the sheer mass of the system is self-defeating. A ship so equipped has an enormous advantage in hyper, but the volume consumed by the generators cuts deeply into that available for weapons, which places the same vessel at an even greater disadvantage in normal-space combat. Since n-space combat is the rule and hyper-space combat is the exception, no navy has ever built a major class of warship with bubble generators.
Because warships in hyper are stripped of both their major passive defense against broadside fire and their longest ranged offensive weapons, conventional tactical wisdom calls for a head-on engagement, the exact reverse of n-space warfare. The idea is that the area of the ship ahead or astern of the impenetrable Warshawski sail is much smaller than its unprotected length, and that the reduction in target area (and hence vulnerability) more than compensates for any loss in firepower.
In terms of maneuver once combat is joined in hyper, the advantage of 'altitude' can become even more crucial than 'crossing the T' in n-space battles. If a portion of one fleet can curl 'over' or 'under' Us opponent, it can fire down (or up) upon the unarmed topsides or bottoms of enemy snips without receiving return fire.
Moreover, rolling ship is not an effective way to break off action under such circumstances, since there is no impeller wedge to hide behind. Obviously, then, any admiral engaged from more than one bearing in hyper-space is in serious trouble.
NAVAL WEAPONRY
The long-range normal-space shipkiller at the beginning of the 20th century of the Diaspora was the impeller-drive missile, capable of maximum accelerations of some 85,000 gravities and fitted with defensive ECM, sidewall penetrators, and laser warheads.
Because even the highest missile velocities are well under that of light, they can be tracked and engaged by antimissile defenses as they close. The ranges at which they can be fired also require that they be capable of active, self-guided homing on their targets, since light-speed transmission limits would quickly render shipboard control arthritic and inaccurate. Because their onboard seeking systems simply can not be as sensitive and capable as those of a full-sized starship, they are particularly susceptible to electronic counter measures, and the fleet whose ECM is superior to its opponents has a marked edge in combat.
The tracking time enjoyed against missiles also means that a captain can employ evasive maneuvers against them. If nothing else, he can roll ship to take the incoming fire against the impenetrable roof or floor of his wedge. In longer range engagements, the flight time of the missile and the acceleration capability of his ship allow him to maneuver well clear of the position his opponent's fire control had predicted at the moment of fire, imposing a still greater strain on an attacking missiles drive and seekers.
All of this requires that for effective missile fire, the missile drive must still be active and capable of terminal attack maneuvers right up to the instant of detonation.
A missile's effective powered flight envelope can be increased by setting it for a lower rate of acceleration, which delays burnout time on its small but powerful impeller drive. Eighty-five thousand gravities represents the maximum attainable acceleration, used for snapshots at closer ranges in order to achieve the shortest possible flight times. At this acceleration rate, the missile has a maximum powered endurance of sixty seconds, which restricts it to a powered engagement envelope (assuming target and firer were at rest relative to one another at the moment of fire) of approximately 1,500,000 kilometers and a terminal velocity of approximately 50,000 KPS. By setting the drive down to 42,500 gravities, time to burnout can be extended to 180 seconds, producing a maximum powered engagement range of 6,755,000 kilometers and a terminal velocity of 75,000 KPS. Lower accelerations are possible, but the maximum range and velocity actually begin to drop as acceleration is further reduced, and most navies adopted hardwired minimum settings in the vicinity of 42,500 g. The RMN, however, had not, as it believed there were instances in which absolute engagement range and velocity were less important than powered flight time to follow an opponent's maneuvers. All of these attack envelopes, of course, can be radically extended or reduced by the relative velocities and accelerations of the ships engaged.
Because the chance of knocking a missile down increases geometrically in the last 50,000 or 60,000 kilometers of its run, as it steadies down on its final attack vector, direct hits against modern point defense are virtually unheard of. As a result, the standard megaton-range nuclear warhead was falling into general disuse for ship-to-ship combat by Honor Harrington's time, replaced by the laser head. The terminal bus of a laser head mounts sophisticated targeting systems and powerful attitude thrusters to enable it to align itself so as to direct the greatest number of bomb-pumped laser beams at the target, but it is also designed to have a 'porcupine' effect, radiating lasers in all directions. Each laser inflicts less damage than a direct hit could have, but the chances of a hit—even multiple hits—from a single missile are greatly increased. Not only does a laser head's stand-off range lessen point defense s chance to kill it short of detonation, but the cluster effect allows each to cover a much greater volume of space.
Active antimissile defenses consist of countermissiles, laser clusters, and (in navies further from 'state of the art' hardware) autocannon. Countermissiles are much smaller versions of shipkillers, with more limited endurance and no warheads but capable of even higher acceleration. Their weapon is their impeller wedge. If any portion of it impinges on an attacking missile's active wedge, both vaporize as their drives burn out; if the target's drive has already burned out, the 'grav shear' of the counter missile's wedge is more than adequate to rip it apart. Because of their overpowered drives, however, maximum effective counter missile range is seldom more than 1,000,000 kilometers or so.
If the countermissiles miss their prey, stopping them is up to the computer-commanded laser clusters. Unlike missiles, these require direct hits, but by the time they come into play, their target is normally steadying down for its final attack run, which gives them much simpler fire solutions.
In some navies, the lasers were backed by a last-ditch autocannon defense. The theory was simple: throw so many shells that they built a wall of metal in the missiles' paths. Given missiles' closing velocities, any hit could be counted on to vaporize them, but the development of laser heads made autocannon largely irrelevant. When a missile can attack from 20,000 or 30,000 kilometers, no last-ditch ballistic projectile can reach it in time.
Note that all of the above comments apply only to engagements under impeller drive. All normal space combats are, of course, fought out under impeller drive, as are those in hyper-space but outside the boundaries of a grav wave. Within a grav wave, however, where movement is possible only under Warshawski sail, missiles cannot be used. Only energy weapons are effective there, and combat under those conditions tends to be very close and extremely brutal.
The energy weapons of choice are the laser and graser, of which the graser has both a longer range and greater effect. But grasers are considerably more massive than lasers, so most ships have mixed batteries, accepting the lower effectiveness of the laser in order to mount greater numbers of weapons (which let them engage greater numbers of targets) while retaining the 'smashing' ability of the graser. Ships smaller than light cruisers are normally so cramped for weapons space that they have pure laser energy armaments.
Another energy weapon, though seldom used at this period, was the energy torpedo, which fired what were for all intents and purposes packets of plasma confined in electromagnetic bottles. Energy torpedoes moved at near-light speeds, which made them very difficult for point defense to engage, but the energy torpedo had no homing capability. This made it a purely ballistic weapon, so the initial (and only) fire control solution was far more critical than for missiles, and the endurance of its 'bottle' was barely more than one second, limiting absolute energy torpedo range to 300,000 kilometers or so. In addition, the fact that they were totally ineffective against an intact sidewall restricted them to down the throat or up the kilt shots, which made them of strictly limited utility. Despite this, some navies' capital ships (the RMNs among them) incorporated light torpedo batteries for use if the enemy's T' could be crossed or if his sidewall failed due to other battle damage.
A new development, the grav lance, offered the ability to burn out a sidewall by hitting it with a disrupting burst of focused gravitic energy, but this weapon had a maximum effective range of little more than 100,000 kilometers. It was also extremely slow firing, mass intensive, and temperamental, and very few captains were willing to sacrifice displacement which could be used for tried and proven weapons to squeeze in something that might work... if they could survive to get into its range of the enemy.
