a multikilometer diameter platform for the graser. A few meters in diamter will suffice.

No, but what you are shooting at is a couple of KMs across.

kzt wrote:Gama ray mirrors seem difficult.

And just hitting your "reflector" seems about as hard as hitting the target directly. If you can tell someone how to shoot at a really far away recon drone that is next to a target, wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just shoot the target?

No, it wouldn't be hard to hit the drone. for one, its stationary, as well as the fact that an enemy ship can move and dodge very easily making a long range laser shot impossible to hit them with. as well as the fact that sidewalls and ECM make it hard to see EXACTLY where the ship is. (which is required for shooting a ship at long range with lasers. but not for missiles which can home in when they are closer.)

this laser drone is close enough that it can see the enemy just fine and react quick enough to hit the target regardless of how it moves in space. if it imposes its wedge its another thing. but if its a fleet, then for this to work it would require multiple drones anyway. so the fleet can't put a wedge against ALL the drones. and that is ONLY if they know where they are. which means they would then swat them out of space. which is the exact same weakness of the space mines out there already. this is just an enhanced version of them.


(hmm....that gave me an idea for another thing...i'll think it through a little before i post it...for you to shoot down :)

Misunderstood your post. I thought you were suggesting that the Graser array rather than the target would be kilometers across. My Bad.

I absolutely agree that hitting an orbiting space station from a few AUs out should be doable with honorverse tech. In fact the precision of the tracking systems on modern telescopes is comparable to the diffraction limitation of their optics, so I'd expect Honorverse Tech to do almost as well.

kzt wrote:

namelessfly wrote:You don't need a multikilometer diameter platform for the graser. A few meters in diamter will suffice.

No, but what you are shooting at is a couple of KMs across.

You don't need to have a forward based mirror or lens system to redirect the long range laser. All you need is a forward deployed recon drone with FTL comm that would send updates on the position, velocity vector and accelleration vector of the target back to the ship with the Phased Array Graser. This would cut the time between last known position of target an arrival of the Graser beam in half. The potential uncertainty about the target's location when the Graser beam arrives would be reduced by a factor of four.

Keep in mind that we know that the peak accellerations of Honorverse ships are very high, but how rapidly can they change the magnitude and direction of their accelleration vectors? Can you instantaneously increase or decrease the accelelration of a ship or does it take time for the wedge strength to change? Even more obvious is that the ships can't slew instantaneously to dramaticly new headings. If it takes even a few seconds to turn a ship or change the magnitude of its accelleration, then the uncertainty about the target ship's position decreases dramaticly. This technique might increase the potentially effective range of a Phased Array Graser against manauvering ships to perhaps a few tens of light seconds or millions of kilometers. When going up against opponents whose effective energy range is not much more than 100,000 kilometers, this would be devastating.

You'd still have to fight your way through the enemies SKM envelope, but if you had superior accell or stealth you could build up a considerable relative velocity that would allow you to close the range quickly. Imagine the consernation of an SLN SD captain who is told by their tactical section that a ROLLAND DD is making a suicide run on them. Just as they are finally thinking about preparing their beam weapons to fire at their puny opponent, it opens fire and eviscerates the SD with a single salvo. And the icing on the cake is that no precious SKMs had to be expended.

This sounds alot like the Sunbeam concept from the Lensman series. You use a large number of gravitational lenses to reflect, refract and focus a large pergentage of the star's output along a single vector. The result is not actually a laser, but is a photonic beam of such strength that at the very least, it would cause normal matter to simply sublime, or evaporate. The only problem is getting the beam to hit the evading target, you'd need to cause the incoming hostiles to utilise a predictable path and not "hide" behind things like planets and so forth.

Yaay! We're having another "Lensman Arms Race"!

Awaiting comments.