KlavoHunter wrote:NecronLord wrote:Important question then, is can the other guys also reverse engineer the plot drive and counter-invade LoGH?
If so I can see the Death Star being a very, very serious problem.
That is, if Reinhard doesn't pre-empt them by building more mobile Fortresses like Geiersburg and sending them along with his extragalactic war fleets.
Yeah, as others note, that's not gonna work out too well. Geiersburg/Iserlohn-class fortresses are very impressive technological achievements, but they do not show many signs of being armed or powered to the same (planet-disintegrating) scale as the Death Stars.
NecronLord wrote:So... I went and looked up the fortress you mention.
The Geiersburg Fortress (Japanese: ガイエスブルク要塞) was an Imperial fortress located in the Freya Starzone. At 45 kilometres in diameter, it was of the same order of magnitude as Iserlohn, albeit smaller, and was the second most powerful Imperial fortress. The fortress had a mass of roughly 40 trillion tonnes and could maintain a fleet of up to 16,000 war ships within. Its primary armament, a massive X-ray beam cannon called the Vulture's Claw, had a wavelength of 100 ångströms and an energy output of 740 million megawatts
source
740 terawatts.
Brian Young's Turbolaser Commentaries established a minimum of 450 terawatts for a
medium turbolaser on an ISD.
Assuming this is accurate, and given that these fortresses are mortal threats to one another, will these people not be demoralized and coming to the table when their invincible battle station is shot down in say, five or six shots from the first patrol ship they meet, using its mid power guns?
Again, the 740-terawatt figure is just stupidly underpowered compared to the visuals of what we see the weapon
doing. It's like "phased plasma guns in the forty watt range" or whatever, it's pure technobabble and cannot be taken seriously because otherwise it creates a paradox.
However, even considering the on-screen capability of the great fortresses from that setting, their weapons are, to be highly informal, planet-scorching rather than planet-cracking. And they are vulnerable (more or less) to fire from their own main guns.
Meanwhile, the Death Stars have planet-vaporizing weapons, and are shielded heavily enough that a planet-scorching capital ship bombardment will not seriously threaten them.
Thus, one can argue reasonably that the LoGH fortresses are not armed or powered to the same scale as the Death Star. Nor are they shielded or armored to withstand hits from a Death Star superlaser. While one of them might well be able to tackle Star Wars ships, blowing them up one at a time (IF they can focus their main weapons down to a pencil beam), they really shouldn't cancel out the Death Stars.
They just don't have the power density, in terms of watts per ton of spaceship, to take on something that nasty.
willyvereb wrote:They are false statistics compared to what kind of showings the thing have. By a rough calculation Thor's hammer has the firepower equivalent of many petatons of TNT. And if required the beam can be focused to be as "thin" as a battleship's width.
When did this happen?
Actually given that the emerge of Geiersburg Fortress from warp caused such gravity and space-time fluctuation that it threatened warships from even 300 light-seconds away I say that firepower might be a still a gross understatement.
That says much about LoGH warp drive and nothing about their weapons technology. It may well be that warp drive navigation is highly sensitive to suddenly having a planetoid-sized mass appear within ten million kilometers of your position. This does not mean that the ship's
weapons are in and of themselves that vulnerable.
As for actual warships their weapons range from a few to few tens of megatons of TNT equivalent energy per shot. When breaching the shields shots regularly vaporize a sizable portion of the enemy hull. And LoGH ships literally have armors counted in meters in thickness (5m according to databooks, ranging from 10 to 30 meters according to the anime's visuals). Actually, the armor of LoGH ships are quite durable even if not up to par with their shields or weaponry. During the battle of Mar-Adetta Star Zone solar winds flung asteroids of various sizes at high speed at the Empire's fleet. (Don't ask how, space environment in LoGH occasionally reach Star Trek levels of weirdness). One such asteroid hit the side armor of the battleship. Said asteroid was about 2-3 times the diameter of a battleship's length (~700m) and the rock moved roughly the length of its own diameter under a second. So it impacted at a few km/s velocity yet it had little effect on the ship aside from pushing it away. Electromagnetic shields might've helped (the coldness of space might make even inert rock into good conductors) but due to its huge mass I doubt that had much effect here.
Armor wouldn't be very helpful at protecting against that, because you still end up slamming the ship sideways fast enough to turn everyone to jelly: zero to two kilometers per second in one second is 200 gravities, enough to kill everyone and destroy almost everything that isn't a hardened, high-durability structural element of the ship.
Honestly, for handling a (relatively) low velocity collision, the ship's inertial compensation technology may matter more than its armor.
Suppose you have the power to 'compensate' for accelerations of hundreds of gravities generated by the main engines. If you have a similar system ready to react to collisions, then the ship can be accelerated sideways at hundreds of gravities without being damaged.
In a normal collision, what happens is that the impacting mass strikes, say, the side of your car, and crumples that side inward
while imparting force and acceleration to the rest of the vehicle. The structure of the car is damaged, and the contents (like the driver) are thrown about sharply by a sudden spike of acceleration.
With handwavium inertial dampers in play, you may be able to take that sudden spike of destructive impact force and turn it into a more gradual 'push' that simply shoves the ship sideways... at hundreds of gravities, but you can handle that with whatever technology makes the engines not kill everyone.
Another thing to note is the speed at which beam cannons project their beams. Even though the target is at times 20 light-seconds away they score hits in nearly an instant. I think the most impressive feat happened when Kircheis challenged Lichtendale in a large scale fleet battle. My quick calculation resulted in the beam traveling at almost 500 times the speed of light. You may frown at the idea of relatively hard-SF beam weapon moving at FTL speeds but so we could dis the power generation and firepower in Sci-Fi.
Eh, Doc Smith did it in 1930.
But my real question is, how do you know that the beams propagate at superluminal speeds? There are a couple of possible explanations I can think of
without reviewing the episode footage, though if you give me an episode number I could look it up maybe.
1) You may see a one second on-screen 'cut' from Kircheis firing to Lichtendale's ships being hit, when in fact this cuts out a much longer period of time in which the beam propagates through space.
2) You may be seeing 'sped-up' imagery of something that actually took thirty seconds to happen only taking one second in the visuals, which would hardly be the first or only time that's happened in anime because seriously who wants to draw thirty seconds of a beam flying through space.
3) There may be some confusion about exactly what happens when according to the visuals
We also see examples of beams fired by ships propagating at very finite speed, like the "artillery attacks" used by Reinhard's fleet to break up the Alliance breakthrough assault at Fourth Tiamat.
Anyways, it's better to view these as just simple beam weapons that only happen to be extremely fast. But that speed can be a major tactical advantage when engaging an enemy fleet from great ranges. A beam moving at 500c can for example reach the Sun from Earth under just a single second.
Which of course explains why effective beam range in LoGH is limited to about six million kilometers.
That is consistent with beams taking 20 seconds to cross the distance (at light speed) and ships being able to easily dodge or deflect the beam after it's traveled that far. Or with ships taking one second to cross six million kilometers, sure... in which case the ships are only needing one second to dodge. LoGH ships aren't
that maneuverable.
Speaking of which, LotGH also have some retardedly FTL sensors.They can immediately spot a black hole from 3200 light-seconds away or the previous example when Geiersburg Fortress warped out during the 8th battle of Iserlohn. It was reported to be 300 light-seconds away (although the perspective was terribly off as the 5km diameter fortress filled half the screen) yet Alliance ships saw it emerging in real-time, implying something akin to a "FTL camera". So they can both quickly notice enemies from long range and effectively target them thanks to these weirdly fast beams and sensors. Many other civilizations sport strangely FTL sensors, some of these even have tehnobabble to semi-explain them. But not many have it to such degree.
This can come in handy for the Empire during battle.
It certainly can, but in many ways it just grants them parity. There
are settings whose sensor capability is inferior to what you describe, but most of them are also technologically weaker than Reinhard's Empire in other ways. The settings where major powers actually have the technology and numbers it'd take to be a threat (Stargate's bigger powers, Star Wars) can duplicate that kind of sensor capability too.
