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MEMO: TO ALL OFFICERS and ratings.

Jonathan_S wrote:Is the MAlign graser warhead more destruction than a single laserhead? Sure, no question. But it (and its power source; since it's not being powered by the very energy dense explosion of a grav pinch nuclear bomb) and also almost certainly many times larger than a laserhead.

If my hypothesis is correct about the destructiveness of a g-torp, it is misleading to compare it to a "single" laser head. If the g-torp delivers 1-2 million X dwell time then it represents 1-2 million more missiles. All delivered in one blow and concentrated in a single area of the sidewalls! And up to 100% of that energy is delivered in a Doppler Effect.*

Consider one of my previous posts ...

cthia wrote:If I do the math right, in my head, the missile can begin firing at -250,000 km on up thru +250,000 km for a full two seconds of time on target.

Energy weapons are measured in microseconds. If GA missiles fire for one microsecond then that is two million times normal time on target.

Two microseconds and it is still one million times more time on target.

And one full second of that is ever increasing energy in a Doppler Effect!*

However, that is very assuming and giving GA missiles the benefit of the doubt that they fire in microseconds (10^6) and not nanoseconds (10^9). If GA energy weapons fire in nanoseconds then the g-torp represents 1-2 billion X time on target! That should slice thru even an SD's sidewall like a hot knife thru butter.

Everyone is fatally underestimating the destructiveness of a graser torp.

* I don't intend to calculate what the Doppler Effect will have on the g-torp's "perceived" energy when it is delivered to the sidewalls. I wouldn't be surprised if it greatly exceeds the output of an SD! As I said, I certainly don't intend to unsheath my slipstick, even if it didn't turn out to be extremely complicated. Especially since the relativistic Doppler Effect should be used because of the significant velocities of both missile and target. But if any one of you gear heads is interested in breaking out your sliderule then slide away til your heart's content. And the less inclined of those of us in class will simply copy off of your paper. LOL

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:But Graser Torpedoes appear to be have the potential to restore the one-hit/one-kill capability that David has deliberately avoided. They don't punch a hole through the side your warship, they punch a hole through the entire length of the ship and then they start to spiralize it.

Which is overkill. State of the art RMN missiles are good enough to guarantee kills against any opponent except other GA members. It's not one hit one kill, but one swarm one kill. Every ship targeted in Hypatia was killed or mission-killed, with enough left-overs for collateral damage.

Underkill can be fatal. If left alive a battered wreck can do what Henke did to the Peeps before she was captured. You want kills. Not mission kills.

But you're missing the point. Everyone is missing the point. This weapon exists now! We must not forget that this is an LD's weapon. Everyone seems to be forgetting that. Thus far it has simply been an object lesson of what the GA will be facing. If an LD manages to sneak several of these things into a GA formation, they need maximum overkill! And they will get it. These things represent one missile - several kills! LACs and Light Cruisers and BCs will only be a snack for these things.

And the hollowness of pod layers? Wait, on second thought, it ain't gonna matter one bit whether they're hollow or not. They're gonna be after these things are done.

cthia wrote:If my hypothesis is correct about the destructiveness of a g-torp, it is misleading to compare it to a "single" laser head. If the g-torp delivers 1-2 million X dwell time then it represents 1-2 million more missiles. All delivered in one blow and concentrated in a single area of the sidewalls! And up to 100% of that energy is delivered in a Doppler Effect.*

Consider one of my previous posts ...

cthia wrote:If I do the math right, in my head, the missile can begin firing at -250,000 km on up thru +250,000 km for a full two seconds of time on target.

Energy weapons are measured in microseconds. If GA missiles fire for one microsecond then that is two million times normal time on target.

Two microseconds and it is still one million times more time on target.

And one full second of that is ever increasing energy in a Doppler Effect!*

However, that is very assuming and giving GA missiles the benefit of the doubt that they fire in microseconds (10^6) and not nanoseconds (10^9). If GA energy weapons fire in nanoseconds then the g-torp represents 1-2 billion X time on target! That should slice thru even an SD's sidewall like a hot knife thru butter.

Everyone is fatally underestimating the destructiveness of a graser torp.

* I don't intend to calculate what the Doppler Effect will have on the g-torp's "perceived" energy when it is delivered to the sidewalls. I wouldn't be surprised if it greatly exceeds the output of an SD! As I said, I certainly don't intend to unsheath my slipstick, even if it didn't turn out to be extremely complicated. Especially since the relativistic Doppler Effect should be used because of the significant velocities of both missile and target. But if any one of you gear heads is interested in breaking out your sliderule then slide away til your heart's content. And the less inclined of those of us in class will simply copy off of your paper. LOL

Well, the only time we've seen it in action is was very slow, so no appreciable Doppler effect.

Mission of Honor - Ch. 28 wrote:The incoming weapons had extraordinarily low radar signatures, and they were coming in at barely 60,000 KPS.

However in hypothetical missile form (which I don't think is at all practical in the current century) they wouldn't be closing any faster than an MDM already is -- so any advantage from the doppler effect would also apply to the X-ray laser from the laserhead.

You're also wildly underestimating the endurance of the laserhead; by 3 to 6 orders of magnitude. It's not microseconds ((10^-6) or nanoseconds (10^-9); it's thousandths (10^-3) of a second.

ibid wrote: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.

So the graser lasts "only" a bit less than 3000 times as long; not millions or billions of times longer. Oh, and there's its sidewall burnthrough distance -- not 250,000 km but around the same 50,000 km of a modern RMN laserhead.

And finally we don't have to do that maths; we're explicitly told that it's significantly less powerful than a Shrike's graser. Not "less powerful per instant but more destructive overall" just "less powerful".

ibid wrote: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.

I don't see any way to take the author's words and realistically expect a graser torp to more powerful than an SD's graser, or be destroying multiple ships per torp, especially not if they've got their sidewalls up.

Your enthusiasm seems to have taken you far, far, beyond the capabilities the author has written for this.

Dangerous, yes. Ruin even an SD's day if a few of them sneak into position (at their not "more than a few hundred gravities’ acceleration" [ibid]) for a down the throat shot where no sidewall is in the way; absolutely. Single shot that SD and several of its escorts; no, there doesn't seem to be any way to take the authors description of its capabilities and expect that outcome.

Good thing you knocked me off my high horse. I was having way too much fun with this.

I took ThinksMarkedly's word that it was either microseconds or nanoseconds by his inference upstream. That's what I get for copying off of someone else's paper. It was hard to believe but I ran with it, though the responsibility is my own.

That is still the equivalent energy of 3000 missiles delivered all at once in one area of the sidewall. Or the equivalent of hitting that same rock in space that is 3000 times thicker. Dunno how that would not rip even an SD to shreds, but if the author says no, then it is no.

Thanks for placing that negative sign in your exponent. Also, what is the source you are using for those quotes? (IBID?)

BTW, regular grasers don't create a Doppler Effect. They don't exist long enough. The Doppler Effect is created by a moving object. GA missiles explode in thousandths of a second I'm told. Next to instantly. So no "two-way" Doppler Effect. And the Doppler Effect caused by the warship heading into the graser is negligible as well, since it only lasts that same thousandths of a second. With a reverse engineered GA graser torp closing at 250,000 km/sec for close to or equal to three seconds, it would be very significant.

I should not be surprised that the author ignores the Doppler Effect. Why should it be any more important than relativity, which he ignores as well. But it makes for an interesting read as he has it. This is why I leave my slipstick in its sheath. A graser torp can have less nominal energy in comparison but more in the field due to the Doppler Effect caused by its sustained firing time even at its lethargic acceleration. But no means no.

I wonder if the MA can benefit from the GA's lensing technology.

cthia wrote:I took ThinksMarkedly's word that it was either microseconds or nanoseconds by his inference upstream. That's what I get for copying off of someone else's paper. It was hard to believe but I ran with it, though the responsibility is my own.

I mis-remembered and didn't research. I get an F.

That is still the equivalent energy of 3000 missiles delivered all at once in one area of the sidewall. Or the equivalent of hitting that same rock in space that is 3000 times thicker. Dunno how that would not rip even an SD to shreds, but if the author says no, then it is no.

Sure, 3000 times a CL graser. But I'll grant you it's unlikely an SD or even BC graser is more than 50x more powerful than a CL, so that would still be another 60x at a minimum.

BTW, on tracking: a long-firing weapon has to have some kind of tracking. Otherwise, it might just waste 99% of its energy on empty space. So yes, I expect the gtorps have them. But I don't expect that they slewed to cause more damage: I expect that what happened during Oyster Bay was actually the imperfection of the tracking. The torpedoes were coming in at a fraction of the speed of light (can't recall how high, but wasn't that high) and firing from a long way away. Any small imperfection would be amplified by the distance and cause the beam to move around on the target, thus causing more damage.

But this was against a fixed target. Against a moving one, evading, we simply don't know how well it can track. If it's firing from 30,000 km away, its light-speed sensing has a 0.1 second delay in seeing the target move and then reacting to it.

BTW, regular grasers don't create a Doppler Effect. They don't exist long enough. The Doppler Effect is created by a moving object. GA missiles explode in thousandths of a second I'm told. Next to instantly. So no "two-way" Doppler Effect. And the Doppler Effect caused by the warship heading into the graser is negligible as well, since it only lasts that same thousandths of a second. With a reverse engineered GA graser torp closing at 250,000 km/sec for close to or equal to three seconds, it would be very significant.

First of all, that's not how Doppler Effect works. The blue-shifting depends on the weapon's base velocity, not the length of time it fires. So it doesn't matter how long the shot was: 1 ns, 5 ms, 3 seconds or an hour. The effect on the frequency is the same.

Second, even at 240,000 km/s (0.8c), the relativistic Doppler is a mere 5/3. The energy is not going to be significantly higher because of this base velocity. Higher, sure, but not significantly so.

Third and most important, gtorps are unlikely to get anywhere near 0.8c. At 150 gravities, it would need 45.2 hours of acceleration to get to that speed and would need to start its attack run from 18.11 light-hours away. Any conceivable scenario of an attack against a moving target places it at less than 3 hours from start to finish, which means the gtorp would reach 0.052c, for a relativistic Doppler of 1.0014. I wouldn't be surprised if the power output variance between warhead lots was greater than 0.14%. In fact, the biggest component of the relative velocity to the target is going to be contributed by the target itself, if it's a head-on attack: an SD with old-style compensators would be pulling 450 gravities and would therefore contribute 3/4th of the closing velocity.

On the other hand, 3-stage missiles do get to 0.81c in 9 minutes; 4-stage missiles are probably capped at 0.9c due to their particle screen limitations.

Exercise for the reader: calculate at what speed the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation blue-shifts into the gamma ray range.

cthia wrote:Good thing you knocked me off my high horse. I was having way too much fun with this.

I took ThinksMarkedly's word that it was either microseconds or nanoseconds by his inference upstream. That's what I get for copying off of someone else's paper. It was hard to believe but I ran with it, though the responsibility is my own.

That is still the equivalent energy of 3000 missiles delivered all at once in one area of the sidewall. Or the equivalent of hitting that same rock in space that is 3000 times thicker. Dunno how that would not rip even an SD to shreds, but if the author says no, then it is no.

Thanks for placing that negative sign in your exponent. Also, what is the source you are using for those quotes? (IBID?)

BTW, regular grasers don't create a Doppler Effect. They don't exist long enough. The Doppler Effect is created by a moving object. GA missiles explode in thousandths of a second I'm told. Next to instantly. So no "two-way" Doppler Effect. And the Doppler Effect caused by the warship heading into the graser is negligible as well, since it only lasts that same thousandths of a second. With a reverse engineered GA graser torp closing at 250,000 km/sec for close to or equal to three seconds, it would be very significant.

I should not be surprised that the author ignores the Doppler Effect. Why should it be any more important than relativity, which he ignores as well. But it makes for an interesting read as he has it. This is why I leave my slipstick in its sheath. A graser torp can have less nominal energy in comparison but more in the field due to the Doppler Effect caused by its sustained firing time even at its lethargic acceleration. But no means no.

I wonder if the MA can benefit from the GA's lensing technology.

ibid is a standard citation term meaning from "in the same source (used to save space in textual references to a quoted work which has been mentioned in a previous reference)." [google - Oxford Languages]; from the the Latin word, ibidem, which means the same place.

Just a shorthand way of saying each one of those quotes (including the later inline one) all came from Mission of Honor Ch. 28.

Still, guess I should have taken the extra seconds to copy & paste the actual reference in, rather than trying to be cute.



As for the GA's improved grav lensing tech? If the MAlign can get their hands on it then, yes, they'd definitely benefit. It helps with missile warheads (Mk-16G), which would benefit the MAlign cataphracts and warship weapons mounts (Shrike grasers) which would help benefit graser torps as well as any ship, fort, or remote energy platform mounted lasers or grasers.

First of all, that's not how Doppler Effect works. The blue-shifting depends on the weapon's base velocity, not the length of time it fires. So it doesn't matter how long the shot was: 1 ns, 5 ms, 3 seconds or an hour. The effect on the frequency is the same.

Huh? Think about what you are saying. It depends on both. If a speeding train stops firing it grasers (whistling) after thousandths of a second there will be no Doppler Effect. There has to be a wave source.

In our case the significant velocity of the observer (enemy ship) will also matter.

cthia wrote:Why isn't it a given that the g-torp can be made somewhat smaller right out of the box simply by replacing the power source with the GA's smaller reactor?

Because the GT is a very long duration, highly stealthy weapon. And having a 60 million degree reactor that needs to be started by a ship reator and runs out of fuel in a week probably isn't ideal for this mission.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:Why isn't it a given that the g-torp can be made somewhat smaller right out of the box simply by replacing the power source with the GA's smaller reactor?

Because the GT is a very long duration, highly stealthy weapon. And having a 60 million degree reactor that needs to be started by a ship reator and runs out of fuel in a week probably isn't ideal for this mission.

What powers the Spider drive? Please don't say capacitors.

cthia wrote:Huh? Think about what you are saying. It depends on both. If a speeding train stops firing it grasers (whistling) after thousandths of a second there will be no Doppler Effect. There has to be a wave source.

In our case the significant velocity of the observer (enemy ship) will also matter.

I have thought about that before posting and I stand by what I said. If a train stops whistling, then I won't hear the whistle any more, but the whistle I heard while it was whistling was Doppler-shifted. Whether my ears were good enough to perceive it or not.

Gamma rays start at 10^19 or 10^20 Hz (10 to 100 exahertz). That means a 1 millisecond pulse of gamma rays is at least 10^16 cycles. That's not instantaneous by any means.

If it were a maser instead of a graser, which start at 300 MHz, a millisecond pulse would be only 300,000 pulses.

cthia wrote:

kzt wrote:Because the GT is a very long duration, highly stealthy weapon. And having a 60 million degree reactor that needs to be started by a ship reator and runs out of fuel in a week probably isn't ideal for this mission.

What powers the Spider drive? Please don't say capacitors.

In the graser torp? Well okay, I won't say capacitors - I'll let Daniel Detweiler say it for me

Uncompromising Honor wrote: The good news was that the spider drive’s gravitic signature was incredibly faint compared to conventional impellers, so it didn’t require as much stealthing in the first place. The bad news was that the drive itself took up a lot of space and its plasma-charged accumulators took up almost as much.

Ok, technically that discussion is about the spider drive for their Wraith recon drone; and a little later it talks about how the Silver Bullet (built around two of those Wraith's power packs) included those "deployable solar panels and a trickle charger for the plasma capacitors".

But I've every reason to assume, with the other two known unmanned spider drive platforms using plasma capacitors, that the graser torp would too. (Especially as it seems the smallest of the 3 and Daniel was bemoaning the fact that his people hasn't been able to duplicate the Manty microfusion plants)