Archives
| Title | Posted |
|---|---|
| The Fourth Empire's missing ships | Apr 2009 |
| Status of the Grand Alliance as of the start of <em>In Death Ground</em> | Apr 2009 |
| How do you pronounce 'Dahak'? | Apr 2009 |
| Why does towing pods decrease ship acceleration? | Apr 2009 |
| Firing through a drive band | Apr 2009 |
| Naval blockades | Apr 2009 |
| The rationale for the Theisman Buildup | Apr 2009 |
| Aftermath of the Terran Civil War | Apr 2009 |
| The pre-war importance of Basilisk Station | Apr 2009 |
| Treecat intelligence II | Apr 2009 |
Filters
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.
