cthia wrote:ThinksMarkedly wrote:I'd expect that a EMP-like weapon to have a range similar to a boom-mode nuclear missile. That's far, far shorter than any stealth has a right to be, for all we know of the Honorverse tech. Not even the SLN would be fooled by it.
Except for the MA's smart material. You can't see it with the naked eye if it is oriented correctly towards you. In the heat of battle, it can be missed. Who is going to be looking out of a port anyway during battle.
Looking out a porthole was a facetious remark. My point was that if it could be seen with naked eye, it shouldn't be too difficult for the sensors the ship normally employs. A radar that can pick something up at over a light second is a million times more powerful at 300 km. And considering the returns drop at a power of 4 ratio, the return signal of something at 300 km is a trillion times more powerful than at a light-second.
And such a thing won't have suddenly materialised there. It must have manoeuvred, which means it must be lucky all the time to avoid detection. The defenders only have to be lucky once to see it.
Indeed, but that will only destroy a single target, when the aim is to destroy an entire launch.
Not exactly. A graser can have multiple emitters. Once the bomb explodes, the energy can be channelled into multiple beams. They probably need to be within a small arc of each other though.
On the other hand, just how many ships are within the range of this short-range weapon? If it can at most affect two with optimal positioning, then you still need to send a lot of those out to cripple the attack that is yet to launch (and ALL of the platforms need to be lucky in stealth). We don't know what range such a thing needs, but if it is like a boom-mode nuke, it's useless. It needs to get closer to a target than a graser.