Honorverse Superdreadnought
Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2015 6:02 pm
I posted a thread in books a while back about the Honorverse, a series of sci-fi books by David Weber. Lately I tried my hand at one of his ships in Blender! I like how it came out...
The idea of the Honorverse is that the tech is designed to approximate the way that ships fought in the Napoleonic era. So here's how it works...
The two spiked rings near the ends of the ships are the "Impellers". These generate a gravitational distortion field above and below the ship, which is called the "Wedge". The field lets you accelerate at several hundred gees in normal space. In hyperspace, the wedge does the same thing but at FTL speeds.
The mechanics of the wedge are such that it generates two distortion bands, one above the ship and one below. The bands are utterly impenetrable to any weapon or sensor, no matter how strong. Thus, all weapons and sensors are mounted so as to fire to the sides, front, and rear. To the sides, you can have "sidewall generators" which create shiled walls one either side of the ship, which you can see through and fire through from the inside but which resist weapons fire from the outside. Unlike the wedge, sidewalls can be penetrated by sufficiently powerful weapons.
The wedge bands are also sloped such that open area at the front aspect (the throat) is three times larger than the rear aspect (the kilt). At the time of the first book, these cannot be protected with sidewalls - doing so would negate the wedge and leave the ship unable to accelerate. Later on that changed.
Thus, the ultimate aim of naval maneuvering is to get into a position where you can fire down the throat of the enemy with your broadside - the equivalent of "Crossing the T" in the Napoleonic era.
The main weapons are long range missiles, which are equivalent to cannon, with lasers and grasers effective at shorter ranges. What you do is fire your broadside at the enemy, then ideally as their missiles arrive you spin the ship around the long axis so that the missiles hit your wedge, protecting you. To counter this, most missiles use bomb-pumped laser warheads - the missile scatters a bunch of lasers around itself and then detonates, firing them at the enemy ship. Laser heads are far less powerful than a contact nuke, but the point is that a broadside can be set to scatter around your ship and the lasers can fire in any direction, enabling them to hit your sidewalls even if you are rotating the ship around.
With missiles able to do tens of thousands of gees and ranges long enough that flight times are in the minutes, battles then largely revolve around precise timing and statistics; great attention is paid to how you accelerate and maneuver to bring the enemy within your missile envelope at the right time, how many broadsides you can launch, how effective your defences are as making missiles lose their homing lock, how many you can shoot down, etc.
They also tend to be battles of attrition; like the sail era, any given hit is generally not enough to kill a ship. Rather, one hit will usually kill one weapon or sensor emplacement. With a big ship like the above, clearly you are going to be able to take dozens of hits before you're knocked out. And as you lose weapons emplacements you gradually lose your ability to fire or defend yourself. Ships can simply explode if you hit them in the reactors, but for the most part these things simply batter one another down with hundreds of missiles over the course of hours of combat - much as sail-era ships took hundreds of cannonballs to slowly batter one another to pieces.
One of the fun things about the series is how the technology advances over time. Especially the development of the missile pod, essentially a box launcher with ten missiles in it. Initially each ship drags a bunch of these through space behind it on tractor beams - meaning you can blast the enemy with an absolutely enormous opening slavo by triggering all the missile pods at once. The first time they were used an enemy that expected something like 30 incoming missiles per broadside found itself facing an opening salvo of over 1,700... and things only escalate from there throughout the series. One of my favourite "holy shit" lines from the series is when Admiral Harrington informs an enemy commander that "Those contacts that just lit up on your sensors are my missile pods. There are a quarter of a million of them."
Anyway, the above is a "Superdreadnought" - because an ordinary everyday Dreadnought is just not big enough for Weber, lol. It's my first real go at an Honorverse ship, but it's turned out rather well!
The idea of the Honorverse is that the tech is designed to approximate the way that ships fought in the Napoleonic era. So here's how it works...
The two spiked rings near the ends of the ships are the "Impellers". These generate a gravitational distortion field above and below the ship, which is called the "Wedge". The field lets you accelerate at several hundred gees in normal space. In hyperspace, the wedge does the same thing but at FTL speeds.
The mechanics of the wedge are such that it generates two distortion bands, one above the ship and one below. The bands are utterly impenetrable to any weapon or sensor, no matter how strong. Thus, all weapons and sensors are mounted so as to fire to the sides, front, and rear. To the sides, you can have "sidewall generators" which create shiled walls one either side of the ship, which you can see through and fire through from the inside but which resist weapons fire from the outside. Unlike the wedge, sidewalls can be penetrated by sufficiently powerful weapons.
The wedge bands are also sloped such that open area at the front aspect (the throat) is three times larger than the rear aspect (the kilt). At the time of the first book, these cannot be protected with sidewalls - doing so would negate the wedge and leave the ship unable to accelerate. Later on that changed.
Thus, the ultimate aim of naval maneuvering is to get into a position where you can fire down the throat of the enemy with your broadside - the equivalent of "Crossing the T" in the Napoleonic era.
The main weapons are long range missiles, which are equivalent to cannon, with lasers and grasers effective at shorter ranges. What you do is fire your broadside at the enemy, then ideally as their missiles arrive you spin the ship around the long axis so that the missiles hit your wedge, protecting you. To counter this, most missiles use bomb-pumped laser warheads - the missile scatters a bunch of lasers around itself and then detonates, firing them at the enemy ship. Laser heads are far less powerful than a contact nuke, but the point is that a broadside can be set to scatter around your ship and the lasers can fire in any direction, enabling them to hit your sidewalls even if you are rotating the ship around.
With missiles able to do tens of thousands of gees and ranges long enough that flight times are in the minutes, battles then largely revolve around precise timing and statistics; great attention is paid to how you accelerate and maneuver to bring the enemy within your missile envelope at the right time, how many broadsides you can launch, how effective your defences are as making missiles lose their homing lock, how many you can shoot down, etc.
They also tend to be battles of attrition; like the sail era, any given hit is generally not enough to kill a ship. Rather, one hit will usually kill one weapon or sensor emplacement. With a big ship like the above, clearly you are going to be able to take dozens of hits before you're knocked out. And as you lose weapons emplacements you gradually lose your ability to fire or defend yourself. Ships can simply explode if you hit them in the reactors, but for the most part these things simply batter one another down with hundreds of missiles over the course of hours of combat - much as sail-era ships took hundreds of cannonballs to slowly batter one another to pieces.
One of the fun things about the series is how the technology advances over time. Especially the development of the missile pod, essentially a box launcher with ten missiles in it. Initially each ship drags a bunch of these through space behind it on tractor beams - meaning you can blast the enemy with an absolutely enormous opening slavo by triggering all the missile pods at once. The first time they were used an enemy that expected something like 30 incoming missiles per broadside found itself facing an opening salvo of over 1,700... and things only escalate from there throughout the series. One of my favourite "holy shit" lines from the series is when Admiral Harrington informs an enemy commander that "Those contacts that just lit up on your sensors are my missile pods. There are a quarter of a million of them."
Anyway, the above is a "Superdreadnought" - because an ordinary everyday Dreadnought is just not big enough for Weber, lol. It's my first real go at an Honorverse ship, but it's turned out rather well!