?

What is the distance from ship to ship in a Manticoran formation? Is it less than the range of deflected laserheads off the sidewalls? IOW, is there a possibility deflected (ricocheting) laserheads can damage another ship?

I would think not, ordinarily. Or there would be a lot of the "pinball effect."

cthia wrote:What is the distance from ship to ship in a Manticoran formation? Is it less than the range of deflected laserheads off the sidewalls? IOW, is there a possibility deflected (ricocheting) laserheads can damage another ship?

I would think not, ordinarily. Or there would be a lot of the "pinball effect."

Quite apart from the minimal odds of achieving such a hit, is a laser beam even collimated after encountering a wedge or sidewall?

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:What is the distance from ship to ship in a Manticoran formation? Is it less than the range of deflected laserheads off the sidewalls? IOW, is there a possibility deflected (ricocheting) laserheads can damage another ship?

I would think not, ordinarily. Or there would be a lot of the "pinball effect."

Quite apart from the minimal odds of achieving such a hit, is a laser beam even collimated after encountering a wedge or sidewall?

I wouldn't think so after hitting the wedge. That is why I only enquired about the deflection off the sidewalls. Then there is the life of the beam.

tlb wrote:You have been writing as though the remains of the object should go off in some preferred direction; but that will only happen if momentum is in some measure preserved. Perhaps it would be if the bullet had hit at a glancing angle, but when it comes in at close to perpendicular to the wall, then no momentum survives.

Why are you still thinking this is about Newtonian physics where a physical object impacts another physical object? It's not, it's about a physical object entering a gravity field and kinetic energy can never be released when that happens, it can be changed by the field though.

I'm interested to know how you think an objects kinetic energy is released when it intersects a sidewall for example and where its momentum goes. Pointing to some text saying "it disappeared in a bright flash" doesn't cut it, because that doesn't in any way refute what I've said since it's totally consistent with all textev.

Joat42 wrote:Why are you still thinking this is about Newtonian physics where a physical object impacts another physical object? It's not, it's about a physical object entering a gravity field and kinetic energy can never be released when that happens, it can be changed by the field though.

I'm interested to know how you think an objects kinetic energy is released when it intersects a sidewall for example and where its momentum goes. Pointing to some text saying "it disappeared in a bright flash" doesn't cut it, because that doesn't in any way refute what I've said since it's totally consistent with all textev.

You have agreed that the object can be torn apart when it encountered the focused gravity field, down to the ionized plasma level (or did I misunderstand you when you wrote "will get secondary effects due to internal friction when atoms accelerates faster than its surrounding companions plus you have atomic bonds being broken which also tend to release energy"?). So where does the kinetic energy reside at that point? It has to be in the ionized atoms of the original object. If you say it is "never released", then there is no other place for it to be. Obviously the remains of the object cannot pass though the area of focused gravity, because it is clear from the books that a wedge at least cannot be penetrated; so that is also true to a lesser extent for a "sidewall". There is no other place for what is now the gas to go except to expand outward. That was the behavior mentioned in the text. Whether it expands straight out or to a side is of little interest to me. As it moves it will radiate, as also mentioned in the text.

PS: After you point out all the flaws in this narrative, I hope you will edify us with the correct description of what happens when an antique 1911 AD handgun fires a .45 caliber bullet "into the focused grav wall 'backstop'". We know that to an observer it vanishes in a "fiery flash".

PPS: I hope you are not making the mistake of thinking these artificial fields must have a simple, although very steep, gradient. Since they are artificial they could be composed of multiple paired layers of opposing directions; just as an example, since we do not know how they are generated.
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tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:What is the distance from ship to ship in a Manticoran formation? Is it less than the range of deflected laserheads off the sidewalls? IOW, is there a possibility deflected (ricocheting) laserheads can damage another ship?

I would think not, ordinarily. Or there would be a lot of the "pinball effect."

Quite apart from the minimal odds of achieving such a hit, is a laser beam even collimated after encountering a wedge or sidewall?

And they're never described as 'reflected'. Rather they're described as "bent", or "defocused". It may be bent enough to hit the inside of the wedge, where it'd just go away, or the IFF armor essay says that after being scattered by the sidewall (and rad shielding) any photons hitting the hull can easily be handled by the physical armor. And of course any that misses the hull & the wedge is likely going to have to pass through the far sidewall before it'd have a change to hit anything else -- which would render it even less potentially harmfull.

These sidewalls aren't mirrors and so you aren't going to be bouncing deadly lasers around onto other targets.


But let's still circle back to how tight the formations are. I don't recall a specific statement; but we know from an infodump that SD wedges are on about 300 km wide (probably a bit more for the latest SD(P)s, as ships have grown since RFC's 1998 post on the subject. You need a certain amount of safety margin to avoid the risk of wedge contact (resulting in the loss of both ships), but the RMN drilled hard to maintain very tight intervals. So ships might have been as little as 900 km apart, though 1,200 seems safer.

Though with their new antimissile doctrines, which involve firing your CMs from behind your wedge (using Keyhole to control them) they may have switched to a less tightly packed formation -- just to leave room for the CM's to make the post-launch turn and for the Keyhole platforms to get the necessary standoff 'height' w/o getting in the way of a neighboring ship.

Still, a laserhead has an effective standoff range of 30,000 - 50,000 km. So at least their classic SD formations were easily packed over 10 times closer than the effective range of a laserhead. (And yet, 'ricochets' never have been, and presumably never will be, a concern )

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:What is the distance from ship to ship in a Manticoran formation? Is it less than the range of deflected laserheads off the sidewalls? IOW, is there a possibility deflected (ricocheting) laserheads can damage another ship?

I would think not, ordinarily. Or there would be a lot of the "pinball effect."

Quite apart from the minimal odds of achieving such a hit, is a laser beam even collimated after encountering a wedge or sidewall?

Jonathan'S wrote:And they're never described as 'reflected'. "bent" or "defocused". It may be bent enough to hit the inside of the wedge, where it'd just go away, or the IFF armor essay says that after being scattered by the sidewall (and rad shielding) any photons hitting the hull can easily be handled by the physical armor. And of course any that misses the hull & the wedge is likely going to have to pass through the far sidewall before it'd have a change to hit anything else -- which would render it even less potentially harmfull.

These sidewalls aren't mirrors and so you aren't going to be bouncing deadly lasers around onto other targets.


But let's still circle back to how tight the formations are. I don't recall a specific statement; but we know from an infodump that SD wedges are on about 300 km wide (probably a bit more for the latest SD(P)s, as ships have grown since RFC's 1998 post on the subject. You need a certain amount of safety margin to avoid the risk of wedge contact (resulting in the loss of both ships), but the RMN drilled hard to maintain very tight intervals. So ships might have been as little as 900 km apart, though 1,200 seems safer.

Though with their new antimissile doctrines, which involve firing your CMs from behind your wedge (using Keyhole to control them) they may have switched to a less tightly packed formation -- just to leave room for the CM's to make the post-launch turn and for the Keyhole platforms to get the necessary standoff 'height' w/o getting in the way of a neighboring ship.

Still, a laserhead has an effective standoff range of 30,000 - 50,000 km. So at least their classic SD formations were easily packed over 10 times closer than the effective range of a laserhead. (And yet, 'ricochets' never have been, and presumably never will be, a concern )

Thanks for the info. Evenso, I should have realized that since ricochets travel nearly the same speed, the standoff range of deflections, if there were any, essentially should be the same.

I was almost sure text talks about deflection off the sidewalls. Perhaps my memory is tainted by our recent discussions upstream.

cthia wrote:Thanks for the info. Evenso, I should have realized that since ricochets travel nearly the same speed, the standoff range of deflections, if there were any, essentially should be the same.

I was almost sure text talks about deflection off the sidewalls. Perhaps my memory is tainted by our recent discussions upstream.

BTW, rereading it I realize I was a bit sloppy with the start of that post; and left the period after "reflected" doing too much work.

I added some text to the 2nd sentence so it (hopefully) actually now gets across what I meant.

And they're never described as 'reflected'. Rather they're described as "bent", or "defocused".

Joat42 wrote:Synchrotron radiation only occurs when a fast traveling charged particle is subjected to strong magnetic or electric fields - see Larmor's formula. A particle only affected by strong gravitational fields does not produce synchrotron radiation, it only changes it's speed and direction.

Ok, I'll revise my opinion. I thought it was simply from forcing it to change direction, I didn't realize it was due to a specific force causing that direction change. Or is it, though--we have no other force capable of causing such deflections, do we even know?

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Thanks for the info. Evenso, I should have realized that since ricochets travel nearly the same speed, the standoff range of deflections, if there were any, essentially should be the same.

I was almost sure text talks about deflection off the sidewalls. Perhaps my memory is tainted by our recent discussions upstream.

BTW, rereading it I realize I was a bit sloppy with the start of that post; and left the period after "reflected" doing too much work.

I added some text to the 2nd sentence so it (hopefully) actually now gets across what I meant.

And they're never described as 'reflected'. Rather they're described as "bent", or "defocused".

Thanks again. I can see that I equated bent with deflect. This is a good example of how things can become lost in translation.