Plasma Torpedo

This is a "Stub", or a short article with little useful information.  Any editor with more information about this subject is invited to help improve it.

Plasma Torpedo

   The Confederacy warship weapon commonly known as a Plasma Torpedo is not a solid munition.  It is a ball of high-energy plasma contained in a magnetic 'bottle'.  A Confederacy Navy Plasma Torpedo Launcher creates the bottle, fills it with plasma, and then ejects the bottle towards a target.  Fans of 1960's television will recognize this as the old Star Trek "Photon Torpedo".
   The magnetic bottle will rupture if it contacts solid matter or several types of Force Fields, or in any event after several seconds.  As long as the torpedo reaches the target before the bottle dissipates, the target will become bathed in high-energy plasma.  An armored warship may survive this, but if nothing else all sensors within the bath will be destroyed.

Confederacy Version

   The Confederacy Navy's version is generated and launched by a massive weapon system which requires huge amounts of power to operate.  The weapon system's maximum range depends upon two factors: how long the magnetic bottle can last, and how fast the bottle is moving.  The launcher installed on the Castles creates a bottle that lasts about 3 seconds, and it spits the bottle out moving about 35 kps.  The bottle travels approximately 98 Km in that time, making the Plasma Torpedo one of the shortest-range weapons in our arsenal.  The First Command has:

   The ship's primary weapon was the "Plasma Torpedo Launcher" in a nose mount where it could only fire forward. It was steerable over about 15 degrees from the ship's centerline, so it could shoot at anything in an arc about 30 degrees across and was thus completely worthless if the ship wasn't pointed pretty much directly at the target. 

and

   After that we settled down for a rational test program, beating up asteroids and getting used to how to use the weapons. The Plasma Torpedos were moving just under 35 kps (relative to the ship) when they left the launcher, and the bottle collapsed on its own just under three seconds after launch. Together they gave us a pretty hard outer limit for range, about 98 kilometers out.
   There was no theoretical lower range, but firing it at something touching the 'barrel' of the launcher would have undesirable effects on the launcher, right? Don't use this weapon on a ship that is docked and is boarding you unless you are willing to take damage yourself. 

   On the other hand, the Plasma Torpedo was also one of the most destructive weapons available to us for the first several years of the Swarm War.

Sa'arm Version

   The only version of Plasma Torpedo that the Sa'arm have been found to use is launched from a local-space 'bomber' that Central Command code-named Lima.  The Lima is a three-crew-unit space-only small craft that mounts two Plasma Torpedo projectors.
   These projectors appear to be one-shot devices.   The Fleet has encountered literally tens of thousands of these craft, and every one of them either:

• was destroyed before launching any PTs,
• was destroyed after launching one PT,
• was destroyed after launching two PTs, or
• launched two PTs and evaded destruction.

   No Lima has ever been detected launching more than two Plasma Torpedoes.
   The Sa'arm version of Plasma Torpedo travels at roughly the same speed as the Confederacy version and it lasts about the same time after launch, so both versions have roughly the same maximum range.  The Sa'arm version, however, has roughly ten times the energy contained in the bottle as the Confederacy version, making it that much more destructive. Independent Command has:

   The one plasma torpedo that hit Nice turned her into a mangled wreck, killing about a third of her crew.  If the other torpedo had hit, or if the bomber had rammed, we probably would have lost the whole ship.
   We don't know what happened to Kestrel.  We know she got one of the bombers -one of the Shiros saw it explode- and after their run there were no more bombers, but we don't know what happened between those two points in time.  Kestrel exploded just like Mama had.  She was there, then she was just gone.  There was no point in looking for survivors. 

   Ending This Mess has:

   Killing a plasma torpedo's launch platform did no good, after it launched.  A plasma torpedo had no homing abilities; it went where it was aimed and it wasn't that fast.  You could watch it move, and if it was on an intersecting course -closing range and no lateral movement- you could try to dodge out of the way.  That was one reason we didn't sweat the short range on our own PTs; if you fired it from farther out it would probably miss anyway, so why worry about extending the range?  Anyway, every ship in the assault force did what it could to not be where the PTs were going.  A lot of the PTs missed.
   A lot didn't miss.  The only weapons we had that could realistically target an incoming PT was our PDLs, the Point Defense Laser mounts that most of our ships had.  One hit on a PT from a good-sized laser would disrupt the containment field, pretty much the same thing as happened when a PT hit a working shield.  So, if you hit a PT more than a second or so before impact, it was pretty much harmless.  It would stress your shield, but that was it.
   Hitting a PT closer than one second out, or disrupting two or more farther out, would still take out your shield but do no real damage to the ship inside.  Maybe you'd lose some sensor arrays, but they were considered 'consumables' anyway.  Every ship had multiple backups.
   Leaving the ship inside with no shield at all for a split second before the backup shield, in its weaker all-around configuration, could come up.
   Leaving the ship inside with no shield at all for a split second when one -or more- of those monster Sa'arm PTs hit.  As I said, Kevin lost about half of his ships within a span of four or five seconds. 

   The Confederacy Navy's R&D establishment wants to examine an intact Lima in hopes that we can learn how the Sa'arm create and launch their PTs without the Castles' massive launcher system as well as why the Sa'arm PTs are so much more powerful than ours.  The combat forces accept that request, but the Limas are too dangerous to let live.  The Confederacy Navy has a standing official policy of destroying any Limas detected as a first-rank priority.  Until some method of mitigating the damage is invented, collection of a Lima to examine is simply too dangerous to attempt.

Classes Armed With Plasma Torpedos

• Castle Corvettes
• Lima Bombers

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))