kzt wrote:KNick wrote:Yes, yes, I know. You're just the artist whom makes their ideas look real. But you are not the only member of BuNine to read these. One of them might have some thoughts on this.
Most of the people who have that info won't talk about it. At all. I know someone who has at least some of the tech bible stuff and he says "no comment" to ANY question on Honorverse stuff, plot or tech.
OK. I guess in that case, we go back to our usual modus operandi..ie. lots of WAGS. For an array with a diameter of 2,000 KM, that gives us a surface area of 3.14 million SQ. KM. It is my belief that a physical structure that large, if it was solidly constructed, would have it's own gravitation issues. That is one of the reasons I always thought of them as cobwebs.
On the other hand, if they were individual nodes connected by fiber optics or the honorverse equivalent, they would have very little mass to compensate for.
A missile impacting at a 90degree angle would destroy 100 SQ KM of the array. That would not even qualify as a flee bite. In fact, if the elements of the array are more than 10 KM apart, it might actually destroy only 1. If the elements of the array are connected by something like a cable, there would be no shock damage, even in the case of a contact nuke.
A missile travelling parallel to the array would destroy a channel 2,000 KM long by 10 KM wide or 20,000 SQ KM or less than 0.06% of the array. An SD travelling the same path would intersect more nodes, but it would still be less than 2% at the best.
The only effective way to totally destroy an array that I can think of would be to park a ship within PDLC range and target the nodes one batch at a time. Depending on how much time that took, it might allow for the interception and destruction of the ship involved. That would be almost a certainty someplace like Manticore or Haven.