Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Simon_Jester]

Now, let's roll on into the 1890s. Here, we see what might be termed the "mature technology" designs produced by the RMN after they've had a generation or so to come to terms with the consequences of the laser head, and to make sure the ships themselves are functional. This last is not to be ignored, as it is a real issue in real naval design. Competent detail design has a lot to do with making a ship a success story; for an example of what happens when this is missing, look at the WWII German surface navy. Most of those ships were designed by people with little or no prior experience with warship design, because the Allies destroyed the German design bureau and its archives after World War One. As a consequence, ships like Bismarck often had poorly thought out systems aboard. Or were designed with armament, protection, and speed that another power with more experienced engineers could have fit on a platform 10% smaller and lighter- and a good deal cheaper.

Also, the 1890s are a time of very rapid military buildup. The experienced workforce is in place, the infrastructure has been built up to massive scale, and Haven's expansion has now absorbed Trevor's Star and is threatening systems near Manticore proper.
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Culverin-class Destroyer
Mass: 104000 tons
Dimensions: 404 x 48 x 27 m
Acceleration: 547.4 g
80% Accel: 437.9 g
Broadside: 5 missile tubes, 4 lasers, 5 countermissile tubes, 4 point defense mounts
Chase: 2 missile tubes, 1 laser, 2 countermissile tubes, 2 point defense mounts
Number Built: 72
Service Life: 1899-present

The Culverin-class was designed as a powerful, general-purpose destroyer to replace both the Havoc and Chanson-classes. Although a bold design in terms of intent, the first units to be delivered came in over budget, and "overweight." Changes in requirements during the design process resulted in an increase in the offensive throw weight and a decrease in crew size, dictating the use of automation more commonly seen in merchant ships. In the end, the automation project was abandoned after the first two ships, but not before these changes delayed the commissioning of the first ship by two years and resulted in software and hardware glitches that were all but impossible to work out. The armament changes caused the Culverin to grow by nearly eight thousand tons and to lengthen by almost ten meters. Some point to these early problems as the reason that it took the Admiralty another ten years to try again to reduce crew requirements through automation.

When all was said and done however, the Culverin-class was nearly as good as its design simulations said it should be. It has significant electronic warfare assets, an impressive broadside for a destroyer, and solid defensive capabilities that mesh perfectly with the latest generation of Manticoran hardware. The primary complaint about the Culverin is its reputation as a maintenance headache, although part of this reputation resulted from periodic shortages of spare parts during the initial construction phase. The particular internal layout brought on by the design changes has caused a great deal of trouble for damage control teams, a fact that wasn't fully appreciated until the first units began to see combat.

Comments

This was brand-new as of the events of On Basilisk Station. Observe the problems that result from changing specifications in the middle of the design process. Also observe that the end result "destroyer" has darn near as much firepower, both offensive and defensive, as an Apollo-class cruiser twenty thousand tons heavier. Knowing the RMN's predilections, the reduced weight probably comes out of protection, energy armament, and long endurance; destroyers aren't usually designed to spend very long away from support bases or ports in RMN service as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, the Culverin is considerably lighter and less heavily armed than its contemporary CL design, the Valiant, which I'll cover in the next update since it's a post-1900 PD design.

Also, we see teething problems associated with increased automation of the ship. This has been discussed; the basic problem is that each crewman replaced by automation represents three things the ship does NOT have:

1) A pair of sentient eyes monitoring a system to spot failures and respond to them before something goes wrong. Hopefully, automation can be made smart enough to do this job. But any failure modes not specified in the software's parameters (say, unexpected problems caused by battle damage) can represent a problem that at least one human being has to deal with. And the fewer human beings there are, the harder it is to juggle all those problems, so the broader the software's remit and analytical capabilities have to be.

2) A mobile, flexible, self-aware "damage control remote" that can run around reacting to a crisis in one part of the ship that demands more resources to solve than would normally be present.

3) A similarly mobile, flexible person who can go around routinely replacing and maintaining systems so that no part of them is in danger of unexpected failures when a heavy burden is placed on it.

A lack of any of these things can be a problem in combat, even before the ship gets shot at.
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And now for one of the stars of our recent show...

Star Knight-class Heavy Cruiser
Mass: 305250 tons
Dimensions: 523 x 63 x 53 m
Acceleration: 509.3 g
80% Accel: 407.4 g
Broadside: 12 missile tubes, 6 lasers, 3 grasers, 8 countermissile tubes, 8 point defense mounts
Chase: 3 missile tubes, 1 laser, 5 countermissile tubes, 5 point defense mounts
Number Built: 74
Service Life: 1893-present

The Star Knight is in all ways a revolutionary design, not simply for the Manticoran Navy but for the heavy cruiser type in general. This class was the first two-deck heavy cruiser in the service of any navy, though a careful disinformation campaign kept that fact from becoming obvious until well into its service life. The fourth and final design built on the Prince Consort hull, the Star Knight was designed to replace both the Prince Consort and Crusader-classes. The design takes advantage of decades of research by the Weapons Development Board in system miniaturization and it represents arguably the most significant achievement of BuShips in the nineteenth century. Its significantly increased armament, more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems make it at least thirty percent tougher than the Prince Consorts

This improvement was due to the fact that the Star Knight was the first heavy cruiser designed from the keel out with the laser head threat in mind. The designers realized missile exchanges would begin to dominate, even among the lighter classes, and with half again as many missile tubes as a Prince Consort, the Star Knight could lay down an impressive volume of fire. While the number of beam mounts is equally impressive, the truth is that they are individually much lighter weapons than on some older classes, though the decisive edge in missile combat has blunted any criticism in that respect.

Despite this class' exemplary performance compared to its contemporaries, combat experience has shown that insufficient volume was allocated to offensive systems. This lack was largely due to one of the most controversial design choices: installation of a third fusion reactor as opposed to the normal two found on most ships of this size. Only a single reactor is required to carry the ship's combat load and the additional volume could have been used to mount a heavier broadside but, unable to find any way to mount ejectable GRAVMAK reactors and not entirely certain that their passive armor scheme could protect the core hull from laser head strikes, the designers opted for increased power system redundancy.

Despite the exponential increase in lethality over the Prince Consort, the RMN has come to consider the Star Knight a transitional design. Once wartime experience was factored in, the RMN began to develop an even more powerful and revolutionary heavy cruiser class as its replacement.

Comments:

"Two-deck" simply means that the ship's main weapon mounts are positioned on multiple "decks" that run parallel to the long axis of the ship; in other words, the ship devotes more of its volume to armament. This is supported by the weapons breakdown- a LOT more weapons. I'm surprised that they still think not enough capacity was devoted to weapons, though maybe the problem is limited magazine space- with the Star Knight dumping all its missiles and having nothing left to fight with.

One wonders how they measure the intangible that is ship "toughness;" if I were them I'd use simulations, but that begs the question of how reliable the simulators are at modeling RMN electronic warfare systems.

Also, they claim that the Star Knights have much lighter energy weapons- but neither Honor nor the actual test of events gave any sign that these weapons would have any trouble penetrating and destroying the defenses of a Havenite battlecruiser. Which suggests that the older weapons were if anything TOO heavy, if we accept as our premise that ships are designed mostly to fight opponents of roughly equal tonnage.
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And the star of our next show:

Reliant-class Battlecruiser
Mass: 877500 tons
Dimensions: 712 x 90 x 80 m
Acceleration: 488.7 g
80% Accel: 390.9 g
Broadside: 22 missile tubes, 8 lasers, 6 grasers, 2 energy torpedo launchers, 10 countermissile tubes, 10 point defense mounts
Chase: 4 missile tubes, 1 laser, 2 grasers, 6 countermissile tubes, 6 point defense mounts
Number Built: 95
Service Life: 1896-present

The Reliant is only five percent larger than a Homer but is a far more capable platform. While perhaps not as revolutionary for battlecruisers as the Star Knight was for a heavy cruiser, they are still extremely capable warships and ideally suited to the fast, slashing tactics that the Royal Manticoran Navy has embraced for over four T-centuries. They are the first units below the wall fitted with fully integrated modern armor materials. While these materials offered improved laser/graser absorption and far better secondary mechanical and thermal properties, they are difficult to nanoform, requiring specialized coded chemical catalyst gear and careful environmental control to emplace or replace.

Designed from the keel out as a squadron flagship, the Reliant-class has three boat bays with reserved visitor space for up to four additional pinnaces. Early in the First Havenite War, the few Reliants in service were most often found leading squadrons of older Homers and Redoubtables. As the wartime construction programs accelerated, they rapidly began to replace those earlier classes in frontline service.

Comments:

Actually surprisingly weak on antimissile defenses- the Reliants of this generation have only slightly better countermissile and point defense armament than a Star Knight of one third the tonnage. But by this time the RMN is fairly clueful about the laser head threat. And the Reliants have pretty darn good offensive missile armament (heavier than, say, a Sultan with its eighteen tubes). This suggests to me that the Reliants were in fact designed to operate alongside destroyer and cruiser screening forces that would supply additional antimissile capability to the combined fleet.

Note the remarks about the armor- again, details matter. This will be an issue in the next book, when a repair crew working on the Reliant-class battlecruiser Nike decides that they'd rather practically rip the guts out of the ship working from above/below (where there is no thick plate of this advanced armor material to cut through and replace) than try to get through that armor belt. In short, having thicker, harder skin makes the ship harder to do surgery on, and means that hospital stays are longer, so to speak.

One thing to bear in mind when doing weapons counts is that as a ship gets heavier, its tonnage increases with the cube of the length, but the surface area available to mount weapons on increases only with the square of the length: another version of the square-cube law. Thus, if you double all a ship's dimensions, its tonnage increases by a factor of eight, but it only has four times as much room to fit guns on. Interestingly, if we compare the Reliants to the hundred thousand ton Culverins, we do find that they have roughly four times as many weapon mounts...

The extra volume is still useful though. When the ship is twice as thick, that doesn't mean it can present more weapons to the enemy. But it does mean that the hull can be plated with twice as much armor, making it immune to weapons that would have gutted the smaller ship. And that the ship's weapons can be fed by bigger power plants, and magazines that store larger missiles, more numerous missiles, or both. And that internal spaces can have internal armor to protect them more thoroughly, in addition to the heavier surface armor. And that crew accomodations can be larger and more comfortable, allowing the ship to go on longer missions and keeping the crew in prime mental and physical condition. Et cetera...
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Now for a BIG step up in size- while we're on the subject of increasing tonnage by a factor of eight...

Majestic-class Dreadnought
Mass: 6750500 tons
Dimensions: 1278 x 185 x 173 m
Acceleration: 422.5 g
80% Accel: 338 g
Broadside: 28 missile tubes, 18 lasers, 24 grasers, 24 countermissile tubes, 24 point defense mounts
Chase: 8 missile tubes, 6 lasers, 4 grasers, 8 countermissile tubes, 8 point defense mounts
Number Built: 40
Service Life: 1896-1918

Following her father's death* and the subsequent forcible annexation of the Trevor's Star System (and terminus) by the People's Republic of haven, one of Queen Elizabeth's first actions was to reaffirm her commitment to her father's naval buildup, including a provision to more than double production of capital units within five years.

While the reasons behind the move to the Majestic-class were many, the argument that the RMN could build a substantially less costly dreadnought class than the Gladiators was one of the primary drivers, and the class was sold to Parliament as having a per-platform cost seven percent less than a Gladiator. There were other factors in play, however, including the fact that the Navy had to shift government contracts away from electronics providers that were under investigation for fraud and malfeasance.

Speeding up construction of a dreadnought (at least a dreadnought as capable as the Gladiator) proved to be a challenge, but the experience was to stand the RMN in very good stead in its ever-expanding wartime building programs. Ironically, though, while the Majestic had the virtue of being less expensive on a per-unit basis, the increased missile magazine size meant that the deployed cost of a fully equipped and armed Majestic was nearly equal to the "more expensive" Gladiator it supplanted.

For all of that, the Majestic was never an entirely satisfactory design. Slightly smaller than a Gladiator, its heavy missile broadside was only possible at the cost of close combat capability, and despite the increase in active defenses, it had a far more fragile hull than the Gladiator. This relative frailty, despite far more numerous missile tubes during a time when beam combat was falling out of favor, was one of the reasons the entire class was decommissioned before the older Gladiator.

*Technically a spoiler for House of Steel the story, but come on, you knew Roger III wasn't monarch when the mainline novels began...

Comments

Contra my earlier predictions, the Majestic does NOT mount four times as many weapons as the Reliant. Two to three times, at most. On the other hand, we've been explicitly told that superdreadnought weapons are individually much larger and more powerful than battlecruiser weapons, which may explain it.

Again we see the costs of trying to push the armament ratio on a ship too far in favor of weapons or defenses- a ship with too many missile tubes and magazines, and which pares down on expensive armor assembly (see the Reliant's issues for why that might cost) is going to become structurally weak and easy to destroy in combat. Combine that with the relatively large crew numbers per ton that the Majestics would demand, and it's easy to see why a demobilizing RMN would take them out of service and lay off or reassign the crews.

Note that this class is only about 15-20% lighter than the contemporary 'superdreadnought' classes: enough to matter, but not enough to make it comically lopsided if there's a fight between the two. In general, equal tonnages of dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts might well be able to fight reasonably effectively against each other in the pre-SD(P) era. And the main reason not to build dreadnought-sized DN(P)s is that you'd either have to sacrifice volume for the internal missile core, or to sacrifice thickness of defensive armor around that missile core. Neither of which is a very palatable solution.

...

Finally, notice that while the light ships from this generation (the Star Knights, the Culverins, and even the older cruisers and destroyers) are still in service as of the 'present' of the series (the early 1920s PD), the capital ships are being retired (in this case, by Houseman) This is an indication of two things:

1) The demand for light ships in the RMN is underserved because of wartime construction demanding lots of capital ships. Thus, even older light ships remain in service despite huge changes in technology that have made those ships nearly obsolete. For many purposes that a light ship carries out, all that matters is that A ship be physically present, not that it be a super-duper headbuster of a ship that can beat anything in its weight class in the universe.

2) By contrast, capital ships are built specifically to fight large units of the enemy's best forces. And if they aren't up to that task, they immediately become obsolete. The older heavy ships have such high manpower and maintenance requirements that they simply do not offer enough return on investment to maintain in service compared to pod-capable combatants.

It's not just that they do not themselves dump pods (two pre-pod SDs could together throw nearly as many missiles as one SD(P)). It's that they lack the capability to fire the modern MDM missile, so basically the only contribution they could make in modern missile combat is to park in the middle of a formation and shoot down as many incoming MDMs as possible. This is not enough to justify keeping thousands of people sitting around on a seven million ton warship.
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Victory-class Superdreadnought
Mass: 7781250 tons
Dimensions: 1340 x 194 x 181 m
Acceleration: 409.6 g
80% Accel: 327.7 g
Broadside: 35 missile tubes, 20 lasers, 19 grasers, 6 energy torpedo launchers, 29 countermissile tubes, 27 point defense mounts
Chase: 9 missile tubes, 5 lasers, 5 grasers, 11 countermissile tubes, 9 point defense mounts
Number Built: 36
Service Life: 1892-1918

With the Victory-class, the RMN had finally hit its stride in superdreadnoughts. The construction woes plaguing the King William were a thing of the past, and the new design was a capable, missile-optimized platform that was a perfect match for the doctrine BuPlan had been perfecting since the advent of the laser head.

The class wasn't particularly large, as even at the time advances in capital ship design were progressing at breakneck speed. The entire series production run lasted no more than a handful of years before it was superseded by the Sphinx-class.

The disposal of the entire Victory-class in early 1918 PD by the Janacek Admiralty was one of the most contentious decisions made by Second Lord Houseman. Every single remaining hull was sold to Grayson at scrap prices, despite the fact that the GSN couldn't possibly provide the manpower for all of those ships out of its own resources.

Benjamin Mayhew's decision proved to be fortuitous, however, as the RMN scrabled to reactivate every hull it had in mothballs after the resumption of the war with Haven. While the newer ships had been brought back into service first, BuShips has been negotiating with the GSN for the return of over half the hulls over the next year. The remainder were crewed as GSN units with a higher than normal percentage of RMN "loaner" personnel.

Comments:

Go Steadholder Mayhew, buying up RMN ships at scrap prices and now selling them back!

More generally, I think Houseman may well have made the right choice by selling off these ships, see above; the one questionable call is that he might have been wise to hold out for a higher price. Although in that case the ships thus sold to powers other than Grayson might well have been irretrievably lost, this would still represent only a limited dent in the Alliance's combat strength given how old and obsolete any pre-pod SD is inevitably going to be.

Aaand some random things:

Please stop for a moment to visualize the ship: about four fifths of a mile long, over six hundred feet wide and almost exactly six hundred feet high. Or possibly reverse 'wide' and 'high,' I'm not sure. Anyway, these things are big beasts. Just wanted to say.

Also, notice the energy torpedoes. Clearly those are only useful at very close beam weapon range; it is a remark on the design priorities of the era that these are part of ship design. They sort of remind me of the ramming bows put on a lot of 19th century steam frigates and ironclads- many navies assumed that with the new technology allowing ships to move in any direction, and effective cannon ranges still being pretty short, there would be a mass return to ramming tactics found in ancient galley wars. To some extent that even actually happened- but it seems anachronistic in hindsight even if it was deadly serious at the time.
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Sphinx-class Superdreadnought
Mass: 8207000 tons
Dimensions: 1364 x 198 x 184 m
Acceleration: 403.9 g
80% Accel: 323.1 g
Broadside: 36 missile tubes, 21 lasers, 19 grasers, 6 energy torpedo launchers, 27 countermissile tubes, 31 point defense mounts
Chase: 8 missile tubes, 4 lasers, 5 grasers, 9 countermissile tubes, 11 point defense mounts
Number Built: 67
Service Life: 1895-present

The Sphinx-class was by far the largest SD class (in total hulls) when the war started. During the peak of the buildup these ships were entering service at an almost frantic pace of more than one every month.

In terms of weapons fit, the most visible feature of any warship, the Sphinx was merely an incremental update over the Victory-class, with no truly revolutionary ideas. That was scarcely surprising given the pace of production and improvements in design and construction. The first Sphinx was laid down before the first Victory was even commissioned, so there was little time for lessons learned from one to propagate to another.

While the weapons fit was largely the same as the preceding class, the defenses were much different. In theory, the RMN has always designed their capital ships to be able to survive their own fire; in practice, up until the war began, RMN simulation models were in an almost continual state of flux as the damage potential of the laser head warheads kept increasing, without actual real-world testing data to ground the sims.

The Sphinx-class marks the turning point where enough real-world data had been accumulated for BuShips to fully understand the kind of armoring and compartmentalization a ship of the wall needed to survive the new environment. Weapon mounts were rearranged, internal bulkheads were strengthened, magazines were hardened, and compartments were arranged to protect critical systems with less critical equipment spaces, all leading to a ship that was far more survivable than any design yet in service.

Still, the speed of design and development had not slowed, and, in a short construction run of only six years the RMN built almost twice as many Sphinxes as the previous Victory-class.

The Sphinx and follow-on Gryphon were the only classes spared in the Janacek build-down, though over half of both these classes had been placed in reserve by the time the war resumed. They have been reactivated on a crash priority basis on the theory that any ship of the wall is preferable to none, especially with the loss of so many incomplete modern units at Grendelsbane.

Comments:

Interestingly, the Sphinx is only slightly better armed than the Victory, and in some ways mounts slightly fewer weapons of certain types. As noted, most of the extra mass was allocated to bulking up the ship's passive defenses, so as to be fully survivable in a modern combat environment. I find it interesting that these ships are supposedly vastly more survivable than the Andurils, which are explicitly pitched as having so stupidly much armor that it actively gets in the way of doing any real work on the ship.

We can always chalk that up to improvements in layout. A ship whose fusion reactors are less likely to randomly explode, or whose ludicrous high-energy capacitors for firing beam weapons will "fail safe" instead of failing by shorting out and melting the power distribution grid, will be a lot more survivable even if it doesn't have big extra slabs of armor plate bolted on.

Note that "survivable" is here designed as being able to absorb hundreds of hits from X-ray laser pulses carrying energy on the close order of a few hundred kilotons- maybe as high as a megaton, but not much lower based on what I can remember.

[Connor MacLeod]

I find this interesting, because I think that the books after Echoes of Honor are where a lot of things get pretty interesting, because she's a political figure of some reputation on multiple planets. Her problems are not solvable by finding the largest nearby concentration of enemy ships and blowing them up, and her possible actions to address the problems are constrained by her public image (and the politics of the situation).

She wasn't bad as an actual teacher either. I think the problem with many of the latter books is that they're still basically Honor-centric, long after Honor has ceased being a viable major character. By the latter point Weber has started shifting the focus to others in the series but for whatever reason Honor remains so central to the series, but there's also nothing really compelling that can justify her as a central figure. The recent plotlines with her (except maybe the Oyster Bay stuff - I'm still mixed about that) didn't really justify it or carry the books and as I've said in the past Weber was too hasty in closing off some plot points in past books (like wrapping up the consequneces of Fields of Dishonor solely within the context of two books, rather than being an ongoing plot point, for example.)

I think keeping Honor in the series would have meant turning the series itself into more of a 'sandbox' setting for stories, like you get with the anthologies (which are quite good still by and large, IMHO), but trying to push the main storyline as if we were still in the 'On Basilik Station-Short Victorious War' arc of things does not really work, I think.

Also, (semi-spoilers) Honor was supposed to die in At All Costs. At Second Manticore, she was supposed to die, unretconably. From how Weber describes it, she was always going to die around then, and the Mesan antagonists introduced in later books were going to be taken on by her children some decades down the line. However, the use of the Mesans as antagonists in Crown of Slaves moved the timeline up enough that there was no plausible way to have her children be fighting them, so he rejiggered Second Manticore to have Honor survive. No doubt, there's some personal attachment to the character going on there as well.

That would actually have made more sense in context of the Solarian League falling. One of the more favorite targets of bitching WRT the Honorverse (apart from the podnaughts themselves) is that the Solarian League's collapse was (for some people at least) bizarre. If it was supposed to happen over a much longer timeframe that would probably have worked better than what we got now.

Although to be honest, I'm not sure how Crown of Slaves bringing Mesans in earlier neccesarily screws up the original timeline that badly. Its not as if the Mesans have actually taken the center stage yet (although the last book I read was a Rising Thunder, and I dont think I finsihed it lol.) Even if Honor didn't die there'd have to be other ways to take her out of hte picture anyhow - so there would be no reason to keep her as a central figure 'in the spotlight' as it were.

As for the 'personal attachment' bit you could add 'profitability' to it. It IS the HONORVERSE after all, so I suppose at this point its hard to have her stop being a main character even if Weber wanted to.

[Simon_Jester]

I find this interesting, because I think that the books after Echoes of Honor are where a lot of things get pretty interesting, because she's a political figure of some reputation on multiple planets. Her problems are not solvable by finding the largest nearby concentration of enemy ships and blowing them up, and her possible actions to address the problems are constrained by her public image (and the politics of the situation).

She wasn't bad as an actual teacher either. I think the problem with many of the latter books is that they're still basically Honor-centric, long after Honor has ceased being a viable major character. By the latter point Weber has started shifting the focus to others in the series but for whatever reason Honor remains so central to the series, but there's also nothing really compelling that can justify her as a central figure. The recent plotlines with her (except maybe the Oyster Bay stuff - I'm still mixed about that) didn't really justify it or carry the books and as I've said in the past Weber was too hasty in closing off some plot points in past books (like wrapping up the consequneces of Fields of Dishonor solely within the context of two books, rather than being an ongoing plot point, for example.)

I think keeping Honor in the series would have meant turning the series itself into more of a 'sandbox' setting for stories, like you get with the anthologies (which are quite good still by and large, IMHO), but trying to push the main storyline as if we were still in the 'On Basilik Station-Short Victorious War' arc of things does not really work, I think.

Well, it's fine that Honor is still our viewpoint character for major fleet actions and political discussions- but it's probably just as well that he's got a side series going where Michelle Henke and so on are the focus instead, and yet another where it's Zilwicki and Cachat.

Even within the 'main' Honor-centric sequence he'd do well to take a page or three from Echoes of Honor, where most of the naval action was from someone else's viewpoint- either enemies or other Manticoran characters.

That would actually have made more sense in context of the Solarian League falling. One of the more favorite targets of bitching WRT the Honorverse (apart from the podnaughts themselves) is that the Solarian League's collapse was (for some people at least) bizarre. If it was supposed to happen over a much longer timeframe that would probably have worked better than what we got now.

Yes. Although honestly, they haven't actually started to collapse yet, and if anything it is MORE believable that the League would be behind in weapons technology (and therefore vulnerable) at this time than at some later time. Ten years from now the League really should have modernized its battlefleet to take into account some of the modern realities. It's kind of painfully hard to believe that they've remained ignorant as long as they have, let alone remaining so for another decade or two.

Although to be honest, I'm not sure how Crown of Slaves bringing Mesans in earlier neccesarily screws up the original timeline that badly. Its not as if the Mesans have actually taken the center stage yet (although the last book I read was a Rising Thunder, and I dont think I finsihed it lol.) Even if Honor didn't die there'd have to be other ways to take her out of hte picture anyhow - so there would be no reason to keep her as a central figure 'in the spotlight' as it were.

With this I quite agree. I think what's going on is that Weber wanted to advance the 'slaves and Mesa' plot he had cooking with Flint, but couldn't think of a way to do that without moving up his mainline plot.

[Terralthra]

Even within the 'main' Honor-centric sequence he'd do well to take a page or three from Echoes of Honor, where most of the naval action was from someone else's viewpoint- either enemies or other Manticoran characters.

I don't know, man. Most of the naval action in recent mainline books has been involved multiple viewpoint characters, even if Honor is there. E.g. First Manticore is told from at least the following viewpoints: Admiral Kuzak, Fleet Admiral D'Orville, Rear Admiral McKeon, Admiral Harrington, Vice Admiral Truman, Admiral Tourville, Admiral Chin, Rear Admiral Diamato, Commodore Oversteegen, Captain Prescott Tremaine...

I'm not seeing the lack of viewpoint characters for naval battles, really. The only battles told primarily from Honor's point of view are the small (relatively speaking) actions fought as part of Cutworm I/II, and even those have lots of switching.

That would actually have made more sense in context of the Solarian League falling. One of the more favorite targets of bitching WRT the Honorverse (apart from the podnaughts themselves) is that the Solarian League's collapse was (for some people at least) bizarre. If it was supposed to happen over a much longer timeframe that would probably have worked better than what we got now.

Yes. Although honestly, they haven't actually started to collapse yet, and if anything it is MORE believable that the League would be behind in weapons technology (and therefore vulnerable) at this time than at some later time. Ten years from now the League really should have modernized its battlefleet to take into account some of the modern realities. It's kind of painfully hard to believe that they've remained ignorant as long as they have, let alone remaining so for another decade or two.

Yes, though presumably by the time they caught up to MDMs and SD(P)s, both Haven and Manticore would be rolling with their third-gen versions of Apollo, with launch-to-detonation FTL telemetry, plus whatever the hell else Foraker and Hemphill come up with in the mean-time. No matter how one looks at the exact time, the SLN has been set up by cultural forces (and Mesan interference) to get their ass kicked by the RMN and RHN, specifically because getting their ass kicked so unilaterally would help bring about the collapse the Mesans want.

Although to be honest, I'm not sure how Crown of Slaves bringing Mesans in earlier neccesarily screws up the original timeline that badly. Its not as if the Mesans have actually taken the center stage yet (although the last book I read was a Rising Thunder, and I dont think I finsihed it lol.) Even if Honor didn't die there'd have to be other ways to take her out of hte picture anyhow - so there would be no reason to keep her as a central figure 'in the spotlight' as it were.

With this I quite agree. I think what's going on is that Weber wanted to advance the 'slaves and Mesa' plot he had cooking with Flint, but couldn't think of a way to do that without moving up his mainline plot.

Agreed.

[Connor MacLeod]

Is there something I'm forgetting about the whole Mesa subplot between the various books? As I recall there was Simoes but he didn't show up til the second novel anyhow, and beyond that Mesa was supposed to have some 'onion conspiracy' plan within a plan thing going on (and however they portray Zilwicki and Cachat I don't think they're going to singlehandedly dismantle an entire spacefaring empire in a matter of years even with Simoes in their hands.) And even if they couldn't pull off the original 'after Honor's time' thing (which I am honestly still not seeing.) I still don't see what required the level of acceleration of events we actually got (I mean given how aging and shit happens in these novels decades wouldn't seem that far out of place.)

It seems that the HV is suffering some of the same problems that you had with B5 - the original premise keeps encountering roadblocks and the continual need for revisions keeps complicating the evolution of the whole setting. I mean it doesnt neccesarily ruin it wholly, but you can see the changes that have been made and it sa bit jarring to SoD (unless you're one of those who think the Solarian League's setup is farcical from the outset, like you'll get on Spacebattles whenever HV discussions come up.)

[Mr Bean]

Okay let me break down Mesa and how the books explain it.

Beowulf back in the day had a geneticist who push the engineering of humans as far as science would let them. Leonard Detweiler was a very rich man, a brilliant scientist and the founder of what was called "Progressive eugenics". Not that people will be purged but all people would be improved and shaped to their chosen role. He in essence wanted to make a race of atomic super men.

Well he got so much push back and opposition on his home planet of Beowulf he decided he was going to take his like minded followers and wealth and move to the planet of Mesa. And one thing the books stress is that Detweiler plan for the long term. One of the first things he did after settling Mesa and building up the new Mesa corporation was seeing the long term picture. His beliefs would not be accepted because people feared what he was pushing and the end of the earth final war and the devastation of the "Scags" (Genetically engineered super soldiers, who while they were peak human in every catagorhy were also violent, semi-psychopathic and suicidal and arrogant as hell.) and other bioweapons had done to the home of humanity.

So fast forward a few years, he sees the writing is on the wall so he goes underground. He's already sired a few sons (Clones of himself) who he's already started improving. He brings in two dozen like minded individual and thus begins the long term external actor for the entire series, the Mesa Alignment.

Current leader of the Mesan Alignment Albrecht Detweiler is the cloned son of a cloned son of a cloned son. The sons are not derivative clones. Instead each generation is a chance to improve on what came before. While the first clone was a direct clone the next clone bred was created with the best genetic material that could be found or made back into the same Detweiler genes. Its a little confusing but TL:DR Albrecht Detweiler is is own great grandfather/genetic "Alpha" line.

The Alignment does not believe in a single string to any bow. They want to create galactic sized chaos in order to break up the Solarian Union so their carefully chosen pawns/co-conspirators can come forward and "save the day".

That's one of the most interesting things about the Mesan Alignment, they seek to breed not just the dragon but also the dragon slayer. One of the most interesting tibits is that there are "Gamma lines" scattered throughout the galaxy who are in essence long term plants of the Alignment. These two or three person cells are father to son, mother to daughter affairs who pass on the secret when the time comes they will execute orders to support the Alignment's goals. Each ignorant of what the full goals are but each knowing they have some vital part to play. The best example is an Anti-Manpower journalist who's well known for doing hard hitting scopes and investigations into genetic slavers. She is in fact one of these "Gamma" lines, her targets (Various corrupt officials) were carefully picked pawns sacrificed over decades to build up her street cred so she's in a position to very carefully shade public opinion.

You have to admire the fact that while Manpower hates her guts, she's the well known best regarded journalist out there fighting the evils of genetic slavery and has risked her life dozens of times to get the story... she is in fact Alignment fighting the same dragon (Manpower) that the Alignment carefully crafted into the biggest nastiest dragon one could want slain.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, though presumably by the time they caught up to MDMs and SD(P)s, both Haven and Manticore would be rolling with their third-gen versions of Apollo, with launch-to-detonation FTL telemetry, plus whatever the hell else Foraker and Hemphill come up with in the mean-time. No matter how one looks at the exact time, the SLN has been set up by cultural forces (and Mesan interference) to get their ass kicked by the RMN and RHN, specifically because getting their ass kicked so unilaterally would help bring about the collapse the Mesans want.

In all honesty, once the Sollies figure out what the hell is going on, their larger-than-Manticore's-entire-population scientific establishment and huge intelligence apparatus should be able to work out weapons close enough to competitive that the RMN/RHN cannot readily win. Apollo makes MDMs more dangerous, but not that much more dangerous; a sufficiently stupidly huge fleet with self-guided MDMs of its own, and utter boatloads of countermissiles to fire, could counter them. And the League totally has that kind of construction capability if they choose to use it.

Basically, it's bordering on Idiot Plot territory that the League hasn't already started a rearmament program*. It's still sort of believable, but it's causing a lot of people's suspension of disbelief to creak that they remain so ignorant, that they do not respond to events happening in a polity literally one Junction transit away from their core worlds.* I can forgive it, some can't, the point is that it is in fact a real criticism of Weber's story, that unlike the Havenites (who always showed signs that they were at least trying to win), the League is very explicitly set up to lose, and pursuant to this Weber has told us that they've spent ten years not responding* to rapid military advancement in a region of space not really all that far from their own frontiers.

While this criticism CAN be answered, and attempting to answer it at this time is really not the point, nevertheless it would present even more of a strain if the League did not respond effectively given another 20-30 years in which to do so. It's not like they have zero scientists or engineers, after all. It's not like the Manticoran and Havenite battles aren't a matter of public records, fought in front of huge numbers of witnesses. It's not like the League doesn't have intelligence organs that would gather up these records eventually, as a matter of routine curiosity and sizing up various polities in the region for future incorporation into the League.

And given the size and wealth Weber has allocated to the League, if they responded effectively by even having MDMs, by duplicating the super-fusion plants the Manticorans use to maintain their edge, and so on... they'd win. The Manticorans are only winning these battles because they are 25 years ahead technologically, including at least three generational advances in military affairs any one of which confers a devastating edge over the bearer. If the Solarians start playing catchup, they'll succeed in narrowing that gap quickly enough that it just won't be there in any serious way twenty years down the road.
________________

*And don't tell me "but they have," and talk about some random Aegis/Halo/Fleet2000 stuff Weber snuck in an infodump that has no real effect on the ships' ability to fight on an MDM-capable opponent. My point is that the League Navy remained institutionally ignorant of the need to replace its basically 19th century weapons fit with a 20th century weapons fit. And they stayed that way for nearly ten years- which is how long the MDM has existed in-setting.

With this I quite agree. I think what's going on is that Weber wanted to advance the 'slaves and Mesa' plot he had cooking with Flint, but couldn't think of a way to do that without moving up his mainline plot.

Agreed.

Pursuant to what I said earlier, I think if Weber had pursued his original plot plans, he would have had to have the Solarian League already be falling apart under its own weight when he kicked off his second string of mainline novels- because even a mediocre effort at military catchup would make a unified League too powerful to fight.

[Ahriman238]

Alright, and on to Short Victorious War. Let's start as the story does, with a look at the Haven/Manticore frontier.



As you can see, the Manticoran Alliance has grown a lot since the last book, obtaining allies in Alizon, Zanzibar, Mendoza, Chelsea, Doreas, Yorik, Minorca, Reevesport, Clearaway, and Candor, while setting up major fleet bases at Hancock, Klein and Grendelsbane. It has at this point been just over a year since Honor saved Grayson, just long enough for her to get her augmentics and stumble through therapy, and both sides have settled into their final pre-war positions.

Since this is one I got an older edition of, it still has the afterword that expounds a bit on space combat in the Honorverse, nothing you shouldn't know already if you'd been paying attention, and a chart comparing Haven and Manticoran fleet strengths at this point, in both tonnage and hulls.


Manticore Haven

SD 188 hulls, 1318.5 Mt 412 hulls, 2801.6 Mt
DN 121 hulls, 694.3 Mt 48 hulls, 258.3 Mt
BB N/A 374 hulls, 1430.6 Mt
BC 199 hulls, 148.7 Mt 81 hulls, 59.0 Mt
CA 333 hulls, 92.0 Mt 210 hulls, 54.5 Mt
CL 295 hulls, 30.1 Mt 354 hulls, 29.8 Mt
DD 485 hulls, 35.0 Mt 627 hulls, 40.7 Mt

TOTAL: 1621 hulls, 2318.6 Mt 1944 hulls, 4674.5 Mt

So Haven has an advantage, but less of one than you'd think given the sheer divide in size and population. Manticoran ships are usually bigger, and if Haven has a massive tonnage advantage it lessens if you remove the battleships which they use mostly for rear-duty policing and so on. Though Haven does have a large advantage in the wall, both in absolute numbers and because they have a lot more SDs.

[Terralthra]

Short Victorious War was actually the first HH book I read. I'm looking forward to the analysis and re-read.

[Simon_Jester]

Note that I recently posted stats for the battlecruisers involved- the Reliant is the brand new class Nike is a member of, with some Homers and possibly the older class mixed in. Note that RMN battlecruisers are a lot weaker on missile defense per ton than the light-ship counterparts. My impression is that this is an issue the extent that they kind of have to rely on cruiser/destroyer support to deal effectively with missile salvoes from a comparable-sized opposing force.

[Esquire]

Short Victorious War was actually the first HH book I read. I'm looking forward to the analysis and re-read.

Me too, oddly enough.

[Ahriman238]

Ook, the chart did not come out the way I meant it. Oh well, left side is Manticore, right side is Haven, it was a lot more spread out.

Anyways, we start with the Ominous Evil Haven Council discussing ominous, evil things. They're perturbed because one of their number, the Finance Minister Walter Frankel, was assassinated by a lone gunman loosely affiliated with the Citizen's Rights Union, the radical arm of the Citizen's Rights Party which advocates constantly for more welfare. They honestly have no idea if this was ordered by the CRU leadership, or a lone extremist.

The CRU believed the Dolists had a God-given right to an ever higher Basic Living Stipend.They blew up other people (including their fellow Dolists) to make their point, and it would have done Harris' heart good to shoot every one of them. Unfortunately, the Legislaturist families who ran the People's Republic had no choice but to permit organizations like the CRU to exist.

-snip-

Dolist violence was almost legitimized, part of the power structure which kept the mob satisfied while the Legislaturists got on with the business of running the government. Occasional riots and attacks on expendable potion;s of the Republic's bureaucratic structure had become a sanctioned part of what passed for the political process, but there was- or had been- a tacit understanding between the Dolist leaders and the establishment that excluded cabinet-level officials and prominent Legislaturists from the list of acceptable targets.

Extent to which violence is part of the system and commonly accepted. Of course, another reason they can't line the CRU up against the wall is they're established and security has extensive member lists. Better the devil you know, and all.

Robert Stanton Pierre was Haven's most powerful Dolist manager. He not only controlled eight percent of the total Dolist vote but served as the current speaker of the People's Quorum, the "democratic caucus" which told the Dolist Managers how to vote.

That much power in any non-Legislaturist hands was enough to make anyone nervous, since the hereditary governing families relied on the People's Quorum to provide the rubber-stamp "elections" which legitimized their regime. But Pierre was scary. He'd been born a Dolist himself and clawed his way from a childhood on the BLS to his present power with every dirty trick ambition could conceive of. Some of them hadn't even occurred to the Legislaturists themselves, and if he followed their instructions because he knew what side his bread was buttered on, he was still a lean and hungry man.

Intro for Rob Pierre and discussion of the People's Quorum and it's role in Haven politics.

Not including it, but it's mentioned here briefly that the Mental Health Police used to work for security, but now answer to Public Information.

On the basis of what happened to Saladin and reports of survivors from the earlier actions, we're estimating that. ton-for-ton, their technical superiority gives their units a twenty to thirty percent edge over our own.

Estimated margin of superiority, as others have said it's not like the Manties' tech is an insta-win, in fact the odds are still against them from any reasonable perspective and it's only their superior tech and officer corps given them a real chance.

Of course, the destruction of Saladin was something of an outlier, but the estimate gels well with my impression and memories of the early fleet engagements.

The catastrophic consequences of the "democratization of education" in the People's Republic were a sore point between his ministry and the ministries of economics and war alike, and the exchanges between him and Dumarest since the superiority of Manticore's technology had become evident had been acid.

The Legislaturists are self-aware enough to know their educational system is shit, and for important people to be very upset over the whole thing, but there's no solution in sight. Sound familiar?

"Added to that, we've got a lot of combat experience, and their alliance partners don't add much to their actual fighting power."

"Then why are we so worried about them?" Jessup demanded.

"Because of astrography." Parnell replied. "The Manties already have the advantage of the interior position; now they've built up a defense in depth.

Simon has said a lot about how they built up this depth that people can still deep strike through. Parnell here is worried that they'll have to take every base between them and Manticore, or deal with Manty BCs and cruisers raiding their supply lines freely.

"My staff and I have drawn up plans, under the over-all operational code name of Perseus, for several possible approaches. Perseus One envisions the capture of Basilisk as a preliminary in order to allow us to attack Manticore directly via the Manticore Wormhole Junction with simultaneous assaults down the Basilisk-Manticore and Trevor's Star-Manticore lines. It gives us the best chance to achieve surprise and win the war in a single blow, but runs the greatest risk of catastrophic losses if we fail.

Perseus Two is more conventional. We could assemble our forces at DuQuesne Base in the Barnett system, far enough inside the frontier the Manticorans couldn't tell what we were up to. From there, we'd attack to the southwest against Yeltsin, the thinnest point in their perimeter. With Yeltsin in our hands, we could advance directly against Manticore, taking out the bases on our flanks to protect our rear as we went. Losses would be higher than a successful Perseus One, but we;d avoid the risk of the total destruction of our forces which Perseus One entails.

Perseus Three is a variant of Perseus Two, directing two prongs from Barnett, one against Yeltsin and a second striking northwest against Hancock. The intentions is to present Manticore with two axes of threat, forcing them to split their forces against them. There's some risk of their concentrating their total strength to defeat one attack in detail, but the odds are against it because of the risks it would force them to accept against the other arm of the offensive. In my staff's opinion, our exposure to that sort of attack would be offset by our own ability to dictate the pace of operations by choosing when to push with either prong.

Finally there's Perseus Four. Unlike the others, Four envisions a limited offensive to weaken the Alliance rather than take Manticore completely with one blow. In this instance we would attack northwest once more, toward Hancock Station. There are two possible variants. One is to reinforce our forces at Seaford Nine and attack Hancock directly, while the other is to send a seperate force out from Barnett, take Zanzibar, then hook up to the north while our Seaford Nine forces attack southwest to take Hancock in a pincer. The immediate objective is to destroy the only major Manty base in the area and conquer Zanzibar, Alizon and Yorik, after which we should offer to negotiate a cease-fire in place. The loss of three inhabited star systems- especially in an area only recently added to the Alliance- would have to shake the Manties' other alliance partners, and possession of the region would position us quite nicely for a later activation of Perseus One or Three.

The Haven military's invasion plans. Perseus One could have worked if they'd tried it years ago before Basilisk became a fortress. Three is what they wound up going for. Parnell likes Three or Four, depending on what his political masters decide his main objective is.

Just a bit after, they discuss how the next best sector for expansion is the Silesian Confederacy, but if they went for it they'd probably still get into a war with Manticore, which has so much economic interest in Silesia.

Two-thirds of the homeworld's population was now on the Dole, and rampant inflation was an economic fact of life.

Majority of Haven population on welfare. Frankel figured they might try cutting it just a little to keep things going. They arranged a few carefully controlled leaks to test public opinion a couple of months back, and were met with rioting and the treasurer getting blown away with a pulser.

"You say we may take losses against the Manticorans, Admiral?" Parnell nodded. "But would operations against them be extended?"

"I don't see how they could be too extended, Ms. Secretary. Their fleet simply isn't large enough to absorb the sort of losses we can. Unless they somehow managed to inflict an incredibly lopsided loss ration, it would have to be a fairly short war."

-snip-

"There you are then." Palmer-Levy said. "What we need is a short , victorious war... and I think we all know where we can find one, don't we?

Title drop, and there we go. Haven commits to a war because Manticore is the nearest viable prize (worth more effort than they'd spend) and would defend even the less convenient one. Plus they can put off raising the BLS for the duration of the military crisis without inspiring lynch mobs (which are hard enough to pull off with 21st century gear, can you really see a peasant mob storming the Presidential Palace on Haven?) and can mobilize public opinion and take people away from their troubles with stirring war footage and news of the glorious march to triumph.

Almost a pity their war is neither short nor victorious. Plus, Harris and co. have no idea how little time they already have.

[Terralthra]

The Haven military's invasion plans. Perseus One could have worked if they'd tried it years ago before Basilisk became a fortress. Three is what they wound up going for. Parnell likes Three or Four, depending on what his political masters decide his main objective is.

I'm pretty sure the Junction had forts on it for some time before even On Basilisk Station. No matter what, a mass transit through with the max tonnage (~200 mtons, call it 25-30 of the wall) is going to have terrible losses. Honestly, I'm not sure that Perseus One was ever going to be an effective strategy. 50 of the wall vs. the Junction forts and Home Fleet? The only way it'd work would be a misdirection like White Haven pulled off (off-page) on Trevor's Star: he attacked conventionally in sufficient strength to pull any forces off the Junction, then put a few squadrons of the Home Fleet through and hoped for the best.

In this case, it'd be more the opposite: sortie a max transit of battle squadrons of the wall through each of the junction termini, hoping to pull the Home Fleet away from the planets, then attack conventionally from across the system. Either way, it's a win - control either the planets or the Junction, and the war is effectively over. Unless the forts and covering forces can handle your 6-odd squadrons of wallers, in which case you just lost 50+ of the wall and the strategic situation is effectively unchanged.

Two-thirds of the homeworld's population was now on the Dole, and rampant inflation was an economic fact of life.

Majority of Haven population on welfare. Frankel figured they might try cutting it just a little to keep things going. They arranged a few carefully controlled leaks to test public opinion a couple of months back, and were met with rioting and the treasurer getting blown away with a pulser.

Hilariously, the proposed "cut" was to just limit the BLS to rising in line with inflation.

[Ahriman238]

Even in the worst days of the war, until Ham took Trevor's Star, they maintained the incredibly expensive Junction Forts and still lived in terror of a Wormhole attack. IIRC, Honor says in a later book that a suicide max mass push through the wormhole, even with obsolete battleships could inflict a 2 to 1 loss in men and tonnage on the Junction Forts. Luckily, she doesn't think Pierre will go for a suicide attack since it would crush morale, but they still have to guard against the possibility.

With two wormholes they could pump forces through alternatively every what, 20 hours? Or send one max mass through to help knock out the Forts, taking terrible casualties in the progress and the second wormhole you can send through one ship every 5-15 minutes to reinforce.

It was doable, not without a ton of casualties, maybe more than a longer war would have cost them, but doable. Then Basilisk Station went from a bad joke to an actual base, with a fleet and everything including it's own mini-forts (that are later supplemented with more missile pods than any two fleets have.)

[Terralthra]

They can send up to 25 or so SDs in a single wave per terminus, locking it down for 17 hours or so, while a single SD has a transit window on the order of 45 seconds or so (Echoes of Honor).

The trouble is, I think he determined the mass transit windows and the danger of a mass assault (even from multiple termini) before the Great Resizing, or just didn't think about the sizes and numbers involved. The smallest of the Junction forts weighs twice as much as a SD, and is better-armed per mton (less mass for things like all-up impellers, more mass for armament), and as of Honor Among Enemies, they have 124 junction forts. As a conservative estimate, that's equivalent firepower to well over 250 SDs, and depending on how much bigger the forts get and how much more heavily armed per mton they are, conceivably much much more. But let's go with "250 SD-equivalent" for the sake of argument.

Even taking 2-1 losses (every SD takes out approximately twice its firepower worth of fort out), that's at least 3 waves of simultaneous junction mass-transits before the Junction is something approaching "clear," and probably more like 5 or 6. Again, this is not counting things like the tech advantage, huge (20-30 mton) forts, or the proportionally heavier armament.

Plus, of course, the problem of coordinating the second wave of transits. So, you say to your fleet commanders, "Ok, both go at 01/01/1902, 00:00 on the dot," and assuming you can get around relativity (which Honorverse seems to...somehow...), you get both waves in simultaneously. Great. 50 SDs take out somewhere between 20 and 40 forts (probably toward the lower end) and get blown up in return. When do you send wave two? As soon as the junction restabilizes? What happens when the two new arriving fleets smash directly into the debris of the earlier fight? How long do you give it to clear?

Also, remember, that 17 hours is enough time for Home Fleet to sortie from the inner system and come to support the forts, so now you're walking your second wave of 50 or so SDs into the massed fire of the remaining forts, PLUS Home Fleet (roughly 16 squadrons, or 128 ships of the wall, as of Short Victorious War), and now they're not just at ready stations, they're at action stations. The loss ratio would have to diminish under those circumstances, making the subsequent waves less effective than the first wave, which is the only real "surprise" wave. And this is before the RMN puts fuck-off huge clouds of bomb-pumped laser mines at the Junction (which is mentioned they do when on a war footing).

Say you get (stupidly) lucky, and the RMN Home Fleet doesn't sortie to support the Junction. Ok, great. You have just sent 250 SDs (out of ~400 [or 280-300 ships of the wall out of 450, if we're counting DNs]), in order to make the strategic situation equivalent to invading a single-system power, but you've now completely squandered your numerical advantage. You now have a smaller wall of battle than the RMN does, and you're still faced with invading their home system against their home fleet. I guess now you could go send a sixth wave of SDs to sit on the junction as a kind of "fuck you, come and get us" (which Manticore must surely do), but I still don't think this is a viable strategy. If you have the 250+ SDs free to attempt this strategy, you mass them at Trevor's Star, then send them through hyper straight at Manticore. Walk over their Home Fleet (2:1 advantage in hulls, significantly more in mtons), take the high orbitals, and force a surrender. The Junction forts can't intervene, war over. Why grind your fleet down by over half to take something that isn't in your way?

Even if this were a viable strategy in the grand scheme of things, I don't see how you'd convince the 4th wave of SDs through after the previous 200 SDs were all blown up with all hands.

This is the same point Beowulf tried to make to the larger Solarian League after Second Manticore. A Junction assault seems like a good idea, sorta, but it really isn't. 200 mton assaults sound like a lot, but not when we're talking about "first galaxy space-nations." I think, much like the "defense in depth" strategy of getting Alliance partners and an array of bases, the fear of a Junction assault is a holdover neurosis of much smaller scale wars.

[Mr Bean]

Here's the thing Terralthra your forgetting, when you transit the Junction the forts are within beam range. Because of the nature of the physics around wormholes you can't use impellers. In fact to transit you have to cut your wedge a few million miles short of the wormholes and coast in before switching to sail. Meaning those SD will be in energy range, have the element of surprise and can come at any time. So the SD can make the transit and using complete control open fire with everything they have. Meaning the expected is four forts per SD meaning because honorverse SD beam weapons are simply so large you can't build anything big enough to armor against it.

Now add in the missiles they will be tossing in every direction and it gets even nastier. The SD might only last twenty seconds before being destroyed or battered into scrap but that's time for three shots per energy weapon.

[mr friendly guy]

And given the size and wealth Weber has allocated to the League, if they responded effectively by even having MDMs, by duplicating the super-fusion plants the Manticorans use to maintain their edge, and so on... they'd win. The Manticorans are only winning these battles because they are 25 years ahead technologically, including at least three generational advances in military affairs any one of which confers a devastating edge over the bearer. If the Solarians start playing catchup, they'll succeed in narrowing that gap quickly enough that it just won't be there in any serious way twenty years down the road.

I am not sure if that is going to make much difference. In the latest book the Solarian League's own analysis of the economy of the Grand Alliance was that their combined economies will soon surpass the league in a few years. Granted GDP is more analogous to income rather than total assets (ie the league could still have lots of resources on its numerous worlds which it could tap), but it looks like the GA is going to have the larger economy before the Solarian League can even come close to equalizing the technology gap. In other words, the GA are closing the gap on where the League is stronger, at a faster rate than the League can on where its weaker (technology).

[Mr Bean]

Ughh hours later I see "complete control" when I meant was computer control.
Super dreadnaughts making the transit can transit into the Manticore system and use computer controls to open fire in all directions with lightspeed weaponry and nukes which while not lightspeed will be impossible to intercept in that time frame. Making the transit to the junction forts means appearing in knife fighting range next to millions of tons of forts. So if you transit in you have plenty of time (About two seconds) to engage and destroy anything your computer defines as a target. Worse the gravitational situation of the junction means it's slowly moving back and forth around the outer system meaning your very slowly have to calculate in where to best place forts and you can't be but in so many places and still be useful.

Add it all up your SD will transit in with the computers knowing roughly where to fire at, the forts have to decided if it's friend or foe and then engage as needed. Making the wrong call means dead civilians or dead your own ships.

[Simon_Jester]

As you can see, the Manticoran Alliance has grown a lot since the last book, obtaining allies in Alizon, Zanzibar, Mendoza, Chelsea, Doreas, Yorik, Minorca, Reevesport, Clearaway, and Candor, while setting up major fleet bases at Hancock, Klein and Grendelsbane.

Some of this may have taken place in earlier years, rather than the past year with Grayson. There are reasons why Manticore might not have sought Grayson's alliance in a major way until they already had many other positions cemented in place.

So Haven has an advantage, but less of one than you'd think given the sheer divide in size and population. Manticoran ships are usually bigger, and if Haven has a massive tonnage advantage it lessens if you remove the battleships which they use mostly for rear-duty policing and so on. Though Haven does have a large advantage in the wall, both in absolute numbers and because they have a lot more SDs.

It's also unclear how large the battleships are- four million tons is thrown around in some cases, only about half the size of a fully modern RMN superdreadnought, but the oldest battleships like the Thorstens tip the scales at only two million tons. Haven is just as likely to keep aging units in service as the RMN, for the aforementioned rear area duties.

Also note that the size difference between dreadnoughts and "super" dreadnoughts is only 10-20%.

Anyways, we start with the Ominous Evil Haven Council discussing ominous, evil things. They're perturbed because one of their number, the Finance Minister Walter Frankel, was assassinated by a lone gunman loosely affiliated with the Citizen's Rights Union, the radical arm of the Citizen's Rights Party which advocates constantly for more welfare. They honestly have no idea if this was ordered by the CRU leadership, or a lone extremist.

I remember Necker- though Necker wasn't assassinated. However, Necker's attempt to publish the royal finances as a way of reassuring the public in the early 1780s backfired badly, because he cooked the books to make France's financial situation look better- and that cooking became a matter of public record. Thus, the rising middle class in France started really looking at the competence of their government for the first time.

Not including it, but it's mentioned here briefly that the Mental Health Police used to work for security, but now answer to Public Information.

Yeah. As noted, I think the Mental Health Police are the 'soft power' counterpart to the 'hard power' forces of Internal Security; they are responsible for the "medicalization of dissent," the idea that people who disapprove of the system are in fact mentally ill and need treatment rather than redress of grievances.

They are probably also responsible for mass-scale use of psychiatric medication to keep the Dolist population under control despite any psychological problems resulting from crowded, high-crime upbringing. At least, I'd expect that.

On the basis of what happened to Saladin and reports of survivors from the earlier actions, we're estimating that. ton-for-ton, their technical superiority gives their units a twenty to thirty percent edge over our own.

Estimated margin of superiority, as others have said it's not like the Manties' tech is an insta-win, in fact the odds are still against them from any reasonable perspective and it's only their superior tech and officer corps given them a real chance.

That is also just about fair- note that while Simonds enjoyed a tonnage advantage of eight to five, he was also vastly inexperienced with his own hardware.

The Legislaturists are self-aware enough to know their educational system is shit, and for important people to be very upset over the whole thing, but there's no solution in sight. Sound familiar?

Part of the problem is that the system has been set up to use education as a means of social control for so long that using at a means to produce educated people, capable of operating advanced technology competently, requires a drastic reform not only of how they teach, but how they teach teachers, and the administrative/disciplinary structure surrounding those teachers (and students).

It's not a quick process even if you know exactly what to do.

Simon has said a lot about how they built up this depth that people can still deep strike through. Parnell here is worried that they'll have to take every base between them and Manticore, or deal with Manty BCs and cruisers raiding their supply lines freely.

They may also be worried about the possible consequences of a disastrous defeat of their entire deep-strike force at a hypothetical Battle of Manticore, especially knowing about the RMN technical advantage. In other words, more or less what happened historically in the second round of the war, except with Haven having less ability to replace their losses in a hurry, and Manticore having a larger reserve.

The Haven military's invasion plans. Perseus One could have worked if they'd tried it years ago before Basilisk became a fortress. Three is what they wound up going for. Parnell likes Three or Four, depending on what his political masters decide his main objective is.

Also, Perseus is an... interesting name for a plan intended to slay a thing named "manticore," "basilisk," and so on. Check mythology.

Just a bit after, they discuss how the next best sector for expansion is the Silesian Confederacy, but if they went for it they'd probably still get into a war with Manticore, which has so much economic interest in Silesia.

Majority of Haven population on welfare. Frankel figured they might try cutting it just a little to keep things going. They arranged a few carefully controlled leaks to test public opinion a couple of months back, and were met with rioting and the treasurer getting blown away with a pulser.

Right-o. Note that the percentage on the BLS isn't nearly as high on the other planets, if later works in the series are to be believed. In large part, what is happening is that Haven is using the economic surplus of numerous other planets to support the lifestyle of its masses on the homeworld; one might draw analogies to the way Rome drew on grain and gold from other parts of its empire to support the Roman masses with "bread and circuses."

Title drop, and there we go. Haven commits to a war because Manticore is the nearest viable prize (worth more effort than they'd spend) and would defend even the less convenient one. Plus they can put off raising the BLS for the duration of the military crisis without inspiring lynch mobs (which are hard enough to pull off with 21st century gear, can you really see a peasant mob storming the Presidential Palace on Haven?) and can mobilize public opinion and take people away from their troubles with stirring war footage and news of the glorious march to triumph.

The fundamental problem they then face is that the Legislaturalist regime cannot necessarily survive massacres of peasants. Think Arab Spring in Egypt; the army would not necessarily remain loyal in the face of mass, sustained popular dissent. Or think about what Pierre would do in that political climate- seize the reins of power, in all probability.

The analogy here is to Czarist Russia in 1905; it was their Minister of the Interior that said it first: “What this country needs is a short victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.”

Unfortunately for the Czars, they lost their war, mass civilian protests arose and were gunned down by the czar's troops. In the short term the consequences were contained, but pro-revolutionary movements remained underground and intellectually active afterward and were never suppressed successfully. The result was the later April and October revolutions of 1917, the massacre of the Romanov dynasty, and the total collapse of the Czarist political order.

Even a regime that succeeds in destroying the first peasant mobs to rebel against itself can fail in the long run, if those massacres motivate a cadre of determined revolutionaries and ambitious underlings to overthrow the state.

This is the same point Beowulf tried to make to the larger Solarian League after Second Manticore. A Junction assault seems like a good idea, sorta, but it really isn't. 200 mton assaults sound like a lot, but not when we're talking about "first galaxy space-nations." I think, much like the "defense in depth" strategy of getting Alliance partners and an array of bases, the fear of a Junction assault is a holdover neurosis of much smaller scale wars.

There are real problems with deep strike strategy. The junction-assault fear is, yes, to an extent a neurosis... but on the other hand, the reason it is NOT a probable threat to Manticore is that Manticore has committed vast resources to making sure that the problem never comes up. Manticore had to build those impenetrable Junction defenses, if it was to deter attacks through the Junction.

Had the defenses not been built, or kept on a smaller scale, Junction assaults would be a credible threat in that they could take out large Manticoran tonnage (the smaller-scale Junction garrison) and possibly survive the experience. This threat would be made even worse if, say, the Havenites had deliberately built a class optimized to assault the junction (i.e. numerous relatively small dreadnought-sized vessels armed entirely with heavy energy weapons, since by definition a junction assault will always emerge in energy range of its target). Which the RMN could never really rule out- so they'd have to design the Junction forts to totally wipe out, with no real possibility of defeat, the most massive and most optimized attack that could hit them.

So the Junction forts are designed not just to defeat 200 million tons of capital ships, but to defeat 200 million tons of capital ships with no missile magazines, limited maneuverability, and indeed precious little BUT beam weapons designed to blow big holes in forts and (possibly) point defense lasers to preemptively kill as many of the laser-head mines around them as possible before those mines fire.

[Ahriman238]

Correction: the Junction Forts are all at least half a million klicks from any possible exit point, specifically so no one can pop up in beam range. Point defense is on constant standby, with the computers set to override and use them the moment hostile launch is detected, even in peacetime.

I had believed there were only 2 dozen Junction Forts at this time, looking back over OBS I couldn't find the figure anywhere. With 2 dozen forts, a wormhole assault could work, even if it took severe causulties, with one prong feeding ships through as fast as they can go without shutting down the wormhole. much like Ham or Honor did, and the other providing the opening at max force. That said, causulties really would be horrendus even in victory and they could easily lose the bulk of their fleet that way, so Perseus One was never going to be their best option.

[Simon_Jester]

Correction: the Junction Forts are all at least half a million klicks from any possible exit point, specifically so no one can pop up in beam range.

Hwrm? Ah, that's not how I remembered it. Where did you see that?

[Crazedwraith]

Correction: the Junction Forts are all at least half a million klicks from any possible exit point, specifically so no one can pop up in beam range.

Hwrm? Ah, that's not how I remembered it. Where did you see that?

On Bassalisk Station. Or... Page one of this thread.

Last paragraph of the fifth quote of that post.

That was why no defensive planner placed his permanent defenses closer than a half million kilometers or so to a junction. If a hostile task force emerged within energy weapon range of the defenses, those defenses would be destroyed before they could reply, but ships transiting a wormhole junction arrived with a normal-space velocity of barely a few dozen kilometers per second, far too little for a high-speed attack run. With the closest forts so far from him and too little speed for a quick run-in to energy weapon range, any attacker must rely on missiles, and even impeller-drive missiles would require almost thirty-five seconds to reach them. Thus the forts' duty watches—in theory, at least—had time to reach full readiness while the weapons accelerated towards them. In practice, Honor suspected, most of them would still be coming on-line when the missiles arrived, which was why their point defense (unlike their offensive weaponry) was designed for emergency computer override even in peacetime.

[Ahriman238]

EDIT: Ninja'd.

[Terralthra]

Here's the thing Terralthra your forgetting, when you transit the Junction the forts are within beam range. Because of the nature of the physics around wormholes you can't use impellers. In fact to transit you have to cut your wedge a few million miles short of the wormholes and coast in before switching to sail. Meaning those SD will be in energy range, have the element of surprise and can come at any time. So the SD can make the transit and using complete control open fire with everything they have. Meaning the expected is four forts per SD meaning because honorverse SD beam weapons are simply so large you can't build anything big enough to armor against it.

Now add in the missiles they will be tossing in every direction and it gets even nastier. The SD might only last twenty seconds before being destroyed or battered into scrap but that's time for three shots per energy weapon.

No, they are not. This is explicit in the books. They are not in beam range, given their always-on 360 degree sidewall.

Each of those forts maintained a stand-by battle watch and a 360º sidewall "bubble" at all times, but no one at this end of the Junction could know anyone was coming through it until they arrived, and no one could remain eternally vigilant. Thus a sneak attack—from, say, Trevor’s Star—would always have the advantage of surprise; the attacker would arrive ready for battle, already seeking out targets for his weapons, while the defenders were still reacting to his arrival in their midst.

That was why no defensive planner placed his permanent defenses closer than a half million kilometers or so to a junction. If a hostile task force emerged within energy weapon range of the defenses, those defenses would be destroyed before they could reply, but ships transiting a wormhole junction arrived with a normal-space velocity of barely a few dozen kilometers per second, far too little for a high-speed attack run. With the closest forts so far from him and too little speed for a quick run-in to energy weapon range, any attacker must rely on missiles, and even impeller-drive missiles would require almost thirty-five seconds to reach them. Thus the forts’ duty watches—in theory, at least—had time to reach full readiness while the weapons accelerated towards them. In practice, Honor suspected, most of them would still be coming on-line when the missiles arrived, which was why their point defense (unlike their offensive weaponry) was designed for emergency computer override even in peacetime.

On the other hand, ships coming in will have their impellers configured for Warshawski sails, meaning their relatively unarmored tops and bottoms are completely exposed to enemy energy fire (assuming the forts are placed in-between the range at which energy weapons are effective against un-sidewalled targets and the range at which energy weapons burn through sidewalls - and that they're placed so they have +/- y firing angles on the exit vectors of the termini - which would be the intelligent place to put them. So at the same time your transiting SDs can't burn through the forts' sidewalls with their energy weapons, they're getting carved the fuck up by the forts' much more numerous, much more powerful energy weapons.

Care to revise your opinion?

As for Ahriman238's opinion that there were only a few dozen forts...the only place I was able to find a count of fortresses was in Honor Among Enemies when Lucian Cortez is explaining the manpower shortage. That book takes place before White Haven takes Trevor's Star, but years after the war begins in earnest. The count at that point is 124, which is doubtless higher than it would have been during "peace time", but this was a peace time in which Manticore knew war was coming, and knew it would probably be an attempt at a sneak attack. I have trouble believing they only had a couple dozen fortresses in 1905 but had over a hundred (a full order of magnitude expansion) in 1908/9.

[Simon_Jester]

Terralthra, calm down, Crazedwraith already quoted that bit.

The point here is that the threat environment is pretty serious, the weapons are powerful, and even with huge, heavily armored forts it's not entirely certain that they are fully immune to counterattack by an enemy barging through the junction. Especially given the unknown X-factors of enemy weapon design (what if they have a longer-range graser than we give them credit for?), enemy ship design (what if the front half of their ship is a lean-manned solid plug of armor designed to absorb our forts' fire while they dump piles of missiles out the back and go for massed barrages?), and strategic context (the Junction forts must remain effective even if the mobile fleet runs into a string of catastrophes, AND even if units from Home Fleet have to be peeled off to deal with some other crisis).

So the current level of Junction fortification is quite sensible, in my opinion; it's very heavy, but it needs to be heavy to deter the enemy from trying a Junction attack.