Missiles

[The Yosemite Bear]

propellent and explosive projectiles in science fiction. as vonbraun would say, the sky's the limit.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

What about a missile propelled by explosives? As I recall it, the engine for the http://www.designation-systems.net/dusr ... print.html Sprint point- defence ABM was pretty damn' exotic, using a detonating rather than deflagrating propellant- nitroglycerine, I think. Hundred plus 'g' acceleration for all of one and two- tenths seconds.

http://www.designation-systems.net/dusr ... hibex.html was actually faster- and in an alternate universe where the space race went on long enough to get us somewhere, this is exactly the sort of thing- these or a direct descendant, possibly with Casaba-Howitzer warheads- that the warships of the competing powers would be pointing at each other to enforce their claims to the Jovian and Saturnian satellite systems.


Apart from those, the sequentially self- teleporting missiles of 2300AD, which used an electron-tunnelling based drive to cover short interstellar distances at several thousand times the speed of light, jettisoning clusters of detonation beam xaser warheads to spear stutter-warping starships. They were fun to play with.

[The Yosemite Bear]

exactly, but please no macross spam.

i figured since we had threads on tanks, flame throwers, etc. in sci fi, we could have one on missiles.

also fond of coil launched plasma driven missiles in a sci-fi setting, and mini ftl drives are nice too.

[Andras]

E.E. Smith's Subspace Explorer's featured 'leybyrdite' enhanced missiles that had 175,000g accel for 15 seconds. Their Chaytor engines 'tapped the total energy of the universe'.

[The Dark]

Apart from those, the sequentially self- teleporting missiles of 2300AD, which used an electron-tunnelling based drive to cover short interstellar distances at several thousand times the speed of light, jettisoning clusters of detonation beam xaser warheads to spear stutter-warping starships. They were fun to play with.

1,206.786 times the speed of light for the Hyde, 1,044.98025 for the Ritage (using 365.25 days as a year ). The Hyde had the single-shot x-ray laser, while the Ritage carried a particle beam gun.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I was sure there was a missile type that actually carried a submunition pack? Found it- Ships of the French Arm, the DA-2290, submunition dispenser warhead. Five hours endurance at warp efficiency 2.73 (997 c). The system did suffer a bit from believing that stealth in space was possible, though.

Another personal favourite is the AKV's from Transhuman Space; chemical powered, low acceleration and delta-V, long range independent AI fighters- the sophisticated American SIM-7 Predator only does about .33 'g' with a total of 15kps, the ships they launch from- Angel and Archangel class space dominance vehicles- are fusion and antimatter torch driven, 0.07 to 0.09 'g', total delta-vs 80 to 95 kps for the fusion powered Angel class, the antimatter pion drive DFS-3C Archangels pull 135;

the infomorph fighters are fully intelligent and armed with a large bore coilgun they use to toss kinetic, explosive, utility or teller-mine (detonation beam laser) warheads; they are also expected to play kamikaze if necessary, downloading an updated copy of themselves to the carrier and flying into the enemy ship. In the context of the game, they were actually playable characters.

The leybyrdite missiles, that's what, 25,777.5 kps total delta-v? What were they using for warhead?

[Andras]

The leybyrdite missiles, that's what, 25,777.5 kps total delta-v? What were they using for warhead?

175,000g*9.8m/s=1,715,000m/s

V=AT^2=1.715e6*225=385.875e6m/s=1.286c

The missiles 'dead-shorted' their Universe Energy motors, and also acted as KKVs. The books describes the impact as so violent, the fireball was 10 miles in diameter by the time it cooled enough to be seen.

I think Doc messed up the math a little, but that universe never got real specific on FTL methods.

The short story the book( books actually, there is a sequel) is based on was published in Astounding Science Fact and Fiction, July 1960, and is available on Gutenberg Here

It mentions the Chaytors here:

IV.

The Procyon bored on through space, at one unchanging gravity of acceleration. It may not seem, at first glance, that one gravity would result in any very high velocity; but when it is maintained steadily for days and weeks and months, it builds up to a very respectable speed. Nor was there any question of power, for the Procyon's atomics did not drive the ship, but merely energized the "Chaytors"—the Chaytor Effect engines that tapped the energy of the expanding universe itself.

Thus, in less than six months, the Procyon had attained a velocity almost half that of light. At the estimated mid-point of the flight the spaceship, still at one gravity of drive, was turned end-for-end; so that for the ensuing five-and-a-fraction months she would be slowing down.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

"messed up" is right; c is 300,000 (well, 299, 792.458) kilometres per second-3E8 m/s. s=ut+ 1/2 at2 is for distance covered while under acceleration, surely?

I had simply figured it as increasing velocity by (175,000 x 9.82) 1,718,500 m/s every second, fifteen seconds later, velocity would have changed by 25,777,500 m/s. About eight point six percent of lightspeed.


And then, there are of course the pair of 'courtesy' fully armed nuclear missiles fired from a nearly dead planet inhabited only be a fjord- obsessed, heebiephone- playing planetary engineer and a pair of mice*.

Which makes me wonder- there was an early Arthur C. Clarke short story, one of the very few 'war' stories he ever wrote and basically a parody of the entire bug-eyed monster genre and setup for a truly awful pun, but which did feature as a thowaway line "a salvo of probability inverters".

Which raises the possibility of a missile warhead indended to do to the target, deliberately (as far as the term applies), what happened over Magrathea? Now that could be entertaining.


*= yes, we all know what they really were. "A thoroughly nasty lot who ought to be smashed and done in, and would be too, if only someone could find a way of firing missiles at right angles to reality." See; probability inverter. Two birds, one warhead.

[Andras]

Ok, I got my formulas confused, my mistake.

ECR is right on deltaV

[The Dark]

I was sure there was a missile type that actually carried a submunition pack? Found it- Ships of the French Arm, the DA-2290, submunition dispenser warhead. Five hours endurance at warp efficiency 2.73 (997 c). The system did suffer a bit from believing that stealth in space was possible, though.

Ah, cool. I just have the boxed set, the Equipment Guide, and the Ground Vehicles Guide. Picked them up for $10 at a local con; a couple I know was moving, and decided to sell a bunch of old RPG stuff rather than move it all.



Back on-topic, Space: 1889 had the Smutts Patent Aerial Torpedo - a projectile held aloft by liftwood, powered by a flywheel driving a propeller, packed with dynamite, and trailing a grapnel to snag airships. Against an unarmored or lightly armored vessel, it was as damaging as a hit from a 12" gun, as well as causing the target to lose control and go into a dive.

[The Yosemite Bear]

how about a GP hulled, stasis shieled, inertialess drive equiped missile using known universe tech?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Did Niven ever seriously suggest such a thing? GP hulls only came in four standard sizes, and we know about two of them in detail from the adventures of Bey Schaeffer; size two (from "There is a Tide") is a 20ft diameter, 300ft long cylinder, size four is a 1000ft sphere. Reasonable to suppose that size one is smaller than size two, possibly the equivalent of the singleship- courier's and prospector's boat- and size three is somewhere between two and four.

Now, I do remember in one of his essays Niven being quite rude about 'Doc' Smith's ideas of how an inertialess drive worked, but I'm damned if I recall how he figured out that it worked instead.
The http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1324 Mach- Lorenz Thruster represents an interesting take on the problem- but I have no clue what the actual hardware to take advantage of the theory would look and behave like, and I'm reasonably sure that wasn't Niven's idea anyway.

A stasis shielded missile (with an 'off' switch on an internal timer presumably- time does not cease within the field, it passes extremely slowly; an atomic clock could still do this), and an antimatter payload, could be an excellent way to deliver a camouflet charge- powerdive into the planetary crust, as I understand it a stasis shield behaves like a completely inelastic object, it will be stopped after burying itself- and then the charge releases.

Explosion, void blasted out of the rock, if done at the right altitude the upper surface of the void caves in and everything on top crumbles into an extremely dirty crater. Compared to a normal airburst, it would result in a smaller area of devastation, but all A-ring, and with those killed dying rather nasty deaths. To kill an underground target, ideal.

In ship to ship, it would be effectively unstoppable by point defence, but also completely unsteerable until it drops the stasis field to see what's going on and use thrust. Good for a bombardment round against surface facilities and orbital fortresses, not so much against moving targets.

Could it be scooped up and diverted or returned to sender, by bussard ram, tractor, or conventional netting? If it could, I think we might have found the real (for a given value, anyway...) equivalent of Pong.

[SeaTrooper]

Could it be scooped up and diverted or returned to sender, by bussard ram, tractor, or conventional netting? If it could, I think we might have found the real (for a given value, anyway...) equivalent of Pong.

Ha! There's an idea I'd like to see. Mighty warships bouncing missiles back and forth until they go off Brings a whole new level to the idea of PD.

BTW, shouldn't you be off writing the next chapters in Hull 721?

Back to the thread... Honorverse was the first series where I've seen serious consideration to penetration-aides. Rather than handwavum mentions of ECM, and then only in passing, Weber regularly wrote of massed jamming-missiles in among their salvoes. I could see that getting very expensive, very quickly, but the point was apparently to ensure that enough of your ship-killer missiles getting through to get the job done.

[Nyrath]

Which makes me wonder- there was an early Arthur C. Clarke short story, one of the very few 'war' stories he ever wrote and basically a parody of the entire bug-eyed monster genre and setup for a truly awful pun, but which did feature as a thowaway line "a salvo of probability inverters".

Which raises the possibility of a missile warhead indended to do to the target, deliberately (as far as the term applies), what happened over Magrathea? Now that could be entertaining.

Story is "Neutron Tide" by Arthur C. Clarke.

Later David Brin wrote in his novel STARTIDE RISING:

...The displays that rimmed Krat's settee showed many dangers. One panel was an overlay of curling lines, indicating zones of anomalous probability. Others pointed out where the slough from psychic weapons was still dangerous...

...They will first understand when this moon begins to vibrate on the fifteenth probability band sending out waves of uncertainty that will tear their battle fleets apart!...

...It lightly skirted over untriggered psi-traps and fields of unresolved probability...

...Brookida had told him that there was even one small area where the metal had been changed from one alloy to another. The structural integrity of the ship was intact, but it meant that someone had come awfully close to them with a probability distorter. It was disturbing to think that that piece of Streaker had been swapped with another similar but slightly different ship, containing similar but slightly different fugitives, in some hypothetical parallel universe....

[Andras]

Reminds me of an old scifi novel called the Chaos Weapon by Colin Kapp. A device that can alter the probability of an event, either making it more likely to occur, or delaying it and making it more devastating. An elite law enforcement officer of the Federation has to track down what is causing the brightest scientific minds of the Federation to die in unrelated, but also unlikely, accidents.

[Nyrath]

Now, I do remember in one of his essays Niven being quite rude about 'Doc' Smith's ideas of how an inertialess drive worked, but I'm damned if I recall how he figured out that it worked instead.

It was not an essay. It was the story "ARM", collected in THE LONG ARM OF GIL HAMILTON
The inertialess drive creates a field within which time is compressed (for every seven seconds outside of the field, one hour elapses inside the field).

An interstellar drive?
He was startled. He debated with himself; then: "Yes. It was supposed to be secret."
We admitted having seen the machine in action. How did a time-compression field serve as an interstellar drive?
"That's not exactly what it is," Peterfi said. Again he debated with himself. Then: "There have always been a few optimists around who thought that just because mass and inertia have always been associated in human experience, it need not be a universal law. What Ray and I have done is to create a condition of low inertia. You see -- "
"An inertialess drive!"
Peterfi nodded vigorously at me. "Essentially, yes. Is the machine intact? If not..."

She shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. There aren't any experts on inertialess fields."
"There was one. He's dead," I reminded her.
"All I know is what I learned watching the Gray Lensman show in the holo wall when I was a kid." She smiled suddenly. "That old space opera..."
Valpredo laughed. "You too? I used to watch that show in study hall on a little pocket phone. One day the principal caught me at it."
"Sure. And then we outgrew it. Too bad. Those inertialess ships I'm sure an inertialess ship wouldn't behave like those did. You couldn't possibly get rid of the time-compression effect."

"It's a low-inertia field," said Bera. "Things inside lose most of their inertia...not their mass, just the resistance to movement. Ratio of about five hundred to one. The interface is sharp as a razor. We think there are quantum levels involved."
"Uh-huh. The field doesn't affect time directly?"
"No, it...I shouldn't say that. Who the hell knows what time really is? It affects chemical and nuclear reactions, energy release of all kinds, but it doesn't affect the speed of light. You know, it's kind of kicky to be measuring the speed of light at three hundred and seventy miles per second with honest instruments."

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Ah, right. I thought it must have been an essay because it doesn't show up in the rest of the Known Space universe- at least, I think it doesn't, their hyperdrive is based on alien (Outsider) technology probably ultimately derived from Tnuctipun work, is it not? There is a suspicious lack of funky time and causality involved, anyway.

Alastair Reynolds has a lot of the plot of his novel Redemption Ark involve inertia control and it's use for propulsion, actually the plot part is a chase scene; he had something of the same effect, reduced inertia gives you reduced motion resistance and time dilation, zero inertia means you become a luxon- or, to quote the Dwarf, a non- event mass with a quantum probability of zero.

So an inertialess drive is a stasis field, effectively...there were several accidents involving this, and several characters who erased their own, or just jumped world lines- turned into alternative versions of themselves, trying to achieve FTL through negative inertia. Complicated, isn't it?

Oh, and mentioning the title of that story comes close to revealing the punchline; I think he was trying to out- Asimov Asimov with this one. Spoiler

The only identifiable fragment of the pride of the United States Space Navy after it collided with a neutron star was one star- mangled spanner.

[open_sketchbook]

40k Vortex missiles. Fuck trying to blow you up, it just sucks you into hell, and the scale from grenades to space torpedos the size of skycrapers. Armour won't protect you. Shields can't save you. The missile hits and just like that, your metaphorical miniature is removed from the board of life. No armour save.