David Weber's Dahak series vs... Anybody

[Ford Prefect]

So a single ISD can tear it up with ease, seeing as how it has a broadside which can put out at least 1,600,000 megatons.

Note that a single cannon barrel of an ISD turret has at least a firepower of 200,000 megatons. And an ISD has 16 of those.

Also, if all they have is that low of shielding/damage absorption, a single DS blast is overkill. Way overkill.

In Mutineer's Moon, Colin asks Dahak why he doesn't just shoot the mutineer base with energy beams, and Dahak replies that he would, except that in the process of defeating the base shield he would have also vaporised the Earth.

[Stark]

Not enough power settings.

[Ford Prefect]

Not enough power settings.

It seems pretty clear that Weber changed his mind about stuff after the first book.

[Black Admiral]

In Mutineer's Moon, Colin asks Dahak why he doesn't just shoot the mutineer base with energy beams, and Dahak replies that he would, except that in the process of defeating the base shield he would have also vaporised the Earth.

You're mixing up two separate conversations - the "vaporise Earth" line comes up when Dahak's explaining to Colin what he's capable of. As for the shield over Anu's enclave;

"But why haven't you blasted them off the planet since? Surely that comes under the heading of taking them into custody or destroying them!"

"It does. Such action, however, would conflict with Alpha Priority core programs. This vessel has the capacity to penetrate the defences Fleet Captain Anu has established to protect his enclave, but only by using weaponry which would destroy seventy percent of the human race upon the planet."
- Empire From The Ashes, pg. 26

[NecronLord]

Yeah. Dahak can vapourise a planet. While this is less than a Death Star, the Utu-class is equipped with a munitions (missile) payload it can expend in less than a few hours at most and seems to account for most of its combat ability. It consequently has a higher capacity to mete out the pain than an Imperial Star Destroyer.

Of course, their FTL also sucks comparatively.

[aaaaa0]

First Death Star scales to 160km, not 120. The second Death Star is over 900km in diameter, but both of them probably have more useful space than Dahak. Look at how much of the Death Star is habitable. Look at how Dahack is 90% stardrive. Who has more space to serve as a warship?

@ (3476-160) km diameter, the internal volume of the Dahak is ~ 1.9×10^10 km^3
@ (900) km diameter, the internal volume of the Death Star II is ~ 3.8×10^8 km^3

One tenth of the Dahak's internal volume would therefore be ~1.9×10^9 km^3 ~= 3.8×10^8 km^3×5.

Therefore, for their internal volumes to be equal, the Dahak would have to be ~98% engine.

[Darth Hoth]

Just because the topic is huge metal spheres of doom, I feel like throwing the latter Skylarks at them. Even if that is absurd overkill. (Skylark is one of the comparatively few franchises that can easily destroy the Culture.)

So . . . Lensman? They are one of the (also comparatively few) franchises to have the sheer numbers required to take on the whole fleet of planetoids in pitched battle, if nothing else.

[keen320]

I need to get around to reading some Culture books.
Anyway, yeah, I forgot about Lensman stuff. The entire purpose of their ship's drive is to accelerate instantly from rest to FTL by canceling out inertia.

I don't see why we can't have the GE attack the Imperium. Although A death Star would be a minimum requirement for that to be successful, as The Imperium's capital system is shielded. And by that I mean the Solar system itself (or at least the inner system, not clear on that) is shielded.

[Darth Hoth]

I need to get around to reading some Culture books.

Or not; they are not everyone's cup of tea. I must say, I did not find much amusement in the book I read (Excession), myself.

If you like "deep" stories about flawed people dealing with transhumanism, multiculturalism, sex change and such, with "clever" writing and humour (occasionally verging into parody), I suppose they are fun. If you like storming space opera, not so much.

Anyway, yeah, I forgot about Lensman stuff. The entire purpose of their ship's drive is to accelerate instantly from rest to FTL by canceling out inertia.

The real nasty stuff that would be most problematic to deal with is the superweapons - negaspheres of lunar anti-mass and such. Although I am not entirely sure how those would interact with Weberverse shields.

I don't see why we can't have the GE attack the Imperium. Although A death Star would be a minimum requirement for that to be successful, as The Imperium's capital system is shielded. And by that I mean the Solar system itself (or at least the inner system, not clear on that) is shielded.

The Imperium's slower FTL drive will grant the Empire the upper hand, I would think. If used competently, they could essentially gather sufficiently strong forces to take on the individual planetoids (or smaller formations of them) and pick them off piecemeal. Mobility and logistics are usually more important in war than is actual tactical ability.

Although if, say, they crammed a large number of planetoids into their fortified main base system and just went for holding their ground, that would be a handful to deal with, to say the least. Barring superweapons, of course.

[eyl]

The Imperium's slower FTL drive will grant the Empire the upper hand, I would think. If used competently, they could essentially gather sufficiently strong forces to take on the individual planetoids (or smaller formations of them) and pick them off piecemeal. Mobility and logistics are usually more important in war than is actual tactical ability.

Although if, say, they crammed a large number of planetoids into their fortified main base system and just went for holding their ground, that would be a handful to deal with, to say the least. Barring superweapons, of course.

Depends. Dahakverse's relatively slow FTL means they can't really counterattack the Empire. Defensively, however, the situation is different - unless SW shields can block multiple hyperspace bands (and there's no reason to think they can, given the differences in hyperspace between the series) grav-warhead hypermissiles become essentialy one-shot-kill weapons against pretty much any SW ship (just pop one inside the hull, which is apparently possible given descriptions in TAI) except possibly the very largest, which can't be intercepted and which can be launched from a planetary surface as well as a space station or ship (even the smaller parasites) - hell, you could probably convert a frieghter to launch the things without too much trouble. Given the added advantage of Dahakverse stealth and engagement ranges, the Empire may well wind up losing whole fleets to single Dahakverse combatants. Since the planetoids could just run if necessary hyperspace may be slower, but their Enchanach drive gives them an essentially realspace tactical FTL capability) the Empire is going to find it very difficult to actually destroy a significant number of planetoids.

[SylasGaunt]

I'm trying to remember, but have we ever actually seen a planetoid's shields fail by having a ton of firepower thrown at them? I know we've seen it with parasite ships, and I recall a couple instances where planetoids lost shields because their shield generators got fragged when enemy hypermissiles managed to find a band they weren't covering and bypassed them, but I can't recall off hand an incident where brute force knocked them down.

[Vendetta]

(Skylark is one of the comparatively few franchises that can easily destroy the Culture.)

Can they? I'm not familiar with the capabilities of Skylark, but the real problem in defeating the Culture isn't the sheer physical capability of their vessels, despite that capability being frighteningly high by most SF metrics, it's finding them in the first place and then getting them to sit still and be shot once you have.

Can they actually pin the Culture down to decisive battle? Even if they have the power to win that battle easily.

[RhoOmicronMu]

It's shields can withstand dozens of hits by missile weapons rated as 10,000 megatons. The ship itself can withstand hundreds of hits even when the shields are failing.

Scout missiles are 20 gigatons. We don't have numbers on warheads on anything bigger than a scout and considering every other system we know about gets better the larger and more trusted/important the ships get. Lasers to molecular disruptors and slower to faster hyperdrives for example. In fact the entire purpose of the smaller crappier ships is for them to suffer casualties to maintain a state of emergency.

So a single ISD can tear it up with ease, seeing as how it has a broadside which can put out at least 1,600,000 megatons.

One old AI controlled planetoid and 12 uncrewed planetoids controlled by the AI set stationary and with their cloaks down and let over a million ships (they deployed a second line to catch them if they managed to get through the first), minus the 109,000 the planetoids killed with hyper weapons, killed open fire on them with hyper missles.

Jiltanith tasted blood, and her knuckles whitened on her dagger as a second star blazed in the Zeta Trianguli System. It grew in fury, hotter and brighter, born of millions of anti-matter warheads

The planetoids then closed range and opened fire with their energy weapons. They kept closing and eventually fired up their black hole drives which blew a giant hole in the enemy fleet and made the star nova. They lost 5 of 13 ships. The book doesn't say if any of the losses where caused by damage done to the planetoids shields rather than damage done directly to the hull with hypermissiles. I'm not anywhere near as hard core as some people are about planetoids having never been taken out by applying firepower to the shields, but it is true that no where in the trilogy is it ever said to happen.

Also, if all they have is that low of shielding/damage absorption, a single DS blast is overkill. Way overkill.

A Death Star blast should kill them.

SW ships are capable of that speed themselves. What counts here is acceleration - how fast can that thing accelerate?

All of their ships have innertialess drives and go from zero to full speed in a small number of seconds. I couldn't find a quote with a few keyword searches, but IIRC it only takes a few seconds to go from zero to .7c.

The Fifth Imperium's gravitonic drive had a maximum sublight velocity of a smidgen over seventy percent of light-speed (missiles could top .8 c before their drives lost phase lock and Bad Things happened) and countered mass and inertia. That conferred essentially unlimited maneuverability and allowed maximum velocity to be attained very quickly—not instantly; a vessel's mass determined the efficiency curves of its drive—without turning a crew into anchovy paste.

6. While Imperiem shields are specifically designed to block hyperspace missiles, Galactic Empire shields likely could not, given that even Imperium shields are not 100% effective.

Empire Strikes Back drop shields to use hypercom in the asteroid field wasn't it?

If an ISDs shields can't stop a black whole weapon that can crack planets open and has a radius of effect much larger than the ISD trying to get that missile past the ISDs shields seems rather pointless when you can much more safely set off the missiles warhead several kilometers from the ISD and remove the ISD from the universe.

Star wars ships have been shown to hit kilometer-sized targets from a distance of an entire solar system.

The effective range of a planetoids hypermissiles against targets that have inertialess drives is measured in light minutes not kilometers.

maximum range for the Fourth Empire's hyper missiles against a target her size was thirty-eight light-minutes.

Israel is a sub-light Battleship, so it should be considerably smaller than an ISD as well as vastly more maneuverable.

[eyl]

Star wars ships have been shown to hit kilometer-sized targets from a distance of an entire solar system.

The effective range of a planetoids hypermissiles against targets that have inertialess drives is measured in light minutes not kilometers.

maximum range for the Fourth Empire's hyper missiles against a target her size was thirty-eight light-minutes.

Israel is a sub-light Battleship, so it should be considerably smaller than an ISD as well as vastly more maneuverable.

The km in Thanas' post is the target size, not the range. That said, the only such incident I'm aware of is that Vong worldship that was struck by an "interstellar" beam (I forget the book, possibly Rebel Dream?) - but that was an attack against a stationary target with probably considerable set-up time.

[keen320]

The effective range of a planetoids hypermissiles against targets that have inertialess drives is measured in light minutes not kilometers.

maximum range for the Fourth Empire's hyper missiles against a target her size was thirty-eight light-minutes.

Israel is a sub-light Battleship, so it should be considerably smaller than an ISD as well as vastly more maneuverable.

Whoa. I forgot about that bit. That comes out to... 683 Billion kilometers! .... .... .... Okay, even I'm surprised by that kind of range.

[Darth Hoth]

Depends. Dahakverse's relatively slow FTL means they can't really counterattack the Empire. Defensively, however, the situation is different - unless SW shields can block multiple hyperspace bands (and there's no reason to think they can, given the differences in hyperspace between the series) grav-warhead hypermissiles become essentialy one-shot-kill weapons against pretty much any SW ship (just pop one inside the hull, which is apparently possible given descriptions in TAI) except possibly the very largest, which can't be intercepted and which can be launched from a planetary surface as well as a space station or ship (even the smaller parasites) - hell, you could probably convert a frieghter to launch the things without too much trouble. Given the added advantage of Dahakverse stealth and engagement ranges, the Empire may well wind up losing whole fleets to single Dahakverse combatants. Since the planetoids could just run if necessary hyperspace may be slower, but their Enchanach drive gives them an essentially realspace tactical FTL capability) the Empire is going to find it very difficult to actually destroy a significant number of planetoids.

Would the planetoids not have territory to defend, though? That puts limits on how far they can flee. Unless they decide to just abandon their planets and flee, of course. Which is a possibility, of course; if I recall correctly, each planetoid was also a colony ship.

How do the tracking mechanisms for the hyper-missiles work, again? They travel in hyper-space, but they should still require Einstein-space input in order to hit moving targets. Star wars has the technology to jam electromagnetic and gravitic sensors, as well as subspace and other technobabble ones.

Can they? I'm not familiar with the capabilities of Skylark, but the real problem in defeating the Culture isn't the sheer physical capability of their vessels, despite that capability being frighteningly high by most SF metrics, it's finding them in the first place and then getting them to sit still and be shot once you have.

Can they actually pin the Culture down to decisive battle? Even if they have the power to win that battle easily.

As of the last book, the Skylarks were run by psychics with effective reaction times in the microseconds (their computers were faster by multiple orders of magnitude and could be set to fire weapons/raise shields), and their weapons included teleporters much like the Culture's Displacers in effect . . . except that their ranges were in the hundreds of thousands/millions of light-years. (Capable of transporting stellar masses over inter-galactic distances.) They should be able to go toe-to-toe with most of them in pitched battle.

Of course, if this fails, they can resort to their strategic option: Destroying all the Culture galaxy by teleporting a stellar mass into each of its stars. They used this against a galactic empire that was too strong for them to take down conventionally.

Although it is plausible that some Culture ship or another that happened to be in hyper space right then might escape, but they would be few, alone and unable to retaliate.

[Luzifer's right hand]

How do the tracking mechanisms for the hyper-missiles work, again? They travel in hyper-space, but they should still require Einstein-space input in order to hit moving targets. Star wars has the technology to jam electromagnetic and gravitic sensors, as well as subspace and other technobabble ones.

Dahakverse hyper missiles are fire and forget weapons.

Hyper missiles weren't seeking weapons; they went straight to their pre-programmed coordinates, and the distance between shield and hull effectively made Earth's ships bigger targets. All too often, a hyper missile close enough to penetrate a human warship's shield detonated outside an Achuultani ship's shields—which, coupled with the Achuultani's greater ability to saturate the hyper bands, left Hawter's ships at a grievous disadvantage.

They use electronic, gravitonic and fold space sensors/scanners IIRC. They also need to predict the course of the targets and adjust the fire accordingly at when they fight across light minutes(the missiles do not travel instantaneous).

[keen320]

How do the tracking mechanisms for the hyper-missiles work, again? They travel in hyper-space, but they should still require Einstein-space input in order to hit moving targets. Star wars has the technology to jam electromagnetic and gravitic sensors, as well as subspace and other technobabble ones.

The biggest weakness of hypermissiles is that they don't have on board tracking technology, because they wouldn't be able to see real-space objects anyway. They have to be pre-programmed by the ship that's firing them. Since they arrive the next best thing to instantly, that's not a problem with big or slow targets, but it is a problem when firing against nimble targets that may have moved too much in the microseconds it takes the missile to arrive. Presumably the missiles can lead their targets, but evasive maneuvers can pose a problem. But Imperial capital ships don't seem to go in for evasive maneuvers, so the real issue is whether the ship can lock on. Still, the final battles of the second Dahak book involve the planetoids accurately hitting their targets despite millions of antimatter detonations and gravitonic weapons going off amongst their targets and millions of antimatter warheads detonating among the planetoids, which is probably at least as much interference as star wars ships can cause by jamming, if not more. Something the size of the moon has a lot of sensors to work with.

Sorry to repeat some of what Luzifer said.

[fgalkin]

Uh...mate? Much of the Culture's population lives on really big spaceships that are just randomly flying about the galaxy. Meaning, that quite a bit of them would be in hyperspace at the time.

As strange as it may sound, the Culture may well survive the death of it's galaxy, although I pity anyone on an Orbital. Of course, such an action is bound to piss off quite a few Sublimed.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[RhoOmicronMu]

The km in Thanas' post is the target size, not the range. That said, the only such incident I'm aware of is that Vong worldship that was struck by an "interstellar" beam (I forget the book, possibly Rebel Dream?) - but that was an attack against a stationary target with probably considerable set-up time.

Sorry about that, I was also responding to what Thanas was too and the quotes got a bit messed up.

Also, Imperium Hyper missiles can hit a fighter on a straight course in Earth's atmosphere from Dahak's orbit as the moon, a distance of 363,300 km.

Would the planetoids not have territory to defend, though? That puts limits on how far they can flee.

If the 5,000 suns figure can be believed the 4th Empire has about 200 planetoids and tens of thousands of sub-light warships per system. I think they can spare some of that for offensive operations. Especially considering how heavy their purpose built defenses can get.

[XaLEv]

Although it is plausible that some Culture ship or another that happened to be in hyper space right then might escape, but they would be few, alone and unable to retaliate.

The majority of them would survive, in hyperspace at the time or not. The effects of the attack are limited by c, while the ship's view of the star through hyperspace is not. They'll see the change in the star while its effects are still minutes or hours away from affecting them, and can enter hyperspace or warp away. Orbitals may well be able to do the same thing, since they have engines too, and interstellar sites like Pittance Rock would be entirely unaffected.

Even if the above wasn't true, the ranks of ships that happen to be in hyperspace at the time would include a large percentage of the General Systems Vehicles, which spend most of their time traveling. As the author describes them: "The idea behind them is that they represent the Culture, fully. All that the Culture knows, each GSV knows; anything that can be done anywhere in the Culture can be done within or by any GSV. In terms of both information and technology, they represent a last resort, and act like holographic fragments of the Culture itself, the whole contained within each part." You said above that you've read Excession, so you should know the sort of things a GSV can do.

Additionally, as this is a general attack on the galaxy, not just on the Culture itself, you've attacked several other Culture level civilizations, numerous powers which share the Culture's military advantages over other franchises in miniature, and antagonized who knows how many Sublimed entities which retain an interest in the material universe. Good job.

[Vendetta]

Although it is plausible that some Culture ship or another that happened to be in hyper space right then might escape, but they would be few, alone and unable to retaliate.

As noted, actually rather a lot of the Culture's ships would survive, and this is the perspective shift you need to debate who can actually beat the Culture. The Culture is it's ships. Orbitals, Rocks, and the odd bunch of weirdoes on a Planet are basically the ones that have retired to a quiet place in the countryside. The ships, especially the GSVs, house the majority of the Culture's population, industry, and military activity. The overwhelming tendency in SF is to treat future civilizations as modern ones but In Space, with territory based around fixed assets like planets, but the Culture isn't like that, it's completely fluid.

That's why even most equiv-tech races from other 'verses can't beat them, it's like punching the sea.

[Thanas]

So wait a minute, what is their firepower really? Is it megatons per missile as claimed earlier or did Weber wank them up between books?

[Connor MacLeod]

So wait a minute, what is their firepower really? Is it megatons per missile as claimed earlier or did Weber wank them up between books?

Honestly? It could be either. You're talking about an author who can create a universe that uses projectiles that could double as mutli-GT/TT kinetic kill projectiles in order to deliver multi-megaton warheads.

The Dahakverse has some advantages over alot of other universes like SW, but alot of that stems precisely from technobabble. Their gravitic warheads are technobabble (as are most of their energy weapons) as are their propulsion systems (I'm rpetty sure it was described as using some bizarre mass lightening shit) but at the same time they have and are threatened by gigaton range antimatter missiles (The Achuultani use them, and I remember Armageddon Inheritance noting that millions of Achuultani missiles threatened the Planetoid fleet used against them.) And while they have hypermissiles they still use sublight missiles as well (as well as fighters).

They do alot of things much other sci fi can't do (or could do if they applied it intelilgently) but they also tend to use cheats to make it work more often than not (whereas other things like the Death Star seem more brute force) hence the discrepancy. Their FTL speed sucks ass, for example, and like some other universes (like Honorverse and 40K) they need to emerge from their FTL (both kinds) some distance from planets. Core taps also seem to operate merely in the TT or so range (judging by Armageddon inheritance and the concerns if the one they used to power the earth shield lost control) so they aren't neccesarily on the uber-high end for powerplants either.

On the other hand they had that neat transmat system between worlds, which is something few sci fi (including SW) can match, which ofssets their sucky FTL.

They have the Potential for planetary elimination but again using technobabble gravitonic warheads in unknown numbers and quantity (nevermind the manner of destruction.) The only notable example of gravitonic warhead destruction I can recall is that 16 4th Empire gravitonic warheads (at least the most powerful ones) managed to obliterate the moon of Iapetus in Armageddon Inheritance. That might allow something on the order of Petatons per torpedo or therabouts I believe, if it were translated into brute firepower.

The 4th Empire/Imperium is impressive (they built something like 980,000 battle planetoids over however long they lasted and only had thousands/tens of thousands of worlds) but anything at Culture level (or approaching it) is going to kick their ass with small effort.

[Dahak]

The Dahakverse has some advantages over alot of other universes like SW, but alot of that stems precisely from technobabble.

Not to defend either side, but isn't basically all in question "technobabble", be it SW, ST or Dahakverse? Hypermatter reactors" vs. core taps, turbolasers vs. warp beams,...?