Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[Batman]

So-they have gravity-based STL and FTL but no actual artificial gravity. That sounds...curious, to say the least.

[VhenRa]

So-they have gravity-based STL and FTL but no actual artificial gravity. That sounds...curious, to say the least.

They have inertial compensator technology (hence their 210g accelerations), the problem is. It kills ALL inertia, including acceleration gravity.

[Batman]

I'm not sure why they'd want acceleration gravity given that would be perpendicular to their deck layout. What I find irritating is that they can both generate and do away with 210 gees worth of accel...but need rotating sections to get shipboard gravity. (I'll leave working out the rotation speeds they'd need to get a single gee in something as small as a superdreadnought-leave alone cruisers or a destroyer-as an exercise to the reader)

[White Haven]

I can easily see gravity-based propulsion and artificially-generated gravity being finicky to get working in the same place at the same time. Additionally, if your primary generated-gravity technology comes from 'metric fucktons of gravity out of nowhere' impeller wedges, I can also easily see it being tricky to get working under fine enough control to be safe for use as a life support addendum. Clearly solvable problems, as we see later, but it's not unreasonable for them to be problems at some point.

Look at how long it took to go from 'we can make chemicals explode violently' to 'we can harness that in a finely-tuned machine to make a wheeled vehicle travel under its own power.' Explosives weren't at all a new idea; harnessing explosions safely, reliably, and cheaply to build an engine around them? That took a while.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not sure why they'd want acceleration gravity given that would be perpendicular to their deck layout.

Because if the perceived gravity (due to engine acceleration, grav plates, or whatever) doesn't point perpendicular to the deck, then you slide comically down the length of the deck and wind up in a hilarious man-heap on the far wall?

What I find irritating is that they can both generate and do away with 210 gees worth of accel...but need rotating sections to get shipboard gravity. (I'll leave working out the rotation speeds they'd need to get a single gee in something as small as a superdreadnought-leave alone cruisers or a destroyer-as an exercise to the reader)

As long as it isn't enough to horribly disorient people with Coriolis forces, good enough; the mechanical engineering of the era is up to it.

[VhenRa]

On the Salamander-class in the short story they are only running em at .5Gs (for the outer ring) and the next 4 rings down at .45, .4, .35 and .3 Gravity respectively. As in, 5 decks in the rotating section, outer most gets .5Gs, inner most has less of a rotation radius.

[Simon_Jester]

Note: whatever the radius of the outer ring is, this indicates that the sections below it have 90%, 80%, 70%, and 60% of that radius.

[VhenRa]

That looks about right from the illustration. http://wiki.honor-harrington.de/images/ ... _Class.jpg

[Batman]

I'm not sure why they'd want acceleration gravity given that would be perpendicular to their deck layout.

Because if the perceived gravity (due to engine acceleration, grav plates, or whatever) doesn't point perpendicular to the deck, then you slide comically down the length of the deck and wind up in a hilarious man-heap on the far wall?

I didn't say to the deck, I said to the deck layoutHonorverse ship design as I know it would be really awkward to operate with shipboard gravity being determined by engine acceleration precisely for that reason. From all I've seen Honorverse ships aren't designed with 'bow=up, stern=down' deck arrangements.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, if you have inertial compensation that exactly cancels out the artificial 'gravity' of the ship's acceleration, you don't actually have any 'acceleration gravity.' And since these ships' acceleration is enough to instantly kill and crush everyone on the ship if their 'acceleration gravity' is not compensated for... they don't have any 'acceleration gravity.'

Inertial compensators have always removed all the acceleration experienced due to accelerating with an impeller wedge, not 99.8% of it, all of it. And onboard ship artificial gravity has always had to be supplied by other means. It's just that on this ship that other means is a rotating section, not grav plates. Possibly because the grav plates couldn't be made to interact with the compensator and impellers in a stable, predictable manner.

It may also be desirable to have the impeller machinery lying at a certain angle to the deck for maintenance and operation purpose.

[VhenRa]

Actually, it PREDATES Grav Plate technology. Grav Plates were invented years after hyper, wedge, sails, compensators.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, if they didn't have grav plates, they surely could not get them to work with the drive.

[Batman]

If they 'had' grav plates they wouldn't have needed to bother with rotational gravity to begin with.

[Terralthra]

If compensators could compensate for less than 100% of the acceleration experienced by the crew, then every ship around would have another 100-150 gs of acceleration, as they could set the compensator to compensate for the existing 500-700gs, then set the grav plates to reduce the remaining 50-150 to 3-10, like the Mesans do with the spider drive, or like Harrington did on her insane Cerberus maneuver.

[Ahriman238]

I suppose this is as good a juncture as any to sit down and talk about the Honorverse from a versus standpoint.

The Honorverse is populous and has an amazing industry, even a decidedly fourth-rate system like New Tuscany can produce and run 30+ dreadnought and SD-sized freighters without issue. That said they are limited to a relatively small sphere of the galaxy, making vs. scenarios far easier.

The major x factor in versus scenarios with the Honorverse comes from the sheer detail given to things normally glossed over in sci-fi. Normally ships move at the speed of plot, if we the fans can later calc things that's fine with them but unlikely to be a main point. And if the writers do mention sublight speeds like in TNG, it'll be in terms of maximum sublight velocity with no thought given to acceleration. Likewise the defenses, weapons and sensors are described in lavish detail rather than starting from the ability to do whatever the plot demands.

Going back to sensors for a moment as an example. The primary long-range sensors in the Honorverse are gravitic, detecting the distinctive drive wedges of every starship in their experience. They do have radar though with stealth they can find it hard to detect a ship without active drives before it hits energy range. They also use lidar for short-range fire control, telescopes as backups to the backups, and some kind of high-energy detector. This last seems to involve the detection of hyper-footprints, but is also mentioned at the Battle of Cerberus as the incoming Peeps might conceivably detect a powerful and sustained use of reaction thrusters. Could they likewise detect say, a plasma-driven sublight drive? We don't know. For that matter, there's a very valid question (Mesa is about to demonstrate, albeit with specially designed stealth ships) whether Honorverse ships will detect ships that don't use impeller drive outside of energy range.

Then again, HH energy range is quite a bit outside of the pure visual ranges we normally see in sci-fi shows and films. So sometimes the assumptions of those media work against them too.


In fact, the Honorverse so severely outranges most sci-fi universes I can think of off the top of my head, even before we factor in MDMs, that we may want to assume sensors barely work just to even things out. Of course, the honorverse navies are full of professional officers who learn from their mistakes so eventually they'd simply get paranoid about deploying recon platforms every where they go. They're already mostly there anyways. In general, if something can be killed by hundreds or thousands of laser-head missiles it will die, and the honorverse militaries are generally professional enough that they'll start by focusing an insane overkill on one or two targets and then revise their estimates of what constitutes 'enough missiles' downward.


Despite my best efforts, I've found no hard figures and nothing calculable about HH energy weapons. Every time they're used the target is crippled or killed, except for SDs and then only because of extensive armor and cofferdamming specifically to limit damage. Their nukes we know run from 15-500 megatons and that seems to be generally enough for a one-shot kill, except that never happens anymore due to missile defense. That certainly suggests say, a turbolaser, could one-shot most HH ships.


Also, the books present a very Manticore-centric view of the Honorverse. Any scenario with hordes of alien invaders would likely involve the Solarian League as well as the Haven Quadrant powers.

[Simon_Jester]

I suppose this is as good a juncture as any to sit down and talk about the Honorverse from a versus standpoint.

The Honorverse is populous and has an amazing industry, even a decidedly fourth-rate system like New Tuscany can produce and run 30+ dreadnought and SD-sized freighters without issue. That said they are limited to a relatively small sphere of the galaxy, making vs. scenarios far easier.

The major x factor in versus scenarios with the Honorverse comes from the sheer detail given to things normally glossed over in sci-fi. Normally ships move at the speed of plot, if we the fans can later calc things that's fine with them but unlikely to be a main point. And if the writers do mention sublight speeds like in TNG, it'll be in terms of maximum sublight velocity with no thought given to acceleration. Likewise the defenses, weapons and sensors are described in lavish detail rather than starting from the ability to do whatever the plot demands.

Going back to sensors for a moment as an example. The primary long-range sensors in the Honorverse are gravitic, detecting the distinctive drive wedges of every starship in their experience. They do have radar though with stealth they can find it hard to detect a ship without active drives before it hits energy range. They also use lidar for short-range fire control, telescopes as backups to the backups, and some kind of high-energy detector. This last seems to involve the detection of hyper-footprints, but is also mentioned at the Battle of Cerberus as the incoming Peeps might conceivably detect a powerful and sustained use of reaction thrusters. Could they likewise detect say, a plasma-driven sublight drive?

Most likely. Honor had to maneuver her ships carefully so that their reaction drive burn was done while they were near the sun from the point of view of the attacking SS fleet. I doubt a ship that relies on high-energy reaction thrusters could hide effectively from Honorverse sensors, if the engine is pointed in the same general direction as the observing platform. This is especially an issue if it's attacking a defended target that has reconnaissance platforms in the outer system, because you can't thrust 'inward' without being observed from 'outward.'

We don't know. For that matter, there's a very valid question (Mesa is about to demonstrate, albeit with specially designed stealth ships) whether Honorverse ships will detect ships that don't use impeller drive outside of energy range.

On the other hand, that's outside of their own energy range, and Honorverse beam weapon technology is actually rather nasty, significantly more nasty than their armor or shielding technology.

Then again, HH energy range is quite a bit outside of the pure visual ranges we normally see in sci-fi shows and films. So sometimes the assumptions of those media work against them too.

To be fair, in visual SF media we usually have enough evidence from the 'text' of long combat ranges; it's just that the special effects crews like to do stuff within visual range.

In fact, the Honorverse so severely outranges most sci-fi universes I can think of off the top of my head, even before we factor in MDMs, that we may want to assume sensors barely work just to even things out. Of course, the honorverse navies are full of professional officers who learn from their mistakes so eventually they'd simply get paranoid about deploying recon platforms every where they go. They're already mostly there anyways. In general, if something can be killed by hundreds or thousands of laser-head missiles it will die, and the honorverse militaries are generally professional enough that they'll start by focusing an insane overkill on one or two targets and then revise their estimates of what constitutes 'enough missiles' downward.

On the other hand, laser heads are actually not individually all that nasty by soft-SF beam weapon standards; I would estimate 100 kilotons directed energy transfer, and that's making very optimistic assumptions about how well a lasing rod actually works. Enough to explosively disintegrate a respectable tunnel through a big solid object- but not enough to physically annihilate them. A lot of SF settings have shielding technology that seems capable of absorbing large numbers of laser head hits... then again, when you've got hundreds or thousands of hits it starts to add up.

Despite my best efforts, I've found no hard figures and nothing calculable about HH energy weapons. Every time they're used the target is crippled or killed, except for SDs and then only because of extensive armor and cofferdamming specifically to limit damage. Their nukes we know run from 15-500 megatons and that seems to be generally enough for a one-shot kill, except that never happens anymore due to missile defense.

Well, delivering a multimegaton nuclear blast, shaped to hit the whole side of a ship, pretty well fried one broadside of Thunder of God in book two. Lots of surface damage, shock damage seems likely, no actual boiling away of the interior of the ship punching into the core hull.

Personally I'd estimate single digit megaton per shot for heavy Honorverse beam weapons- enough that a full broadside of superdreadnought grasers can do to an Honorverse battlecruiser roughly what an Honorverse 'contact' nuke can, only more concentrated and focused so that it punches through the target rather than uniformly baking its surface.

Also, the books present a very Manticore-centric view of the Honorverse. Any scenario with hordes of alien invaders would likely involve the Solarian League as well as the Haven Quadrant powers.

[/quote]Agreed. Also, SLN capital ships might well prove quite effective in a versus setting, because they still have beam weapons that can target at light-second ranges with multimegaton broadside firepower, and they still have missiles with reliable, effective range out to several million kilometers, and so on.

[Crazedwraith]

Random stupid question time: I've been thinking lately; why are HH warships built with hammerheads? I mean I know the reason they state in the books. Impeller nodes + chase weapons = Hammerheads. But why once you've expanded sections fore and aft. Why don't you just built the whole thing wider, with more room for all the other things you want to stick in. Is it just the extra mass, armour, supplies whatever aren't worth the reduction in acceleration? I mean would it add that enough extra mass to alter your acceleration significantly ?

[Batman]

Always depends on the vs. There's plenty of universes that can ignore podnoughts to their heart's content even if they can't hope to match their ranges (ICS level Wars comes to mind, and using the EU they can easily match/exceed those ranges, and TL bolts are MUCH harder to intercept than missiles), as does a lot of the Perryverse (which also has missile ranges measured in lightyears). On the lower end with TNG Trek and B5 you have settings that would probably get eaten even by the League at least in direct combat (Trek has the 'technology' to even the odds some but hardly ever seems to make good use of it, and unless they can get the Vorlons to tag along B5's only advantage is realtime interstellar communications...assuming that isn't heavily reliant on the gate network).
An interesting case would be the Systems Commonwealth from 'Andromeda', which while being able to match their missile range and easily out-missile spam even podlayers, suffers from no tactical FTL-neither comms nor sensors-but is going to give them fits with their strategic mobility and interstellar communications thanks to Slipstream. (Not to mention the ability to kablooey systems with fighter-portable weapons).

One interesting aspect of this is HHs heavy reliance on gravitics for detection. Would they even be able to detect, say, Systems Commonwealth missiles outside radar range?

[Batman]

Random stupid question time: I've been thinking lately; why are HH warships built with hammerheads? I mean I know the reason they state in the books. Impeller nodes + chase weapons = Hammerheads. But why once you've expanded sections fore and aft. Why don't you just built the whole thing wider, with more room for all the other things you want to stick in. Is it just the extra mass, armour, supplies whatever aren't worth the reduction in acceleration? I mean would it add that enough extra mass to alter your acceleration significantly ?

Um-the impeller nodes are inboards of the hammerheads on the main hull, the only reason Weber gives for the hammerheads are the chasers (note that civilian ships don't have them so it's unlikely to be some weird wedge geometry thing).

That being said, there does seem to be some correlation between hull shape and impeller drive function (at least for FTL capable ships) so given the shapes shown in the diagrams just making the hull wider to the extent that the front/rear end of the spindle matches the width of the hammerhead would require a significant increase in hull volume (I haven't run any numbers but eyeballing gets me somewhere upwards of 20%) and thus mass.

[Simon_Jester]

Random stupid question time: I've been thinking lately; why are HH warships built with hammerheads? I mean I know the reason they state in the books. Impeller nodes + chase weapons = Hammerheads. But why once you've expanded sections fore and aft. Why don't you just built the whole thing wider, with more room for all the other things you want to stick in. Is it just the extra mass, armour, supplies whatever aren't worth the reduction in acceleration? I mean would it add that enough extra mass to alter your acceleration significantly ?

The mass of the ship increases with the square of its thickness (assuming it gets 'taller' as you make it thicker), so yes, it does.

Another issue is that the real constraint on ship designs may not be internal volume so much as hull space. Radar antennas, communications devices, laser cannons, missile launchers... all these things have a physical footprint on the hull of the ship, an area of the ship's outer surface that cannot be used for any other purpose. And most of this stuff has to be mounted on the broadsides so it can be pointed in the direction of the enemy.

So the main obstacle to equipping a ship more lavishly with systems is surface area, not tonnage. We seldom if ever hear about capital ships running out of countermissiles, for instance- presumably because they can be stored in stupid-huge numbers and the main limiting factor is physically having enough 'gunports' to fire them all from. One countermissile takes up like a few percent of the space that one capital ship missile does, after all. Presumably, capital ships can devote 'enough' volume to countermissiles (however much that is) that they usually don't run out until well after the enemy capital ship force runs out of missiles.

Meanwhile, everybody wishes that they could have, not more countermissiles total, but more tubes to fire them from, because that's how you avoid letting the enemy saturate your defenses with a single massed barrage. Thing is, that costs in surface area on the hull. Having 500 countermissiles and 10 tubes to fire them from might actually not weigh much less or take up much less internal volume than having 500 countermissiles and 20 tubes to fire them from... but it'd take up double the surface area. Plus doubling the surface area devoted to tracking and controlling the countermissiles.

Therefore, upsizing the ship really only contributes to firepower and missile defense if it correspondingly increases surface area.

Making the ship 50% wider (but no taller or longer) doesn't really change the available surface area on the broadsides, and it does make the ship a lot heavier and slower. You may gain a few advantages (more capacious magazines for missiles, thicker armor protection over the core hull), but you can't mount more countermissile tubes or radar dishes.

Making the ship 'taller' increases surface area on the broadsides... so the only reason I can think of NOT to do that to at least some extent is the mass tradeoff. Or a physical 'hard' barrier, whereby you run up against a limit on the geometry of the hull that can work with impeller rings of a given size.

[gigabytelord]

From what I've heard (I'm listening to the Ashes of Victory audio book right now) so far is that hammer heads have no real effect on how HH ship's STL of FTL drives functions. In fact the one time I do remember hearing someone say some thing about it. They were very specific in it being a result of trying to find a place to stick chaser batteries. Civilian vessels don't go into combat and therefore, theoretically anyway, shouldn't need chaser batteries, or armament, however you prefer to say it.

[Ahriman238]

Another thought in this vein of versus scenarios, your average starfighter is smaller than most honorverse missiles, but probably isn't as fast or evasive, or as laden with ECM. And those harder targets have to be stopped tens of thousands of kilometers away from the ship. I imagine HH ships (especially those designed and built in the MDM-era) are going to generally massacre helpless fighter swarms until people learn to stop trying to overwhelm SDs with fighters.

[Batman]

Always depends on the fighters' capabilities and how well the Honorverse ships can actually target them. Without the target having a convenient impeller signature to track with gravitics, they're limited to lightspeed sensors, and their effective range is apparently in the low end single-figure lightsecond range even against all-up starships. Targets as comparatively minuscule as, say, X-Wings could conceivably get a lot closer before being detected, and they can carry missiles that can threaten Wars capital ships in nonridiculous numbers, up to and including Super Star Destroyers (even if it's just the stupid 8km variant). That should really ruin an SD's day, especially given that proton torpedoes are tiny so intercepting them is going to be a bitch.

[Simon_Jester]

I've always assumed some degree of sensor interoperability in cases like this. Among other things, any drive that explicitly warps space (not all of them) is creating some kind of gravitational distortion. It may not be as visible as an impeller wedge but it'll be there.

Also, arguably the single greatest threat to enemy starfighters at close range is the countermissile- if you program a countermissile to home in on a nearby target it will smack into that target like a big destructive wall o' gravity, coincidentally having a chance of blowing up any small munitions located on a direct line from the ship to the target.

We don't really have figures for what an impeller wedge does when it collides with solid matter, but it isn't pretty even without the wedge-wedge interference countermissiles normally use.

[Batman]

A CM's ability to kill most fighters I don't question, and yes, if the fighter uses gravity manipulation/space warp technology (Trek Warp drive, Perryverse Metagrav, the Minbari gravimagnetic -or something to that effect-drive etc) gravitics should be of some use. But what of fighters that use reaction drives, and gravitics only in the form of acceleration compensators/inertial dampers/whatever you want to call the doodads that prevent the crew from going splat at triple figure and up g accelerations? I don't remember how Andromeda STL works but I do know Wars ion engines are supposed to be ridiculously effective rockets (as are Trek and Perryverse impulse drive, Wars and Trek somehow and Perryverse by cheating) so no gravity manipulation to lock onto, and Honorverse defenses are kinda optimized for dealing with wedged targets, because in-universe, those are the only ones they have to worry about. Plus even Honorverse countermissiles are (even without the wedge) noticeably larger than most Wars fighters, leave alone Wars missiles, and without the wedge they're a much harder to locate target. And that's assuming they have to wander into CM range to begin with.