Attacking Darius:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:If the torpedo is passing at 30,000 km away, it's at 200x the distance from the ship as the edge of the wedge is from the ship. That means it a clear shot for a transversal distance of 200 x 245 = 49,000 km. If that missile is moving at a third the speed of light, it's going to have a clear shot for 0.49 seconds. From this, you need to subtract 0.1 seconds light-speed lag for the reaction of the missile once it has cleared the wedge, seen the ship and reoriented. Minus a bit more because the reaction isn't instantaneous.

The ship has to be detected by lightspeed sensors. Only the wedge detection is FTL. Thus all your lagtimes must be doubled.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Reality: The graser torp is a devastating ambush weapon but little better than an ordinary missile (by giving up the range advantage it has) against a knowledgeable foe. To End in Fire got it very, very wrong.

I wish people would STOP quoting To End in Fire in a thread that is not marked with a spoiler warning. It makes it very hard to argue their point, one way or another, without violating the spoiler rule.

I can only emphasize what I said earlier: it is not a spoiler to say that at Darius there will be many thousands, perhaps many millions, of graser torpedoes with the latest stealth mounted on the quietest spider drives that the Malign can produce. At that point we will see how effectively the Malign can use them. Yes, it is an ambush weapon; but it is an invisible ambush weapon that only advertises its presence by blowing up things (including itself).

tlb wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Reality: The graser torp is a devastating ambush weapon but little better than an ordinary missile (by giving up the range advantage it has) against a knowledgeable foe. To End in Fire got it very, very wrong.

I wish people would STOP quoting To End in Fire in a thread that is not marked with a spoiler warning. It makes it very hard to argue their point, one way or another, without violating the spoiler rule.

I can only emphasize what I said earlier: it is not a spoiler to say that at Darius there will be many thousands, perhaps many millions, of graser torpedoes with the latest stealth mounted on the quietest spider drives that the Malign can produce. At that point we will see how effectively the Malign can use them. Yes, it is an ambush weapon; but it is an invisible ambush weapon that only advertises its presence by blowing up things (including itself).

Saying a book got it wrong doesn't say what happened in the book, how is that a spoiler? All that it actually says is that weapons we already knew the Alignment had are used. Duh!

Loren Pechtel wrote:The real issue is that energy weapons aren't seeking at all, they can't compensate at all. They have to lead their targets by twice the time light takes to cover the distance. Thus long range energy shots will have abysmal hit rates.

There is no reason that the missile cannot passively detect the ship's wedge and use that to calculate where the opening in the wedge should be when the light arrives. So it is not twice the lag time, but about 1.0167 times the light speed lag. Yes, there is uncertainty in this; but there is also multiple independently aimed rods that give a spread of beams with a chance to hit. Or with the graser torpedo there is time that will wiggle the beam.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Saying a book got it wrong doesn't say what happened in the book, how is that a spoiler? All that it actually says is that weapons we already knew the Alignment had are used. Duh!

Because if I try to argue that the book did not get it wrong or that the conditions on Darius will be different; then I am stymied by the prohibition against spoilers. So your statement (and those by other people in this thread) get a free ride until the spoiler time period lapses.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Honorverse drives are very powerful. Anything in the fleet can easily produce 5000 m/s^2. Lets say your attacker is 1 light second away and is trying to aim at your ship. 1 second for the image of where you are to reach the warhead, 1 second for the warhead's beam to come back. In that time the ship can move 1/2 * 5000 m/s (a) * 2^2s (t) = 10,000 m. That's a circle with an area of 79 km^2 while even a waller has a profile of no more than .3 km^2. In other words, a 1 in 250 chance that attacking a point actually hits. A graser torp with a clean attack fares better, by spraying the beam around it can get it on target for about 10 milliseconds.

Well, the Graser torp has FTL sensors. So it knows where the ship was and how it was maneuvering ~1/60th of a second ago. Large honorverse ships are markedly slow in maneuvering. Small one not so bad, but the whole ooda loop doesn't start until you observe. Which is when the wavefront reaches you. Then you have to figure out what is going on, decide what to do and issue an order, then wait for it to get carried out.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The real issue is that energy weapons aren't seeking at all, they can't compensate at all. They have to lead their targets by twice the time light takes to cover the distance. Thus long range energy shots will have abysmal hit rates.

That's true, but that's not what I meant. An energy weapon can only fire if it gets within energy range and can only have a sufficient probability of hit if it gets very close (how close will depend on its ECM).

I meant that it can't even get into range. If a ship dedicates a third of its 600 G acceleration on a perpendicular vector, it will have 50 gravity advantage on what a torpedo is expected to produce, with the torpedo changing its acceleration vector completely. In 13 minutes, that 50 gravity advantage adds a full light-second.

Or, alternatively, we can use exactly what you said, but for the longer range: the torpedo must lead the target to where the target will be, so it will reach firing range. But it has a huge error bar on where the target will be at more than 10 minutes out.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The ship has to be detected by lightspeed sensors. Only the wedge detection is FTL. Thus all your lagtimes must be doubled.

Not really. We're not talking about radar or lidar, meaning it's a round-trip for the signal. Passive sensors can see the photons that were already on the way from the ship and simply got intercepted by the torpedo.

Using an active scan would be more accurate, but it would also tell the ship where exactly the torpedo is, with much better accuracy than the lidar which had to go through the sidewall twice. The ship can swing a laser point-defence on that direction and fire within 50 ms, meaning the lidar return is tailed by a powerful laser by 50 ms.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The ship has to be detected by lightspeed sensors. Only the wedge detection is FTL. Thus all your lagtimes must be doubled.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Not really. We're not talking about radar or lidar, meaning it's a round-trip for the signal. Passive sensors can see the photons that were already on the way from the ship and simply got intercepted by the torpedo.

As both KZT and I have pointed out the passive sensors could be looking at the wedge for target positioning and velocity, therefore using information that arrived 60 times faster than the speed of light. So the target ship may only have 1.067 times the light speed time lapse to maneuver the ship.

You might point out that checking for the wedge only gives an approximate idea of the ships position, but that is true no matter how you try to pinpoint the ship. And it also is why a ship might be killed by a single weapon, but it usually requires multiple weapons converging from multiple directions to cause serious damage.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I meant that it can't even get into range. If a ship dedicates a third of its 600 G acceleration on a perpendicular vector, it will have 50 gravity advantage on what a torpedo is expected to produce, with the torpedo changing its acceleration vector completely. In 13 minutes, that 50 gravity advantage adds a full light-second.

The ship needs to turn to change it's vector. It only goes straight ahead. If you want to introduce deviations you need to roll, pitch or yaw. That moves the wedge, which is obvious to an observer and also takes a certain amount of time to do.

tlb wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The real issue is that energy weapons aren't seeking at all, they can't compensate at all. They have to lead their targets by twice the time light takes to cover the distance. Thus long range energy shots will have abysmal hit rates.

There is no reason that the missile cannot passively detect the ship's wedge and use that to calculate where the opening in the wedge should be when the light arrives. So it is not twice the lag time, but about 1.0167 times the light speed lag. Yes, there is uncertainty in this; but there is also multiple independently aimed rods that give a spread of beams with a chance to hit. Or with the graser torpedo there is time that will wiggle the beam.

It knows where the wedge is FTL. It doesn't know where the ship is within the wedge.