Terralthra wrote:In fairness, he does characterize the Edict as more or less the only (consistent) foreign policy that the League has. It's possible to consider this one tradition old enough that no matter how much internecine bureaucratic bullshit there is, everyone still refuses to argue with the Edict.
The writers of the Edict took the League's disfunctionality IRT foreign affairs into account - that's why the Edict is an amendment to the Solarian Constitution. It comes into effect automatically, without the Assembly needing to approve it (at least in theory, I assume that there are some provisions to determine if a violation actually took place before taking action, and you could presumably fudge with that investigation if you were so inclined).
This. Basically, the problem is that the very bodies the League would normally count on to investigate (OFS and Frontier Fleet) are very much corrupt and compromised, to the point that they themselves appear to be the main walking, talking Eridani Edict violators in the known galaxy, as demonstrated by their use of kinetic strikes to wipe out entire rebel towns on frontier planets when the corrupt government calls them in.
So basically the question is, if someone really grasped just how screwed up the League is, would they really expect the Edict to be enforced in a timely, efficient manner?
DarkArk wrote:Maybe it's because I've been reading the later books that go into exquisite detail with regards to how far behind the SLN is, but at this stage in the war is the Solarian League really still that much better than Haven at missile tech? Could it be that Haven is getting tech that the SLN for whatever reason has decided to not acquire?
Maybe, and yes.
The SLN shows no sign of being inferior to, say, 1902-era RMN hardware. They have missile pods but the pods have not yet reached mass deployment; I suspect that SLN ships would be able to put up a perfectly good fight against, say, the 1905-era Manticoran navy. They might be slightly outpointed in terms of EW effectiveness and design quality, but the 1922 PD Solarians are probably considerably more dangerous than the 1905 Havenites were.
The catch is that Solarian fleet weapons technology has remained largely static since 1900 PD while RMN technology has advanced quickly. In 1910 PD, it was still to Haven's advantage to acquire the latest Solarian fire control, ECM, and ECCM technology; this was better than what they could produce domestically. It wasn't as good as what Manticore had in 1910 PD but it was a lot closer.
By 1915 PD, it's fair to say that Haven has learned everything the Sollies have to teach them, and has added wrinkles of their own (such as their own version of the MDM).
The fight between the Fearless and the Q-ship at the end was particularly hair raising, and my god the ships in the universe can take a hell of a beating.
Yes, it might just be the most visceral fight in the whole series. Honestly, after reading a dozen fleet actions I'm kind of missing the intimate fight between two ships.
Agreed.
So I finished A Rising Thunder, and I have now realized that the two spinoff series of Torch and Saganami Island were supposed to be read before At All Costs. While certainly not incomprehensible, I did find it unusual that Torch and Talbott were not gone into in much depth.
Two questions:
How are you going to handle this with regards to the tread? Also, I'm assuming they're still worth reading after getting this far into the series, so which of the two should I start with first?
The proper sequence of events is:
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor Crown of Slaves Shadow of Saganami
(the latter two books take place during the action of War of Honor, don't have much direct effect on it, and have at least some effect on At All Costs)
At All Costs Torch of Freedom Storm from the Shadows
(the latter two books take place during the action of At All Costs but don't have much direct effect on it. They *definitely* affect the action of Mission of Honor)
Mission of Honor Shadow of Freedom Cauldron of Ghosts
(the latter two books take place during the action of Mission of Honor but don't have much direct effect on it)
So I finished A Rising Thunder, and I have now realized that the two spinoff series of Torch and Saganami Island were supposed to be read before At All Costs. While certainly not incomprehensible, I did find it unusual that Torch and Talbott were not gone into in much depth.
Two questions:
How are you going to handle this with regards to the tread? Also, I'm assuming they're still worth reading after getting this far into the series, so which of the two should I start with first?
There are actually three going on four spin-offs. I like the Shadow of Saganami much better, because it feels more like the early series with good, clean sci-fi adventure. I missed that charm. Also, you get to see the Talbot cluster and the genesis of the current problems with the SLN. Crown of Slaves is good for some Sollie/Erewhon politics and the creation of the new Torch state, and definitely worth it for the introduction to Mesa and Manpower. The thing is, you may be a trifle confused about the characters if you don't first read the short stories 'From the Highlands' and 'Fanatic' from the third and fourth short story anthologies respectively. The Star Kingdom series is a bunch of prequels about Honor's ancestor, Stephanie Harrington, who made first contact with the treecats and the first bond some four hundred years before the main books, then got involved in various conspiracies to hide the treecats' true intellect while still protecting them from exploitation. These books do not interest me at all, maybe check them out if you're burning with curiosity about Sphinx. Finally, Timothy Zahn has been co-writing with Weber a trilogy, the first book should be released later this year, Call to Duty, another prequel showing the earliest years of the RMN.
I'm planning on handling it the same way as the multiple Rifts series, give a thread to each spin-off when I get to it chronologically. Which probably means a Crown of Slaves one after this book, the two short stories I mentioned occurring roughly at the same time as Ashes of Victory.
"Any plan which requires the direct intervention of any deity to work can be assumed to be a very poor one."- Newbiespud
Ahriman238 wrote:There are actually three going on four spin-offs. I like the Shadow of Saganami much better, because it feels more like the early series with good, clean sci-fi adventure. I missed that charm. Also, you get to see the Talbot cluster and the genesis of the current problems with the SLN.
Agreed.
Crown of Slaves is good for some Sollie/Erewhon politics and the creation of the new Torch state, and definitely worth it for the introduction to Mesa and Manpower. The thing is, you may be a trifle confused about the characters if you don't first read the short stories 'From the Highlands' and 'Fanatic' from the third and fourth short story anthologies respectively.
I feel that these characters are adequately introduced in Crown of Slaves itself, though reading those two stories can't hurt. I don't think I actually have copies, though...
The Star Kingdom series is a bunch of prequels about Honor's ancestor, Stephanie Harrington, who made first contact with the treecats and the first bond some four hundred years before the main books, then got involved in various conspiracies to hide the treecats' true intellect while still protecting them from exploitation. These books do not interest me at all, maybe check them out if you're burning with curiosity about Sphinx.
Yeah. They are also unlikely to produce any information relevant to a versus or crossover, which is one of the nominal objectives of these threads.
Finally, Timothy Zahn has been co-writing with Weber a trilogy, the first book should be released later this year, Call to Duty, another prequel showing the earliest years of the RMN.
This COULD produce (indirectly) information relevant to a versus or crossover. It will probably also be interesting because in theory it will consist of RMN personnel fighting with weapons more similar to what the Graysons were using in Honor of the Queen.
I'm planning on handling it the same way as the multiple Rifts series, give a thread to each spin-off when I get to it chronologically.
That should work. Of course, Ashes of Victory would be a good place to start the next 'main line Honorverse' thread. Tentatively we might want another thread for books 9, 10, and 11 of the main line, and then a whole different one for 12 and 13 which consist of Manticore beating up on the Sollies.
The catch is that while the Weber/Flint collaborations in the Wages of Sin series have relatively little information about naval warfare*, the Shadow of Saganami series have quite a lot of it. So it might actually be best to include them in the mainline thread. They are, stylistically and in terms of topic, closer to the mainline novels, because Weber's doing most of the writing.
*Conspicuous exception is one naval battle at the end of Torch of Freedom, which is interesting because it features a sort of 'broken-backed war' between two sides that are both trying to improve on the pre-1900 baseline, and have interestingly different approaches to doing so... but both of which are sharply inferior to frontline Manticoran and Havenite hardware.
Which probably means a Crown of Slaves one after this book, the two short stories I mentioned occurring roughly at the same time as Ashes of Victory.
Crown of Slaves proper takes place AFTER Ashes of Victory, though.
'Shadows of Saganami' and its followups worked perfectly fine for me without having read any of the short stories and I can't believe I missed a third spinoff subseries.
Following the Honorverse was so much easier (not to mention cheaper) when all the books were already available in paperback for a year or more. Reading a contemporary ongoing series is no fun.
'Next time I let Superman take charge, just hit me. Real hard.'
'You're a princess from a society of immortal warriors. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.'
'No. No dating for the Batman. It might cut into your brooding time.'
'Tactically we have multiple objectives. So we need to split into teams.'-'Dibs on the Amazon!'
'Hey, we both have a Martian's phone number on our speed dial. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt.'
'You know, for a guy with like 50 different kinds of vision, you sure are blind.'
Terralthra wrote:In fairness, he does characterize the Edict as more or less the only (consistent) foreign policy that the League has. It's possible to consider this one tradition old enough that no matter how much internecine bureaucratic bullshit there is, everyone still refuses to argue with the Edict.
The writers of the Edict took the League's disfunctionality IRT foreign affairs into account - that's why the Edict is an amendment to the Solarian Constitution. It comes into effect automatically, without the Assembly needing to approve it (at least in theory, I assume that there are some provisions to determine if a violation actually took place before taking action, and you could presumably fudge with that investigation if you were so inclined).
This. Basically, the problem is that the very bodies the League would normally count on to investigate (OFS and Frontier Fleet) are very much corrupt and compromised, to the point that they themselves appear to be the main walking, talking Eridani Edict violators in the known galaxy, as demonstrated by their use of kinetic strikes to wipe out entire rebel towns on frontier planets when the corrupt government calls them in.
So basically the question is, if someone really grasped just how screwed up the League is, would they really expect the Edict to be enforced in a timely, efficient manner?
I think at the time the EE was written the corruption in the League wasn't as bad; the main issue was the fact that anything could be vetoed by the Assembly with a single dissenter.
As for OFS and FF violating the EE, strictly speaking I don't think that's the case. It would be the equivalent of the US conducting drone strikes against AQ targets in Yemen with the local government's blessing (except here Yemen is part of the US). Also, orbital strikes in themselves do not constitute an EE violation; it depends on what the target is, how indiscrimanate the weapons are and so on
Simon_Jester wrote:I feel that these characters are adequately introduced in Crown of Slaves itself, though reading those two stories can't hurt. I don't think I actually have copies, though...
See here (the Mission of Honor ISO or ZIP contain the first four anthologies)
Thanks Simon for clearing that up for me. I had looked for what the proper order for reading should be, but only found the series orders. I wish that was made obvious somewhere in the books themselves.
Crown of Slaves is good for some Sollie/Erewhon politics and the creation of the new Torch state, and definitely worth it for the introduction to Mesa and Manpower.
Good, because one of the main things that was troubling me up to this point was what made genetic slavery, well, genetic. Which is never explained in the main series.
The Star Kingdom series is a bunch of prequels about Honor's ancestor, Stephanie Harrington, who made first contact with the treecats and the first bond some four hundred years before the main books, then got involved in various conspiracies to hide the treecats' true intellect while still protecting them from exploitation. These books do not interest me at all
Me neither, if only because they were apparently written to cash in on the young adult reading market. Also isn't some of this covered in the short stories?
Finally, Timothy Zahn has been co-writing with Weber a trilogy, the first book should be released later this year, Call to Duty, another prequel showing the earliest years of the RMN.
Zahn you say? Isn't that interesting. Might have to check that out when the whole thing is in paperback.
Reading a contemporary ongoing series is no fun.
Agreed. I picked up HH because it was a long runner, and to keep me occupied on the long bus trips I have to take. Also because I enjoyed two of his other series: March Upcountry and Hell's Gate (a great series in desperate need of more books).
See here (the Mission of Honor ISO or ZIP contain the first four anthologies)
Thank you for this. The electronic version of the novels doesn't really help me because of said bus trips, but I'm glad I don't have to buy the anthologies.
They might be slightly outpointed in terms of EW effectiveness and design quality, but the 1922 PD Solarians are probably considerably more dangerous than the 1905 Havenites were.
Their mainline fleet probably is. The Reserve, not so much. I seem to remember the majority of those still having autocannon point defense.
It really does seem to be the MDMs that give Manticore their real advantage. The LACs haven't even been used yet against the Sollies. Will be interesting when that happens.
They'll have something like the same advantage they enjoyed against prewar Peeps, though they may have trouble getting as close without detection. On the other hand, the Sollies have boatloads of light starships, and one of the best counters to LACs is sheer massed weapons fire.
As to the reserve- I suspect they have plans in place to refit quickly. Well, they'd better, because the RMN just blew through about 25% of their standing superdreadnought force in the first couple of engagements.
Good, because one of the main things that was troubling me up to this point was what made genetic slavery, well, genetic. Which is never explained in the main series.
Short version is that slaves are pod people, grown in tubes without mommies, daddies or legal rights to serve a specific purpose. Like K line being personal servants/entertainers, or V line being shock-troop supersoldiers. And naturally they're tweaked for their purpose, sex slaves are perfectly pretty etc.
Slaves have their identity coded in a barcode on their tongue, it's actually how the tongue is colored and can't be scrapped off or removed like a tattoo, though it can be removed.
The slaves aren't given names, just numbers. For instance, Jeremy X was born K-86b/273-1/5. K describing his line and purpose, 86 his variant within that (K-86s are jugglers/acrobats/jesters) followed by either an a for a girl, b for a boy. Then the batch number, 273, which apparently contained five individuals as he's the first of five to be decanted.
Many slaves are actually pretty well educated, since technical illiterates are of limited use in a modern economy, but they are trained very carefully in the ways of fear and absolute obedience. In theory slavery is illegal everywhere, in practice only Haven and Manticore are really serious about enforcement and they've been... busy the last few years.
Me neither, if only because they were apparently written to cash in on the young adult reading market. Also isn't some of this covered in the short stories?
Bingo, the first book is essentially the Stephanie and her treecat story from the first anthology, just with some padding. The second and upcoming third AFAIK are original but like I said, meh.
'Shadows of Saganami' and its followups worked perfectly fine for me without having read any of the short stories and I can't believe I missed a third spinoff subseries.
Yeah, that's fine. It's only Crown of Slaves that may work better if you go in knowing who Victor Cachat, the Zilwickis, Cathy and Jeremy et al. are.
Oh, and it may or may not interest you to know that six weeks ago they published the first of a comic book miniseries adaptation of the main books, Tales of Honor. It consists of Honor, in her cell aboard Tepes telling the story of Basilisk Station via flashback. The first issue ending respectively on Honor getting her implants burned out and Young's dumping responsibility for the picket on her. It apparently sold out extremely quickly.
"Any plan which requires the direct intervention of any deity to work can be assumed to be a very poor one."- Newbiespud
I think 'Crown of Slaves' and followups are quite sufficient to understand that subset of the story too (and the cross-quoting of events that happened in another book is getting on my nerves-yes, I know that happened. I read the damned book.)
I think the one thing we can never honestly accuse Weber of is providing not enough information.
'Next time I let Superman take charge, just hit me. Real hard.'
'You're a princess from a society of immortal warriors. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.'
'No. No dating for the Batman. It might cut into your brooding time.'
'Tactically we have multiple objectives. So we need to split into teams.'-'Dibs on the Amazon!'
'Hey, we both have a Martian's phone number on our speed dial. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt.'
'You know, for a guy with like 50 different kinds of vision, you sure are blind.'
Well, in some cases he provides not enough of what we want, and too much of what we don't, but certainly you can't complain about the gross quantity of it...
Parallels between the genetic slave resistance movement and African-American history are legion, obviously, right down to X being the surname freed genetic slaves take, and the guerilla resistance movement referring to itself as the Audubon Ballroom.
An interesting point I hadn't thought of before: do the Solarians have military attaches at all? And further would either Manticore or Haven allow them access in the first place?
Although a thought I just had with regards to this is that before the Manticore-Havenite war there wasn't a series of major conflicts that would engender an attitude of needing to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. Indeed it's noted on multiple occasions that this war is the first of its kind, and certainly its scale. Thus before this there was no great need to constantly be improving your naval tech in a grinding war against a roughly equal opponent. Quick wars don't bring as many changes. Therefore there likely wouldn't be a system of military attaches like happened between European states in the pre-World War era.
Simon wrote:On the other hand, the Sollies have boatloads of light starships, and one of the best counters to LACs is sheer massed weapons fire.
True. On the other hand they're going to have to learn it first hand just how effective they really are. They're going to need to advance their doctrine to effectively deal with it, and given the state of the SLN's staff officers I'm not optimistic about their chances.
It consists of Honor, in her cell aboard Tepes telling the story of Basilisk Station via flashback. The first issue ending respectively on Honor getting her implants burned out and Young's dumping responsibility for the picket on her.
That is an interesting way of going about it. I suppose it allows them to cover more ground that way in terms of the plot. Honestly I wouldn't mind having something of a HH art book; I know it took me like 5 books to start visualizing the ships properly.
but certainly you can't complain about the gross quantity of it...
I find myself never really getting bored with Weber though. The padding and information is always rather interesting or relevant.
DarkArk wrote:An interesting point I hadn't thought of before: do the Solarians have military attaches at all? And further would either Manticore or Haven allow them access in the first place?
I suspect that any such program is run through OFS and Frontier Fleet, and that the answer is "sort of." The catch is that by now their attache program is probably configured to provide "advisers" to third-rate military forces- which is not very useful to powers like Manticore and Haven that have large professional fleets of their own.
Also, Manticore and Haven both have incentives NOT to let Sollie observers anywhere near their fleets, let alone officially trained ones. The RMN has technical secrets they don't want the Sollies copying, because they'll sell them right back to Haven. Haven has a variety of human rights issues they don't want exposed...
Although a thought I just had with regards to this is that before the Manticore-Havenite war there wasn't a series of major conflicts that would engender an attitude of needing to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. Indeed it's noted on multiple occasions that this war is the first of its kind, and certainly its scale. Thus before this there was no great need to constantly be improving your naval tech in a grinding war against a roughly equal opponent. Quick wars don't bring as many changes. Therefore there likely wouldn't be a system of military attaches like happened between European states in the pre-World War era.
Seems likely. Sure, the Solarians have the concept of assigning a military officer to another country, but that's just because of the routine requirements of their gradual imperial expansion.
Simon wrote:On the other hand, the Sollies have boatloads of light starships, and one of the best counters to LACs is sheer massed weapons fire.
True. On the other hand they're going to have to learn it first hand just how effective they really are. They're going to need to advance their doctrine to effectively deal with it, and given the state of the SLN's staff officers I'm not optimistic about their chances.
Well, it's strongly implied that the Frontier Fleet admirals have more brains- and the existing losses are serious enough that even the SLN is going to start thinking. They can't actually deploy another fleet much bigger the size of the one they already lost at Second Manticore, which means even they will start thinking about fighting 'smarter.'
"They're going for a straight-up duel," Citizen Captain Bogdanovich said, and shook his head.
"Why not?" Tourville replied quietly. The two of them stood gazing down into the master plot, hands clasped behind them, and the citizen vice admiral shrugged. "Thanks to Shannon, they may figure we forgot to bring any pods along, and their missiles—and point defense—have always been better than ours. In their place, I think I'd want to get to energy range as quickly as possible, but then, I do know about our pods. Even if I try to forget it, I can't, which may be affecting my opinion."
"No it's not," the chief of staff said with a wry smile. "You'd want to charge in and get it done anyway."
"I'm not that bad," Tourville protested. He turned to frown quellingly at Bogdanovich, but the chief of staff only grinned. "Am I?" the citizen vice admiral asked rather more plaintively, and Bogdanovich nodded.
Heh. Zanizabaran picket charging out to meet Turville. They don't have the numbers but they do have some pods. Plus, unlike Santino, there's an inhabited allied planet behind them which they can't evacuate or simply abandon.
"I see it," Tennard said, and the sound of his own voice surprised him. It was even, almost relaxed, when every cell of his brain screamed his fatal mistake at him. It hadn't even occurred to him that they might have held their pods inside their wedges, and it should have. Such a simple thing to do ... and he'd never seen it coming, never even considered it.
But it was always the simple things, wasn't it? And he knew now. The long, lumpy trails of pods deployed astern of the battleships and battlecruisers in ungainly tails, revealing themselves to his sensors, and there were far more of them than he had.
"Course change," he said. "Let's close the range."
"Close the range, Sir?" his chief of staff asked as Tennard's flag captain acknowledged the order.
"Close it," the rear admiral confirmed grimly. "Those people are going to blow the ever living hell out of us when they launch. And then, if they have a clue at all, they'll be the ones holding the range open. They'll stay outside our energy envelope and pound us with more missiles until we're scrap metal."
Tennard has guts, accepting that his command is already dead, his mission fialed he figures the best he can do is charge into energy range and hope to bring a lot of Peeps down with him.
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.
Seriously overcompensating. Now we see that most systems and qualities of a Manty missile are at least slightly better than Haven's. Slightly better accel and range to play with, better computers, better penaids. In an equivalent missile duel, this would give them maybe enough of an edge, against this sort of missile spam, not so much.
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, 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.
TF 12.2 is fired on by 1200 missiles, kills 600 with counter-missiles, 200 with laser clusters, and diverts another 200 with decoys. Their missile defense has really been improved by the tech-transfer, but the best is yet to come.
Two hundred missiles plummeted inward, 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 Manticoran-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.
The benefits of extensive drill and learning from the enemy. Tennard still gets in two BB kills and two cripples, but that's better than Peeps have done against missile swarms in some time.
TF 12.2's fire had been five times as heavy as Rear Admiral Tennard's, and every missile had been concentrated solely upon his superdreadnoughts. Nine hundred and sixty missiles roared in upon each of them, and Tennard's ships were too far apart to duplicate Tourville's maneuver and build a wall in space with their wedges. The Manticoran admiral had never anticipated such a weight of fire. Against what he'd thought he faced, it had made sense to maintain unit separation, give each ship room to maneuver independently within the envelope of the task group's combined point defense. There had been no time to close up his formation when he realized what he actually confronted . . . and even if there had been, the galling truth was that his force was insufficiently drilled for it. This time, at least, it was the despised Peeps who possessed the superior training, the superior weight of fire . . . and the superior command team.
The problem of formations, move ships closer for better mutual support and the ability to build a wall of wedges, or further out so they have some maneuvering room. Tennard chose... poorly, but it made sense in the context of what he 'knew" to be true.
Nausea stirred in Tourville's belly as he looked out at the spreading patterns of wreckage, the life pods and unidentifiable debris which had once been megaton ships of the wall, each with a crew of over five thousand, and wondered how many of them had survived.
Roughly five thousand to crew an SD.
"Start calculating your fire patterns, Shannon," he said. "I hope to God they're smart enough to surrender, and if they are, I'll give them up to twelve hours to evacuate their orbital installations before we take them out. But I don't intend to spend much time discussing it with them." He produced a wintry smile. "If this can't convince them to accept sanity, then nothing I can say will, now will it?
He sat down in his command chair, tipped it back, crossed his legs, and felt in his breast pocket for a cigar, and all the time he wanted to weep.
Tourville is here to dismantle the shiny new Zanzibar shipyards, but if they surrender he plans on giving them plenty of time to evacuate first.
The PN had no hard data on the Basilisk net, but Giscard knew what the Republic's Navy had assembled to watch over its own core systems. The huge, sensitive, deep-system passive sensor arrays standing sentry over the Haven System for the Capital Fleet, for example, measured something on the order of a thousand kilometers in diameter and could detect the footprint of even a normal hyper translation at a range of up to a hundred light-hours. He had to assume the Manties' arrays were even better—after all, every other sensor they had was—which meant there was no point trying to sneak up on them with a slow, furtive approach.
The Haven System sensor platform network can detect hyper translation from a hundred light hours, or 722 AUs. Not sure what to make of a thousand kilometers in diameter, that's mighty small in space for a satellite network.
Besides, the Manties were supposed to see him. If the timing worked properly, they would have almost an hour to react to his presence before Citizen Rear Admiral Darlington arrived. Which should give the defenders time to let themselves be well and truly caught between stools when they realized what was actually happening.
Of course, trying to achieve that sort of coordination comes awfully close to asking for the impossible, he acknowledged as his body's protests began to subside and his vision cleared enough for him to see his plot once more. But the beauty of it here is that we don't really have to achieve it. It'll be nice if we pull it off, sort of like frosting on the cake, but we should be all right either way. Should.
TF 12.4 attack Basilisk has broken into two elements. Giscard himself will command 12.4.1 in attacking the picket in Basilisk orbit and destroying all orbital industry and infrastructure. 12.4.2 will pounce on the wormhole defenses, take them out, and hopefully any freighters or reinforcements arriving from Manticore. They've tried to time their arrival so Giscard will get there an or so before Point-Two, hopefully luring any ships near the wormhole out of position. As he says, tough to coordinate to that degree with forces that have been out of communication for weeks, but then it doesn't terribly matter to their plan whether they pull it off or not.
"Present position is three hundred ninety-five-point-niner million klicks from Basilisk-A, bearing oh-oh-five by oh-oh-three relative. Velocity is ... fourteen-point-one KPS, and task force acceleration is three-point-seven-five KPS squared. Range to Medusa orbit is two hundred twenty-nine-point-niner-five million klicks. On current heading and acceleration, we should reach a zero-range intercept with the planet in one hundred thirty-two minutes, with a crossing velocity of forty-three-point-eight-two thousand KPS at the moment we cut its orbit."
Someday, when I'm feeling particularly masochistic, I'm going to sit down and try and figure some of these astrogation problems, just to know if Weber's been pulling numbers out of his ass this whole time.
Like the Royal Manticoran Navy, the prewar People's Navy had restricted its ships' top drive settings to a maximum of eighty percent of their full officially rated inertial compensator capacity. That was because the only warning a compensator usually gave that it was thinking about failing was the abrupt cessation of function . . . which instantly turned a ship's crew into goo. Since higher power settings were more likely to result in failure, most navies (and all merchant shipping lines) made a habit of limiting their ships to a comfortable safety margin of around twenty percent.
Unfortunately, the new Manty compensators made that unacceptable to the People's Republic. Unable to match the new compensators' power levels, they had opted both to begin building dreadnoughts for the first time in eighteen T-years and to cut their prewar compensator safety margins in half. The new dreadnoughts were considerably less powerful than superdreadnoughts would have been, but their lower tonnage gave them something approaching the acceleration curves a Manty superdreadnought could pull with the RMN's new compensators. By the same token, cutting the safety margins let the People's Navy steal back most of the Manties' advantage across the board. Which didn't help a whole lot when the Manties decided to go to full military power and toss their safety margins out the airlock, but at least it reduced the differential a little.
The Peeps are running their impellers with no safety margins a lot more, to just to cut into the accel advantage granted by Grayson-style compensators. Also they've recently begun building new dreadnoughts.
It wasn't a particularly loud alarm, but it didn't have to be, for the master control room buried deep at the heart of the multimegaton space station that housed Basilisk ACS was a calm, quiet place.
Astro Control Service (air traffic controllers for the wormhole) is a several megaton installation. I'd always imagined it being a lot smaller, maybe cruiser-sized.
It was also the reason the lighting was intentionally adjusted to be on the dim side, the better to make the various displays visible, and why, in a practice dating back to the earliest days of electronic watch standing on Old Earth, the temperature was kept decidedly cool. (Except, Reynaud reminded himself wryly, for the handful of Sphinxians on staff; they insist it's like a balmy spring day . . . the showoffs!) The deliberate chill was carefully designed to prevent people from becoming so comfortable they dozed off on duty.
In the first thread, the first book, Simon mentioned that contemporary navy ships keep things a bit cool on the bridge and CIC so everyone stays sharp. Seems that was very much the intent then and now in the series.
It always took a fair amount of propitiating with codes and responses to various challenges to convince the FTL com systems to disgorge their contents. Of course, that was to be expected. In Reynaud's humble opinion, most people who went into the Navy tended to be on the anal retentive side (ACS personnel were civil servants, not military—and proud of it—despite their uniforms and rank insignia), and they were especially retentive about toys like their FTL com. Except under very special and carefully defined conditions, ACS was absolutely forbidden the use of its own FTL transmitter, and the fact that only Manticore knew how to read the grav pulses hadn't prevented the RMN from insisting on all sorts of internal security fences.
Internal security on FTL comms.
But that thought was far away and unimportant compared to the content of the short, terse sentences, and his thoughts reeled as he read the estimate of what was headed for Medusa and all the orbital warehouses, freight transfer points, repair shops, and supply bases that served the commerce which poured through Basilisk daily.
Very little of this, if any, was present thirteen years ago. A nice repair shop in particular would have been invaluable.
"I'm sure the terminus picket will be getting underway shortly," he went on, "but even if they could get there in time, there aren't enough ships in the system to stop this kind of attack. Which means—" he inhaled deeply "—that I am declaring Case Zulu. Jessie—" he looked at his senior watchkeeper "—you're in charge of organizing the evac queue. You know the drill: neutrals and passenger ships first, bulk carriers last."
Zulu, been a while since I heard that one. Mind, it's been a while since a system could report an invasion to Manticore and expect reinforcements within a reasonable timeframe. Evacuation priority with the system under attack, passenger liners and neutral flags first. Cargo-heavy and crew-light ships last.
Lady Harrington had begun a tradition when she detached two of her pinnaces to support ACS' antismuggling inspections twelve years ago. But these days there were twelve pinnaces, not two, and the personnel to man them were assigned directly to Basilisk ACS by the Royal Marine Corps. A pinnace's twin pulse cannon and single light laser weren't even popguns compared to the weapons carried by real warships, but they were more than powerful enough to deal with unarmed, unarmored merchantmen who got out of hand. More than that, Reynaud knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Cynthia Carluchi and her Marine crews would use those weapons in a heartbeat if the situation required it.
Pinnaces sent to keep the wormhole evacuation nice and orderly. There are now a dozen pinnaces, crewed by Marines, permanently stationed at Basilisk ACS for customs inspections. A pinnace is armed standard with a laser and two pulser cannon.
Even battlecruisers would require almost nineteen hours just to reach the Basilisk terminus from Manticore orbit; SDs would take almost twenty-two . . . and that was for ships with the latest-generation compensators. Ships could make the actual transit from Manticore to Basilisk in mere seconds, but to do that they first had to get to the central Junction terminus in Manticore. And even after they hit Basilisk space, they would be another twenty-two and twenty-six hours respectively from Medusa. Which meant that getting any reinforcements out here was going to take time. Virtually none by the standards of normal interstellar movement, but tactical combat within a star system operated on another scale entirely. And on that scale, forty-one hours was a very long time indeed . . . especially with the enemy barely two hours out from Medusa and coming hard.
Ask me for anything but time...
Almost a day's flight from Manticore orbit to the Junction, just about a day from the Basilisk Wormhole to the planet Medusa, though it may be in opposition now. Albeit the hyper-limit is just over two hours away, so they may be able to shave quite some time off that latter trip.
The superdreadnought's tractors reached out to the pinnace, capturing it and easing it into the brilliantly lit cavern of a boat bay, and Markham stood. It was against Regs, of course. Passengers were supposed to remain seated and strapped in during any approach maneuver, but he was in a hurry . . . and he was also a vice admiral, which meant no one was going to tell him no.
Please remain seated with your seatbelts on until the pinnace has come to a full and complete stop.
His eye caught the ship's crest, painted on the outer face of the docking gallery below the armorplast viewing area, and his mouth twitched. The crest was built around the personal seal of King William I, for whom the ship was named, and Markham wondered once again how many of Billy Boy's crew ever considered the fact that their namesake had been assassinated by a psychotic.
Apparently Manticoran ships have painted crests, and hull numbers, but not names.
"Still too far for any sort of positive count, Citizen Admiral, but it looks like they're present in considerably lower strength than predicted. We make it six to eight of the wall and an unknown number of battlecruisers. They seem to be headed our way at about three hundred gravities."
For a long time, the Basilisk picket was one of the most formidable in Alliance space. Alas, being a rear area it has been steadily stripped to the bone.
"We haven't made any scouting sweeps of Basilisk since the war started and the Manties blew out Seaford Nine. Instead, we've relied on covert intelligence gathered by merchant skippers on our payroll. For the most part, they're foreign nationals, not our own people, which means any report from them has to be taken with a grain of salt, but they're the best we've had."
The Peeps have learned to sometimes hire other people's freighters to do their spying.
"They'd get a good look at anyone in close proximity to Medusa, but not at any units that were further out—on patrol, say, or conducting exercises. And the Manties are as sensitive to the possibility of espionage here as we would be in their place. They don't exactly encourage through traffic to use active sensors in areas like this, and there are limits to what merchant-grade passives can pick up. Unfortunately, part of the inspection the Manties have been insisting on since the war started includes a very close look at the sensor suites of visiting merchantmen, and if they find something more sophisticated than they feel is appropriate, the ship in question better have a very good justification for it. If she doesn't—pffft!" The Citizen Commander made a throwing away gesture with one hand. "That ship and that merchant skipper are banned from any use of the Junction for the duration of hostilities, which leaves them no real legitimate reason to be anywhere in the Basilisk System, much less anyplace they could see something that would do us any good to know about. Sort of cavalier of them, I suppose, but effective, and I'd do the same thing in their position."
Manticore's take on 'fool me once.'
The initial reaction of the merchant traffic awaiting transit had been confusion, promptly followed by a panic that was as inevitable as it was irrational. They were ten light-hours from the Peeps' obvious objective, and every hostile starship in the vicinity was headed for Medusa, which meant almost directly away from them. There was ample time to get every one of them through the Junction and safely out of harm's way, and even if there hadn't been, they were far outside the Basilisk hyper limit. The FTL sensor net would give plenty of warning if any of the Peeps turned around and headed this way, and it would be relatively simple to duck into hyper and vanish long before the enemy could possibly get here.
Those comforting reflections, however, did not appear to be foremost in the minds of the merchant skippers arguing vociferously with Michel Reynaud's controllers. Lieutenant Carluchi and her pinnaces had already been required to physically intervene to keep a big Andermani ore ship and a Solarian freighter loaded with agricultural delicacies for the inner League worlds from jumping the queue.
Two thousand years into the future. The more things change...
The six dreadnoughts and eight battlecruisers composing the terminus picket had headed in-system at maximum acceleration the instant the first report came in. They couldn't possibly arrive in time to intercept the Peeps before they hit Medusa, but their CO could hardly just sit here and watch the system fall. The dreadnoughts had all received new compensators, but they were only second-generation upgrades with no more than a six percent efficiency boost over the old style. Nonetheless, Rear Admiral Hanaby was running them at full military power—right on four hundred and eighty gravities—and she'd been underway for ten minutes now.
Second-gen compensators as opposed to, what? Third or fourth they're on currently? 6 DN and 8 BC sitting on the wormhole terminus.
But the outbreak of hostilities and the more immediate needs of the Fleet had cut deeply into the funding originally appropriated to pay for the deep-space fortresses that had been supposed to protect the Basilisk terminus . . . and into the priority assigned to their construction, as well. What had been planned as a shell of eighteen sixteen-million-ton forts had been downgraded to ten . . . and only two of those had actually been completed. The other eight were anywhere from six T-months to a T-year from readiness—which put the most advanced of them something like five T-years behind the prewar schedule—and Reynaud gritted his teeth at the thought. Two fortresses should be ample to stand off any Peep battlecruisers which might be hiding out there to come running in and jump on the terminus from which Hanaby had withdrawn, but if there was something bigger and nastier in the offing . . .
Fixed defenses of the Basilisk terminus, promised vs. actual. Effectively they wanted to give Basilisk a miniature set-up like the Manticore Junction forts, just with less of them.
Will they give the orbit bases' personnel time to evacuate? Of course they will . . . unless their CO is one of the new regime's fanatics. But even if they do allow an evac, that's still sixty T-years' worth of infrastructure. My God! Who knows how many trillions of dollars of investment it represents? How in hell will we manage to replace it in the middle of a damned war?
Perhaps more than I thought was around before. It's not like Honor had a reason to record every little cargo station for us.
"Cindy, record the following message to Admiral Webster. Message begins: 'Jim, keep your ships where they are. This could be a trick to draw Home Fleet into Basilisk to clear the way for an attack on the capital. Eighth Fleet will move immediately to Basilisk.' Message ends."
White Haven emergency redeploying the Eighth Fleet from Trevor's Star to Basilisk, a distance of hundreds of light-years but with two wormholes he can get there a heck of a lot faster than Home Fleet. Oh, and the message was naturally passed on to Trevor's star within ten minutes by ACS Manticore.
Also, why in all the hells is everyone italicizing Basilisk suddenly? They're not doing it to other system names and I highly doubt everyone is saying or thinking it with special emphasis.
"Good. Second message, this one to CO Manticore ACS Central. Message begins: 'Admiral Yestremensky, upon my authority, you will clear all traffic—I repeat, all traffic—from the Manticore-Basilisk queue immediately and stand by for a Fleet priority transit.' Message ends."
"Recorded," McTierney confirmed again.
"New message," White Haven rapped, "this one to Rear Admiral Hanaby via Basilisk ACS. Message begins: 'Admiral Hanaby, I am headed to relieve Basilisk at my best speed from Trevor's Star via the Junction with forty-nine of the wall, forty battlecruisers, and screen.'"
"Recorded, Sir."
"Very well. I want information copies repeated to the Admiralty, special attention Admiral Caparelli and Admiral Givens, to Vice Admiral Reynaud, and to Vice Admiral Markham," White Haven went on with staccato clarity. "Standard encryption and code, Priority One. As soon as you've got them coded up, transmit them to Admiral Reynaud's courier boat."
The plan, and Eighth Fleet's current strength at 49 wallers (including two podnoughts) 40 BCs and screen.
"Standard translation order, Sir?" she asked.
"No." The earl shook his head curtly. "There's no time for a nice, neat, orderly transit; we'll send them through as fast as we can, in whatever order they reach the terminus. If it's a choice between a capital ship and a screening unit, the capital ship goes first; otherwise, it's strictly on an 'on arrival' basis. And, Alyson—" he looked straight into her eyes "—I want this set up to go quickly. Ships will move to the terminus at maximum military power, and transit windows are to be cut to the minimum possible, not the minimum allowed. Use the courier boat to inform Manticore ACS of that intention, as well."
Well this will be interesting.
His fleet was forty-five light-seconds from the Trevor's Star terminus. A destroyer with the latest compensator could accelerate at six hundred and twenty gravities with its safety margin cut to zero, but his superdreadnoughts could manage only four hundred and sixty-six with the same generation of compensator. That meant his destroyer screen could reach the local terminus on a least-time course in approximately thirty-five minutes while his SDs would need closer to forty-one. But a least-time course allowed no room for turnover and deceleration, and this large a force would have no choice but to decelerate to zero relative to the terminus before making transit, however urgent the crisis. And that meant those same destroyers would take fifty minutes while the SDs took just over fifty-seven. And once they'd gotten there, they still had to make transit—not once, but twice—just to get to the Basilisk terminus.
Time for Eighth Fleet to make the wormhole.
Nor could they go through together. Oh, it was tempting. There was an absolute ceiling on the amount of tonnage which could transit through any wormhole junction. In the case of the Manticore Junction, the maximum possible mass for a single transit was approximately two hundred million tons, which meant he could put that much of Eighth Fleet's wall—twenty-two SDs, for all practical purposes—through the junction in one, convulsive heave. Unfortunately, any wormhole transit destabilized the termini involved for a minimum of ten seconds, and vessels which massed more than about two and a half million tons destabilized it for a total interval proportional to the square of the transiting mass . . . which meant a maximum-mass transit would lock the route from Manticore to Basilisk solid for over seventeen hours.
If twenty-two superdreadnoughts were sufficient to deal with what White Haven feared the Peeps might be up to, that would pose no problem. But they might not be, and he had fifteen more of them, plus twelve dreadnoughts, under his command. They were the only ships which could possibly reach Basilisk in less than thirty hours, and he dared not leave any of them behind.
Restating of the wormhole rules, what the mass limit means in SDs. Those 49 wallers include 35 SDs and 12 DNs. Not sure what happened to the other two.
His screening units, up to and including his battlecruisers, would each produce a ten-second blockage of the route for whoever came next in line, but his dreadnoughts would close the route for almost seventy seconds and each superdreadnought would shut it down for a hundred and thirteen. Which meant that cramming his entire fleet through would require a minimum of a hundred and eight minutes. Add in the time required just to reach the Trevor's Star terminus, and it would be over a hundred and sixty-six minutes—over two and three-quarters hours—before his last ship could possibly reach Basilisk.
Wormhole shut-down times, a BC will close it for 10 seconds, a DN for over a minute, an SD for just under two minutes. Might be able to figure out the mass scaling from that.
Seriously, the italicizing of Basilisk is really distracting me now.
Under normal circumstances, the minimum allowable transit window was one minute. Usually the windows actually ran considerably longer than that, since the number of ships awaiting passage was seldom large enough to cause ACS to push the minimum. But that limitation had been adopted for a very simple reason: to give people time to get out of the way.
A ship made transit under Warshawski sail. Those sails provided no propulsion in n-space, but a wormhole junction was best thought of as a frozen funnel of hyper-space which happened to connect to n-space at either end. That meant sails not only could be used in a junction transit, but that the transiting vessel had no option but to use them. And that, in turn, meant each ship had to reconfigure its impeller nodes from sail to wedge as it emerged from the far side of the wormhole. Its sails would leave it with some momentum, but not very much, and if the lead ship in a transit was even a little tardy reconfiguring and the one astern of it ran up its backside—
-next thing you know you've got a seven-SD pileup and they have to shut down the thing just in time for rush hour. But that was Hamish's order, every ship gets one minute to get out of the way, then the next one is coming through.
"We've got a Category One Alpha emergency. Manticore ACS is proclaiming Condition Delta. All outgoing merchant shipping will be cleared from the Junction immediately. Dispatch, tag a message to that courier boat before you let it go back to Basilisk. Inform Vice Admiral Reynaud that he will halt all outbound traffic from Basilisk thirty minutes from now. There will be no exceptions, and he may inform any merchant master who objects that he is acting under my authority as per Article Four, Section Three, of the Junction Transit Instructions."
-snip-
"The three of you turn your boards over to your reliefs. We've got a two-hundred-ship, minimum-window, double transit coming at us, and you're elected to supervise it. Get started planning now."
"Two hundred ships?" Serena Ustinov repeated, as if she were positive she must have misunderstood somehow.
"Two hundred," Yestremensky confirmed grimly. "Now get cracking. You're down to ... forty-three minutes before the first one comes in from Trevor's Star."
ACS Manticore. And I was correct in remembering 200 ships for the Eighth, that makes their screen 111 ships strong, no clue as to classes yet.
The Manties were coming hell for leather, and he didn't blame them. Even with their present high accel, his task group would be only thirteen minutes' flight from Medusa when their vectors converged. If their vectors converged. It was hardly likely that the Manties would break off at this late date, but they had to survive clear across his missile zone to get to energy range . . . and even with a closure rate of over sixty thousand KPS, he doubted very much that any of them would.
He grimaced at the thought, already feeling the weight of all the deaths about to occur. Yet what made him grimace was the fact that even knowing the nightmares he would face in years to come, he was eager for it. His Navy had been humiliated too many times. Too many men and women he'd known and liked—even loved—had been killed, and he was sick unto death of the handicaps under which he had taken other men and women into battle so many times. Now it was his turn, and if his execution of Esther McQueen's plan was working even half as well as the two of them had hoped, he was about to hurt the Royal Manticoran Navy as it had never been hurt. Hand it not one but an entire series of simultaneous defeats such as it had not known in its entire four-hundred-year history.
Yes, he thought coldly. Let's see how your damned morale holds up after this, you bastards.
Giscard's state of mind, and a decent pausing point.
"Any plan which requires the direct intervention of any deity to work can be assumed to be a very poor one."- Newbiespud
Ahriman238 wrote:The Haven System sensor platform network can detect hyper translation from a hundred light hours, or 722 AUs. Not sure what to make of a thousand kilometers in diameter, that's mighty small in space for a satellite network.
I read it as consisting of several arrays, each of which is 1,000 km in diameter.
Ahriman238 wrote:Seriously overcompensating. Now we see that most systems and qualities of a Manty missile are at least slightly better than Haven's. Slightly better accel and range to play with, better computers, better penaids. In an equivalent missile duel, this would give them maybe enough of an edge, against this sort of missile spam, not so much.
Yes. They had a much bigger qualitative edge before the Sollies stuck their oar in (we see this in the ability of a Star Knight to give as good as she gets in a missile duel with a Sultan in 1902 PD). But the RMN's advantage over Solarian export (or not-for-export?) hardware is much slimmer than its advantage over prewar Havenite hardware.
The Haven System sensor platform network can detect hyper translation from a hundred light hours, or 722 AUs. Not sure what to make of a thousand kilometers in diameter, that's mighty small in space for a satellite network.
Uh... I think that's an antenna a thousand kilometers across. "Small" is not the word...
Someday, when I'm feeling particularly masochistic, I'm going to sit down and try and figure some of these astrogation problems, just to know if Weber's been pulling numbers out of his ass this whole time.
Call me if you see any discrepancies.
Most of the times I've calculated anything out he's borne out, his main problem being that he has no concept of significant figures. No realistic officer is going to report that there are 51,378 missiles headed for his fleet, if only because there is NO way the shipboard systems are certain it isn't 51,379 or even 51,388. Likewise, it's pointless to say "we are 75,892,781 kilometers away" when you're traveling at a thousand kilometers per second and the number changed by several thousand in the time it took you to say that. Say "75.9 million" like a normal nerd, dammit!
The Peeps are running their impellers with no safety margins a lot more, to just to cut into the accel advantage granted by Grayson-style compensators. Also they've recently begun building new dreadnoughts.
They have the building slips for it, so sure why not?
Also, they cut the margins to 90% of maximum power for normal operations instead of 80%- running at maximum power may be a more common thing now though, yeah.
Astro Control Service (air traffic controllers for the wormhole) is a several megaton installation. I'd always imagined it being a lot smaller, maybe cruiser-sized.
I think it's part of a larger station that serves multiple purposes...
In the first thread, the first book, Simon mentioned that contemporary navy ships keep things a bit cool on the bridge and CIC so everyone stays sharp. Seems that was very much the intent then and now in the series.
Speaking from schoolteacher experience, heat tends to make people cranky, uncomfortable, sleepy, or all of the above. None of those are good things to have in a room full of people who are trying to keep track of a complex, fast-changing situation.
It always took a fair amount of propitiating with codes and responses to various challenges to convince the FTL com systems to disgorge their contents. Of course, that was to be expected. In Reynaud's humble opinion, most people who went into the Navy tended to be on the anal retentive side (ACS personnel were civil servants, not military—and proud of it—despite their uniforms and rank insignia), and they were especially retentive about toys like their FTL com. Except under very special and carefully defined conditions, ACS was absolutely forbidden the use of its own FTL transmitter, and the fact that only Manticore knew how to read the grav pulses hadn't prevented the RMN from insisting on all sorts of internal security fences.
Internal security on FTL comms.
Partly justified by the fact that while it takes special hardware to transmit, and special decryption information to read the pulses, there's probably nothing stopping Haven (or anyone else) from saying "generate these pulses to send us this signal." Just because they don't have their own transmitter doesn't mean they can't make up a code, and they DO have gravitic detectors quite capable of seeing someone else's gravitic comms.
Very little of this, if any, was present thirteen years ago. A nice repair shop in particular would have been invaluable.
Yes, if only because Honor would probably have pressured Coglin to make use of it.
For a long time, the Basilisk picket was one of the most formidable in Alliance space. Alas, being a rear area it has been steadily stripped to the bone.
By "long time" I take it you mean "less than about ten years?"
Manticore's take on 'fool me once.'
Plus, they blatantly pull the same trick themselves all the time and rely on their own merchant marine for intelligence-gathering, so it's not like they don't know people can do it to them right back.
Fixed defenses of the Basilisk terminus, promised vs. actual. Effectively they wanted to give Basilisk a miniature set-up like the Manticore Junction forts, just with less of them.
Of course, the forts become semi-obsolete once pods are adopted on a large scale- though a podlaying fort would be kind of frightening.
Restating of the wormhole rules, what the mass limit means in SDs. Those 49 wallers include 35 SDs and 12 DNs. Not sure what happened to the other two.
Either he's not counting the two SD(P)s as conventional capital ships, or Weber slipped.
His screening units, up to and including his battlecruisers, would each produce a ten-second blockage of the route for whoever came next in line, but his dreadnoughts would close the route for almost seventy seconds and each superdreadnought would shut it down for a hundred and thirteen. Which meant that cramming his entire fleet through would require a minimum of a hundred and eight minutes. Add in the time required just to reach the Trevor's Star terminus, and it would be over a hundred and sixty-six minutes—over two and three-quarters hours—before his last ship could possibly reach Basilisk.
Wormhole shut-down times, a BC will close it for 10 seconds, a DN for over a minute, an SD for just under two minutes. Might be able to figure out the mass scaling from that.
The smart move would be to send through as many ships as possible one by one, then send the final 22 of the wall through in one big thwack, which would save like half an hour and provide a decisive 'reserve' for White Haven if he finds his command embattled at the far end.
Also, Weber has published the mass figures, silly.
-next thing you know you've got a seven-SD pileup and they have to shut down the thing just in time for rush hour. But that was Hamish's order, every ship gets one minute to get out of the way, then the next one is coming through.
It's made worse by the fact that you can't see the pileup until you literally fly smack into it because it's on the other end of the wormhole.
Ahriman 238 wrote:Seriously, the italicizing of Basilisk is really distracting me now.
Which is curiously absent from bot my print copy and my Honorverse CD iteration of that book
Simon_Jester wrote:
The smart move would be to send through as many ships as possible one by one, then send the final 22 of the wall through in one big thwack, which would save like half an hour and provide a decisive 'reserve' for White Haven if he finds his command embattled at the far end.
It saves half an hour...and closes all three termini for nineteen. Yes, Home Fleet is more than 19 hours away from the terminus so sending reinforcements to Basilisk or Trevor's Star is a no go anyway, but keeping the wormhole open so couriers can tell you what the hell is going on at the other two ends (or let 8th Fleet move back to Manticore or Trevor's Star should that prove necessary) doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
Besides, by the time 8th Fleet is in a position to send those final 22 SDs through they should already know the terminus-bound part of the Peep attack made a navigation oopsie and there's ample time to get every single ship through.
'Next time I let Superman take charge, just hit me. Real hard.'
'You're a princess from a society of immortal warriors. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.'
'No. No dating for the Batman. It might cut into your brooding time.'
'Tactically we have multiple objectives. So we need to split into teams.'-'Dibs on the Amazon!'
'Hey, we both have a Martian's phone number on our speed dial. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt.'
'You know, for a guy with like 50 different kinds of vision, you sure are blind.'
It may not come as a surprise that I am quite familiar with The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress...
Ah. Not one I've read, so I feel less dumb now.
Meanwhile, I'd also like to point out that this axiomatic certainty that the League will step in to enforce an Eridani Edict violation does not sit well with Weber's later characterization of the League. On the other hand, he may have made that intentional- the Edict being part of the 'old rules' status quo that the League's modern, creaky and corrupt state makes irrelevant.
I think they would. The League is slightly more complex than a straight dystopia of bureaucratic inefficiency and heartlessness. And two things will get the average Solly (OFS is another story) interested in the universe beyond their border. An Eridani Edict violation, and their "keep the wormholes open" act.
As far as your Solly on the street is concerned, the League is a benevolent entity that people willingly join or request the protection of all the time. They allegedly have a sense of Manifest Destiny, not in terms of conquest, but in the belief that all humanity will one day see the light and sign on.
Similarly, with one representative having the power to stonewall the entire legislature, there is a procedure in place to strip a world of League membership by supermajority vote. It's actually happened roughly never, but votes have called, threats made and it is generally understood that this will be the fate of any world whose representative proves too obstructionist.
Yes, if only because Honor would probably have pressured Coglin to make use of it.
Yes, precisely. Avail yourself of the convenient facilities right here or GTFO.
By "long time" I take it you mean "less than about ten years?"
Huh. Meant to say "a long time after OBS." Ah well, I'm young and for me, ten years is a long time. Particularly in deployment terms.
"Any plan which requires the direct intervention of any deity to work can be assumed to be a very poor one."- Newbiespud
If it's any help I've been on this job for 75 years and I agree 10 years does qualify as 'a long time'.
'Next time I let Superman take charge, just hit me. Real hard.'
'You're a princess from a society of immortal warriors. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.'
'No. No dating for the Batman. It might cut into your brooding time.'
'Tactically we have multiple objectives. So we need to split into teams.'-'Dibs on the Amazon!'
'Hey, we both have a Martian's phone number on our speed dial. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt.'
'You know, for a guy with like 50 different kinds of vision, you sure are blind.'
Task Group 12.4.2 had been supposed to emerge from hyper four million klicks from the Basilisk terminus, headed directly towards it with a velocity of five thousand kilometers per second. That would have put them in missile range and firing by the time the defenders could realize they were coming. And with any luck at all, the picket force normally stationed on the terminus would have been headed in-system at max for a full hour, which would have put those ships safely out of the way and left only the two operational forts to deal with. Thirty-two million tons of fort would still have been a handful, but he had eight dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and four battlecruisers— a better than three-to-one edge in tonnage—and he should have had the invaluable advantage of complete and total surprise, as well.
-snip-
"Time to decelerate and return to the terminus?" the citizen rear admiral demanded after a moment.
-snip-
"After that," the citizen commander went on, working furiously at his console as he spoke, "we'll be just over thirty million kilometers out. A zero/zero intercept with the terminus would take us a hundred and eleven minutes from now, with turnover for the original braking maneuver at twenty-one minutes and for the intercept at sixty-six minutes from now. A least-time course would get us to range zero in ... eighty-four-point-three minutes from now, but our relative velocity at intercept would be almost sixteen thousand KPS."
TF 12.4.2 overshoots their objective and will take over an hour to get into position. Closer to two if they don't want to go blazing past the place again.
Didn't quote it, but this group at least dropped out two light-months from the system to refine their data for this last hop.
He didn't like closing into all that jamming. Even with his Solarian-upgraded ECM and sensors, he'd have to cross something just under a million kilometers in which they'd be able to shoot at him, but he couldn't pick out a clear target to shoot back at. At the relatively low closing velocity he could generate between now and then, it would take him almost a minute to cross that fire zone. Which wouldn't have been all that bad if he hadn't been confident those forts were going to have missile pods—lots of missile pods—deployed and waiting for him.
Again we see ECM reducing the effective range of missiles and not just suckering some off while in flight. And even the Sollie tech doesn't make up much of the difference there.
I believe Simon said something about pod-laying forts? My understanding is it's more like a fort inside a cloud of pods it controls. In this case, they're under-armed, more budget cuts and pods desperately needed on the front.
He considered nipping back into hyper and trying to micro-jump his way to the terminus, but he rejected the notion almost instantly. Superficially appealing though it might be, a hyper jump this short was actually more difficult for an astrogator to calculate, not less. That, no doubt, was the reason the Manty picket commander was headed for Medusa in n-space instead of hyper. Control had to be so fine at such low ranges that something as small as a tiny difference in the cycle time of the hyper generators of two different ships could throw their n-space emergences off by light-seconds and hopelessly scramble his formation.
Why no one is really using micro-jumps tactically, despite the wormhole being beyond the hyper limit. It's not something you can really do in formation usually, without scattering.
Well, one counter example leaps to mind, but that's for a long, long time now.
"Can we still defeat the fortresses?" Leopold asked, not even glancing at Huff—which, Darlington reflected, boded ill for the citizen commander when Leopold turned in his report.
"I believe so, Sir. We'll take heavier losses than the ops plan originally contemplated, but we should be able to secure control of the terminus. Whether we can carry through and maintain control until Citizen Admiral Giscard rejoins us is another matter, however. The terminus picket has almost as many dreadnoughts as we do. They can be here well before Citizen Admiral Giscard if they reverse course promptly, and if they do that and we've taken heavy damage from the forts, then I doubt we could stand them off and pick off anything making transit from the Manties' Home Fleet. On the other hand, we're well outside the hyper limit here. If we see a force we can't fight coming at us, we can retreat into hyper immediately. That," he added quietly, "was the reason Citizen Admiral Giscard was willing to contemplate this maneuver in the first place, Sir. Because we can always run away if the odds turn to crap on us."
At least part of the plan is for Giscard to catch up after taking out the Medusan infrastructure and join them in ambushing any reinforcements. That they can quickly hyper out in case something too big to handle comes through is a great way to justify what would otherwise be a risky division of their forces.
Thirty-nine destroyers hovered just beyond the terminus threshold. They'd come through in a steady stream, as rapidly and remorselessly as an old, prespace freight train, and Reynaud had felt like some small, terrified animal frozen on the rails as the train's headlamp thundered down upon him. But he'd handed each warship off to its own controller, cycling through the available list with feverish speed, and somehow—he still wasn't sure how—they'd managed to avoid outright collisions.
But not all damage. HMS Glorioso had been just a fraction of a second too slow reconfiguring from sails to wedge, and HMS Vixen had run right up her backside. Fortunately, perhaps, the second destroyer had gotten her wedge up quickly, for it had come on-line one bare instant before Glorioso's had, but without building to full power. Which meant that only Glorioso's after nodes had blown. The resultant explosion had vaporized two-thirds of her after impeller room, and Reynaud had no desire at all to think about how many people it must have killed when it went, but it hadn't destroyed her hull or her compensator, and the fail-safes had blown in time to save her forward impellers. Momentum, coupled with instantaneous and brilliant evasive action on Vixen's part, had been just sufficient to carry her clear of an outright collision, and two of her sisters had speared her with tractors and dragged her bodily out of the way of Vixen's next astern. But for all that, it had been impossibly close. A thousandth of a second's difference in when either wedge came on-line, a dozen meters difference in their relative locations, a single split-second of distraction on the part of Vixen's watch officer or helmsman, and not only would they have collided, but the next ship in line would have plowed straight into their molten wreckage in the beginning of a chain-reaction collision that could have killed thousands.
But they'd avoided it, and now the first superdreadnoughts were coming through. The huge ships were much slower on the helm, but they were almost as quick to reconfigure from sails to wedge, and their longer transit windows gave them precious additional seconds to maneuver. They were actually easier to handle than the destroyers had been, and Reynaud leaned back in his chair and mopped the skim of sweat from his forehead.
The emergency transit, so far it's going very well, with only 35 confirmed casualties and several dozen missing from the collision.
"See?" He pointed at the flickering shift of questionable icons in the display. "It looks to me like their decoys must be considerably more advanced and flexible than we'd thought, Citizen Admiral. We've still got probable fixes on the forts themselves, but our confidence in them is degrading steadily because they're throwing so damned many false impeller signatures at us."
The Peeps actually see Eighth Fleet, but not terribly well owing to all the jamming and EW from the two active forts, and they assume the new contacts are decoys.
He'd brought his Grayson SDs through first, because even if it might hurt the Royal Navy's pride to admit it, they were newer, more powerful units than most of his Manticoran ships. Eight of them were through the Junction now, with three more to go and the first Manticoran units following on behind them. He'd gotten here in time to defend the terminus against the second prong of the Peep attack, but his pride at his achievement tasted of ashes and gall.
White Haven knows where it's at. Sorry Manty SDs, but in these new days there are podnoughts and the category we call "other."
Diamond dust icons speckled the plot as both sides flushed their pods and the missiles went out. Markham launched first, and his fire control was better, but the Peeps had many more birds than he did. There was a mechanistic inevitability to it, a sense that he was watching not the clash of human adversaries, but some dreadful, insensate disaster produced by the unthinking forces of nature.
A distant corner of his mind noted the huge numbers of incoming missiles Markham's ships picked off or fooled with their ECM and decoys, but it wasn't enough. It couldn't have been, and he bit his lip until he tasted blood as the first Manticoran superdreadnought vanished from the plot. Then another died—a second. A third. A fourth. A fifth. Three of them survived the opening exchange, led by King William, but the flickering sidebars of damage codes told how savagely wounded they were as they closed to energy range of the Peeps behind their flagship. The butchery grew suddenly even worse, yet no one flinched, no one surrendered—not on either side.
Two Peep superdreadnoughts had died with King William's consorts, and others had been damaged, if none had been hurt so dreadfully as the Manticoran ships of the wall. Now the two forces slammed together and interpenetrated, short-range weapons ripping and tearing with brief, titanic fury.
It took only seconds, and when it was over, two more Peep SDs had been destroyed. At least three more were severely damaged . . . and every single ship of Vice Admiral Silas Markham's task group had been obliterated.
Admiral Markham, CO Basilisk Station dies as so many Manty officers did in Icarus, with unflinching resolve to do his duty however hopeless and doomed. This time White Haven couldn't even distract the aggressors with ballistic missiles.
The active forts had strictly limited numbers of pods—another point to take up with Logistics Command, he thought grimly; when a fort is declared operational, then it should damned well receive its full ammunition allocation immediately, not "as soon as practical!"
White Haven is not pleased that the forts don't have enough pods to swat the attackers like flies. Somebody's got 'splaining to do.
— but, fortunately, the Harrington and her two sisters were another story. Built to the radical new design proposed by the Weapons Development Board, they'd been constructed around huge, hollow cores packed full of missile pods and ejection racks to deploy them. Between the three of them, they carried no less than fifteen hundred pods, and they'd been busy launching them into space ever since their arrival. Unlike older ships of the wall, they also had the fire control to handle a couple of hundred pods each, and they'd been handing the other eleven hundred off to the two forts and to their fellow SDs. But it was the Honor Harrington and Admiral Judah Yanakov who would call the shot for them. Not only did he have the best fire control equipment, but they were his navy's pods . . . and the Grayson Navy had earned the right.
Picked up an extra podnought somewhere, before it was Harrington and one of her sister ships. Not that I'm complaining.
Harringtons carry 500 pods. Believe it or not, we'll later learn that endurance is a big issue. In the short term or with a steady stream of resupply though, nobody does overkill better. Also, unlike every ship before, they have the fire control capacity to manage a couple hundred (to me that says two hundred) pods' worth of missile. Or, they can fire thousand missile salvos without resorting to dumb-fire. And the forts and other SDs can take up the fire control slack so yes, they pretty much flush out the pod-bays for this, Eighth Fleet's first salvo fired in anger.
"I'm not really certain, Citizen Admiral," the ops officer said slowly, shaking his head. "We've had impeller ghosts coming and going inside the jamming all along, of course. Now more of them seem to be hardening up simultaneously, and there's something else going on. It's almost as if we were taking lidar and radar hits from a lot more units all of a sudden."
"What?" Darlington spun to face the tactical section, but it was already too late.
Ever wondered how Wile E. Coyote feels in that long moment between when he realizes there's no ground beneath him and he actually starts falling?
"Sir, I've just picked up something I think you should hear," Cynthia McTierney said.
"What?" White Haven looked at her irritably. "Cindy, this is hardly the time—"
"It was an all-ships transmission from Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units, Sir," McTierney said with stubborn diffidence, and then, before White Haven could respond, she pressed a stud and Judah Yanakov's harsh recorded voice echoed in White Haven's earbug.
"Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units," it said, and White Haven could almost hear the clangor of clashing swords in its depths. "The order is—
Lady Harrington, and no mercy!"
"What?" White Haven spun towards his own com, but it was already too late.
Now there's something you want to hear as you prepare to unleash the biggest single missile salvo in the history of ever.
Sixteen hundred and ninety-five missile pods fired as one, and broadside launchers fired with them. The next best thing to nineteen thousand missiles went howling towards the Peeps at 95,000 gravities, and the range was only five million kilometers and the Peeps were headed straight to meet them at over fourteen thousand kilometers per second.
RMN: We'll see your six thousand missile salvos and raise by more than twelve thousand.
I see they scrapped up an extra ten thousand Gs of missile accel somewhere, I don't think these are MDMs. Not yet. Truman and Minnie are still proving the concept at Hancock, this very day in fact.
"Take us into hyper!" Darlington shouted, but flight time was under ninety seconds, and he'd wasted four responding.
Counter-missiles launched desperately, and laser clusters trained onto the incoming fire, but there simply wasn't time. His engineers needed at least sixty seconds to bring their generators on-line, and by the time Darlington snapped the order to Citizen Commander Huff, and Huff relayed it to the captains of the other ships, and they relayed it to their engineers, time had run out.
Space itself seemed to vanish in the titanic violence as thousands upon thousands of laserheads exploded in a solid wall of fury. At least a thousand of the Allies' own warheads killed one another in old-fashioned nuclear fratricide, but it scarcely mattered. There were more than enough of them to deal with eight dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and four battlecruisers. Amazingly, and against all apparent reason, two of Darlington's six destroyers actually escaped into hyper. Because no one was intentionally wasting missiles on such small fry, no doubt.
One minute to cold-start FTL. Near total devastation of TF 12.4.2, two destroyers manage to run.
Alexander Hamish grabbed for his own com with frantic haste with Judah Yanakov's order still ringing in his ears. He was horrified by the implications, and his horror grew as the Graysons' fire control continued to sweep the tumbling wreckage and the handful of life pods which had escaped. But none of them fired, and as he slowly relaxed in his chair once more, his memory replayed the words once more. "No mercy," Yanakov had said, not "No quarter," and a long, quavering breath sighed out of him as he realized he was not about to see a vengeful atrocity by units under his command.
He inhaled slowly, then looked at Granston-Henley.
"Remind me to have a little discussion with Admiral Yanakov about communications discipline," he said, and his mouth quirked in a wry, exhausted grin that might actually hold true humor again someday.
No flags when men are drowning.
Anyways, that's it for Icarus and the wider galaxy. Next we'll turn the clock back nearly eighteen months and see how Honor and co. make out on Hades. Rarely has the Descent into the Underworld been quite this literal.
Icarus inflicted substantial damage and loss of life, though the Peeps took at least a few casualties everywhere and lost big at Hancock. Basilisk I consider something of a draw, one element completed it's mission and got out alright, the other was annihilated. But Icarus wasn't so much about the numbers are reclaiming the initiative, hitting Manticore where they live for a change, and hopefully drawing more of their ships to pickets. And giving the People's Navy a much-needed win.
Like the Tet Offensive, the actual results matter less than how it plays to the press and public. On both sides.
"Any plan which requires the direct intervention of any deity to work can be assumed to be a very poor one."- Newbiespud
Ahriman238 wrote:In the first thread, the first book, Simon mentioned that contemporary navy ships keep things a bit cool on the bridge and CIC so everyone stays sharp. Seems that was very much the intent then and now in the series.
Especially in dim light.
Ahriman238 wrote:Also, why in all the hells is everyone italicizing Basilisk suddenly? They're not doing it to other system names and I highly doubt everyone is saying or thinking it with special emphasis.
Not in my copy either. I'm guessing your version had some editor zealously find/replace HMS Basilisk the ship name with italics and s/he caught the planetary system as well.
Ahriman238 wrote:
If twenty-two superdreadnoughts were sufficient to deal with what White Haven feared the Peeps might be up to, that would pose no problem. But they might not be, and he had fifteen more of them, plus twelve dreadnoughts, under his command. They were the only ships which could possibly reach Basilisk in less than thirty hours, and he dared not leave any of them behind.
Restating of the wormhole rules, what the mass limit means in SDs. Those 49 wallers include 35 SDs and 12 DNs. Not sure what happened to the other two.
He didn't like closing into all that jamming. Even with his Solarian-upgraded ECM and sensors, he'd have to cross something just under a million kilometers in which they'd be able to shoot at him, but he couldn't pick out a clear target to shoot back at. At the relatively low closing velocity he could generate between now and then, it would take him almost a minute to cross that fire zone. Which wouldn't have been all that bad if he hadn't been confident those forts were going to have missile pods—lots of missile pods—deployed and waiting for him.
Again we see ECM reducing the effective range of missiles and not just suckering some off while in flight. And even the Sollie tech doesn't make up much of the difference there.
"Effective range" has always been defined by a combination of factors, and 'do you have a prayer of hitting the target' is one of them. There's literally no point firing a missile salvo if only one percent of your missiles are likely to hit the target, or if you can't get a lock on the target you're firing AT.
That goes double if it is your one and only pod salvo.
I believe Simon said something about pod-laying forts? My understanding is it's more like a fort inside a cloud of pods it controls.
Well, there are good arguments for keeping the pods inside the fort when they're not urgently needed. They're better protected against enemy attacks, they're easier to service and maintain, and it's just all around easier to work with them.
Well, one counter example leaps to mind, but that's for a long, long time now.
Hm?
The Peeps actually see Eighth Fleet, but not terribly well owing to all the jamming and EW from the two active forts, and they assume the new contacts are decoys.
You know how you don't like it when the Havenites look at an 'impossible' thing and assume it must be stupidity?
Here, the Havenites are overestimating their enemy- assuming that the RMN's jammers are good enough to fool them with a huge ghost fleet of fake sensor images, when in fact those are real sensor images. To be fair, of course, the Manties probably could create at least a temporarily convincing ghost fleet that way...
White Haven knows where it's at. Sorry Manty SDs, but in these new days there are podnoughts and the category we call "other."
Yep. Like dreadnoughts and predreadnoughts. Dreadnoughts have roughly two or three times as much big gun firepower, in addition to being somewhat bigger and better protected against long range gunfire. So despite often only being 5-10 years newer, they were vastly more effective and dangerous...
Likewise, an SD(P)'s advantage in volume of fire is about a factor of two or three over a pre-pod capital ship. What makes them really, really nasty is the ability to stack salvoes (which is arguably not new) and the possession of the hundreds of control links required to coordinate a stacked salvo (which IS new).
[By the way, the term SD(P) had not yet been devised by the fanbase when this book was written]
Admiral Markham, CO Basilisk Station dies as so many Manty officers did in Icarus, with unflinching resolve to do his duty however hopeless and doomed. This time White Haven couldn't even distract the aggressors with ballistic missiles.
Also... you know? I think that might be the LAST beam engagement between capital ships in the series. I can't think of any later ones off the top of my head.
The MDM basically makes the prospect of a beam engagement hopeless, unless someone manages an WHERE IS YOUR MISSILEGOD NOW ambush in a grav wave.
[Eighth Fleet] picked up an extra podnought somewhere, before it was Harrington and one of her sister ships. Not that I'm complaining.
Maybe the Graysons got another one in service some time after White Haven's last viewpoint segment?
Harringtons carry 500 pods. Believe it or not, we'll later learn that endurance is a big issue. In the short term or with a steady stream of resupply though, nobody does overkill better. Also, unlike every ship before, they have the fire control capacity to manage a couple hundred (to me that says two hundred) pods' worth of missile. Or, they can fire thousand missile salvos without resorting to dumb-fire. And the forts and other SDs can take up the fire control slack so yes, they pretty much flush out the pod-bays for this, Eighth Fleet's first salvo fired in anger.
Part of the reason endurance is a problem is that the quality of missile defenses increases hugely in the mid- to late 1910s PD, partly in response to the missile pod threat. I mean, when he first talked about this, Weber said:
"An SD(P) is limited to 20 minutes of rapid missile fire. If fire rates are slowed, endurance increases. Moreover, if you have a target that can stand up to 20 minutes of the massed fire a wall of SD(P)s can hand out, then you shouldn't have pissed off the Invincible Armada of Ming the Merciless (or Skylark DuQuesne) to start with."
Since that's about five thousand missiles per first-generation SD(P) (potentially ten thousand in an Invictus, not sure about the Havenite designs), I'm inclined to agree. However, within about five years of in-story time... well, to quote Giscard:
"Yeah [I got a big piece of one of their SD(P)s], and I shot six SD(P)s dry to do it... that missile defense of theirs, it's a bear."
____________
[PS, Skylark DuQuesne is definitely overkill; honestly I think that beastie could tangle with the Culture]
"What?" White Haven spun towards his own com, but it was already too late.
Now there's something you want to hear as you prepare to unleash the biggest single missile salvo in the history of ever.[/quote]
I don't know. It's not like the thousands of live nuclear warheads you're lobbing at the enemy will sting less if you're in a good mood when you launch them. WHatever makes the Graysons feel good, I guess.
Sixteen hundred and ninety-five missile pods fired as one, and broadside launchers fired with them. The next best thing to nineteen thousand missiles went howling towards the Peeps at 95,000 gravities, and the range was only five million kilometers and the Peeps were headed straight to meet them at over fourteen thousand kilometers per second.
RMN: We'll see your six thousand missile salvos and raise by more than twelve thousand.
I see they scrapped up an extra ten thousand Gs of missile accel somewhere, I don't think these are MDMs. Not yet. Truman and Minnie are still proving the concept at Hancock, this very day in fact.
There's no reason to assume Eighth Fleet is armed with MDMs at this point, the missile acceleration is perfectly normal for conventional single-drive missiles, and frankly the MDM production line at this point is probably small-scale enough that supplying tens of thousands of them to equip Eighth Fleet would be nigh-impossible.
Icarus inflicted substantial damage and loss of life, though the Peeps took at least a few casualties everywhere and lost big at Hancock. Basilisk I consider something of a draw, one element completed it's mission and got out alright, the other was annihilated. But Icarus wasn't so much about the numbers are reclaiming the initiative, hitting Manticore where they live for a change, and hopefully drawing more of their ships to pickets. And giving the People's Navy a much-needed win.
Like the Tet Offensive, the actual results matter less than how it plays to the press and public. On both sides.
Right. Honestly, if it hadn't been for the political crap, plus the secret weapons (the super-LAC, the MDM, and maaaybe to an extent Ghost Rider), I think McQueen was about to turn the war around.
[One wonders how long it would have taken Haven to create their first native-build podlayers on their own. They know what the things are, they have to have gotten THAT much from interviewing Caslet... and now they have the pods and know damn well how effective they are]
Simon_Jester wrote:Here, the Havenites are overestimating their enemy- assuming that the RMN's jammers are good enough to fool them with a huge ghost fleet of fake sensor images, when in fact those are real sensor images. To be fair, of course, the Manties probably could create at least a temporarily convincing ghost fleet that way...
And they do, both before and after this book...
Simon_Jester wrote:
[Eighth Fleet] picked up an extra podnought somewhere, before it was Harrington and one of her sister ships. Not that I'm complaining.
Maybe the Graysons got another one in service some time after White Haven's last viewpoint segment?
Nope, he explicitly says two pod SDs before the transit occurs.
Simon_Jester wrote:"Yeah [I got a big piece of one of their SD(P)s], and I shot six SD(P)s dry to do it... that missile defense of theirs, it's a bear."
Indeed, this is a point I made earlier (though he gets 1 outright kill, and a piece of a second).
Simon_Jester wrote:
Ahriman238 wrote:Now there's something you want to hear as you prepare to unleash the biggest single missile salvo in the history of ever.
I don't know. It's not like the thousands of live nuclear warheads you're lobbing at the enemy will sting less if you're in a good mood when you launch them. WHatever makes the Graysons feel good, I guess.
Gotta say, I got chills when I read that the first time.
Simon_Jester wrote:Honestly, if it hadn't been for the political crap, plus the secret weapons (the super-LAC, the MDM, and maaaybe to an extent Ghost Rider), I think McQueen was about to turn the war around.
MDMs are part of Ghost Rider. And really, Caparelli's approach to fending off the PRN's Operation Scylla relied heavily on Ghost Rider's capabilities. It was a key part of suckering the PRN into their Operation Bagration and giving the RMN time to build up 8th Fleet for Buttercup.
Simon_Jester wrote:[One wonders how long it would have taken Haven to create their first native-build podlayers on their own. They know what the things are, they have to have gotten THAT much from interviewing Caslet... and now they have the pods and know damn well how effective they are]
From AoV, the Peep ONI didn't really buy his description of Wayfarer's firepower, probably figuring he was trying to make the Q-ship that captured his ship seem tougher. Believable, given the 2nd Hancock and 2nd Basilisk whitewashes.
