Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Terralthra]

Admiral Pierre swallowed a groan as the dreadnought snapped around and her sidewall swatted his broadsides contemptuously aside (ed. actually, she took light damage from degraded shots that still got through the sidewall). He'd never seen a ship that size maneuver so rapidly and confidently. She'd taken barely ten second to bring her sidewalls up and get around - her captain must have the instincts and reactions of a cat!

Bellerophon, a 6.5 megaton dreadnought, makes a 90 degree turn in < 10 seconds. Not roll, turn; Big B is bow-on to the battleship devisions when they exit hyper, as Admiral Pierre specifically comments he's got a down-the-throat shot. That's an order of magnitude less than Weber claims a destroyer can make a 90 degree turn, and several orders of magnitude less than the "12-minutes" Weber says for a SD. His tech bible certainly doesn't match what he's written in this case. And that's from the opposing Admiral's perspective! On the Bellerophon's bridge, it takes a second or two to start the turn, since the junior tac officer with the watch decides which way to turn after one sidewall comes up faster than the other. It's probably on the order of 6-7 seconds to make the turn.

The other passage I was thinking of is actually from Operation Icarus in Echoes of Honor, and lays out clearly that a wall of Havenite battleships rolls ship as one after the laser clusters get their shot at the incoming missile swarm. Given ranges and closing velocity, that's a matter of seconds at best for a 90 degree roll.

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Also, to respond (waaaay) back to Irbis's point about the "retcon" of Second Hancock. Oliver Diamato doesn't have a touching scene where he gets the mangled fleet out of the LAC/MDM/superdreadnought trap. He has a touching scene after Admiral Kellet is killed and Captain Hall is mortally wounded in which she makes him promise to get her people out, and then he gets to satisfactorily blow LAC-001 Harpy, Capt. Harmon's LAC, out of space, before it cuts away to the other attacks.

It's foreshadowed throughout the entire attack that the second in command of the fleet, Admiral Porter, is a complete dumbass, and Captain Hall specifically lies about Admiral Kellet's death in order to keep from passing command to him as long as she can (echoing Honor's actions in First Hancock in SVW). Once she (and her commissioner) are killed in the hit on the bridge, Diamato has no option to avoid passing command, even if he didn't get injured himself shortly thereafter (he does). That Porter would order a scatter (and in effect toss away Kellet and Hall's efforts to get as much of their command out as possible) is easily foreseeable from the foreshadowing earlier in the book.

To sum up, I don't see the off-page order to scatter from the incompetent Admiral and subsequent nearly-complete destruction of that task force as a retcon at all, more as (predictable) extra information not given in that set of scenes.

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Also, I only noticed this on re-reading, but it seems like Weber redefines a division halfway or so through the books. In the initial books (at least up through Flag in Exile, a division is a pair of ships. In later books, a division is half a squadron, or four ships.

[Simon_Jester]

Admiral Pierre swallowed a groan as the dreadnought snapped around and her sidewall swatted his broadsides contemptuously aside (ed. actually, she took light damage from degraded shots that still got through the sidewall). He'd never seen a ship that size maneuver so rapidly and confidently. She'd taken barely ten second to bring her sidewalls up and get around - her captain must have the instincts and reactions of a cat!

Bellerophon, a 6.5 megaton dreadnought, makes a 90 degree turn in < 10 seconds.

Given how wedge geometry works, it doesn't take a 90 degree turn to interpose the sidewall. The gap at a ship's "throat" is much taller than it is wide; it's a narrow slot that you really only need to wiggle by a few degrees to remove the enemy's direct line of fire. I'll do calcs later based on his stated figures.

The other passage I was thinking of is actually from Operation Icarus in Echoes of Honor, and lays out clearly that a wall of Havenite battleships rolls ship as one after the laser clusters get their shot at the incoming missile swarm. Given ranges and closing velocity, that's a matter of seconds at best for a 90 degree roll.

That is more conclusive, again I'll be willing to revisit it with math later once I have time and quotes to work from.

Also, I only noticed this on re-reading, but it seems like Weber redefines a division halfway or so through the books. In the initial books (at least up through Flag in Exile, a division is a pair of ships. In later books, a division is half a squadron, or four ships.

In naval parlance, a "division" of ships is typically whatever unit of ships is large enough to be effective, but smaller than a squadron. Capital ships typically work in pairs or trios for this role, while screening ships may work in larger groups like four, especially in a fleet battle where it takes the coordinated actions of several DDs or CLs to accomplish anything.

"Division" is a rather loosely defined term in real life, let alone in Weber.

[Terralthra]

Admiral Pierre swallowed a groan as the dreadnought snapped around and her sidewall swatted his broadsides contemptuously aside (ed. actually, she took light damage from degraded shots that still got through the sidewall). He'd never seen a ship that size maneuver so rapidly and confidently. She'd taken barely ten second to bring her sidewalls up and get around - her captain must have the instincts and reactions of a cat!

Bellerophon, a 6.5 megaton dreadnought, makes a 90 degree turn in < 10 seconds.

Given how wedge geometry works, it doesn't take a 90 degree turn to interpose the sidewall. The gap at a ship's "throat" is much taller than it is wide; it's a narrow slot that you really only need to wiggle by a few degrees to remove the enemy's direct line of fire. I'll do calcs later based on his stated figures.

Granted, but still...at the initial range listed (574,000 km), closing velocity in excess of 40 kmps, <10 seconds to interpose the sidewall just does not jive with a 12 minute 90 degree turn. 12 minutes for 90 degrees means it's roughly 8 seconds to turn one degree. At the stated rates, that means Bellerophon had only to turn a little over a degree to interpose a sidewall, from well-within energy range, as close to point blank as it gets for Honorverse ships (574k km, minus 10*40(+) kps = <175 k km at time of impact).

The other passage I was thinking of is actually from Operation Icarus in Echoes of Honor, and lays out clearly that a wall of Havenite battleships rolls ship as one after the laser clusters get their shot at the incoming missile swarm. Given ranges and closing velocity, that's a matter of seconds at best for a 90 degree roll.

That is more conclusive, again I'll be willing to revisit it with math later once I have time and quotes to work from.

The two forces continued to close, but at a much lower rate, and as the range fell below sex and a half million kilometers, both opened fire almost simultaneously. Rear Admiral Tennard's missiles slashed out, driving for the solid core of Tourville's battleships. But unlike Alice Truman, he had none of Ghost Rider's experimental missiles. Those he possessed had marginally greater range and marginally greater acceleration than the People's Navy's, coupled with superior penaids and seekers, but not enough to make up the difference in numbers. Even with his internal tubes to thicken the launch, he could put only twelve hundred missiles into space; Lester Tourville and Shannon Foraker replied with almost six thousand.

The two salvos interprenetrated and passed one another, and both admirals turned their walls of battle broadside-on to one another, swinging the most vulnerable aspects of their wedges away from incoming fire...and also clearing their broadside tubes to pour maximum-rate fire into one another. (ed. note: this is a 90 degree turn executed while missiles are in flight. Since they're both launching at the extremes of single-drive powered range, that means that the maximum time they have to execute this turn is 180 seconds, 3 minutes. Tennard's force is led by SDs. 12 minutes to turn 90 degrees is wrong)

The displays in CIC showed the holocaust reaching out for both of them, showed the fury hurtling through space, and yet there was something unreal, almost dreamy about it. There were only the light dots of hostile missiles, not the reality - not yet. For now, for a few seconds still, there was only the professional tension, the slivered edges of what they had thought was fear only to feel the reality of that emotion trying to break loose within them, and wrapped about it all the quiet hum of ventilators, the beep and murmur of background chatter, and the flat half-chants of tracking officers.

They seemed to last forever, those last few seconds, and then the illusion shattered with the silence as the counter-missiles began to launch and the reality of megatons of death howling towards rendezvous burst in upon them. (ed. note: I dig this little interlude here. maybe a little corny, but the way Weber describes the emotions of combat in space appeals to me)

Incoming fire began to vanish from the plot as counter-missiles blotted it away, tearing great holes in the shoals of destruction. And then laser clusters began to fire, and broadside energy mounts (ed. note: at this point, both sides are still broadside on, if they're firing laser clusters and broadside mounts at incoming missiles), and both sides ripped great swathes through the other side's fire. But it was not the sort of battle the Royal Manticoran Navy had become accustomed to fighting. TF 12.2's point defense was far better than the People's Navy's had been, its Solarian enhanced ECM was more effective...and there were far fewer missiles coming at it. The counter-missiles killed almost half of them, and the laser clusters killed a third of those that remained. Scarcely four hundred broke through to actually attack, and half of those were spoofed and confused by decoys and false targets far superior to anything the people who'd launched them had expected.

Two hundred missiles plummeted inward (ed. note: these missiles have passed through all defensive perimeters at this point: decoys, CMs, laser clusters), targeted on thirty-three battleships, but those battleships turned as one, in the exquisitely choreographed maneuver Shannon Foraker had conceived and Lester Tourville had ruthlessly drilled them upon all the way here. The maneuver which turned the entire wall up on its side, showing only the bellies of its wedges to the missiles.

There were chinks in that wall of wedges - huge ones, for battleships required wide safety perimeters for their wedges - but it was far tighter than anything a Havenite fleet had assembled in over eight T-years. It was a Manticorn-style defense, one only a superbly drilled formation could attain, and the chinks in it were fewer, and smaller, and further apart than they ought to have been. Missile after missile wasted its fury on the unyielding defenses of the wedges of which it was built, and Lester Tourville smiled savagely as he watched it.

He lost ships anyway, of course. He'd known he would. Manticoran missiles were too good, their warheads too powerful, for it to have been any other way. But as he had told Everard Honeker three T-weeks before, Esther McQueen and Javier Giscard - and Lester Tourville, for that matter - had allowed for that. They had expected to lose ships...and to keep coming anyway.

Two battleships were destroyed outright, with two more driven out of the wall in a debris-shedding slither, but that left twenty, and they rolled back down to pour fire into what remained of their opponents.

Notes throughout. Italics not parenthesized are as written.

Also, I only noticed this on re-reading, but it seems like Weber redefines a division halfway or so through the books. In the initial books (at least up through Flag in Exile, a division is a pair of ships. In later books, a division is half a squadron, or four ships.

In naval parlance, a "division" of ships is typically whatever unit of ships is large enough to be effective, but smaller than a squadron. Capital ships typically work in pairs or trios for this role, while screening ships may work in larger groups like four, especially in a fleet battle where it takes the coordinated actions of several DDs or CLs to accomplish anything.

"Division" is a rather loosely defined term in real life, let alone in Weber.

The same terms are applied to SDs and BCs, and with the same difference in meaning from book to book. In SVW, two BCs is a division. In Flag in Exile, two SDs is a division. In At All Costs, later books, and Shadow of Saganami, divisions of both SDs and BCs are four ships. It doesn't seem to vary by class (the only real distinction in classes seems to be destroyers, which come in "flotillas" of varying size, rather than squadrons), as throughout the earlier books, divisions are always 2 ships, regardless of ship type, while in later books, divisions are always 4 ships. I wouldn't have noticed without the epic week-long re-read of everything in the series in chronological order.

[Simon_Jester]

Granted, but still...at the initial range listed (574,000 km), closing velocity in excess of 40 kmps, <10 seconds to interpose the sidewall just does not jive with a 12 minute 90 degree turn. 12 minutes for 90 degrees means it's roughly 8 seconds to turn one degree. At the stated rates, that means Bellerophon had only to turn a little over a degree to interpose a sidewall, from well-within energy range, as close to point blank as it gets for Honorverse ships (574k km, minus 10*40(+) kps = <175 k km at time of impact).

The gap is wider than that, I believe- so yes, this does appear to be an inconsistency. Basically, the sidewalls are... as I recall, only a few kilometers away from the ship to port and starboard, but extend about 100-200 kilometers "forward" and "backward." Thus, the 'throat' and 'wedge' gaps really are something like 5, 10, or at most 20 degrees wide.

That is more conclusive, again I'll be willing to revisit it with math later once I have time and quotes to work from.

The two forces continued to close, but at a much lower rate, and as the range fell below six and a half million kilometers, both opened fire almost simultaneously. Rear Admiral Tennard's missiles slashed out, driving for the solid core of Tourville's battleships. But unlike Alice Truman, he had none of Ghost Rider's experimental missiles. Those he possessed had marginally greater range and marginally greater acceleration than the People's Navy's, coupled with superior penaids and seekers, but not enough to make up the difference in numbers. Even with his internal tubes to thicken the launch, he could put only twelve hundred missiles into space; Lester Tourville and Shannon Foraker replied with almost six thousand.

The two salvos interprenetrated and passed one another, and both admirals turned their walls of battle broadside-on to one another, swinging the most vulnerable aspects of their wedges away from incoming fire...and also clearing their broadside tubes to pour maximum-rate fire into one another. (ed. note: this is a 90 degree turn executed while missiles are in flight. Since they're both launching at the extremes of single-drive powered range, that means that the maximum time they have to execute this turn is 180 seconds, 3 minutes. Tennard's force is led by SDs. 12 minutes to turn 90 degrees is wrong)

I believe you are correct. However, consider:

The ships do not have to be headed straight for each other, nor is there a logical reason for them to do so. They might close at an oblique angle, just to avoid inviting the enemy to try taking potshots down the throat of your wedge from long range. If so, then you might only have to turn 20 or 30 degrees, not 90, to at least begin to get your sidewalls pointed in the optimal direction, and to clear your broadside launchers.

So the actual rate might still be "minutes to turn 90 degrees..." but not twelve of them, because at 90 degrees per twelve minutes, even a modest 30 degree turn would take far too long.

Two hundred missiles plummeted inward (ed. note: these missiles have passed through all defensive perimeters at this point: decoys, CMs, laser clusters), targeted on thirty-three battleships, but those battleships turned as one, in the exquisitely choreographed maneuver Shannon Foraker had conceived and Lester Tourville had ruthlessly drilled them upon all the way here. The maneuver which turned the entire wall up on its side, showing only the bellies of its wedges to the missiles.

The missiles have been boosting at roughly fifty thousand gravities for 180 seconds- closing velocity is 90,000 km/s. So, yes- the laser clusters would probably not stop firing until the enemy is a few hundred thousand kilometers out (they couldn't even engage much farther out than that!).

Battleships are supposed to take longer to roll ship than that, yeah. I agree, you have found another inconsistency.

Also, I only noticed this on re-reading, but it seems like Weber redefines a division halfway or so through the books. In the initial books (at least up through Flag in Exile, a division is a pair of ships. In later books, a division is half a squadron, or four ships.

In naval parlance, a "division" of ships is typically whatever unit of ships is large enough to be effective, but smaller than a squadron. Capital ships typically work in pairs or trios for this role, while screening ships may work in larger groups like four, especially in a fleet battle where it takes the coordinated actions of several DDs or CLs to accomplish anything.

"Division" is a rather loosely defined term in real life, let alone in Weber.

The same terms are applied to SDs and BCs, and with the same difference in meaning from book to book. In SVW, two BCs is a division. In Flag in Exile, two SDs is a division. In At All Costs, later books, and Shadow of Saganami, divisions of both SDs and BCs are four ships. It doesn't seem to vary by class (the only real distinction in classes seems to be destroyers, which come in "flotillas" of varying size, rather than squadrons), as throughout the earlier books, divisions are always 2 ships, regardless of ship type, while in later books, divisions are always 4 ships. I wouldn't have noticed without the epic week-long re-read of everything in the series in chronological order.

And these are RMN divisions in both cases? Because I know the RMN went to six-ship squadrons in the interwar period, so why they'd divide their ships into subunits of four is beyond me.

If it's not RMN divisions in both cases, the explanation is obvious: the RMN divides ships into pairs, the Havenite navy divides them into quartets. I can think of many reasons for this to be so.

[Terralthra]

It's RMN in both cases.

Another example of a fast turn: Shadow of Saganami, when ambushing two ex-peep commerce raiders, the heavy cruiser Hexapuma makes a 180 degree turn (explicitly referred to as both 180 degrees and "reverse course") in 27 seconds. That's an order of magnitude less than Weber claims it would take a destroyer to make the same turn (100 seconds for 90 degrees = 200 seconds for a 180). Part of the passage mentions "a heavy cruiser couldn't turn that fast!" but...it does. And there's no explanation of why or what changed. Hexapuma is a Saganami-C, making her ~480 kilotons, or about 30% larger than a Star Knight, and over half the size of a Reliant battle cruiser.

Also, in HotQ, the final portion of the battle between Saladin and Fearless doesn't say times to turn outright, but it sure as shit implies they're making yaws big enough to go from topside (approaching behind wedge) facing broadside (firing missiles, meaning reasonably perpendicular to the long axis of the ship) to "has turned the open throat of her wedge into immediate mortal peril" in seconds at best. Based on the intercutting from one bridge to another with only single lines of dialogue, it's heavily implied that this is taking place very quickly.

[Terralthra]

Missed the edit window -

My mistake on divisions. It's not 2 -> 4, it's it's 2->3. It goes from a quarter of a squadron (SVW, FiE) to a half a squadron (but only one more ship) (AAC, SoS).

[Connor MacLeod]

It's RMN in both cases.

Another example of a fast turn: Shadow of Saganami, when ambushing two ex-peep commerce raiders, the heavy cruiser Hexapuma makes a 180 degree turn (explicitly referred to as both 180 degrees and "reverse course") in 27 seconds. That's an order of magnitude less than Weber claims it would take a destroyer to make the same turn (100 seconds for 90 degrees = 200 seconds for a 180). Part of the passage mentions "a heavy cruiser couldn't turn that fast!" but...it does. And there's no explanation of why or what changed. Hexapuma is a Saganami-C, making her ~480 kilotons, or about 30% larger than a Star Knight, and over half the size of a Reliant battle cruiser.

Also, in HotQ, the final portion of the battle between Saladin and Fearless doesn't say times to turn outright, but it sure as shit implies they're making yaws big enough to go from topside (approaching behind wedge) facing broadside (firing missiles, meaning reasonably perpendicular to the long axis of the ship) to "has turned the open throat of her wedge into immediate mortal peril" in seconds at best. Based on the intercutting from one bridge to another with only single lines of dialogue, it's heavily implied that this is taking place very quickly.

Dude, I kind of question your assertion that it was 'obviously' only twenty seven seconds. The context of the scene is way more ambiguous than that:

HMS Hexapuma's impeller wedge snapped abruptly to full power. Senior Chief Clary's joystick went hard over, and the heavy cruiser snarled around to starboard in a six-hundred-gravity, hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Her sidewalls snapped into existence; tethered EW drones popped out to port and starboard; her energy weapons ran out, locking their gravity lenses to the edges of the sidewalls' "gun ports"; and radar and lidar lashed the two Havenite ships like savage whips.
It was the worst nightmare of any pirate—a fat, defenseless merchie, transformed with brutal suddenness from terrified prey into one of the most dangerous warships in space at a range where evasion was impossible . . . and survival almost equally unlikely.
It took Hexapuma fourteen seconds to go from standby to full combat readiness. The EW drones' systems were still coming on-line, but Kaplan's fire control computers had been running continuously updated tracks on both targets for hours. The missiles in her tubes' firing queues had been programmed for three broadsides in advance, and the firing solutions had been updated every fifteen seconds from the instant Bogey One and Bogey Two entered her maximum missile range. Now, even as she turned, a double broadside roared from her tubes, oriented itself, and drove headlong for Bogey Two.
At such a short range, they were maximum-power shots, and current-generation Manticoran missile drives at that power setting produced an acceleration of over 900 KPS2. Worse, from the enemy's viewpoint, the bogeys were rushing to meet them at over two thousand KPS. Flight time was under thirty-four seconds, and it took the bogeys' tactical crews precious seconds to realize what had happened. Bogey Two's anti-missile crews got off a single counter-missile. Just one . . . that missed. The Haven-built destroyer's laser clusters managed to intercept three of the incoming laser heads. The others—all the others—ripped through the desperate, inner-boundary defenses and detonated in a single, cataclysmic instant that trapped the doomed vessel at the heart of a hell-born spider's lightning web.
The destroyer's sidewalls didn't even flicker. She simply vanished in the flash of a fusion plant which had taken at least a dozen direct hits.
But Kaplan wasn't even watching the destroyer. She'd known what was going to happen to it, and she'd assigned a single one of her petty officer assistants to the tin can. If, by some miracle, the destroyer somehow managed to survive, the noncom was authorized to continue the missile engagement on his own. Kaplan could do that, because she hadn't assigned a single one of her missile tubes to Bogey One . . . also known as Anhur.
Helen knew she was witnessing a brilliantly planned, ruthlessly executed assassination, not a battle. But she was a tactical specialist herself, however junior a practitioner she might still be. She recognized a work of art when she saw one, even if its sheer, brutal efficiency did send an icy chill of horror straight through her.
Aivars Terekhov felt no horror. He felt only exultation and vengeful satisfaction. The Desforge-class destroyer had been no more than an irritant. A distraction. A foe which was too unimportant to worry about taking intact. The cruiser was the target he wanted—the flagship, where the senior officers and relevant data the cold-blooded professional in him needed to capture would be found. And he was glad it was so, for it was also the cruiser—the Mars-class cruiser—the avenger within him needed to crush. There must be nothing to distract him from Anhur, and so he and Kaplan had planned the destroyer's total destruction to clear the path to her.

Hexapuma settled on her new heading, her bow directly towards Anhur. But Hexapuma possessed a bow wall even tougher than the conventional sidewalls covering her flanks, and Anhur didn't.

There were ports in Hexapuma's bow wall for the two massive grasers and three lasers she mounted as chase weapons. Like her broadside energy mounts, they were heavier than most battlecruisers had carried at the beginning of the Havenite Wars. In fact, they'd been scaled up even more than her broadside weapons, because they were no longer required to share space with missile tubes now that the RMN's broadside tubes had acquired the ability to fire radically off-bore, and the Manticoran cruiser's fire control had Anhur in a lock of iron. It took Hexapuma another twenty-seven seconds to reverse her heading—twenty-seven seconds in which the missiles which doomed Bogey Two were sent hurtling through space and the bogeys' overtake velocity closed the range between them by 54,362 kilometers.

Then Terekhov's ship settled on her new heading at maximum military power.

Now it is possible to INTERPRET that as only twenty seven seconds if you assume the fourteen seconds either was irrelevant for purposes of turning or overlapped into the twenty seven seconds, and if you also assume that the destroyer was killed by missiles AFTER the cruiser completed its turn, but the context by itself does not support that interpretation. Indeed it sort of supposes the opposite (I'm not even sure you can argue that we're talking about the same heading in the 'twenty seven second' timeframe, since they bother mentioning 'settling on their heading' twice. Blame it on Weber's phrasing if you will, but its still fairly ambiguous.)

But lets say Weber DID in fact make an error. Its possible, since we know he's done it before on ship dimensions vs tonnages. We don't have all the information behind this (which weber arguably does.) but even if we allow for that to be the case... it doesn't really change much. For one thing Shadows of Saganami still pretty much invalidates the idea that a Dreadnnought far older than the Hexapuma makes a 90 degree turn in 10 seconds (tops.), and that interpretation is keeping more in the spirit of what Weber intended. Even if the numbers are actually wrong, the turn rates are skewed far more towards 'slow' than 'right turns in seconds' as I've seen many fans try to insist is the 'correct' interpretation.

SoS makes a better argument for 'error' but it can also be argued that the time between Short Victorious War and Shadows of Saganami has seen changes in how turn rates are achieved and how fast they can be pulled off. The ex-Peep cruiser officer was in fact shocked by the Hexapuma's turn:

The sheer stupefaction of the savagely reversed trap paralyzed Anhur's bridge crew, just as Terekhov had intended. Most of their brains gibbered that this could not be happening, and even the parts that worked had no idea what to do about it. A heavy cruiser could not reverse course that quickly. A ship of so much tonnage could not accelerate at that rate. And though they knew RMN heavy cruisers had bow walls, they didn't know a thing about the new technology.

Which suggests it was not the 'common' turn rates, but is something fairly recent (at least as of the end of the Havenite-Manticore war) and unprecedented in the Peep's experience.

[Terralthra]

Dude, it says "27 seconds to reverse her heading" in the text. You quoted it. Even if you assume that's on top of the 14 seconds it takes her to clear for action, that's still a grand total of 41 seconds, less than a quarter the time he cites in his infodumps as the time it takes a (much smaller) destroyer to make a similar turn.

edit: The best interpretation I can come up with is actually that she's angling away from the raiders in the "bait" portion, turns hard toward them to fire with her bow chasers (gutting Anhur), then reverses course to decelerate hard (closing the gap), and that last course change is the 27-second one.

[Simon_Jester]

It's RMN in both cases.

Another example of a fast turn: Shadow of Saganami, when ambushing two ex-peep commerce raiders, the heavy cruiser Hexapuma makes a 180 degree turn (explicitly referred to as both 180 degrees and "reverse course") in 27 seconds. That's an order of magnitude less than Weber claims it would take a destroyer to make the same turn (100 seconds for 90 degrees = 200 seconds for a 180). Part of the passage mentions "a heavy cruiser couldn't turn that fast!" but...it does. And there's no explanation of why or what changed. Hexapuma is a Saganami-C, making her ~480 kilotons, or about 30% larger than a Star Knight, and over half the size of a Reliant battle cruiser.

Looking at the Grayson LAC description (I posted that, I think), one point you might want to consider:

It seems like the slow turn rates of Honorverse ships are in part a design choice, not an inherent constraint. Ships could, hypothetically, be a lot more maneuverable than they are designed to be in the pre-1900 PD environment... or at least LACs could. The assumption then was that that most combat would involve large walls or groups of ships gliding toward energy range in a stately waltz of death. There was very little need to maneuver quickly in response to incoming missile attacks- and the main defense in energy combat was rolling the ship, not yawing or pitching. Rolling to present your broadside or the impenetrable impeller bands was therefore prioritized, and could happen reasonably fast, while yaw and pitch were... somewhat neglected.

Post-1900, this starts to change as people notice that ships are much more likely to survive if they maneuver effectively, on a timescale of about 10-100 seconds, to confront missile attacks.

However, you've certainly presented plenty of evidence to prove that Weber seems inconsistent- no explanation could easily cover all these disparate data points, without a detailed analysis.

Hmmm...

One thought. To rotate about their own center of mass, ships need not just acceleration but torque. Torque produces angular acceleration- you could measure that acceleration in degrees per second squared, as you'd measure a linear acceleration in meters per second squared. So to make a fixed turn in a realistic Newtonian environment, you have to apply 'accelerating' torque to get yourself spinning, until the turnover half way into the turn. At which point you start torquing the other way to slow down your rate of spin and come to a rest pointing in the correct direction.

This makes longer turns proportionately shorter than fast ones. With a continuous acceleration rocket, traveling twice as far only takes 1.4 times as much time, because you can reach a higher velocity at turnover and thus cover much more of the distance at high speeds. The same would be true of ships that rotate in response to a defined application of torque: spinning 180 degrees wouldn't actually take that much longer than spinning 90 degrees.

It also favors turns where you're allowed to "overshoot" a bit- you get to the desired angle a bit faster, but don't stop there because you didn't get a "zero-zero intercept," to borrow a phrase from the novels.

[Terralthra]

That does make sense in the context of the fast turns from HotQ, as in the climactic moment, Simonds makes a huge maneuvering mistake, realizes it (after moments, which are enough to turn from broadside to throat towards Fearless enough for energy fire to hit successfully), and then calls for the helmsman to "belay that order!" at which point the helmsman reverses the turn. This causes Saladin to stop dead, bow-on, to Fearless, while merely continuing the same turn 180 degrees would've been significantly faster at getting the throat away from fire. This certainly implies that the angular jerk (change in the rate of acceleration, θ/sec^3) is high compared to angular acceleration, as the turn rate is stopped nearly instantaneously, but that angular acceleration itself is not so great.

[SMJB]

"WHERE IS YOUR MISSILEGOD NOW!?"

I am so gonna sig that.

[Vehrec]

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).

Pardon my french, but do you actually need prize crews and marine detachments in the modern Manticore fleet? They are far enough ahead of everyone else in the tech race that capturing ships can only slow them down, and captured ships of the wall cannot be integrated into their formations. I highly doubt that even a Haven ship will be able to fire Manticore's missiles, or stow the pods without major refits. That takes up yard space, and putting older ships with less automation in service only increases the need for trained crew-who might need to be retrained to handle the equipment. Scuttling captured ships makes more sense than bringing them home. The prize rules ought to be changed to reflect this.

As for marines, well how many do you really need for self-defense? It's a controlled environment the ship, isn't it? Any damage control officer worth their salt should be able to come up with something to repel boarders, even if they can't control gravity on a room by room basis. And who says that your mobile defenders need to be human? Are there no robots in this setting that can be used to offset the need for people in a front-line boarding and counter-boarding role? Even a remote-controlled auto-pulsar built into a wall might work for this.

Marines for offense make even less sense since you need to get through missile, energy and even grav-lance range to board another ship. If you can board them, they are already at your mercy, and stomping on heads and shooting people isn't going to increase how screwed they are. If they aren't willing to get into their lifepods and shuttles and set scuttling charges when you're that close, you're doing something wrong.

...wait, has there ever been a ship scuttled rather than captured in this setting? Or anything like the Germans at Scapa Flow?

[Terralthra]

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).

Pardon my french, but do you actually need prize crews and marine detachments in the modern Manticore fleet? They are far enough ahead of everyone else in the tech race that capturing ships can only slow them down, and captured ships of the wall cannot be integrated into their formations. I highly doubt that even a Haven ship will be able to fire Manticore's missiles, or stow the pods without major refits. That takes up yard space, and putting older ships with less automation in service only increases the need for trained crew-who might need to be retrained to handle the equipment. Scuttling captured ships makes more sense than bringing them home. The prize rules ought to be changed to reflect this.

And if they capture a pirate/slaver ship with prisoners aboard intact? Scuttle it and put the prisoners/freed slaves down on the nearest planet and hope for the best? Prize crews aren't just for warships. And even if they do take a warship, and don't put it into service with the RMN, it's still their practice to send at least the first couple of any new class of ships they capture back to Manticore for thorough analysis by BuShips and BuWeaps. Even a technologically outmatched opponent has details of their systems that can more useful to know than to blow up, and that kind of analysis can't be effectively done in situ.

As for marines, well how many do you really need for self-defense? It's a controlled environment the ship, isn't it? Any damage control officer worth their salt should be able to come up with something to repel boarders, even if they can't control gravity on a room by room basis. And who says that your mobile defenders need to be human? Are there no robots in this setting that can be used to offset the need for people in a front-line boarding and counter-boarding role? Even a remote-controlled auto-pulsar built into a wall might work for this.

Remote-controlled robots and weapons on a personal scale have never shown up in this 'verse (nor has using gravity in that manner, though they can clearly control it room-by-room).

Marines for offense make even less sense since you need to get through missile, energy and even grav-lance range to board another ship. If you can board them, they are already at your mercy, and stomping on heads and shooting people isn't going to increase how screwed they are. If they aren't willing to get into their lifepods and shuttles and set scuttling charges when you're that close, you're doing something wrong.

Unless they have prisoners. Or useful information. Or cargo. Or you want their databases intact. Or they're irrational. Or they're stupid (pirates, slavers). In SoS, for example, a slaver ship fires on a boarding shuttle, despite catastrophic consequences for the slavers (a gutted slaver ship), because one of the crew on the slaver ship "wanted to take some of them with us".

...wait, has there ever been a ship scuttled rather than captured in this setting? Or anything like the Germans at Scapa Flow?

Yes, there have been ships scuttled rather than captured (or the possibility of capture).

[Esquire]

The other reason for prize crews might be a social one - the rules the RMN operates under makes capturing a ship extremely profitable for the crew involved, indeed for the entire chain of command involved. That's part of how Honor manages to become such a political force, if I remember correctly, becoming wealth from the sale of captured ships. Just try to get the fleet admirals to sign off on a policy that would hit them right in the pocketbook.

[Simon_Jester]

Pardon my french, but do you actually need prize crews and marine detachments in the modern Manticore fleet?

Prize crews and Marine detachments are needed for patrol functions. Take for example Fearless's operations on Basilisk Station, or Hexapuma's cruise

A number of ships had to be captured and taken over for various reasons- pirate ships whose computers needed analysis, freighters seized with contraband, and so on. Honor had to leave detachments to do several things because her ship couldn't be everywhere at once. She needed to land Marines to help fight the natives, and Hexapuma needed Marines too, for a number of ship-to-surface or ship-to-ship actions that involved boarding or taking a hostile point.

The prize crews aren't for enemy warships (which usually get blown up); they're for other purposes and policing functions. And Marines are typically used for policing functions as well, or for assaulting targets on the ground where vaporizing them with lasers from orbit is a bad plan.

[Vehrec]

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).

Pardon my french, but do you actually need prize crews and marine detachments in the modern Manticore fleet? They are far enough ahead of everyone else in the tech race that capturing ships can only slow them down, and captured ships of the wall cannot be integrated into their formations. I highly doubt that even a Haven ship will be able to fire Manticore's missiles, or stow the pods without major refits. That takes up yard space, and putting older ships with less automation in service only increases the need for trained crew-who might need to be retrained to handle the equipment. Scuttling captured ships makes more sense than bringing them home. The prize rules ought to be changed to reflect this.

And if they capture a pirate/slaver ship with prisoners aboard intact? Scuttle it and put the prisoners/freed slaves down on the nearest planet and hope for the best? Prize crews aren't just for warships. And even if they do take a warship, and don't put it into service with the RMN, it's still their practice to send at least the first couple of any new class of ships they capture back to Manticore for thorough analysis by BuShips and BuWeaps. Even a technologically outmatched opponent has details of their systems that can more useful to know than to blow up, and that kind of analysis can't be effectively done in situ.

And how many slavers and pirate ships have more prisoners than you can find room for with sleeping bags/zip ties on the gunnery decks? This is made out to be a major issue by Batman, but I suspect it's a very incidental thing If you've captured a ship to send it home, can't you stash it somewhere in the Oort cloud of a system powered down until a prize crew can arrive if it's so important?

As for marines, well how many do you really need for self-defense? It's a controlled environment the ship, isn't it? Any damage control officer worth their salt should be able to come up with something to repel boarders, even if they can't control gravity on a room by room basis. And who says that your mobile defenders need to be human? Are there no robots in this setting that can be used to offset the need for people in a front-line boarding and counter-boarding role? Even a remote-controlled auto-pulsar built into a wall might work for this.

Remote-controlled robots and weapons on a personal scale have never shown up in this 'verse (nor has using gravity in that manner, though they can clearly control it room-by-room).

It's good to know that South Africa and South Korea have more advanced automation technology than Manticore then .

Marines for offense make even less sense since you need to get through missile, energy and even grav-lance range to board another ship. If you can board them, they are already at your mercy, and stomping on heads and shooting people isn't going to increase how screwed they are. If they aren't willing to get into their lifepods and shuttles and set scuttling charges when you're that close, you're doing something wrong.

Unless they have prisoners. Or useful information. Or cargo. Or you want their databases intact. Or they're irrational. Or they're stupid (pirates, slavers). In SoS, for example, a slaver ship fires on a boarding shuttle, despite catastrophic consequences for the slavers (a gutted slaver ship), because one of the crew on the slaver ship "wanted to take some of them with us".

Well if they wanted to go out with a bang, there is always overloading your reactor until it explodes in this setting. And if you want to take control of a ship, why not take inspiration from Ninven? Send a midshipman with a nuke, and there will be little to no fighting unless they are already intent on going out fighting. And why is the number of marines on a ship the bottleneck here, shouldn't they would be the easiest crew to train? It's as close to unskilled labor as you get.

...wait, has there ever been a ship scuttled rather than captured in this setting? Or anything like the Germans at Scapa Flow?

Yes, there have been ships scuttled rather than captured (or the possibility of capture).

Good to know. I've made it a point of policy not to read any of them, and I'm happy not to break that tradition. Reading people discuss it is far more fun.

[Vehrec]

The other reason for prize crews might be a social one - the rules the RMN operates under makes capturing a ship extremely profitable for the crew involved, indeed for the entire chain of command involved. That's part of how Honor manages to become such a political force, if I remember correctly, becoming wealth from the sale of captured ships. Just try to get the fleet admirals to sign off on a policy that would hit them right in the pocketbook.

So the prize rules are set by the admiralty, and the various Liberal governments that cut military spending have never touched them and never will. Got it, it's a system to grease palms and make our hero rich, and it cannot be ended even if the ships are worth only their scrap value.

I also repeat my thought that Marines are the least-likely people to be subject to a manpower crunch-if you're as rich as Manticore, you can hire mercenaries if nothing else, or raise the pay for the Marines or do other things to increase their numbers if you need more of them. So if they haven't maintained the number of marines while keeping the other crew figures constant, then they obviously do not see the need to maintain marine numbers, even on patrol ships. Were this a serious problem instead, there would be efforts to deal with it-quite possibly with robots or cyborgs or something of that nature.

[Esquire]

So the prize rules are set by the admiralty, and the various Liberal governments that cut military spending have never touched them and never will. Got it, it's a system to grease palms and make our hero rich, and it cannot be ended even if the ships are worth only their scrap value.

I can't tell if this is meant to be sarcasm or agreement. Considering the influence the Navy has, both institutionally and through the number of peers who are either ex-military or have military connections, does it seem unreasonable to you that a policy which every rank of the fighting navy has reason to love dearly stays around?

I also repeat my thought that Marines are the least-likely people to be subject to a manpower crunch-if you're as rich as Manticore, you can hire mercenaries if nothing else, or raise the pay for the Marines or do other things to increase their numbers if you need more of them. So if they haven't maintained the number of marines while keeping the other crew figures constant, then they obviously do not see the need to maintain marine numbers, even on patrol ships. Were this a serious problem instead, there would be efforts to deal with it-quite possibly with robots or cyborgs or something of that nature.

The issue isn't bodies to fill Marine uniforms, as I understand it, but rather the more highly-trained regular crewmembers. The capture of the Trevor's Star terminus to the Manticore junction let the RMN close down its hugely manpower-intensive junction forts at the same time that automation improvements reduced the crews for individual ships, letting them crew many more ships with the same overall number of enlisted personnel, but this leads to its own problems. If I absolutely need every single superdreadnought possible to stand up to Haven, then I will shave crew margins as thin as possible to get more wallers into action, which makes sense.

However, if ships are operating at the very lower limit of their crew capacity, detaching, say, fifty people to take a freighter back to Manticore starts to cut into combat efficiency. Marines don't help with this problem because they aren't trained in, for example, regulating starship-grade nuclear reactors. Manticore's problem has always been one of trained manpower, and this is consistent throughout the series.

[Vehrec]

So the prize rules are set by the admiralty, and the various Liberal governments that cut military spending have never touched them and never will. Got it, it's a system to grease palms and make our hero rich, and it cannot be ended even if the ships are worth only their scrap value.

I can't tell if this is meant to be sarcasm or agreement. Considering the influence the Navy has, both institutionally and through the number of peers who are either ex-military or have military connections, does it seem unreasonable to you that a policy which every rank of the fighting navy has reason to love dearly stays around?

It's sarcasm, and yes, there's no longer a rational reason for the whole institution. But I do think that the massive pay-outs are probably bad for the budget, and maybe those budget-cutters would have had reason to go after them for that reason, even if there was a reason to keep encouraging capture of ships.

I also repeat my thought that Marines are the least-likely people to be subject to a manpower crunch-if you're as rich as Manticore, you can hire mercenaries if nothing else, or raise the pay for the Marines or do other things to increase their numbers if you need more of them. So if they haven't maintained the number of marines while keeping the other crew figures constant, then they obviously do not see the need to maintain marine numbers, even on patrol ships. Were this a serious problem instead, there would be efforts to deal with it-quite possibly with robots or cyborgs or something of that nature.

The issue isn't bodies to fill Marine uniforms, as I understand it, but rather the more highly-trained regular crewmembers. The capture of the Trevor's Star terminus to the Manticore junction let the RMN close down its hugely manpower-intensive junction forts at the same time that automation improvements reduced the crews for individual ships, letting them crew many more ships with the same overall number of enlisted personnel, but this leads to its own problems. If I absolutely need every single superdreadnought possible to stand up to Haven, then I will shave crew margins as thin as possible to get more wallers into action, which makes sense.

However, if ships are operating at the very lower limit of their crew capacity, detaching, say, fifty people to take a freighter back to Manticore starts to cut into combat efficiency. Marines don't help with this problem because they aren't trained in, for example, regulating starship-grade nuclear reactors. Manticore's problem has always been one of trained manpower, and this is consistent throughout the series.

You can stop explaining this because I already understand it. There are ways around all these restrictions. Why should Manticore, with it's deep pockets, be limited by it's own manpower? How expensive would it be to fill out ranks with foreign nationals in some sort of 'Foreign Legion' type thing? The fact that there has been no major effort to import strength, to start a guest-worker program to free up Manticore nationals for their military, or anything of that sort indicates that the lack of trained manpower isn't an existential threat or even a serious problem-it's an annoyance, something that can be solved by tightening the belt and accepting that some compromises must be made. Further, it's pretty obvious that such compromises are more a war-time expedient than a permanent state of affairs. A post-war draw-down and mothballing will allow crew sizes to swing back up for commerce protection and anti-piracy operations. Problems will only become permanent if Manticore has to secure and protect a much larger volume of space permanently and refuses to draw manpower from said volume in any way.

I do accept your concession that the marines are inconsequential in this discussion however, and will not speak of them again.

[SMJB]

And how many slavers and pirate ships have more prisoners than you can find room for with sleeping bags/zip ties on the gunnery decks? This is made out to be a major issue by Batman, but I suspect it's a very incidental thing If you've captured a ship to send it home, can't you stash it somewhere in the Oort cloud of a system powered down until a prize crew can arrive if it's so important?

If you're talking keeping prisoners in burlap bags in out-of-the-way corners on your ship--yeah, that sounds like something a civilized naval power does. If you're talking about leaving them aboard their ship that you've stranded in the oort cloud--after disabling their engines, I hope--what happens if they run out of food? Or if, since there's little point in claiming it as salvage if you completely trash the drive, they get around whatever you did to disable the engines and GTFO?

It's good to know that South Africa and South Korea have more advanced automation technology than Manticore then .

There's probably jammers or some such technobabble.

Well if they wanted to go out with a bang, there is always overloading your reactor until it explodes in this setting. And if you want to take control of a ship, why not take inspiration from Ninven? Send a midshipman with a nuke, and there will be little to no fighting unless they are already intent on going out fighting. And why is the number of marines on a ship the bottleneck here, shouldn't they would be the easiest crew to train? It's as close to unskilled labor as you get.

That might work for some situations, but no one's going to believe that you'll nuke the entire ship if they dump their records. Not every problem can be solved with the biggest hammer in your arsenal--that's the whole reason we still have a conventional army when we've also got nuclear warheads in the first place, after all.

Good to know. I've made it a point of policy not to read any of them, and I'm happy not to break that tradition. Reading people discuss it is far more fun.

Read any of what? The books in this series? That doesn't make sense, and besides, why are you even posting on this thread, then?

[Vehrec]

And how many slavers and pirate ships have more prisoners than you can find room for with sleeping bags/zip ties on the gunnery decks? This is made out to be a major issue by Batman, but I suspect it's a very incidental thing If you've captured a ship to send it home, can't you stash it somewhere in the Oort cloud of a system powered down until a prize crew can arrive if it's so important?

If you're talking keeping prisoners in burlap bags in out-of-the-way corners on your ship--yeah, that sounds like something a civilized naval power does. If you're talking about leaving them aboard their ship that you've stranded in the oort cloud--after disabling their engines, I hope--what happens if they run out of food? Or if, since there's little point in claiming it as salvage if you completely trash the drive, they get around whatever you did to disable the engines and GTFO?

Don't be silly, you don't leave them onboard their own ship. But if you put the prize crew on the pirate ship, where do you keep the old crew that is less problematic than keeping them restrained and on your own ship where you know how all the doors lock? Furthermore, I still say this is an incidental thing-it only becomes relevant when dealing with a specific mission, which you can plan for and carry extra crew if you anticipate the need. I'm just saying that the need is illusionary, and you should probably head back to port with your prize in tow anyways to make sure it arrives safely. So why carry extra crew even if you are going out to capture pirates before hoisting them from the yardarm?

It's good to know that South Africa and South Korea have more advanced automation technology than Manticore then .

There's probably jammers or some such technobabble.

If jammers can remotely stop some of the systems we have today, then they can shut down a human brain as well, given that the korean system is a camera, a computer, and a robotic machine gun in one package. Webber just doesn't care about future automation, beyond the sense of mid-20th century automation with robot arms in factories to do repetitive work and computers to do the heavy number-crunching. Going beyond that would start to remove humans from wars, and that violates the 0th law of sci-fi, but as time goes on it becomes more and more straining at my disbelief.

Well if they wanted to go out with a bang, there is always overloading your reactor until it explodes in this setting. And if you want to take control of a ship, why not take inspiration from Ninven? Send a midshipman with a nuke, and there will be little to no fighting unless they are already intent on going out fighting. And why is the number of marines on a ship the bottleneck here, shouldn't they would be the easiest crew to train? It's as close to unskilled labor as you get.

That might work for some situations, but no one's going to believe that you'll nuke the entire ship if they dump their records. Not every problem can be solved with the biggest hammer in your arsenal--that's the whole reason we still have a conventional army when we've also got nuclear warheads in the first place, after all.

Except I think that marines aren't going to stop them from dumping their records either, given the time and distance involved in transferring them over. Marines aren't going to do anything to help you there, are they? Sure, smashing hard drives might take a while, but it's not going to be a 30 minute procedure.

Good to know. I've made it a point of policy not to read any of them, and I'm happy not to break that tradition. Reading people discuss it is far more fun.

Read any of what? The books in this series? That doesn't make sense, and besides, why are you even posting on this thread, then?

[/quote] Because I don't think they're terribly good books, I'm sick of reading overly long fiction, and I don't care for the bits I've seen? It makes perfect sense to me. And I post in this thread because I can analyse it without ever actually seeing it, to entertain myself better than actually reading the books would do.

[Batman]

Furthermore, I still say this is an incidental thing-it only becomes relevant when dealing with a specific mission, which you can plan for and carry extra crew if you anticipate the need.

No you can't because your ship doesn't have the room to carry extra crew because you know, you're in the middle of a war for survival so you don't have the luxury of devoting resources to dedicated antipiracy cruisers and instead the antipiracy duties (even when anticipated beforehand, which is far from a given) go to the same ships that go into the fleet train as screening units. You know, the ones with the seriously small crews.
And what if you don't anticipate the need? What if you're actually on a fleet deployment (or even just a 'showing the flag' mission) and end up needing prize crews and MArine detachments anyway? A small place called the 'Talbott Quadrant' comes to mind.

I'm just saying that the need is illusionary, and you should probably head back to port with your prize in tow anyways to make sure it arrives safely. So why carry extra crew even if you are going out to capture pirates before hoisting them from the yardarm?

Because spending several weeks if not months shuttling back to the next fleet base, then back to your designated area of operations every time you pick up a prize is an incredible waste of time as opposed to sending her home with a prize crew and continuing with your patrol?

It's good to know that South Africa and South Korea have more advanced automation technology than Manticore then .

There's probably jammers or some such technobabble.

If jammers can remotely stop some of the systems we have today, then they can shut down a human brain as well, given that the korean system is a camera, a computer, and a robotic machine gun in one package.

Is it totally autonomous or remote-controlled? Because if it IS remote controlled, if it's radio, jammers just terminated your connection meaning you not only can no longer control the damn robot, but you have no clue what it's doing or what's happening around it. If you're talking about the korean prison guard robots, those operate in an environment deliberately designed to make them viable, with two-way communications that aren't easily jammed due to being in a semiclosed system where people with the means and intention TO jam have a hard time getting in and lots of prearranged communication spots to maintain the comm link. I don't quite see that as similar to sending a robot to board a potentially still uncooperative ship hundreds of kilometres away.

Webber just doesn't care about future automation, beyond the sense of mid-20th century automation with robot arms in factories to do repetitive work and computers to do the heavy number-crunching. Going beyond that would start to remove humans from wars, and that violates the 0th law of sci-fi, but as time goes on it becomes more and more straining at my disbelief.

Since you allegedly couldn't even be arsed to read the books I'm not sure how that is supposed to work. You could always ease the strain on your disbelief by staying out of Honorverse threads you know.

And why is the number of marines on a ship the bottleneck here, shouldn't they would be the easiest crew to train? It's as close to unskilled labor as you get.

Ignoring the abject stupidity of Marines being 'as close to unskilled labour as you get', whether or not they are easy to train or not has absolutely no bearing on the problem, which is the new ships simply aren't designed to carry all that many of them in the first place.
There being 19 trillion Marines available doesn't help you one bit if your ship is only designed to support 48 of them.

[Terralthra]

It's sarcasm, and yes, there's no longer a rational reason for the whole institution. But I do think that the massive pay-outs are probably bad for the budget, and maybe those budget-cutters would have had reason to go after them for that reason, even if there was a reason to keep encouraging capture of ships.

Those budget-cutters would be countered by peer-heavy naval dynasties (Trumans, Alexanders, etc.) given that any budget bill has to originate in the House of Lords.

You can stop explaining this because I already understand it. There are ways around all these restrictions. Why should Manticore, with it's deep pockets, be limited by it's own manpower? How expensive would it be to fill out ranks with foreign nationals in some sort of 'Foreign Legion' type thing? The fact that there has been no major effort to import strength, to start a guest-worker program to free up Manticore nationals for their military, or anything of that sort indicates that the lack of trained manpower isn't an existential threat or even a serious problem-it's an annoyance, something that can be solved by tightening the belt and accepting that some compromises must be made. Further, it's pretty obvious that such compromises are more a war-time expedient than a permanent state of affairs. A post-war draw-down and mothballing will allow crew sizes to swing back up for commerce protection and anti-piracy operations. Problems will only become permanent if Manticore has to secure and protect a much larger volume of space permanently and refuses to draw manpower from said volume in any way.

Recruit guest workers...from where? It's clear from the very beginning that a large part of why the RMN is superior to the PN/RHN is that the crews are better educated and trained from birth. The educational system of the SKM/SEM is simply leagues better than the PRH/RH. Recruiting guest workers and mercenary naval/marine personnel would dilute that advantage, assuming they even measured up to begin with. Silesians have a shit educational system, the Talbott "Cluster" is too far away, also practically neobarb. Andermani are at best a neutral power until quite late in the series (and has its own navy to man), the PRH/RH is an enemy (and has lower educational standards)(and they take some defectors anyway), the core Solarian League is so powerful and peaceful it's doubtful many would want to leave...where are these magical mercenaries who are up to the RMN's standards for technology (of the ships and equipment) and education (of the people)? And why wouldn't they go pirate, where they get paid a hell of a lot more and don't have to get themselves shot for Queen and Country?

Don't be silly, you don't leave them onboard their own ship. But if you put the prize crew on the pirate ship, where do you keep the old crew that is less problematic than keeping them restrained and on your own ship where you know how all the doors lock? Furthermore, I still say this is an incidental thing-it only becomes relevant when dealing with a specific mission, which you can plan for and carry extra crew if you anticipate the need. I'm just saying that the need is illusionary, and you should probably head back to port with your prize in tow anyways to make sure it arrives safely. So why carry extra crew even if you are going out to capture pirates before hoisting them from the yardarm?

Spending time towing prize ships back to port is a massive waste of a warship's time, given that until midway through the series, the SKM/SEM doesn't have any port facilities in half of the places its merchant marine travels (and even then, they're well out of the way). The SKM/SEM's wealth comes from that even for the things they don't make and export, the Junction gives them a massive advantage in simply being the carrying transports for goods from anywhere to anywhere else. Their merchant ships spend a lot of time not in Manticoran space, and hence, so does their Navy.

You could read In Enemy Hands to find out what can happen to a ship who thinks that crew quarters are a reasonable place to restrain captives.

Webber just doesn't care about future automation, beyond the sense of mid-20th century automation with robot arms in factories to do repetitive work and computers to do the heavy number-crunching. Going beyond that would start to remove humans from wars, and that violates the 0th law of sci-fi, but as time goes on it becomes more and more straining at my disbelief.

Nonsense. There are sophisticated robots and computers (example: remote damage control/repair automatons). There are also ground combat drones and remote devices (e.g. door-breaching explosive deployment robots, seen in (iirc) Shadow of Freedom). They aren't mentioned much because it isn't a ground combat series. They're mentioned incidentally from time to time, as appropriate.

Except I think that marines aren't going to stop them from dumping their records either, given the time and distance involved in transferring them over. Marines aren't going to do anything to help you there, are they? Sure, smashing hard drives might take a while, but it's not going to be a 30 minute procedure.

No, but say they say "ok, we won't dump our hard drives, send over your retrieval team," you send over a team to retrieve the records, and they ambush the team and take them hostage. Now what? You could blow up the ship...but you'll lose your retrieval team, and the records you wanted. You could let them go, and still lose both. Your options are shit and shit, unless you, say, have a well-trained team of soldiers skilled in the boarding of a hostile vessel. Like, say, a company or two of Marines.

And I post in this thread because I can analyse it without ever actually seeing it, to entertain myself better than actually reading the books would do.

As is blatantly obvious from your "contribution" to this thread, analysis without knowledge of the source material is suspect at best and useless at worst.

For example, the idea that they could just "bring extra crew along for those missions" is obviously not going to work. The ships are designed to hold and crew x many people. Surely there's a little wiggle room for combat losses and/or evacuees, but it's not a very big one, because cubage is a major restriction of military ships. Roomier = bigger = heavier = slower.

The ships they come up with when at war maximize combat potential (not just of the individual ship, but of the navy to which it belongs) against another navy, and when those same ships are deployed to peacetime endeavours, it's found that some of the design decisions don't work out so well for commerce protection and patrol duties. Why is this objectionable? Do you feel, from your complete lack of knowledge of the 'verse, that it should be possible to design a ship (and a navy) which can do both things equally well?

[Simon_Jester]

And how many slavers and pirate ships have more prisoners than you can find room for with sleeping bags/zip ties on the gunnery decks? This is made out to be a major issue by Batman, but I suspect it's a very incidental thing If you've captured a ship to send it home, can't you stash it somewhere in the Oort cloud of a system powered down until a prize crew can arrive if it's so important?

If you are on a remote patrol mission, arguably you cannot- or cannot always do so, or it might be irresponsible to do so. The point here is that for ships operating far from base on complicated missions, being able to detach people to do something is a mission requirement. This shouldn't be controversial; warships do it all the time.

It's good to know that South Africa and South Korea have more advanced automation technology than Manticore then .

What, those countries have combat robots that can be told "go board that ship, kill or capture all left-handed redheads aboard, and don't shoot any of the hostages they might be keeping?" If not, then you're just bullshitting on this one.

Well if they wanted to go out with a bang, there is always overloading your reactor until it explodes in this setting. And if you want to take control of a ship, why not take inspiration from Ninven? Send a midshipman with a nuke, and there will be little to no fighting unless they are already intent on going out fighting.

It is sometimes desirable to bring people into custody.

Also, you forget that spacecraft interact with planets. There are important things on planets, or asteroid base-like stations. Sometimes, "shoot at them until they give up, then send over a midshipman with a nuclear bomb" is not a practical solution.

The other reason for prize crews might be a social one - the rules the RMN operates under makes capturing a ship extremely profitable for the crew involved, indeed for the entire chain of command involved. That's part of how Honor manages to become such a political force, if I remember correctly, becoming wealth from the sale of captured ships. Just try to get the fleet admirals to sign off on a policy that would hit them right in the pocketbook.

So the prize rules are set by the admiralty, and the various Liberal governments that cut military spending have never touched them and never will. Got it, it's a system to grease palms and make our hero rich, and it cannot be ended even if the ships are worth only their scrap value.

Even the scrap metal on several million tons of alloy is pretty impressive.

I also repeat my thought that Marines are the least-likely people to be subject to a manpower crunch-if you're as rich as Manticore, you can hire mercenaries if nothing else, or raise the pay for the Marines or do other things to increase their numbers if you need more of them. So if they haven't maintained the number of marines while keeping the other crew figures constant, then they obviously do not see the need to maintain marine numbers, even on patrol ships. Were this a serious problem instead, there would be efforts to deal with it-quite possibly with robots or cyborgs or something of that nature.

What's happening is that they scaled down the Marine contingents because they had built more ships, and the Marine units were scaled down proportionate to the rest of the ship's crew, partly so they could be distributed to more individual ships. Marines operate complex hardware, they're not just cavemen with guns, so there are real training costs associated with expanding the force.

[Esquire]

A further note on prizetaking - as I understand, the combat unit involved sells (transfers, hands over, etc; it's a thing for money exchange regardless of what you call it) the prize to the Admiralty, which puts it into service if it's deemed useful, thus saving on new construction, or selling it in turn at a profit to a third party of some sort, be it another government or a private scrapyard. There's simply nobody who benefits from getting rid of the practice.