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Warship armor Nov 2002
Grav pulse comm and the detection of hyper footprints Nov 2002
Naval refits Oct 2002
Hamish Alexander and children Oct 2002
Who are the Peeps buying their technology from? Oct 2002
The origin of <em>Bolthole</em> Oct 2002
How powerful are superdreadnoughts? Oct 2002
Impeller rooms Oct 2002
<em>Reliant</em>-class battlecruiser ship layout Oct 2002
Ships of the Wall and battleships Oct 2002

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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

Hardening shipkiller missile drives

  • Series: Honorverse
  • Date: June 10, 2005

A suggestion has been made that it would make sense to put drives into shipkiller missiles of sufficient power to make them immune to wedge kill by a counter-missile. Is this practical? Could it be done as the final stage of a MDM?

 

No, it isn't. And it won't be -- ever. I believe we've had this discussion before. You cannot -- not "it would be hard," not "only possible with great difficulty," but cannot -- build a missile drive sufficiently powerful to take out another missile (or counter-missile) drive without being taken out itself. End of story. The physical size constraints make it impossible. That's why counter-missiles have used their impeller wedges as their primary missile-killing weapon for so long.