cthia wrote:I will trust your math, but you must consider that the designers of the missile run those same numbers along with the optimum spread pattern and vector the missiles will need to assume. We're talking about the throw weight of a Solarian Alpha launch.
Yes, at a single ship. With 10,000 missiles per ship, the SLN had better score a kill!
And I'm not exaggerating. I said that with a 1 minute of warning, the target ship can place itself anywhere inside a sphere of 9,000 km in radius, which means a cross-section of 244.7 million km². Assuming it keeps the wedge on and face-on to the missiles, the wedge is about 25,000 km². The cross-section area is 10,000 more than the wedge area, so that's how many missiles you need to saturate the area to guarantee one hit.
This number can be smaller if the attacker can predict where the ship will be. I don't think that's possible, see below.
This is also assuming that hit anywhere on the wedge will kill the ship. That's not only assuming that a kinetic energy weapon can penetrate a warship's dual wedge, but the simple destruction of the wedge will mission-kill the ship inside. If it must hit the actual ship after passing through the wedge, then you need FAR more than 10,000 missiles: an Invictus is 1394 m long and at its tallest, 202 m. That means its cross section is 0.29 km², or 9 orders of magnitude less than the cross-section of where it can be.
And you can definitely count on the first unveiling of this acceleration to be devastating, catching a defender off-guard. The range at the moment the missile goes "supernova" will catch all evasive maneuvers off guard. And remember, even though the launch won't be as good as Lays Potato Chips, you will only need to eat just one.
What does the acceleration have to do with anything? The missile is ballistic at the end, meaning it's moving at constant speed and direction.
And another thing, totally unlike when a missile goes ballistic and you don't know where it is. In this case when a missile goes supernova, you may not realize that it has gone supernova. And possibly neither will your sensors and defensive systems realize what is coming if it can no longer detect a launch that is now traveling at such speeds.
"WTF? Did it just go ballistic?"
Uh uh.
More like "WTF are you talking about?"
A missile that goes ballistic is a hunk of metal and molycircs that is going on a very, very predictable pattern.
In some other Sci-Fi, I've seen missiles that consume themselves by converting into plasma and held by some sort of magnetic field so they don't dissipate immediately. At that point, the plasma is indeed moving ballistically and can't change direction. And since it's just a ball of ionised gas, it can't be shot down either. The only defence against those is to not be where it'll be.
But that's even more detectable than a rail gun round, because plasma is radiating energy away.