Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[VhenRa]

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

Andromeda uses mass manipulation technology from memory. The Andromeda herself is weighing only a few tons or something when active. As far as wars missiles go... wouldn't Honorverse particle shielding lolnope most settings? Given they weigh less then a ton and aren't moving at like 70% of light?

[Batman]

Um-proton torpedoes aren't kinetic impactors you now, they 'do' have warheads. Warheads that can threaten Wars warships, which have shields that can pretty much ignore anything the Honorverse can throw at them.

[VhenRa]

Um-proton torpedoes aren't kinetic impactors you now, they 'do' have warheads. Warheads that can threaten Wars warships, which have shields that can pretty much ignore anything the Honorverse can throw at them.

Yeah, but they have to get CLOSE enough to detonate. Does it help them much if they get deflected 100 KMs away or something?

[Batman]

They're not getting deflected until they hit the sidewall, at which point they likely detonate, putting some serious stress on the sidewall (they 'are' designed to deal with shielded targets so chances are they aren't just going to shatter themselves against the sidewall). Given the firepower/shield resilience discrepancy between HH and Wars it's not going to take all that many torpedoes to kill the sidewall, the HH ship's defenses are tailored around attacking wedged missiles considerably larger than the fighters that launched the Wars missiles and are likely limited to lightspeed sensors. I don't see them intercepting proton torpedoes with any degree of accuracy. If the Wars fighters get within missile range, there's enough of them, and they carry the proper payload, the HH ship is scrap metal (or a superheated expanding cloud of plasma, depending on circumstances). And we know they can do the 'enough of them' and 'carry the proper payload' to the extent of killing baby SSDs against Wars defenses. The big question that remains is 'what is the range of a fighter-scale anti-capship proton torpedo'? Anything above a lightsecond should to the trick but we rarely see those ranges in Wars.

[Simon_Jester]

Plus even Honorverse countermissiles are (even without the wedge) noticeably larger than most Wars fighters, leave alone Wars missiles, and without the wedge they're a much harder to locate target. And that's assuming they have to wander into CM range to begin with.

You'd have to launch the countermissile on command guidance, which might work but would have problems.

Given time to adapt and reengineer one's systems, an Honorverse countermissile could be modified to be a quite effective antifighter weapon, since it's designed to engage the fighters from ranges at which most SF fighters cannot shoot back (a million plus kilometers against a shielded, maneuvering target), and has accelerations high enough to overmatch those of most SF fighters (including, for example, Star Wars).

But as currently designed, an Honorverse countermissile leaves a lot to be desired in this role, and the task would be pretty much restricted to shipboard beam weapons including point defense lasers.

Shooting down an Honorverse countermissile with a fighter's onboard weapons would be very difficult owing to their great acceleration; if they make any evasive maneuvers or doglegs at all they'd be hard targets indeed.

Andromeda uses mass manipulation technology from memory. The Andromeda herself is weighing only a few tons or something when active. As far as wars missiles go... wouldn't Honorverse particle shielding lolnope most settings? Given they weigh less then a ton and aren't moving at like 70% of light?

Particle shielding can't handle a radiation flux of charged particles over...

I worked this out in 2011, here.

At 0.9c, interplanetary hydrogen hitting the bow of your ship dumps 100-500 kilowatts' worth of 2.2 GeV protons onto each square meter of the hull. Honorverse shipboard radiation shielding can't handle that and reliably protect the underlying hull. Which is why Honorverse ships are limited to 0.8c in sidereal space (at which the radiation flux is about 40% less energetic; I can redo these calculations in this thread if you like).

But a radiation shield that can't reliably stop 0.9c protons at an intensity of a few hundred kilowatts per square meter is going to crumple like so much gold foil if it gets hit by a typical soft-SF weaponized particle beam.

[Side note, 400 kilowatts per square meter is roughly one kiloton per thousand square kilometers per second, so it's like being, oh... thirty kilometers from a one-megaton nuclear explosion, each second. Nasty, but not something that would reliably destroy solid, heavily armored constructions]

Now, meanwhile... Wedges have magical stop-anything properties. Although sidewalls really shouldn't be able to laugh off thirty-gigaton kinetic impacts from a missile ramming them and be penetrable by a hundred kiloton X-ray laser bolt. Honorverse particle shielding, though, while effective against certain kinds of attacks. Like the aforementioned one-megaton warhead at forty or fifty kilometers, or a hard-SF particle beam that realistically is more like a dispersed "spray target with intense radiation" weapon.

Um-proton torpedoes aren't kinetic impactors you now, they 'do' have warheads. Warheads that can threaten Wars warships, which have shields that can pretty much ignore anything the Honorverse can throw at them.

Yeah, but they have to get CLOSE enough to detonate. Does it help them much if they get deflected 100 KMs away or something?

Actually, IF we buy the yields quoted on this forum, they might well be able to detonate from outside the sidewall and still kill the ship, because they are just that much nastier than nuclear warheads.

[Batman]

While I'm one of the people who have absolutely no problem with those yields I was rather thinking in terms of the first (or the first three, or whatever) torpedo salvoes killing the sidewall, and the followup torpedoes killing the ship. Which, on hindsight, doesn't seem to be the way it works in the Honorverse-hits that actually penetrate the sidewall weaken/kill the sidewall by physically destroying the sidewall generators, but I don't think Trek style 'wearing the shields sidewall down' attacks ever actually happened.

And yes, I was talking about CMs and targeting systems as currently exist in HH. Could they adapt to the threat of Wars fighters given time? Probably, at least to some extent. Eventually. Until then, the Wars fighters are likely mostly invulnerable unless they have to stray into PDL range to launch (and are going to be pretty hard targets even there).

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly, they probably do have to get that close; we just plain don't have a lot of evidence of Star Wars ships routinely launching from farther away than point defense lasers can lock and fire. And we DO have lots of what you might call 'negative' evidence: why would anyone deliberately close to 10% (or 1%, or 0.1%) of their maximum effective range against a well-defended target?

[Batman]

Because against that target it might not be their maximum effective range. We know Wars has jamming so that might considerably cut into the range at which they can get a lock/reasonably expect the missiles to maintain that lock (doesn't really explain why they close to 70mm rocket ranges at times but meh), and they'd be up against Wars sensors and defenses. While HH has sensors/ECM up the wazzoo too, it's all based on gravitics and EM, whereas Wars sensor and jamming systems seem to work mostly on magic technobabble (when Lando cobbled together an actual EM band radio in the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy everybody was flabberghasted by his use of such antiquated technology).
Of course, to an extent that works both ways-the Wars side is highly unlikely to have EM jammers or gravitics spoofing gear, too.

And all that just covers the technology. The Wars pilots are going to need time to figure out they can get away with launching from far further out than they're used to (assuming I'm right about that), but that again goes both ways, the HH crews have to adapt to shooting at targets that are not only smaller than their own missiles but have little to no gravitic signature (and fire even tinier missiles).

[Simon_Jester]

Well, my default is to assume at least some degree of interoperability between one party's technobabble and another's because otherwise you get too many "mutually impenetrable" cases of "HAH! Your weapon is not specifically a SUBSPACE weapon, so it has no effect!" "Ah, but your SUBSPACE weapon is clearly not guided by an ETHERIC DETECTULATOR, so you cannot even see my ship!"

[Batman]

And that's a sensible approach when the technobabble is vague on what it can do. That is not the case here. We have a pretty clear idea of what Wars and HH sensors and weapons (offensive and defensive) are capable of.

[Crazedwraith]

I've been reading On Bassalisk Station again after procuring a paperback copy of my very own. (Read a friend's copy at first) Now I hope is a better place to comment than resurrecting the first thread. But I remember Ahriman was wondering what the post of Sailing Master was about? I can't remember how much was said about this at the time but I remembered about it each time Mercedes Brigham, Sailing Master of HMS Fearless was mentioned.

Well, in the actual Navy the Master was a position that was sort of the most senior non-comissioned officer on board. But his main responsibility was navigation and sailing the ship, keeping it clear of navigational hazard like rocks and shoals etc.

Now it seems weird that Honorverse ships would have such a post since it's navigation was done by astogration. But every time Honor needs some big navigational tasks preplanned. She always asks to astrogator, and Brigham the sailing master to get together. (Like the sensor bouy drop offs for example) and it's Brigham who duty requires her to formally object to Honor's course that melt's the courier ship's nodes 'accidently' and Brigham takes over the astrogator's roll when the astrogator is killed in combat with the Q-Ship Sirius.

Additionally, the big infodump on hyperspace (half through the climax of the book. way to go Weber) also mentions hazards and difficulties in hyperspace such as moving between hyperspace bands that needs sails to be trimmed else bad stuff happens. Now these hazards are never really touched upon again in later books.

Now this makes sense to me. Because the position of Sailing Master is said to be being phased out. So what if the Sailing Master is a back astrogator with special duties to avoid collisions and space hazards and things. An honorverse ship's sails is its ftl drive after all. So if hyperspace travel is become safer and more automated. All the monitoring and sail trimming that was the sailing master's responsibility is no longer needed and those hazards aren't mentioned in later books.

Am I making any sense?

Strangely though, given it definitely seems to involve astogation, Honor herself did a stint as Sailing Master on HMS Osprey early in her career. Maybe someone in BuPer was forcing her to sink or swim/get passed her math issues?

[Mr Bean]

I wonder if it's the reverse astrogator used to ONLY handle FTL calculations and conditions while the sailing master handled all sub-light maneuvers. If old FTL jumps were the equivalent of 11th dimensional math and were part feel/part luck/part science it makes sense that someone on the ship does nothing but crunch FTL jump calculations all day in case the ship needs to jump to lightspeed. Because if the sailing master's job is to object when the captain wants to run a in system course that will result in the minimum safe distance between two Impeller ships being violated then it makes sense of the sailing master is pure sub-light while the astrogator handles everything FTL. Now I'm no hyper physicist but I don't see how you qualify to become a astrogator without getting certed as a sailing master at some point so maybe greater training combined with improved computers removes that position breakdown.

[Simon_Jester]

Now it seems weird that Honorverse ships would have such a post since it's navigation was done by astogration. But every time Honor needs some big navigational tasks preplanned. She always asks to astrogator, and Brigham the sailing master to get together. (Like the sensor bouy drop offs for example) and it's Brigham who duty requires her to formally object to Honor's course that melt's the courier ship's nodes 'accidently' and Brigham takes over the astrogator's roll when the astrogator is killed in combat with the Q-Ship Sirius.

In theory, it would make sense to have a "sailing master" whose responsibility is to make the the ship is physically secure from navigational hazards and a "navigator" whose responsibility is to say "in order to reach this point, we should go this way at this acceleration or this length of time." However, it would also make sense to consolidate the two roles under one department, or for the "sailing master" to end up as an assistant navigator whose job is to quietly remind the navigator that the course they just plotted involves flying through a planet, before anyone gets squashed.

Now this makes sense to me. Because the position of Sailing Master is said to be being phased out. So what if the Sailing Master is a back astrogator with special duties to avoid collisions and space hazards and things. An honorverse ship's sails is its ftl drive after all. So if hyperspace travel is become safer and more automated. All the monitoring and sail trimming that was the sailing master's responsibility is no longer needed and those hazards aren't mentioned in later books.

Am I making any sense?

Yes. Yes you are...

Strangely though, given it definitely seems to involve astogation, Honor herself did a stint as Sailing Master on HMS Osprey early in her career. Maybe someone in BuPer was forcing her to sink or swim/get passed her math issues?

That's... fairly clever.

[Ahriman238]

The repercussions of the Battle of Monica were still wending their way through the Navy's labyrinthine bowels—and the gladiatorial circus of the courts was only just beginning, really—but the battle itself had been fought over ten T-months ago. Although the SLN hadn't been directly involved in the Royal Manticoran Navy's destruction of the Monican Navy, the consequences for Technodyne Industries had been profound. And Technodyne had been one of the Navy's major contractors for four hundred years. It was perfectly reasonable for Rajampet, as the chief of naval operations, to be deeply involved in trying to salvage something from the shipwreck of investigations, indictments, and show trials, and Kolokoltsov never doubted that the admiral's attention had been tightly focused on that task for the past several T-weeks.

Apparently the relationship between Technodyne and the SLN goes back centuries, and the trials for "losing" so many ships that turned up in Monica are just beginning.

"They weren't?" The question came from Wodoslawski, not Rajampet, and Kolokoltsov glanced at her.

She was twenty-five T-years younger than he was—a third-gerneration prolong recipient with dark red hair, gray eyes, and quite an attractive figure. She was also fairly new to her position as the real head of the Treasury Department, and she'd received it, following her predecesor's demise, only as a compromise between the other permanent senior undersecretaries. She knew perfectly well that she'd been everyone else's second choice—that all her current colleagues had allies they would really have preferred to see in that slot. But she'd been there for over a decade, now, and she'd solidified her powerbase quite nicely.

She was no longer the junior probationary member of the quintet of permanent undersecretaries who truly ran the League from their personal fiefdoms in the Foreign Ministry, Commerce Department, Interior Department, Department of Education and Information, and Treasury Department. She was, however, the only one of them who'd been out-system and unavailable when the first Manticoran diplomatic note arrived. As such, she could make an excellent claim to bearing no responsibility for how that note had been handled, and from her expression, Kolokoltsov thought sourly, she was thoroughly aware of that minor fact.

Wodolawski is the youngest, most recent member, and the unofficial head of the Treasury Dept.

Abruzzi only snorted, although Kolokoltsov suspected he was tempted to do something considerably more forceful. The vast majority of the Solarian League's member star systems looked after their own educational systems, which meant, despite its name, that Education and Information was primarily concerned with the information half of its theoretical responsibilities. Abruzzi's position thus made him, in effect, the Solarian League's chief propagandist. In that role, it had been his job to find a positive spin to put on Josef Byng's actions, and he'd been working on it ever since the Manties' first diplomatic note reached Old Chicago.

Abruzzi, officially of education, in actuality the Mandarin's propaganda guy.

"All right, Rajani. Approximately ninety minutes ago, we received a second note from the Manticorans. Under the circumstances, the fact that we decided to opt for a 'reasoned and deliberate' response to their original complaint—and refused to let anyone think we were allowing ourselves to be rushed by any Manticoran demands—may have been less optimal than we'd thought. I don't imagine getting our response to their first note a couple of days after they banged off their second note to us is going to amuse Queen Elizabeth and her prime minister very much.

"And the reason they've sent us this second note is that when Admiral Gold Peak arrived in New Tuscany she issued exactly the demands the Manties had warned us about in their first note. She demanded that Byng stand down his ships and permit Manticoran boarding parties to sequester and examine their sensor data relative to the destruction of three of her destroyers. She also informed him that the Star Empire of Manticore intended to insist upon an open examination of the facts and intended to hold the guilty parties responsible under the appropriate provisions of interstellar law for the unprovoked destruction of their ships and the deaths of their personnel. And"—Kolokoltsov allowed his eyes to flip sideways to Abruzzi for a moment—"it would appear it wasn't all part of some sort of propaganda maneuver on their part, after all."

The Mandarins can at least admit when they screw up.

"In that case, Rajani, I recommend you read Admiral Sigbee's report yourself. She found herself in command after Admiral Byng's . . . demise, and the Manties were kind enough to forward her dispatches to us along with their note. According to our own security people, they didn't even open the file and read it, first. Apparently they saw no reason to."

This time, Rajampet was clearly bereft of speech. He just sat there, staring at Kolokoltsov, and the diplomat shrugged.

"According to the synopsis of Admiral Sigbee's report, the Manties destroyed Admiral Byng's flagship, the Jean Bart, with a single missile salvo launched from far beyond our own ships' effective range. His flagship was completely destroyed, Rajani. There were no survivors at all. Under the circumstances, and since Admiral Gold Peak—who, I suppose I might also mention, turns out to be none other than Queen Elizabeth's first cousin and fifth in line for the Manticoran throne—had made it crystal clear that she'd destroy all of Byng's ships if her demands were not met, Admiral Sigbee—under protest, I need hardly add—complied with them."

Manticore passed on Sigbee's report, unaltered and apparently even unread. The report warning them about MDMs.

On the face of it, the loss of a single ship and the surrender of twenty or so others, counting Byng's screening destroyers, could hardly be considered a catastrophe for the Solarian League Navy. The SLN was the biggest fleet in the galaxy. Counting active duty and reserve squadrons, it boasted almost eleven thousand superdreadnoughts, and that didn't even count the thousands upon thousands of battlecruisers, cruisers, and destroyers of Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet . . . or the thousands of ships in the various system-defense forces maintained for local security by several of the League's wealthier member systems. Against that kind of firepower, against such a massive preponderance of tonnage, the destruction of a single battlecruiser and the two thousand or so people aboard it, was less than a flea bite. It was certainly a far, far smaller relative loss, in terms of both tonnage and personnel, than the Manticorans had suffered when Byng blew three of their newest destroyers out of space with absolutely no warning.

But it was the first Solarian warship destroyed by hostile action in centuries, and no Solarian League admiral had ever surrendered his command.

Until now.

Scale of the SLN, and Sigbee is the first flag officer to ever surrender in that service.

And that was what truly had the others worried, Kolokoltsov thought coldly. Just as it had him worried. The omnipotence of the Solarian League Navy was the fundamental bedrock upon which the entire League stood. The whole purpose of the League was to maintain interstellar order, protect and nurture the interactions, prosperity, and sovereignty of its member systems. There'd been times—more times than Kolokoltsov could count, really—when Rajampet and his predecessors had found themselves fighting tooth and nail for funding, given the fact that it was so obvious that no one conceivable hostile star nation, or combination of them, could truly threaten the League's security. Yet while they might have had to fight for the funding they wanted, they'd never come close to not getting the funding they actually needed. In fact, their fellow bureaucrats had never seriously considered cutting off or even drastically curtailing expenditures on the Navy.

Partly, that was because no matter how big Frontier Fleet was, it would never have enough ships to be everywhere it needed to be to carry out its mandate as the League's neighborhood cop and enforcer. Battle Fleet would have been a much more reasonable area for cost reductions, except that it had more prestige and was even more deeply entrenched in the League's bureaucratic structure than Frontier Fleet, not to mention having so many more allies in the industrial sector, given how lucrative superdreadnought building contracts were. But even the most fanatical expenditure-cutting reformer (assuming that any such mythical being existed anywhere in the Solarian League) would have found very few allies if he'd set his sights on the Navy's budget. Supporting the fleet was too important to the economy as a whole, and all the patronage that went with the disbursement of such enormous amounts was far too valuable to be surrendered. And, after all, making certain everyone else was as well aware as they were of the Navy's invincibility was an essential element of the clout wielded by the League in general and by the Office of Frontier Security, in particular.

Funding for the Navy, why they have 11,000 SDs when it's been centuries since they had a credible external threat.

"She did," Kolokoltsov confirmed. "And the Manties did board her ships, and they did take possession of their computers—their fully operable computers, with intact databases. At the time she was 'permitted' to include her dispatches along with Admiral Gold Peak's so we could receive her report as promptly as possible, she had no idea what ultimate disposition the Manties intend to make where her ships are concerned."

-snip-

"Than they've got an enormous amount of our secure technical data," he agreed. "Even worse, these were Frontier Fleet ships."

MacArtney looked physically ill. He was even better aware then Kolokoltsov of how the rest of the galaxy might react if some of the official, highly secret contingency plans stored in the computers of Frontier Fleet flagships were to be leaked.

I admit, I'm curious just what those contingency plans might be.

"They say the data they've recovered from Byng's computers completely supports the data they already sent to us. They say they've recovered Sigbee's copy of Byng's order to open fire on the Manticoran destroyers. They've appended her copy of the message traffic between Gold Peak and Byng, as well, and pointed out that Gold Peak repeatedly warned Byng not only that she would fire if he failed to comply with her instructions but that she had the capability to destroy his ships from beyond his effective range. And, by the way, Sigbee's attested the accuracy of the copies from her communications section.

"In other words, they've told us their original interpretation of what happened to their destroyers has been confirmed, and that the admiral responsible for that incident has now been killed, along with the destruction of his flagship and its entire crew, because he rejected their demands. And they've pointed out, in case any of us might miss it, that Byng's original actions at New Tuscany constitute an act of war under interstellar law and that under that same interstellar law, Admiral Gold Peak was completely justified in the actions she took. Indeed," he showed his teeth in something no one would ever mistake for a smile, "they've pointed out how restrained Gold Peak was, under the circumstances, since Byng's entire task force was entirely at her mercy and she gave him at least three separate opportunities to comply with their demands without bloodshed."

The thing being, Mike was pretty restrained, but it doesn't matter. Any defiance of the mighty SLN cannot be permitted. But what do we make of that range effectiveness.

"Then it doesn't goddammed matter!" Rajampet shot back. "We're talking about frigging battlecruisers, Nathan. Battlecruisers—and Frontier Fleet battlecruisers, at that. They don't begin to have the antimissile defenses a ship-of-the-wall does, and no battlecruiser can take the kind of damage a waller can take! I don't care how many fancy missiles they've got, there's no way they can stop Battle Fleet if we throw four or five hundred superdreadnoughts straight at them, especially after the losses they've already taken in their damned Battle of Manticore."

It's been tried, guy.

"I might find that thought just a little more reassuring if not for the fact that all reports indicate they apparently just finished taking out something like three or four hundred Havenite SDs in the same battle," MacArtney pointed out even more acidly.

"So what," Rajampet more than half-sneered. "One damned batch of barbarians beating on another one. What's that got to do with us?"

MacArtney stared at him, as if he literally couldn't comprehend what Rajampet was saying, and Kolokoltsov didn't blame MacArtney at all. Even allowing for the fact that all of this had come at the CNO cold . . . .

Even the Mandarins can't believe Admiral Rajampet's arrogance and stupidity.

"So we send a thousand," Rajampet said. "Or, hell, we send twice that many! We've got over two thousand in full commission, another three hundred in the yards for regular overhaul and refit cycles, and over eight thousand in reserve. They may've beaten the crap out of the Havenites, but they got the shit shot out of them, too, from all reports. They can't have more than a hundred of the wall left! And however long-ranged their missiles may be, it takes hundreds of laser heads to take out a single superdreadnought. Against the kind of counter missile fire and decoys five or six hundred of our wallers can throw out, they'd need a hell of a lot more missiles than anything they've got left could possibly throw!"

That's 700 short of the earlier figure, but Rjana is right about the scale of attack the SLN can send out. I'm a lot less confident about those ships' ability to be anything but targets.

"That's exactly the point. I don't care how damned justified the Manties may have thought they were. For that matter, I don't care how 'justified' they may actually have been, and I don't give a damn whether or not they were operating within the letter of interstellar war. What I care about is the fact that we have to make an example out of them if we don't want to suddenly find ourselves eyeball-to-eyeball with other neobarbs, all over the galaxy, who suddenly think they can screw around with the Solarian League, too."

Just so we've established that the decision-makers don't care who is right or wrong.

"They've already released the news?" Abruzzi seemed stunned in a way even the news of Jean Bart's destruction had failed to achieve.

"That's what they tell us." Kolokoltsov shrugged."When you get right down to it, they may not have a lot of choice. It's been two months since the first incident, and the communications loop from New Tuscany to Manticore's only about three weeks. Word of something this big was bound to leak to their newsies pretty damned quickly after Byng managed to get himself blown away." Rajampet's eyes glittered at his choice of words, but Kolokoltsov didn't especially care. "Under the circumstances, they probably figured they couldn't keep it under wraps much longer even if they tried, so they'd damned well better get their version of it out first—especially to their own people."

That is what happens when you sit on their pressing message for three weeks.

. "If you wind up needing a formal declaration of war, don't you think it would be a good thing if nobody out there—like, oh, Beowulf, for example—decided to exercise that power?"

Wait, they only need one dissenting voice to spike a declaration of war? No wonder they never bother.

"We don't need any frigging declarations of war! This is a clear-cut case of self-defense, of responding to an actual attack on our ships and personnel, and the judiciary's interpretation of Article Seven has always supported the Navy's authority to respond to that kind of attack in whatever strength is necessary."

Kolokoltsov started to respond to that statement, then made himself pause. Rajampet had a point about the judiciary's interpretation of Article Seven of the League Constitution . . . historically, at least. The third section of that particular article had been specifically drafted to permit the SLN to respond to emergency situations without waiting weeks or months for reports to trickle back to the capital and for the ponderous political mechanism to issue formal declarations of war. It had not, however, been intended by the Constitution's drafters as a blank check, and if Rajampet wanted to move the Navy to an actual war footing—to begin mobilizing additional superdreadnoughts from the Reserve, for example—someone was going to point out that he needed the authorization of that same formal declaration. At which point someone else was going to support Rajampet's position.

Rather similar to how in the US the President can authorize the military to go fight, as long as it gets wrapped up within two months or they secure a declaration of war. It made sense in a time before instant communication.

He wondered how many of his colleagues grasped the true gravity of the threat they faced. If Rajampet was able to crush Manticore quickly after all, this would almost certainly blow over, as many another tempest had over the course of the League's long history. But if the Navy couldn't crush Manticore quickly, if this turned into a succession of bloody fiascoes, not even the most resounding ultimate victory would be enough to prevent seismic shockwaves throughout the entire tissue of bureaucratic fiefdoms which held the League together.

He suspected from Abruzzi's attitude that Malachai, if no one else, had at least an inkling of just how dangerous this could turn out to be. Wodoslawski probably did, too, although it was harder to tell in her case. Rajampet obviously wasn't thinking that far ahead, and Kolokoltsov honestly didn't have a clue whether or not MacArtney and Quartermain were able to see beyond the immediate potential consequences for their own departments.

Well, Manticore can certainly supply a chain of bloody disasters. Balkanization is looking more and more viable as a long-term strategy.

"Then how in hell do you think we're going to convince that 'public support' of yours we're in the right if we smash the Manties like they deserve?" Rajampet sneered.

"We lie." Abruzzi shrugged. "It's not like we haven't done it before. And, in the end, the truth is what the winner says it is. But in order to rebut the Manties' version effectively, I have to know what it is, first. And we can't make any military moves until after I've had a chance to do the preliminary spadework."

Just to establish the lack of virtue in the Solly leadership.

[Simon_Jester]

But it was the first Solarian warship destroyed by hostile action in centuries, and no Solarian League admiral had ever surrendered his command.

Until now.

Scale of the SLN, and Sigbee is the first flag officer to ever surrender in that service.[/quote]Honestly, I'm skeptical of the idea that the SLN has gone 'centuries' without losing a ship. Capital ships, sure, but destroyers and cruisers? Frontier Fleet leads way too active a lifestyle for that to be the case.

Funding for the Navy, why they have 11,000 SDs when it's been centuries since they had a credible external threat.

Of course, to be fair, like 80% of those are in the parking garage under plastic wrap, so it's not like they cost very much to maintain.

MacArtney looked physically ill. He was even better aware then Kolokoltsov of how the rest of the galaxy might react if some of the official, highly secret contingency plans stored in the computers of Frontier Fleet flagships were to be leaked.

I admit, I'm curious just what those contingency plans might be.

Probably stuff like genocidal bombardments of innocent planets outside League space, given the shit we know OFS gets up to.

"Then it doesn't goddammed matter!" Rajampet shot back. "We're talking about frigging battlecruisers, Nathan. Battlecruisers—and Frontier Fleet battlecruisers, at that. They don't begin to have the antimissile defenses a ship-of-the-wall does, and no battlecruiser can take the kind of damage a waller can take! I don't care how many fancy missiles they've got, there's no way they can stop Battle Fleet if we throw four or five hundred superdreadnoughts straight at them, especially after the losses they've already taken in their damned Battle of Manticore."

It's been tried, guy.

To be fair, no it has not. That was three hundred superdreadnoughts. And Rajampet is entirely ignorant of just how much vastly more powerful and dangerous a modern Havenite SD(P) is than his own ships.

Hard to blame him, when only ten years ago (probably more like seven) any Solarian SD would, tonnage being equal, have taken any Havenite SD and carved it like a roast.

"I might find that thought just a little more reassuring if not for the fact that all reports indicate they apparently just finished taking out something like three or four hundred Havenite SDs in the same battle," MacArtney pointed out even more acidly.

"So what," Rajampet more than half-sneered. "One damned batch of barbarians beating on another one. What's that got to do with us?"

MacArtney stared at him, as if he literally couldn't comprehend what Rajampet was saying, and Kolokoltsov didn't blame MacArtney at all. Even allowing for the fact that all of this had come at the CNO cold . . . .

Even the Mandarins can't believe Admiral Rajampet's arrogance and stupidity.

And, yes, he's a moron.

"So we send a thousand," Rajampet said. "Or, hell, we send twice that many! We've got over two thousand in full commission, another three hundred in the yards for regular overhaul and refit cycles, and over eight thousand in reserve. They may've beaten the crap out of the Havenites, but they got the shit shot out of them, too, from all reports. They can't have more than a hundred of the wall left! And however long-ranged their missiles may be, it takes hundreds of laser heads to take out a single superdreadnought. Against the kind of counter missile fire and decoys five or six hundred of our wallers can throw out, they'd need a hell of a lot more missiles than anything they've got left could possibly throw!"

That's 700 short of the earlier figure, but Rjana is right about the scale of attack the SLN can send out. I'm a lot less confident about those ships' ability to be anything but targets.

Uh, no, "over 2000" plus "300" plus "over 8000" can very easily add up to "11000."

However, yes, they are basically just targets. If the League actually HAD any SD(P)s with missiles capable of replying effectively to the MDM threat, then those swarms of prewar ships could at least thicken the active missile defenses and produce masses of countermissile spam a la Havenite "wall in space" doctrine. But in and of themselves, they're useless except as a massive ablative wall of targets.

Rather similar to how in the US the President can authorize the military to go fight, as long as it gets wrapped up within two months or they secure a declaration of war. It made sense in a time before instant communication.

The US actually did not have that power until the War Powers Act of 1973. If anything, it makes MORE sense to grant the executive the power to order the military into a fight without authorization in an era where communications ARE instantaneous. Without instant communications this sort of thing inevitably winds up falling on local commanders' authority (i.e. Byng and Crandall), and by the time the executive even knows anything's happened, it's too react meaningfully. And seeking congressional support won't cause any meaningful delay.

[Terralthra]

MacArtney looked physically ill. He was even better aware then Kolokoltsov of how the rest of the galaxy might react if some of the official, highly secret contingency plans stored in the computers of Frontier Fleet flagships were to be leaked.

I admit, I'm curious just what those contingency plans might be.

Probably stuff like genocidal bombardments of innocent planets outside League space, given the shit we know OFS gets up to.

At least two of them are detailed somewhere (not sure where, but I think Mission of Honor): Case Buccaneer, in which Frontier Fleet ships masquerade as pirates in order to destabilize a verge system and provide a pretext for the Solarians to come in to "stabilize" the situation, and Case Fabius, in which orbital facilities would be demolished if local authorities rejected economic concessions to Solarian-colluding transstellars.

[Simon_Jester]

Side note: I just picked up my copy of Mission of Honor, the book Ahriman's quoting.

It's interesting that later in that same Meeting of the Mandarins he quotes here, our viewpoint character, Kolkowhatsisname*, does actually come right out and say "Let's think shit through before we reply to this next note instead of just firing off whatever the hell we feel like after a few minutes of bullshitting around a conference table. Oh, and start making plans for actually fighting Manticore, including very pessimistic assumptions of what they're capable of, we don't want to lose ships we don't have to or underestimate the enemy."

Which is pretty cool when you think about it.

Of course, realistically the SLN's battle fleet under Rajampet's leadership is totally incapable of making appropriate 'pessimistic' assumptions (although even he pays lip service to the idea, in chapter two). Or rather, their 'pessimistic' assumptions probably fall a long way short of the reality. Because (by author fiat if nothing else) their institutional arrogance is so absolutely ironclad that it makes Janacek look smart by comparison.

What makes it somewhat more annoying is that the civilian leadership seems readier to believe that the SLN isn't invincible than Rajampet is. Even if he's the granddaddy of all staff pukes, you'd think he'd know enough about military technology to at least begin to comprehend that the SLN can lose, at least in principle, and that any defeat as humiliating and one-sided as what happened to Byng indicates that something very significant just changed. And to at least seriously think about paying attention to the Manticore-Havenite Wars.

Then again, since he's been in office a while, he's probably presided over the latest round of updates. He may be too busy feeling godlike over the modest improvements in SLN ships' performance lately, and enjoying the sensation of being the biggest baddest man in the biggest baddest fighting service that's ever existed, to recognize that those improvements aren't the be-all and end-all of warfare.

Which is still a pretty dumb thing for a man to do, especially a man who's supposedly fought his way to the top of a highly bureaucratic service. People who do that may not be the best tacticians or the best at their actual jobs, but they really should have learned not to underestimate an enemy, especially one who's already given you a nasty surprise at least once.
________________

*I know I could look it up, but frankly all these interchangeable forgettable ministers are kind of dull, so making fun of it is amusing...

[Simon_Jester]

Another note:

Think about the Manticore-Haven War from a Sollie point of view. First of all, it is literally one wormhole away from the League's core territory. The outcome is of serious strategic interest to the League; if it wasn't, then the League wouldn't get so stressed out about Manticore's control of the Junction in the first place. Meanwhile, Haven is supposedly still thought of as the 'jewel of the Verge' or whatever, arguably the single most successful of the 'neobarb' polities.

If any war would ever draw the Sollies' attention, this one should.

Then think about what actually happens. The Manticorans make a slow, grinding advance, pushing Haven back little by little even though Haven has superior numbers. Even if you don't actually know what the ships on both sides are armed with, this suggests that they're equipped with roughly equivalent technology, with Manticore having a modest edge in equipment quality, generalship, or both.

Then, suddenly, Manticore starts going through Havenite systems like a bandsaw, and anyone who can read a map knows that's happening. Haven is suddenly hugely outclassed. That is not normal.

So the best-case scenario for the League, then, is...

"Haven's ships are very primitive, like ours were 150 years ago. In which case to kick their asses so hard, Manticore would still need modern ships at least... Where'd they get them from? All the contractors we know about are helping Haven, not the Manties! In which case they just kicked Haven's ass, have hundreds of capital ships armed with modern-grade technology..."

They're still the biggest threat the SLN has encountered in a looong time. They could conceivably dogpile and destroy a respectable SLN battlegroup. Things could get awkward. Sure, they'd lose in the long run, but it'd at least be worth trying to find out what weapons they used to so easily defeat Haven, and where they got them from.

[Terralthra]

Of course, realistically the SLN's battle fleet under Rajampet's leadership is totally incapable of making appropriate 'pessimistic' assumptions (although even he pays lip service to the idea, in chapter two). Or rather, their 'pessimistic' assumptions probably fall a long way short of the reality. Because (by author fiat if nothing else) their institutional arrogance is so absolutely ironclad that it makes Janacek look smart by comparison.

What makes it somewhat more annoying is that the civilian leadership seems readier to believe that the SLN isn't invincible than Rajampet is. Even if he's the granddaddy of all staff pukes, you'd think he'd know enough about military technology to at least begin to comprehend that the SLN can lose, at least in principle, and that any defeat as humiliating and one-sided as what happened to Byng indicates that something very significant just changed. And to at least seriously think about paying attention to the Manticore-Havenite Wars.

Then again, since he's been in office a while, he's probably presided over the latest round of updates. He may be too busy feeling godlike over the modest improvements in SLN ships' performance lately, and enjoying the sensation of being the biggest baddest man in the biggest baddest fighting service that's ever existed, to recognize that those improvements aren't the be-all and end-all of warfare.

Which is still a pretty dumb thing for a man to do, especially a man who's supposedly fought his way to the top of a highly bureaucratic service. People who do that may not be the best tacticians or the best at their actual jobs, but they really should have learned not to underestimate an enemy, especially one who's already given you a nasty surprise at least once.

He was getting paid billions of Solarian credits by the Mesans specifically to cause the war between the SEM and the SL. Of course the advice he gave the other Mandarins was bad and massively underestimated the wood chipper they'd be sticking their dick into.

[SpottedKitty]

He was getting paid billions of Solarian credits by the Mesans specifically to cause the war between the SEM and the SL. Of course the advice he gave the other Mandarins was bad and massively underestimated the wood chipper they'd be sticking their dick into.

<nod> He was paid to be a "useful idiot", although IMHO there are a few clues here and there that he had a natural talent for it as well.

[Simon_Jester]

He was getting paid billions of Solarian credits by the Mesans specifically to cause the war between the SEM and the SL. Of course the advice he gave the other Mandarins was bad and massively underestimated the wood chipper they'd be sticking their dick into.

The fact that he's getting paid to provoke a war doesn't mean he's going to fight that war in such a way that he's setting himself up to lose.

A smart Rajampet would have acted somewhat differently. That is, one who actually is trying to secure and maintain his own power and position, and who has the basic competence to have 'earned' his position, for certain values of 'earned.'

Basically, he'd probably still have done all the same things at the macro level, but I doubt he'd have sent such a huge task force straight for Manticore without a lot more thought about the strategic implications of long range missiles, or a good faith effort at intelligence gathering. The loss of Crandall's command would have been plenty to ensure a war would be fought, especially if it was combined with the Manticorans cutting off wormholes left and right.

This would also have preserved more Battle Fleet units to jump on and secure the wormhole network, where the Manticorans have been forced to parcel out small units with a few capital ships or battlecruiser squadrons, and where a large force of pre-MDM SDs might actually have a prayer of driving off the enemy.

He was getting paid billions of Solarian credits by the Mesans specifically to cause the war between the SEM and the SL. Of course the advice he gave the other Mandarins was bad and massively underestimated the wood chipper they'd be sticking their dick into.

<nod> He was paid to be a "useful idiot", although IMHO there are a few clues here and there that he had a natural talent for it as well.

Yeah. That's what I'm getting at. Most of the Solarian characters aren't just arrogant and overconfident and decadent. They're dumb. They make the same mistakes over and over for a period of months if not years.

Even accepting that the Mesan Alignment has been manipulating Solarian politics, you can't take such a huge political structure and realistically prevent smart, competent people from rising to the top of it. About all you can do is get those smart, competent people into your debt. Which may make them do 'wrong' things but won't make them too stupid or ignorant to figure out how to protect themselves from the consequences.

[Ahriman238]

I am sorry for the partial quotation, all of these meetings drag on for large chapters. Basically, it was late and I had work in the morning. From here on out I'm going to glance over a lot of the meetings unless something particularly relevant is brought up or decided.

[Simon_Jester]

Eh, yeah. The meetings can safely be fast-forwarded.

I'm reading the book right now; one of the few genuinely interesting meeting bits is where Honor meets Pritchart. It's made... pretty obvious, at least to me, that your observation about Honor and her social 'hacks' is spot-on. Pritchart has superb self-control- but it doesn't do her any good to control her expression and tone when she's dealing with an actual empath.

And, yeah, it's interesting that Honor's rise to prominence in the Manticoran elite correlates rather sharply with her developing empathic abilities, plus little things like being able to spot sub-millimeter dilations of people's pupils with a telescopic eye...

[Laguna]

Ahriman, I've greatly enjoyed all the HH analysis threads you've done (and the Dahak one too, which has prompted me to actually read beyond the first couple of chapters of Heirs Of Empire). Especially with the more recent novels, these ultra-condensed versions actually read better than the books themselves. I initially gave up on War Of Honor (got "distracted" and never went back), but when the new books came out in a flood, I did another re-read of the whole HH series, and even slogged all the way through WOH and AAC. These new books though, yikes, I think snails move faster than the plot does in these books!

Yeah, Mission Of Honor, the whole thing can be boiled down to three things: The Oyster Bay attack, Crandall getting curb-stomped, and the Honor-Pritchart meeting. Those are the meaningful events, probably the ONLY actual events in fact.

[Simon_Jester]

The mainline Honor novels are becoming a major problem that way- too many scenes that essentially reduce to details of Groups A, B, C, D, and E all reacting to the same event in parallel as they find out what happened. Although in Mission of Honor I can sort of see it, because it's Weber writing an end to the Manticore-Haven Wars. Which is certainly not something that'd realistically happen without a lot of deliberation and uncertainty from both sides.

The problem is that it's just... not good writing to create a situation where you basically have one plot event, then 200 pages of reaction in which no further plot events occur. Then do it again and again until you've sold another mass-market tome.

It became extremely clear with Mission of Honor that Weber has basically stopped writing the books as standalone novels... but the problem is that instead of writing elaborately plotted novel-length stories that flow into one another, he basically just took one novel and puffed it full of filler text until it was too long to be released as one novel. The process by which the confrontation with Byng escalated into a full Solarian invasion of Manticore really should have been compressed to about half its length and paired off with a good-sized chunk of what became A Rising Thunder.

Then the rest of A Rising Thunder and Shadow of Freedom could have been combined into one novel likewise, and the result would be a lot more appealing for people not already long-time fans of the series.