Archives
| Title | Posted |
|---|---|
| The basis for Manticoran inventiveness | Jul 2005 |
| Education reform in the Republic of Haven | Jul 2005 |
| Technical improvements in the Talbott Cluster | Jul 2005 |
| Locating new Manticoran shipyards | Jul 2005 |
| Mesan assassin nanotech | Jul 2005 |
| The rationale behind when to reveal Apollo's existence | Jul 2005 |
| Refitting to the Keyhole-II standard | Jul 2005 |
| Expanding upon the Eridani Edict | Dec 2005 |
| Manticore's relationship with Beowulf | Dec 2005 |
| Power of the Manticoran Monarchy | Dec 2005 |
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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.
c-Fractional pod-based missile attack plan II
- Series: Honorverse
- Date: May 24, 2009
Most of the other issues you've raised vis-à-vis the Mesan pods are answered by two basic considerations. First, my comments about cee-fractional strikes were predicated on the [way?] the people wanted these things to come looking in at 80 or 90% of light-speed. The Mesan ships are down to only 20% of light-speed when they deploy their pods, which means that they're coming in at only somewhere around 60,000 KPS instead of 270,000 KPS. Moreover, they were specifically designed for this specific operation. You can think of it as the equivalent of the Japanese adapting their torpedoes for the Pearl Harbor attack so that they didn't drive as deep and bury themselves in the harbor mud when they were dropped. Each pod is equipped with specially designed ablative shielding which obviously wouldn't stand up to the erosion of weeks and weeks of .9 cee travel but is tough enough to survive this attack profile, especially since they're going to be given their long-range targeting information from pre-deployed sensor platforms. In other words, what needs to be protected is their relatively short-range sensors, not what they'd be using to [acquire] targets at long range for themselves.
