Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington II

[eyl]

That's the Pirate's Bane, commanded by ex-RMN Captain Thomas Bachfisch. He gets drummed out of the RMN (effectively, anyway; he's still technically in the RMN on half-pay) while captaining the War Maiden, aboard which Honor was serving her middie cruise, for letting another warship beat the stuffing out of War Maiden until Honor, serving as acting tac officer, saves his bacon. He also owns and commands the Ambuscade, another armed merchant cruiser.

Thank you, that's the one. Dug up its page on the Honorverse wiki and the Pirates' Bane seems to be another refit freighter. "Armed collier" led me to "collier" on Wikipedia, which turned out to be a fuel tender for coal-fired warships.

It was also all the way over in War of Honor, so no wonder he hasn't turned up yet.

Although unlike the Trojans,Pirate's Bane is actually used as a freighter, rather than a warship.

[Simon_Jester]

\The RMN has stewards for Captain and higher, I see no reason why the PRN wouldn't have similar personnel for command and flag officers. It's "unegalitarian" on one level, but on another level, we really don't want our ship COs and Admirals to be worrying about polishing their own boots, I wouldn't think.

It was very practical for the Legislaturalists, but the Committee is more worried about ideology than practicality in this case- and they associate the practice of having stewards for senior officers with Legislaturalists, with the aristocrats who expected to be waited on hand and foot all the time whether on duty or not. Not with just being a pragmatic thing to ensure that captains don't have to do their own laundry.

I agree with Simon on this one. We don't see her orders, and we see Harkness do more than just "befriend Aubrey." He tries to get Aubrey to talk about the situation, the accomplices and so on. He keeps an eye on him when the confrontation occurs, and he's probably doing even more behind the scenes. MacBride probably ordered him to handle it, but Harkness isn't really a POV character this book; we see what Aubrey sees him doing.

In other words, McBride is delegating the responsibility to Harkness. Rather than try to protect Aubrey herself, she hands the job off to someone else who can do it about as well, so that she can devote her concentration and energy to other things like whipping the overall ship's complement into shape.

Not going to beat a dead horse here, but uh...when the cruisers pass Scheherazade, they have "well over thirty thousand kps" of overtake. Webster fires a full broadside at their chasers, meaning he has effectively made them cross their own T by committing to a stern chase, then making a 90 degree turn to fire, and after firing, completes his turn (Weber is explicit here that Webster is "completing a 180 degree turn to port") and half-rolls to bring Scheherazade's wedge up to block as the cruisers flash by on either side (top/bottom) of her. At over 30,000 kps of overtake, it takes a maximum of 13.3... seconds to go 400,000 kilometers. During that time, Scheherazade, explicitly a converted bulk cargo ship the size of a ship of the wall, with the manueverability of a particularly misshapen brick, makes a 90 degree turn.

Weber's tech bible/pearls of weber time-to-turn figures (a dozen minutes for an SD to turn 90 degrees, 120 seconds for a DD to make a 90 degree turn) are simply not in keeping with what he wrote in his books.

Agreed. "Minutes" is simply not in the cards.

[Ahriman238]

It wasn't like the basic unarmed combat courses the Navy taught its recruits. That was almost more of a stylized form of exercise, not the basis for serious mayhem, because Navy types weren't supposed to indulge in such low-brow combat. They threw megaton-range warheads and beams of coherent light or gamma radiation at one another, and, like most of his fellow recruits, Aubrey had considered his rudimentary hand-to-hand training no more than a concession to military tradition.

Manty naval officers study classical military history, from Hannibal to Clausewitz, they learn to sail a boat and fly a plane, but hand-to-hand is the concession to military tradition they expect never to use?

Marines were different. They were expected to get down in the mud and the blood, and they were entirely serious about learning how to disassemble their fellow humans with bare hands. They were all volunteers, and like most military people from societies with prolong, they'd signed up for long hitches—the minimum was ten T-years—which gave them plenty of time to study their chosen trade.

It's later confirmed that the Navy also uses decade-long hitches, which is less of an issue when you can live for a couple of centuries.

The Royal Manticoran Marines no longer used the rank of gunnery sergeant, but the senior noncom aboard any Queen's ship was still referred to by the ancient title of "Gunny," and that meant this giant was Battalion Sergeant Major Lewis Hallowell—effectively the Bosun's equivalent in Marine Country.

Gunnery Sergeant is the senior Marine noncom.

Her ship had spent ten days orbiting Walther's single inhabited planet, and the way System Governor Hagen had spun out the paperwork on the pirates had confirmed her suspicions. He intended to delay their "trial" until Wayfarer disappeared over the hyper limit, and she knew why. With her out of sight, he could stage manage his hearings to guarantee the pirates walked—or, at worst, received a slap on the wrist—on the basis of some suitable technicality or "ambiguities" in the evidence. But he had no intention of trying that while Honor and her personnel were available to offer testimony to clarify those ambiguities . . . and he knew time was on his side. Every day Honor delayed in Walther was a day she wasn't chasing other pirates, and she found his mask of pious concern over due process and protecting the sovereignty of the Silesian Confederacy more irritating with every conversation.

Well, she'd known what was going to happen from the moment she'd turned the raiders over . . . and she'd warned them, she thought grimly. Of course, she hadn't mentioned that the dispatches she'd left with the local Manticoran attaché would provide each ship of the squadron with positive IDs of her erstwhile prisoners as it arrived. If the governor and his raider allies thought hers was the only Q-ship in the sector—or that she was the only RMN captain prepared to carry out her promises to them—they might just discover their error the hard way.

The Walther Governor is definitely in bed with the pirates, but Honor will ensure the rest of her squadron, the follow-ups and any RMN ship going to Silesia gets that info, along with the pirates' names and faces so they can get a summary execution, just as she promised.

More to the point, every conversation with him was on record, along with his promises that the raiders would be severely punished. When it turned out, as she was certain it would, that nothing of the sort had happened, those recordings would be forwarded to his superiors by Her Majesty's Government. The Star Kingdom seldom involved itself directly in the internal affairs of the Confederacy, but it had done so on occasion, and this was a point she'd discussed in some detail with her superiors before leaving Manticore. Obstructionism by Silesian officials was an old story, and Honor entertained no false hope that it could be eliminated. But the Star Kingdom periodically pruned it back by identifying specific governors whose hands were dirty and going after them with every weapon at its disposal. Even with the current reduction in force levels, Manticore retained more than sufficient nonmilitary clout to squash any given governor. If nothing else, the Board of Trade could simply blacklist Walther for all Manticoran shipping, with devastating consequences for the system's economy. Coupled with official demands for Hagen's recall and prosecution for complicity with the raiders, that was guaranteed to bring his career to a screeching halt. And without his governorship, he had no value to his criminal associates . . . many of whom had a habit of eliminating discarded allies to keep them from turning state's evidence.

How Manticorans deal with the worst of government corruption in Silesia.

Passenger loads for Silesia had dropped radically in the last five or six months, to a point at which Artemis and Athena were barely breaking even. Of course, they'd never been exactly cheap to operate, given their out-sized crews and armaments. At barely a million tons, Artemis wasn't much bigger than most battlecruisers, but she carried three times the crew of a multimillion-ton freighter like Bonaventure, most of them ex-Navy personnel who looked after her weapons systems. She needed to run with almost full passenger loads to show a profit, which wasn't normally a problem, given the security her speed and those same weapons systems offered. Now, however, the situation was so bad even she was badly under booked, and the captain's reference to the fact was as close as she would let herself come to suggesting—again—that her boss stay the hell home where it was safe

So apparently at least some Silesian shipping (fast armed passenger liners) have profit margins so barely ahead of expenses that they start turning a loss almost right away when trouble hits.

Commander Gene Usher, CO HMS Hawkwing, swore softly as he read the message. Hawkwing wasn't the RMN's newest destroyer, but she was a most satisfactory billet for a brand new commander, and Usher was proud of her. He hadn't been looking forward to a six-month deployment to Basilisk Station, even if Basilisk was no longer the punishment station it had been, but he'd adjusted to that . . . and he hated last minute order changes.

He reread the dispatch again, and swore a bit louder. Artemis. At least playing nursemaid to a single ship was easier than sheepherding an entire convoy, and the Atlas-class liners were fast enough to make the passage mercifully short, but Usher had been around. He could read between the lines, and there was only one reason SysCom had appended a copy of her passenger manifest. Two names fairly leapt off the screen at him, and the thought that a vindictive old bastard like Klaus Hauptman had the juice to pull in a desperately needed destroyer just to watch his ass was enough to upset anyone.

Hmmm. In the first book it was mentioned that Honor's first hyper-capable command was the tin-can Hawkwing. Same ship?

For once, Hauptman is innocent. The Admiralty pulled strings to shake loose an escort when they realized that a.) a VIP was going into the near-warzone Silesia has recently become, b.) if he dies, that's the end of the Silesian trade and a political nightmare as people demand to know why the Centrist Government allowed it to happen and c.) they can't stop him from going. Private individual on his own ship.

Traditionally, berthing assignments aboard a Queen's ship were subject to adjustment by mutual consent. Initial assignments were made as personnel reported aboard, but as long as divisional officers were kept informed, the Navy's people were free to swap around as long as the division between ratings, petty officers, and officers was maintained. The Navy had come to that arrangement long ago, though the Marines remained far more formal about the whole thing and required officer approval of changes.

The Navy had also concluded that attempting to enforce celibacy on its mixed crews would not only be a Bad Idea but also doomed to fail, and BuPers had adopted a pragmatic policy over five hundred T-years previously. The only relationships which were absolutely banned were those covered by Article 119: those between officers and or noncoms and any of their own subordinates. Aside from that, personnel were free to make whatever arrangements they chose, and all female personnel received five-year contraceptive implants which could be deactivated upon request. In peacetime, such requests were granted automatically; in wartime, they were granted only if personnel were available to replace the woman making the request. More than that, women who chose to become pregnant were immediately pulled from shipboard duty and assigned to one of the space stations or ground bases, where they could be promptly replaced and transferred to duty without radiation hazards if they did become pregnant. It wasn't fair—women's procreation was more limited, though women could also use a decision to have children to avoid shipboard duty—but biology wasn't fair, either, and the practice of tubing children took a lot of the sting out of it. In fact, BuPers both provided free storage for sperm and ova to its personnel and covered seventy-five percent of the cost for tubed offspring in an effort to even the possibilities still further. Despite periodic complaints, the policy was understood—and, in the main, accepted—as the best compromise a military institution could come up with.

The policy also meant a wise captain and executive officer generally kept their noses out of who was sleeping with whom as long as no one violated Article 119.

RMN rules on fraternization and bunking arrangements. Also, serving women get a contraceptive implant or they accept duty groundside and the Navy maintains a sperm bank and pays the lion's share for in vivo tubes.

He was only four years into his current enlistment, and he would never have reupped if he'd thought a shooting war might actually break out. He wasn't really certain why he'd signed up again, anyway, except that it was the only life he knew, and he hadn't stopped to wonder why the Navy had even allowed him to reenlist. His discipline record had gotten worse, not better, in the preceding ten years, and under normal conditions, the Navy would have declined his services with alacrity. But Steilman didn't think about things like that, and so it had never occurred to him that the only reason he'd squeaked through was that, unlike him, the Navy had known war was coming and lowered its screening standards where experienced personnel were concerned because it knew how badly it would soon need them.

So Steilman would have reenlisted... shortly after all the excitement at Grayson. And it never occurred to him that things were getting a little exciting between that and Basilisk?

Given all that, the decision to desert had come easily, but there was one enormous hitch. The sentence for desertion in peacetime was not less than thirty years in prison; in wartime it was the firing squad, and he didn't particularly want to face that either. Worse, wartime deployment patterns made jumping ship more difficult. Steilman wasn't the sort any captain wanted aboard a destroyer or light cruiser, whose smaller companies meant every individual had to pull his weight, but the heavier ships had been pulled from peacetime cruising patterns and concentrated into fleets and task forces. It was only the light combatants which could be spared for convoy escort or anti-piracy operations, which meant they were the only ones likely to touch at foreign ports where a man might manage to disappear into the local population.

Ah, a deserter's dilemma. The only ships one can realistically desert from, the cruisers and destroyers on anti-piracy patrols, are exactly the ones where a missing person will be quickly noticed and slackers and malcontents kept under close watch and whipped into shape. At least, such was the situation before Manticore started deploying Q-ships with 1,500 man crews.

Also, I wonder how much a thirty-year prison sentence means in a prolong society? Sure, it's still an enormous amount of time to spend in confinement and out of society, but on the other hand it's no longer a third of a lifetime.

The number of people who could expect to get out of a ship lost to battle damage would be low, but someone almost always made it—unless the damned ship blew up, of course—and ships could be lost to other causes. That was what the pods were for. In deep space, they were little more than life support bubbles fitted with transponders which both sides were supposedly duty bound to pick up after an engagement, but they were also designed to be capable of independent atmospheric entry if there should happen to be a habitable planet handy when disaster struck.

On the one hand, there are almost always at least some survivors when a ship is lost. On the other, it's pretty rare that a majority, or even a large number of the crew get out. Oh, and while there have odd mentions of picking up survivors, I think this is the first time in the series lifepods were mentioned by name. Honorverse pods capable of re-entry.

At Steilman's direction, Showforth had built and Stennis and Illyushin had installed an unobtrusive little box in the circuits which monitored Pod 184. When the time came, that box would be turned on, and it would continue to report that the ten-man pod was exactly where it was supposed to be, with every system at standby, when, in fact, it was somewhere else entirely. The trick would be to create conditions that produced enough confusion to keep everyone too preoccupied to notice any outbound radar traces, and Steilman had worked that out, as well. He and Coulter had already built the bomb for Impeller One. It wasn't a huge thing, but it would be enough to completely cripple two of the alpha node generators. The energy released when the generator capacitors blew would wreak additional havoc, both on the ship and on anyone unfortunate enough to be in Impeller One at the time, and in the ensuing confusion and panic, five people who all happened to be off duty would quietly descend on Pod 184 and depart for greener pastures.

Steilman's escape plan, sabotage Impeller One, causing casualties and crippling the ship. Then take a lifepod they've rigged to read as present even after launch to the surface, and use the day or two it will take to confirm that they're missing and probably responsible to blend into the local population. They were just a bit too late setting things up to pull this off in Walther, with the obstructionist Governor, and their next port of call (Schiller) is a Planet of the Black People where they can't hope to blend in.

Oh, and Steilman is needlessly complicating the plan because he intends to murder Wanderman and Lewis on the way out. He's not very bright. And he's downloaded specs for the ship and all the technical goodies he could to maybe sell to the Peeps, adding treason to make a trifecta of capital charges.

Citizen Commander Caslet heaved a profound sigh of relief as his pinnace docked. His orders to remain covert at all times made sense, he supposed, but they were also an unmitigated pain, especially since not even the Republic's own diplomatic corps knew Citizen Admiral Giscard had been dispatched to the Confederacy. The ambassadors and trade attachés threaded through Silesian space were integral parts of the Republic's intelligence chain, but most were also holdovers from the old regime. The Committee of Public Safety had applied the new broom theory to the diplomats dispatched to places like the Solarian League, but Silesia was a backwater, too far from the critical arenas of diplomatic maneuvering to give the same housekeeping priority. As a result, State Security trusted its own embassy staffs no further than it had to—which, Caslet conceded, was probably wise of the SS. Six senior Legislaturalist ambassadors had defected to the Manties . . . after StateSec executed most of the rest of their families for "treason against the people."

That sort of predictable cause and effect was one of the more egregious examples of the lunacies of revolutionary ardor, in Caslet's estimation, and it made his own life difficult. He couldn't tap directly into the diplomatic service's intelligence conduits without revealing his presence and, probably, something about his mission, and that was forbidden, since those very intelligence sources were suspect in the eyes of his superiors. Citizen Admiral Giscard could use any information they turned up, but only after it had been funneled to one of the ambassadors sent out since the coup attempt, and Jasmine Haines, the Schiller System trade attaché, was much too far down the food chain for that. Caslet could use Haines to send encrypted dispatches to Giscard via diplomatic courier, but he could neither tell her what those dispatches said, nor who he was, nor even ask her for specific data which might "in any way compromise the operational security of your mission," as his orders succinctly, if unhelpfully, put it.

Statesec is still using Haven embassies and trading posts as an intelligence network, but are adamant that they never handle actual intelligence or know anything. Or be asked anything that might lead to them guessing something about what Haven may or may not be doing in their sector. The secret Haven mission has to hide from Haven spies, even while using them for communications. Go figure.

"How'd it go?" he asked.

"Not too badly," she said with a small shrug. "Their customs patrols really aren't worth a damn. No one even closed to make an eyeball on us."

"Good," Caslet grunted. He'd been unhappy about the "asteroid mining boat" cover his orders specified, since a pinnace didn't look the least bit like a civilian craft. But what had once been NavInt insisted that what passed for a customs patrol out here would settle for a transponder read, and damned if they hadn't been right. Well, that makes a nice change, he thought dryly.

A pinnace communicates with the embassy using a comm laser. The least inspection would show it wasn't what it claimed to be, but apparently Schiller just checks transponder codes.

To keep StateSec happy, they had to send their dispatches to the Saginaw System, from which another dispatch boat (this one under the orders of an ambassador the Committee of Public Safety trusted) would carry them to Giscard. Even at the high FTL velocities dispatch boats routinely turned out, that was going to take time.

Three weeks to be exact. A bit less than twice the time it would take if they could just tell them to send the mail to the embassy nearest the Admiral's last known position.

But among the bits and pieces Simonson had retrieved there was more than enough to confirm Captain Sukowski's claims about Andre Warnecke, and some sobering stats on other units of the "privateer squadron." Most were at least as powerful as the one Vaubon had destroyed, and they had four ships which looked to be more heavily armed than most of the Republic's heavy cruisers. The good news was that an examination of their capture's weapons systems had shown some glaring deficiencies. The Chalice's "revolutionary government" had built its ships to kill merchantmen, which couldn't shoot back, or engage Silesian Navy units, which were hardly up to the standards of major navies, and it showed. They seemed to have insisted in cramming in as heavy an offensive punch as possible, which wasn't an uncommon mistake in the navies of weaker powers. Heavy throw weights were impressive as hell, but it was just as important to keep the bad guys from scoring on your ship, and they were under-equipped for that.

Which wasn't to say they wouldn't be dangerous if they were handled properly, but there were no indications of anything that could go toe-to-toe with Giscard's battlecruisers. Still, if Warnecke's people managed to mass two or three of their ships against one of his, things could get iffy. And if that was true for battlecruisers, it was far more true for light cruisers.

Apparently it's common for minor and/or inexperienced navies to cram as much firepower as they reasonably can into a hull and have it fly, skimping on defenses, EW and options like drones and recon platforms. Making them a sort of glass cannon like Honor's Q-ship, albeit to a lesser degree.

That was a sobering thought, but the computers had also coughed up the fact that all of Warnecke's ships had been built in the same yard and fitted with the same derivative of the standard Silesian Navy sensor and EW systems. So far as Foraker had been able to determine, their radar was a unique installation, so all they needed was a good read on it, and they'd know they had the murderous bastards they wanted.

In the last book, Shannon Foraker was able to definitely ID two Grayson SDs because they were using a specific model of Peep Radar she's very familiar with. Here, Warneke's ships all have a very distinctive radar fingerprint.

"Well," Caslet felt himself smile, "in that case, we'll have to convince these other people to let us have her, won't we?" Jourdain blinked at him, and Caslet shrugged. "It'll be a bit hard on her crew if we 'rescue' them and then take their ship ourselves, Citizen Commissioner, but once they've had a chance to talk it over with Captain Sukowski, I think they'll agree they're better off with us than with Warnecke's people. And, as you say, we are supposed to capture any Manty merchie we run into. It says so right in our orders."

Caslet finds three Chalice raiders in the act of jumping a freighter. A Manticoran freighter, which he's supposed to be raiding himself. So here's how he justifies intervening and capturing the ship and crew himself instead of leaving them to the pirates, which he is simply unable to do as a decent human being.

Like the PN's smaller Breslau-class destroyers, the Conqueror-class light cruisers were missile-heavy. They were also twenty thousand tons heavier than the RMN's Apollos, with a broadside of nine tubes to the Manticoran class's six. Against an Apollo, Vaubon's throw weight advantage was canceled out by Manticore's superior missiles, EW, and point defense, but her birds were better than those the raiders carried, and Citizen Commander Caslet and Shannon Foraker had spent hours discussing the best way to use them even against Manties.

Vaubon came tearing down on her enemies spinning on her central axis like a dervish. The pirates might be forgiven for assuming that was simply a move to gain maximum cover from the roof and floor of her wedge, but it wasn't—as they discovered when Foraker pressed her firing key. Nine missiles spat from her port tubes, but their drives were set for delayed activation. They coasted outward at the velocity imparted by their tubes' mass drivers, and then the cruiser's starboard broadside rolled onto the target bearing and fired. It was a complicated evolution, but Foraker had worked it out to perfection, and her careful orders to the first broadside's drives sent all eighteen missiles shrieking down on her target in a single, finely coordinated salvo.

The pirate destroyer had never expected that much fire. Counter missiles raced to meet it, but she didn't have enough missiles—or time—to stop all of them, and five laser heads broke through to attack range. They came in on individual runs, slashing down on her while she rolled frantically to interpose her wedge, and three of them reached attack position. Bomb-pumped x-ray lasers clawed at her sidewalls, and the ship lurched and bucked as they tore into her unarmored hull. Air and debris belched into space, and Warner Caslet's eyes blazed.

There's that stacking of broadsides! And yes, that's one way to swamp Manty missile defense.

I didn't quote it, but the Chalice commander figures out Caslet's a Peep when he tries to fake him out with an EW drone, because they're not a Manty or an Andy and nothing local is going to waste the mass for something like that.

The Silesian Navy was a second-rate fleet, and the Chalice's "revolutionary government" had used its ships for models. The raider destroyer had a heavy energy armament for her size, but she mounted only four missile tubes in her broadside, and her point defense was grossly sub-par. She lurched again as two more warheads from the second double broadside gouged at her, her impeller wedge fluctuated as drive nodes were wiped away, and shattered hull plating trailed in her wake as she accelerated frantically towards the support of her consorts.

So we see again that poor and amateur navies usually go beam-heavy and missile-light, while better navies are trending more and more the other way.

He stole a glance at the merchantman and nodded. The merchie didn't know what the hell was going on—perhaps she'd thought Vaubon was simply another pirate coming in to join the attack on her—but her skipper had done the smart thing. She was well within range of all the combatants, any one of which might suddenly decide to throw a missile or two her way, so she'd altered her heading by ninety degrees in the same plane and rolled up on her side, presenting only the belly of her wedge to the warships. It meant the range was closing even more quickly—she'd be in energy range, not just missile range, in a very few minutes on her present heading—but it was her only logical move, and Caslet spared a moment to pity her captain. Whoever won out here, his ship was still dead meat for the victor, and he wondered which side he was pulling for.

Hoo boy. Caslet? You're not going to particularly enjoy what comes next.

Foraker's shocked exclamation burned across the bridge like a buzz saw, and Caslet's mouth fell open as his plot suddenly changed. One instant, his ship was charging into the teeth of two opponents' fire; the next instant, there were no opponents. The warships' acceleration had carried them within less than three hundred thousand klicks of the Manty merchantman, which had suddenly rolled back down to present her own broadside to them. Eight incredibly powerful grasers smashed out from the "unarmed freighter" like the wrath of God, and the second raider destroyer simply vanished. A single pair of hits on the light cruiser burned through her sidewall as if it hadn't even existed, and her after third blew apart in a hurricane of splintered and vaporized plating. Three of Shannon's shipboard lasers added their own fury to her damage, chewing huge holes in what was left of her hull, but they were strictly an afterthought, for that ship was already a helpless hulk.

"We're being hailed, Skipper," Lieutenant Dutton said shakenly from Communications. Caslet just looked at him, unable to speak, then looked back down at his plot and swallowed as the unmistakable impeller signatures of a full dozen LACs drifted up from the "freighter's" gravitic shadow and locked their weapons on his ship.

"Speaker," he rasped.

"Unknown cruiser, this is Captain Honor Harrington of Her Majesty's Armed Merchant Cruiser Wayfarer," a soprano voice said quietly. "I appreciate your assistance, and I wish I could offer you the reward your gallantry deserves, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to surrender."

And as survivors of Fourth Yeltsin, I bet that's a phrase Caslet and crew have heard before in their nightmares.

[Simon_Jester]

Manty naval officers study classical military history, from Hannibal to Clausewitz, they learn to sail a boat and fly a plane, but hand-to-hand is the concession to military tradition they expect never to use?

Classical military history has an actual use- it's not really more applicable today than it would be to Honor, and serves much the same purpose. Classical warfare simplifies all the basic principles of warfare. Battles reduce to big blocks of men moving around, or appear to. The problems of logistics involve things that every person can easily visualize and understand (people struggling through heavy mud, for instance). The impact of human emotions like cowardice and bravery, indecisiveness and quick reactions, are all easy to picture.

Used correctly, you distill out the things that matter- "in War, all things are very simple, but the simplest things are very difficult." And you discard the stuff that doesn't matter or pay only a very little attention to it. As in, it doesn't matter that Greek phalanxes fought with spears and shields, EXCEPT, say, if it teaches you a lesson about how Greek infantry formations would get skewed because of each man subconsciously seeking to take cover behind his neighbor's shield.

Meanwhile, while hand to hand combat is definitely going to matter for ground troops (including Marines) who might be called on to police people or control rowdy individuals, Navy officers in this setting are very explicitly never called on to fight in close combat. Throughout Honor's entire career, the list of instances where she actually needed her hand to hand combat training 'on camera' comes down to... hm:

1) Definitely helped her stop an attempted rape at the naval academy.
2) Definitely helped her stop an assassination attempt on a head of state when she was attending a dinner.
3) Arguably helped her fight a pistol duel with a paid gunman, and again with a disgraced former officer.
4) Definitely helped her win a sword duel with a foreign nobleman, when serving in her capacity as champion-at-arms to a foreign potentate.
5) Maybe helped her in this book, won't spoiler but it involves a rather tense personal confrontation.
6) Maybe helped her again when dealing with an assassin several books from now, but the cybernetics helped more.

Looking down the list, we see that none of these incidents fall under the normal job description of an RMN officer. They're not expected to routinely have to deal with random rapists. They're certainly not expected to have to fight assassins single-handedly, that's what Marines and the foreign potentate's bodyguards are supposed to be for. They're not even really expected to fight duels on a regular basis, unless they are acting in stupid and contemptible ways.

It's later confirmed that the Navy also uses decade-long hitches, which is less of an issue when you can live for a couple of centuries.

The Navy is also a long-service organization that until recently was both all-volunteer and relatively limited in size; it relies on a very high level of technical skill among its crews. Two years isn't necessarily enough to learn all the hardware skills you need.

Hmmm. In the first book it was mentioned that Honor's first hyper-capable command was the tin-can Hawkwing. Same ship?

Ayup.

So Steilman would have reenlisted... shortly after all the excitement at Grayson. And it never occurred to him that things were getting a little exciting between that and Basilisk?

Steilman isn't the brightest bulb in the box. Also, a couple of incidents over a couple of years could easily go under the radar to a guy who doesn't read the news much.

The number of people who could expect to get out of a ship lost to battle damage would be low, but someone almost always made it—unless the damned ship blew up, of course—and ships could be lost to other causes. That was what the pods were for. In deep space, they were little more than life support bubbles fitted with transponders which both sides were supposedly duty bound to pick up after an engagement, but they were also designed to be capable of independent atmospheric entry if there should happen to be a habitable planet handy when disaster struck.

On the one hand, there are almost always at least some survivors when a ship is lost. On the other, it's pretty rare that a majority, or even a large number of the crew get out. Oh, and while there have odd mentions of picking up survivors, I think this is the first time in the series lifepods were mentioned by name. Honorverse pods capable of re-entry.

By the way, have you noticed? Steilman has one of the tells of a truly irredeemable villain, someone the author is telegraphing his dislike for, in the Honorverse:

He curses in his internal monologue.

Apparently it's common for minor and/or inexperienced navies to cram as much firepower as they reasonably can into a hull and have it fly, skimping on defenses, EW and options like drones and recon platforms. Making them a sort of glass cannon like Honor's Q-ship, albeit to a lesser degree.

There's historical precedent, such as the battleship Agincourt, originally paid for by Brazil and built in a British yard. Agincourt had more gun turrets than any other dreadnought in history, to pack on a record-setting fourteen-gun broadside. The excessive weight of guns caused a lot of problems, and forced the designers to skimp on armor plate. But it served its real purpose- to impress the Brazilian people that the new ship was more badass than the older, twelve-gun ships.

In the last book, Shannon Foraker was able to definitely ID two Grayson SDs because they were using a specific model of Peep Radar she's very familiar with. Here, Warneke's ships all have a very distinctive radar fingerprint.

One of the disadvantages of radar (and active sensors in general) is that if you use them, other people can detect your emissions from much farther away than the radar allows you to detect them in return. Just looking at the situation on a naive basis, I'd expect the range at which you can be seen to scale with the square of the range at which you can see. Although the scaling constant is pretty uncertain.

Like the PN's smaller Breslau-class destroyers, the Conqueror-class light cruisers were missile-heavy. They were also twenty thousand tons heavier than the RMN's Apollos, with a broadside of nine tubes to the Manticoran class's six. Against an Apollo, Vaubon's throw weight advantage was canceled out by Manticore's superior missiles, EW, and point defense, but her birds were better than those the raiders carried, and Citizen Commander Caslet and Shannon Foraker had spent hours discussing the best way to use them even against Manties.

This supports my general characterization in my 'excerpts from the tech bible posts' of Havenite ships as actually being built with MORE broadside missile firepower than their Manticoran counterparts. Manticore may have better missiles on a one-for-one basis, but they're clearly not the only people who were thinking about how advances in missile technology would change the tactical game.

Vaubon came tearing down on her enemies spinning on her central axis like a dervish. The pirates might be forgiven for assuming that was simply a move to gain maximum cover from the roof and floor of her wedge, but it wasn't—as they discovered when Foraker pressed her firing key. Nine missiles spat from her port tubes, but their drives were set for delayed activation. They coasted outward at the velocity imparted by their tubes' mass drivers, and then the cruiser's starboard broadside rolled onto the target bearing and fired. It was a complicated evolution, but Foraker had worked it out to perfection, and her careful orders to the first broadside's drives sent all eighteen missiles shrieking down on her target in a single, finely coordinated salvo.

The pirate destroyer had never expected that much fire. Counter missiles raced to meet it, but she didn't have enough missiles—or time—to stop all of them, and five laser heads broke through to attack range. They came in on individual runs, slashing down on her while she rolled frantically to interpose her wedge, and three of them reached attack position. Bomb-pumped x-ray lasers clawed at her sidewalls, and the ship lurched and bucked as they tore into her unarmored hull. Air and debris belched into space, and Warner Caslet's eyes blazed.

There's that stacking of broadsides! And yes, that's one way to swamp Manty missile defense.[/quote]Well, it might actually not work against an opponent who's got a significant EW edge, but it sure helps. If the tech bible can be trusted, typical Honorverse ships carry about one antimissile weapon per tube in their own broadside, almost invariably less than two antimissile weapons. Doubling your broadside gives you a very good chance of overwhelming defense.

On the other hand, the pirate appears to have shot down, disabled, bamboozled, or otherwise avoided coming to harm from fifteen missiles out of the eighteen-round double broadside. Granted, hits from the other three were enough to cripple the Warneckist ship, but seriously? Three hits out of eighteen rounds fired, against Silesian military hardware? Havenite missiles stink.

The Silesian Navy was a second-rate fleet, and the Chalice's "revolutionary government" had used its ships for models. The raider destroyer had a heavy energy armament for her size, but she mounted only four missile tubes in her broadside, and her point defense was grossly sub-par. She lurched again as two more warheads from the second double broadside gouged at her, her impeller wedge fluctuated as drive nodes were wiped away, and shattered hull plating trailed in her wake as she accelerated frantically towards the support of her consorts.

So we see again that poor and amateur navies usually go beam-heavy and missile-light, while better navies are trending more and more the other way.

But if their missile defense is so bad, how are they knocking down ~75% of all missiles fired at them from these huge eighteen-shot salvoes? Do they have some kind of EW system that's protecting them? Are the Havenite missiles just too stupid and inferior to find the target?

There's a hole here. Weber wants to make out the Silesians (and rebels in Silesia) as inferior, but at the same time he also makes the Havenites look weak when you think about it.

"Unknown cruiser, this is Captain Honor Harrington of Her Majesty's Armed Merchant Cruiser Wayfarer," a soprano voice said quietly. "I appreciate your assistance, and I wish I could offer you the reward your gallantry deserves, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to surrender."

And as survivors of Fourth Yeltsin, I bet that's a phrase Caslet and crew have heard before in their nightmares.

I don't think Honor actually captured many ships at Fourth Yeltsin, except maybe for the survivors of the destroyed PN battleships who made it to the escape pods.

Remember, Honor set that battle up as a joust- her ships shot past the enemy ships very quickly. Any enemies who ran the gauntlet without being crippled by her superdreadnoughts would have simply escaped.

The fact that Caslet escaped at all suggests that his ship was not crippled and was able to run away in a hurry.

[Ahriman238]

By the way, have you noticed? Steilman has one of the tells of a truly irredeemable villain, someone the author is telegraphing his dislike for, in the Honorverse:

He curses in his internal monologue.

Not entirely fair. Both Honor and Hamish sometimes curse in theirs, out of sheer frustration with a military situation or, more often, their own political leaders.

This supports my general characterization in my 'excerpts from the tech bible posts' of Havenite ships as actually being built with MORE broadside missile firepower than their Manticoran counterparts. Manticore may have better missiles on a one-for-one basis, but they're clearly not the only people who were thinking about how advances in missile technology would change the tactical game.

And bringing their own "quantity has a quality of it's own" mindset to the problem. So are the Andies and Graysons.

Well, it might actually not work against an opponent who's got a significant EW edge, but it sure helps. If the tech bible can be trusted, typical Honorverse ships carry about one antimissile weapon per tube in their own broadside, almost invariably less than two antimissile weapons. Doubling your broadside gives you a very good chance of overwhelming defense.

On the other hand, the pirate appears to have shot down, disabled, bamboozled, or otherwise avoided coming to harm from fifteen missiles out of the eighteen-round double broadside. Granted, hits from the other three were enough to cripple the Warneckist ship, but seriously? Three hits out of eighteen rounds fired, against Silesian military hardware? Havenite missiles stink.

I could be totally off-base here, but the impression I always got was that missile flight times usually allowed two or three salvoes of counter-missiles before they came in. Though you have less of a breather for all the follow-on broadsides. The unusual survivability (four broadsides to bring down one Chalice cruiser) I attribute to them having better than average crews, but yes 3/18 is a bit of a statistical anomaly given what's come before and will later.

I don't think Honor actually captured many ships at Fourth Yeltsin, except maybe for the survivors of the destroyed PN battleships who made it to the escape pods.

Remember, Honor set that battle up as a joust- her ships shot past the enemy ships very quickly. Any enemies who ran the gauntlet without being crippled by her superdreadnoughts would have simply escaped.

The fact that Caslet escaped at all suggests that his ship was not crippled and was able to run away in a hurry.

Yes. Vaubon was in the cruiser screen that largely survived that high-speed pass, and kept on running.

Perhaps I should have said, not that specific phrase, but finding out suddenly that he was within missile (and beam!) range of Honor Harrington is something from Warner Caslet's nightmares.

[Simon_Jester]

By the way, have you noticed? Steilman has one of the tells of a truly irredeemable villain, someone the author is telegraphing his dislike for, in the Honorverse:

He curses in his internal monologue.

Not entirely fair. Both Honor and Hamish sometimes curse in theirs, out of sheer frustration with a military situation or, more often, their own political leaders.

To be more clear, it's not an either/or thing. But some of Weber's characters are downright foulmouthed in their internal monologue. This is almost invariably a sign that Weber is trying to write the character as hateful or hostile or angry, and generally a sign that they're too evil to be redeemed (unlike, say, Tom Theisman).

Also, the bad guys use nastier curse words in their internal monologue- I can't think of a single good person in the Honorverse who has used the word "bitch," but really bad people fighting Honor Harrington use it routinely.

This supports my general characterization in my 'excerpts from the tech bible posts' of Havenite ships as actually being built with MORE broadside missile firepower than their Manticoran counterparts. Manticore may have better missiles on a one-for-one basis, but they're clearly not the only people who were thinking about how advances in missile technology would change the tactical game.

And bringing their own "quantity has a quality of it's own" mindset to the problem. So are the Andies and Graysons.

You might say that. On the other hand you might simply note that if a ship fires its missiles twice a year and its laser cannon once a decade, you really SHOULD prioritize missile firepower at the expense of lasers. So a ship of the same tonnage has vastly more missiles than a competitor, because it's built so unbalanced in favor of (useful) missiles at the expense of (useless) beam weapons.

Perhaps I should have said, not that specific phrase, but finding out suddenly that he was within missile (and beam!) range of Honor Harrington is something from Warner Caslet's nightmares.

Point.

[Batman]

I take exception to Tom Theisman being called evil (redeemably or otherwise). From the moment he was introduced in in 'Honor of the Queen' it was clear he was a basically decent man who just happened to be playing for the wrong team-and wasn't particularly happy about the playbook from the word go. The man did his level best to see to it that Manticoran POWs were treated decently when they were taken on his watch and as long as they were under his care and let's not forget this is the guy that destroyed the Pierre/St. Just/Ransom government the moment he was in a position to. Working for the Designated Bad Guys? Definitely. Evil? No.

While I agree that especially for what is supposed to be a third-world shithole navy that intercept rate looks suspiciously good, Ahriman is right that at that point in the narrative there being a window for multiple countermissile launches against a single salvo was the norm.

[Ahriman238]

I don't think that Simon meant that Theisman was evil. Just that he's a villain we're not supposed to loathe, unlike Burdette, Warnecke, Houseman etc.

I think Coglin thought some unflattering words towards Honor, but it never stopped me from sympathizing with him.

[Simon_Jester]

I take exception to Tom Theisman being called evil (redeemably or otherwise)...

I said that X was irredeemably evil unlike Theisman.

It does not follow that I think Theisman was any type of evil. If you wish to draw this implication, feel free- but don't expect me to sweat about it.

[Batman]

I don't think that Simon meant that Theisman was evil. Just that he's a villain we're not supposed to loathe, unlike Burdette, Warnecke, Houseman etc.

I don't even like calling him a villain, really. He was definitely working for the villains, no questions asked. He was also going out of his way to compensate, to the extent of his ability, for some of the things that made the Pierre regime the villains and was instrumental in ending it. And sorry, and preemptive apology to s_J if you didn't mean it that way, but when somebody says 'a sign that they're too evil to be redeemed (unlike, say, Tom Theisman)' then yes, I interpret this to mean they think Theisman is evil too, just not as irredeemably so.

I think Coglin thought some unflattering words towards Honor, but it never stopped me from sympathizing with him.

Nevermind the amount of harsh language that is considered perfectly acceptable here, I can sympathize with the guy too. 'Um-hello? I'm trying to call the whole thing off! All you have to do to avoid the Havenite invasion (that as of now isn't going to do us any good anyway) is letting me get away.' I'd be using harsh language in my inner monologues too.

[Simon_Jester]

See, I'm not saying that Weber villains* are always wrong to be cursing in internal monologues. I'm saying they do do so, to a level that basically no decent person in the setting does, and that this rule is one I've observed across multiple settings. Protagonists may curse in internal monologues, but infrequently and only either about politics (Weber is very bad about the way he presents politics) or stressful situations. Villains, genuine villains, will curse in their inner monologue when they're sitting in an armchair quietly thinking about the situation. They curse more, they use nastier words.

Does that mean it's immoral to do so? No. But it's a very reliable indicator, in that if you find yourself going "wow, this character drops a lot of F-bombs," they're almost invariably a villain.

*(And let's just call them villains, classing sympathetic enemy characters as antagonists)

[Batman]

Since I have done exactly zero research on how internal monologue cursing coincides with villaindom generally leave alone in the Honorverse and might quite possibly be jaded by the amount of cursing that is considered a 'yeah, right, so what?' around here, you're probably right.

I like the Villain/Antagonist distinction, by the way.Villain is pretty unambiguously Bad Guy. Antagonist merely means you're not working with/at cross-purposes with/ ARE working against but for benign reasons the Designated Good Guys.

[Terralthra]

Marines were different. They were expected to get down in the mud and the blood, and they were entirely serious about learning how to disassemble their fellow humans with bare hands. They were all volunteers, and like most military people from societies with prolong, they'd signed up for long hitches—the minimum was ten T-years—which gave them plenty of time to study their chosen trade.

It's later confirmed that the Navy also uses decade-long hitches, which is less of an issue when you can live for a couple of centuries.

This is actually a little surprising, to me. Prolong is not that old, societally speaking. Militaries especially tend to be conservative in social terms, so it's odd that something less than 70 years old has already been incorporated enough that all branches of the military have incorporated it into their hitch length.

He was only four years into his current enlistment, and he would never have reupped if he'd thought a shooting war might actually break out. He wasn't really certain why he'd signed up again, anyway, except that it was the only life he knew, and he hadn't stopped to wonder why the Navy had even allowed him to reenlist. His discipline record had gotten worse, not better, in the preceding ten years, and under normal conditions, the Navy would have declined his services with alacrity. But Steilman didn't think about things like that, and so it had never occurred to him that the only reason he'd squeaked through was that, unlike him, the Navy had known war was coming and lowered its screening standards where experienced personnel were concerned because it knew how badly it would soon need them.

So Steilman would have reenlisted... shortly after all the excitement at Grayson. And it never occurred to him that things were getting a little exciting between that and Basilisk?

Not surprising at all. Steilman is a complete idiot. There are connected politicians who thought (or said they thought) war was avoidable (or at least delayable) after the initial invasion, let alone before.

On the one hand, there are almost always at least some survivors when a ship is lost. On the other, it's pretty rare that a majority, or even a large number of the crew get out. Oh, and while there have odd mentions of picking up survivors, I think this is the first time in the series lifepods were mentioned by name. Honorverse pods capable of re-entry.

Escape pods are mentioned in First Hancock. After the minefield, when Chin's dreadnaughts blow away Defiant and Achilles, it mentions that nearly 1/6 of the crew of Defiant got to escape pods, while Banton's Achilles blew the hell up with all hands.

Oh, and Steilman is needlessly complicating the plan because he intends to murder Wanderman and Lewis on the way out. He's not very bright. And he's downloaded specs for the ship and all the technical goodies he could to maybe sell to the Peeps, adding treason to make a trifecta of capital charges.

He also brings like nothing to the plan. He's along apparently because "deserting was my idea!" and pure viciousness.

There's that stacking of broadsides! And yes, that's one way to swamp Manty missile defense.

Not the first time we see it, but yep.

On the other hand, the pirate appears to have shot down, disabled, bamboozled, or otherwise avoided coming to harm from fifteen missiles out of the eighteen-round double broadside. Granted, hits from the other three were enough to cripple the Warneckist ship, but seriously? Three hits out of eighteen rounds fired, against Silesian military hardware? Havenite missiles stink.
[snip]
...But if their missile defense is so bad, how are they knocking down ~75% of all missiles fired at them from these huge eighteen-shot salvoes? Do they have some kind of EW system that's protecting them? Are the Havenite missiles just too stupid and inferior to find the target?

There's a hole here. Weber wants to make out the Silesians (and rebels in Silesia) as inferior, but at the same time he also makes the Havenites look weak when you think about it.

There's a way to rationalize it, but you have to retcon back from the later MDM-salvo books to make it work. Once all these assholes start flinging massive salvos of thousands of missiles around, it's clear that everyone didn't/doesn't have enough control links to manage more missiles than they could fire, which makes sense: why bother? The pod-layers start putting in more control links, and eventually the RMN develops Keyhole I/II and Apollo, while various other ships work out various other hacks along the way. Both the Havenites and the RMN's non-frontline ships work out a time-share system where their control links rotate amongst active missiles enough to steer and help them with EW for a bit, then switch to other missiles. It's conceivable that Vaubon's double-broadside exceeded her own control linkage, hoping that the missile weight would be more important than their finesse, against such a glass hammer of a target.

Not the greatest explanation, but it's something.

"Unknown cruiser, this is Captain Honor Harrington of Her Majesty's Armed Merchant Cruiser Wayfarer," a soprano voice said quietly. "I appreciate your assistance, and I wish I could offer you the reward your gallantry deserves, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to surrender."

And as survivors of Fourth Yeltsin, I bet that's a phrase Caslet and crew have heard before in their nightmares.

I don't think Honor actually captured many ships at Fourth Yeltsin, except maybe for the survivors of the destroyed PN battleships who made it to the escape pods.

Remember, Honor set that battle up as a joust- her ships shot past the enemy ships very quickly. Any enemies who ran the gauntlet without being crippled by her superdreadnoughts would have simply escaped.

The fact that Caslet escaped at all suggests that his ship was not crippled and was able to run away in a hurry.

Explicitly. Vaubon escapes, with Caslet's thankful thought that at least none of the Grayson ships bothered shooting at a light cruiser.

By the way, have you noticed? Steilman has one of the tells of a truly irredeemable villain, someone the author is telegraphing his dislike for, in the Honorverse:

He curses in his internal monologue.

Not entirely fair. Both Honor and Hamish sometimes curse in theirs, out of sheer frustration with a military situation or, more often, their own political leaders.

To be more clear, it's not an either/or thing. But some of Weber's characters are downright foulmouthed in their internal monologue. This is almost invariably a sign that Weber is trying to write the character as hateful or hostile or angry, and generally a sign that they're too evil to be redeemed (unlike, say, Tom Theisman).

Also, the bad guys use nastier curse words in their internal monologue- I can't think of a single good person in the Honorverse who has used the word "bitch," but really bad people fighting Honor Harrington use it routinely.

Many people in the novels use the verb "to bitch" as in to complain; few use it as an insult except the designated bad guys. However, I'm really not sure this is an unfair characterization. Bitch is the epitome of a misogynist insult, and this is a society that has supposedly been egalitarian for centuries. Hell, most people I know would consider anyone who goes around calling women "bitches" because of personal animus not a nice person today.

[eyl]

Marines were different. They were expected to get down in the mud and the blood, and they were entirely serious about learning how to disassemble their fellow humans with bare hands. They were all volunteers, and like most military people from societies with prolong, they'd signed up for long hitches—the minimum was ten T-years—which gave them plenty of time to study their chosen trade.

It's later confirmed that the Navy also uses decade-long hitches, which is less of an issue when you can live for a couple of centuries.

This is actually a little surprising, to me. Prolong is not that old, societally speaking. Militaries especially tend to be conservative in social terms, so it's odd that something less than 70 years old has already been incorporated enough that all branches of the military have incorporated it into their hitch length.

On the other hand, personnel retention is always an issue for militaries, and it gets work the more advanced the technology is. I'd imagine the RMN would jump at the opportunity to lengthen the enlistment terms prolong gave them.

[Simon_Jester]

This is actually a little surprising, to me. Prolong is not that old, societally speaking. Militaries especially tend to be conservative in social terms, so it's odd that something less than 70 years old has already been incorporated enough that all branches of the military have incorporated it into their hitch length.

Well, the Navy and Marines, anyway. The RMMC is a lot more like the US Marine s than it is like the British equivalent, and the US Marine Corps are a service with a strong HOO-RAH! warrior tradition and a very solid core of long-service members who think of themselves as Marines for life. The Navy, meanwhile... Well. I see it like this.

One, they need very high standards of technical training and skill- you think learning to operate a fission reactor in the USN is hard, Manticore has systems which are if anything even more complicated to understand and relies almost entirely on its crews knowing how to handle computers and automatic remotes.

Two, they've been undergoing a massive military buildup and need to retain trained manpower, and this has been the case since 1860-1870 PD. That's a lot of time for King Roger or Queen Elizabeth to have (first) taken steps to ensure retention of key personnel and (second) finally declare that the existing five-year term of service or whatever will now be doubled, it already being routine for a lot of Navy men to reenlist if they weren't planning to go to the merchant marine.

He also brings like nothing to the plan. He's along apparently because "deserting was my idea!" and pure viciousness.

Basically, he's alpha male of his little criminal 'pack' or gang. That's about it.

There's a way to rationalize it, but you have to retcon back from the later MDM-salvo books to make it work. Once all these assholes start flinging massive salvos of thousands of missiles around, it's clear that everyone didn't/doesn't have enough control links to manage more missiles than they could fire, which makes sense: why bother?

Ah-HA!

Which means we can retcon THIS as the time Shannon, growling at the miserable ineffectiveness of her missiles against an ignorant bozo-ship in Silesia, got the idea that later evolved into the RHN's time-share scheme that serves as their answer to Keyhole.

Not the greatest explanation, but it's something.

I actually like it and it easily explains the reason why light ships don't just use double broadsides all the time. Why, for example, Honor didn't use them in Honor of the Queen when it would have let her match the salvo weight of Thunder of God. She made a considered decision that firing 24 missiles in two staggered waves that could all be effectively controlled would be more effective as a use of her ammo and superior EW systems than firing all 24 in a single salvo that could not be effectively controlled.

Many people in the novels use the verb "to bitch" as in to complain; few use it as an insult except the designated bad guys. However, I'm really not sure this is an unfair characterization. Bitch is the epitome of a misogynist insult, and this is a society that has supposedly been egalitarian for centuries. Hell, most people I know would consider anyone who goes around calling women "bitches" because of personal animus not a nice person today.

Well, my point is that it's kind of a "this character is an evil asshole" flag. If a Weber character curses a lot in their internal monologue, saying "bitch" and dropping F-bombs all over the place in the privacy of their own head, they are probably not a good person, are probably not redeemable, and will probably come to a bad end.

I'm not saying Weber's wrong to do this, just that it's one of his signatures.

[Mr Bean]

I've not commented on this thread in awhile but I have been reading it.

Wanted to throw in a short comment about Manticore terms of enlistment. Current US Navy contracts are 8 years and have been for years now. What is different in our modern world is it's X years of active duty, with X years of time in the reserves. For certain rates already it's a six year contract and nukes sign up for eight years to begin with since they have a two year school.

Having enlistment getting two extra years longer a thousand years from now is a very modest growth, extra long life expectancy or not. Heck if future no prolog Manticore has average life expectancy of 100 then 2 extra years works perfectly. 8 years for life expectancy of 74 is 11% of your life compared to 10% of your life at 100.

[Batman]

There's a way to rationalize it, but you have to retcon back from the later MDM-salvo books to make it work. Once all these assholes start flinging massive salvos of thousands of missiles around, it's clear that everyone didn't/doesn't have enough control links to manage more missiles than they could fire, which makes sense: why bother?

Ah-HA!
Which means we can retcon THIS as the time Shannon, growling at the miserable ineffectiveness of her missiles against an ignorant bozo-ship in Silesia, got the idea that later evolved into the RHN's time-share scheme that serves as their answer to Keyhole.

Would still make Havenite missiles of that era depressingly ineffective, though-1 in 6 against a Silesian 'and when I grow up I want to be a real destroyer!' ship but they're supposed to be a threat to the Manties?
Haven is supposed to be out-teched by Manticore, but if they're out-teched this badly Manticore wouldn't have needed MDMs and the podlayers for this war to turn into a one-sided curbstomp.

Not the greatest explanation, but it's something.

I actually like it and it easily explains the reason why light ships don't just use double broadsides all the time. Why, for example, Honor didn't use them in Honor of the Queen when it would have let her match the salvo weight of Thunder of God. She made a considered decision that firing 24 missiles in two staggered waves that could all be effectively controlled would be more effective as a use of her ammo and superior EW systems than firing all 24 in a single salvo that could not be effectively controlled.

Or it might have been because Fearless was a CA and simply not able to rotate quickly enough to make this feasible, and Troubadour was already damaged and as a mere DD likely had even less control links to make double broadsides useful.
While the 'ships take freaking forever to turn' claim has, I think, been satisfactorily dealt with, the fact remains that we only ever see DDs and CLs do the 'double broadside' move, so while they're obviously a lot quicker on the helm than Weber wants us to believe out of series, it's still possible ships CA and up aren't quick enough to make stacking broadsides work.

[Simon_Jester]

Would still make Havenite missiles of that era depressingly ineffective, though-1 in 6 against a Silesian 'and when I grow up I want to be a real destroyer!' ship but they're supposed to be a threat to the Manties?

I think the lack of effective fire control for an eighteen-missile salvo is the most likely explanation. Maybe they overestimated how effective their missiles' autonomous guidance would be against the destroyer, and half the first salvo were all fooled by the same ECM jammer or something.

On the other hand... actually, when you think about it, hit rates are ALWAYS low throughout the series. A capital-class starship is almost invariably destroyed or at least mission-killed if it takes... anywhere from 100-300 hits from laser head missiles. Even one or two laser head hits on a destroyer (or small CL, like the old Fearless) are likely to cause serious harm, which is proportionate since the capital ship has roughly 100 times the mass of the destroyer.

And yet, small-ship combats aren't instantly decided by the first missile exchange.

So we have to assume that even when ships fire 4-8 missiles at each other (representative throw weight for DD/CL-weight combatants), they frequently score zero hits, because even a couple of hits will be devastating. And that rule seems to apply to almost everybody, not just the Havenites, and even when fighting relatively crappy and weak ships.

Wayfarer, on the other hand, can casually blow away small ships with a single salvo... by virtue of that salvo containing anywhere from sixty to three hundred missiles.

Not the greatest explanation, but it's something.

I actually like it and it easily explains the reason why light ships don't just use double broadsides all the time. Why, for example, Honor didn't use them in Honor of the Queen when it would have let her match the salvo weight of Thunder of God. She made a considered decision that firing 24 missiles in two staggered waves that could all be effectively controlled would be more effective as a use of her ammo and superior EW systems than firing all 24 in a single salvo that could not be effectively controlled.

Or it might have been because Fearless was a CA and simply not able to rotate quickly enough to make this feasible, and Troubadour was already damaged and as a mere DD likely had even less control links to make double broadsides useful.[/quote]True. That is very plausible.

Then again, Honor misidentifies the heavy salvo thrown by Thunder of God at First Yeltsin as being a double broadside from a heavy cruiser, though- which suggests that double broadsides are at least broadly within the limits of the possible for heavy cruiser-weight units.

And since the Star Knight-class was explicitly the first generation of light combatant designed from the keel up to use the rapidly improving Manticoran missile technology to its full potential... I'd kind of be disappointed if they didn't manage to make the ships double broadside-capable.

[Ahriman238]

She'd spent two hours sucking the raiders into going after Wayfarer, and she'd been more than a little concerned over how to handle all three of them. She'd had the firepower to take them, but unless they'd come in massed tight, at least one would have had an excellent chance to rip Wayfarer up before she or her LACs could nail him. Then a light cruiser—and a Peep, at that—had come tearing in out of nowhere to "rescue" her. Despite all the scenarios she and her tac people had gamed out, this one had never occurred to them, and she'd felt both dishonest and guilty as she let the Peep sail straight into her trap and take a hammering in the process. That skipper had lost some of his people—over fifty of them, if Susan Hibson's and Scotty Tremaine's initial reports were accurate—to save an enemy merchantman, and it seemed cruelly ungrateful to "reward" him by taking his ship away from him.

But she had no choice. The mere presence of a Peep CL in Silesia demanded investigation, and that ship was an enemy man of war. Yet she could at least do everything in her power to assist with the wounded it had taken in its uneven battle, and Angela Ryder, both her assistant surgeons, and a dozen sick berth attendants had gone over in the first pinnace.

The last battle from Honor's perspective.

He and Honor stood on Wayfarer's bridge, gazing at the plot and wondering what the Schiller authorities made of it all. Even Silesian system surveillance sensors must have picked up the emissions of the short, savage battle, but no one was coming out to ask any questions. That might indicate the Schiller governor, like Hagen, had an "understanding" with the local raiders, but it might also be simple prudence, especially if they'd gotten good reads on the weapons employed. According to Honor's intelligence files, Schiller's heaviest unit was a corvette, and nothing that small would want to irritate anything which mounted a ship of the wall's grasers.

Apparently there are corvettes in the Honorverse. Don't recall them ever coming up again.

Caslet had followed the proper protocols for surrendering his ship. If a captain had time, she was supposed to take her crew off in her own small craft, then fire her scuttling charges, but the rules of war established different standards if she found herself in a hopeless tactical position. The enemy was supposed to give her a chance to surrender, and she was supposed to take it rather than get her crew killed for nothing. There were, after all, few survivors from a ship destroyed by point-blank fire, and the quid pro quo for getting them off alive was that her ship, once surrendered, stayed surrendered as the intact prize of the victor.

But before her ship was boarded, she was also supposed to purge her computers and destroy classified equipment, and Caslet had. No doubt ONI would still want to examine the ship in detail, and Honor's search parties would ransack her for any hardcopy documents. Yet there would be precious little data to be recovered, and by now the RMN had taken enough Peep ships to be fully conversant with their technology. Honor expected no treasure trove from Vaubon, but she still had to decide what to do with her prize . . . and her prisoners.

Proper surrender procedure. Purge sensitive data and destroy classified equipment.

"Makes sense, Ma'am. But what about notifying the Peeps?"

"There's that," Honor agreed unhappily. The Deneb Accords required combatants to report the names of prisoners—and KIAs—to the other side, usually through the Solarian League, since it was almost always the most powerful neutral around. Though the Peeps were traditionally sloppy about that, the Star Kingdom wasn't, yet telling the Peeps Caslet and his people were prisoners would also tell them his ship had been taken.

"We can hold off for a while," she decided. "We're required to notify their government in 'a reasonable time period', not as soon as physically possible. Given our own operational security requirements, I'm going to interpret that a bit liberally." Cardones nodded, and she brooded down at the display for a few more moments, then nodded in decision.

Interstellar treaties require both sides to report captures and KIAs. Through a neutral party instead of directly. Haven is apparently 'sloppy' in it's following of this provision.

"We don't have brig space to hang onto them," Honor murmured, rubbing the tip of her nose, "and I'd like to get their wounded into a proper hospital as soon as possible. We owe them that." She scooped Nimitz off her chair and cradled him in her arms while she considered, then nodded once more. "Vaubon's sickbay is undamaged, and her life support's in good shape. We'll strip out the officers and send most of her enlisted personnel—and all the wounded—off in her, and I'll have Reynolds ask the IAN to take her casualties off in Sachsen."

The plan, unload a marine-heavy prize crew to ride herd on most of Vaubon's crew, hold onto the officers and Commisioner to keep them from inciting mutiny.

Well, at least she had an excellent chance to find out what it had all been about. There'd been no survivors from Vaubon's first victim; total compensator failure and fifty-one seconds of runaway acceleration at over four hundred gravities had seen to that. But her computers were intact. It had taken three of Commander Harmon's LACs five hours to chase the hulk down and tow it back to Wayfarer, but Harold Tschu and Jennifer Hughes had crews tickling the system. Honor tried not to think about the human wreckage they were working amidst while they did it and turned away from the plot at last, hoping at least some answers would be forthcoming shortly.

Ouch.

And this is how they capture an intact computer and find Warnecke's secret base.

The People's Republic had refused to exchange POWs for the duration. There were precedents for and against prisoner exchange, but the Manties had a far smaller population than the Republic . . . which had no intention of returning trained personnel to the RMN. Besides, he thought with a flash of bitter humor, we'd have to trade them twenty to one just to hold even!

Given how much larger and more populous Haven is, it makes sense they'd be uninterested in prisoner exchanges. Anything to make the Manties' manpower crisis a bit worse.

He'd considered asking for asylum, but he just couldn't do it. He knew some PN personnel had—like Alfredo Yu, who was now an admiral in the Grayson Navy. Any one of them was a dead man if he ever fall back into Republican hands; that went without saying, but it wasn't the reason Caslet couldn't do it. For all the excesses of the Committee of Public Safety, for all the lunatic handicaps the Committee and its commissioners and StateSec had inflicted upon the People's Navy, Warner Caslet had sworn an oath when he accepted his commission. He could no more turn his back upon that oath than he could have let Warnecke's butchers rape and murder the civilian spacers he'd thought crewed this ship. It had come as a shock to him to realize that, yet it was true. Even if it did mean he was probably going to be shot by his own people.

And that is as clear as Caslet's politics can be spelled out. He's no great fan of the current regime, but he refuses to betray Haven or his oaths as a naval officer, even to request asylum.

Caslet watched her warily. He'd been too shocked to form much of an impression of her in the boat bay gallery. That irritated him, though he'd certainly had ample excuse, but he was back on balance now, and he sized her up carefully. From her reputation, she should have breathed fire and been three meters tall, and something itched between his shoulder blades at finding himself in her presence. This woman was one of the PN's bogeymen, like Admiral White Haven or Admiral Kuzak, and he couldn't imagine what she was doing commanding a single Q-ship in this backwater. He supposed he should be grateful the Manties were misusing her abilities so thoroughly, but it was a bit hard at the moment.

Always good to know what the opposition thinks of you. And Honor is apparently notorious on a level with White Haven (whose been blitizing the Peeps from the day he got the okay from Parliament) and Theodosia Kuzak (White Haven's 2IC, who took over ONI) despite being a rear-area Admiral at Grayson and effectively sitting out most of the war. I mostly blame her prewar adventures. Though she was briefly in command at Hancock and did smash a large force at Fourth Yeltsin.

One look told him his dossier had been wrong to dismiss it as a dumb animal, but, then, the Republic knew very little about treecats. Most of what they had were only rumors, and the rumors themselves were widely at variance with one another.

Treecats do not seem to be a priority for StateSec or previous intelligence-gathering organizations and efforts. That's fair. Most Manticorans have only contradictory rumors regarding the 'cat's intelligence.

"Wayfarer's teeth are quite sharp, Citizen Commander," she returned with a slight, dangerous smile. "And we've got complete downloads on their fleet. They've taken over the planet Sidemore, in the Marsh System. Marsh is—or was—an independent republic just outside the Confederacy, which may explain why the Silesians never looked there for him, assuming they even know he got away. But it was a fairly marginal system even before they took it, and their sole logistic support seems to be a single repair ship they brought out of the Chalice with them. Their resources are limited, despite whatever contacts Warnecke may have maintained, and by our count, they have—had—a total of twelve ships. You've eliminated two, and we've eliminated another pair, which reduces them to eight, and some of them will be out on operations. From the prize's data, their orbital defenses are negligible, and they have only a few thousand troops on the planet. Trust me, Citizen Commander. We can take them . . . and we're going to."

Warnecke's base on Sidemore, and the defenses and some resources available to him.

"Most of it's as personal as you'd expect, but there are several references in here to 'the squadron', though he was careful never to give its strength. There's also a rather pungent comment on orders to assist Andy merchies—which suggests an effort at diplomatic spin control in the event their activities get blown—and a reference to a Citizen Admiral Giscard. I didn't really expect to find anything, but I checked our database anyway, and we do have a little on Giscard. He was only a commander before the coup attempt, but we've got excerpts from the package ONI put together on him because he'd served as a naval attaché on Manticore . . . and because he'd served as an instructor at their war college."

"A commander?" Cardones blinked, and Honor nodded.

"I suspect he'd have held higher rank if he'd been a Legislaturalist. You know how hard it was for anyone else to break into flag rank—they only made Alfredo Yu a captain, for goodness sake! But it seems Javier Giscard was one of the PN's foremost advocates of commerce warfare."

One of Caslet's people keeps a diary, with commendably little useful information. But it does mention that Giscard is their commander, and they just happen to have an intelligence file on him. A short file, with a note that more information is available upon request.

Cardones nodded; even with modern data-storing technology, there was no way everything from ONI's massive files on enemy officers could have been crammed into a single ship's memory

Well, the simple interpretation of this is that ONI has a massive amount of data on Haven officers. If Moore's Law holds through the next two thousand years of human development, replace with a MASSIVE amount of data.

"Rifts" were volumes of hyper-space between gravity waves. They weren't uncommon; in fact, most of h-space was one huge rift, since grav waves tended to be quite narrow in interstellar terms. Unfortunately, the waves' crazy-quilt patterns meant most voyages required a starship to cross at least one. And since each wave was more powerful than anything man could generate and had its own unique frequency and flux, interference between it and an impeller wedge instantly generated an energy release sufficient to destroy any ship ever built.

That was the reason colonizing expeditions had continued to use cryo-equipped sublight, normal-space vessels, despite voyages which might last centuries, before the invention of the Warshawski sail and gravitic anomaly detector. Survey ships crewed by daredevil specialists had used hyper to explore the universe, yet the death toll had been heavy. Crews had continued to come forward—drawn by a combination of wanderlust, adrenaline addiction, and incredible salaries—but people taking their families to the stars had settled for n-space and cryo.

In 1273 P.D., however, hyper-physicist Adrienne Warshawski had mounted radically redesigned and much more powerful drive nodes—which she'd dubbed "alpha nodes"—on the test ship Fleetwing and produced the very first Warshawski sails. On the gross scale, they were simply the two stressed-space bands of a normal impeller wedge, but Fleetwing had projected them as enormous disks, perpendicular to her central axis, not as a wedge. The real sorcery had lain in what Warshawski had managed to do with those sails, for what she'd done was to give them a "tuning" ability that allowed them to adjust phase and merge with a naturally occurring grav wave. They stabilized Fleetwing relative to the grav wave, and by making subtle adjustments to their strength and frequency, they generated a "grab factor" which allowed her to use the wave itself, in conjunction with her inertial compensator, to generate stupendous rates of acceleration. And just as a side benefit, the interface between sail and wave produced eddies of preposterously high energy levels which could be tapped by a ship underway, allowing her to enjoy enormous savings in reactor mass.

Needless to say, the Warshawski sail revolutionized interstellar travel. Rather than avoid grav waves like the plague, captains began seeking them out, aided by the gravitic detectors she'd already produced (and which were still known as "Warshawskis" in her honor), for they had changed from death traps to the most efficient means of transportation known to man. A ship could generate the same sustained velocities under impeller drive, but the evasive routing required to avoid waves added enormously to voyage times, and the consequences of encountering an unexpected wave remained fatal. By riding the waves, however, a starship accelerated faster, cost less to operate, and eliminated the danger of running into one of them.

At the same time, it was almost always necessary for a ship to make at least one transition (and usually more) between grav waves on any extended voyage, and those transitions were made—very cautiously—under impeller drive.

More history of grav waves and FTL travel. It seems the first Warshawski sail vessel was named the Fleetwing. And the better-traveled spaces between grav waves are called Rifts.

Most grav waves were "locked," part of a web of mutually anchored and anchoring stress patterns which forced its strands to retain fixed relationships to one another. They moved over the years, but slowly and gradually, as a whole and in predictable fashion.

Rogue waves didn't. Rogue waves were spurs or flares thrown off by locked waves; they weren't part of the web. They could appear and disappear without warning or shift position with incredible speed, and while most hyper-physicists believed rogue waves were, in fact, cyclical phenomena whose timing could be predicted once enough data had been accumulated, accumulating data on them was exactly what merchant skippers were most eager to avoid.

But the Selker Rift couldn't be avoided, and so ships moving between the Empire and Confederacy crossed it under impeller drive at extremely low velocities—on the order of .16 c—in order to be sure they could dodge if the Selker Shear suddenly appeared on their detectors. It meant they took over five days just to cross the Rift, but it also meant they made it alive.

So the Selker is a dangerous area where ships have to move slowly to avoid the odd rogue wave. From this and it's proximity, Honor deduces (correctly) that Giscard will move there once he's heard there are Q-ships in the area, seeking greener pastures.

"By now, everyone in the Confederacy knows we're using only destroyers to escort our convoys. That's enough to deter regular raiders, but not heavy cruisers or battlecruisers. And the particle density's abnormally low in the Rift. That gives greater sensor reach if you want to establish a picket line, and the low speed of your targets would make it a lot easier to intercept any you picked up. Not only that, you can go after them under impeller drive, with sidewalls up and without losing your missile capability. Heavy ships could slaughter the escorts . . . and then run down the merchies at leisure."

"And take out as many as forty or fifty freighters at once," Cardones said softly.

40-50 ships to a large convoy, more reasons the Selker Rift is a commerce raider's paradise.

Caslet blinked. She was worried that a heavy cruiser might "get away" from a converted merchantman? He was willing to admit her ship mounted powerful energy weapons, but he'd had ample opportunity to realize Wayfarer truly was a civilian design, with all the vulnerabilities that implied, and there couldn't be many places to put missile tubes. Her long-range armament had to be weak, especially given the space those god awful grasers must eat up, and she couldn't take much damage. All of which meant a properly handled CA would cut her slow, unarmored, ungainly hull to pieces in any sort of sustained engagement. Granted she did carry those LACs, but LACs were fragile and weakly armed themselves. No matter how Warner Caslet looked at it, he expected Wayfarer to be severely damaged before she could take out that many opponents.

Which is why you don't invite foreign officers onto your bridge in combat if you want to save some surprises. Don't worry Caslet, Wayfarer is a champ at missile duels.

In light of any missile pod's complete vulnerability to any weapon, BuWeaps was still trying to come up with a design made out of sufficiently low-signature materials to defeat enemy fire control. They hadn't quite managed that yet, but they had come up with one whose radar return was far weaker than something its size ought to have been, and their new optical coating was much more effective against both visual detection and the laser pulses of the lidar most navies favored for short-range fire control, as well. Which meant they didn't look big enough to be any particular threat . . . a fact upon which Honor had counted when she, Cardones, and Hughes planned their initial tactics.

Five complete salvoes spilled astern, ejecting cleanly from the outsized cargo doors, and the pods' onboard fire control was programmed for delayed activation. The first salvo waited forty-eight seconds, the second thirty-six, the third twenty-four, and the fourth twelve . . .

The last fired on launch, and three hundred capital missiles streaked straight into the privateers' teeth.

The range was under a half-million kilometers, and the RMN's latest capital missiles accelerated at 92,000 KPS2. Flight time to the closest enemy ship was twenty-four seconds; time to the most distant was only four seconds longer, and Hendrickson, Jarmon, and Willis never had a chance.

Seventy-five immensely powerful laser heads screamed in on each of them, and they didn't even have their fire control on-line, far less their point defense. There was no need for it. They were the hunters, and their prey was only a huge, slow, totally defenseless freighter. They'd known that—or thought they had. Now captains shouted frantic helm orders, trying to roll ship and interpose their wedges, and Jarmon actually managed it . . . not that it did her any good. Jennifer Hughes' exquisitely timed missile storm slashed down on them, and her birds had plenty of time left on their drives for terminal attack maneuvers. Bomb-pumped lasers smashed through their targets' sidewalls as if they were tissue, detonating at ranges as short as a thousand kilometers, and no heavy cruiser ever built could survive that sort of fire.

Stacking pod salvoes works really, really well for Wayfarer. Could be it was designed with lots of control links, or if you 75 missiles to a target it doesn't terribly matter. Pods are getting stealthier, the Chalice Navy thought they were streaming debris or possibly ejecting a small amount of contraband cargo.

Oh, and max missile accel is up 7,000 KPS2, though that seems to explicitly for capital ship and pod missiles.

EDIT: whoops, hang on. That KPS2 should be Gs, else Manticore made a quantum leap in missile tech.

Warner Caslet stared at the plot in disbelief as the missile traces spawned like hideous serpents of light. He whirled to the visual display, and then staggered back a step as the laser heads detonated. The range was little more than a light-second and a half, and the savage white glare of nuclear fire stabbed at his eyes despite the optical filters.

God, he thought numbly. Dear sweet God, this is only a Q-ship! What the hell happens if they fit a warship with . . . with whatever the hell that was?!

What indeed, Warner Caslet. What indeed.

"I know." She stood, cradling Nimitz in her arms, and crossed to the main plot. Commander Harmon's LACs moved across it—three of them speeding ahead to planetary orbit while the other nine collected Wayfarer's missile pods and towed them in for reuse—and she watched Sidemore drawing closer.

The LACs get pod-retrieval duty. Reuse. Recycle. Reduce doesn't get much use. Might be harder with the new stealth-material pods.

Three LACs are apparently enough for orbital control (where orbital defenses are negligible.)

[Simon_Jester]

Apparently there are corvettes in the Honorverse. Don't recall them ever coming up again.

Since "frigate" has previously been presented as "anything that is bigger than a dispatch boat and has guns," I would assume that a corvette is basically a big LAC, say a 30-40 thousand ton combatant with missiles and lasers. Or maybe a hyper-capable unit that has one weapon per broadside maybe.

But that's on very very very weak evidence.

"We don't have brig space to hang onto them," Honor murmured, rubbing the tip of her nose, "and I'd like to get their wounded into a proper hospital as soon as possible. We owe them that." She scooped Nimitz off her chair and cradled him in her arms while she considered, then nodded once more. "Vaubon's sickbay is undamaged, and her life support's in good shape. We'll strip out the officers and send most of her enlisted personnel—and all the wounded—off in her, and I'll have Reynolds ask the IAN to take her casualties off in Sachsen."

The plan, unload a marine-heavy prize crew to ride herd on most of Vaubon's crew, hold onto the officers and Commisioner to keep them from inciting mutiny.

It also helps that RMN crews are cross-trained to operate at least some naval systems, so they're not complete ignoramuses if the Havenite prisoners try something sneaky. Honor might also send a few naval ratings or officers along, just to make sure they have someone to (for instance) serve the role of chief engineer.

Treecats do not seem to be a priority for StateSec or previous intelligence-gathering organizations and efforts. That's fair. Most Manticorans have only contradictory rumors regarding the 'cat's intelligence.

The evidence at this time in the series is that they're basically the Manticoran version of a pet monkey, albeit a carnivorous pet monkey. So yeah.

One of Caslet's people keeps a diary, with commendably little useful information. But it does mention that Giscard is their commander, and they just happen to have an intelligence file on him. A short file, with a note that more information is available upon request.

For lo, it is written, loose lips sink ships.

Warner Caslet stared at the plot in disbelief as the missile traces spawned like hideous serpents of light. He whirled to the visual display, and then staggered back a step as the laser heads detonated. The range was little more than a light-second and a half, and the savage white glare of nuclear fire stabbed at his eyes despite the optical filters.

God, he thought numbly. Dear sweet God, this is only a Q-ship! What the hell happens if they fit a warship with . . . with whatever the hell that was?!

Caslet gets a record: he was the first Havenite to see the Manticore Missile Massacre in action.

Now, it seems likely that Wayfarer was equipped with communications equipment as powerful and flexible as possible. Weber makes it very unclear just what a "control link" entails. Does each missile need a dedicated transceiver antenna to manage it?

In real life, phased array antennas can communicate with and control multiple targets at once- in which case the limiting parameters have more to do with the software. And maybe with the communications gear not being able to transmit numerous high powered beams to a whole lot of targets that are all millions of miles away and flying into a cloud of electronic jamming.

If I were making up an answer to this... Wayfarer may have systems designed to control a whole heap of missiles but only against the kind of shitty jamming they're likely to encounter in Silesia. Or they may spam hundreds of missiles and only control a few dozen of them, saying "well, maybe 5-10% of the uncontrolled missiles will hit but that's still a lot, and we can be damn sure all the controlled missiles will hit in the confusion!"

We never actually find out how Weber handles this, assuming that at this time he even DID think the control link issue was as paramount as he made it out to be later.

The LACs get pod-retrieval duty. Reuse. Recycle. Reduce doesn't get much use. Might be harder with the new stealth-material pods.

Oh, that's easy. Bolt an IFF beacon to the side of the stealth pod, set to activate if and only if a specific broadcast radio signal hits it.

Three LACs are apparently enough for orbital control (where orbital defenses are negligible.)

Given that each LAC could fire its laser from low Earth orbit and hit a target on the Moon, and that they can literally fly around the planet in a powered orbit in a matter of minutes at most, yes, I believe they would be enough.

[Batman]

Given that this engagement was practically in energy range Wayfarer may not have needed control links-for that short a flight time and distance (not to mention with that level of overkill) the missiles may have been capable of doing this on their own, without the launch vessel holding their hands.
And given that the Trojans were designed to throw those (at the time) humongous salvoes it would only make sense to equip them with the required control links (to the extent that's actually possible, as Simon says we don't really know what the limiting factors are that make that a problem later in the series).

[Terralthra]

We don't know *all* of the limiting factors. We know some of them. We know that a control link must have a free path to the missile in question, which is what prevents a ship from firing missiles and then rolling up on its side to block incoming fire with its wedge - it'll cut off missile control links, crippling their own missiles' performance. Part of what enables the off-bore missile capacity of later books is the RMN's Keyhole program, which gets the control link into an external drone towed outside the wedge and sidewall. Since it must require space on the external hull (unimpeded path), that means it takes up hull space, which means it has to be squeezed in with all the other shit on the hull (beam emitters, missile tubes, CM laser clusters, sensors, etc. etc. etc.), so hull surface (and thus hull size) is also a concern.

[Simon_Jester]

Given that this engagement was practically in energy range Wayfarer may not have needed control links-for that short a flight time and distance (not to mention with that level of overkill) the missiles may have been capable of doing this on their own, without the launch vessel holding their hands.
And given that the Trojans were designed to throw those (at the time) humongous salvoes it would only make sense to equip them with the required control links (to the extent that's actually possible, as Simon says we don't really know what the limiting factors are that make that a problem later in the series).

Yes. It could be MDM salvoes that cause control links to become a really serious problem.

Speculatively: since MDMs operate at much longer ranges, they need more capability. They need more telemetry support (because the target can move or change more in the MDM's long flight time). And they need more powerful transmitter beams to send any messages to them becaues they're an order of magnitude farther away.

So the same missiles that need a relatively small transmitter to control at a range of four million kilometers need huge, dedicated tracking and telemetry rigs to control from forty million kilometers. This makes the "we haven't got the control capacity" more of an issue. Plus it introduces another obstacle to refitting older ships to fire MDMs- their telemetry transmitters may not be powerful enough, and the ship might need modifications to be able to control its own missiles from that far away.

...Come to think of it, a ship firing double broadsides would necessarily cut the control links to its own missiles on a regular basis. A double broadside salvo thus almost HAS to be uncontrolled, which helps to explain its low hit rate, and why not everyone does it all the time. It'd only be viable when you have an EW advantage (say, when shooting at pre-Alliance Graysons or Silesians), because otherwise you're not going to hit a single thing.

[Batman]

Um-I don't see why a double broadside has to be 'uncontrolled'. Yes, rolling takes half your telemetry emitters out of the loop, but half of them remain in, so you should at least be able to continue controlling half your double broadside, and I don't see anything keeping them from rotating several missiles on a single telemetry link (especially as for double broadsides, 'several' means 'two').
Something they have to be able to do anyway now I think about it because if we're going with one link per tube how else do they control multiple underway salvoes, and if they have the telemetry links to control several salvoes, at least for double broadsides the issue becomes mute.

And why would the ship cutting half its telemetry links out of the loop for a few seconds mean the missiles are on their own? We've been telling missiles 'You go thataway until further notice, wait for updates' for decades. The number of SAMs a Tico can control really simultaneously is four. It can manage a lot more than that because it rotates through missiles, telling them 'your target is currently there, go there until further notice, I'll be back shortly' and switches to another missile. I don't see why Honorverse targeting can't do the same within limits. Certainly within the limits of a measly double broadside.

[Terralthra]

At some point downrange, the controlling ship severs control links with the missiles anyway, once light-speed lag overcomes how much shittier the onboard computers are compared to the ship's computers. That's why Apollo was such a huge win.