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GRASERS

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Re: GRASERS
Post by kzt   » Sat Jul 16, 2022 8:13 pm

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Brigade XO wrote:
Somehow I wonder about the potential ability of a ship's weapons systems to calculate a proper aim point against an opponent's ship by graser at "a couple of light hours"....just saying.

I drop out of hyper at the limit. I verify the time based on the ephemeris and those angles tells me where I an. Ephemeris will also tell me where you 200km long space station should be when my exawatt graser pulsees arrives. So I fire until I get bored or until my computers say I should have covered the potential error and hyper out. My bad deed for the day being done I head for the next planet on my naughty list.

Your defense against this is what?
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Re: GRASERS
Post by Brigade XO   » Sun Jul 17, 2022 10:23 am

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kzt wrote:
Brigade XO wrote:
Somehow I wonder about the potential ability of a ship's weapons systems to calculate a proper aim point against an opponent's ship by graser at "a couple of light hours"....just saying.

I drop out of hyper at the limit. I verify the time based on the ephemeris and those angles tells me where I an. Ephemeris will also tell me where you 200km long space station should be when my exawatt graser pulsees arrives. So I fire until I get bored or until my computers say I should have covered the potential error and hyper out. My bad deed for the day being done I head for the next planet on my naughty list.

Your defense against this is what?


None beyond standing sidewall and various other full time screens. Any place that hasn't installed what be think Manticore is building for it's replacement stations is totally out of options and has no little it could do beyond any "normal" orbital defense shielding automatically switch on whenever an arrival from hyper-space is detected (if detected....there are those spider ships) and not switched off till the local Astro Control is sure the arrival is friendly.
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Re: GRASERS
Post by kzt   » Sun Jul 17, 2022 1:45 pm

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Yeah. That might not have been why David decided grasers are short ranged, but grasers being short ranged makes this and some other nastiness impossible.
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Re: GRASERS
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Mon Jul 18, 2022 12:16 am

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kzt wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:
Thus you end up with a narrower, more powerful beam when you increase the frequency.

Technically, a multi-meter gamma ray laser would have so little beam divergence that the beam diameter doubles at light-hours range.

Which isn't how it works in the Honorverse because 'reasons'.


Being able to hold the beam together is a different issue than being able to aim the beam with the requisite accuracy. You have a lot of power flowing into those things, that means thermal issues.
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Re: GRASERS
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Mon Jul 18, 2022 12:20 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:We do know it involves gravitational technology somehow. And since the same grav tech can be used to make nuclear fusion, it should be possible to use it to somehow mess with the nuclei and produce gamma rays. Not that I would expect a controlled nuclear fusion happening on the graser emitters.

The point being that we don't know how they do it in the first place, so we can't dismiss the possibility that it is way into the gamma ray range.


No--I'm saying they're not messing with the nucleus because we would see that showing up in other technologies. A true gamma ray laser is based either on transmutation or antimatter.

Though it's entirely possible that the nomenclature has nothing to do with the scientific principle. Like you're proposing, if they simply achieve a much higher frequency ("towards gamma ray range"), the name "graser" might have simply stuck, like the "lasers" being used where "xrasers" would have probably been more correct but unpronounceable.


Yeah, this makes sense for why they're misnamed.

By the way, any masers?


Masers have long wavelengths, you can't hold the beam together.
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Re: GRASERS
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Mon Jul 18, 2022 12:22 am

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kzt wrote:
Brigade XO wrote:
Somehow I wonder about the potential ability of a ship's weapons systems to calculate a proper aim point against an opponent's ship by graser at "a couple of light hours"....just saying.

I drop out of hyper at the limit. I verify the time based on the ephemeris and those angles tells me where I an. Ephemeris will also tell me where you 200km long space station should be when my exawatt graser pulsees arrives. So I fire until I get bored or until my computers say I should have covered the potential error and hyper out. My bad deed for the day being done I head for the next planet on my naughty list.

Your defense against this is what?


And what's the mount for your graser that can push an exawatt through it while maintaining aiming accuracy? And what's the aiming system for your graser that can actually figure out where that 200km space station is with sufficient accuracy? You're limited by the optical resolution of your aiming system even if the graser focuses better.
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Re: GRASERS
Post by kzt   » Mon Jul 18, 2022 1:46 am

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Loren Pechtel wrote:You're limited by the optical resolution of your aiming system even if the graser focuses better.

Honorverse creates enormously powerful gravitational fields routinely. And really, you don't think you can easily find in a telescope a 200 km sized object at 180 million km range?

We were spotting 160 km asteroids in the 1850s. Without a guide that tells you to the millimeter where the centeroid of the object is, which tends to make it a bit easier to correctly aim your telescope. I also suspect that telescopes have improved a bit in the Honorverse over the 3000 years since Abraham Lincoln was president.
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Re: GRASERS
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:33 pm

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Loren Pechtel wrote:
Though it's entirely possible that the nomenclature has nothing to do with the scientific principle. Like you're proposing, if they simply achieve a much higher frequency ("towards gamma ray range"), the name "graser" might have simply stuck, like the "lasers" being used where "xrasers" would have probably been more correct but unpronounceable.


Yeah, this makes sense for why they're misnamed.


Yeah, I can just picture the conversation.

Sailor: So you've made a graser?
Scientist: No, it's a X-Ray laser with a higher frequency.
Sailor: Gamma Rays are above X-Rays, right?
Scientist: Yes.
Sailor: So it's a graser.
Scientist: No, it's still X-Ray.
Sailor: But it's closer to gamma rays than before, right?
Scientist: Yes.
Sailor: I'll just call it a graser.
Scientist: Why do I bother explaining...
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Re: GRASERS
Post by phillies   » Tue Jul 19, 2022 9:51 am

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kzt wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:You're limited by the optical resolution of your aiming system even if the graser focuses better.

Honorverse creates enormously powerful gravitational fields routinely. And really, you don't think you can easily find in a telescope a 200 km sized object at 180 million km range?

We were spotting 160 km asteroids in the 1850s. Without a guide that tells you to the millimeter where the centeroid of the object is, which tends to make it a bit easier to correctly aim your telescope. I also suspect that telescopes have improved a bit in the Honorverse over the 3000 years since Abraham Lincoln was president.


If you look at a planet a light hour out with a telescope, with current planet based tech, are objects 200 km across blurry because the telescope shakes? Well, no, so an optical telescope will do an adequate job of finding the platform.

defense: Put very low power drives on the platform so its orbit is randomized.
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Re: GRASERS
Post by tlb   » Tue Jul 19, 2022 11:11 am

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Loren Pechtel wrote:No--I'm saying they're not messing with the nucleus because we would see that showing up in other technologies. A true gamma ray laser is based either on transmutation or antimatter.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Though it's entirely possible that the nomenclature has nothing to do with the scientific principle. Like you're proposing, if they simply achieve a much higher frequency ("towards gamma ray range"), the name "graser" might have simply stuck, like the "lasers" being used where "xrasers" would have probably been more correct but unpronounceable.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Yeah, this makes sense for why they're misnamed.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Yeah, I can just picture the conversation.

Sailor: So you've made a graser?
Scientist: No, it's a X-Ray laser with a higher frequency.
Sailor: Gamma Rays are above X-Rays, right?
Scientist: Yes.
Sailor: So it's a graser.
Scientist: No, it's still X-Ray.
Sailor: But it's closer to gamma rays than before, right?
Scientist: Yes.
Sailor: I'll just call it a graser.
Scientist: Why do I bother explaining...

Despite the skepticism; unless we find something that gives the actual wavelength of the Graser, we have no proof that the author does not intend that the output is in the Gamma Ray range. Saying that Gamma Rays are produced by nuclear transitions is not proof when were are dealing with a scientific base that includes fusion; which obviously involves involves changes to the nucleus: which is precisely "transmutation".
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