Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Simon_Jester]

Yu was a good tactician, and if he'd been in command of Thunder of God he could probably have handled Honor's entire squadron. However, in the ambush plan that actually resulted (which I think was settled on before the Masadans knew the bulk of the Manticoran squadron was gone)...

Yeah. A Star Knight's missile defense would have basically made the ambush completely ineffective, and any attempt by the Masadans to close to range would have been a bad joke. It would have taken Yu taking Thunder of God into a sustained engagement, with the Havenite-led crew, to win that one. That couldn't have happened during the ambush. It would have had to take place later... but later, the Masadans would have been just as freaked out as happened anyway, would have stupidly and ignorantly demanded that their modern ships waste time ferrying their LACs over to Grayson. By the time that was sorted out...

Hell, Honor and/or Courvosier would have sent Madrigal running off to Manticore for reinforcements, much as she did after Blackbird with Apollo. They'd have shown up sooner, and probably averted the whole thing.

[Batman]

That reminds me. At this point, Manticore was seriously trying to get Grayson as an ally to the point that they were effectively willing to just give them several billion (if not more) dollars to jumpstart their economy, they sent a CA, a CL, and two DDs but they couldn't be arsed to have a dispatch boat tag along with them?

[Mr Bean]

That reminds me. At this point, Manticore was seriously trying to get Grayson as an ally to the point that they were effectively willing to just give them several billion (if not more) dollars to jumpstart their economy, they sent a CA, a CL, and two DDs but they couldn't be arsed to have a dispatch boat tag along with them?

Two things
1. Dispatch boats in peacetime in Manticore are all State ships, as in part of the State department not the Navy since until 1901... the Navy has no need of dispatch boats since there is exactly two areas (Basilisk and the Confederacy) that you simply can't send a Destroyer to do the same job. It's a mark of how long Manticore has been a single system power. What ships are required would be in Solly or Confed space. They don't need many.

Later on we see navy specific dispatch boats but there are never many. There are plenty of times a destroyer does the job a dispatch boat should be doing.

2. Funny enough a lack of a dispatch boat bites every side in the ass. There are several times that Harrington gets hurt because she lacks a dispatch boat. Several times Haven and recently the Sollies. I'm guessing the things are pretty rare which considering they are nothing but tiny ships just big enough to mount reactors and implellers makes sense. They can ONLY take messages and only the most time critical and even still most places will be a week late.

[Terralthra]

Yu was a good tactician, and if he'd been in command of Thunder of God he could probably have handled Honor's entire squadron. However, in the ambush plan that actually resulted (which I think was settled on before the Masadans knew the bulk of the Manticoran squadron was gone)...

Yeah. A Star Knight's missile defense would have basically made the ambush completely ineffective, and any attempt by the Masadans to close to range would have been a bad joke. It would have taken Yu taking Thunder of God into a sustained engagement, with the Havenite-led crew, to win that one. That couldn't have happened during the ambush. It would have had to take place later... but later, the Masadans would have been just as freaked out as happened anyway, would have stupidly and ignorantly demanded that their modern ships waste time ferrying their LACs over to Grayson. By the time that was sorted out...

Hell, Honor and/or Courvosier would have sent Madrigal running off to Manticore for reinforcements, much as she did after Blackbird with Apollo. They'd have shown up sooner, and probably averted the whole thing.

The LAC-ferrying wasn't necessary to help the Masadans with their freak-out; their freak-out was largely a fake reaction to give Maccabeus time to set up and execute. That's why they transferred the LACs there but largely pottered around with them in the outer system once they were there. If it wasn't the highly effective missile defenses of the Madrigal, it would've been something else they fixated on to delay Yu and Theisman. Masada's plan from the get-go was to try to use the power of Thunder of God and Principality to hurt Grayson's navy, but only as set-up to Maccabeus, which they thought was the best way to achieve Jericho's goals.

Now, it could be argued they didn't want to rely on a space naval victory over Grayson because of the general fear they held the GSN in after the last naval war between them a few decades prior, but that's outside the scope of the particular decision sets in between First Yeltsin and Blackbird. Simonds was spooked by how well Madrigal held up at First Yeltsin, but he did more or less believe Yu when he stated that Thunder of God could take the RMN squadron. In fact, it was Yu's hesitance to do just that after Blackbird (because Yu had orders to delay from the ambassador) that caused the mutiny, and ultimately Jericho's failure.

In the end, Harrington's decision to take Fearless, Apollo, and Troubadour out of Grayson was a mistake that cost her a mentor, 2 ships, and a hell of a lot of crew (and cost the Graysons a hell of a lot of metal and people as well), but given the multiple conflicting interests of Masada and Haven in the run-up and execution of Jericho, it's doubtful that we can easily predict what would've happened if she hadn't. Had Fearless been in Madrigal's place, the ambush that took place in the actual First Yeltsin wouldn't have worked, but Yu and Theisman set up the ambush knowing it was a destroyer, not a heavy cruiser. If the situation had been different, so would've been their plan of battle. Yu is certainly a competent enough tactician to come up with something effective in either case, given the preponderance of firepower he had.

[Batman]

@Bean-you're quite right-I keep forgetting that at the time of the early novels, Manticore was essentially a single system power and wouldn't need all that many dispatch boats.
Of course that changed by the time of 'Flag in Exile' at the latest where the Manticoran Alliance was up and running and DID involve a number of star systems other than Manticore and Yeltsin, but you are quite right that at the time they dispatched Honor's task force to Yeltsin, there was no indication she might ever wind up needing help, leave alone along the lines of 'I desperately need reinforcements, and I need them 20 minutes ago.'

[Simon_Jester]

Two things
1. Dispatch boats in peacetime in Manticore are all State ships, as in part of the State department not the Navy since until 1901... the Navy has no need of dispatch boats since there is exactly two areas (Basilisk and the Confederacy) that you simply can't send a Destroyer to do the same job. It's a mark of how long Manticore has been a single system power. What ships are required would be in Solly or Confed space. They don't need many.

Later on we see navy specific dispatch boats but there are never many. There are plenty of times a destroyer does the job a dispatch boat should be doing.

When it isn't actually shooting at anyone, a destroyer may not be much more expensive to build and operate than the dispatch boat would be. Sure, trained crews are expensive and a destroyer has (probably) ten times the dispatch boat's crew. But the boat has something like two thirds of the same tonnage as an old-model destroyer, and contains just about all the same equipment, except the weapons mounts.

[Incidentally, scaling from a dispatch boat to a destroyer probably gives us a clue what percentage of the destroyer's tonnage is actually devoted to weapons and defensive electronics, as opposed to the engines, hull frames, and reactor]

The LAC-ferrying wasn't necessary to help the Masadans with their freak-out; their freak-out was largely a fake reaction to give Maccabeus time to set up and execute. That's why they transferred the LACs there but largely pottered around with them in the outer system once they were there. If it wasn't the highly effective missile defenses of the Madrigal, it would've been something else they fixated on to delay Yu and Theisman. Masada's plan from the get-go was to try to use the power of Thunder of God and Principality to hurt Grayson's navy, but only as set-up to Maccabeus, which they thought was the best way to achieve Jericho's goals.

[blinks] Yeah, come to think of it you're right. That said, I think the basic sequence of events still works more or less as I describe, in that the combined Grayson-Manticoran force would be far better equipped to deal with Haven had Fearless remained behind. The Fearless/Madrigal combination would have had enough missile defense capability to largely neutralize any attempt to ambush the GSN with missiles. At the same time, it would have been very practical to, say, send for help from Manticore immediately with the destroyer and hopefully short-circuit the whole Masadan plan before Masada gets around to rolling over Grayson with its modern ships, again because the Masadans are waiting for Maccabeus to work.

Leaving Apollo but not Fearless might actually have been the worst of both worlds- it gives Grayson enough of a modern force that Yu comes up with a better tactical plan than the one that took out Madrigal and the bulk of the GSN... but not enough to survive that plan. Because an Apollo is much, much less well equipped to handle an attack by a Peep battlecruiser than a Star Knight is.

[Simon_Jester]

Another post to serve as... side-information for our discussion of Honor of the Queen, this one taken from House of Steel's discussion of the pre-contact Grayson Space Navy.

To summarize, the GSN is descended from the relatively lightly armed peacekeeping forces Grayson had in orbital space back during the Grayson Civil War, the one that ended with the fanatical "Faithful" kicked off Grayson and over to the Endicott system. This took place around 1422 PD. 250 years later, the "Grayson Space Guard" once again protected Grayson against the first (sublight!) counterattack from the Masadans.

As of the time of the stories, it is a further three centuries after that. Grayson and Masada both made contact with the outside universe starting around 1693 PD. Both nations started frantically trying to develop 'modern' weapons technology from native capability- obviously, it would be a total disaster for Grayson if Masada developed a fleet of impeller-drive, hyperspace-capable starships for its war effort while Grayson was still relying on reaction drives and sublight speeds. The reverse was equally true.

On the other hand, the Graysons and Masadans had very minimal foreign exchange and contact with the outside galaxy, so they had to improvise a lot of things. Their relatively crude gravity control technology stops them from building RMN/Solarian/Havenite style fusion reactors for small platforms, for instance, so they use fission power plants for their smaller, LAC-weight spacecraft. As discussed above, Grayson in particular has a vast space-industrial base; even if it's crude by RMN standards, the Graysons are very much "living in the future" by 21st century Earth standards.

So by the time of the series, the GSN consists of three major categories of armed starship, all equipped with the impeller drive and the impeller drive missile. They do not have point defense lasers or impeller-drive countermissiles, though, which makes them basically incapable of shooting down a laser head-tipped missile short of its target. Uh-oh.

---

Faith-class System Defense Unit
Mass: 11250 tons
Dimensions: 138 x 23 x 21 meters
Acceleration: 409.3 G
80% Accel: 327.5 G
Broadside: 12 missile box launchers, 1 laser, 1 autocannon
Chase: 1 laser, 1 autocannon
Service Life: 1891-1907

The Faith-class unit's formal designation in Grayson service was "system defense unit" rather than "light attack craft" because it was actually the primary sublight system defense platform for the primitive, pre-Alliance GSN, and massed barely twelve percent as much as a contemporary Grayson cruiser. However, these units were widely regarded as LAC analogs by other navies, given their mission requirements.

The Faith class was divided into at least three distinct subtypes, but the weapons fit between them is nearly identical. The major changes between subtypes are in the sensors, electronic warfare packages, and fire control systems. Like many pre-Alliance GSN units, the Faith class were protected by point defense autocannons, as the smallest pre-Alliance Grayson beam installation was far too large and slow firing to be an effective missile defense system. The designs are crude compared to modern units, but the Faith class performed well in the final Masadan attack.

Fission power plants driving plasma accelerators for gravitic conversion were standard in these units, and the inability to refit more modern Manticoran gravitic radscreens into their powerplants was a major factor in their retirement. The GSN initially considered upgrading them to modern GRAVMAK fusion plants similar to those used in RMN LACs, but decided against it. The tradeoffs revealed in that study convinced the GSN to propose the combination of Grayson fission reactors with Manticoran shielding materials and screen generators that ultimately resulted in the Shrike's powerplant, however.

Another significant presage of the Shrike design were the Faith's spinal laser weapons. While most impeller-drive warships mount their largest weapons in their chase batteries, the Faith-class mounts were unusually large compared to their broadside mounts, requiring a dedicated plasma accelerator to feed them from the fission pile. The Faith-class's designers realized that the platform needed improved turn rates if its crews were going to survive to use these weapons, and gave it larger maneuvering gyros and more wedge torque than previous designs. All of these features provided valuable experience for designing the Shrike around a single spinal beam.

Comments:
Several interesting tidbits here. One is the idea that the design of the Faith provided design experience for the 'super LAC' classes that came out of Manticore and Grayson a decade after the two nations allied.

Also, technobabble about "plasma accelerators" as a way to move power around the ship, I'm not touching that... and something more interesting- the 'GRAVMAK' fusion reactor. More generally, we know that Honorverse ships run their fusion reactors very very hot, and rely on gravitic force fields to contain the reaction. This is why their fusion reactors tend to blow up so dramatically: they are badly overpressured and supercharged, relying on active containment to provide the necessary power. This reminds me of some critiques I've seen of Star Trek reactor handling procedure.

Third, we have comments on spinal beam weapons. There are good reasons this isn't common in the Honorverse- a ship that has to expose the throat of its own impeller wedge to fire is a vulnerable ship. A LAC-sized combatant has less trouble here- it's a smaller, more agile target... if it is designed that way. Which is also addressed here; the Faiths get modifications to improve the (generally shitty) rate of turn an impeller drive ship would otherwise have.

Finally, the observation that the Graysons call a LAC a "system defense unit." This strikes me as rather odd- or rather, knowing that LACs are not FTL capable at all, it seems a matter of common sense that they would be used to defend and patrol a single system. Indeed, it's hard to figure out how they ever got the name "attack craft" at all...

---

...the first GSN "destroyers" were really just the lower level of two tiers of hyper-capable Grayson warships, used defensively to intercept Masadan raiders in the Yeltsin's Star system and offensively as support units on Grayson raids into the Endicott System. Unlike most other navies, limited interstellar trade meant that GSN destroyers were not needed in the traditional commerce protection role common across the rest of human explored space.

Now, here are the destroyers the GSN owns at the start of Honor of the Queen...

Ararat-class Destroyer
Mass: 62500 tons
Dimensions: 341 x 40 x 23 meters
Acceleration: 526.6 G
80% Accel: 421.2 G
Broadside: 3 missile tubes, 2 lasers, 2 countermissile launchers, 2 autocannon
Chase: 1 laser, 1 point defense
Number Built: 1
Service Life: 1874-1905

GNS Ararat was the oldest ship in Grayson service at the time of the battles of the final Grayson-Masadan War. As the first vessel built from the keel up to take advantage of the locally developed inertial compensator, Ararat could in many ways be considered the first modern GSN warship.

Like all of the pre-Alliance warships, Ararat mounted few broadside missile launchers, with even fewer chemical-burning countermissiles for area defense. On the broadsides she still mounted autocannon for point defense, but had recently been refited with crude, but longer-ranged laser clusters to cover her vulnerable hammerheads. Ararat was destroyed with all hands during the Masadan War.

Comments
First Grayson warship with an inertial compensator. Without a compensator, shipboard artificial gravity limits practical accelerations to 100g or less, so the compensator is a big step up. Chemical burning countermissiles would typically be nuclear tipped, probably some kind of advanced solid fuel rocket- I'm picturing something like an advanced descendant of this. Sprint was capable of going from zero to 3.5 km/s in about five seconds, so its accelerations aren't a complete joke by Honorverse standards, but even something with ten times the performance would still be useless against a laser head missile.

The same problem applies to autocannon- a laser head initiates ten or twenty thousand kilometers from your hull, so even if you have an immensely powerful projectile weapon that accelerates slugs to 100 km/s or more, the bullets will take two or three minutes just to get far enough out to have any chance of protecting the ship. The only thing they're effective against is a missile that has to basically fly smack into your hull or wedge to have any effect.

Which is apparently all the Graysons had before dealings with Manticore; I doubt they had anything like the extremely good shaped-charge techniques the 'First Galaxy' nations use gravitics to achieve. They might have at least been able to shape a nuclear charge by more conventional means, but that still wouldn't give them that much standoff distance.

One more remark- note that these Grayson destroyers have damn near the same acceleration as an RMN destroyer of equivalent mass. Clearly, once the Graysons figured out the compensator, there wasn't a long period of having trouble getting it to work properly.


Zion-class Destroyer
Mass: 65250 tons
Dimensions: 346 x 41 x 24 meters
Acceleration: 525.5 G
80% Accel: 420.4 G
Broadside: 4 missile tubes, 2 lasers, 2 countermissile launchers, 3 autocannon
Chase: 1 laser, 2 autocannon
Number Built: 3
Service Life: 1879-1905

The Zion-class was designed as a follow-on to GSN Ararat. The most significant change was to add a fourth broadside missile launcher. Unfortunately, the lack of room for additional missile storage reduced the number of salvoes per launcher from eight to six. Defenses include dual gravitically driven point defense autocannon as chasers and an additional autocannon on the broadsides. These autocannon were imported ex-Solarian weapons. Grayson industry was as yet unable to construct such weapons, but the GSN was able to acquire them from Solarian reclamation yards as the SLN converted to laser clusters in more recent construction. Although the autocannon were more volume intensive than the cruder, electromagnetically driven Grayson weapons, they required much less volume and a lower energy budget than laser clusters would have, while their higher rate of fire and muzzle velocity remained more than adequate for dealing with then state-of-the-art Masadan shipkillers.

The class was scheduled to receive the same defensive upgrades as Ararat, but the onset of the final Masadan War disrupted those plans. GNS Saul, the only member of the class to survive the War, was decommissioned in 1905 PD after the first wave of the Alliance Technological Exchange Program ships arrived. Her survival in combat was directly attributed in official reports to an increased volume of defensive antimissile firepower and the dramatic improvement that her autocannon represented over the older electromagnetic guns on Ararat.

Comments
So the Graysons put a fourth launcher on each broadside, but still pack 24 missiles into each broadside's magazines. Note how pathetic this is compared to RMN and Havenite ships; I can only assume that Grayson impeller drive missiles are fricking huge.

Oh. One note: some of the ships in this book I'm working from come with line drawings. Aesthetically the pre-modern GSN ships are much 'bumpier' than their Manticoran counterparts, with big bulky vanes and tubes sticking out from the more or less cylindrically symmetric hull we normally see in pictures of Honorverse ships. I don't know what some of those protrusions are- radiators? Magazines for large bulky missiles? Housings for large bulky fusion plants?

We also see more info on autocannon. The Sollies are switching out autocannon for point defense lasers on new construction during the 1870s PD, and basically selling used autocannon off for cheap to whoever can scrape up a little cash. Gravitic technology (i.e. a greatly scaled up version of an infantry "pulser" weapon) is superior to electromagnetic 'railgun' propulsion for slug-throwing projectile weapons... but still not good enough to match the long range of a point defense laser.

---

Modern GSN light cruisers are the direct descendants of the "cruiser" type of hyper-capable warship used by Grayson in its wars with Masada after the rediscovery of Yeltsin's Star but before the Alliance with Manticore. The larger of the two GSN hyper-capable designs, these ships were the largest locally produced units before the Alliance and served as the centerpieces of GSN combat formations during the last Masadan War.

Glory-class Cruiser
Mass: 83000 tons
Dimensions: 381 x 40 x 30 meters
Acceleration: 519.9 G
80% Accel: 415.9 G
Broadside: 4 missile tubes, 3 lasers, 2 countermissile launchers, 3 autocannon
Chase: 1 missile launcher, 1 laser, 1 autocannon
Number Built: 1
Service Life: 1869-1903

Built simply as a "cruiser" when commissioned, GNS Glory was the first power projection unit of what most consider the modern GSN. Boasting an inertial compensator of home-built design and a true broadside missile battery of first-generation impeller-drive shipkillers, she was the largest and most powerful ship in the Navy for over a decade.

By the standards of the rest of the galaxy, she was hopelessly antiquated even before she was launched, with short-ranged ship-killing contact nuclear missiles, rocket-propelled countermissiles, autocannon point defense, and a myopic beam armament. However, by the standards of the war with Masada, she was a powerful ship, well suited for duty as the system defense flagship for Yeltsin's Star and finally capable of true power projection into Endicott.

Damaged during the First Battle of Yeltsin's Star, Glory was decommissioned shortly after the first of the Alliance Technological Exchange program ships began to arrive.

Comments:
The listed commissioning date is not consistent with the description of Ararat as the GSN's oldest ship during the final Masadan War. I wonder what's going on there. Note that the Graysons don't bother to distinguish between "light" and "heavy" cruisers, and frankly the only reason they call the ships they build "destroyers" and "cruisers" is because that's what everyone in the galaxy calls ships of those tonnage ranges. By their standards, Glory was a first class battleship

This reflects a pet peeve of mine, that Honorverse naming conventions seem to stay fairly static in some ways. For example, "superdreadnought" and "dreadnought" remain in play as terms for starships of over about 4.5 million tons, long after people have stopped building battleships of 2-4 million tons that a dreadnought would outgun. Why do people still talk about superdreadnoughts long after most of the great powers have standardized on 'superdreadnought'-sized hulls and being a seven million ton warship has ceased to be anything that impressive or unusual?


Austin Grayson-class Cruiser
Mass: 91750 tons
Dimensions: 394 x 41 x 32 meters
Acceleration: 519.4 G
80% Accel: 415.6 G
Broadside: 5 missile tubes, 2 lasers, 3 countermissile launchers, 3 autocannon
Chase: 1 missile tube, 1 laser, 1 countermissile launcher, 1 autocannon
Number Built: 2
Service Life: 1880-1904

GNS Austin Grayson and GNS Covington comprised the remaining two indigenously built cruisers in service at the start of the Alliance. While both are listed as the same class, several minor differences appeared in layout and weapons fit between the two vessels, as each of the three light cruisers in GSN service was rotated through refits at least once in its operational lifetime. Weapons fit was similar to GNS Glory, and equally obsolete by the standards of the rest of the galaxy at the time.

Austin Grayson was the flagship of the GSN and was lost in the initial Masadan ambush at the First Battle of Yeltsin's Star, while GNS Covington survived the battle only to be decommissioned by necessity along with Glory when the first modern units began to arrive from Manticore. Covington remains a museum ship in close orbit over Grayson at the time of this writing.

---

To review, a Grayson ship as of Honor of the Queen compares fairly badly to a modern ship of equal tonnage (a destroyer or old light cruiser; newer CLs like Apollo are significantly bulkier than any GSN ship). Acceleration is comparable, but the Grayson ship definitely has inferiority in:
-Missile magazine capacity (24 missiles stored total per broadside for a Grayson destroyer)
-Missile guidance
-Missile standoff attack range (no laser heads, not even a long ranged nuclear shaped charge "sidewall burner" as far as I know)
-Missile defense capability, to the point of having effectively NO missile defense against a laser head.
-Beam weapon range and power
-Sensor capability, ECCM, and command/control facilities.

It is also likely that they are inferior in material science, and therefore build ships out of relatively fragile material compared to the armor and hull frames of a Manticoran or Havenite ship.

We can reasonably expect a Masadan warship to be built with much the same limitations, too...

[CaptainChewbacca]

Do you have the text on what exactly was so special about the Grayson compensator that made it somehow better than the design Manticore came up with? I looked, but I can't find it.

[Terralthra]

It's never been explained, just as the mechanics of compensators have never been explained, beyond "they dump inertia into a handy gravitic sump", and assorted trivia about failure modes. The only thing that was explained was that they had to invent one themselves, since no one would tell them how it worked, and what they came up with was more mass-intensive than standard designs, but more efficient ton for ton, once the RMN applied their miniaturization techniques to the equipment.

[CaptainChewbacca]

So a 'modern' ship equipped with a Grayson-derived compensator is more maneuverable than otherwise?

[Simon_Jester]

Better straight-line acceleration, at any rate. Maneuverability is a whole different question, and I see no evidence that new Manticoran ships turn faster than they ever did, in terms of rotating the ship's bow to bear on a new heading. But hoo boy does their acceleration improve.

As an illustration of this, an Invictus, the latest superdreadnought class out of Manticore, tips the scales at 8.7 million tons and has a peak acceleration of 562 gravities... better than a prewar Star Knight (like Honor's second Fearless) could achieve on a hull of about 3.5% the tonnage.

Though that's showing the two endpoints of a multiple-generation series of upgrades. It might be more fair to compare the Star Knight (509 G on 305 thousand tons) to a first-generation Saganami-class (592 G on 393 thousand tons). Granted that all ships "below the wall" of a given generation in the Honorverse seem to have almost the same acceleration, so that the extra weight doesnt mean very much... it's still a considerable jump. On the other hand, you can see how it's not such a massive jump. The enemy can counter it.

All ships normally limit themselves to 80% of maximum acceleration for safety reasons. the Havenites shaved that to 90%, or maybe even higher, as a way of regaining 40 or 50g of their acceleration disadvantage. By the time Round Two of the fighting breaks out that's no longer enough to fix the problem (witness the acceleration on the Invictus)... but at that same time, Haven becomes able to obtain compensator upgrades from Erewhon.

Honestly, the compensator upgrades just don't seem to change much plotwise, or at least it's never made very explicit that they do so. There are a few examples where it matters (Honor taking advantage of it to run her SDs at accelerations high enough that they can be mistaken for battlecruisers at Fourth Yeltsin), but of all the areas where Manticore has an edge, it's one of the least decisive.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I think the compensator upgrade was written as a way to justify all the tech and aide Grayson was getting from Manticore and to make Grayson seem to be 'worthy allies'.

[Connor MacLeod]

the accelerations mentioned in the novels seem to be mainly linear acceleration 'forwards'. IIRC they have to do a turnover at some point in their travels in order to slow down on approach, so it seems that there is no 'retro rocket's for an impeller wedge.

How manuevering is handled IIRC is never outlined (although LACS and bow/sternwalls might suggest you CAN manuver with them), but Weber does hint its not particularily fast as mentioned here

The rate of turn for an impeller-drive ship outside a wall of battle is fairly high, although it is considerably higher for a smaller ship than for a larger one. A typical SKM DD can alter her heading (but not necessarily her vector, of course) by 90 degrees in about 100 seconds; an SD would need about twelve minutes for a 90-degree turn. (The difference in roll rates is not as a great, although it also favors the smaller ship by a largish margin. In addition, of course, a smaller ship, with a lower beam and a narrower wedge, can roll "further" in a given length of time with the same roll rate than a larger ship can.) And as someone pointed out in connection with the Bellerophon in SVW, however, how far you have to turn to deny a shot to an enemy is entirely a function of range-to-target, so even a relatively low absolute turn rate can take away a shot if it starts soon enough and the range is long enough. Remember also that sidewalls extend the full length of the wedge, creating a protected "box" within the wedge from its front edge to its rear edge. It is not necessary to turn 90 degrees away from an opponent to deny him a down-the-throat shot; all you have to do is turn far enough that your sidewall--which is no more than 10 km from the side of your ship--is interposed.

That has been contested by the fans of course, citing examples like the Short Victorious War example Weber is talking about, but also 'Shadows of Saganami' where the Hexapuma made some sort of turn in a supposedly much shorter period of time (although how clear that is context wise is also contested IIRC.) but there ya go.

It could be that the sluggishness is related to the peculiarities of the sidewall in manuvering. Reaction thrusters might be used for faster turns (at the expsense of burning up considerably more power, and thus cutting down massively on the ship's endurance, like in 'Echoes of Honour')

[Mr Bean]

I think the compensator upgrade was written as a way to justify all the tech and aide Grayson was getting from Manticore and to make Grayson seem to be 'worthy allies'.

It's part of a longer term plot point about Grayson not being fans of the status quo and "that's the way things have always been". By the time of the latest books the tech in Manticore ships may be home built, but the designed are so heavily influenced by Grayson as to be considered almost total copies of Grayson designs. The LAC designs, the automation and interior redesigns and the efficiency improvements are all stuff created by Grayson engineers working out of Blackbird. There's a bit in the later books where I think it was Admiral Mathews is walking Earl White Haven around showing off all the new design concepts that he had put down to Honor the year before. As in this will never work, it won't make sense, no military would accept this... oh you already built one and there it is? In the books its implied it comes from Grayson's isolation combined with long term enemy of the Masdan's. They have to build all this stuff from scratch because no one would sell them anything, in 9 times out of ten what they make is almost as good or worse... and one time it's better.

Grayson are great traditionalists in personnel matters but in tech matters they are rabid new adopter fans. As in I don't care how silly our religious hats are, by God if my great grandfather believed God wanted us to wear these silly hats we will wear them outside to go get the new latest and greatest space Iphone.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I guess fighting a war against an enemy that won't rest until you're destroyed for 600 years will do that to a culture.

[The Romulan Republic]

What about living on a horrendously inhospitable planet?

[Black Admiral]

Comments
So the Graysons put a fourth launcher on each broadside, but still pack 24 missiles into each broadside's magazines. Note how pathetic this is compared to RMN and Havenite ships; I can only assume that Grayson impeller drive missiles are fricking huge.

They are. I quote Admiral Courvosier;

[The GSN's] point defence missiles still used reaction drives, for God's sake! That had stunned Courvosier - until he discovered that their smallest impeller missile massed over a hundred and twenty tons. That was fifty percent more than a Manticoran ship-killer, much less a point-defence missile
- The Honor of the Queen, pg. 151

[CaptainChewbacca]

Anyone know when the next Manticore novel comes out? I'm interested in seeing how a large Solarian fleet does against a combined Grand Alliance armada.

[Batman]

Define 'large'. We know how Admiral Filareta fared when he tried to attack the Manticore system in 'Shadow of Freedom' and the guy had 400 of the wall.
And that's ignoring what Mike did to Admiral Crandall in 'A Rising Thunder' without a single waller (if, admittedly, with missile pods up the wazzoo).

[Simon_Jester]

I think the compensator upgrade was written as a way to justify all the tech and aide Grayson was getting from Manticore and to make Grayson seem to be 'worthy allies'.

True. Part of the problem is that the Graysons occupy a strange place if we look at historical precedents. In real life, countries that far behind the curve technologically were basically exploited prey, and were unable to quickly and efficiently reform or catch up.

Grayson's different, because while they are technologically primitive, and culturally primitive, they are not "primitives." They have a basically functional government, a highly educated population that is accustomed to working with complex technology, and a well established native engineering establishment. They are also accustomed to a very high level of war mobilization to meet existential threats, something even Manticore was still trying to get the hang of in the early 1900s PD.

So it's hard to parse exactly how that works. They're not a bunch of nomadic tribesmen, they CAN understand, use, and duplicate any technology they're shown by foreigners, as long as they can get their hands on the tools. On the other hand, they are very much behind the curve in terms of actual capabilities.

the accelerations mentioned in the novels seem to be mainly linear acceleration 'forwards'. IIRC they have to do a turnover at some point in their travels in order to slow down on approach, so it seems that there is no 'retro rocket's for an impeller wedge.

How manuevering is handled IIRC is never outlined (although LACS and bow/sternwalls might suggest you CAN manuver with them), but Weber does hint its not particularily fast as mentioned here

"Wedge torque" suggests that the wedge can, well, exert torque on the ship... but obviously not nearly as well as it exerts straight line acceleration. "Gyros" present in a Grayson LAC are also a hint, since a gyroscope could certainly be used to rotate the ship... but that may not scale up to something the size of a superdreadnought.

It's part of a longer term plot point about Grayson not being fans of the status quo and "that's the way things have always been". By the time of the latest books the tech in Manticore ships may be home built, but the designed are so heavily influenced by Grayson as to be considered almost total copies of Grayson designs. The LAC designs, the automation and interior redesigns and the efficiency improvements are all stuff created by Grayson engineers working out of Blackbird. There's a bit in the later books where I think it was Admiral Mathews is walking Earl White Haven around showing off all the new design concepts that he had put down to Honor the year before. As in this will never work, it won't make sense, no military would accept this... oh you already built one and there it is? In the books its implied it comes from Grayson's isolation combined with long term enemy of the Masdan's. They have to build all this stuff from scratch because no one would sell them anything, in 9 times out of ten what they make is almost as good or worse... and one time it's better.

Well, there are also some more... questionable calls on the Graysons' parts, like the "lasers versus grasers" argument for energy weapons. And they use their ships for different doctrinal roles in ways that would sometimes NOT work well for Manticore, because Grayson's entire modern navy is optimized for participating in major fleet battles, with much less of an eye to commerce protection and patrolling large volumes of controlled space.

Another point is that most of the post-1910 PD designs were at least finalized by joint RMN-Grayson design teams. So you can't really say "yes, it was Grayson influence that led to higher shipboard automation." Indeed, this is probably entirely untrue; Manticore had excellent reasons to automate its ships extensively whether Grayson was involved or not. And responsibility for developing the tools to do so fell squarely on Manticoran shoulders; Grayson would simply lack the expertise.

[Batman]

Last I checked Manticore went for higher automation independently but for the same reason the Graysons did, they simply didn't have a choice. The massive expansion of both system's navies meant that they no longer had the manpower to meet traditional navy crew requirements (and we see that bite them on the ass towards the current status of the series especially where prize crews and Marine detachments are concerned).

[Terralthra]

There are some countervailing points, as well. The GSN has always been a force of waging war, and defensive war at that, and their population pressures mean that trained spacers are hard to come by. They jump at the increased automation, and the automation proves excellent at allowing them (and the RMN) to man a much larger fleet than other powers. However, once out of war and performing the commerce-protection, system patrol, and anti-piracy functions that the RMN considered its bread and butter, the automation hurt, badly. While a Roland destroyer was literally twice as large as the Courageous-class light cruisers, (like the original Fearless), the crew complement was...not anywhere close. Courageous - 200 crew; Roland - 62. While a Roland could have blown Sirius away without breaking a sweat, any attempt to make the sort of crew detachments Fearless made in Basilisk would've been disastrous, as even the smallest possible pinnace and cutter crews, liaisons, and marine companies would've basically reduced a Roland to less than a skeleton crew of bridge officers and a (gutted) engineering staff.

When deployed as commerce protection, ships with the new automation systems consistently have problems with this in the short stories and in Shadow of Saganami.

The GSN also made the new BC(P), which proved to be an expensive experiment. They were only any good against non-MDM equipped non-wall opponents, since they didn't have the sustained throw weight for a MDM-range opponent, nor the durability to last against a ship of the wall that got into range.

---

Also worth noting that the RMN has been pushing their compensator margins short as well, in the later books, with the official excuse being that "older estimates of the odds of compensator failure were overly high." I think that this, in particular, represents an admission by Weber that he kept including the Chekhov's Gun of Harrington (and others) thinking about the dangers of pushing their compensator margins too high, without ever paying off on it by having a ship's compensator fail (other than due to combat damage). If you keep having characters mention or think about it, but it never happens, you undercut your own narrative.

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Also, those turn rates make no sense at all. Read the beginning of the battle of On Basilisk Station again. Harrington sends Fearless shrieking into the orbital traffic pattern on the courier boat at 300g, blows its impeller ring, then immediately does a hard turn to pursue Sirius at maximum military power. If it takes her 100 seconds to turn 90 degres, that means a turn like the one Harrington executes (375 mark 171 to 274 mark 093) should take her nearly 2 minutes, over 12 times as long as she was accelerating on her first heading. It even descibes "the starscape slewed crazily as she shot up and away from the planet in a mad skew turn." Slewing crazily is not a phrase I'd use to describe turning less than 1 degree per second. The descriptions of snap-rolls in wall combat (e.g. during Thunderbolt in War of Honor) don't make any sense if it takes multiple minutes to roll. I can dig up quotes on that too, but it describes the Havenite wall firing broadsides until just before the RMN missiles reach attack range, when the wall as a whole snaps on its side to present its wedges. If it takes 10+ minutes for an SD to make a 90 degree roll, that's longer than the entire flight time of the RMN of Havenite missiles; there'd be no time to even fire a broadside before they'd have to roll ship.

[Terralthra]

Edit - that's 357 x 171 to 274 x 093. Not 375 (which makes no sense).

[Simon_Jester]

Also worth noting that the RMN has been pushing their compensator margins short as well, in the later books, with the official excuse being that "older estimates of the odds of compensator failure were overly high." I think that this, in particular, represents an admission by Weber that he kept including the Chekhov's Gun of Harrington (and others) thinking about the dangers of pushing their compensator margins too high, without ever paying off on it by having a ship's compensator fail (other than due to combat damage). If you keep having characters mention or think about it, but it never happens, you undercut your own narrative.

You're probably right.

Also in play is another effect: the move from prewar to wartime conditions. Before the war, catastrophic compensator failures were probably the single thing most likely to destroy an RMN ship of the wall, and maybe even a battlecruiser- because nothing larger than that was in any serious danger from the kinds of enemies the RMN normally encountered. In war against a peer competitor, worries about compensator failure take a distant second to worries about enemy missile fire.

Hm. Another thing- compensators may actually have been significantly less reliable in the 1700s and 1800s PD than they are in the main novel series, giving the RMN a good reason to be conservative under peacetime conditions when ships usually aren't in much of a hurry.

Also, not disputing your comments about the maneuverability of light units, but...

The descriptions of snap-rolls in wall combat (e.g. during Thunderbolt in War of Honor) don't make any sense if it takes multiple minutes to roll. I can dig up quotes on that too, but it describes the Havenite wall firing broadsides until just before the RMN missiles reach attack range, when the wall as a whole snaps on its side to present its wedges. If it takes 10+ minutes for an SD to make a 90 degree roll, that's longer than the entire flight time of the RMN of Havenite missiles; there'd be no time to even fire a broadside before they'd have to roll ship.

I seem to recall it being strongly implied that rolling a ship about its long axis takes less time than pitching or yawing the ship does. I can see good reasons for that- Honorverse ships are long, narrow cylinders, so they have much less moment of inertia when you try to roll them than when you try to pitch or yaw them. It would probably take an order of magnitude less torque, maybe two, to get the same angular velocity in a roll.

[Terralthra]

Even an order of magnitude difference leaves a tau/4 snaproll at over a minute, which is strongly counter-indicated by the scene of the Havenite wall rolling ship en masse (or Bellerophon rolling in SVW). I'll dig up quotes.