Attacking Darius:

Force multiplier

Invisible force = (force)²

If invisible force = g-torps, then...

(invisible-force)² = (force²)²

Found in the mind of every Alpha.

Honor brutally applied these truths at Cerberus.

The MAN used the power of the equations to serve up Oysters on the half-shell.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:Question: are you still intent on mounting the multi-second graser on a manned ship?

penny wrote:Yes! Don't you see? Every formidable spider has a stinger. Sometimes it is very venomous.

We all speculate that the Spider will be a glass cannon. And by the nature of its own stealth, a Spider may find itself a half light-second - or even closer like inside an opponent's underwear - away from prey. At that range, just to protect itself, it should have a devastating weapon. You are essentially in its web at a half light-second. A Spider usually goes ahead and wraps things up at that point.

You will allow the MAN to have a Spider, but you begrudge the Spider its stinger?

Your premise is false! You are ignoring that in the "?" thread I proposed a way for Sharks and multi-second grasers to work together without endangering the ship or crew and I defended the idea against ThinksMarkedly's criticisms.

I advocate that only regular grasers be mounted on the Shark, because then you will not disclose the ship's location when its main armament explodes.

We speculate that ANY spider drive ship will be a glass cannon.

My apology! So, Thinksmarkedly is the arachnologist voting to remove the stinger from the spider?

But why do you still insist that the MAN's 3-second graser still explodes when using? It was their first iteration of the technology and exploding was a benefit to ensure secrecy. But if it is mounted on an LD or Shark, I will be more willing to accept a limitation that includes needing a cool down period after using it several times in a single battle.

penny wrote:But why do you still insist that the MAN's 3-second graser still explodes when using? It was their first iteration of the technology and exploding was a benefit to ensure secrecy. But if it is mounted on an LD or Shark, I will be more willing to accept a limitation that includes needing a cool down period after using it several times in a single battle.

Why do you think that has been fixed? Yes, if the explosive result is ever cured, then there is no reason to prohibit the weapon from being mounted on a manned ship.

However, until that is accomplished; DON'T put it where your ship or crew can be hurt, mount a regular graser instead.

PS:
invisible-force = (force)²

(invisible-force)² = (force²)²

There is NO mathematical difference in the value for invisible-force between these two statements. However, physically force squared is something other than force.

Jonathan_S wrote:

tlb wrote:Scotty's ship, as you should know, did not come out at the hyper-limit; instead it made the transition three light-weeks out. Do you really think the defense will extend that far? I will accept that the ship will not see everything in stealth mode, but it will certainly see that this is an inhabited sytem. Remember that stealth has to be aligned with the enemy, so the forts would have to know where Scotty will make transit three weeks before he arrives in order to be invisible to him.

It will be about eight hours before they could even get a sensor reading on his arrival.

That's probably an overstatement. Yes, the stealth field has to have its weak side pointed away from the enemy. But simply aiming their waste heat towards the planet they're orbiting, or the system's star, should prevent it from being picked up by anybody looking inward from beyond the hyper limit.

(Won't help if the scout manages to sneak recon drones in behind the stealthed forts though. And if they're dumping waste heat towards the planet a close enough view might be able to pick up to resulting hot spots in its upper atmosphere)

I think the bigger problem is that no system, including stealth fields, has 100% uptime. Some of the forts are almost inevitable going to have their stealth fields down for maintenance at any given time -- making them far easier to spot.

If there are enough forts - remember, Galton had over thirty - then the MAN can emulate the RMN and perform their own kind of rotation game, by rotating active forts into place to mask, block, hide, occlude the forts that are down.

That tactic would still need for the MAN to detect GA drones.

penny wrote:

tlb wrote:Question: are you still intent on mounting the multi-second graser on a manned ship?

[quote="penny"] Yes! Don't you see? Every formidable spider has a stinger. Sometimes it is very venomous.[quote="penny"]

I believe you misunderstand the 3 second duration graser in the G-Torp. Unless the weapon can be very redesigned and very carefully shielded it is going to be a catastrohy on board a ship using it in any kind of hard mount. They use a lot of power and they don't "shut down" or just cut off, they don't "burn out" they burn up. The entire weapon is consumed. If I remember correctly, there is effectively nothing left of either the graser or the torpedo as they are consumed in the process of holding the power on for 3 seconds. And, no, nothing has been said so far about anything being recovered from either the G-torps used in Oyster Bay nor the Silver Bullets used at Beowulf. Again, the sensors systems got a fair fix on where the graser fire was coming from at Beowulf but nobody seems to have reported anything there. Neither in anything been reported from combing the locations (and those would be expanding) potential debris relative to where the fire came from.

You hook one of those to the weapons power feed lines of a starship and have it self-destruct onboard said ship, you are going to have one hell of an mess with the damage probably caused by 1st the grazer incinerating itself and 2nd combine with the "fluctuations" of the power feed with all that juice swishing on and then burning open inside the hull to say nothing about feedback down the system further into the ship. Messy.

Ok, the Alignment might make a disposable weapons mount that you could extend from the ship and effectively jettison just before the graser goes off (having already charged the capacitor disconnected from the ship's power feed before the grazer starts it 3 second life span.

Could make a real interesting divot in the hull.

tlb wrote:Question: are you still intent on mounting the multi-second graser on a manned ship?

penny wrote: Yes! Don't you see? Every formidable spider has a stinger. Sometimes it is very venomous.

Brigade_XO wrote: I believe you misunderstand the 3 second duration graser in the G-Torp. Unless the weapon can be very redesigned and very carefully shielded it is going to be a catastrohy on board a ship using it in any kind of hard mount. They use a lot of power and they don't "shut down" or just cut off, they don't "burn out" they burn up. The entire weapon is consumed. If I remember correctly, there is effectively nothing left of either the graser or the torpedo as they are consumed in the process of holding the power on for 3 seconds. And, no, nothing has been said so far about anything being recovered from either the G-torps used in Oyster Bay nor the Silver Bullets used at Beowulf. Again, the sensors systems got a fair fix on where the graser fire was coming from at Beowulf but nobody seems to have reported anything there. Neither in anything been reported from combing the locations (and those would be expanding) potential debris relative to where the fire came from.

You hook one of those to the weapons power feed lines of a starship and have it self-destruct onboard said ship, you are going to have one hell of an mess with the damage probably caused by 1st the grazer incinerating itself and 2nd combine with the "fluctuations" of the power feed with all that juice swishing on and then burning open inside the hull to say nothing about feedback down the system further into the ship. Messy.

Ok, the Alignment might make a disposable weapons mount that you could extend from the ship and effectively jettison just before the graser goes off (having already charged the capacitor disconnected from the ship's power feed before the grazer starts it 3 second life span.

Could make a real interesting divot in the hull.

I think mostly everyone feels the same. Except I don't. And tlb to some extent?

I tend to think getting a graser to fire for 3-seconds in the first place would be the difficult task. Getting it to fire w/o destroying itself is the easy part. Most of the time by the time you've gotten to that stage, you have pretty much figured out what to do to make it more practical. Sometimes it is obvious that the tech isn't available. But sometimes it is available. Like, perhaps, advanced grav pinch technology?

At any rate, getting the thing to fire for 3-seconds was the hard part.

Brigade XO wrote:Ok, the Alignment might make a disposable weapons mount that you could extend from the ship and effectively jettison just before the graser goes off (having already charged the capacitor disconnected from the ship's power feed before the grazer starts it 3 second life span.

Could make a real interesting divot in the hull.

You actually don't want that thing firing anywhere near your hull. Just outside of it is not good enough; it's going to irradiate your hull, burn out your sensors and active stealth camouflage. It will also light up the entire sky of where the fire is coming from, so firing such a weapon would need to be a one-time thing.

So you want to make it mobile. And since you don't want it to light up a wedge that can be seen from clear across the system, you should mount a spider drive on it.

We've described a graser torpedo.

penny wrote:I tend to think getting a graser to fire for 3-seconds in the first place would be the difficult task. Getting it to fire w/o destroying itself is the easy part. Most of the time by the time you've gotten to that stage, you have pretty much figured out what to do to make it more practical. Sometimes it is obvious that the tech isn't available. But sometimes it is available. Like, perhaps, advanced grav pinch technology?

At any rate, getting the thing to fire for 3-seconds was the hard part.

Sure, just push less power through it. That way, it won't heat up too much to the point of burning itself up, much less catastrophically so.

The question is whether this power is sufficient to make any damage to the target. Is this any better than standard shipboard grasers?

And besides, spider ships should not want to get close enough to energy range. The chance of accidental detection is too great. Just fire the torpedoes.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:I tend to think getting a graser to fire for 3-seconds in the first place would be the difficult task. Getting it to fire w/o destroying itself is the easy part. Most of the time by the time you've gotten to that stage, you have pretty much figured out what to do to make it more practical. Sometimes it is obvious that the tech isn't available. But sometimes it is available. Like, perhaps, advanced grav pinch technology?

At any rate, getting the thing to fire for 3-seconds was the hard part.

Sure, just push less power through it. That way, it won't heat up too much to the point of burning itself up, much less catastrophically so.

The question is whether this power is sufficient to make any damage to the target. Is this any better than standard shipboard grasers?

And besides, spider ships should not want to get close enough to energy range. The chance of accidental detection is too great. Just fire the torpedoes.

Pushing less power defeats the purpose. You don't want to decrease the "amount of venom" produced.

Just use the same muffler you obtained from Meineke that radiates the massive amount of waste heat away from the ship at the rear. LOL

Seriously, if grav pinch technology turns out to be the "lifesaver" (pardon the pun) which prevents the graser from exploding, then that same technology will also radiate the enormous energy away from the hull.

Everyone should stop saying that a Spider should not want to get to energy range. Of course it should! If that is its mission.

Besides, by the very nature of its stealth, a Spider very well may find itself in that predicament. Prey unknowingly wanders into a Spider's web. All on its own. Imagine that. Honestly, all on its own prey does that. Can you believe it? A Spider casts a web and waits. "Build it and they will come." That is a Spider's motto.

At any rate, I don't have any reservations that a Spider will have a stinger. Adapting the 3-second firing graser to ship board use is simply the next iteration of the tech. I can see that, even if at one point the Peeps couldn't see the next iteration of any tech.

But in a Spider's world, prey are blind. And blind prey does not fail to deliver themselves to you. In droves. Spiders do not have a shortage of food. Prey is going to be amenable whether the spider is hungry (amenable) or not. So if by the nature of its stealth the Spider is going to find itself in energy range, it cannot deploy a slow acting graser torpedo. Anymore than the GA would choose to use a missile at energy range. Remember, the doctrine of a stealthed enemy will be completely different by inherent design.

And ... it does not matter if using the stinger lights up the sky. It won't matter if an obliterated enemy once knew where you were.

However, a submarine chooses its prey well. They did not always attack if that particular prey was not the objective. Many times subs had prey in its sights, but let them past preferring juicier, or more appropriate targets. But should prey haphazardly stumble or fly into a Spider's web, what spider does not have a stinger?

Actually, I can not get it out of my head that a certain spider rears up on its "hind legs" in preparation to inject its venom. Perhaps an LD has to mimic the action to deliver its "venom" as well.

.

The Lenny Detweiler aka Spider


Versions: Mission related


The Brown Recluse Brown recluse spiders are rarely seen or identified. A brown recluse bite often is not felt when it happens.


The Wandering Spider A rear area specialist. They have an aggressive defense posture, in which they raise their front legs straight up into the air. They are considered to be the deadliest of all the world’s spiders.

The Wolf Spider aka Wolfpack. The Wolf spider are named for their wolflike habit of chasing and pouncing upon prey. Most wolf spiders are dark brown, and their hairy bodies are long and broad, with stout, long legs. They are noted for their running speed. This painful bite, coupled with their speed and startling appearance, can be unsettling, and some bite victims panic from the experience.

Common House Spider Gets itself into the dwellings of all sorts of buildings. Ports and warships. Stealthily it gets itself inside enemy formations and can easily infest an entire solar system. This one can even set up housekeeping behind the intense gravity of the MWJ and await flies.

And it has developed a venomous stinger.