In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V-ARC (46 page)

The early missiles were large and expensive. Only a few could be carried on the largest ships, but a hit was essentially guaranteed to completely destroy the target. These weapons had no warhead. Rather, the missile sought to slip between the planes of the target’s wedge and ram its own wedge into the target directly. Then as now, a wedge was completely irresistible by any known spacecraft building material. This lasted for roughly a decade and spurred several star nations research programs into producing the first generation gravitic sidewall generators. These were artificial gravity waves powerful enough to burn out an attacking missile’s drives, vaporize the debris, and prevent damage to a ship.

The defense was not perfect. It was soon learned that only the side aspects of the wedge could be closed with sidewalls. The bow and stern aspects remained undefended, permitting the oft mentioned “down-the-throat” and “up-the-kilt” shots. Nevertheless the sidewall inspired missile designers to find alternate means of damaging a target. The reappearance of large multimegaton nuclear warheads on missiles dates from this period. These first attempts tried to use the missile to move a payload close to an enemy starship rather than killing the ship with the missile’s wedge. These early impeller drive space-to-space nuclear weapons were mostly ineffective. The open ends of the wedge presented too small a target to incoming missiles, and the weapons were not maneuverable enough to drive around an imposed wedge or sidewall and detonate inside the perimeter. Tacticians also tried precisely timing the detonation of the weapon some distance ahead of the target in such a way that the ship flew into the radiation and debris from the explosion. The target’s own wedge would then act something like a funnel to direct the blast onto the ship. These early nuclear “standoff” weapons were hindered by their low yield fission-fusion warheads, but did provide valuable lessons on precision timing in high crossing velocity missile engagements.

The gods that govern arms races abhor imbalance, and the sidewall’s impenetrability did not last long. In 1298, research yielded the first practical sidewall penetrator. The term actually describes a bewildering array of different methods and technologies of getting an attack through a sidewall. Early devices took many forms and it is not entirely clear even today which type came first. Research has uncovered at least seven unique “inventors” of the sidewall penetrator. Whoever invented it, the consensus among historians is that the first widely employed devices used a precisely timed reshaping of the missile’s own impeller wedge in the fraction of a second before contact to temporarily “flicker” the target’s sidewall and allow the weapon to pass through unimpeded. This approach had the downside of destroying the attacking missile’s own drive (and much of its afterbody) rendering it both unable to maneuver inside the target’s wedge and removing its primary means of killing the target. The answer was to merge the standoff nuclear weapon with the sidewall penetrator and use the inert missile front end to carry a nuclear charge into the sidewall perimeter. Careful control of the missile’s impeller power curve, proper construction of the afterbody, and a powerful pressor field which threw the payload clear prior to the impeller ring’s vaporization allowed the warhead portion to survive long enough to detonate within the target’s sidewall. Aside from the obvious improvements in understanding of gravitics, considerable advances in computing were also required to ensure that the nuclear explosive would properly detonate after the warhead was through the first sidewall and before the inert missile body was shredded by the intact opposite sidewall. It was not uncommon in this period for these “sidewall contacting nuclear weapons” or “contact nukes” (as they came to be known) to detonate on the opposite side of the target from the sidewall that they pierced. Weapons that detonated prematurely outside the sidewall still had a chance to overload the generators by the sheer amount of energy dumped into the sidewall by the explosion. This had the happy effect (for the attacker) of weakening the sidewall for follow on attacks. The invulnerability of the sidewall had lasted less than fifty years and was ended forever.

Spacecraft designers responded with vigorous innovation in defensive measures. Early research in electromagnetic and gravitic deception and countermeasures renewed the importance of the ancient and archaically named art of “electronic” countermeasures. Navies turned to mass driver technology for point defense. The point defense autocannon found in some third rate navies today and even on truly ancient reserve Battle Fleet vessels in the Solarian Navy, are direct descendents of weapons developed in this period as a response to the early contact nuke.

The stage was now set for an arms development race that has continued for the last seven hundred years. Military spacecraft designers devised increasingly effective ways to deceive, destroy, or block the attacking missiles. Weapon designers invented increasingly effective seekers, sidewall penetrators, and warheads. The evolutionary development over the period between about 1300 and 1800 was sometimes punctuated by bursts of revolutionary activity that introduced competing technologies on both sides of the offensive/defensive divide. The development of the inertial compensator in 1412 allowed larger starships which could carry more massive multilayered armor on their outer skins. The new armor reduced attacking energy in stages and was the first practical scheme capable of withstanding the detonation of contact nukes within several hundred meters of the hull. The damage from near misses was still enormous but the core of the ship protected vital systems and spaces from the worst effects and allowed it to continue to fight. Weapon designers responded by steadily increasing warhead yields until they reached the limit of the age old fission, fission-fusion, and fission-fusion-fission nuclear device technologies.

Further change hinged on many years of work on practical miniaturization of gravitic generators in the commercial sector. Their introduction made possible the long sought after pure fusion warhead in the 1650s. This was a nuclear bomb whose only fuels were relatively common light elements like hydrogen and its isotopes. Cheap gravitic implosion made it economical to fit devices with previously unheard of yields into a missile body. The pure fuel made it possible to predict the output radiation of the bomb explosion precisely and ultimately control (to a small degree) the spectrum and duration of the explosion’s radiation. Since most nuclear weapon damage to space targets is caused by X-ray radiation from the explosion, the ability to tune that radiation, even slightly, made the defender’s problem significantly more difficult. Missile warhead yields of hundreds of megatons became commonplace in this time period and heavy weapons in the gigaton range were not unheard of. Ship to ship actions once again became brutally short. Warhead designers quickly realized that they could change the compression pattern and sequence of the new gravitic imploders to somewhat shape the resulting release of radiation. In 1669, a series of tests by several navies quietly confirmed the ability of the new warheads compressing fuel in different patterns to produce modest increases in stand-off ranges for impeller missiles in some cases. The necessary software to sequence the imploders and optimize the blast pattern at the moment of detonation appeared in routine upgrades all over known space, because essentially no new hardware was required. Little remarked at the time, these early nuclear directed energy weapons (NDEW) portended more lethal technologies to come.

The defense was not at all idle during this period. Advances in gravitic deception technologies raced neck-and-neck with seeker improvements. Sidewall systems largely took the lead in thwarting penetrator improvements and improved materials and designs kept the defense almost in step as missile warheads grew. The pure fusion warhead might have had more disruptive consequences if the impeller drive countermissile had not appeared on scene in 1701. Essentially a smaller version of the shipkiller, this weapon destroyed incoming missiles by wedge to wedge interaction. This added a new depth to the missile defense problem which allowed nearby ships to defend each other cooperatively as never before. The countermissile dramatically reduced the effectiveness of shipkillers. This was followed some eighty years later by the widespread introduction of numerous small point defense laser weapons. The new active defenses ensured that even a weapon whose seeker was not decoyed by the target’s ECM would be stopped short of the sidewall. The point defense laser cluster created the final layer of light speed defense that resulted in the now familiar geometrically increased chance of the missile being destroyed in the last 50,000 to 60,000 km of its run. Hits against intact defenses became rare. This relegated the impeller drive missile to a counter sidewall role in which the best that could typically be achieved was a close aboard detonation of a multiple missile salvo to burn out sidewall generators and soften the target up for an energy range attack. Sidewall burning was in fact the end to which the largest pure fusion weapons were built.

That most navies kept building dual mode (sidewall burning and contact nuke) impeller missiles after this point surprises some. Dual mode weapons provided tactical flexibility. Opportunities occasionally arose in large counter-sidewall salvos to get a contact nuke through. Under those conditions, the ability to have a dual mode weapon capable of performing both as a contact nuke and in an anti-sidewall role gave a chance for a decisive strike at the slight cost of the space and mass of sidewall penetrating equipment and extra software. The RMN chose to retain the dual mode capability, and it is became known colloquially to old spacers (such as the author) as “boom” or “burn” presets. Other navies followed the same logic to the same capability.

Though retained, “boom” settings were rarely useful, so missile designers seeking ways to increase sidewall burning effectiveness kept trying for longer standoff range. The development of another generation of powerful practical micronized grav generators marked the next evolutionary step in missile warfare in 1806 with the introduction of the first nuclear gravitically directed energy weapon (NGDEW). The key components were grav lens arrays derived from those that had dramatically increased shipboard laser/graser effectiveness roughly fifty years earlier. The very first of these arrays was called a “plate array” and simply reflected the bomb’s energy off a flat artificial grav wave similar to an impeller or sidewall behind the warhead. Research continually tightened the focus of the grav arrays as impeller missile standoff ranges grew from tens of hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers over the ensuing decades. The early grav lens arrays were quite large, however and frequently displaced the sidewall penetrators until further refinements could reduce their sizes. By 1826, a state of the art RMN impeller drive nuclear armed missile could boast a standoff range of 8,000 to 10,000 kilometers in sidewall burning mode.
 

That same year, a small Solarian defense contractor, Aberu and Harmon, developed the unique combination of a state of the art grav lens array with a series of multiple submunitions carrying rods that emitted short wavelength X-ray laser light when exposed to the broadband X-ray pulse from a nuclear explosion. The idea was that these rods would produce intense laser beams which would impact on a target whose sidewall was weakened by the portion of the blast front that did not impact the rods. The slight delay produced by the lasing process ensured that the bomb energy which missed the rods would hit and weaken the target sidewall before the laser beams arrived. Initially called a laser enhanced nuclear gravitically directed energy weapon (LENGDEW), the device quickly earned the handier title of “laser head.” It promised to end the stalemate in missile arms and net the first star nation adopting it serious advantages over those which did not. Aberu and Harmon leveraged heavily to develop the laser rods, specialized submunitions to carry them, and telemetry links that allowed the main missile body and its deployed warheads to operate in concert. The Solarian League Navy, however, was less than enthusiastic about the effect of a potentially destabilizing weapon on its unchallenged naval supremacy. Strong Aberu family influence within the SLN and the lure of being first eventually won modest funding for a short series of live tests in 1833.
 

The tests proved embarrassing failures. Characterized by one Solarian League Battle Fleet observer as “anemic.” the system’s submunitions proved difficult to position accurately, focusing was much harder than predicted, and the beam output itself was too low to make an effective weapon. Some of these problems were easy to solve, but others could not be overcome with the technology of the day. The lasing process in the rods, in particular, was significantly less efficient than predicted. Recriminations, accusations of falsified data, and scandal ensued. The resulting media attention brought word of the laser head briefly into the public eye where it came to the attention of Astral Energetics, Ltd. Sensing an opportunity, the company bought out Aberu and Harmon, collected all existing research materials, and began a long term incremental development program. Astral’s huge sales of gravitic and nuclear physics packages for military, mining, and scientific uses meant a steady flow of resources to their extensive project team located amidst the sprawling industry of the 70 Virginis system. Their work took over thirty years, but it produced the first complete laser-head-armed impeller-drive anti-ship missile system in 1866. The key advance that made the laser head practical was the perfection of a gravitic lens array with a much tighter focus than previous units. This new array increased the bomb power fed to the laser rods and resulted in increased laser output. It also had the happy side effect of directing much more of the bomb output energy that missed the laser rods into a narrower cone. This dramatically increased standoff range and made the weapon significantly more effective against targets protected by active defenses.
 

Once they had a product, however, Astral found that they could no longer interest their intended buyer. Time and negative political repercussions from the Aberu and Harmon tests had solidified the SLN’s habitual disinterest in destabilizing technology into an abiding disdain for anything that altered the status quo. Convinced that the weapon was nothing more than a passing novelty, the SLN rejected the best efforts of Astral’s sales department and lobbyists for years. Desperate, Astral eventually began advertising the weapon for export. The Imperial Andermani Navy was their first official buyer in early 1872. Successful, though infrequent, use of laser heads against pirates in Silesia over the ensuing decade encouraged the People’s Republic to begin acquiring laser heads and the capability to produce them in the early 1880s in the midst of its forcible expansion into much of the Haven sector.