Simon_Jester wrote:So much depends on subtlety and electronics, rather than brute power generation, that I'm reluctant to take this very far- consider that within the Honorverse, Manticoran EW advantages have a lot more to do with miniaturization and electronics capability than they do with being able to generate more electricity per ship.
Though power generation on compact platforms certainly plays a role.
True. subtelty and sophistication plays a role (as in what sorts of sensors your trying to jam, in sci fi that can be quite a variety) as well as how you're trying ot jam them.
I guess in the context of this debate I was thinking more in terms of jamming active sensors and having to "burn through," - raw power matters quite a bit there, and lots of sci fi universes tend to use active sensors for targeting purposes. But even then that's a very crude comparison.
Well, if Weber could resist the temptation to report his numbers to four or five significant figures, I wouldn't complain- relativistic effects are really quite small until you get up to something like half light speed, small enough that I can shrug them off as "close enough for government work."
But somehow, Weber got into the absurd habit of rattling off "142,391 kilometers per second" or whatever, as if that actually conveyed useful information rather than simply being over-precise for the purpose.
Yeah. What's particularily frustrating here though is that the drive times and the velocities are basically fixed, so that makes it hard to mesh
And if we're honest, you have to wonder, givne the distance and travel times they engage with, whether there is that much of a difference between say, .9, .95, or .99c. Hell maybe even .8c. (something I've been willing to consider for Nova cannons as well, to be blunt.) I mean in some cases it might matter, but not always in others.
Yeah, that folds into my "how many missiles per kill" figure.
In combat between Honorverse fleets, it takes, on average, hundreds of missile hits to score a kill on one enemy capital ship. That doesn't change much through the series- the range and precision with which those hits can be scored varies, and if your missiles are inaccurate/easily jammed enough you may need to fire thousands of shots to get one capital ship kill, but you still need hundreds of hits.
I belive we're talking about "ships of the wall" mainly though, right? That's largely because they're optimized for warfare and the general of stopping damage by lots of ways. I believe either the books or Weber himself commented on this, but Wallers are basically so big, with such powerful defenses, that even if hits get through point defense they generally do too little damage to matter. Podlayers get around this by ramping up the number of missiles/warheads they shoot at the target, basically. It works, but rather crude in its own way IHMO.
The other thing to remember is while they can throw massive salvos, they're fairly limited in missiles they can carry (IIRC the Invictus ones could carry 20K missiles, and other ones carried far less than that.) So throwing massive multi-hundred missile salvos may be impressive, but they will run out of ammo pretty quick at that level without resupply.
If LoGH ships can manage anything like that standard of defensive quality, of active and passive defense demanding massed fire to overcome, they're going to win by sheer numbers. Because their enemies will physically not be able to carry enough munitions to saturate the defenses of the 10000-ship fleets the LoGH galactic powers routinely dispatch to handle objectives of modest importance.
The biggest advantage they have here is their relative lack of strong "gravitic" signatures and their massive numerical advantage. At best that's going to force engagement ranges alot closer, at worst it may make missile attacks inefficient. Numbers is obvious from the 'absorbing losses" standpoint, but it also gives them a large number of guns to direct at incoming missiles. If they're using their standard guns to engage missiles, they would also have lots of time to shoot down incoming missiles even if they aren't very efficient.
I'm also wondering if proximity-fired missiles might help. Since missiles typically don't have sidewalls, and they have to come AT the targets, and there are so many missiles (on both sides), they could use that to mess things up as well. At the very least, having thousands of multimegaton detonations going off is going to mess with sensors even more, and even soft killing the missiles would help (EG frying the targeting sensors.)
I'm also not sure how fast missiles would be moving at "far less than light minute" ranges, especially if they have to do manuvering for defensive purposes or whatever. That could be a case where the possible "shorter range but faster travle times" for missiles come in handy.
And of course, relative durability matters in the LOGH ship's case. It is quite possible that LOGH ships are relatively "tougher" than HV ships depending on how the firepower issue plays out.
If the required number of missiles committed to a given target in order to kill it averages lower, more like ten or twenty missiles per ship, then the Honorverse is in a much better position to wear down their opposition by inflicting unacceptable casualties via missile bombardment- if we give them the range advantage of Manticoran/Havenite multiple-drive missiles.
It can also depend on how the fleets Approach matters. I mean, its all well and good to have LOGH ships coming in as one huge, aggregate mass to engage the HV ships, but what if they split fleets up? You could flank or even have ships come at the HV side from behind, depending on how you play it. I mean LOGH is really tossing aorund alot of ships, and even if they have a firepower/durability parity with the HV, the numbers give them a huge advantage (especially if they catch them on the sides or behind, or from above or below, or whatever.) Hell what about fighters and other small attack ships?
Nothing at all says LOGH has to fight the way Honorverse fights.
[quoteIf Vympel's thinking of what I'm thinking of... Those impactors are being used to engage orbital defense platforms, not planetary targets. Said defense platforms would be fairly effective at replying to a fleet's nuclear or beam weapon capabilities; the relativistic impactors are being used so that the fleet can remain out of effective range of the orbital defense net (a long long way away), while still reducing it with powerful strikes.[/quote]
That makes sense. You could still get soem limits mind (it implies they're able to track and fire on targets moving at least at some fraction of lightspeed, which in a way makes some sense. Since they can't just hyper into a system, that means they have to either take absurdly long lengths of time to get from the edge of the system to inhabited planets, or they can pull some high acceleration and/or velocity to shorten the times.) And as big as an ice asteroid may be, its still just ice and can be pretty easy to blast apart. (EG it might be megatons, but not gigatons.. which then tells us something about their firepower relative to power generation methinks.)
Physicists use "relativistic" to mean speeds at which the relativistic corrections to classical-physics equations become significant. At .1c, those corrections are roughly 1%; at .2c, roughly 4-5%.
I would hesitate to call an object "relativistic" unless it's moving at .3c or higher, speeds at which you get a gamma around 1.1 and the effects of relativity start being of the same order as the classical-physics effects.
But that's just me.
Hey, I think it helps me alot to have your input on the matter, since you're not exactly a dim sort. Its been kinda frustrating for me because of how vague it is (I've seen some define it as high as .8c) and I know it depends largely on what a person considers "significant" relativity. Between us I've tended to lean towards the higher end of the scale too, but people will always argue it, so its generally safer to include the possibility of the lower values (I had this "near relatvisticic" issue pop up with both Renegade Legion and recently with 40K and the velocities it translates into.)
Besides, like I said, regardless of whether you're throwing a huge chunk of ice at 10% of c or .80%, that's a fuckton of energy.
n this case, the implication is that the bombs are triggering some kind of event within the star itself- causing disruptions that generate some kind of solar-prominence analogue.
I honestly doubt this could be made to work, but I have a healthy enough respect for the complexities of plasma physics that I'd be afraid to contemplate it even if I
knew it could work...
I suspect you're right. At best, my gut tells me that even if it works, it would be ludicrously inefficient (you'd need far more firepower than a nuke could provide, unless they were ludicrously huge). But like I also pointed out to Vympel, its quite possible they have some magic tech means of making blast effects in a vaccuum (not a first for a sci fi series, so I'm not going to criticize them for it
) which might actually make it more plausible. Hell for all we know its just an application of their shield technology powered by the nuke or something.
That's correct; their main battery is mounted in those axial guns on the nose too. The ships are totally designed to engage targets directly ahead, and if there's any serious attempt to armor them at all, that armor would probably be concentrated forward.
That actually probably plays into their advantage as far as resisting laser head impacts as well as being targeted. They'd be basically putting thair narrowest and most heavily armored profile towards the enemy, which would make it evne harder for the missiles to track on them (which is already an issue for them.)
