Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington II

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-03-24 11:05pm

Well, what else do we have for a baseline?

We know superdreadnought grasers can blow away a battlecruiser in short order (Honor Among Enemies)

And that one superdreadnought can account for 3-4 (probably missile-heavy) battleships in energy combat during a relatively short span of time (Flag in Exile) although at high risk of being crippled or killed.

And that's... really about it, not counting the beam combat at First Yeltsin and Blackbird which tells us little about large-ship durability, and the use of energy torpedoes at Basilisk that is basically never repeated.

So really, we have very little concrete information on how shipboard energy weapons perform except "they blow the crap out of things, unless the things they shoot at are a lot bigger and heavier than the ship doing the shooting."

We can reasonably estimate that one shipboard beam weapon is several times more powerful per shot than one beam from a laser head on a missile... Or at least a comparable missile; a superdreadnought's grasers probably pack more punch than individual hits from the SD's missiles, but a destroyer's lasers might not hit harder than those same capital-ship missiles.

Moreover, that increased firepower translates into much greater chance of a hull-penetrating hit that causes damage to critical systems, rather than just arbitrarily blowing up a couple of weapon and sensor arrays on the ship's outer surface.

My point is that the only real reason to mount heavier beams is to increase penetration. In which case I have to ask:

Why do the Graysons expect this to be an issue? What realistic doctrinal role or threat environment made them predict that their shipboard beam weapons needed the extra penetration that much? It seems very arbitrary to me.

Are they planning to fight heavier ships a lot? That is poor policy on general principles, and even if they do, they'd be fools to seek out a beam engagement against a Peep battlecruiser when they have a massive acceleration advantage (lower mass, better compensators), and can easily keep the range open and deliver missile attacks.

Do they expect that by mounting fewer, heavier beams they'll be able to knock out same-sized opponents before said opponents can do much damage? That seems doubtful because we never see any ship of a given tonnage have trouble scoring decisive hits on ships of comparable tonnage in energy combat. On the contrary, everything I've seen suggests that shipboard energy weapons routinely punch deep into the hull of peer-competitor warships. And that it takes unusually massive armor (for a ship of given size) to even seriously slow down Honorverse beam weapons.

Unless I'm badly wrong, firing fewer more powerful beams may just mean you drill half as many holes in the target that are individually twice as big around- which is not necessarily a good way to make sure you hit a fusion reactor or compensator or other key target on the first salvo.

Do they need the bigger beams against lighter opponent ships? Even with Peep compensators, chasing down a destroyer in a Jason Alvarez would take some doing, and while the bigger grasers could easily blow away a destroyer or CL... frankly, so could the weapons a Star Knight already carries.

So if the heavy-graser armament isn't really good for shooting at bigger ships or smaller ships or ships of the same size... what is it for, exactly?

Frankly, I think Weber's been captivated by false analogies to the "all-big-gun broadside" that made the WWI dreadnoughts so much more effective than earlier 'pre-dreadnought' battleships. That was a good idea for reasons that have very little to do with the realities we've observed applying to Honorverse beam combat.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2014-03-24 11:48pm

Lots of the way certain things interact don't make sense when drawing purely from the way things are written.

For example, okay. Lasers and Grasers. The effective difference they make in terms of what happens in the books? Pretty much nothing. I don't think we've ever seen a single case of two ships in an energy exchange, and both damaged but surviving. This makes it confusing as well what the role of energy torpedos were, a weapon that lets a CL blow up an SD under very special conditions.

The books also under no circumstances ever want a smaller ship engaging a larger one, even with the Manty tech advantage. So, it is indeed rather puzzling why they care so hard. After all, if an equal class on equal class energy duel is based on overkill, why not under-gun your energy to improve your missile attack, thus making it more likely that you'll soften them up harder or kill them outright?

As for the Grayson graser battery doctrine, it does seem like a false analogy. The closest thing to a dreadnaught revolution would be SD(P).

It also makes you wonder why some ship classes even exist. As far as I can tell, what is the problem with a space navy in the Weberverse that only fields Destroyers, Battlecruisers and SDs? The CL and CA roles seem rather superfluous, and can replace or be replaced by one of their neighbors.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-03-25 12:22am

Nephtys wrote:Lots of the way certain things interact don't make sense when drawing purely from the way things are written.

For example, okay. Lasers and Grasers. The effective difference they make in terms of what happens in the books? Pretty much nothing. I don't think we've ever seen a single case of two ships in an energy exchange, and both damaged but surviving. This makes it confusing as well what the role of energy torpedos were, a weapon that lets a CL blow up an SD under very special conditions.

The "energy torpedo" seems to be sort of the apotheosis of energy weapon firepower- a beam weapon that is even bigger but lacks the ability to penetrate sidewalls.

The books also under no circumstances ever want a smaller ship engaging a larger one, even with the Manty tech advantage. So, it is indeed rather puzzling why they care so hard. After all, if an equal class on equal class energy duel is based on overkill, why not under-gun your energy to improve your missile attack, thus making it more likely that you'll soften them up harder or kill them outright?

This is pretty much my point, yes. It's sensible for ships to de-emphasize beam armament in favor of missiles (which Weber has them doing to some extent). It's not necessarily wise to drop the beams entirely, both because they do act as auxiliary antimissile defense, and because there's still a number of ways that a ship might be forced to fight an energy-range battle.

It also makes you wonder why some ship classes even exist. As far as I can tell, what is the problem with a space navy in the Weberverse that only fields Destroyers, Battlecruisers and SDs? The CL and CA roles seem rather superfluous, and can replace or be replaced by one of their neighbors.

The main rationale seems to be that destroyers are light enough to be easily blown up. If your entire fleet consists of, say... 80 thousand ton destroyers, 800 thousand ton battlecruisers, and 8 million ton capital ships, you are in some ways quite vulnerable to an enemy who exploits the gaps in your deployments.

The biggest issue is that it's not that hard for the enemy to construct 100 or 150 thousand ton ships that can fry your little ships at will on deployment. Since of necessity you have to trawl those little destroyers out there, even relatively primitive enemies can build "cruiser-weight" ships that will kill them by sheer tonnage.

You can counter with numbers, but that requires you either never operate your destroyers alone, or to make utterly huge numbers of them and embrace attritional losses, knowing that a random percentage of destroyers you send out will run into something too big to fight, and die.

Or you can try to counter by sending out your battlecruisers- but those 100-200 thousand ton ships will easily evade battlecruisers much of the time, and are so much more numerous that you simply cannot have battlecruisers present every time a 100-200 thousand ton ship attacks one of your bitty little destroyers.

So basically there's a niche for "cruisers" simply because it IS quite practical to build ships that are heavy enough to maul destroyers, but light enough to evade battlecruisers. Even if you don't start building them for yourself, you need ships of your own in that tonnage range that can counter them effectively.

On the other hand, doing the same thing to mousetrap your battlecruisers doesn't pay very well. By the time a ship gets big enough to be a reliable battlecruiser-killer, it's getting up into a tonnage range where it'll have a hard time escaping enemy capital ships, and becomes vulnerable to them because of its relatively tiny size compared to them.

This seems to be why there's a wide variety of tonnage classes between "smallest practical warship" and "battlecruiser..." and then a BIG gap between "battlecruiser" and "smallest practical capital ship."

Sometimes the mission description is "be the smallest practical warship because ANY warship is big enough for this job." A destroyer can do that.

Sometimes the mission is "fight on equal terms with anything a random backwater can field, and overmatch most pirates." A destroyer can't do that. This takes a hull of about 100,000 tons: a 'light cruiser.'

Sometimes the mission is "beat the tar out of anything other than a serious national navy's armed forces, while being big and tough enough to have at least reasonable survivability against the heavy weapons of an enemy national navy." This sends your tonnage requirements spiraling upwards- 200 or 300 thousand tons for heavy cruisers, more if you're technologically outgunned or are trying to cram lots of powerful systems into the hull.

It goes up even farther, toward 700-800, if you want battlecruisers capable of taking on most single-system national navies and winning.

Then... huge gap and you encounter the super-duper monster ships, which are literally built as large as possible and are designed to (in warship terms) leisurely waltz up to things and obliterate them. There's a range of sizes within the "capital ship" classifications, but the grouping is relatively tight- about 6.5 to 8.5 million tons.

PKRudeBoy · Post by **PKRudeBoy** » 2014-03-25 11:26am

One of the reasons that Grayson might go for heavier energy weapons is that, up until Apollo and total dominance of missiles, energy combat occurs when your opponent forces you to defend something. For a single system polity that is heavily reliant on orbital infrastructure, and whose territory is frequently invaded during the war, making sure that all of your warships can more effectively mount a desperate defense of the homeworld would be a fairly large concern. Sure, the commanders might know that they will die, but if your ships are say, punching one class above what they should in energy range, when that final assault comes they'll take more of the enemy with them.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-03-25 01:08pm

It's not entirely clear that they punch one class above, though- they hit harder but fewer times. If a Jason Alvarez had to, say, re-enact Second Yeltsin... well, they'd fight the same battle in missile range, and when the time came for a final beam exchange with Thunder of God, it is far from obvious that the Alvarez would do a significantly more effective job.

Terralthra · Post by **Terralthra** » 2014-03-25 01:45pm

Another reason they might want heavier mounts is their experience of Fourth Yeltsin. They brought 20 BCs screening the 1st Battle Squadron, and there's no real indication those BCs were able to materially contribute to the main battle with the BBs. Indeed, Honor basically tells them from the very beginning that they aren't particularly useful in main combat, only useful as a distraction to help get the SDs in range, and once the exchange of fire begins, they are tasked only with defending themselves from the BBs' broadsides. There's no indication they particularly contribute to the missile exchange, nor the energy combat exchange, and that's fighting against what are in essence, oversized BCs without the redundancy and toughness of true capital ships.

The second phase of the battle bears this out. The staredown between TG 14.2 and the remaining combat effective forces of BatRon 1 is always framed as 4(.5) SDs vs. 12 BBs, and whether or not each could take the other, with effectively no mention of the 12 BCs escorting the 12 BBs, nor the 13 BCs screening the SDs. Maybe if the Grayson BCs had a bit more powerful beam weaponry, they could be considered as contributing to the overall wall's energy power once it closes to energy range with another wall of battle. They'd be glass hammers if they tried to come to grips with enemy BBs or ships of the wall themselves, but in screening a force of capital ships against another force, it's entirely reasonable that they'd reach energy range of another wall of battle without grievous errors involved in getting there. Once there, it's eminently reasonable that the Graysons try to devise a way that they contribute in that engagement, if they can do so without significantly sacrificing some other capability.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-03-25 02:20pm

That makes sense for Grayson battlecruisers- which are large enough to mount capital-class beam weapons in theory, and which are apparently used doctrinally as escort for the wall of battle.

But... my honest impression is that the Grayson heavy cruisers are not intended to be employed in this way.

Terralthra · Post by **Terralthra** » 2014-03-25 03:36pm

Simon_Jester wrote:That makes sense for Grayson battlecruisers- which are large enough to mount capital-class beam weapons in theory, and which are apparently used doctrinally as escort for the wall of battle.

But... my honest impression is that the Grayson heavy cruisers are not intended to be employed in this way.

Except, if we make it so cruisers can punch above their weight in energy range and hit like a BC (even if not as many times), we can have a squadron of CAs screen the capships and that frees up a squadron of BCs to go commerce raiding or whatever.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-03-25 04:07pm

Assuming the cruisers can also handle the task force missile defense role adequately, yes.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-03-25 06:02pm

"All right, people—let's see some enthusiasm! We've got some Manty ass to kick!"

Citizen Rear Admiral Lester Tourville's thick mustache bristled aggressively over his fierce grin. Conformity had become the path to survival for most of the People's Navy's senior officers, but Tourville was and would always remain a character—indeed, almost a caricature. His climb from captain to rear admiral had been meteoric, yet he knew as well as anyone that the likelihood of his ever rising above rear admiral was essentially nonexistent. Not that it bothered him. Most of his more colorful mannerisms might be deliberate affectations, but underneath them he truly was the hard-charging warrior he parodied so well. Higher rank would only have diluted the impact his talents (and style) could exert at the squadron level. It would also require him to play the political game, and Tourville knew his limits. Even those idiots at StateSec were unlikely to execute a mere rear admiral who was constitutionally unable to fit the party mold—particularly if he was also a troubleshooter who always came through—but a vice admiral or admiral with the same tendencies would quickly end up dead. All of which helped explain the "loose warhead" persona he'd gone to such lengths to perfect.

Meet Rear Admiral Lester Tourville. Like Theisman's performance at Fourth Yeltsin, Tourville has figured that in the new Navy it's better to be overeager and have your Commisioner reign you in than it is for them to possibly consider you a coward. So he's cultivated the appearance and reputation of a cartoonishly boisterous and aggressive officer, forcing his long-suffering Commisioner to serve as the voice of reason and talk him down to what he wanted to do anyways.

"Agreed. Agreed." Tourville waved one hand airily and drew a cigar from the breast pocket of his tunic. He shoved it into his mouth at precisely the right angle of jauntiness, lit it, and blew a stream of pungent smoke at the air return over his console. In point of fact, he didn't much care for cigars, but smoking had once more become fashionable over the past several years, and he'd decided cigars fitted his image. Now he couldn't get rid of the miserable things without admitting they'd been a mistake, and he was damned if he'd do that.

Smoking goes in and out of fashion on Haven, as elsewhere. But a cigar is part of Tourville's character.

"Our current areas of interest are these three systems," he went on. "Sallah, Adler, and Micah. According to our latest intelligence dumps, the Manties have taken Adler and Micah, but we still hold Sallah. Unfortunately, the data on Sallah is over two weeks old, so with your permission, Citizen Commander Lowe and I recommend beginning our sweep there, then moving south to Adler and Micah before returning to Barnett."

"What sort of passage times are we looking at?" Tourville demanded.

"Just under nine and a half days to Sallah, Citizen Rear Admiral," Citizen Commander Karen Lowe, Tourville's staff astrogator, replied. "Sallah to Adler would be another three days, and Adler to Micah would be another thirty-one hours. Return passage from Micah to Barnett would be another nine-plus days."

"So the entire sweep, exclusive of any time we spend shooting Manties, would be—what?" Tourville squinted against his cigar smoke while he did the mental math. "About three T-weeks?"

Proposed (later rejected) cruising plan for Tourville's recon-by-force. Keeping with news only traveling by courier, they're not entirely sure Sallah is still theirs, just that it was two weeks ago.

"Our info on Micah is especially spotty," Foraker went on. "We think there's a light Manty task force—call it a couple of divisions of the wall—with escorts from the Grayson and Casca navies. That's what moved in and took it away from us, anyway, and I think it would be smart to assume they're still there until we prove differently."

-snip-

"At our last count, their Adler picket was only a cruiser squadron and two or three divisions of tin cans. That's probably gone up some since, but given that we haven't counterattacked or raided at all in this entire sector for over six months, I doubt they've reinforced very heavily. They're strapped for ships, too, Citizen Commissioner. They have to be skimming hulls off from quiet areas to build up for their next offensive."

Shannon Foraker (now Tourville's ops officer) and her estimate of local Manticoran strength. Also, at least on other Alliance member, Casca, is providing some light ships.

"Well, it's just that I—that is, Citizen Commander Foraker and I—wondered if we could get HQ to agree to release some of the new missile pods to us?" There was a moment of silence, and Bogdanovich hurried on before anyone else could break it. "The thing is, Citizen Rear Admiral, that by now the Manties must be aware that we've got them. We know they've already been used closer to Trevor's Star, and we know HQ is planning to use them against any attack on Barnett. But what we don't know is whether or not the Allied units in our sector have been informed that we have them. If they haven't, the surprise factor could be decisive. And we have been assigned Yarnowski and Simmons, Citizen Admiral. Each of them could carry up to seventy pods and a complete set of reloads and still leave plenty of capacity for the rest of our requirements."

-snip-

"All right," he said finally. "I'll support you if you want to ask for them, at any rate. Just try to write a convincing proposal."

For now Havenite pods are special requisition only for secrecy, because they're still new and scarce or, I suspect, both.

"we have to bear in mind that Manty tech systems are still better than ours across the board. On the other hand, they haven't been in possession of Adler or Micah long enough to have deployed their usual sensor platform network. Even if they had been, their operational patterns around Trevor's Star indicate their Sixth Fleet is short of platforms just now. That, at least, is NavInt's interpretation of their increased use of destroyers and light cruisers as perimeter pickets, and it makes sense to me, too. If they don't have enough sensor platforms, they'd have to cover the gaps with ships. I also think it's a fairly safe bet that if they're short at someplace as critical as Trevor's Star, they're probably even shorter in the much lower priority systems in our operational area. If they do have a sensor bottleneck, it's probably temporary, but until they get it fixed, it offers us a window of opportunity."

For now, the RMN is running short of remote sensor platforms to provide total coverage for all their new acquisitions.

GNS Jason Alvarez's flag briefing room was on the small size, compared to that of a battlecruiser or ship of the wall, but it was well equipped and large enough for Honor's needs. A little more space between the back of her chair and the compartment's forward bulkhead would have been welcome, and inviting anyone in addition to her staff quickly made it seem badly congested, but she'd had to work under much less congenial conditions, and at least her chair was comfortable.

No mention of a flag bridge, but a heavy cruiser has at least space for a squadron commander's briefings.

"Our biggest problem is that, for the moment, we aren't anywhere near as strong in the sector as we could wish, either. The situation around Trevor's Star has drawn off most of the available Peep tonnage, but it's done the same thing for us, too. Given how many capital ships the final fighting there sent to the repair yards, quieter sectors—including ours—have been raided pretty hard to build up Admiral Kuzak's strength, and drawing in Eighth Fleet's designated units has stripped the cupboard still barer between Yeltsin and Barnett. What that means for us is that our pickets are all relatively light and much too shorthanded for aggressive reconnaissance of Peep-held systems, which means we have to pretty much guess at what's on the other side of the hill."

He paused for a moment to let that settle in, then continued.

"On the basis of the information we do have and the best estimates our analysts can come up with, Command Central feels we can anticipate that most local Peep pickets will be weak—probably no more than a screen of cruisers whose primary function is more to warn Barnett an attacking force is inbound than to mount any serious defense of their station. Command Central also feels Peep system COs will tend to be cautious, since they must be aware that we're planning an eventual move into their command areas in strength. While Central's latest update stops short of predicting that the enemy will adopt a purely defensive posture, it clearly anticipates a high degree of timidity on his part."

"I see." Honor leaned back and pursed her lips. She reached up to rub Nimitz's ears where the 'cat lay stretched across the top of her chair back and let her eyes rest on Mayhew's face. "Should I gather, Lieutenant, that you don't share that anticipation?"

"No, My Lady. I don't." Many a lieutenant would have waffled, but Mayhew shook his head firmly. "According to the Manty Office of Naval Intelligence's last download, the new system commander at Barnett is Admiral Thomas Theisman." Honor felt her eyebrows arch. This was the first she'd heard of that, and the news put a human face on the enemy, for she and Thomas Theisman had met, and she had a high respect for his ability and initiative. "I've studied Theisman's record," Mayhew went on, unaware of his commodore's thoughts, "and he doesn't fit the standard Peep profile. He's a chance-taker. I wouldn't call him rash, but he's proved he's willing to go against the odds when his own judgment tells him to. Sooner or later, that's almost certain to get him shot. He can't be right all the time, and the first time he blows an operation, he's done for. But so far he's always managed to deliver, and I don't see him changing his approach now."

Neither side has as many ships in the area as they'd like, so there's been little recn and much guesswork on both sides of the fence. Honor hears that Theisman is leading the local opposition.

"I'd simply point out that our local shipping patterns have been materially altered to consolidate our escort capability over the past months. We're sending out more ships per convoy, but the total number of convoys—and thus potential targets—has been cut in half, which means, theoretically, at least, that the available escort strength per convoy has been doubled. The Peeps may not know that yet, though anyone sent out to raid our shipping lanes will catch on in a hurry. But what if they already realize how our deployments are shifting? Command Central is sending us out to escort a single convoy, which means that there will be six heavy cruisers waiting for any raiders. That comes close to matching the strength available to more than a third of our local system pickets, so why go after a moving target? The enemy would have to spread his available strength widely to locate a convoy in hyper, even if he knew its exact schedule, and that very dispersal would mean he was unlikely to have enough combat power to engage its escort if he managed to find it at all. On the other hand, star systems don't dodge around. He knows exactly where they are, and if he does have battlecruisers available and chooses to operate them aggressively, he'd be like a spider in a web. If he managed to seize a system, it would be impossible to warn any ships already en route to it until they arrived . . . at which point his concentrated strength would be available to take out any escorts before he massacred the merchantmen. Especially if he could suck them inside the hyper limit to keep them from simply translating out on him."

Manticore has been doubling up convoys to concentrate escorts, and six heavy cruisers are apparently equivalent to a third of the local system pickets. Past that discussion of the Peep's options and ominous foreshadowing.

Any commerce raider knew that the best chance to hit a merchantman (or a convoy of them) was immediately after it translated from hyper- to normal-space, before its sensors had time to locate potential threats and while its velocity was at its lowest. Since the general volumes in which traffic was likely to make translation could be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy, placing a raider in position to hit merchantmen at their most vulnerable wasn't particularly difficult. Covering all probable target areas might require a goodly number of hulls, but their actual placement was straightforward.

By the same token, the best relative position from which to attack a convoy, whether in hyper- or n-space, was from directly ahead of it, where its velocity would carry it straight towards you. The execution of any effective evasion maneuver would require its ships to overcome a potentially enormous relative closing velocity, and no vast, lumbering merchantman, with its commercial grade inertial compensator and impellers, could match the acceleration and maneuverability of a warship. As a consequence, raiders preferred to get ahead of a convoy and let it come to them.

The classic defensive gambit was for the escort commander to place the majority of her strength ahead of her charges, so as to put her warships between them and the most probable axis of threat while one or two pickets watched the rear as a hedge against the lesser threat of a raider overtaking from astern. Against pirates, whose primary goal was to take prizes (and those prizes' cargoes) intact, that remained RMN convoy doctrine, but against Peep commerce raiders, the Navy had adopted the new strategy proposed by Vice Admiral Mark Sarnow. Instead of massing the escorts ahead, they were concentrated on the flanks and astern of the convoy, with relatively weak scouting elements deployed at least thirty to forty minutes of flight time ahead of the entire formation.

It made sense, given that Peeps, unlike pirates, were interested only in denying a convoy's cargo to the Alliance. They might prefer capturing it, but simply destroying it would do the job just as well, so from their perspective, it only made sense to open fire the moment they reached attack range of the merchies, which, in turn, made it imperative for the escorts to keep them out of range. The new doctrine placed the escorts' main fighting strength in a position which let them use their superior speed to intercept a threat coming in on any attack vector, and the forward scouting elements served to "sanitize" the convoy's projected course in order to prevent surprises. It also, of course, meant that the ships assigned to break trail were the most exposed units of the escort, but that couldn't be helped, and the scouts should have time to fall back on the main body of the escort before they could be overwhelmed in isolation.

The 'Sarnow Deployment' for protecting convoys from commerce raiders, how and why the tactics of commerce raiders differ from pirates, making the Sarnow plan viable, Also good to know the guy did at least this one more thing in the war. Well, we know TF Hancock 1 was being assigned to White Haven so he's probably seen a fair bit of action.

"True enough," McKeon agreed. "But our first responsibility is to the convoy. If it comes right down to it, any escort is expendable, and a Sarnow deployment will stretch the convoy's sensor envelope by a good nine light-minutes. Even those of us who don't have built in FTL coms have recon drones that do, and that means the picket will be able to see any bad guys and report them to the flagship long before they see the flagship. At worst, that should at least let us keep the merchies clear of them; at best, we'll have a pretty fair shot of sucking any weak raiding force into an ambush of our own."

They don't quite have enough ships for a Sarnow deployment as it's meant to be done, but just trying will give them lots more sensor coverage, and even ships without FTL comm can route messages through recon drones that do. I wonder how long RMN commanders were delegating stuff to drones on the fly before BuWeaps took a long hard look at them for Ghost Rider.

"Sir, any star system's a mighty big fishpond, and our approach course was designed to stay well clear of the ecliptic to avoid blundering into any of the local traffic's sensor envelopes. Unless a starship already has a pretty good idea about where another ship is hiding, its active sensor reach is simply too short for any realistically useful sweeps. That's one of the things that makes the Manties' remotes such pains. Their sensor arrays, signal amplification, and dedicated software are better than any of our shipboard systems can come close to matching, and just to be on the safe side, they like to seed the things so densely and generate so much overlap that active sensors can pick up anyone who tries to sneak through. Which doesn't even mention the fact that an intact sensor net lets them shut down their mobile systems completely and rely on relayed data without revealing their own positions. But everything we've seen so far supports the theory that they're short on platforms, and we'll pick up any active sensor emissions long before they can get a useful return off of us."

Sneaking into a system got so much harder with vast networks of FTL-comm sensor platforms.

"I see." Dillinger rubbed his jaw for a moment. Given that none of Enchanter's enormously sensitive passive arrays had picked up anything, it seemed most likely that Singer's "ghost" was just that: an electronic glitch with no existence in real space. For it to be anything else would have required a starship to be coasting in-system under total EmCon, and that sort of maneuver took more balls than any Peep CO was likely to boast. Especially after the way Manticoran perimeter sensor platforms had repeatedly spotted incoming hostiles far short of the inner system. Still . . .

"Go active," he said.

Singer glanced up over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow. Commodore Yeargin had specifically instructed her orbiting units to maintain a passive sensor watch only. Active sensors were too short ranged to do much good, anyway, and their only practical function would have been to turn the emitting ships into brilliant electronic beacons for anyone who'd managed to make it past the limited number of platforms her understrength "task group" had been able to deploy. But her orders had included a proviso authorizing officers of the watch to make targeted, short-duration active sweeps if they felt they were required, and Dillinger nodded to Singer to get on with it.

The ships in Adler were hiding out, but were allowed to go active if the commander thought it prudent to look at something with active sensors, a degree of autonomy the Peeps would never permit. Not that it does the Manties much good here.

I actually wound up quoting the whole Battle of Adler, just breaking it into discreet chunks for commentary.

"My God!"

Holden Singer snapped upright in his chair, eyes wide. It took eight seconds for his radar pulse to reach Count Tilly and her consorts, and another eight seconds for it to return. During that time, the Peeps' approach speed had cut the range by over a million kilometers . . . and brought them well into missile range. It took the lieutenant another two seconds to realize what he was seeing and shout a warning, and it took Commander Dillinger another second and a half to order the General Quarters alarm sounded. In all, twenty seconds elapsed between the time Tourville passed his order to fire and the moment the atonal, two-toned howl of the alarm actually began to sound.

HMS Enchanter's crew had barely begun to race to their battle stations when four battlecruisers, eight heavy cruisers, and six light cruisers, with a combined total of fifty-six missile pods on tow behind them, opened fire. Peep missiles were less efficient than those of the RMN, but in compensation, Peep warships mounted more tubes . . . and so did their missile pods.

By the time Singer's assistant tac officer flung herself into the chair beside his, over nine hundred missiles were in space and streaking for his ship.

Radar still works within light-speed limitations. Order of battle for the Haven side: 4 BC, 8, CA, 6 CL.

Later we'll learn that Haven goes for gigantic pods with 16 missiles apiece. They've been waiting a long time to see the Manties' faces pale as missiles fill the void.

Citizen Captain Bogdanovich's exultant, sibilant whisper said it all as Tourville and his staff watched their massive salvo stream towards the enemy. Even as the missiles went out, Tourville's engineers were bringing up his ships' impellers and sidewalls, for there was no longer any reason to hide. Unlike the Manties, Tourville's officers had known their drives and defensive systems would be needed, and they'd been at standby for over fifteen hours, but even with hot impeller nodes, they would need at least another thirteen minutes to bring their wedges up.

Yet that still put them far ahead of the Manties, for the Manties hadn't known this was coming. Their missile-defense fire control started to come on-line, blossoming on Shannon Foraker's display in bursts of light, but their passive defenses could never be brought up in time. And against the hurricane of fire coming at them, all their radar and lidar could really do was provide targeting beacons for her missiles' onboard seekers.

Interesting, we have missiles homing in on radar/lidar sources. A bit over thirteen minutes for Haven BCs to bring up their drives from standby. Compare with fifteen minutes for both Sirius and Fearless in the first book.

Lester Tourville stared into the master plot, unable even now to truly believe what it showed. A Manty task group had been caught totally unprepared, and that wasn't supposed to happen. But it had, and Shannon's plan had taken merciless advantage of the Manties' fatal overconfidence. He watched targeting codes blossom and change as the missiles reported back over their telemetry links. They were on their own, but Foraker had told them precisely what to look for, and the steady procession of fire control systems coming on-line before them beckoned to their homing sensors. The massive flight of missiles began to spread and disperse, apportioning itself among the victims in its path.

It wasn't a perfect distribution, a corner of his brain noted. One or two of those ships were going to get off with no more than a dozen or so birds, while others were going to be attacked by scores of them, but it didn't really matter. Shannon was already reprogramming the missiles waiting in her broadside tubes, and even as Tourville watched, a second salvo—much smaller than the first, but carefully targeted on the handful of Manties who might survive the first one—spat from his ships.

How's that catharsis for all those years? The 900 missiles were dumb-fired, not enough control links to guide them all in, but carefully preprogrammed by Shannon Foraker.

For all intents and purposes, surprise was total.

Commodore Yeargin's crews were still scrambling frantically to their stations when the first wave came in. Of her six heavy cruisers, two never got their point defense on-line at all. Three more managed—somehow—to bring their laser clusters up under computer control, but only Enchanter got off a single salvo of counter-missiles. Not that it made much difference. One hundred and six incoming missiles were picked off before they reached attack range; the other eight hundred and sixty-two raced in to twenty-thousand kilometers and detonated in rippling succession.

Nuclear explosions pocked space, each one generating a thicket of bomb-pumped X-ray lasers. It wasn't even a massacre, for there was nothing—absolutely nothing—between those lasers and their targets. It took less than four seconds for all eight hundred-plus warheads to attack. Sixteen seconds later, Shannon Foraker's second salvo streaked down on the stunned, mangled survivors, and when the last of them detonated, the Manticoran Alliance had lost six RMN heavy cruisers, three RMN and seven GSN light cruisers, and nine destroyers . . . without getting a single shot off at their attackers.

The Manticoran side had 6 CA, 10 CL, 9 DD (there were actually three more cruisers well out of range of the action) between them they managed to kill 106 of a 900 missile salvo, granted they were taken by surprise by enemies already in missile range. Though Tourville did need a second salvo to finish things, largely because of too many missiles focusing on one target.

She had just witnessed the most crushing, one-sided defeat in the history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.

-snip-

Compared to the tonnages routinely destroyed when walls of battle clashed, the loss of Commodore Yeargin's task group would hardly be noticed, but Dorcett knew tonnage was the least of what had been lost here. Even the personnel casualties, terrible as they must have been, were secondary to what she'd just seen. It was the speed—the brutal, overwhelming power and efficiency—with which the task group had been killed that mattered. That was what was going to stick in the craws of the Alliance and, especially, the Manticoran Navy.

This wasn't the first victory the Peeps had won, but its totality put it in a category all its own. A category the RMN had believed was reserved for it, not for the clumsy, outclassed stumblebums of the People's Navy.

It's a war. You win some, you lose some.

"Manticore grows arrogant, gets punished" is a recurring theme in these books, we first saw it in the third book with the Argus nets. But this won't be the last time we see it, oh no. Not even close.

"Pass the word. We'll hyper out to Clairmont ourselves. Rondeau and Balladeer will head for Quest and Treadway respectively."

"But—" Dreyfus paused. "That won't leave anyone to picket the system and keep an eye on them, Ma'am," he pointed out quietly.

"We don't have that luxury." Dorcett's tone was as bleak as her expression. "I don't know what the schedule was, but I do know GHQ's already detailed reinforcements for this system. The warships will probably be coming in in ones and twos, which is bad enough, but Logistics Command has supply ships and troop transports in the pipeline, as well. Individual warships won't stand a chance against a force that size, but at least they may have the speed to run for it. Transports won't . . . but Logistics Command is bound to stage them through Clairmont, Quest, or Treadway. Which means we have to catch them in one of those systems and warn them off in time. Besides—" she managed a death's head grin "—we're all there is. Someone's got to alert the other local pickets about what's happened here, and the only people who can do that are us."

Spreading the alarm, a good use of the survivors.

He realized he'd allowed thoughts of Farragut to distract him when the band broke into the Harrington Anthem. Only a steadholder was greeted with the Steadholders' March, but any member of Lady Harrington's family was properly saluted with her steading's anthem, and a shouted command brought the honor guard to attention. The perfectly turned out members of the Harrington Guard formed two ruler-straight rows of green-on-green uniforms, flanking the path from the foot of the shuttle pad to the terminal escalator, and a very small figure paused in midstride as the music surprised her.

Apparently each Steading has it's own anthem, which is used to greet not the Steadholder, but all their immediate (and possibly wider) family. I wonder what Honor picked to represent her home?

The fact was that Beowulfans were no more "libertine" than anyone else; they simply declined to pass judgment or declare that any single lifestyle, regardless of who sanctioned it, was the one true way, and Allison would never have accepted Alfred's proposal if she'd had any intention of pursuing a lifestyle which would distress him. Nor would she have accepted it if she'd believed he would expect her to squeeze herself into one which distressed her. That didn't prevent her from feeling that Sphinxians were much too sexually repressed, nor had it kept her from worrying—a lot—over Honor's total lack of a sex life prior to Paul Tankersley, but she'd never felt any actual temptation to be anything but monogamous.

Not that she'd exactly gone out of the way to make that fact public. The mere fact that she was from—gasp!—Beowulf had been enough to earn her sidelong glances from the more puritanical of Sphinx's populace, and her mischievous streak had been totally unable to overlook the possibilities that offered. After almost seventy years honing her skills, she could play a prude like a Stradivarius, and she took a devilish delight in doing so. It was so much fun to play to their prejudices and stereotypes and come as close as she possibly could to the edge without ever quite stepping over it. Besides, as a physician, she owed it to her critics. A little apoplexy from time to time elevated the pulse and improved the circulatory system.

Of course, she wouldn't dream of doing anything to embarrass Honor—well, not seriously, anyway. A little embarrassment would probably be good for her.

Allison Chou Harrington, five foot-two of doom for Grayson, which has more than a handful of prudes.

"Yes, M—Allison. And I hope you won't be offended, but I simply wouldn't dare address you by name in front of Lord Clinkscales." Miranda feigned a shiver of terror, and Allison laughed.

"Oh, don't worry about that, dear! I had something else in mind."

"Oh?" Miranda cocked her head as her guest's tone rang warning bells, and Allison smiled wickedly.

"Certainly. You see, I haven't had time to as much as try on a Grayson gown, so I'm going to have to choose something to wear from my Manticoran wardrobe, and I need advice." A sort of wary consternation crept into Miranda's expression, and Allison's smile grew broader and still more wicked. "I'm afraid styles are just a bit different back home," she went on in an artfully worried voice, "but I did manage to find a few formal gowns before I left. Do you think I should wear the backless one with the V-neckline, or the one slit to the hip?"

Oh dear, she doesn't waste time. Wonder if Honor is going to come back to another Grayson Civil War?

As she'd told MacGuiness, seating was limited, for the pinnace was heavily loaded with cargo—in this case, consigned to Prince Adrian's engineer. One of the cruiser's air scrubbers had failed, reducing her life-support capacity by ten percent, and although McKeon's ship had enough spares to rebuild the scrubber from scratch, if necessary, the job would take over a week without yard support. No one looked forward to the amount of sheer grunt work involved, but that was a relatively minor concern beside the lost capacity the scrubber represented. Taking it off-line had reduced Prince Adrian's environmental safety margin by thirty-three percent, and no starship skipper wanted to operate with that little reserve for an entire week if it could be helped.

And as it happened, this time it could be helped. Prince Adrian carried sufficient spare parts to repair the scrubber, but the newer, bigger Alvarez turned out to have three complete backup scrubbers tucked away in her capacious Engineering spaces. Exactly where Alvarez's chief engineer had acquired the third one (which put her above establishment) was something of a mystery, and Lieutenant Commander Sinkowitz had been a bit vague when discussing the subject, but Honor was used to the way odds and ends of extra equipment had a habit of turning up aboard ship.

Context is everything, Honor is visiting McKeon's ship at the van of the convoy to tell him he's being promoted, and throw a surprise party celebrating the fact. Though the busted air scrubber is genuine, it provides a nice cover.

So a CL has the parts to assemble a new scrubber in a week, while a heavy has the space to just carry spares (though they presumably have an impressive machine shop of their own.) Loss of one scrubber sets back actual life support capacity by 10%, but their safety margins by a third. I'm thinking seven air scrubbers and three backups.

The Grayson and Manticoran navies shared Edward Saganami's dictum that time, as the single absolutely irreplaceable commodity any fleet possessed, was never to be wasted.

"New pods?" Honor's brows came back down—not in a frown, but rather in the absence of one—and her voice was cool. "What new pods would those be?"

"The low-image, top secret, burn-before-reading-classified pods with the new long-ranged, multiengined missiles," McKeon replied patiently. "You know—the ones you helped write the final specs on while you were at the WDB? Those pods."

"Oh," Honor said expressionlessly. "Those pods. And just how, Captain McKeon, do you happen to know 'those pods' even exist, much less who wrote the specs?"

"I'm a captain of the list," McKeon explained. "But back in my lowly days as a mere commander, I just happen to have been assigned to field-testing the original FTL drones' utility for light units back before the war. Playing test bed was my first big job with Madrigal, remember? And I'm still tapped into BuWeaps and BuShips. As a matter of fact, I'm still on Admiral Adcock's short list for operator input."

McKeon has connections still in BuWeaps, so he's heard of MDMs. Honor wrote the final specs on MDM pods.

Honor gazed at McKeon thoughtfully. Vice Admiral of the Green Jonas Adcock, the Bureau of Weapons' commanding officer, was one of the RMN's characters. He was also one of the Navy's very few senior officers who had never received prolong, for he and his family had immigrated to the Star Kingdom from Maslow, a planet as technically backward as Pre-Alliance Grayson. Adcock had been too old to accept prolong when he arrived, but there hadn't been anything wrong with his brain. He'd graduated eighth in his Academy class, despite not having encountered a modern educational system until he was nineteen T-years old, and his career had been distinguished. Now, at an age of just over a hundred and fourteen, he was far too physically frail ever to hold a spacegoing command again, but there was still nothing wrong with his brain. He'd taken over BuWeaps eleven years before, just in time for the war, and he'd been an aggressive dynamo ever since. Indeed, he was probably the largest single reason that rationalized versions of the jeune école's proposals were beginning to come off the drawing boards as useable hardware.

Props to the Adcock.

Esquire · Post by **Esquire** » 2014-03-25 08:46pm

re: the Alvarez-class' energy armament - does it make sense to say that having fewer, individually-larger weapons would free up hull space for countermissiles, laser clusters, missile tubes, and fire control links while keeping the same nominal energy firepower? If so, the GSN would almost have to be crazy not to do it in the new missile-heavy environment.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-03-25 10:41pm

Esquire wrote:re: the Alvarez-class' energy armament - does it make sense to say that having fewer, individually-larger weapons would free up hull space for countermissiles, laser clusters, missile tubes, and fire control links while keeping the same nominal energy firepower? If so, the GSN would almost have to be crazy not to do it in the new missile-heavy environment.

Good question. More powerful beam weapons are definitely bigger, but how much bigger is an open question. If mounting half as many beams with double the individual punch actually does save space, then many of my objections can be retracted.

Ahriman238 wrote:Meet Rear Admiral Lester Tourville. Like Theisman's performance at Fourth Yeltsin, Tourville has figured that in the new Navy it's better to be overeager and have your Commisioner reign you in than it is for them to possibly consider you a coward. So he's cultivated the appearance and reputation of a cartoonishly boisterous and aggressive officer, forcing his long-suffering Commisioner to serve as the voice of reason and talk him down to what he wanted to do anyways.

Although it helps that Lester really is a more flamboyant and aggressive character than Theisman. Theisman's kind of cautious by nature- we see this repeatedly. He's basically sensible, he doesn't like to take big risks, even though he's willing to do it as a calculated maneuver to win an advantage for his own side (Blackbird, First Seabring).

Tourville, even when he doesn't have a commissar watching him, is more comfortable taking chances. This is probably why he's the admiral who gets fingered to make not one but two high-risk high-reward offensives in the second round of the war... and he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that meddling Harrington.

"Agreed. Agreed." Tourville waved one hand airily and drew a cigar from the breast pocket of his tunic. He shoved it into his mouth at precisely the right angle of jauntiness, lit it, and blew a stream of pungent smoke at the air return over his console. In point of fact, he didn't much care for cigars, but smoking had once more become fashionable over the past several years, and he'd decided cigars fitted his image. Now he couldn't get rid of the miserable things without admitting they'd been a mistake, and he was damned if he'd do that.
Smoking goes in and out of fashion on Haven, as elsewhere. But a cigar is part of Tourville's character.

It is later revealed that he's addicted. As the tac witch said... oops.

Shannon Foraker (now Tourville's ops officer) and her estimate of local Manticoran strength. Also, at least on other Alliance member, Casca, is providing some light ships.

At a guess, they probably bought them from Manticore or Haven (or the Sollies) at an earlier time...

"No, My Lady. I don't." Many a lieutenant would have waffled, but Mayhew shook his head firmly. "According to the Manty Office of Naval Intelligence's last download, the new system commander at Barnett is Admiral Thomas Theisman." Honor felt her eyebrows arch. This was the first she'd heard of that, and the news put a human face on the enemy, for she and Thomas Theisman had met, and she had a high respect for his ability and initiative. "I've studied Theisman's record," Mayhew went on, unaware of his commodore's thoughts, "and he doesn't fit the standard Peep profile. He's a chance-taker. I wouldn't call him rash, but he's proved he's willing to go against the odds when his own judgment tells him to. Sooner or later, that's almost certain to get him shot. He can't be right all the time, and the first time he blows an operation, he's done for. But so far he's always managed to deliver, and I don't see him changing his approach now."
Neither side has as many ships in the area as they'd like, so there's been little recn and much guesswork on both sides of the fence. Honor hears that Theisman is leading the local opposition.

This interacts with my previous statement- but having looked inside Theisman's head, I think my claim stands. Theisman's inner voice is much less aggressive than his outward demeanor- and like Honor, he frequently finds himself in situations where the only logical option he sees is a desperate but aggressive one (i.e. his maneuver at Blackbird, his recommended tactics in the convoy attack in The Short Victorious War, his bluffing his commissar by proposing the second-wave attack at Fourth Yeltsin, presumably his actions at First Seabring, and definitely his coup in Ashes of Victory.

Manticore has been doubling up convoys to concentrate escorts, and six heavy cruisers are apparently equivalent to a third of the local system pickets. Past that discussion of the Peep's options and ominous foreshadowing.

This suggests that a typical 'light' system picket here is, say, 4-5 heavy cruisers worth of tonnage. That would be, oh... a battlecruiser with a spray of destroyers, a squadron of CLs or destroyers, something like that. Say, a force broadly comparable to what Honor was senior captain of in Honor of the Queen, or maybe a little heavier.

Typically going to be older ships too, I'd imagine.

They don't quite have enough ships for a Sarnow deployment as it's meant to be done, but just trying will give them lots more sensor coverage, and even ships without FTL comm can route messages through recon drones that do. I wonder how long RMN commanders were delegating stuff to drones on the fly before BuWeaps took a long hard look at them for Ghost Rider.

Ever since before the war started? See On Basilisk Station. Then again, the drones have to have been more or less designed for this in the first place or they wouldn't have the necessary capabilities.

Interesting, we have missiles homing in on radar/lidar sources.

A home-on-jamming and home-on-sensor mode would be incredibly useful in Honorverse missile guidance. This is probably a big part of why decoys and EW drones work so well, because the missiles are programmed to hunt targets that intentionally bombard them with sensor emissions in order to shoot them down faster. So a big shiny radar beam in the missile's face will tend to distract it from the real target.

The Manticoran side had 6 CA, 10 CL, 9 DD (there were actually three more cruisers well out of range of the action) between them they managed to kill 106 of a 900 missile salvo, granted they were taken by surprise by enemies already in missile range. Though Tourville did need a second salvo to finish things, largely because of too many missiles focusing on one target.

So speaking roughly, Yeargin's got, say...

I'm going to guesstimate that she's got about three to 3.5 million tons of warships, against a Havenite force that could be anywhere from five to six million tons depending on how many big honking Mars-class cruisers Tourville brought along. Combine with total tactical surprise and something close to equipment parity and... splat.

So a CL has the parts to assemble a new scrubber in a week, while a heavy has the space to just carry spares (though they presumably have an impressive machine shop of their own.) Loss of one scrubber sets back actual life support capacity by 10%, but their safety margins by a third. I'm thinking seven air scrubbers and three backups.

Prince Adrian is a heavy cruiser in its own right- Prince Consort-class, I think. However, the Alvarez-class is newer and bigger, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of that room went to general stores.

I seem to remember some rambles in the tech book about Grayson designing its heavy cruisers more for long, extended duties the RMN would use battlecruisers for, too- which argues in favor of having good operational endurance and the ability to stay in the field after a big, sharp fight. Having spare parts (both to replace routine engineering accidents AND to patch up the ship after battle damage) helps with that.

Meanwhile, the Prince Consorts are older, stripped-down, heavily armed for their tonnage, hulls that reflect Roger III's military buildup and the need to put as many nasty, powerful units in space as possible. They compromise on a lot of things to get that, including command and control facilities and apparently spare parts storage.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-03-26 07:43am

re: the Alvarez-class' energy armament - does it make sense to say that having fewer, individually-larger weapons would free up hull space for countermissiles, laser clusters, missile tubes, and fire control links while keeping the same nominal energy firepower? If so, the GSN would almost have to be crazy not to do it in the new missile-heavy environment.
Good question. More powerful beam weapons are definitely bigger, but how much bigger is an open question. If mounting half as many beams with double the individual punch actually does save space, then many of my objections can be retracted.

Didn't this round start when we finally got that exact reason for the beam armament? Namely, they cut down on beams (10: 6 laser, 4 graser) for space, and doubled up the size so they'd still be competitive? Specifically, they seem to have added two missiles to each broadside, and one to the chasers, which makes sense for the increasingly missile-heavy environment.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-03-26 11:24am

I confess I don't entirely understand what you're asking me. Could you repeat your statement, using more words this time?

Terralthra · Post by **Terralthra** » 2014-03-26 02:53pm

Simon_Jester wrote:I confess I don't entirely understand what you're asking me. Could you repeat your statement, using more words this time?

David Weber wrote:Alvarez carried less than half the energy weapons of a Star Knight, which substantially reduced the number of targets she could engage simultaneously. It also cost her a small but possibly significant percentage of her antimissile capability, since starships often used broadside energy batteries to back up their purpose-built point defense weapons during long-range missile duels. But by accepting that reduction in weapon numbers, the combined Grayson–Manticoran design team had been able to mount twenty percent more missile tubes and fit in graser projectors heavier than most battlecruisers mounted.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-03-28 07:02am

Simon_Jester wrote:I confess I don't entirely understand what you're asking me. Could you repeat your statement, using more words this time?

First, terribly sorry for taking so long. I've been incredibly busy this week, that and work has started monitoring our web searches, looking for unprofessional activities they can lower the boom on.

Second, you expressed dissatisfaction with the 'less but bigger energy guns' armament of Jason Alvarez when it was first introduced in book four (the ship itself had a scene a book sooner, but that's not really relevant to anything) saying that even light energy weapons seemed quite energetic enough to punch holes clean through a ship, unless it was a much bigger ship in which case getting into beam range is effectively suicide anyway. This is a fair point. Most recently, in this book, it was mentioned that they cut down on beams to make room for more missile tubes, and used the remaining space allocated for beams to upscale them so the ship could remain competitive at those ranges, which seemed a far more sensible arrangement to me then simply mounting less but bigger guns for the heck of it, and a smart move in an increasingly missile-heavy environment, though your point about just blowing bigger holes through a ship stands. You laid out your objections anew, went into further detail and culminated by saying:

Simon Jester wrote:
Esquire wrote:re: the Alvarez-class' energy armament - does it make sense to say that having fewer, individually-larger weapons would free up hull space for countermissiles, laser clusters, missile tubes, and fire control links while keeping the same nominal energy firepower? If so, the GSN would almost have to be crazy not to do it in the new missile-heavy environment.
Good question. More powerful beam weapons are definitely bigger, but how much bigger is an open question. If mounting half as many beams with double the individual punch actually does save space, then many of my objections can be retracted.

Which was the entire reason I brought it up again in the first place, the odd decision to bulk up on guns now makes complete sense because it was done to save space for more missiles.

Though... Honor in the old Fearless had to worry about magazine space a fair deal, like not using rapid-fire broadsides in the first missile duel with Thunder to save ammo (which she later admitted was a mistake in hindsight, she could have conceivably overwhelmed Thunder's inexperienced crew and sloppy missile defense and ended it there.) How much worse is that problem going to be with two extra tubes?

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-03-28 09:15am

Since the Alvarez is an entirely new ship design built with actual war experience (Honor's at Second Yeltsin being high on the list) in mind... I suspect they upscaled the magazines to fit the increased number of launch tubes.

Batman · Post by **Batman** » 2014-03-29 05:15pm

Assuming they had the room for it. Was the magazine capacity of the 'Star Knights' decided by 'going by experience, you'll only need X missiles on a standard deployment, maybe 20% more if you meet an unusually high number of pirates/light raiders, so let's make it 50% more just to be on the safe side' or was it 'This ship is only so big. Yes, I CAN up the magazine space by half...If you don't mind me eliminating the Marine presence and half the boat bays or a couple of graser mounts.'(this is most likely excessive but you know what I'm talking about.)
Pre-Great Resizing that shouldn't have been too much of a problem (1.2km CAs have lots of wiggle room for even bigass Honorverse missiles). After?
Has anybody ever run the numbers on how much volume all those missiles would take up?

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-04-01 09:49pm

Wanted to do the whole battle of Honor's capture in one sitting, but there's enough side-information for me to have to break it up for both time and space.

It was late arriving—System Control had expected it over a week ago—but delayed arrivals weren't all that unusual. Of course, an entire week was a bit excessive. In fact, a regular Navy captain who turned up that late could expect his superiors to devote several unpleasant minutes to discussing exactly why he'd been so casual about his movement orders. But no one was likely to raise any such question with the captain of this ship.

Ships are late all the time, but for a ship to be a week overdue is unusual. Not that anyone is going to call the captain of Cordelia Ransom's over-sized pleasure yacht on it.

"Approximately fifty minutes, Citizen Admiral. She'll reach Enki in about forty minutes, but it'll take a little longer to settle her into the designated orbit."

Theisman nodded without comment. Normally, Traffic Control for a system as busy as Barnett assigned parking orbits to ships on a "first available" basis. Far though the system had fallen from its glory days as the Republic's launch pad to conquest, there was more than enough traffic to make its management a full-time job, and controllers hated VIP ships which required special treatment. But no one was going to complain, even if Traffic Control was required to clear all other ships from the newcomer's assigned orbit and a security bubble five thousand kilometers across.

Of course, Theisman thought mordantly, only an idiot would think five k-klicks actually provided any advantage. Oh, it might help against a boarding action or keep some demented crew of kamikazes from physically ramming you, but five thousand kilometers wouldn't mean diddly against a graser or an impeller-drive missile. Hell, for that matter, at five k-klicks a laser head would start out inside its attack range!

About ten minutes to settle into orbit. No ship may approach within 5,000 klicks of Tepes which is still comfortably within beam range.

She was shorter than he'd thought.

Theisman felt a flicker of surprise at the prosaic nature of his own observation as Cordelia Ransom stepped into his office. It seemed so . . . inappropriate, somehow, to think about a thing like that at a time like this. Yet it was true, and as he rose to greet her, it occurred to him that his surprise might say something significant about her. Her HD appearances had led him to expect someone at least ten centimeters taller, and it must have taken careful camera work and editing to create that impression. That sort of trick wasn't complicated, but it didn't happen by accident, and he wondered why it was important to her.

Ransom is careful to look taller in all released footage, a full 10 cm (4 inches.)

"As I'm sure you're aware, Citizen Admiral, we've been on the defensive virtually since this war began. Not that it's the fault of our heroic Navy and Marines, of course," she said, and paused, smiling another of those thin smiles. But Theisman only waited, refusing to rise to the bait, if bait was what it was, and she went on after a few seconds.

"The corrupt, imperialistic ambitions and incompetence of the Legislaturalist oppressors combined to betray the Republic on both the domestic and the military fronts," she said. "Domestically, they systematically impoverished the People for their own greedy ends and to support the machinery of oppression needed to suppress resistance to their ruthless exploitation of the People. Militarily, their criminal overconfidence led them into the initial disasters on the frontier which squandered our original numerical superiority and allowed the enemy to throw our courageous fighting forces back in disarray. Would you agree with that analysis, Citizen Admiral?"

Amazingly enough, every word is true, Ransom just leaves out the part where the new regime is equally in favor of oppression and imperialistic ambition.

"Good! Then tell me how you think we got into this mess," Ransom invited, and she sounded so sincerely curious that Theisman almost answered her candidly. But even as he opened his mouth, that cold flatness in her eyes hit him like a splash of ice water. This woman was even more dangerous than he'd thought, he realized. He knew how perilous answering her honestly could—would—be, yet she'd almost sucked him into doing just that. And she'd made it look so easy.

"Well, Ma'am," he said after the briefest of pauses, "I'm not as gifted with words as you are, so I hope you'll forgive me if I speak bluntly?" He paused once more until she nodded, then went on. "In that case, Citizen Secretary, and speaking bluntly, the military 'mess' we're in is so deep that picking a single cause—or even the most important group of causes—for it is extremely difficult. Certainly our prewar officers' planning and their faulty execution of the war's opening operations are major factors. As you yourself suggested, we began the war with a substantial numerical advantage which was frittered away in the opening battles. That was compounded by the Manties' superior weapon systems, and I'd have to say that the failure to recognize our technological inferiority and delay operations until we'd attained at least parity was the direct responsibility of the prewar government and officer corps. Our intelligence services obviously came up short, as well, given their failure to correctly project the Manties' initial deployments . . . not to mention their failure to detect and prevent the Harris Assassination."

Theisman's politically correct judo. Extremely important when speaking to a ruling Citizen Secretary.

Well, Dame Madeleine had plenty of excuses for her desk's untidiness . . . and any fretting she happened to be doing, Jessica Dorcett reminded herself. As the senior officer on Clairmont Station, Sorbanne had seen half her capital ship strength siphoned off to build up Eighth Fleet, but no one had bothered to reduce her command area or responsibilities to reflect her lower strength. And with all the comings and goings leading up to Earl White Haven's eventual advance on Barnett, the bustling confusion of Clairmont's local and through traffic must be enough to try the patience of a saint.

So a significant portion of Eighth Fleet's strength is coming not from new construction but the stripping of low-priority pickets.

"The Peeps came in from above the system ecliptic, which let them skirt the Commodore's platforms and avoid my command's sensor envelope entirely. And they also came in ballistic."

"Peeps came in ballistic?" Sorbanne repeated carefully, and Dorcett nodded.

"Yes, Ma'am. They must have. Either that, or their stealth systems have achieved a much higher degree of improvement than ONI's been projecting. Even on the course they followed, they should have passed close enough to at least one of our sensor platforms for active impellers to've been detected."

"They came in powered down all the way to attack range?" Sorbanne still seemed to be having trouble with the concept, and Dorcett nodded again.

"Yes, Ma'am. And I'm afraid that isn't all." Sorbanne eyed her narrowly and made a "tell me more" gesture, and Dorcett sighed. "They used missile pods, Admiral," she said quietly.

Apparently the Manties think no one else is sneaky or ballsy enough to pull off a ballistic stealth attack, or at least no one in Haven uniform. Secret of Haven pods properly out, even the ships on the far side of the system have enough sensor data to see a stupid huge cloud of missiles from a mid-sized task force.

Some RMN officers, McKeon knew, would have found Honor's title and status either ridiculous or irritating. A certain percentage of Manticorans—mostly civilians, but including a number of Queen's officers who should know better—had never bothered to amend their mental images of the Yeltsin System. They still looked down on Grayson (and its navy) as some sort of comic opera, technically backward vest-pocket principality of religious fanatics with delusions of grandeur, and their contempt extended itself to the planet's aristocratic titles and those who held them. And however much most of the RMN's officers might respect Honor's achievements, there would always be those souls who would denigrate her reputation, whether out of jealousy, resentment, or the genuine belief that she owed it all to luck.

Not everyone admires Honor, and not all Manticorans are impressed by Steadholders, or Graysons in general. This dismissal of "neo-barb Graysons" seems to come mostly from the upper class and particularly those nobles involved in the Evil OppositionTM, showing once again that Centrists are the only Manticorans with a clue what to do about foreigners, enemy and ally both.

He took it from her slowly, his expression a silent question, but she merely shook her head and gestured for him to unwrap it. Her armsmen's formality and her own change of demeanor made McKeon's nerves tingle, and he untied the ribbon and quickly ripped away the wrapping to reveal the simple black box under it. He glanced back up at Honor, then opened the box slowly and inhaled sharply. Its velvet-lined interior held a pair of RMN collar badges, but instead of the single gold planet of a captain of the list, each of them bore a pair of planets, identical to the ones on Honor's collar. He stared at them for a dozen heartbeats, then shook himself and met Honor's gravely smiling eyes.

"Congratulations, Alistair," she said. "It won't be official until we return to Yeltsin, and I know it's supposed to be bad luck to let the cat out of the bag early. But the Admiralty sent out confirmation just before we sailed, and High Admiral Matthews knew I'd want to be the one to tell you, so he passed me the word. When you suffered your Environmental casualty, I decided your birthday was the perfect time to tell you."

Captain's of the List wear a single Saturn planet badge on their collar, Commodores get two. McKeon is promoted to Commodore and informed during his surprise birthday party.

The Prince Consort-class ships like Prince Adrian were the product of a design philosophy which had been abandoned with the emergence of the later Star Knights. The Prince Consorts' original design was over sixty T-years old, dating back to the very first installment of the naval build-up Roger III had begun to counter the PRH's expansionism, and they hadn't been intended to function as flagships. Instead, in an effort to get as much firepower into space as quickly—and for as low a cost—as possible, BuShips' architects had chosen to omit a proper flag deck and all its support systems and used the freed mass to tuck an extra graser and an extra pair of missile launchers into each broadside. In fact, even their regular command decks had been built to unusually austere standards to help compensate for the increased armament and more magazine space. Instead of the extra, unused bridge volume BuShips normally allocated to new designs to provide room for the proliferation of control systems which always occurred, the Prince Consorts had been given just enough room for their original requirements. Which meant their bridges had become increasingly cramped as inevitable refits jammed in supplementary consoles and displays and panels anywhere a few cubic centimeters could be found for them.

The problem had been recognized at the time, but accepted as an unavoidable consequence of producing ships with maximum firepower for their cost and tonnage, and BuShips had projected a program which would have built the Prince Consorts in groups of seven and paired each group with a Crusader-class ship which did have a flag deck to make a full eight-ship squadron. Unfortunately, what had seemed like a good idea at the time had begun to look very different since the outbreak of the Navy's first serious shooting war in a hundred and twenty T-years.

The original Crusader building program had failed to allow for the unavoidable cycle of overhauls any warship required, with the result that at least twenty-five percent too few flagships had been allowed from the beginning, and Sir Edward Janacek's decision to cut funding for the Crusaders by over seventy percent during his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty had only made bad worse. But Janacek had viewed the Navy's proper role as anti-piracy patrols and defense of the Manticore Binary System itself. Anything more "aggressive" than that had clashed with his Conservative Party prejudice against "imperialist adventures" which were likely to "provoke" the People's Republic, and he'd regarded the deployment of cruiser squadrons to distant stations as the precursor to the gunboat diplomacy he rejected.

One way to hamstring such deployments was to cut down on the number of available flagships, which was precisely what he'd done, although he'd been careful to make the Crusaders' higher cost per unit his official reason. During his tenure, more than half the Navy's total cruisers had been tasked for solo operations chasing pirates on distant stations (for which no command ships were required), and most of the remainder had been concentrated in one spot and attached to Home Fleet, where only a limited number of flagships were needed. As a result, the implications of the shortage of Crusaders had gone largely unobserved at the time.

Limitations of the Prince Consorts, they're unbalanced in favor of firepower and two concessions to make room were to do away with a flag bridge and include no space for expansion. Relatedly it seems that Manticoran ships are designed with the idea that someone will be adding more switches to each control panel sooner or later. The class of flag-bridge cruisers that would have served as squadron flagships were cut drastically short, quietly, for political reasons leaving them short on CA squadron flagships when the war actually started.

Numerically, the Crown Princes were the largest single class of heavy cruisers in the RMN's inventory, yet their lack of squadron command facilities severely limited their utility. The fact that the bigger, less numerous Star Knights' flag accommodations forced the Admiralty to keep tapping them for the detached command roles the Crown Princes couldn't fulfill properly also meant that the newer ships had suffered higher proportional losses. Prince Adrian and her sisters tended to stay tethered to task force and fleet formations, where someone else could provide the space for a commodore or admiral and her staff. That meant they were normally found in company with ships of the wall, whereas the Star Knights, exposed on frontier and convoy deployments without capital ship support, were much more likely to find themselves engaged with fast battlecruiser/cruiser-level raiding forces. And, of course, every Star Knight lost to enemy action or sent to the yard by battle damage reduced the supply of command ships by yet another unit.

The newer and better CAs with command facilities are the most desperately needed away from big fleet formations, on the pointy end, so they're more often lost. Such is war. Oh, and Fearless II as a Star Knight likely had a flag bridge.

There wasn't actually all that much to choose between the individual offensive power of the two classes, which—given the difference in their tonnages—only went to prove that even the Star Knights' design was less than perfect. Powerful as the Star Knights were, too little of their volume was allocated to offensive systems, in Honor's opinion, and too much was used on defense, probably as a reaction against the perceived shortcomings of their predecessors.

The newer class's more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems made them at least thirty percent tougher than the older Prince Consorts, and BuShips fully recognized the need for a better balance between offense and defense. Unfortunately, the need for cruiser flagships meant the yards were churning out Star Knights as quickly as they could—given the limited amounts of space which could be diverted from capital ship construction for any sort of cruiser—and that had significantly delayed introduction of the new Edward Saganami-class ships. The Saganamis, ten percent larger than the Star Knights and designed to take full advantage of the Navy's current battle experience and to incorporate the best balance of Grayson and Manticoran concepts, should have entered the construction pipeline over three T-years ago, but BuShips had decided it couldn't afford to divert building capacity to a new class (which, undoubtedly, would have its own share of production-oriented bugs to overcome) when the need for volume production was so acute. And so the Star Knights continued to be built to a basic design which was now eighteen years old. To be sure, their design had been on the cutting edge when it was finalized, and—like the Prince Consorts—they had been materially upgraded since, but even with as heavy a refit schedule as deployment pressures would permit, the class was losing its superiority over the Peeps.

Comparison between the Prince Consort, Star Knight and the as-yet-unbuilt Saganami cruisers, three years delayed.

The main body of Convoy JNMTC-76 would reach the point at which Prince Adrian had translated into n-space seven minutes after that, but rather than follow McKeon immediately out of hyper, the other ships would decelerate to zero and wait another two hours before beginning their own translations. The delay was designed to give Prince Adrian time to sort out her sensor picture and move far enough in-system to be sure no nasty surprises awaited them.

That precaution was almost certainly unnecessary here, and some convoy commanders would have skimped on it, but the safety of those ships and all the people and material aboard them was Honor's responsibility. Time wasn't in such short supply that she couldn't afford to spend a couple of hours insuring against even unlikely dangers, and McKeon's quiet double-checking of his tactical section's preparations with Metcalf showed that he shared her determination to do things right.

Part of the Sarnow Deployment is the lead escort translates two hours ahead of the convoy, setting off any trap, scouting the area and generally getting plenty of time to sort out their sensors so the incoming ships can get a feed instead of waiting for their own scanners to clear after translation.

Every line officer knew that rushing replacements—especially replacements drawn from the Dolists' ill-educated ranks—through the training schools in half of what prewar standards had established as the minimum time meant the newbies had to pick up their real training on the job.

Unfortunately, the political establishment didn't want to hear about that. Given the Navy's heavy losses in combat, the people's commissioners assigned to supervise the Admiralty's manpower programs had no choice but to find recruits anywhere they could and then push them through training as rapidly as possible. But they had their own heads to worry about, and admitting they were sending out insufficiently trained personnel might bring StateSec sniffing around them.

Another problem with Haven, they axed most of the senior officers, though they've now had time to replace them, and they're hard up enough n fighting men and women, particularly with the Navy under a dark cloud politically, to have to rush training to meet their needs and hope the recruits learn fast on the job.

The Mars-class cruisers had given up almost a third of the telemetry capacity of the older Swords in part exchange for their superior electronic warfare capabilities, and Nuada simply couldn't operate sufficient drones to cover her entire zone of responsibility without the backup of her shipboard systems.

Comparison between Haven Mars and Sword cruisers. Again we have a theme of tradeoffs, you can manage lots of recon platforms or you can shoehorn in better EW. In general the larger, more developed Navies seem to prefer their ships (at least, cruisers) be balanced generalists.

The PN's drones weren't as good as the Manties', with a maximum passive detection range of no more than twelve to fourteen light-minutes, depending on the strength of a target's emissions, and a maximum telemetry range of ten light-minutes. Because of that, they were normally deployed at ranges of no more than seven or eight light-minutes, which limited their mother ships' sensor reach to twenty light-minutes or so, but got the data on FTL sources (like the gravitic energy of an impeller wedge or a hyper translation) to the combat information center quickly. In this case, Allworth had deployed the drone at the very limit of the telemetry links to take up the slack for Nuada, but even so, the possible contact was near the edge of the drone's envelope.

12-14 light-minute (215.8-251.8 million klicks) sensor range for Peep recon platforms using passive scanners. Also a useful lower limit on Mantie sensor tech.

"We've got a possible contact in Nuada's sector, Citizen Captain," the exec replied. He summarized Allworth's report, then went on, "With your permission, Citizen Captain, I'd like to alert Nuada and Dirk for an Alpha Intercept. We're only fifteen light-minutes from Dirk, so our transmission should reach her long before a ship accelerating after translation enters her sensor range, and if Nuada cuts her pods loose and goes to max accel as soon as she gets the word, she should have a pretty fair chance of intercepting the bogey if it tries to break back out across the limit. But since she will have to leave her pods behind to have a shot, I'd also like to alert Raiden and Claymore to support her and Dirk in case this is a battlecruiser or something even heavier."

Three cruisers in range to intercept Honor and two BCs not too far behind. And this is probably a result of deployment and not pure chance.

The tension on the cruiser's bridge had begun as little more than vague disquiet—a sort of itch no one knew how to scratch—at the absence of any challenge from the system pickets, but it had grown steadily as Prince Adrian continued to accelerate in-system at a constant four hundred gravities. She might not be capable of transmitting FTL herself, but the ships of Task Group Adler were, and Sarah DuChene's course had been plotted to emerge from hyper within the envelope of one of Commodore Yeargin's limited numbers of sensor platforms. As such, Prince Adrian should have been detected, identified, and reported to Yeargin's flagship via the platform's grav pulse transmitter . . . and she should have picked up an FTL challenge from Enchanter within ten minutes of arrival.

a (small, granted) problem with the hope to ambush ships coming in to Adler, the lack of an FTL challenge. Granted, they don't immediately assume enemy action.

McKeon was obviously thinking along the same lines, for he had quietly instructed Geraldine Metcalf to launch a pair of recon drones down his projected track. The stealthed RDs would sweep the area ahead of the ship, and their small FTL transmitters would report whatever they found in near real-time. Drones weren't cheap. Even when they could be recovered, as these probably could, it cost thousands to overhaul and refurbish them for reuse. Despite that, McKeon hadn't even asked for her approval to cover his decision to use them, which said a great deal about his state of mind.

Not that Honor would have hesitated for a moment if he had asked. The one thing no captain could ever have enough of was information, and McKeon had none at all. Without a position fix on at least one of Yeargin's ships, Russ Sanko couldn't even align his com lasers on it, so there was little point trying to contact anyone closer than Samovar itself. In the absence of an FTL challenge, McKeon had, in fact, transmitted a light-speed message to the planet ten minutes after arriving in-system. Unfortunately, Samovar's current orbital position put it over a half light-hour from Prince Adrian, so assuming an instant response, they still wouldn't hear anything back for another ten minutes. And if one thing was likely, given the general slackness which seemed to be the rule here, it was that there would be a delay before any acknowledgment was sent, so—

Recon-drones for a precaution, and they apparently cost a pretty penny to refurbish even if you collect them again. Still nobody is thinking "I wonder if they're quiet because the enemy got here?"

There was no reason for Commodore Yeargin's units to intercept Prince Adrian rather than challenging her by com unless for some reason they'd decided to assume she was hostile, and that was ridiculous. A wise system commander always assumed that anything not definitely identified as friendly was potentially hostile, but pulling pickets off station for a physical intercept opened holes through which other potential hostiles could penetrate your perimeter, so the first step was always to challenge the unknown unit. And what Metcalf had just said about Alpha One's EW worried her. If the contact had been using Allied systems, CIC's database should have recognized them. But if they weren't Allied technology, they were better than anything the Peeps were supposed to have, which—

Light breaks over Marblehead. Again ships are identified, or at least identified as "not us" by their EW and emissions.

Had Prince Adrian been operating solo, Honor would already have ordered her to begin accelerating straight "up" from the ecliptic on a course which would have given her an excellent chance—not a certainty, but a chance any bookmaker would have taken—of getting away clean from all of her enemies. But she cruiser wasn't operating solo, which meant that simply running away, however tempting, was an unacceptable option.

-snip-

On its present course, Bandit One would cross the hyper limit within less than a minute of the moment Thomas Greentree brought the rest of the convoy out of hyper . . . and the convoy would emerge right in the heart of the Peep's missile envelope.

It was unlikely Greentree would have time to realize what was happening before the first broadsides arrived. The odds might be five-to-one in favor of the convoy escorts, but the overwhelming advantage of surprise would go a long way towards canceling that numerical edge even in a stand-up fight. And the Peep might not even choose to engage the escorts at all—might not even see them with all those fat, defenseless merchantmen and transports on his targeting display. There were almost a hundred thousand garrison troops and technicians aboard the personnel ships of JNMTC–76, and every one of them could die in a matter of seconds if Bandit One chose to ignore the escorts.

That could not be allowed to happen. It must not be allowed to, and Honor dared not assume the Peeps were any stupider than she was. Indeed, their presence here—and the ominous absence of Commodore Yeargin's command—was a clear indication that this batch of Peeps, at least, knew what it was about. Which was the reason why Prince Adrian couldn't simply run for it.

If Prince Adrian came to a heading which made it impossible for Bandit One to overhaul, the Peep might do one of several things. He might continue the pursuit anyway, however unlikely that he could overtake his prey, on the principle that someone else might head Prince Adrian off and force her to break back towards him. Or he might simply give up, decelerate, and return to his original station, leaving his consorts to deal with her. Or he might do what Honor would do in his place: head for the point at which Prince Adrian had made her alpha translation. Bandit One would have to consider the possibility that Adrian was a singleton, but a captain with imagination would also allow for the possibility that she wasn't. That she had, in fact, arrived as exactly what she was: the lead scout of a convoy which would follow her into normal-space shortly.

And that was why Honor had to throw away her best chance to avoid action.

And the chase is on with Honor (and McKeon, who is technically the captain) choosing a sub-optimal route to try and lure attention from where the convoy will pop into realspace.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-04-02 05:27am

Ahriman238 wrote:About ten minutes to settle into orbit. No ship may approach within 5,000 klicks of Tepes which is still comfortably within beam range.

Yep. This is one of the early examples of the combination of ignorance and paranoia that makes StateSec such a punching bag for competent enemies in this book and the next.

On the one hand they're too ignorant to take effective defensive measures, and ignorant enough to rely on measures that can't possibly work. On the other hand, they're paranoid enough that they don't get effectual help when they need it to make themselves secure.

Ransom is careful to look taller in all released footage, a full 10 cm (4 inches.)

I don't make such a big thing of this as Theisman does; it's very common for politicians and celebrities. Theisman... probably doesn't know much about show business.

Limitations of the Prince Consorts, they're unbalanced in favor of firepower and two concessions to make room were to do away with a flag bridge and include no space for expansion. Relatedly it seems that Manticoran ships are designed with the idea that someone will be adding more switches to each control panel sooner or later.

Or just adding more panels to handle entirely new functions (like controlling missile pod salvoes or FTL recon drones), or redundant controls, or... you name it.

This is also related to a real life concept in that many ships are designed "for but not with" modifications that will hopefully be installed during their service life. Usually this involves making physical space in the ship for the new equipment to be installed without badly disrupting the function of old equipment.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-04-02 01:39pm

Simon wrote:
About ten minutes to settle into orbit. No ship may approach within 5,000 klicks of Tepes which is still comfortably within beam range.
Yep. This is one of the early examples of the combination of ignorance and paranoia that makes StateSec such a punching bag for competent enemies in this book and the next.

On the one hand they're too ignorant to take effective defensive measures, and ignorant enough to rely on measures that can't possibly work. On the other hand, they're paranoid enough that they don't get effectual help when they need it to make themselves secure.

Which is made really explicit in the next book. Though, as it was mentioned in the context of being an inconvenience for orbital control before Theisman starts thinking about what a useless security measure it is, I suppose it's reasonable to assume that orbit for a major military base-planet is crowded enough that it's actually a big deal to give them that much clearance.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-04-02 02:05pm

Bear in mind that while a sphere ten thousand kilometers across is tiny in terms of Honorverse weapon ranges, it is only slightly smaller than the entire planet Earth. So if Tepes takes up, say, a geosynchronous orbit... then traffic control has to clear out roughly 10% of the entire length of geosynchronous orbit, and any craft orbiting close to geosynchronous, out to a radius roughly equal to that of the Earth.

Yes, it's a serious inconvenience.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-04-02 10:32pm

Like everyone else on Katana's bridge, Kuttner wore his skinsuit, but rather than rack his helmet on his command chair in proper naval fashion, he had it in his lap. Zachary had tried to explain (tactfully) to him why that was a bad idea—the shock of a hit could easily throw an unsecured helmet clear across a compartment, with potentially fatal consequences for its owner—but Kuttner liked to play with the thing. And, Zachary admitted, she hadn't really tried all that hard to convince him not to. He wasn't as bad as some commissioners, but he was a lot worse than others, and at the moment his expression was the one she least liked: that of a man looking hard for some suggestion he could make to prove he was on top of the situation.

Not sure if I've specifically mentioned that bridge chairs have racks for the helmet over the back, so all you have to do is reach up, pull down and twist slightly into place. Of course, the People's Commisioners are above such petty regs, which does give the officers under them a chance to fanaticize about violent vacuum-related death, so it's even good for morale! That last sentence makes me feel so much for Cmndr. Zachary, I know that look well.

Her eyes flicked to Luchner's face, but the exec's attentive expression gave no sign of the exasperation she knew he had to share. Katana had gone to five percent power the moment it became clear the Manty's maneuvers were going to bring the enemy ship back towards her. Katana's EW could hide that weak an impeller signature even from Manticoran sensors at anything over thirty light-seconds, and Zachary, Luchner, and Allworth had made an almost perfect estimate of the Manty's course. Unless she changed heading in the next twenty-three minutes, she would enter Katana's missile envelope, headed almost directly towards the Republican cruiser . . . and still a good half-hour's flight inside the hyper limit.

Under other circumstances, that would have made Zachary nervous. The citizen captain was no coward, but only a fool (which she also was not) would try to deny the combat edge Manticoran ships enjoyed. But Katana had powerful support ready to hand in the form of PNS Nuada, which would enter extreme engagement range barely ten minutes after Katana opened fire. More than that, the system defenders had been given ample time to identify their target. It was one of the older Prince Consort-class cruisers, not a more modern Star Knight, which meant she and Katana would be well-matched.

Peep stealth sufficient to hide a wedge doing 5% normal acceleration, at least at a distance, they'll still get spotted well before missile range. By now they've ID'd Prince Adrian, at least by class.

Navy and Marine skinsuits weren't something which could be ordered off the rack. They had to be very carefully fitted to their wearers—indeed, "fitted" was a barely adequate word, for in many respects they were custom built to suit the individual for whom they were intended. Other vacuum gear, like the heavy hardsuits that construction crews wore or the clumsy rescue suits which were part of any ship's lifesaving gear, could be worn by almost anyone but had limited utility. Hardsuits, for instance, were basically small, independent spacecraft designed for extended deep-space use or handling cargo in depressurized holds. They literally wouldn't fit into the internal spaces of a starship, and while rescue suits could be worn almost anywhere, they were little more than emergency environmental envelopes designed to be towed around by rescue crews.

In many respects, Honor and her party would have been better off aboard a civilian transport, for interstellar law required commercial ships to carry sufficient suits for all passengers. Sheer cost, not to mention the need for fitting time, made it impossible for liners to provide that many skinsuits, so passenger suits were a cross between a rescue suit and a skinsuit—almost a throwback to the clumsy suits of the early first-century Post Diaspora, though considerably less bulky. Even they would have been unsuitable for long-term wear, and their old-fashioned gloves lacked the miniaturized, biofeedback servomechs which made it possible for a skinsuited individual to thread a needle even in vacuum, but they were infinitely preferable to a rescue suit.

Unfortunately, Prince Adrian's equipment list didn't include any of them. Rescue suits were provided for those cases in which people were temporarily separated from their personal equipment, but the Navy assumed naval personnel normally would keep their issue skinsuits to hand. Under the letter of the regs, Honor and her people should have brought their suits with them, however inconvenient the extra baggage would have been, since they'd intended to be aboard Prince Adrian for over twelve hours, but that regulation was routinely ignored. And so it was that of her entire party, only Nimitz, whose special skinsuit fitted neatly into a custom-designed carryall, was properly equipped for a warship at battle stations.

Distinction between skinsuits, which naval personnel normally wear to battlestations, hardsuits and rescue suits.

"We're picking up a Flash Priority transmission from Lady Harrington, Sir!"

"Flash Priority?" Greentree repeated. "What does it say?"

Two thousand years in the future, still have flash priority.

"Orders from the Flag, Captain," Chavez said, and Greentree felt his jaw clench as he noted the com officer's shaken tone and jerked his head for him to continue.

"The convoy is to reenter hyper and return to Clairmont immediately," Chavez said, and now his voice was flat and utterly toneless. "You are to assume command, Sir . . . and inform Admiral Sorbanne at Clairmont that the enemy has taken the Adler System."

Took a bit to decipher the message, still using pulses and all, but not long enough for the Peeps t get back in position to jump the convoy.

"We're between Scylla and Charybdis. I can reduce Bandit Ten's engagement window to a maximum of ten minutes, but only if I increase Bandit One's to a minimum of fifteen. Or I can leave Bandit One at eleven minutes and accept the thirteen-plus-minute engagement from Bandit Ten."

Choice regarding which ship to expose the ship to longer before they can escape into hyper.

She gazed at her old friend for several seconds, but she said nothing more. She might be the commodore of CruRon Eighteen, but Alistair McKeon was the captain of HMS Prince Adrian. The responsibility for what happened to his ship was his, and so was the decision on how he fought her. Honor was as aware as McKeon that many flag officers would have refused to admit that in their own desperate need to do something, but this was no squadron-level decision, for there was no squadron. There was only Prince Adrian, on her own in a single-ship engagement, and even if she hadn't been, Honor had complete faith in Alistair McKeon's judgment. She would not insult him by interfering with his orders or second-guessing his decisions, and she saw a flicker of gratitude in his eyes before he turned back to his officers.

Honor feels no need to micromanage, even with her own behind on the line.

With the enemy accelerating steadily towards Katana, the theoretical maximum powered range of the bigger, more powerful missiles in Zachary's pods was on the order of eight and a half million kilometers, but the Manty's ECM and decoys would reduce their effective range to barely seven million. That should still be enough, however.

Another benefit to EW superiority, it can cut down the other guy's effective missile range significantly, giving you one more little advantage (which is major when combined with pods that need to launch before any enemy missiles can kill them.)

"They're not shooting at Katana, Citizen Commissioner, and those aren't laser heads." Kuttner stared at her, and her nostrils flared. "They're old-fashioned nukes, Sir, going for proximity soft kills on the pods." She looked away from the commissioner and considered her tactical display. The Manticoran warheads sped towards her command, and if she was right about their warheads and targeting, they would detonate well astern of Katana—far enough out to be a difficult point defense solution, yet close enough to burn out the electronics of her missile pods. But they would take time to arrive, and she refused to allow their threat to spook her into a premature launch of her own missiles.

-snip-

The captain had hoped an early launch on his part might shake his enemy's nerve, push her into an early launch of her own, while her accuracy would be at its lowest. But the Peep commander had refused the bait, which left only the meager hope that she might wait too long, let the missiles of Prince Adrian's first broadside get in close to her pods and cripple them before they could—

McKeon fires, hoping to spook Katana into launching the pod missiles he now knows they have early, when they'll be less effective. When Zachary refuses to blink they have a brief hope they may kill the pods before launch after all but... no.

Eighty-four missiles howled towards HMS Prince Adrian. That was little more than half the total she had already fired, but there was an enormous difference between ten separate sixteen-missile broadsides, separated in time and space so that each offered the missile defense crews its own fire solution problem, and a single, massive deluge. It was a grim equation the People's Navy had faced all too often since the war's opening battles. Now it was the turn of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and Geraldine Metcalf and her assistants did their best as the tide of destruction roared down on them.

Jammers snarled, fighting to blind the incoming missiles' homing systems, and decoys sang to them, tempting them astray. But the People's Republic's new Solarian League-upgraded missiles were far more dangerous than the ones with which the PN had begun the war. Their sensors were more sophisticated, the capability of their targeting discrimination software had been increased by a factor of three, and the RMN's lack of data on them made Metcalf's ECM much less effective than projected. Barely a quarter of the birds in that massive salvo were blinded, and only a handful more succumbed to the decoys' seduction. Fifty-seven of them burned straight through the cruiser's best EW efforts, and countermissiles zipped out to meet them. The bloodred icons began to vanish from Metcalf's plot with mechanical precision, but they died too slowly. Thirty-five broke through the countermissile envelope, and last-ditch laser clusters trained onto them, firing desperately, trying to kill them before they reached attack range.

The lasers got nineteen. Only sixteen missiles, less than twenty percent of the original broadside, survived to reach attack range, but it was enough

84 missile salvo, five pods plus a broadside. Prince Adrian stops over 80% of the incoming, but is saturated.

"Good hits on Bandit Ten!" Metcalf announced. "We got at least four in on the bastards, Sir!"

"Negative function on all forward point defense!" someone else barked. "We've lost Lidar One and Two! Grav Three's down!"

"Switch to Lidar Five!" Metcalf replied, and one of her assistants acknowledged the order, but the tide of disaster rolled on over her voice. Without Damage Control Central the reports came in piecemeal . . . but they came.

"Graser One is down. Heavy casualties on Graser Three and Five and in Missile Five. No contact with Missile Seven. Magazine One is out of the feed queue."

"What about Impeller One?" McKeon demanded of the helmsman, abandoning his efforts to get through to anyone in Engineering.

"Sir, Impeller One doesn't answer," Chief Harris replied tautly. "Our accel's down to two hundred gravities and dropping."

"Sidewall Generators One, Three, Five, and Seven are off-line. We're losing the port sidewall, Captain!"

Damage reports come in piecemeal with the Damage Control Center taken out.

"Status of Impeller One?" McKeon demanded.

"Gone, Sir," Juno said harshly. "We may have four or five beta nodes left, if I can get them back on-line, but that's it."

McKeon's face clenched. With her forward alpha nodes gone, Prince Adrian had lost her Warshawski sails . . . and Adler lay squarely in the heart of a hyper-space gravity wave, where only sails would permit a ship to maneuver. That single, devastating salvo from Katana had doomed his ship, and McKeon knew it.

No hyperspace escape for you.

Still McKeon stared at her, and she understood his agonized hesitation. His shame. In the five hundred-T-year history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, only thirty-two Queen's ships had ever surrendered to an enemy.

"I said surrender, Captain!" she said more sharply. "We got the convoy out, but your entire forward impeller room's gone. Now surrender your ship before any more of our people die for nothing!"

"I—" McKeon closed his eyes, then shook himself and nodded. "Helm, turn us away from the enemy and kill your accel," he said in a voice like hammered iron. "Commander Metcalf, jettison every FTL-equipped drone with a locked in self-destruct command, then purge the computers and instruct all hands to destroy classified equipment and material. Lieutenant Sanko, hail Bandit Ten. Inform her captain we surrender."

McKeon becomes the 33rd RMN captain to ever surrender their ship. I suspect this long history has something to do with their fighting few wars, but having centuries of anti-piracy experience. I'd want to go down with the ship rather than fall into the hands of people like Warnecke's crew in the last book. Destruction of FTL-comm equipped drones, sensitive data and classified equipment.

Oh Noes!! Our heroes have been captured by the enemy! However will they get out of this one?

Crazedwraith · Post by **Crazedwraith** » 2014-04-03 04:36am

So Even when bad luck forces them into an impossible situation, It's MacKeon that 'really' loses the fight and MacKeon who has to surrender? What a crock. And Honor orders him to surrender? After first deciding all on him?`

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-04-03 06:49am

Crazedwraith wrote:So Even when bad luck forces them into an impossible situation, It's MacKeon that 'really' loses the fight and MacKeon who has to surrender? What a crock. And Honor orders him to surrender? After first deciding all on him?`

I guess.

Then again, consider. It is supposed to be the captain's responsibility to command his own personal ship even when an admiral's aboard, so that really was McKeon's job to fight that battle. On the other hand, it's also the admiral's responsibility to decide whether or not to fight a battle at all, and to make other such strategic decisions.

It was Honor's choice that stuck Prince Adrian in its dangerous position- she made the operational call that the cruiser should be exposed 'on point;' where to put McKeon's ship is her decision, not McKeon's.

It was Honor's choice to say that Prince Adrian could not avoid action with the Havenites, because that would pose an unacceptable risk to the rest of the convoy (her responsibility, not McKeon's)

Subject to those decisions it was McKeon's job to fight the actual battle as best he could... but it is legitimate and reasonable for Honor to override his intention to go down fighting and command him to surrender rather than accept the death of his entire command.

Now, is this lame because it isn't Honor 'losing the fight' directly? Maybe. But it's pretty consistent with a functioning military tradition.

Ahriman238 wrote:Distinction between skinsuits, which naval personnel normally wear to battlestations, hardsuits and rescue suits.

Unless I missed something, which is quite possible...

Weber is saying that Honorverse warships (at least RMN ones) don't carry any surplus environmental suits. That strikes me as a really bad idea. Among other things, what happens if the ship is attacked while your skinsuit has been damaged or otherwise rendered unavailable? What if your ship has to perform search and rescue operations in outer space? What if it's transporting a few prisoners or refugees or something?

If nothing else there should be some kind of emergency life support bubble you can inflate around a person for later rescue.

Of course, if a ship went into battle with civilians aboard there are obvious solutions like "order them into an escape pod." The pods are armored and individually have a very good chance of survival as long as they don't take a direct hit...

Honor feels no need to micromanage, even with her own behind on the line.

At least, not with an old friend like McKeon.

Another benefit to EW superiority, it can cut down the other guy's effective missile range significantly, giving you one more little advantage (which is major when combined with pods that need to launch before any enemy missiles can kill them.)

On the other hand, "effective range" is probably being defined in terms of a pretty high minimum acceptable hit rate: "this is how many hits we'd expect if only they weren't shooting down missiles short of the target" or some such.

Once the MDM makes it physically possible to launch from eight-figure ranges rather than seven, they pretty much redefine "effective" and accept much lower hit rates.

McKeon fires, hoping to spook Katana into launching the pod missiles he now knows they have early, when they'll be less effective. When Zachary refuses to blink they have a brief hope they may kill the pods before launch after all but... no.

Note that since even a standard nuke is a big nuclear shaped charge... honestly, you could probably detonate the weapons from a hundred thousand kilometers out or more and still fry pods, given that "sidewall-burner" nuclear shaped charge missiles were effective antiship weapons from ten thousand kilometers or so according to that later tech bible.

84 missile salvo, five pods plus a broadside. Prince Adrian stops over 80% of the incoming, but is saturated.

Hm. The Havenites are using 14-missile pods or something...

A couple of notes:
1) A Prince Consort would probably be relatively EW-weak owing to the lack of hull space and refit capability, compared to, say, a Jason Alvarez or even a Star Knight.
2) As we see, EW is really the most effective defense against pod salvoes because of sheer volume of enemy fire. You can double up the ship's antimissile weapons, but it only takes you so far to do so.
3) We also note that Prince Adrian's defensive missile fire is extremely effective at shooting down the Havenite missiles. They only have, oh... something like six to eight each of missiles and point defense mounts, and manage to shoot down about three dozen missiles that way. That part of the Manticoran EW advantage doesn't seem to have gone away; their active antimissile defenses are being very good at localizing and killing Havenite missiles, even while the Havenite missiles themselves have gotten more accurate.

"Good hits on Bandit Ten!" Metcalf announced. "We got at least four in on the bastards, Sir!"

"Negative function on all forward point defense!" someone else barked. "We've lost Lidar One and Two! Grav Three's down!"

"Switch to Lidar Five!" Metcalf replied, and one of her assistants acknowledged the order, but the tide of disaster rolled on over her voice. Without Damage Control Central the reports came in piecemeal . . . but they came...
It suddenly occurred to me that lidar really isn't the most effective thing to use for fire control in this kind of SF context. More on that later.

Oh Noes!! Our heroes have been captured by the enemy! However will they get out of this one?

With considerable difficulty, sometimes in pieces?

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