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Re: ?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Mar 14, 2020 9:45 pm

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Remontoire wrote:What about a grazer impeller hybrid of the two types though? Seems to me the spider drive grazer torps used in oysterbay wearn't designed to be practical ship to ship main combat weapons, they were surprise attack stealth weapons.


Spider drive wasn't a technology Simões knew about, so right now the GA has no idea how it works. They've probably scoured the sensor data from both Oyster Bay attacks as well as the Beowulf data, so they may have seen something. We'll find out in the next mainline book, I suppose.

Until then, we have assume that the GA has no spider drive tech.

Grasers, however, are a well-known technology. The Alignment seems to have made theirs last seconds, as opposed to nano- or microseconds, which made for a more powerful weapon, especially in the context of the surprise attack. If they put their minds to it, the GA can probably duplicate that technology, though whether it makes sense for ship-to-ship missiles remains to be seen.

We know RMN tech can make a missile hit a target between the wedges while flying at over 0.8c, but the missile can precalculate the exact firing position and adjust on the fly to evasive manoeuvres. A sustained fire is a different thing, since the missile would need to keep on target. Plus, if the missile is flying at 0.8c, in the 3.2 seconds the MAlign torpedo graser lasted, the missile would have covered 768,000 km. I would think that scaling up from microseconds to milliseconds makes sense, but 3.2 seconds is wasted effort. Literally overkill.

PS: is your handle related to the Alastair Reynolds character in the Revelation Space books?
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Re: ?
Post by cthia   » Sat Mar 14, 2020 10:46 pm

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The intended premise, is that all of the available research on a piece of technology, falls into enemy hands. Perhaps the Honorverse equivalent of a high capacity thumb drive.

"Oh sh— sh—"

"Shit?"

"Shit!"

"Get this to Fo— Fo— Fo—"

"Foraker?"


"Foraker! ... Well step on it... Stat!"

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: ?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Mar 15, 2020 9:09 am

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cthia wrote:The intended premise, is that all of the available research on a piece of technology, falls into enemy hands. Perhaps the Honorverse equivalent of a high capacity thumb drive


For the MAlign, it would definitely be the spider drive. The spider drive is the MAlign's only technological asset that others don't anyway. I don't expect the GA to actually use them, not unless they're given 20 years of R&D to design a hybrid impeller-spider drive ship. Instead, the worst outcome for the MAlign is that the GA can figure out a way to detect the spider drive at a distance.

Of course, there's one piece of information that would be even worse: the location of Darius.
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Re: ?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Mar 15, 2020 9:16 am

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Galactic Sapper wrote:Alliance micro fusion generators would make grazer torpedoes much worse and potentially allow them to be scaled down as well as given much more range. The possibility of grazer torps the size of MDMs should be terrifying.

Though given the way spider drives are said to work you need size (or at least length) to get acceleration. Spider acceleration, as I understand it, is fairly dependent on the the number of ultra-powerful tractor-like spider projectors that can be mounted. So if you shrink it the already low acceleration is likely to decrease.

(Which means that if the crew could survive the acceleration, which they can't, a spider ship should be able to mount enough projectors to out accelerate the fairly sedate graser torp)

Still, microfusion would give the MAlign a nasty new toy to incorporate in their toolbox.

And given their current military mix (where their main warships seem to be ambush predators (striking unseen to survive) is probably more useful to them than FTL fire control (signals are detectable) or the MDM baffle (their missiles don't seem to be their primary weapon)

Going the other way knowledge of the Spider drive's details might let the GA become more effective at detecting it; but I can't seem them deploying any significant number of spider ships of their own. Possibly the biggest short term impact from a technology transfer would be the vastly higher accelerations of the latest Cataphract missile's drives. If they could put those into a evolution of the Mk23 it'd give their existing MDMs are significant performance boost.
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Re: ?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Mar 15, 2020 8:46 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:Going the other way knowledge of the Spider drive's details might let the GA become more effective at detecting it; but I can't seem them deploying any significant number of spider ships of their own. Possibly the biggest short term impact from a technology transfer would be the vastly higher accelerations of the latest Cataphract missile's drives. If they could put those into a evolution of the Mk23 it'd give their existing MDMs are significant performance boost.


RFC will need to do proper hyperbolic motion equations to calculate the distance and flight proper times for missiles even moderately more powerful than the current generation. Right now, we've all been calculating without taking Relativity into account that a Manticoran missile accelerates ~0.09 c/min, reaching 0.84 c after 9 minutes.

Give it a little more (just 19% more to 0.11 c/min) and they'd be superluminal if you don't account for Relativity.
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Re: ?
Post by tlb   » Sun Mar 15, 2020 10:06 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:Possibly the biggest short term impact from a technology transfer would be the vastly higher accelerations of the latest Cataphract missile's drives. If they could put those into a evolution of the Mk23 it'd give their existing MDMs are significant performance boost.

My understanding of the higher acceleration for the Cataphract is that they used a CM engine for the attack stage; so I do not believe there is any need for a technology transfer, because the RMN already has a CM with high acceleration. The piece that the RMN has not done is to stuff two missiles together to create a multi-stage attack vehicle with a significant size penalty. Not having done it, need not imply that they could not do it. So would the RMN ever want to do that?
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Re: ?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Mar 15, 2020 10:45 pm

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tlb wrote:My understanding of the higher acceleration for the Cataphract is that they used a CM engine for the attack stage; so I do not believe there is any need for a technology transfer, because the RMN already has a CM with high acceleration. The piece that the RMN has not done is to stuff two missiles together to create a multi-stage attack vehicle with a significant size penalty. Not having done it, need not imply that they could not do it. So would the RMN ever want to do that?


And not be able to fire them from internal tubes? Not bloody likely ("as big as a frigate, as expensive as a destroyer", as Travis put it). The MDM concept with baffles is a superior technology.

From the beginning (Cataphract-A), I had the impression that the Manties knew the SLN missiles were faster because of the CM body. And yet they were impressed with the Cs that Filareta and Hajdu fired, which means that Technodyne and/or the MAlign made some improvements worthy of inspection.
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Re: ?
Post by Theemile   » Mon Mar 16, 2020 1:29 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
tlb wrote:My understanding of the higher acceleration for the Cataphract is that they used a CM engine for the attack stage; so I do not believe there is any need for a technology transfer, because the RMN already has a CM with high acceleration. The piece that the RMN has not done is to stuff two missiles together to create a multi-stage attack vehicle with a significant size penalty. Not having done it, need not imply that they could not do it. So would the RMN ever want to do that?


And not be able to fire them from internal tubes? Not bloody likely ("as big as a frigate, as expensive as a destroyer", as Travis put it). The MDM concept with baffles is a superior technology.

From the beginning (Cataphract-A), I had the impression that the Manties knew the SLN missiles were faster because of the CM body. And yet they were impressed with the Cs that Filareta and Hajdu fired, which means that Technodyne and/or the MAlign made some improvements worthy of inspection.


Later variants of the Cataphract had significantly higher accelerations for both the attack missile stage and the cm stage, while not updating the normal cm abilities. It is the updated attack missile stage accelerations that were being referenced.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: ?
Post by tlb   » Mon Mar 16, 2020 10:06 am

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tlb wrote:My understanding of the higher acceleration for the Cataphract is that they used a CM engine for the attack stage; so I do not believe there is any need for a technology transfer, because the RMN already has a CM with high acceleration. The piece that the RMN has not done is to stuff two missiles together to create a multi-stage attack vehicle with a significant size penalty. Not having done it, need not imply that they could not do it. So would the RMN ever want to do that?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And not be able to fire them from internal tubes? Not bloody likely ("as big as a frigate, as expensive as a destroyer", as Travis put it). The MDM concept with baffles is a superior technology.

From the beginning (Cataphract-A), I had the impression that the Manties knew the SLN missiles were faster because of the CM body. And yet they were impressed with the Cs that Filareta and Hajdu fired, which means that Technodyne and/or the MAlign made some improvements worthy of inspection.

Theemile wrote:Later variants of the Cataphract had significantly higher accelerations for both the attack missile stage and the cm stage, while not updating the normal cm abilities. It is the updated attack missile stage accelerations that were being referenced.

Yes, but that is a tweak; the newer Cataphracts used a larger, higher powered CM drive.

Isn't the relationship simple? A CM makes a trade off between acceleration and endurance for a fixed amount of power; the larger CM regains some endurance at increased acceleration by having larger plasma capacitors? However there must also be a limit set by engine life at each power rating, otherwise a single drive missile could have the same flight profile as a MDM without a programmed ballistic stage.

If the RMN manage the breakthrough to allow each drive to run at a different power setting, then that would be more impressive. That might also allow the final stage run at a higher acceleration than currently available.
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Re: ?
Post by Brigade XO   » Mon Mar 16, 2020 11:29 am

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Remontoire wrote:What about a grazer impeller hybrid of the two types though? Seems to me the spider drive grazer torps used in oysterbay wearn't designed to be practical ship to ship main combat weapons, they were surprise attack stealth weapons.


The grazer torpedos are stealth weapons. The spider drive lets them close on the target and get really really close before fireing and, unlike the grazers on a warship, they are a continuous fire for a couple of seconds, alowing them to used like a slicing beam weapon. It's not just a burning though like an energy stiletto, it's an energy sword.
If your delivery vehicle is impeller powered, it shows up like a flare on modern sensors and is going to be seen and engaged by whatever countermeasures the target has at their maximum range.
That spider drive makes the the graser torpedos relativly slow which actualy an advantage since it allows for better manuvering and time-on-target once you fire and swing the beam through your undefended target and damage the largest amout of area vs tying to pivot to do the same thing in a highspeed pass.
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