Actually, not usually; this is one of the odder areas of Honorverse technology. The kinetic energy of the missiles themselves actually has quite a lot more punch than the warhead they carry; it’s just they can’t normally effectively apply that force as a weapon thanks to sidewalls and point defense. So the technically more powerful missiles are relegated to just getting the relatively weak warheads up close, since the warheads can actually attack the ship and not just go splat.
And really, if the missiles could make physical contact with the hull of the target ship, presuming they are not going ballistic at that point, it would be demonstrably more effective just to plow the missile’s wedge into the ship and let it tear the target to scrap.
Which, incidentally, is exactly how Countermissiles and anti-aircraft missiles are typically demonstrated to work in-universe, using their wedges as a weapons.
I remember having a discussion about this topic elsewhere.
Apparently, the impeller wedge of a countermissile is, if not equal in strength to that of a missile, at least comparable in strength to that of a missile. Two comparable-strength impeller wedges crashing into each other will basically cause both objects’ drive systems to go boom.
The impeller wedge of a starship, though, is so huge that the impact of a missile’s impeller wedge with it won’t even be felt by the starship. The starship’s wedge will utterly annihilate the missile’s much-weaker impellers, but not the other way around.
Well, if the missile (and its wedge) can squeeze inside of the wedge of the target ship to make a physical hull contact, then it can presumably do the same thing to make a wedge-hull contact without crossing the wedges.
Ah, I see where my confusion was.
You mentioned countermissiles attacking their missile-targets with their own impeller wedges. What I didn’t catch was that you were implying that the countermissile tries to strike its wedge directly against the hull of the enemy missile.
This is incorrect. According to Missile | Honorverse | Fandom :
“Counter-missiles typically had no warheads; they merely attempted to overlap their over-powered, out-sized impeller wedges with the wedges of the attacking missiles. The mutual destruction, as the gravitic stress vaporized the nodes of both missiles, was the reason counter-missiles used their impeller wedges as their primary missile-killing weapon.”
However, anti-air missiles do kill with their wedge.
[QUOTE=The Short Victorious War]
The pilot twisted the controls in a frantic evasion maneuver, but the Viper had an optical lock now, and his speed was too low to generate a miss. He did his best, but it was too late for his best to be enough.
Constance Palmer-Levy had one fleeting instant to realize what was happening, and then the edge of the Viper’s impeller wedge struck.
The air car tore apart in a hurricane of splintered composites. Its hydrogen reservoirs exploded in balls of brilliant blue flame, and the commander of Internal Security and her bodyguards cascaded down across Nouveau Paris in a grisly rain.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Flag In Exile]
That was when the SAM executed its terminal attack run.
The small, high-tech kamikaze had lost its target when Troubridge dove for the deck, but its seekers had reacquired lock, and it came slashing in at over ten kilometers per second. Even so, the pilot had almost denied it a hit, and its impeller wedge’s leading edge caught the pinnace’s rearing nose one bare meter aft of the radome.
A guillotine of gravitic energy slammed through the fuselage like an axe through butter, and the raw kinetic energy of the impact tore the first ten meters of the pinnace apart. Troubridge, his copilot, and his com tech died instantly, and the impact energy completed what the tail strike had begun. The dying pinnace twisted impossibly, snapping all the way up and over, then slammed into the ground like a dolphin arcing backwards into the water. But it was no dolphin, and the spaceport approaches were paved with forty centimeters of ceramacrete that was much, much harder than water.
[/QUOTE]
Which makes me wonder: If anti-aircraft missiles have their own impeller wedges, and these impeller wedges destroy any aircraft they intersect, what happens to all that air that the impeller is plowing through? The wedge should be doing the same thing to air molecules that it’s doing to the target it eventually strikes.
It probably does. An impeller operating in atmosphere probably generates all sorts of free radicals, which would then recombine into nasty things like ozone and NO[sub]x[/sub]. Note that impellers aren’t used in atmosphere for anything but military purposes; this is probably one reason why.
And an impeller wedge certainly can shred a warship, if it’s somehow close enough to make hull contact. This is basically how Harkness destroyed That Bitch’s battlecruiser: By tricking the electronics in one of the pinnaces into turning on the wedge while still docked.
Was it Harkness? I thought it might have been Scotty Tremaine or one of the other LTs running amok.
Scotty did the actual modification, but it was Harkness’s idea and he told him what to do.
[QUOTE=In Enemy Hands]
Scotty Tremaine crawled out of the pinnace’s electronics bay and scrubbed sweat out of his eyes. He’d never even imagined doing what he’d just done, and the ease with which he’d accomplished it was more than a little chilling. There were many better small craft flight engineers than he—Horace Harkness, for one—but it hadn’t taken a genius to carry out the modifications, and that was scary. Of course, there hadn’t been any security features to stop him, since no one in his right mind would have considered that someone might do such an insane thing on purpose.
But it was done, now, and he hoped to hell that Harkness was as right about this as he’d been about everything else. His track record had been perfect so far—or as far as they knew, at any rate—but it seemed unfair to dump so much responsibility on one man.
[/QUOTE]