kzt wrote:cthia wrote:But she never considered kamikrazying her ship. Why? Now I know against the Q-ship Sirius it wasn't an option. IIRC, she needed to survive the encounter to get that data to the Star Empire regarding the incident. But the option was on the table against Saladin. And that confrontation was a life or death encounter. Many lives and deaths. Graysons. So I wonder why she never considered it.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that a) you cannot survive that kind of approach and b) it most likely won't work. Essentially it is a complex form of suicide.
Except that Saladin was badly damaged as was Fearless. Contemplating it under
normal circumstances with undamaged ships
may well be foolhardy. But under
desperate conditions against a wounded opponent - as existed against Saladin - I'd imagine it would be on the table. If there was a chance it would accomplish the objective, which in this case was to destroy
or mission kill Saladin. With both ships damaged, I was thinking that Honor could use her kinesthetic
and ship handling ability to crash her ship into the most vulnerable part of Saladin's defenses. Her superior kinesthetic and ship handling ability bore witness to in textev in the following...
Sirius's side flashed with the fury of a Fleet battlecruiser, and Honor had cut her maneuver just a fraction of a second too late. Fearless's belly bands came up in time to intercept the missiles, but two of the lasers got through. The sidewall bent and attenuated them, but not enough, and the cruiser lurched as they ripped deep into her hull and smashed her single, unfired missile tube and two of her energy torpedoes.
Yet she survived . . . and so did her grav lance.
"All right, goddamn it," Coglin snarled. "Take us in, Jamal!"
"Aye, aye, Sir."
Honor watched the chronometer tick down, and her mind was cold and clear, accepting no possibility of failure. The sensors she had left couldn't track Sirius clearly through her belly stress band, and her current vector gave the Q-ship four options: retreat and break off the engagement, roll up on her own side relative to Fearless and shoot "down" through the starboard sidewall as she overflew the cruiser, cross her bow, or cross her stern. [b]She might do any of them, but Honor was betting her ship—and her life—that Coglin would cross her bows. It was the classic maneuver, the one any naval officer instinctively sought—and he knew her forward armament had been destroyed.
But if he was going to do that, then he ought to be coming into position . . . just . . . about . . . now!
She slammed the helm over, wrenching her ship still further round to port and rolling to swing the broadside she'd denied Sirius back towards her with blinding speed.
Lieutenant Commander Jamal blinked. It was only for an instant, only the briefest hesitation. There was no logical reason for Fearless to suddenly swing back, and for no more than a heartbeat, he couldn't quite believe she had.
And in that heartbeat, Rafael Cardones targeted his grav lance and fired.
Sirius staggered. Captain Coglin jerked upright in his chair, his eyes wide, face shocked in disbelief as his sidewall went down, and then Fearless's four surviving energy torpedo launchers went to rapid, continuous fire.
The armed merchant raider Sirius disappeared forever in a devastating boil of light and fury.
Question.
I can't wait for the movie to erase certain insistencies and disconnects in my understanding on Honorverse tech. But I am under the understanding that a ship is NOT entirely encompassed in a wedge. Just top and bottom. Or why would a ship need to roll to impose the impenetrable belly wedge? The sidewalls are not so impenetrable.
In conjunction with a kamikaze maneuver - where possible and desperation demands it - I was considering a self-destruct of the ship upon impact, containment field, missiles, the whole shebang. Would that have destroyed, or mission killed even the larger ship?
But there are, of course, sidewalls for... the sides. There are weaker spots of the sidewalls. As textev talks of a "sweet spot." ...
Mad Wizard Weber's words of wisdom from FAQ wrote:The strength of the wedge does affect the effectiveness of the sidewall, but it isn't the decisive factor in sidewall strength. It's the sidewall generators which determine that.
A sidewall is basically a "plate" of focused gravitic energy, and the bigger (and stronger) its generator, the stronger and tougher the sidewall plate is going to be. The logical implication of this is that larger ships with more tonnage for generators and a larger energy budget can produce stronger sidewalls, and that's the real reason ships-of-the-wall, for example, have sidewalls so much tougher than a battlecruiser's or a destroyer's. It's also the reason the Nike-class battlecruisers have stronger sidewalls than the Agamemnons; the BC(L)'s designers devoted the tonnage and the power to generate them because toughness and survivability were higher priorities in the Nike's concept design stage.
Now, where the basic size and power of the ship's impeller wedge come in is in the "stitching" — the interface where the sidewall and the wedge come together. The sidewall is strongest at the center, with the strength (the gravitic "depth," if you will) of the "plate" dropping off proportionately as one approaches its boundaries. That means the upper and lower edges of the sidewall are the "sweet spot" where the attacker really wants his energy weapon shot to hit, and the stronger or "deeper" the impeller wedge is, the more its "shadow" protects that "seam" from incoming fire. The sidewall actually reaches up into the impeller wedge (where the two of them are tuned to interface and interlock), much as the impeller wedge reaches across the alpha wall to siphon in additional power to maintain the wedge once it's up. The effect in this case is much less noticeable in terms of power supply, but the interface also "bends" or slightly deforms the surface of the impeller wedge, pulling it "downward" to the edge of the sidewall plate, which is where the defensive "shadow" originates, and the stronger the impeller band, the stronger (tougher) that shadow becomes. In combination these factors significantly reinforce the strength of the sidewall edges where they are inherently weaker, which means that the same sidewall generator will produce a more effective sidewall when it has a stronger or "deeper" impeller wedge with which to interface. It's not that the sidewall itself is actually stronger, but rather that it is able to use its strength in a more inherently efficient fashion. This is only a factor for hits that would come in through that reinforced area, and the reinforcement itself is a small enough factor in the sidewall's overall power that this is not a significant element in the difference of sidewall strength between, say, a Nike and an Agamemnon. It would, however, be a very significant element in the difference between the strength of an SD's sidewall and that of a CA.
