[Space] Adapting "Honorverse" Concepts to GURPS

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Yeah, that would be the 'only almost certain' end.

Real world CIWS, like Honorverse laser clusters, can and do fire under fully automatic control. .

From a couple books ago and probably in the off-shoot "Shadows" series a bad guy smuggler had one of the borderline headcases aboard the smuggling ship flip out and decide to resist a boarding from a RMN cruiser (The Hexapuma IIRC). He blew up one of the cruisers pinnaces with the smuggling ship's defensive laser clusters.

The RMN cruiser was far too close for it's "conventional" weapons but there was a contingency macro in the firing computer for using the cruiser's own laser clusters in such a situation.

So the RMN fire control officer activated this pre-made firing plan and the ship's computer used the laser clusters to completely disable but not destroy the smuggling ship under automatic control.

There is also some discussion in A Rising Thunder about how anyone with any sense sets us a "Case Omega" weapons launch and it was agreed that it's done as a macro with a simple activation code or even a Big Red Button. Obviously a lot of automation.

This is also obvious from anyone who's totaled up the number of missiles involved in a single volley between major detachments of pod-carrying wallers. By the late books of the series the numbers are frankly ridiculous. The computers are doing the unit-by-unit spadework. The humans are just supervising and strategizing.