Weapons technology in the Honorverse

In David Weber's Honor Harrington military science fiction novels, warfare is naturally ubiquitous. Two thousand years in the future, it remains true that humans will devise ever more ingenious ways of causing death and destruction.

Starship and space weapons

Small craft such as shuttles and pinnaces do not use starship weapons, but larger versions of personal weapons. They are not intended to fight starships. In Shadow of Saganami we learn that pinnaces are equipped with an equivalent of starship point-defence lasers which can be quite deadly to unarmoured merchant ships at close range.

Lasers

Lasers are the most common energy weapon. Their lenses are several meters across; they have effective ranges of about 1,000,000 kilometers (500,000 km against targets with sidewalls).

A majority of ships also mount clusters of smaller, point-defence lasers for the anti-missile duty. In the modern navies, point-defence lasers have replaced older point-defence projectile guns.

In Shadow of Saganami, it is revealed that a ship's broadside lasers can telescope out from the ship and lock their lenses into holes in the sidewall. It is also established that the lenses are not optical but gravitic.

Grasers

Lasers operating in the gamma ray range; not much is known about them. The name is an abbreviation of gamma ray amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

Missiles

The most common weapons are impeller drive missiles. A typical missile masses 80 tons and can accelerate at 88,000 Gs for 180 seconds before its drive burns out, giving a powered flight range of over six million kilometers. Naturally, in space, it is possible to reach a target beyond powered range, but it is very easy to avoid a coasting missile. Even within powered range, electronic countermeasures and evasive systems, point defense and countermissiles are effective, and a direct hit on a defended ship is basically impossible. Missiles spin while in flight, to make it difficult for point defense lasers to get a clear shot past the impeller wedge.

Centuries ago, in the time of Edward Saganami, missiles used fusion warheads in the megaton range. Such weapons had to get very close to the target to do damage, and point defense was improving. The nuclear warhead was superseded as a ship-killer by the laser head. This weapon used the high energy electromagnetic radiation produced during a nuclear explosion to pump about twenty-five X-ray lasers. As the initial radiation entered the gain medium, the gamma rays were amplified and fired, after which the gain medium would have been destroyed by the explosions after affects, resulting in a brief flare of multiple high-energy gamma-ray laser beams. Unlike a pure fusion warhead, meaningful damage could be dealt to anything within 25,000 kilometers of the detonation. It was more effective at penetrating sidewalls than a pure fusion explosive. (In the real world, this exact weapon – but with poorer performance – was designed by Edward Teller; he called it "Project Excalibur".) Nowadays, starships carry mostly laser heads, some nuclear warheads, and some electronic warfare missiles.

Advances in warship technology during the series include the development of the MDM (multi-drive missile). First built by Manticore's researchers, these missiles use the ancient concept of staging. They have ranges approaching thirty million kilometers. They cannot be carried by smaller starships, but this is a minor limitation. When they were first introduced, they made the Royal Manticoran Navy nearly invincible and contributed greatly to their victory in the First Havenite War. During the five-year armistice, the Havenites copied the weapon.

Against immobile targets, no warhead is necessary. A starship can approach the target at 0.8 c and launch missiles that will accelerate to 0.99 c. At this speed, even nuclear warheads are pointless; the kinetic energy of the relativistic missiles can tear a planet apart. This form of strategic bombardment is banned under the Eridani Accords, enforced by the Solarian League with a penalty of loss of sovereignty.

Missile tubes resemble huge pulse guns – they use antigravity to launch the missile, giving it a boost in speed. They were not always designed this way; it was developed as an improvement to counter the increasing effectiveness of point defense.

Before this development, missile pods existed: clusters of single-shot launchers designed to be towed by tractor beam. When mass-driver launch tubes were developed, they could not be fitted to pods. Pod-launched missiles were therefore slow and obsolete.

At the beginning of the First Havenite War, the Royal Manticoran Navy developed a miniaturized mass driver that could be fitted in a pod. Immediately, pods became crucial to warfare again, as a ship could tow pods containing far more tubes than its broadside. As pods could not be reloaded under combat conditions, this made the first salvos of a battle the decisive ones.

The dynamic of war changed again with the design of the "pod-layer" ships. These vessels sacrificed aft chase armament, considerable magazine space, and some structural integrity to store enormous racks of expendable missile pods. With each broadside, a new set of pods could be dropped, fired, and discarded. Now, starships could carry sufficient missile firepower to destroy considerably superior enemy vessels. (Energy firepower had always been similarly excessive.) Pod-layer designs are predominant among new-build superdreadnoughts, and the first pod battlecruisers have entered service.

Missile tubes have also improved. Now, they have much wider fields of fire. Some vessels, such as the Edward Saganami-C class, mount no fore or aft missile tubes, as the broadside launchers can cover the entire horizontal plane.

Countermissiles

Countermissiles are much smaller than ship-killers, and are usually fired from dedicated launchers. It is possible to fire many in one casing from a standard missile tube, similarly to a shotgun. Countermissiles have no warheads; they merely will attempt to overlap their impeller wedges with those of the attacker's missiles. This overlap is destructive to both missiles.

Energy torpedoes

Not actually torpedoes of any kind, they are self-sustaining masses of plasma that can be projected against targets at ranges of up to 300,000 km. They are very destructive and capable of rapid fire, but are completely stopped by sidewalls.

Grav lance

The grav lance is huge, short-ranged and requires almost all the firing ships' power. However, it is the only weapon designed to cause damage to sidewalls, and is quite effective against them. Admiral Sonja Hemphill promoted this weapon.

The Crippler

A more advanced form of the grav lance, the Crippler was intended to not just destroy the target's sidewalls but overload its engines. However, it actually only worked against merchant ships.

Personal and ground-based weapons

Pulsers

Pulsers are mass drivers using gravity rather than electromagnetism to drive projectiles. A typical pulser pistol has a caliber of 2 mm and a muzzle velocity of 2000 m/s. "Darts", as the projectiles are known, are often fitted with explosive warheads. It is essentially unheard of for anyone to survive a pulser hit.

Vehicle-based pulsers can achieve tremendous rates of fire, up to 10,000 rounds per second from one barrel. It is unclear how the weapon can be loaded at this rate, or how it can store enough ammunition.

Flechette guns

Similar to pulsers, these weapons are the equivalent of shotguns.

Plasma weapons

These are less common heavy personal weapons. Scotty Tremaine is an expert with a plasma carbine.

Portable missiles

Similar to bazookas, these shoulder-braced launchers fire impeller drive missiles with an acceleration of 3000 Gs. As with ship-fired countermissiles, the wedge is the warhead.

Disruptors

These are ultrasonic weapons, considerably less destructive than pulsers. Honor Harrington lost her left eye to a disruptor shot.