Grav Lance Questions

It may just be that the best way to well and truly kill the grav lance may be to resurrect it.

Something like a one-line throwaway that mentions that grav lance tech has improved some widget or thingy by say 4.2% or something. Filling in the blank that the author's tum-te-tum-te-tum left wide open may be the only recourse at this point.

Failing that, another option is an entire short story set in Bolthole, where Sonja and Shannon basically spend a large number of pages having a conversation that kills it in every conceivable way the author and BuNine can come up with. Heck, kill several birds with one stone and end it with a shower scene - voila, one dead grav lance and a bunch of distracted posters.

If nothing else works, the author's esteemed wife may just decide to channel her inner Ginny and make us all stop picking on him...

Theemile wrote:... I believe David mentioned about 10 years ago that he was so tired of the repeated Amazing new uses for the Grav Lance as a can opener or automatic dog walker that he has decided to throw as much dirt on the topic as possible and pray the zombie appocalypse never comes.

It's dead. If we ever see it again, the end of the world is neigh. It will never be retrofitted into a '91 VW Jetta. It will never become man portable.

It has Ceased to be - it is an Ex-Parrot..... errr - weapons system....

Somewhat exaggerated (and not really accurate), but I think it sums up David's feelings regarding TWWMNBN:

Missile pods with MDMs have a thousand parents, the grav-lance isn't even an orphan. No one, living or dead in the Honorverse, is willing to acknowledge that the grav-lance was ever even a twinkle in their eye, let alone that they gave birth to and/or nurtured the abomination.

Vince wrote:

Theemile wrote:... I believe David mentioned about 10 years ago that he was so tired of the repeated Amazing new uses for the Grav Lance as a can opener or automatic dog walker that he has decided to throw as much dirt on the topic as possible and pray the zombie appocalypse never comes.

It's dead. If we ever see it again, the end of the world is neigh. It will never be retrofitted into a '91 VW Jetta. It will never become man portable.

It has Ceased to be - it is an Ex-Parrot..... errr - weapons system....

Somewhat exaggerated (and not really accurate), but I think it sums up David's feelings regarding TWWMNBN:

Missile pods with MDMs have a thousand parents, the grav-lance isn't even an orphan. No one, living or dead in the Honorverse, is willing to acknowledge that the grav-lance was ever even a twinkle in their eye, let alone that they gave birth to and/or nurtured the abomination.

Wellll... Hemphill is not likely positively denying a role in fostering the grav lance as one possible way of breaking the traditional tactical stasis. But it was just one of a thousand technical flowers she encouraged to bloom - if it happened to fail, but the refinement of FTL communications, miniaturized fusion plants, the resurrection of the LAC, and the multi-drive missile all worked out, well, the principle stands.

She muzzle-loaded every notion she could into the blunderbuss of BuWeaps. Most of them hit. The grav lance went thataway.

Wellll... Hemphill is not likely positively denying a role in fostering the grav lance as one possible way of breaking the traditional tactical stasis. But it was just one of a thousand technical flowers she encouraged to bloom - if it happened to fail, but the refinement of FTL communications, miniaturized fusion plants, the resurrection of the LAC, and the multi-drive missile all worked out, well, the principle stands.

She muzzle-loaded every notion she could into the blunderbuss of BuWeaps. Most of them hit. The grav lance went thataway.

Actually that's a great point about how research works. Her success rate is far better than average with a single failure (grav lance) that we know of... Maybe Sonja and Shannon can have that long conversation about all of the off screen failures and lump the grav lance into the pile of history's rejects. Hey with RFC's love of military history, the discussion could even encompass some of the rejects from our era.

Grav lance is a product of MDM research anyhow.

biochem wrote:

Wellll... Hemphill is not likely positively denying a role in fostering the grav lance as one possible way of breaking the traditional tactical stasis. But it was just one of a thousand technical flowers she encouraged to bloom - if it happened to fail, but the refinement of FTL communications, miniaturized fusion plants, the resurrection of the LAC, and the multi-drive missile all worked out, well, the principle stands.

She muzzle-loaded every notion she could into the blunderbuss of BuWeaps. Most of them hit. The grav lance went thataway.

Actually that's a great point about how research works. Her success rate is far better than average with a single failure (grav lance) that we know of... Maybe Sonja and Shannon can have that long conversation about all of the off screen failures and lump the grav lance into the pile of history's rejects. Hey with RFC's love of military history, the discussion could even encompass some of the rejects from our era.

I could even see that discussion sparking a comment from Foraker that "you know, what if ..." leading to an interesting use of the grav lance (perhaps as a drive system ala the spider drive?)

kzt wrote:Grav lance is a product of MDM research anyhow.

I don't think so. The grav lance was under development long before the MDM was being researched, unless you have textev to the contrary.

kzt wrote:Grav lance is a product of MDM research anyhow.

Not so.

IIRC, Grav lances were part of early SD armaments until laser and graser ranges improved far enough to make a GL's short range impractical. Thus the GL preceded any MDM/Ghost Rider research projects.

Weird Harold wrote:

kzt wrote:Grav lance is a product of MDM research anyhow.

Not so.

IIRC, Grav lances were part of early SD armaments until laser and graser ranges improved far enough to make a GL's short range impractical. Thus the GL preceded any MDM/Ghost Rider research projects.

Really? Are you sure? Really, really sure? How much you want to bet?

HoS, Sept 1883
"The most critical breakthrough was what Sonja Hemphill and some of Gram’s other team leaders had dubbed simply “the baffle”—essentially, a very carefully designed generator which would project a tame plate of focused gravity to shield adjacent, inactive impeller rings from an active one. Doing it in a way that didn’t slice the missile body into divots the moment it came online had turned out to be…moderately tricky, and they still hadn’t quite licked the problem, but current results were promising. Very promising, actually…in an incremental, God-why-does-this-take-so-long, work-your-butt-off sort of way. And if they could only make the baffle work, all the rest of it was simply fiddly bits. Difficult, challenging, and expensive fiddly bits, perhaps, but still only fiddly bits; he was confident of that.

"Some other interesting bits and pieces were emerging from the effort, as well. Sonja, for example, was intrigued by the implications of something she’d tentatively christened a “grav lance,” although it looked to Jonas like something which would be useful mainly for capital ships that managed to get to knife-fighting range of one another. He couldn’t really see anything lighter than a waller being able to make much use of it, but he was more than willing to let Sonja run with it."

kzt wrote:Grav lance is a product of MDM research anyhow.

Weird Harold wrote:Not so.

IIRC, Grav lances were part of early SD armaments until laser and graser ranges improved far enough to make a GL's short range impractical. Thus the GL preceded any MDM/Ghost Rider research projects.

kzt wrote:Really? Are you sure? Really, really sure? How much you want to bet?

HoS, Sept 1883
"The most critical breakthrough was what Sonja Hemphill and some of Gram’s other team leaders had dubbed simply “the baffle”—essentially, a very carefully designed generator which would project a tame plate of focused gravity to shield adjacent, inactive impeller rings from an active one. Doing it in a way that didn’t slice the missile body into divots the moment it came online had turned out to be…moderately tricky, and they still hadn’t quite licked the problem, but current results were promising. Very promising, actually…in an incremental, God-why-does-this-take-so-long, work-your-butt-off sort of way. And if they could only make the baffle work, all the rest of it was simply fiddly bits. Difficult, challenging, and expensive fiddly bits, perhaps, but still only fiddly bits; he was confident of that.

"Some other interesting bits and pieces were emerging from the effort, as well. Sonja, for example, was intrigued by the implications of something she’d tentatively christened a “grav lance,” although it looked to Jonas like something which would be useful mainly for capital ships that managed to get to knife-fighting range of one another. He couldn’t really see anything lighter than a waller being able to make much use of it, but he was more than willing to let Sonja run with it."

Well that certainly constitutes textev. I stand corrected.