Concentration 2

There were a variety of patterns in which large railguns were fired.

Sequential fire, sometimes called sustained fire, is where every gun with a line of shot was fired in such a way that the time between rods was identical. The timing for a given ship could be found by taking the sum of turrets being fired and dividing it by 3 minutes. Turrets had to fire both of their guns at the same time so as to not twist the turrets, so individual shots were impossible.

Sequential fire was best utilized when 'suppressing' an enemy formation or finishing off crippled ships.

Semi sequential fire shares many of the same properties of sequential fire, but had a completely different purpose. Semi sequential fired two turrets at once, and was commonly used for range finding. This was irrelevant now that ARC and Don had taken the scouting mantle.

Semi broadside doesn't always involve firing half of the available guns, just more than two turrets worth. This was used to 'march' shots in on a target. By keeping time between shots down but firing enough rods to cover an area close to the size of a full broadside, it made it possible to close the firing solution to the true values.

Full broadside was just firing all guns at once. Nothing fancy but damage.

Concentration fire is considered the most difficult, niche, and complicated, but it is absolutely devastating if done properly.

Most of the difficulty stems from the source of its potency, the coordination of several ships' main batteries on a single target. Getting all of them to have accuracy was the first bit. Ranging rod signals would get mixed up if more of them were fired in a close space.

Don and his ship had demonstrated the ability to nullify this issue.

Also a source of difficulty was actually being sure that all ships were firing at the same target. The standard engagement range could make it hard to determine if one ship's target was actually showing up on another's sensors.

Once again, ARC had demonstrated its ability to solve this issue.

The final source of difficulty was syncing up the rods to the greatest effect. The 'trigger' of the railgun was actually pulled three seconds before the rod left the barrel (but not the acceleration field) of the cannon. There was no standardization in the training that determined when, after ordering a launch, the 'trigger' was pulled. The reason primarily being that it was never considered important.

Through the calculation (and rigorous field testing) done by scientists studying how to better use available weaponry, an optimal time-frame for multiple impacts was found. This period of time, roughly half a second for the largest ships and decreasing from there, was where forces imparted onto a ship would 'stack' in a rather unhealthy way.

For the sake of simplification, the largest caliber of railgun will be used. Examples are best demonstrated at their extreme of course.

When the rod first makes contact, the hardened tip will broach the surface of the usually metal armor. This behavior continues as it would for a slower kinetic projectile for approximately a tenth of a meter's worth of distance.

After this point, both the rod and the armor it is in contact with fail to take on a form. The massive amounts of energy imparted turning either into heat from friction or quite literally changing the composition of the atoms involved.

The 'projectile' is now acting less as a kinetic force, but more similarly to how a shaped charge (look up HEAT or 'shaped charge' mechanics, it is interesting I promise) might behave. Obviously, the level of energies are on two entirely different magnitudes.

Now taking on extensive levels of heat capable of simply MELTING their way through metals, what where once rods continue towards the center of the ship.

Or at least that would be the case if it were not for the integrated ceramic plates.

These plates of the hardest and most heat resistant materials available are usually half a meter thick and alternate between layers of softer, but ultimately cheaper and more shock absorbent, metal. These plates, much like the metal armor of the ship, is angled way so as to maximize the amount of ceramic in the now molten blob's way.

A welcome accompaniment to this increase in thickness is that the hot mass of matter and energy is acting more akin to liquid or gas, and its angle of approach will be further decreased as it makes contact with the harder and less prone to melting surface.

The plates still have to contend (and often fail) against the kinetic energy of the soup, but on most large ships there are several layers of this ceramic, further negating its progress with each iteration.

The problem with these ceramic plates is their extreme brittleness. The correlation between "Hard" and "Brittle" has proven itself time and again to be a direct one.

As a function of their inflexibility these plates, thick as they may be, are extremely vulnerable to cracking under vibration. Cracking which a part-liquid, part-gaseous, part-plasma cloud of matter can exploit and breach.

A secondary weakness is that when solid rods hit these plates (rods that have not plasmified yet) they have a tendency to 'dive' into the armor. This means they have less total armor to travel through and are more likely to cause spalling. Usually this is mitigated by covering the plates with a layer of denser metal, usually heat resistant like tungsten.

Combat had shown time and again that these layers were still vulnerable to being sheared off by a hypersonic splash of formless matter, an issue that plagued the thicker standard metal composite that made up the majority of the armor.

It was the glaring weakness to vibration that the egg-heads based this 'golden' time period of only half a second on.

A high concentration of impacts in short succession would impart more force into the ship, and with it more vibration.