Kizarvexis wrote:munroburton wrote:3. The MAlign use the same missiles as the SLN(the Cataphracts). Graser torps have a spider drive and greater endurance, but are very slow and their maximum range falls well inside countermissile range(400,000km vs 3.5 million).
5. Wilder speculation has gone up to 30-40 million tons. It is probably closer to 10 million. Their size is nothing to do with the spider drive - there are frigate-sized spider ships. The size is more so they can carry graser torpedoes in internal magazines - which the "battleship sized" Sharks can't do.
While I would not be surprised at 30+ million LDs, I think they are around fort size, 16+ million. They need pod space, space for graser torp magazines and tubes and massive armor since they don't have a wedge. 10 million is too close to regular SDs and they have been implied as very large, IMO.
Graser torps use the spider drive, but have no crew onboard, so we don't know their max accel. IMO, it will be almost certainly faster than 150g's. A 1,000g would make them faster than ships and I would not be surprised at an accel in the tens of thousands, but that is RFCs call. They don't need to be super fast as graser range is 400,000km against a sidewall, more vs no sidewall or throat/kilt of the wedge of an unsuspecting enemy like the 2nd battle of Hades. Spider drives are very hard to detect at much more then a light second, 300,000km (Ghost captain mentions it while scouting the Manti system), so 400,000k graser range gives them a 100,000km buffer. They also have the range of a modern RD as mentioned during the Oyster Bay attack. So a LD can fire them from really, really long range. Even out of current Apollo range. So I don't think the LDs will be as much of a paper tiger as some have said.
As for the capabilities and limitations of the graser torpedo:
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.Mission of Honor, Chapter 28 wrote:The first wave of each attack consisted of a weapon which was as much a fundamental breakthrough, in its own way, as the Manticoran introduction of the multidrive missile: a graser torpedo which used its own variant of the spider drive. It was a large and cumbersome weapon, with the same trilateral symmetry as the Shark-class ships which had launched it, and for the same reasons.
The torpedo’s size made fitting it into magazines and actually firing it awkward, to say the least, and the Sharks had never been intended to deploy it operationally. For that matter, the Sharks themselves had never been supposed to be deployed “operationally.” The Leonard Detweiler class, which had been intended to carry out this operation, had been designed with magazines and launch tubes which would make it possible to stow and fire torpedoes internally, but none of the Detweilers were even close to completion, and it had required the development of an ingenious external rack system to allow the Sharks to use it for Oyster Bay.
For all its size, it was also a slow weapon. It was simply impossible to fit a spider drive capable of more than a few hundred gravities’ acceleration into something small enough to make a practical weapon. As compensation, however, its drive had almost as much endurance as most of the galaxy’s recon drones, which gave it an impressive absolute range. And a large percentage of the torpedo’s volume had been reserved for systems which had nothing at all to do with propulsion. Whereas the Royal Manticoran Navy had concentrated on improving the efficiency of its standard laser heads, Daniel Detweiler’s R&D staff had taken another approach. They’d figured out how to squeeze what amounted to a cruiser-grade graser projector into something small enough to deploy independently.
The power of the torpedo’s graser wasn’t remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head’s multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best antimissile defense in the universe couldn’t hit something it didn’t know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill’s people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo’s graser’s endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there’d never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN’s designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren’t looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.