Dear Ryk,
Love the books - read them all, can't wait for more. I've been reading the forums for a long time, but never joined up... until now, because I noticed that maybe, perhaps not just by coincidence, posters' comments seemed to get into the book 🙂 Awesome! Makes the series so much more fun if it is. Its a great way to keep a loyal following of readership.
Tech:
- Torpedoes, both nuclear and conventional warheads, outfitted with mini single-use jump drives
- Only needs a few small emitters, easy to fabricate, easy to power
- Probably powered by pre-charged capacitors instead of a powerplant to keep them small
- Space for jump drive system taken from reduced propellant requirement (still need minimal propellant during launch/re-entry)
- Launched from standard torpedo bays.
Tactical Advantages:
1) The ability to deliver a superluminal kinetic strike from way way beyond Jung detection range.
2) The ability to get many more missiles past point defense field of fire and perhaps past shields during battle
3) The ability to deliver a nuclear explosion INSIDE a ship, perhaps even a conventional warhead next to the reactors, assuming the paradox of jumping through matter (one episode says its possible, another says its kinda not).
4) Same assumption, launch attacks without line-of-sight requirements.
5) If missiles miss, then all they have to do is jump back and make another run since their velocities will be maintained.
6) Missiles can make multiple mini jumps to re-target, steering with on-board propellant, finding the soft spots during battle.
Deficiencies:
1) More chances for the Jung to get hold of the Jump Drive if a torpedo does not detonate and is salvaged
2) Amount of munitions is limited by space available on the ship
3) It may not be feasible to have calculations done and continually re-done in the heat of battle.
3) Could be too much of a super weapon, watering the story down.
Variants:
1) Cluster torpedo with 12 jump drive enabled warheads all jumping toward different hostiles, such as a fighter/troopship/missile launches.
2) Surgical Planetary Strikes - jump a warhead in the middle of a military base, air field, or even defense installations (remember the assault on Takarra?)
3) Jump mines - Think of the possibilities!! Jump in hundreds or thousands of proximity mines in an instant surrounding an armada or Jung ships, or even create a defensive perimeter around the Earth/Tanna - they wouldn't know what hit them!
Thoughts!!!
I recon, jump fighters/shuttles/drones are the smallest we are going to get of jump craft/weapons.
From the books and the forum posts, this idea would fail because Plasma has replaced the Torpedo/Missile & KKV's for everything Plasma can't handle.
My order of weapons escalation for the Alliance is thus:
1) Plasma Turret. (which replaced the missile pod, got blown up and disappeared from the story altogether)
2) Plasma Torpedo.
3) Plasma Cannons.
4) KKVs.
5) Antimatter Mines
6) KKVs with Antimatter cores strapped on.
7) Collision with celestial objects.
8) Black hole trickery. (hopefully ^^,)
9) Solar flare trickery. (Instigation of a supernova/solar flare a possibility with jump drives)
10) Unplanned Ghatazhak boarding party.
11) planned Ghatazhak boarding party. (because then you can turn it up to eleven)
I agree I think the jump torpedoes would be a HUGE asset and from ryk already writing about how a falcon jumped through the shield but the passing through that energy fried the system but they were still able to restart.I wonder if maybe they could reinforce (maybe something along the line of emp shielding) the falcon to mitigate the problem allowing the to jump through the shield instead of jumping through the overlaying flaps
The issue with tactical advantages #3 can be resolved using antimatter warheads rather than nuclear warheads. Antimatter mines sounds a lot like my suggestion for jump bombs though this approach uses quality over quality which is problematic given resource constraints.
@ptfreiburger:
That raises the interesting question of what does happen when a ship tries to jump through a star. Seems like nothing most likely. Also, until it's practical to jump an entire world (jumping an asteriod suggests it's possible), it's probably to risky to actually use such a technique in an inhabited system.
Though jumping a world, also suggests one way to keep a world out of Jung hands, just relocate the planet. A fair bit of work would be needed to ensure the planet's climate doesn't change after each jump.
On the note of how to jump a world, I recall a book where a small number of large (kilometer+ sized) asteroids were put into orbit around a world and infrastructure built on them was used to generate a shield which was later modified to be used to teleport the world. I wonder if such a system would be used to move a world. Though from what I've read so far it would require a ridiculous number of smaller satellites, each with their own jump drive (to allow them to be more mobile) as well as the ability to link together to jump something inside the formation. This could also perhaps be used as others have mentioned to cut ships by jumping part of it away though the number of emitters used elsewhere suggest that there would be too few emitters and it wouldn't be practical. Rough calculations on the number required (unless much bigger emitters can reduce the number required) to jump a world be on the order of billions give or take a couple orders of magnitude. Though the number of emitters required to jump the asteroid (and it's size) would certainly help with improving the estimate for a world.
