MU-variant Technobabble Notes

[Big Brother]

This thread will be a collection of bits of possible technobabble for use by Lorpy in his MU-variant story.

First off, my "Cloudship" Concept for space-based warships:

Science Fiction had its roots in pulp adventure stories, tales of swashbuckling pirates, dashing cowboys, and heroic soldiers carving empires out of unexplored continents. In transposing these tales of high adventure to the high frontier of outer space, early sci-fi authors brought with them the conventions, cliches, and traditions of the older genre of stories. Stories of sailing ships on the high seas had the serial numbers filed off and were recast as tales of starships in high vacuum. One of the conventions which has proven surprisingly durable is the concept of the space dreadnought, the single large starship which fulfills a similar role to the dreadnoughts and other capital ships of ocean-going navies. The rise of the aircraft carrier in the second world war only slightly altered this convention, with the large ship now being a mothership for numerous small, fast, highly maneuverable space fighters who used tactics which would have seemed familiar to those who fought the battle of Midway.

But space is not an ocean. There are no horizons to disappear under, no islands to hide behind, no safe harbors to shelter in. Nevertheless, there are some lessons to be drawn from the final days of surface combat on the oceans of earth in the late 20th and early 21st century. The realities of space combat will maginfy some of these effects already seen in oceanic combat. They will diminish others, and bring up entirely new effects as well.

Seeing the enemy first is of supreme importance. Electromagnetic, gravitational, and optical sensors leave very little room to hide in space. But all these sensors can be fooled or degraded by appropriate tactics and technology. And active sensors of various types often help the enemy more than they help you, giving the enemy a target beacon they can home in on from far beyond that sensor's detection range.

Despite attempts at stealth, jamming, decoys, and other sensor countermeasures, detection ranges are likely to still be very long indeed. Weapons range will need to be equally long, and luckily, vacuum environments lend themselves well to extremely long-ranged weaponry. Coherent-energy weapons such as lasers and particle beams will not be limited so much by target detection range as by time: they are quite capable of destroying a target at several light-seconds distance, but so long as FTL sensors remain an apparent physical impossibility, the target is unlikely to still be where you last saw it once the speed-of-light beams arrive. Guided projectiles, with their own onboard targeting systems and maneuvering systems, will have range limited only by your patience in waiting for them to arrive, and the likelihood of the enemy still being in detection range once they do.

Nuclear weapons, as powerful as they are on a planet's surface, are actually only middling-powered weapons in the vacuum of space. Relativistic kinetic-kill projectiles, particle beams, and coherent-energy weapons, as well as a variety of nuclear warheads, are likely to be used in space combat. Trying to armor a starship against most of these threats is an exercise in futility, even leaving aside all considerations of mass and volume restrictions on a starship. Any starship is going to be an eggshell armed with a sledgehammer. Passive defense systems such as armor and shielding are largely going to be useless against contact fusion detonations, antimatter warheads, and kinetic projectiles traveling at a sizable fraction of the speed of light.

Active defenses are likely to be far more valuable. Point defense missiles and energy weapons are the best defense against guided projectiles. Not being in their way is the best defense against coherent-energy weapons and relativistic projectiles. Stealth and saturation, or some combination of the two, will be the best way to overcome enemy point defenses.


To overcome all these tactical problems, I propose a radical new design concept in space-based warships: The Cloudship. The Cloudship is not merely one large spacecraft, except when traveling to and from combat zones. The Cloudship is one large spacecraft that splits into dozens or even hundreds of smaller ones, entering combat as a swarm of separate modules, spread over a volume of thousands or even millions of cubic kilometers, linked together by tight-beam maser or laser communication systems, all controlled from one or more central crew and command modules. After combat is over, the modules link back up for maintenance, repair, or redeployment. This system has several advantages.

Individual modules can be specialized. Active-sensor modules can provide targeting data for weapons modules hundreds of kilometers away in the cloud of modules. In this manner, enemy weapons homing in on an active sensor are unlikely to damage anything but that one sensor module. Weapons mounts that have fired their ammo become decoy drones, still contributing to overall combat effectiveness by soaking up enemy return fire, causing enemy missiles and beams to be wasted taking out empty weapons canisters and box launchers.

Individual modules are expendable and mostly unmanned, so the loss of one or several is not a major handicap. A single large warship is vulnerable to being completely taken out with one weapon, whereas a cloudship can survive the majority of its modules being destroyed individually, and still continue to function and fight with only partial loss of effectiveness.

A fleet of unitary warships that loses some of its members is reduced in effectiveness in much the same way as a single cloudship that has lost some of its modules. But a fleet of cloudships that loses some of its central crew and command modules can simply hand off orphaned weapons and sensor modules to surviving crew and command modules with little or no loss of combat effectiveness. A fleet of cloudships, with their modules all mixed up into a single coherent mass, is known, with a purposeful sense of irony, as a “fog of war”, a swarm of overlapping swarms of individual cloudship modules.

A widely dispersed cloud of weapons modules can fire a wide-spread salvo of missiles, reducing the chances of large numbers of friendly projectiles being taken out by a single enemy point defense system or nuclear warhead, and also greatly reducing the chances of missiles being taken out by the detonation of neighboring warheads conducting standoff attacks with bomb-pumped lasers. Also, the very nature of cloudship weapons modules lends itself to self-contained box-launcher missile launchers, rather than single-tube launchers fed from magazines, greatly increasing salvo weight. All these facts will make saturation attacks to overwhelm enemy point defense far more effective.

Defensively, a cloudship swarm is far better able to withstand enemy saturation attacks, because widely dispersed sensors and point-defense modules can more effectively see through jamming, and a cloud of weapon and sensor modules interspersed between the crew and command modules and the enemy forces presents a powerful and heavily-armed barrier to enemy weapons. As enemy fleets or missile salvos approach, sensor modules at the outer edges of the friendly swarm will increasingly be presented with opportunities for enfilade or flanking fire, as well as side-angle sensor angles on incoming targets, the better to see past jamming systems focused forward from the enemy targets.

The biggest drawback of the cloudship concept is that, with their small size, individual modules will be difficult to outfit with large fuel reserves or large and powerful main engines with which to carry out complex maneuvers requiring a high degree of sustained acceleration. Thus, swarmships may have to remain joined up into one large ship until very close to the outer bubble of enemy detection or weapons range. If we lack solid intelligence on exactly what enemy detection and weapons ranges are, this could lead to disaster. Cloudships are thus also not suited to prolonged combat or stern chases, but then again, neither are most unitary starships with the current level of human technology.

In conclusion, Cloudships may offer the best chance for human-built warships to engage higher-technology alien spacecraft on something approaching equal terms. It is recommended that the next generation of human warships be built with this concept in mind.

NOTE: In order to minimize radar cross-section and optical detection ranges, most cloudship modules will have the appearance of black, sharply angular, multifaceted diamonds, sort of like a radially symmetrical version of the old F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter.

[Big Brother]

This is another concept for use with, or against, Cloudships. I call it the "Parallax Pod".

All objects in the universe, simply from being warmer than absolute zero, give off "black-body" electromagnetic radiation. For most normal temperature ranges, this radiation will peak in the infrared part of the spectrum. In space, this provides a way to detect enemy warships even if they are not emitting active sensors, or are out of active sensor range.

However, at most likely engagement ranges (ranging from a few thousand to a few million miles), a normal-sized warship will show up, if at all, as a point source, a pixel or two wide on your scanner display, even at great maginification. And they are seen against a background of distant stars, which also show up as point-source single-pixel sources of infrared radiation. There are two likely ways to tell them apart.

The first way is with spectral analysis, that is, analyzing the distribution of photons coming from the target by wavelength, to determine the temperature of the object in question. If it's in the thousands of kelvin, it's probably a star, not a starship. But spectral analysis of single-pixel point-sources is notoriously difficult.

The second way is via parallax. If you have two infrared telescopes pointed at the same target, but from different directions, you can determine the range to the target by a simple trigonometry problem. The easiest way to do this is with two widely-separated telescopes. If the target is on the same absolute bearing from both telescopes, it's phenomenally far away, and is probably a distant star. If two telescopes a thousand miles or so apart show the same target, but with a tiny fraction of a degree of arc difference in the apparent bearing to the target, it's close enough to probably not be a star.

So one likely sensor technology in intrasystem space combat will be parallax pods: twin automated infrared telescopes on separate sensor pods, fired from a starship in opposite directions, perpendicular to the presumed bearing to a possible enemy contact. Once they are a few hundred or even thousand miles apart, they turn on, and begin scanning the target area electo-optically in the infrared spectrum. Their onboard computers first subtract signals that are known and well-cataloged stars, as well as any known planets, moons, comets, and so forth in that solar system. Then they electronically subtract other signals that do not display parallax and thus are also likley to be distant fixed stars. What's left are possible heat signatures that are too close to be stars.

Once such signals are identified, they can be targeted with active sensors, better-focused passive sensors, or simply fired upon with area-effect weapons (nuclear fragmentation warheads, buckycable "piano wire" rounds, etc.) or guided missiles (in hopes that once they get close enough, the terminal guidance systems can see the target). If the heat signature is clear enough to be accurately tracked over time, more precise weapons, such as beam weapons, can be aimed at the targets to destroy them.

[Big Brother]

Here's a possible appearance for a Cloudship-type vessel.

[Lorpius Prime]

Discussion of Laser-head nuclear warheads from Honorverse in Storm From The Shadows.

(Excerpted from: LINK)

There was a reason it had taken so long for the laser head to replace the contact nuclear warhead as the deep-space long-ranged weapon of choice. The basic concept for a laser head was actually quite simple, dating back to pre-Diaspora days on Old Terra. In its most basic terms, a cylindrical rod of some suitable material (the Royal Manticoran Navy used a Tantalum/Lithium medium [In the print edition, this is changed to a Hafnium medium --LP]) was subjected to the x-ray pulse of a nuclear detonation, causing it to lase in Gamma-rays until the thermal pulse of the detonation’s core expansion reached the rod and destroyed it. The problem had always been that the process was inherently extraordinarily inefficient. Under normal conditions, only a few percent of the billions of megajoules released by a megaton-range nuclear warhead would actually end up in any single x-ray laser beam, mostly because — under normal conditions — a nuclear detonation propagated in a sphere, and each rod represented only a ridiculously tiny portion of the total spherical area of the explosion and so could be subjected to only a tiny percentage of the total pulse of any detonation. Which meant the overwhelming majority of the destructive effect was completely lost.

Given the toughness of warship armor, even two or three T-centuries ago, that was simply too little to have any appreciable effect, especially since the resultant laser still had to blast its way through not just a warship’s sidewalls, but also its anti-radiation shielding, just to reach the armor in question. So even though the odds of achieving what was effectively a direct hit with a contact nuke were not exactly good, most navies had opted to go with a weapon which could at least hope to inflict some damage if it actually managed to hit the target. Indeed, pre-laser head missiles had been most destructive when they achieved skin-to-skin contact as purely kinetic projectiles. That, unfortunately, had been all but impossible to achieve, even with the best sidewall penetrators, so the proximity-fused nuclear missile had become primarily a sidewall-killer. It’s function was less to inflict actual hull damage than to burn out sidewall generators.

Unfortunately from the missile-firer’s perspective, active missile defenses had improved to such a degree that “not exactly good” odds of scoring a direct hit had turned into “not a chance in hell,” which was the real reason capital ships had gone to such massive energy batteries. Missiles might still be effective against lighter combatants, but they’d been for all intents and purposes completely ineffective against the active and passive defenses of a capital ship, so the only way to fight a battle out had been to close to the sort of eyeball-to-eyeball range at which shipboard energy mounts could get the job done.

But then, little more than a century ago, things had begun to change when some clever individual had figured out how to create what was in effect a shaped nuclear charge. The possibility had been discussed in several of the galaxy’s naval journals considerably longer than that, but the technology to make it work hadn’t been available. Not until improvements in the gravitic pinch effect used in modern fusion plants had been shoehorned down into something that could be fitted into the nose of a capital missile.

A ring of gravity generators, arranged in a collar behind the warhead, had been designed. When the weapon fired, the generators spun up a few milliseconds before the warhead actually detonated, which was just long enough for the layered focal points of a gravitic lens to stabilize and reshape the blast from spherical to Gaussian, directing the radiological and thermal effects forward along the warhead’s axis. The result was to capture far more of the blast’s total effect and focus it into the area occupied by the lasing rods. By modern standards, the original laser heads had been fairly anemic, despite their vast improvement over anything which had been possible previously, and capital ship designers had responded by further thickening the already massive armor dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts carried. But the ancient race between armor and the gun had resumed, and by fifty or sixty T-years ago, the laser head had become a genuine danger to even the most stoutly armored vessel.

There were other factors involved in the design of a successful laser head, of course. The length and diameter of a lasing rod determined its beam divergence, with obvious implications for the percentage of energy the laser delivered at any given range. Ship-mounted energy weapons, with their powerful grav lenses, could squeeze beam divergence in a way no laser head possibly could. There was simply no way to design those lenses into something as small as a laser head which, despite many refinements in design, remained essentially a simple, expendable rod which would have been easily recognizable by any pre-Diaspora physicist.

In the current Mark 23 warhead, the rods were roughly three meters in length and forty centimeters in diameter. They were carried in bays on either side of the weapons bus, which ejected them once the missile had steadied down on its final attack bearing. Each of the laser heads mounted its own thrust-vectoring reaction control system, which acquired the target on its own sensors, thrust to align itself with the target’s bearing, and quickly maneuvered to a position a hundred and fifty meters ahead of the missile. At which point the gravity lens came up, the warhead detonated, and the target found itself out of luck.

The critical factors were laser head rod dimensions, the yield of the detonation, and — in many ways the most critical of all — the grav lens amplification available. Which was the main reason capital missiles were so much more destructive than the smaller missiles carried aboard cruisers and destroyers. There was still a minimum mass/volume constraint on the grav lens assembly itself, and a bigger missile could simply carry both a more powerful lens and the longer — and therefore more powerful — lasing rods which gave it a longer effective standoff range from its target. That was also the reason it had been such a challenge to squeeze a laser head capable of dealing even with LACs into the new Viper anti-LAC missile. The bay for the single lasing rod was almost two thirds the length of the entire missile body, and finding a place where it could be crammed in had presented all sorts of problems.

The general Manticoran technical advantage over the Republic of Haven had made itself felt in laser head design, as well. Manticoran missile gravity generators had always been more powerful on a volume-for-volume basis, and Manticoran sensors and targeting systems had been better, as well. The Star Kingdom had been able to rely upon smaller warheads and greater lens amplification to create laser heads powerful enough for its purposes, especially since it could count on scoring more hits because of its superior fire control and seeking systems. The Republic had been forced to adopt a more brute force approach, using substantially larger warheads and heavier lasing rods, which was one of the factors that explained why Havenite missiles had always been outsized compared to their Manticoran counterparts.

But now, thanks primarily to fallout from the Star Kingdom’s ongoing emphasis on improving its grav-pulse FTL communications capability, BuWeaps had completed field testing and begun production of a new generation of substantially more powerful gravity generators for the cruiser-weight Mark 16. In fact, they’d almost doubled the grav lens amplification factor, and while they were at it, they’d increased the yield of the missile warhead, as well. With its fifteen megaton warhead, the Mark 16 had been capable of dealing with heavy cruiser or battlecruiser armor, although punching through to the interior of a battlecruiser had pushed it almost to the limit. Now, with the new Mod G’s forty megaton warhead and improved grav lensing, the Mark 16 had very nearly as much punch as an all-up capital missile from as recently as five or six T-years ago.

Producing the Mod G had required what amounted to a complete redesign of the older Mark 16 weapons buses, and BuWeaps had decided that it neither wanted to discard all of the existing weapons nor forgo the improvements, so Admiral Hemphill’s minions had come up with a kit to convert the previous Mod E to the Mod E-1. (Exactly what had become of the Mod F designation was more than Helen was prepared to guess. It was well known to every tactical officer that BuWeaps nomenclature worked in mysterious ways.) The Mod E-1 was basically the existing Mod E with its original gravity generators replaced by the new, improved model. Which meant that its effectiveness was “only” doubled, while the Mod G laser heads’ throughput had increased by a factor of over five.

[Big Brother]

Fascinating.

Gravitic lenses are far beyond human technology in this story, so here's the compromise we came up with:

Humans at the start of the story do have laser heads, but only the very early Pre-Diaspora version described above. Not very efficient, can't do much of anything to the armor and shielding of alien ships. Not that humans know this, never having actually shot at an alien ship and lived to study the results. But they do understand that they're woefully under-gunned compared to the aliens.

So when they get their hands on the Tadpole superlaser, they're excited to finally maybe have something. Turns out, the Tadpoles based it on a Charterling design they acquired some years ago from an overenthusiastic Charterling trader. The Charterling version uses an antimatter-matter reaction to produce very high energy plasma, which is mixed with the lower-energy (but more suitable for lasing) plasma in the chamber of a chemical laser, to produce high energy plasma that will lase in the desired wavelength. The Tadpoles didn't get enough technology from the Charterlings to replicate the antimatter plasma part of the design, and can't produce enough antimatter to make such a design practical for them even if they could reproduce the weapon exactly.

So they replicated the basic concept, substituting a magnetic-bottle fusion reactor as a way to produce the high-energy plasma they need. Basically, they stick a chemical laser chamber in the throat of a fusion rocket, and get the high-temperature hydrogen-helium plasma to lase.

Earth scientists realize they are years away from having sufficiently controllable fusion bottles to replicate even this simplified tadpole design. But they think they can replicate the basic concept with a chemical-laser chamber surrounded by radiation-deflecting Beryllium mirrors to direct the neutrons and gamma radiation from an exploding hydrogen bomb into the chamber, superheating the plasma and turning it into a super-powerful one-shot chemical laser. Not exactly suitable for use as the main armament of a starship, but this IS minaturizable enough to cram it into an oversized box-launched missile for use in missile combat as a replacement for carbon-rod bomb-pumped X-Ray laser warheads.

The missile's main job is to be launched from beyond effective enemy beam-weapon range (range limited more by speed-of-light sensors than inherent limitations in the range or accuracy of the beam itself), and get into sensor and beam range of the enemy ship while the launching ship is still too far away to be hit in return. Then, before the missile gets close enough for the enemy to have a good chance of shooting it down with short-ranged point defense weaponry, the missile warhead detonates and fires its one-shot single fusion-enhanced chemical laser beam at the enemy ship.