Battlestar Galactica vs Honor Harrington

[Vehrec]

How big to the sensors on Honorverse ships need to be in order to actually differentiate targets at their combat ranges? I recall that thread on sensors in OT or SLAM, but can't remember the specifics...

[The Dark]

Also, PD laser clusters can fire once every two seconds. Therefore, half the point defense weapons can fire on every missile if they can only fire once during the approach. If the missiles fly slowly enough that multiple shots can be attempted, it goes up proportionally. A Nike carries 30 PD lasers per broadside, allowing at least 15 shots against each torpedo. The obsolete Jean Bart has 16 clusters, allowing 8 shots per missile.

Keep in mind that I'm proposing approach from ahead or astern. Trek ships stand no chance of winning an engagement against Honorverse ships when approaching in their broadside firing arc, not at any range.

Even from ahead or astern, a battlecruiser has 8 to 12 PD clusters, allowing 4 to 6 shots against a torpedo. And if it's a Saganami-C class cruiser (like the Nasty Kitty or Jimmy Boy), the Federation ship would need to catch it entirely off guard and with even passive defenses down, given the non-throat-closing bow-and-stern walls. If it's aware, the Trek ship is even more screwed than usual if it approaches from ahead or astern, given the off-bore missile launch capability of the new cruisers. Against an old Courageous-class cruiser (like Fearless from OBS), the Trek ship would have better odds - have we ever established a time frame for both series for this little fracas?

Some potentially useful quotes from Weber on Baen's Bar and alt.books.david-weber regarding defenses:

Effective intercept range for CMs has been on the order of somewhere around 1,000,000 km for around 60 to 70 years as of OBS. 1,000,000 km equates to a flight time of roughly 14 seconds against a "max velocity" pre-MDM missile, which, with cycle times on CM launchers, usually gives time for no more than three CMs (from the same ship) to target each incoming missile (unless, of course, there are so few incoming that multiple CMs can be devoted to each of them from the same defensive launch, that is)...Laser clusters are usually used in "ganged" intercepts, concentrating the fire of multiple mounts in single threats, but in a saturation attack such as pods can generate, the "swamping" effect prevents this, which accounts for much of the increased deadliness in missile warfare.

In the Royal Manticoran Navy, for example, heavy cruisers have (on average) eight emitters per cluster. If I remember correctly (and I'm speaking from memory here) light cruisers and destroyers have six emitters and wallers have up to twelve emitters per cluster. The greater the number of emitters, the more rapid the cluster's combined rate of fire becomes, and a point defense laser, which is much lighter than an anti-shipping energy weapon, already has a very high rate of fire compared to the aforesaid anti-shipping weapon.

[A] ship can shift position somewhat within the area of its wedge. One can predict exactly where a ship will be within the volume of its wedge if it is seeking to attain the maximum possible acceleration (assuming that one has solid, reliable numbers on its inertial compensator's performance envelope), but at lower accelerations, ships can move "off center" within their wedges.

[Lord of the Abyss]

How big to the sensors on Honorverse ships need to be in order to actually differentiate targets at their combat ranges? I recall that thread on sensors in OT or SLAM, but can't remember the specifics...

My copy of Ashes of Victory is loaned out, but it has pictures at the back showing warships, including their main gravitic arrays. Here is where the latest free Weber Baen CD is available ( yes, it's legal ) at the Dahaks Orbit site; you can read Ashes of Victory and look. The online versions illustrations are blurry enough I can't read the small lettering, but if I'm recalling correctly the gravitic sensors are the large horizontal devices amidships, between the upper rows of missile tubes and grasers/lasers. So, pretty big for gravitic sensors.

[Sheridan]

<snip>
I wouldn't expect them to be able to get through the sidewalls at all, let alone the wedge... but I'd been taking that for granted from day one. The only thing I can see working is a rather desperate tactic involving point-blank engagement from ahead and astern, where the wedge isn't. Firing from warp MIGHT (might!) allow the Trekkers to launch and leave with impunity, but even so they're going to have a lot of trouble stopping Honorverse ships, and it's quite conceivable that they could shoot their magazines dry and still not do more than minor damage, unless they have a major tonnage advantage.
</snip>

Ah. My apology, then. I thought you were talking about either dropping out of warp and firing down the throat/up the kilt of the wedge or firing from warp at the ship from whatever angle the Trekkers decide to. Nevermind.

[Terralthra]

As evidenced by-what again? ALL damages done by proximity nukes against warships in the Honorverse were apparently done by double digit and up MT warheads and EVEN THEN they essentially annoyed a battlecruiser and moderately inconvenienced a battlecruiser-tonnage Q-ship.

The proximity nuke salvo Cardones snuck in on Thunder of God in The Honor of the Queen did far more than "annoy" it. It practically crippled it, setting up the final encounter of the battle wherein both it and Fearless sailed into energy range behind their wedges to hope for luck enough to finish the other off when they both rolled ship.

Edit: fixed tag.

[Lord of the Abyss]

As evidenced by-what again? ALL damages done by proximity nukes against warships in the Honorverse were apparently done by double digit and up MT warheads and EVEN THEN they essentially annoyed a battlecruiser and moderately inconvenienced a battlecruiser-tonnage Q-ship.

The proximity nuke salvo Cardones snuck in on Thunder of God in The Honor of the Queen did far more than "annoy" it. It practically crippled it, setting up the final encounter of the battle wherein both it and Fearless sailed into energy range behind their wedges to hope for luck enough to finish the other off when they both rolled ship.

"Practically crippled" is a bit much, but it certainly did serious damage:

He clenched his jaw as the latest damage reports scrolled up his screen. Thunder’s armor and the radiation shielding inside his wedge had let him live, but his port broadside had been reduced to five lasers and six tubes, and half of them were in local control. His maximum acceleration had been reduced twenty-one percent, his gravitics and half his other sensors—including all of them to port—were gone, and Workman’s report on his sidewall generators was grim. Thunder wasn’t—quite—naked to port, but spreading his remaining generators would weaken his sidewall to less than a third of design strength, and his radiation shields were completely gone. Simonds dared not even contemplate exposing that side of his ship to Harrington’s fire . . . but his starboard armament and fire control were untouched.

[Simon_Jester]

As evidenced by-what again? ALL damages done by proximity nukes against warships in the Honorverse were apparently done by double digit and up MT warheads and EVEN THEN they essentially annoyed a battlecruiser and moderately inconvenienced a battlecruiser-tonnage Q-ship.

First of all, you're wildly understating the damage the hits did. As an example, the shot that hit the battlecruiser in question:

Fearless writhed as a fresh hit killed two more missile tubes, but then someone emitted a banshee shriek of triumph, and Honor stared at her repeater. It wasn't possible! No one could get old-fashioned nukes through the very teeth of a modern warship's defenses! Yet Rafe Cardones had done it. Somehow, he'd done it!
But he hadn't scored direct hits. Saladin's impeller wedge flickered as she staggered out of the fireballs, clouds of atmosphere and vaporized alloy streamed back from where her port sidewall had died, but she was still there, and even as Honor watched, the maimed battlecruiser was rolling desperately to interpose the roof of her impeller wedge against the follow-up missiles charging down upon her. Her wedge restabilized, and her drive went to maximum power as her vector swung sharply away from Fearless.
She accelerated madly, breaking off, fleeing her mangled opponent, and HMS Fearless was too badly damaged to pursue...

[Meanwhile, aboard the battlecruiser...]
Sword Simonds held himself rigidly still as the medical orderly put the last stitch into the gash in his forehead, then waved aside the offer of a painkiller. The orderly retreated quickly, for he had more than enough to do elsewhere; there were over twelve hundred dead men in Thunder of God's hull, two-thirds of them soldiers who'd brought no vac suits aboard.
Simonds touched his own ugly, sutured wound, and knew he was lucky he'd only been knocked senseless, but he didn't feel that way. His head hurt like hell, and if he couldn't fault his exec's decision to break off, that didn't mean he liked the situation he'd found when he regained consciousness.
He clenched his jaw as the latest damage reports scrolled up his screen. Thunder's armor and the radiation shielding inside his wedge had let him live, but his port broadside had been reduced to five lasers and six tubes, and half of them were in local control. His maximum acceleration had been reduced twenty-one percent, his gravitics and half his other sensors—including all of them to port—were gone, and Workman's report on his sidewall generators was grim. Thunder wasn't—quite—naked to port, but spreading his remaining generators would weaken his sidewall to less than a third of design strength, and his radiation shields were completely gone. Simonds dared not even contemplate exposing that side of his ship to Harrington's fire . . . but his starboard armament and fire control were untouched.

That was from a pair of high megaton-range nuclear blasts going off in close proximity- not contact. Twelve hundred dead with close to 20% casualties among the actual crew. All the sensors and most of the main battery scoured off on one side, 20% reduction in speed, and shields permanently down to about 30% on the side that took the hit.

I'd call that more than an annoyance, wouldn't you?
________

Now, the ship is still there, and it can still fight (on the un-nuked side, anyway). There's a reason for that: Those ships are built with something close to an 'all or nothing' armor scheme. The core hull, which contains the fusion bottles, the computer cores, and most of the crew, is tough. So tough that megaton range bombs aren't going to get to them unless you start emplacing them on the hull as demo charges and blasting the armor off one layer at a time. And that means that the ship survives enemy fire very well, since the hull generally holds together as long as the fusion bottle and compensators don't let go.

But the weapon mounts, sidewall generators, impeller drive nodes, and sensor arrays have to be placed on the skin of the ship, and some of them are, by nature, vulnerable to enemy fire: ever tried armoring a radar antenna? They cannot stand up to close-proximity nuclear detonations, even "small" ones that are "only" in the kiloton range. The ship survives the hits, the crew will keep trying to patch something together as per Mr. Bean's comments, but for practical purposes, score enough hits like that and the ship suffers a mission-kill.

To go for a complete kill, you have to drill past the armor around the core hull, which is not easy; that's going to take sustained nuclear bombardment or shots from extremely high energy beam weapons. But if you can get a mission kill, you've at least got the opportunity to go for completion.

And yes, with something like photon torpedoes you're going to need a LOT of hits even to get a mission kill. One or two won't cut it; you'll probably need dozens, and I'm dubious about whether or not Trek ships could get those hits in against a comparable tonnage from the Honorverse. This isn't a surefire tactic; at best it is a plausible but extremely dangerous way by which Trekkers could reasonably hope to cause harm to the enemy in this fight... which they can't really do any other way.

All I'm saying is that this isn't quite as extreme as Star Wars, where entire fleets of Trek ships could fire themselves dry without even warming up the shielding on an enemy ship. It's immensely lopsided, but it's got the potential to be an actual (lopsided) war, not just an exercise in pest control.

============

Even from ahead or astern, a battlecruiser has 8 to 12 PD clusters, allowing 4 to 6 shots against a torpedo. And if it's a Saganami-C class cruiser (like the Nasty Kitty or Jimmy Boy), the Federation ship would need to catch it entirely off guard and with even passive defenses down, given the non-throat-closing bow-and-stern walls. If it's aware, the Trek ship is even more screwed than usual if it approaches from ahead or astern, given the off-bore missile launch capability of the new cruisers. Against an old Courageous-class cruiser (like Fearless from OBS), the Trek ship would have better odds - have we ever established a time frame for both series for this little fracas?

Unfortunately not.

Frankly, despite everything Weber does with his beloved and deadly missiles, it's the energy weapons that are the real threat at the range the Trek ships want to engage at. Outside their optimum range, all they can really do is dodge frantically in warp drive and hope to break the Manticore Missile Massacre's target lock by (in effect) teleporting out of the way. At their optimum range, it's more effective to just fire the damn chase grasers than to waste time fooling around with a missile lock and launch.

Bow and stern walls are liable to be an enormous problem, because they completely defeat the only viable tactic the Trekkers have; with them in play their options are reduced to firing the torpedoes from warp after the Honorverse ships lower the bow wall so that they can accelerate again. Which means their hit rate will suck and they'll be limited to firing when the enemy gives them an opening- not a good combination.

The real threat from a photon torpedo attack is that a Trek ship can flush its magazines out the tubes much faster than an Honorverse ship.* But in any event, in Honorverse terms the larger Trek ships can throw something close to a pod combatant-sized salvo just by firing their available launchers once per second: fewer launchers, but a lot more missiles. That presents a significant point defense problem, especially when it's combined with the complete lack of useful data from gravitics. Countermissiles and laser clusters will still work, and it's hard to say whether the torpedo's smaller target profile cancels out its inferior ECM... but you're still asking the ship to stop a LOT of torpedoes if the Trekkers are smart enough to go for an all-out launch.

*This is probably because impeller drive missiles are the size of ICBMs while photon torpedoes are more like the size of AMRAAMs.

[The Dark]

The real threat from a photon torpedo attack is that a Trek ship can flush its magazines out the tubes much faster than an Honorverse ship.*

I'm not sure that's the case. An Intrepid-class cruiser can theoretically fire 4 shots per second for 10 seconds before exhausting her magazines (using the one torpedo per second projection from above). ASaganami-C can fire that many missiles in a single salvo. A Saganami-B could fire more (the -C removed some missile tubes for magazine space and endwall generators).

A Sovereign-class has four tubes facing forward and six facing aft (insert joke about Starfleet tactical doctrine here). Barring some bizarre targeting ability we haven't seen, that suggests a maximum of 6 shots per second if it's running away. An Inivctus can roll 6 pods every 12 seconds. Since each pod carries 14 missiles, that's 7 missiles per second on average.

Overall, both the initial density and the average over time appear to favor Honorverse designs

[Simon_Jester]

The real threat from a photon torpedo attack is that a Trek ship can flush its magazines out the tubes much faster than an Honorverse ship.*

I'm not sure that's the case. An Intrepid-class cruiser can theoretically fire 4 shots per second for 10 seconds before exhausting her magazines (using the one torpedo per second projection from above). ASaganami-C can fire that many missiles in a single salvo. A Saganami-B could fire more (the -C removed some missile tubes for magazine space and endwall generators).

In ten seconds the Saganami gets one salvo. Broadside-on that comes close to forty missiles (for a double broadside)... and that's their maximum possible rate of fire.

Do Saganamis carry enough point defense to reliably handle a ship of their own class ripple-firing missiles into their forward hammerhead? Yes, yes, I know, they have the bow wall, but I'm trying to get a point across here. Star Trek torpedoes are, individually, crap by Honorverse standards. But the Trekkers at least have a pretty impressive volume of fire given their tonnage. It goes naturally with the smaller missile bodies; they're easier to load into the tubes and launch. They pay for that in reduced payload and range, of course... but they get something for the price.

Side note: it occurs to me that the most effective way for the Honorverse to counter this tactic is probably to launch countermissiles at the enemy ship. They're fast enough and they have the reach, and getting hit by a countermissile impeller wedge would probably hammer the daylights out of a Trek ship's shielding, assuming they manage to dissipate the impact at all rather than just getting torn into a cloud of scrap iron.

A Sovereign-class has four tubes facing forward and six facing aft (insert joke about Starfleet tactical doctrine here). Barring some bizarre targeting ability we haven't seen, that suggests a maximum of 6 shots per second if it's running away. An Inivctus can roll 6 pods every 12 seconds. Since each pod carries 14 missiles, that's 7 missiles per second on average.

An Invictus also outweighs a Sovereign by at least one, quite possibly two orders of magnitude, so I don't think the comparison is fair. The biggest ships in Star Trek are about the size of an Honorverse cruiser, possibly a battlecruiser. In practice this puts them at a massive tonnage disadvantage, which has a major effect on the outcome of any probable war, but tactically it's sort of beside the point.

[Batman]

Star Trek torpedoes are, individually, crap by Honorverse standards. But the Trekkers at least have a pretty impressive volume of fire given their tonnage.

Um no they don't, thanks to their ridiculously low ammunition loads. A SINGLE double broadside by a Saganami-C equals an Intrepid's entire photorp complement numerically, and the entire loadout of a Galaxy (if there's a Fed warship with a higher photorp complement I'm afraid I don't know of it) doesn't come up to three Invictus' salvoes.
Trek may have the theoretical advantage in 'projectiles launched per second' but HH is used to dealing with salvo densities FAR larger than anything Trek can come up with, especially at the capship level and podnoughts and later.

[The Dark]

The real threat from a photon torpedo attack is that a Trek ship can flush its magazines out the tubes much faster than an Honorverse ship.*

I'm not sure that's the case. An Intrepid-class cruiser can theoretically fire 4 shots per second for 10 seconds before exhausting her magazines (using the one torpedo per second projection from above). ASaganami-C can fire that many missiles in a single salvo. A Saganami-B could fire more (the -C removed some missile tubes for magazine space and endwall generators).

In ten seconds the Saganami gets one salvo. Broadside-on that comes close to forty missiles (for a double broadside)... and that's their maximum possible rate of fire.

And in ten seconds an Intrepid fires forty missiles - and is out of ammo. One of these ships is fucked. It's not the Saganami.

A Sovereign-class has four tubes facing forward and six facing aft (insert joke about Starfleet tactical doctrine here). Barring some bizarre targeting ability we haven't seen, that suggests a maximum of 6 shots per second if it's running away. An Inivctus can roll 6 pods every 12 seconds. Since each pod carries 14 missiles, that's 7 missiles per second on average.

An Invictus also outweighs a Sovereign by at least one, quite possibly two orders of magnitude, so I don't think the comparison is fair. The biggest ships in Star Trek are about the size of an Honorverse cruiser, possibly a battlecruiser. In practice this puts them at a massive tonnage disadvantage, which has a major effect on the outcome of any probable war, but tactically it's sort of beside the point.

An Intrepid outmasses a Saganami-C by 1.45 to 1. The new Nike class battlecruiser that Henke has is about half the mass of a Galaxy (Nike is 2,416,750 tons. A Galaxy is around 4,500,000 tons). An Invictus is around 7.5 million tons (give or take - 27 Medusa, 19 CLAC, and 46 Invictus were just under 670 million tons, which is around 7.45 million tons each). Sternbach supposedly pegged the Sovereign at 3.205 million tons. Yes, a modern SD's about twice the size of a Galaxy or Sovereign, but it's certainly not an order of magnitude difference.

[Serafina]

Hm - firing the CMs at the Trekships certainly is an interesting possibilty.

Which leaves the question how well Trek-Ships would handle an impeller wedge from a CM straight to their face.
I honestly do not have a clue about that - anyone got any ideas?

[Batman]

If the Trek ship ever got actually HIT I very much suspect we're looking at an instakill situation (CM or regular). As Simon pointed out though that hit is HIGHLY unlikely to happen because a Trek ship (at least one NOT handled by the complete morons that seem to make up TNG+ Starfleet) can pretty much ignore missile attacks even at lightspeed weapon ranges thanks to being able to warp out at a moment's notice.
When a Honorverse ship kills a Trek one, it'll be with energy weapons.

[Simon_Jester]

And in ten seconds an Intrepid fires forty missiles - and is out of ammo. One of these ships is fucked. It's not the Saganami

Did I ever suggest getting into a stand-up fight?

Consider the names I've been using for this proposed tactic: "hit and run," "launch and leave," "ripple fire." To me, all these terms connote a tactic based on firing a barrage of munitions, then running away. I was under the impression that this was fairly obvious.

For this to work at all, to do any harm to the enemy at even slightly reasonable cost in harm to the Trekkers, they need to think like torpedo boats: dart in, shoot off everything in the magazines as fast as possible and get the hell out while the enemy's too busy coping with your attack to nail you. Because they have a tactical FTL drive that works inside the hyper limit, they can at least hope to do this.

They may screw up the execution and get killed anyway. But they have the technical capability.

It's probably going to take several failed stand-up battles for the Trekkers to figure this out, because they don't normally think like torpedo boats; they think like submarines, only without the emphasis on detection and evasion, because their torpedoes are expensive and are normally only used a few at a time.
_______

An Intrepid outmasses a Saganami-C by 1.45 to 1... Sternbach supposedly pegged the Sovereign at 3.205 million tons.

Could you link, please? Given its actual size, this seems a bit on the heavy side to me. But then, I don't know who Sternbach is, and haven't seen his calculations. But I'd be somewhat surprised, because the scale of a Sovereign isn't such that I'd expect it to weigh that much.

Speaking roughly, that's equivalent to a 75 meter cube of solid iron, and a Sovereign is far from solid. Looking at it, I can imagine it weighing that much, but I'd like to see the calculations. I don't know where to find mass estimates on Trek ships; Memory Alpha doesn't have them.

Maybe I was wrong about the tonnage advantage.

============

Um no they don't, thanks to their ridiculously low ammunition loads. A SINGLE double broadside by a Saganami-C equals an Intrepid's entire photorp complement numerically...

Excuse me. I spoke incautiously.

During a short engagement, such as the launch-and-leave strikes I am contemplating because it's the only thing I can possibly imagine working even as a tactic of desperation, Trek ships can achieve impressive volume of fire given the duration of the engagement. Enough that Honorverse point defense may actually be stressed to deal with ripple fire from Trek ships at short range, assuming comparable tonnage, despite the very high quality of Honorverse point defense.

Given more tracking time, given the ability to acquire targets on gravitics, or given a sustained missile duel, the Trek ships lose hard. Under optimal conditions they... well, lose less hard. Maybe even scratch out a marginal high-cost tactical victory. Maybe.

Trek may have the theoretical advantage in 'projectiles launched per second' but HH is used to dealing with salvo densities FAR larger than anything Trek can come up with, especially at the capship level and podnoughts and later.

At the capital ship level, especially at the fleet level, they also have an enormous tonnage advantage, because they can mount far more launchers and far more point defense on their ships. The fact that they can contemplate having 250 projectiles come swarming at them in a matter of minutes or less, that it is a plausible enemy attack mode, does not mean that every ship in their fleet can handle it. Yes, the SD's can... but an SD can also laugh off the attack of an Honorverse ship that has about the same mass as the Galaxy-class would.

This is a tactic that would only be viable at comparable tonnage. The Trekkers have a major problem there, because most Honorverse interstellar powers have more tonnage than they do in addition to having more firepower and (when they set the terms of engagement) better shielding and (even when they don't) much tougher ships.

[Batman]

Um no they don't, thanks to their ridiculously low ammunition loads. A SINGLE double broadside by a Saganami-C equals an Intrepid's entire photorp complement numerically...

Excuse me. I spoke incautiously.
During a short engagement, such as the launch-and-leave strikes I am contemplating because it's the only thing I can possibly imagine working even as a tactic of desperation, Trek ships can achieve impressive volume of fire given the duration of the engagement. Enough that Honorverse point defense may actually be stressed to deal with ripple fire from Trek ships at short range, assuming comparable tonnage, despite the very high quality of Honorverse point defense.

Um-assuming comparable tonnage handicaps the Trek side even MORE, you know. A Galaxy is hard pressed to more than irritate a Star Knight as it is. And HHverse defenses are set up to deal with dozens to hundred of missiles coming in AT THE SAME TIME at speeds vastly exceeding TNG torpedoes. Again, TNG may have the edge in refire rate but salvo density vastly favours HHverse.

[Simon_Jester]

I need to review the Trek tonnage figures, I think. At least, I do if a Sovereign weighs in at well over three million tons.

The torpedo stream from a Trek ship firing its launchers as fast as possible is numerically (not qualitatively) similar to a single launch from a pod combatant... and most ships below the wall in the Honorverse don't have the point defense to deal with that many shots coming in an interval of ten to twenty seconds, as seen by the fact that wallers work.

This is, as you say, partly offset by the fact that the missiles come in streams. But since the intervals in the missile stream are much shorter than they're used to, the tracking envelope is narrow (assuming the Trekkers are even in range in the first place). Salvoes work in the Honorverse, but because everyone uses them, the active antimissile defenses are based on the expectation that that's what they'll see. Hence you get countermissile launchers with a cycle time of ~10 seconds, and laser clusters with individual emitters that focus on power and range at the expense of rate of fire- individually they have a cycle time of about fifteen seconds.

That's a problem at knife range; I suspect it would be more profitable to rely on jamming to fool enough of the torpedoes to keep the ship alive and fire the point defense at the enemy ship. That way they can't run away and try it again so easily.

Ships that have the advanced point defense fit of the Saganami-Cs and their contemporaries also typically have bow walls; again, this makes using the point defense to kill the ship and relying on the passive antimissile defense to block the torpedo attack an attractive option.

It's not as if the bow/stern-aspect torpedo attack is all that reliable or impossible to counter; it's just less abysmal than trying to slug it out broadside-on in normal space with ships that have you vastly outgunned and are defended by impenetrable shields.

[bobnik]

Some other tactical points to consider:

1.You'll probably never find anything bigger than a cruiser unescorted, and task groups tend to unify their anti-missile systems, as seen in The Short Victorious War. That battle is analysed in the next book as well, and the words "missile defense net" are mentioned at least twice.

2. Photon torpedoes will detonate when intercepted, because for them detonation is merely shutting down the antimatter containment, instead of the complex process of nuclear initiation. What tactical effects this will have I'm not sure. Will sensors be blinded on either side? Presumably not for Trek because they are used to screening for those detonations at those ranges. Would the detonation be big enough to take out any other torpedoes in the stream?

3. Remember that pre-pod designs were capable of towing some exterior pods, so your volume of fire could be upgraded under some situations.

4. It seems that HH FTL is slower than Trek FTL for the most part - if you go here, click on "read as HTML" on the left side, then go to Chapter 4, you'll find a history for FTL tech and political matters. It says that as of OBS, HH warships do about 3000c, and the Imperial Wiki puts most TNG high-warp references above that, but Voyager's highest referenced speed was 21,473c. I do not believe this is fast enough to negate the logistical advantage given by the wormhole network in HHverse.

While the hit-and-run may work on a cruiser or smaller, I don't think it would work on a task group, especially one containing wallers, due to the aforementioned missile defense net. To overcome this net your weight of fire would have to be considerable, essentially saturating the defenses on every ship simultaneously. Another tactic I believe the HH people would adopt is to place LACs in the trailing and leading positions that the Feds need to attack from. It may even be possible for a cruiser to carry a couple for just this purpose - if the war became prolonged, I can see the Manties making a "pocket CLAC" to base a CruRon around.

[Serafina]

If the Trek ship ever got actually HIT I very much suspect we're looking at an instakill situation (CM or regular). As Simon pointed out though that hit is HIGHLY unlikely to happen because a Trek ship (at least one NOT handled by the complete morons that seem to make up TNG+ Starfleet) can pretty much ignore missile attacks even at lightspeed weapon ranges thanks to being able to warp out at a moment's notice.
When a Honorverse ship kills a Trek one, it'll be with energy weapons.

You know, they never warp away from photon torpedoes.

Granted, it would be a pretty viable tactic at longer ranges, but at the ranges ST normally fights, they apparentyl never do it.

[Simon_Jester]

Some other tactical points to consider:

1.You'll probably never find anything bigger than a cruiser unescorted, and task groups tend to unify their anti-missile systems, as seen in The Short Victorious War. That battle is analysed in the next book as well, and the words "missile defense net" are mentioned at least twice.

You saw it even with the mini-flotilla in Honor of the Queen; the modern ships linked their missile defense. And that was the first time in the series that we ever saw a ship action with multiple ships on either side. Networked missile defense is going to be a problem, requiring coordinated squadron-strength attacks on the Trekker side to break through.

2. Photon torpedoes will detonate when intercepted, because for them detonation is merely shutting down the antimatter containment, instead of the complex process of nuclear initiation. What tactical effects this will have I'm not sure. Will sensors be blinded on either side? Presumably not for Trek because they are used to screening for those detonations at those ranges. Would the detonation be big enough to take out any other torpedoes in the stream?

Proximity soft kills of one missile by another would require that the missiles only be a few kilometers apart. The lateral spacing may be that small, but the longitudinal spacing (along the line of flight of the missile stream) probably won't.

This could cause minor problems, maybe even major ones, on the Manticore side... not sure, though. If you remember the Havenite "Triple Ripple" tactic, it depends heavily on the use of EMP-optimized, very dirty nukes. Photon torpedoes with their antimatter warheads should be much cleaner, and probably interfere less with radar. On the other hand the torpedo blasts will wreck optical sensors, making it impractical to track the torpedoes by their glow.

I think the optimum formation would be an angled wall of battle, or possibly a cone. You want to make sure all point defense can be focused ahead or astern. You aren't so worried about the broadsides, because virtually any Honorverse ship can handle virtually any number of Trek attackers broadside-on. It's the sudden emergences from warp directly in your path that are the problem.

3. Remember that pre-pod designs were capable of towing some exterior pods, so your volume of fire could be upgraded under some situations.

True, but in a wild violation of in-setting conventions, missile capability really isn't that important to Honorverse ships fighting Trekkers. The Trekkers' tactical FTL is too good- once they figure out that the enemy is capable of lobbing Manticore Missile Massacres at them, they will invariably jump out of the way of the missile salvoes, causing them to lose lock and be wasted. It's more practical to just bull towards whatever objectives they're trying to defend and crush any Trekker that tries to get in your way at energy range.

4. It seems that HH FTL is slower than Trek FTL for the most part - if you go here, click on "read as HTML" on the left side, then go to Chapter 4, you'll find a history for FTL tech and political matters. It says that as of OBS, HH warships do about 3000c, and the Imperial Wiki puts most TNG high-warp references above that, but Voyager's highest referenced speed was 21,473c. I do not believe this is fast enough to negate the logistical advantage given by the wormhole network in HHverse.

Not on their own territory, no. In the Trekkers' territory (and that's liable to be where the war ends up, because the Trekkers won't win offensive battles very often, if at all)... there won't be any wormholes, or at least none that the Honorverse types can use, because their wormholes rely on the same physics as their FTL system, and the Trekkers would have no use for such wormholes. There wouldn't be any charts of them.

While the hit-and-run may work on a cruiser or smaller, I don't think it would work on a task group, especially one containing wallers, due to the aforementioned missile defense net. To overcome this net your weight of fire would have to be considerable, essentially saturating the defenses on every ship simultaneously. Another tactic I believe the HH people would adopt is to place LACs in the trailing and leading positions that the Feds need to attack from. It may even be possible for a cruiser to carry a couple for just this purpose - if the war became prolonged, I can see the Manties making a "pocket CLAC" to base a CruRon around.

Cruisers are too light to carry LACs in even half-squadron strength; they're just not big enough. A pocket CLAC would have to be built to battlecruiser scale.

The hit and run attacks would have to be large scale and coordinated against anything large; against wallers it would be utter suicide unless they could launch from warp.

[Coalition]

Some other tactical points to consider:
4. It seems that HH FTL is slower than Trek FTL for the most part - if you go here, click on "read as HTML" on the left side, then go to Chapter 4, you'll find a history for FTL tech and political matters. It says that as of OBS, HH warships do about 3000c, and the Imperial Wiki puts most TNG high-warp references above that, but Voyager's highest referenced speed was 21,473c. I do not believe this is fast enough to negate the logistical advantage given by the wormhole network in HHverse.

The nice part about HH strategic FTL is that as long as they can travel along a grav wave, they do not need fuel. So ST ships will be burning up antimatter for high warp travel, while HH ships just cruise along, merely using up food supplies.

[The Dark]

An Intrepid outmasses a Saganami-C by 1.45 to 1... Sternbach supposedly pegged the Sovereign at 3.205 million tons.

Could you link, please? Given its actual size, this seems a bit on the heavy side to me. But then, I don't know who Sternbach is, and haven't seen his calculations. But I'd be somewhat surprised, because the scale of a Sovereign isn't such that I'd expect it to weigh that much.

I've lost the actual post, and have only been able to find references to it. Rick Sternbach is the modelmaker who designed the Sovereign (along with the Galaxy, tricorders, phasers [yes, he's to blame for the dustbuster guns], the Prometheus, the Dauntless, the Nova, and the Intrepid). His word wouldn't be canon, but for the purposes of a discussion where (AFAIK), there is no canon number, I'd consider him a high non-canon authority.

laser clusters with individual emitters that focus on power and range at the expense of rate of fire- individually they have a cycle time of about fifteen seconds.

That's why they use clusters of 6 to 12 emitters. Even a Roland-class destroyer has 180 individual emitters (30 clusters, destroyers have 6 emitters per cluster).

2. Photon torpedoes will detonate when intercepted, because for them detonation is merely shutting down the antimatter containment, instead of the complex process of nuclear initiation. What tactical effects this will have I'm not sure. Will sensors be blinded on either side? Presumably not for Trek because they are used to screening for those detonations at those ranges.

Sensors shouldn't be blinded at all. EMP effects occur because of the interaction of hard radiation with an atmosphere; Foraker's "Triple Ripple" only worked because the nukes were tailored to do it.

4. It seems that HH FTL is slower than Trek FTL for the most part - if you go here, click on "read as HTML" on the left side, then go to Chapter 4, you'll find a history for FTL tech and political matters. It says that as of OBS, HH warships do about 3000c, and the Imperial Wiki puts most TNG high-warp references above that, but Voyager's highest referenced speed was 21,473c. I do not believe this is fast enough to negate the logistical advantage given by the wormhole network in HHverse.

Voyager's dash speed was 21,473c. The highest sustained speed (more than one day) is 3000c.

Voyager speed estimates:
trip home (70+ years): ~1000c
2 months: 1,584c
5 days: "just under 3000c"
2 days: 2,740c
2 hours: 8,766c

This puts the strategic picture in a far different light - for most operations, Trek ships will operate at the same speeds or slower when compared to the 3,000c of Manticoran warships.

True, but in a wild violation of in-setting conventions, missile capability really isn't that important to Honorverse ships fighting Trekkers. The Trekkers' tactical FTL is too good- once they figure out that the enemy is capable of lobbing Manticore Missile Massacres at them, they will invariably jump out of the way of the missile salvoes, causing them to lose lock and be wasted. It's more practical to just bull towards whatever objectives they're trying to defend and crush any Trekker that tries to get in your way at energy range.

Using MDMs, Manticore should be able to shut down missiles and let them coast, as long as they're not on their last drive. Particularly with Apollo and its FTL links, if the Trek ship returns within range, the salvo can be reactivated. It still won't really be efficient, and I agree that, for once, energy mounts will matter, but a missile salvo's no longer a dead-and-gone thing once it's fired. It will also depend on how long it takes for a ship to warp. I'm not up-to-date on Trek's time to warm up the warp drive, but since laser heads have a 25,000 kilometer stand-off range (barring adjustments based on future understanding of Trek shields), the first few encounters could end...poorly if the Federation assumes they're contact missiles like torpedoes.

edit: forgot a " mark

[Simon_Jester]

The nice part about HH strategic FTL is that as long as they can travel along a grav wave, they do not need fuel. So ST ships will be burning up antimatter for high warp travel, while HH ships just cruise along, merely using up food supplies.

Helpful in areas where grav waves are charted; this further increases the advantage of fighting on the defensive from the Honorverse side. On the strategic offensive, they run into problems, because they'll have to chart space as they go, though it at least makes bringing supplies and reinforcements from their rear areas easier.

I've lost the actual post, and have only been able to find references to it. Rick Sternbach is the modelmaker who designed the Sovereign (along with the Galaxy, tricorders, phasers [yes, he's to blame for the dustbuster guns], the Prometheus, the Dauntless, the Nova, and the Intrepid). His word wouldn't be canon, but for the purposes of a discussion where (AFAIK), there is no canon number, I'd consider him a high non-canon authority.

OK, but I would really like to see someone nailing down this number based on some kind of reasoning I can access. I won't argue the point about the mass of the ships any more, but I don't know what to think about it.

laser clusters with individual emitters that focus on power and range at the expense of rate of fire- individually they have a cycle time of about fifteen seconds.

That's why they use clusters of 6 to 12 emitters. Even a Roland-class destroyer has 180 individual emitters (30 clusters, destroyers have 6 emitters per cluster).

Yes. I know. I've read the books, and a fair chunk of the author's commentary, too.

My point is that their capacity to handle salvoes of missiles coming in at fifteen second intervals (for instance) doesn't translate into being able to handle equal-sized salvoes coming in at one second intervals. Or even salvoes of one tenth the size, for that matter. At some point, they hit point defense saturation, taking more than one second to kill the number of missiles that come at them in one second. And that point comes relatively quickly in bow/stern-aspect combat. There just isn't room on the hammerheads to mount that many beam weapons... which is why most of the Roland's point defense emitters are on the flanks.

Against enemies who have to approach over long distances in normal space this is not a major problem, because they can maneuver to bring the broadsides to bear. Against enemies with a bizarre "I can jump to anywhere" drive... it's a problem. It would be a serious problem against Trek ships if the Trekkers weren't so badly undergunned; if they had Honorverse-grade weapons they'd be a major threat.

Using MDMs, Manticore should be able to shut down missiles and let them coast, as long as they're not on their last drive. Particularly with Apollo and its FTL links, if the Trek ship returns within range, the salvo can be reactivated. It still won't really be efficient, and I agree that, for once, energy mounts will matter, but a missile salvo's no longer a dead-and-gone thing once it's fired.

True... but the odds of a missile salvo fired in one direction catching a Trek ship that is quite capable of jumping anywhere it pleases are slim. Example:

[On board RMS Insufferable, Nike-class battlecruiser]
"Sir, drone shell Charlie is picking up a radar contact, designated Bandit One, fifteen million kilometers out, off the port bow."
"Fire one broadside."
"Launching."
[Star Trek ship has "Ohcrap!" moment]
"We've lost contact with Bandit One."
[a few seconds later]
"Sir, Bandit One has reappeared twenty million kilometers off the ventral bow."

At this point, they'll need to transmit a new targeting solution, burn the MDMs' second drive just to kill the momentum they picked up from the first, because it's in the wrong direction... you get the idea. The engagement envelope of a missile isn't the same as the engagement envelope of the ship that fired it, and if you're going to use tactical FTL for evasive maneuvers, there's no reason not to evade radically.

Really, the main reason to fire missiles against the Trekkers at all is as area denial: they can't stay in the general vicinity and are forced to warp somewhere. For pod combatants this is probably a cost-effective way to wear down a Trek ship's endurance- just keep forcing it to make dozens of short FTL hops until the drive coils burn out or something.

It will also depend on how long it takes for a ship to warp. I'm not up-to-date on Trek's time to warm up the warp drive, but since laser heads have a 25,000 kilometer stand-off range (barring adjustments based on future understanding of Trek shields), the first few encounters could end...poorly if the Federation assumes they're contact missiles like torpedoes.

Heh. Bet on it. Though if you see the missile come screaming at you from five million kilometers away, there's really no reason to wait to evade until it's in the last 1% of its run.

The question of warp drive runup time is something I wish I could answer.

[Norade]

Just a quick question, has a Trek ship ever warped away from an incoming missile attack before in the series? If not, why is it assumed they will do it in this case? The same goes for engagement ranges, in most of the new series, which use the ships that are being talked about for the Trek side in this argument, they fight at point blank range so why assume they wouldn't for fights against Honor-verse?

[Crazedwraith]

Doesn't Chekov take the Enterprise to warp to avoid a BoP torpedo in Star Trek V?

[Simon_Jester]

Just a quick question, has a Trek ship ever warped away from an incoming missile attack before in the series? If not, why is it assumed they will do it in this case? The same goes for engagement ranges, in most of the new series, which use the ships that are being talked about for the Trek side in this argument, they fight at point blank range so why assume they wouldn't for fights against Honor-verse?

I suspect that they will start doing it after the first few dozen ships get obliterated by the X-ray lasers crashing through their shields.

Photon torpedoes are usually used at relatively short ranges that offer the target less time to go to warp. Moreover, if you were going to go to warp to escape the torpedoes an enemy fires, you should probably have gone to warp to escape the enemy before they even made it into torpedo range. If you're willing to give battle at all, you have a rough notion of the enemy's torpedo capability and have already decided you can handle it.

To make matters worse, in Trek-on-Trek battles the fight isn't over even if you manage to make it out before the torpedoes arrive. Rival Trekkers are quite capable of following you into warp and keeping up the fire, because they can launch torpedoes from warp speed and hit targets moving at warp speed.

Honorverse missiles are much longer ranged, taking minutes to hit their targets even for long range single-drive shots. And they can't keep shooting at you after you go to warp, not with any good effect. It's not guaranteed that the Trekkers will start trying to use tactical FTL to sidestep the patented Manticoran missile swarms, but it's certainly something I would try to do in their shoes if I had or could improvise the technical capability.

Of course, they might not be able to make jumps on such short notice, even when they go into action expecting to need to. I don't know. Does it normally take them more than a minute or so of prep time to go to warp? How fast can they make a double jump?