Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

penny wrote:We are discussing plans of powering thousands of them in real time with beamed power, for all intents and purposes indefinitely (or until a protracted engagement is over). Split, beamed power.

No, we were NOT. I was saying that if we want more than six shots during an engagement, then the IEWP's would need an internal reactor for power.

The beamed power is for the long periods when there is not active combat, just to keep the platforms ready in case an enemy appears. Either for the graser, if no other internal power source or to start the reactor.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:like kzt is fond of pointing out, cords are not allowed

However power is distributed by plasma conduits instead of electric cables (which blows my mind). At some point plasma is converted to electricity, unless they are powering molecular circuitry directly with plasma.

I mentioned awhile back a sudden realization I had - Plasma is an analog for steam power. Capacitors = Accumulators. Capacitor torpedoes are really steam torpedoes. When you consider the Honorverse as a historical sailing analog with tech innovation trees, it makes sense. After steam flask torpedoes, the next innovation was self powered steam torpedoes with internal heated power creating the steam. For awhile, steam guns were investigated, and as a distributed power system, steam accumulators were near powered systems to power turret mounts and other powered systems in case main power was cut off. And how many people were burned in steam accidents...

Plasma = steam power....

penny wrote:True. But I can easily accept that. For one thing the solar array is directly affixed to the platform. Proximity allows for efficiency. And the panels are only responsible for one shot of the 3-second graser.

We are discussing plans of powering thousands of them in real time with beamed power, for all intents and purposes indefinitely (or until a protracted engagement is over). Split, beamed power.

I'd assume that boththe Silver Bullet and the IEWPs would have been launched with fully charged capacitors (which in the IEWPs' case presumably hold sufficient charge for several shots; possibly even all seven).

So the bulk of the time the solar power or beamed power only needs to provide enough input to cover the normal operations of the platforms plus top up whatever energy might bleed out of the capacitors. That should be a pretty low rate, basically a trickle charge.

It's only when a given IEWP fires that you might need to crank up the charge rate and feed enough additional power into the capacitors to make up whatever difference exists between their max storage and the energy required for 7 shots. And only a relative handful of IEWPs will ever be engaging at once; so only those specific platforms need high rate charging. All the others are still in standby waiting for additional targets to show up and, at most, just need regular trickle charging. So the Junction defenses don't need to be designed to provide max rate beamed power to many thousands of platforms simultaneously because they're never intending to fire all those platforms simultaneously. (And if s**t hits the fan hard enough that all the IEWPs need to fire basically at once then most of them not getting off 7 shots isn't going to be your most pressing concern)

Jonathan_S wrote:It's only when a given IEWP fires that you might need to crank up the charge rate and feed enough additional power into the capacitors to make up whatever difference exists between their max storage and the energy required for 7 shots. And only a relative handful of IEWPs will ever be engaging at once; so only those specific platforms need high rate charging. All the others are still in standby waiting for additional targets to show up and, at most, just need regular trickle charging. So the Junction defenses don't need to be designed to provide max rate beamed power to many thousands of platforms simultaneously because they're never intending to fire all those platforms simultaneously. (And if s**t hits the fan hard enough that all the IEWPs need to fire basically at once then most of them not getting off 7 shots isn't going to be your most pressing concern)

But the original text has Honor saying this:

She’s talking about feeding these things with broadcast power for the plasma capacitors. If her numbers hold up, they’d be good for at least five or six full-power shots each before the platforms had to shut down until the maintenance crews could recharge the capacitor reservoirs.

I questioned at the time why a maintenance crew was needed and did not expect them to venture out during a fire fight.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:It's only when a given IEWP fires that you might need to crank up the charge rate and feed enough additional power into the capacitors to make up whatever difference exists between their max storage and the energy required for 7 shots. And only a relative handful of IEWPs will ever be engaging at once; so only those specific platforms need high rate charging. All the others are still in standby waiting for additional targets to show up and, at most, just need regular trickle charging. So the Junction defenses don't need to be designed to provide max rate beamed power to many thousands of platforms simultaneously because they're never intending to fire all those platforms simultaneously. (And if s**t hits the fan hard enough that all the IEWPs need to fire basically at once then most of them not getting off 7 shots isn't going to be your most pressing concern)

But the original text has Honor saying this:

She’s talking about feeding these things with broadcast power for the plasma capacitors. If her numbers hold up, they’d be good for at least five or six full-power shots each before the platforms had to shut down until the maintenance crews could recharge the capacitor reservoirs.

I questioned at the time why a maintenance crew was needed and did not expect them to venture out during a fire fight.

And this is probably why The junction did not install many IDEWs initially - LACS can provide the same function as a IDEW (5-7 shot Graser), but are mobile and can serve multiple purposes, and have maintenance built into their doctrine. When expended, fresh LACs can move to the trouble area, adding their firepower, while expended LACs can pull back and recharge. Since Minefields are cheaper and easily replaced between massive engagements (17 hours for wormhole cool down), IDEWs are just expensive stationary targets after they fire and would be a costly attrition item.

Besides, I'm not certain Minefields are even part of the standard RMN wormhole defense doctrine anymore - Emplaced MDM Pods have replaced them - they can sit back further from their primary wormhole emergence lane and can be used against hyper attackers and targets in other emergence lanes as secondary munitions.

tlb wrote:I questioned at the time why a maintenance crew was needed and did not expect them to venture out during a fire fight.

Theemile wrote:And this is probably why The junction did not install many IDEWs initially - LACS can provide the same function as a IDEW (5-7 shot Graser), but are mobile and can serve multiple purposes, and have maintenance built into their doctrine. When expended, fresh LACs can move to the trouble area, adding their firepower, while expended LACs can pull back and recharge. Since Minefields are cheaper and easily replaced between massive engagements (17 hours for wormhole cool down), IDEWs are just expensive stationary targets after they fire and would be a costly attrition item.

Did you really mean LAC in this post? Where is it written that a LAC is limited to about a half dozen graser shots? So far as I know, they can continue shooting as long as they have fuel. You can't be talking about an old style LAC with a missile basket, because they did not have a graser.

Anyway these graser replacements for mines at wormhole terminals are being talked about in Uncompromising Honor, which is not that many months (Honorverse time) before To End in Fire (our latest mainstream book). That seems to imply that minefields are still part of "standard RMN wormhole defense doctrine", unless TEiF says something else.

PS: What is "wormhole cool down"? Are you referring to the aftermath of a mass transit? Because we do not expect wormholes to be attacked that way.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:It's only when a given IEWP fires that you might need to crank up the charge rate and feed enough additional power into the capacitors to make up whatever difference exists between their max storage and the energy required for 7 shots. And only a relative handful of IEWPs will ever be engaging at once; so only those specific platforms need high rate charging. All the others are still in standby waiting for additional targets to show up and, at most, just need regular trickle charging. So the Junction defenses don't need to be designed to provide max rate beamed power to many thousands of platforms simultaneously because they're never intending to fire all those platforms simultaneously. (And if s**t hits the fan hard enough that all the IEWPs need to fire basically at once then most of them not getting off 7 shots isn't going to be your most pressing concern)

But the original text has Honor saying this:

She’s talking about feeding these things with broadcast power for the plasma capacitors. If her numbers hold up, they’d be good for at least five or six full-power shots each before the platforms had to shut down until the maintenance crews could recharge the capacitor reservoirs.

I questioned at the time why a maintenance crew was needed and did not expect them to venture out during a fire fight.

Sorry, for some reason 7 stuck in my head not 5 or 6.

I also don't expect maintenance to go out during a firefight. You fire off your shots, but once any given platform reaches its shot limit, whatever that it, it's sidelined until post battle. (But, fortunately, they're planning for lots of platforms so they can continue to cycle to ones that haven't shot themselves out. And the energy platforms, and minefields for that matter, only supplement the Apollo missiles the modern forts are packing; along with their on-board energy mounts)

I still don't understand why refilling capacitor reservoirs would be that necessary maintenance activity -- but whatever. You get your few shots and then the defenses need to switch to a new platform for the next shots.

That doesn't seem a major issue with such a defense. It's still more shots than a mine would give. And since basically all the hardware for these new energy platforms is stripped from captured SLN SDs and you've no other use for it normal concerns about cost effectiveness kind of go by the wayside. It's really now only a question of man-hour opportunity costs; not actual dollars or manufacturing time. So a defense it might no make sense to build from scratch with your own equipment might still be the best, and a net possitive, use of captured hardware.

Jonathan_S wrote:Sorry, for some reason 7 stuck in my head not 5 or 6.

Five, six or seven is just so arbitrary, that it does nor really matter; just a matter of how many capacitors get strapped on. However, only having about six shots and then major maintenance downtime, seems flawed. Why can't the capacitors just be slowly recharged by beamed power, instead of sending maintenance? It's a puzzlement.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:I questioned at the time why a maintenance crew was needed and did not expect them to venture out during a fire fight.

Theemile wrote:And this is probably why The junction did not install many IDEWs initially - LACS can provide the same function as a IDEW (5-7 shot Graser), but are mobile and can serve multiple purposes, and have maintenance built into their doctrine. When expended, fresh LACs can move to the trouble area, adding their firepower, while expended LACs can pull back and recharge. Since Minefields are cheaper and easily replaced between massive engagements (17 hours for wormhole cool down), IDEWs are just expensive stationary targets after they fire and would be a costly attrition item.

Did you really mean LAC in this post? Where is it written that a LAC is limited to about a half dozen graser shots? So far as I know, they can continue shooting as long as they have fuel. You can't be talking about an old style LAC with a missile basket, because they did not have a graser.

Anyway these graser replacements for mines at wormhole terminals are being talked about in Uncompromising Honor, which is not that many months (Honorverse time) before To End in Fire (our latest mainstream book). That seems to imply that minefields are still part of "standard RMN wormhole defense doctrine", unless TEiF says something else.

PS: What is "wormhole cool down"? Are you referring to the aftermath of a mass transit? Because we do not expect wormholes to be attacked that way.

In the Battle of AJ prime, , at the beginning of Uncompromising Honor. The LACS were lined up "behind" the wormhole shooting BCs as they came through initially destroying them, then just blowing the drive rooms. They cycled through LACs (Shrike Bs) shooting because they were limited in the # of Graser shots to around a 1/2 dozen each in the engagement.

The Shrike-B carried fourteen shipkillers, and the attacking LACs’ rotary launchers spat them out in a deadly stream. The range was so short they could easily have taken the Sollies down with graser fire, but the Achilles’ heel of the Shrike’s massive energy armament was that its fission reactor couldn’t recharge its plasma capacitors in battle. The energy budget simply wasn’t there. That meant her units’ energy fire was at least as limited as their magazine capacity, and she wanted all the graser shots she could bank against future need.

tlb wrote:I questioned at the time why a maintenance crew was needed and did not expect them to venture out during a fire fight.

Theemile wrote:And this is probably why The junction did not install many IDEWs initially - LACS can provide the same function as a IDEW (5-7 shot Graser), but are mobile and can serve multiple purposes, and have maintenance built into their doctrine. When expended, fresh LACs can move to the trouble area, adding their firepower, while expended LACs can pull back and recharge. Since Minefields are cheaper and easily replaced between massive engagements (17 hours for wormhole cool down), IDEWs are just expensive stationary targets after they fire and would be a costly attrition item.

tlb wrote:Did you really mean LAC in this post? Where is it written that a LAC is limited to about a half dozen graser shots? So far as I know, they can continue shooting as long as they have fuel. You can't be talking about an old style LAC with a missile basket, because they did not have a graser.

Anyway these graser replacements for mines at wormhole terminals are being talked about in Uncompromising Honor, which is not that many months (Honorverse time) before To End in Fire (our latest mainstream book). That seems to imply that minefields are still part of "standard RMN wormhole defense doctrine", unless TEiF says something else.

PS: What is "wormhole cool down"? Are you referring to the aftermath of a mass transit? Because we do not expect wormholes to be attacked that way.

Theemile wrote:In the Battle of AJ prime, , at the beginning of Uncompromising Honor. The LACS were lined up "behind" the wormhole shooting BCs as they came through initially destroying them, then just blowing the drive rooms. They cycled through LACs (Shrike Bs) shooting because they were limited in the # of Graser shots to around a 1/2 dozen each in the engagement.

The Shrike-B carried fourteen shipkillers, and the attacking LACs’ rotary launchers spat them out in a deadly stream. The range was so short they could easily have taken the Sollies down with graser fire, but the Achilles’ heel of the Shrike’s massive energy armament was that its fission reactor couldn’t recharge its plasma capacitors in battle. The energy budget simply wasn’t there. That meant her units’ energy fire was at least as limited as their magazine capacity, and she wanted all the graser shots she could bank against future need.

Thank you, I completely missed that. So a fixed number of shots per engagement really is a hard limit on graser usage for anything without the full-up ship's fusion reactor. The wording implies a number of shots close to the missile count (more? or less? I read that as saying might be as few as the number of missiles, so possibly more.).

Any idea why there is maintenance required at that point? I can understand that it could take a long time to recharge, but this implies that the graser needs work. Tube burnout?