what is an Eradani Edict what is not?

runsforcelery wrote:Plasma cannon are "sized" to do certain things, and they didn't happen to have a "Destroy Tower, Mark One" version on hand. They had infantry-sized weapons, the "Stinger-equivalent" SAMs, and a few different sizes of vehicle mounted weapons, but even the heaviest of those weapons were the Honorverse equivalent of 155mm howitzers, not 16" guns, and that tower was a very hard target. You're not going to bring down the Sears Tower in Chicago with the main guns of Abrams tanks in a hurry, and this was a vastly larger and much broader target, relatively speaking (and one which might as well have been built as a military bunker the size of a small mountain from the outset). In the Honoverse, if you need a bigger nutcracker than your equivalent of a 155 mm howitzer, then you go out and get a KEW, which is the equivalent of anything from a 16" gun to a 40,000-lb bomb to a tactical nuke to a strategic nuke, and happens to be cheap and so procurable in largish numbers. Why invest in a lot of other, much more expensive hardware to do the same job from the bottom of the gravity well? Sure, in this case that would have turned out to be a good thing to have, but under normal circumstances, you're not going to need it, and Drescher got caught out by the Gods of the Procurement Branch.

Earth's atmosphere is about 400 kilometers deep, with about 80% of it concentrated within --- what? 16 km or so of the planetary surface? A wedge moving through atmosphere has nasty effects on the atmosphere; the atmosphere also has nasty effects on the object doing the moving. The wedges used on SAMs are very small and very short-lived. I don't know where you got your "15 meter wide" from. The strike on Honor's pinnace in FIE destroyed only about 10 meters of its nose, IIRC, which should certainly suggest to you that the wedge is smaller than 15 meters. An impeller-wedge SAM is a short ranged anti-air missile, especially in atmosphere, with about a launch range of about 4-5 km, about the same as a present day Stinger MANPAD. Even the heavier, tripod-version Usher used in SVW has a maximum ceiling of no more than about 7 km, which is one heck of a lot less than the 16 km of fairly dense atmosphere a wedge would have to penetrate for an orbit-to-surface KEW strike.

BobG wrote:Runsforcelery wrote:

Earth's atmosphere is about 400 kilometers deep, with about 80% of it concentrated within --- what? 16 km or so of the planetary surface? A wedge moving through atmosphere has nasty effects on the atmosphere; the atmosphere also has nasty effects on the object doing the moving. The wedges used on SAMs are very small and very short-lived. I don't know where you got your "15 meter wide" from. The strike on Honor's pinnace in FIE destroyed only about 10 meters of its nose, IIRC, which should certainly suggest to you that the wedge is smaller than 15 meters. An impeller-wedge SAM is a short ranged anti-air missile, especially in atmosphere, with about a launch range of about 4-5 km, about the same as a present day Stinger MANPAD. Even the heavier, tripod-version Usher used in SVW has a maximum ceiling of no more than about 7 km, which is one heck of a lot less than the 16 km of fairly dense atmosphere a wedge would have to penetrate for an orbit-to-surface KEW strike.

One thing I've been curious about - the use of PDCs against planetary targets. Obviously they work well at relatively close range, a.k.a. the Golden Butterfly in The Shadow of Saganomi. But I don't ever recall their use against planetary targets. For example, could the PDCs have been used to take out the Gendarmerie tribarrels in the stadium? I'm certainly not suggesting anything was wrong with using shuttle-based missiles, but would it have worked? What are the downsides of using PDCs through the atmosphere? I doubt that x-ray lasers are significantly bent or attenuated by 400 km of atmosphere.

Or is it just that KEWs are so much the weapon of choice that PDCs require out-of-the-box thinking? What would be used to take out a heavy battle tank, but not the school 100 meters away? Obviously a laser-guided missile from an assault shuttle would work, or a crowbar-sized KEW, but what if you need it now?

-- Bob G

kzt wrote:The wedge is just the carrier, the actual damage would be done by the energy of the object being carried by the wedge. In this particular case, if the wedge was running, which David says it is not, the wedge would serve to disrupt the structural integrity of the object you are hitting. Essentially the spinning wedge rips a deep circular gash in the object around the point that the KEW will hit. When the KEW actually hits the surface it is more or less instantly destroyed and the wedge fails then.

In this case, if there was a working wedge, the wedge would likely cut a multimeter wide hole in the armored roof of the building, then the KEW hits the now unsupported very heavy rigid mass and converts some to plasma and accelerates the rest into the building at a rather high speed, along with the plasma shock front. A bad day is had by all.

The wedge doesn't protect the KEW from hitting something, because the front of the wedge is open. So you can, in theory, shoot down a wedge propelled AT or AA missile. Something like the defensive system known as trophy would kill the wedge, then you have to just deal with the hypersonic debris. Not easy, but easier.

Vince wrote:

kzt wrote:The wedge is just the carrier, the actual damage would be done by the energy of the object being carried by the wedge. In this particular case, if the wedge was running, which David says it is not, the wedge would serve to disrupt the structural integrity of the object you are hitting. Essentially the spinning wedge rips a deep circular gash in the object around the point that the KEW will hit. When the KEW actually hits the surface it is more or less instantly destroyed and the wedge fails then.

In this case, if there was a working wedge, the wedge would likely cut a multimeter wide hole in the armored roof of the building, then the KEW hits the now unsupported very heavy rigid mass and converts some to plasma and accelerates the rest into the building at a rather high speed, along with the plasma shock front. A bad day is had by all.

The wedge doesn't protect the KEW from hitting something, because the front of the wedge is open. So you can, in theory, shoot down a wedge propelled AT or AA missile. Something like the defensive system known as trophy would kill the wedge, then you have to just deal with the hypersonic debris. Not easy, but easier.

Why would the wedge be spinning? The only way to spin a wedge is to spin the platform (missile, drone, ship) that is generating it. I would think that spinning the KEW while under acceleration by the wedge would create potential trajectory errors (guidance issues). Also how many RPM's would a KEW have to spin to cut a circular hole with its wedge (assuming that the wedge stayed on until the KEW impacted something that would prevent the wedge from staying up) considering how fast the KEW would be going when it impacted the target? (Assume a wedge size as given by RFC up-thread, and one fourth of a revolution is required to cut a semi-circular hole.)

Castenea wrote:

Vince wrote:Why would the wedge be spinning? The only way to spin a wedge is to spin the platform (missile, drone, ship) that is generating it. I would think that spinning the KEW while under acceleration by the wedge would create potential trajectory errors (guidance issues). Also how many RPM's would a KEW have to spin to cut a circular hole with its wedge (assuming that the wedge stayed on until the KEW impacted something that would prevent the wedge from staying up) considering how fast the KEW would be going when it impacted the target? (Assume a wedge size as given by RFC up-thread, and one fourth of a revolution is required to cut a semi-circular hole.)

I will posit three reasons:

1) that is just the way it is. Everyone just assumes the projectile needs to spin.

2) Small wedges used on missiles have limitations on how they can change direction (possibly only up or down, not side to side) thus spinning allows course changes in 360 degrees.

3) Spinning gives a chance that a projectile will be protected from deflection shots from allies of the target.

kzt wrote:Honorverse missiles spin. It's just how they do it. Remember the gunnery exercise in one of the short stories? I'd assume it's to allow vector changes. Without spin is still going to be pretty darn destructive to the surface.