Main Battery as PD?

[Simon_Jester]

Disturbingly, that armor material (which is taking about a megawatt per square meter of charged particle flux) is absorbing about 90% of the beam energy... or about 900 kW per square meter of shielding material -> 300 to 400 kJ dumped into each cubic meter per second. That could get damaging, if it's kept up long enough.

Hmm........ Would similar results, albeit requiring more dwell time/peak power/closer range, be attainable with a beam of, say, between 200 and 500 gigawatts?

Sure- play a 200 GW laser over a given spot size and you do the math on how intense the radiation hitting the surface is. But there are differences.

-The laser only affects the surface of the material, it doesn't penetrate to heat the entire volume of the armor (like a microwave oven does to food), nor does it penetrate deep into the hull at lower intensities to irradiate things.
-The vapor plume thrown up by the beam chewing up the surface is therefore a greater inconvenience.
-The laser cannot transmute atoms by radioactivating them. Whereas even if the particle beam doesn't melt the armor, the radiation flux is such that it will be intensely radioactive and somewhat transmuted, which is likely to weaken its structural and other properties.

[ComradeClaus]

I would suspect that missiles would be much lighter armoured than even the smallest ship. This might make it reasonable to increase the divergance on the beam. This would result in a larger area covered by less energy. Harmless to ships but enough to detonate a missle even if you don't have the accuracy to pinpoint a beam on it.

You could possibly combine this with a lower powered continous operation mode and just wave the beam over the incomming missiles.

^This, it's like the difference of a 2 gauge firing a single slug, or a cloud of birdshot.

My idea being that the optics at the tip of a capital ship laser, w/ a 50-100m long x .5-m Diameter "barrel" (lasing medium) either focusing the beam to a point a few cm across at c/sec range to 100m diameter at 1 km range, quite the nasty surprise to a swarm of "Xwings" trying to pull a "Death Star I Trench Run" or "DS II Core Strike" especially since the 400m frigate armed w/ this has around 20 of them, plus 100 secondary guns (like the modern 5 inch gun on Aegis Destroyers & about 100 laser & gun type CIWS plus 50 snub fighters & a couple thousand missiles. ranging from AGM-65 Maverick (qty: 2500) size to UGM-73 Poseidon (qty: 200) to LGM-30 minuteman (qty: 50) size (equiped w/ hyperdrive & shields to surprise planets) finally, it has around a dozen "Arena" type active defense system (basically a cross between the chaff rockets on modern warships+active jammer decoys+anti-missile system on Russian & Israeli tanks. I spent about a year making sure it could physically HOLD all this firepower. Yes... yes, it can. Though the fighters can't launch many sorties (They're assigned a mere couple dozen missiles, bombs, gunpods sensor/jammer pods, rocket pods.)

(Naturally, a whole Federation fleet would be fodder for one.)

the larger battleships are essentialy Star Destroyers w/ planet bombardment weapons, CIWS & ground assault vehicles & troops (like USMC LHD Wasp+Arsenal Ship+CVN Nimitz) though with minimal ship-to-ship capability. They basically need the Frigates to clear the near space of opposing ships. But are capable of the terrifying Base Delta Zero.

bigger ships are essentially Death Star+world devastator analogues, basically shatter worlds for war materiel (like Qwi Xux's excuse for designing the super laser) & build fleets of the smaller ships. they can even convert the hydrogen of gas giants into heavier elements for use. Transmuted into iron ingots through nuclear fusion. Asteroids are farmed for super-dense iridium (ideal for bombing planets!)

Impressive? George Lucas & the other SW authors can learn a thing or 2 about ship design.