Legend of Galactic Heroes vs. Honorverse

[Simon_Jester]

By the way, do we know how many crew per ship? I'm guessing hundreds. They look pretty small but not very crew intensive.

At one point in the series there is a public slogan of calling for a fleet of a million ships and a hundred million men, so while that's not a solid number it provides an order-of-magnitude ballpark for crew counts.

As for the size of the Empire, I recall the total population of the galaxy is around 40-50 billion with the empire in the 20-30 billion range.

The Alliance's military casualties from a major offensive (with roughly 200000 ships sent out, and the entire fleet decisively defeated though not totally wiped out) were around 20 million men, further supporting a figure along these lines- once you figure in ground troop detachments who would have been forced to surrender or die during the Imperial counterattack, that would roughly cancel out the surviving ships.

So figure an average of 100 men per ship... which, if we can get a sense for relative crew sizes among different ship classes, may also be useful for getting a handle on roughly how many of which ship classes go into a given "modular fleet."

That's a significant question for us to tackle at some point. Given a LoGH fleet (Empire or FPA, take your pick, and answers will probably differ for each side) of a constant size (say, 10000 ships), what is a "reasonable" order of battle? We get a very different ideas of firepower/tonnage/et cetera if the answer is "100 battleships, 2000 cruisers, and 8000 destroyers" than if the answer is "2000 battleships, 4000 cruisers, and 4000 destroyers." And yet it's hard to say from the visuals which would be the case.

EDIT: Note, the ships are physically quite large- even the cruisers are built to at least the same scale as modern aircraft carriers, which have crews of thousands. This may be an argument for a much higher level of automation, to reduce manpower requirements, than I'd thought applied to the series.

Given that shipboard visuals generally show a high ratio of space to personnel (corridors are large, rooms are large, bridge spaces are fucking gigantic, and not that many people are physically present in any one room as a rule)... this is not unreasonable.

EDIT II: This also has interesting ramifications for industrial layout. The more automation goes into the ship construction, the more centralized the production and recruitment for the ships can be, which plays into the hands of nations like the Empire which have a handful of industrialized worlds and a huge number of lightly populated Ruritanians for the aristocracy to toy with. I suspect, though, that the "real" holdings of the nobles include shares of the industrial machinery, not that I can prove that...

[Vympel]

The official crew figures (Fleet Files) are thus for standard ships:-

GE Battleship: 726 men (677m L x 179m W x 228m H)
FPA Battleship: 660 men (624m x 65m x 136.5m)

GE Cruiser: 670 men (576m x 141m x 144m)
FPA Cruiser: 393 men (372m x 94.5m x 74.4m)

GE Fast Battleship: 745 men (712m x 152m x 219m)
(No Alliance equivalent)

Note, the heights of FPA ships include their long antennae.

For comparison's sake, the unique flagships have lager crews. The Brunhild (1,007m) has 1,171 men. The Rio Grande (1,260m) has 1,216 men. Most unique Imperial flagships have crews ranging between 800 - 950.

Note this doesn't include destroyers, which are not covered by the fleet files, and may or may not make up a significant portion of fleets. Rear Admiral Eihendorf's fleet in Episode 27 - which had roughly 2,000 ships, was estimated by the Alliance to have:-

- 200 to 250 battleships;
- 400 to 500 cruisers;
- 1,000 destroyers; and
- 30 to 40 spacecraft carriers.

(i.e. at least 50% of the fleet were destroyers)

EDIT: I wonder, however, if these figures can't be right, given the casualty figures and the observed fleet compositions. Other casualty listings in the show ostensibly support ~110 - 120 men per ship on average. For example, the Black Lancers fleet had 15,900 ships with 1,908,000 men. And that fleet clearly had a big proportion of fast battleships. I might be missing something. These ships also carry ground forces into battle too, so they could be maximum personnel capacity? I'll ask a guy on the wiki to translate a page from the fleet file booklet for me, double check that I'm not totally misinterpreting the booklets.

EDIT II: This also has interesting ramifications for industrial layout. The more automation goes into the ship construction, the more centralized the production and recruitment for the ships can be, which plays into the hands of nations like the Empire which have a handful of industrialized worlds and a huge number of lightly populated Ruritanians for the aristocracy to toy with. I suspect, though, that the "real" holdings of the nobles include shares of the industrial machinery, not that I can prove that...

There's no canon evidence AFAIK as to how many industrialized worlds vs lightly populated rural worlds the Empire has?

DOUBLE EDIT: yup, the relevant kanji definitely means crew.

[Connor MacLeod]

Could the 100 million men refer to ground forces? I've gottne the impression that LOGH doesn't throw out the huge numbers of troops per battle the way (for example) 40K does, but I remember seeing on the wiki frequent mentions of troops in the tens of millions range.

Also only 40-50 billion total for a group that spans a good fraction of the galaxy? That implies either few planets with lots of spacing, or lots of sparsely-inhabited planets.

I'm kinda wondering how reliable the translations might be again, because even if they got "billion" right, we've known that billion can refer to "1e9 billion" or "1e12 billion". Trillions would SEEM more appropriate, and fit the scale of the space battles, but who knows, maybe they decided to be original and imply insane industrial capacity by having small numbers of planets and huge numbers of ships and generally throwing around trillions of tons worth of matter on a routine basis.

[Connor MacLeod]

Crew figures may or may not be fixed. You could have cases where you have to operate it at minimum efficient or even skeleton levels, and others where you want large crews (replacements for casualties, running multiple shifts, ship defense, etc.)

They probably are quite automated (that thought occured to me as well) but there may be cases where the automation either fails or can't work alone (from what I've been reading on the wiki, here, and SB, they run that "EW renders alot of computer stuff ineffective so weapons and shit have to have som emanual control ot offset" theory.

Another possibility is the crew complmenents include some equilvaent to Marines or soldiers (security, to contribute for ground forces, etc.)

[wautd]

Also only 40-50 billion total for a group that spans a good fraction of the galaxy? That implies either few planets with lots of spacing, or lots of sparsely-inhabited planets.

The galactic map only shows a few dozen dots, at most, representing planets. So it seems there are very few habitable planets in the galaxy.

Which I would find strange though. Habitable panets must be hugely valuable if they are so rare, yet earth is a backwater planet. I remember something about the population being decimated by a big wars on regular time though.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

The short billion is almost certainly the one used for the population figures. Phezzan is said to have two billion people and yet does not appear to be significantly more densely populated than Earth. The FPA also is only a few centuries old and started with a population of less than a million. And the fleets with crews in the millions are a drain not only economically but also as a drain on the population; early in the show, an Alliance politician brings up the fact that too much of the population is tied up in the military as a reason to try to push for peace.

[Simon_Jester]

The official crew figures (Fleet Files) are thus for standard ships:-

GE Battleship: 726 men
FPA Battleship: 660 men

GE Cruiser: 670 men
FPA Cruiser: 393 men

GE Fast Battleship: 745 men

For comparison's sake, the unique flagships have lager crews. The Brunhild (1,007m) has 1,171 men. The Rio Grande (1,260m) has 1,216 men. Most unique Imperial flagships have crews ranging between 800 - 950.

Note this doesn't include destroyers, which are not covered by the fleet files, and may or may not make up a significant portion of fleets.

Destroyer crews aren't that small, though- not small enough to turn the average crew ratio down to 100 men per ship.

Rear Admiral Eihendorf's fleet in Episode 27 - which had roughly 2,000 ships, was estimated by the Alliance to have:-

- 200 to 250 battleships;
- 400 to 500 cruisers;
- 1,000 destroyers; and
- 30 to 40 spacecraft carriers.

(i.e. at least 50% of the fleet were destroyers)

EDIT: I wonder, however, if these figures can't be right, given the casualty figures and the observed fleet compositions. Other casualty listings in the show ostensibly support ~110 - 120 men per ship on average. For example, the Black Lancers fleet had 15,900 ships with 1,908,000 men. And that fleet clearly had a big proportion of fast battleships. I might be missing something. These ships also carry ground forces into battle too, so they could be maximum personnel capacity? I'll ask a guy on the wiki to translate a page from the fleet file booklet for me, double check that I'm not totally misinterpreting the booklets.

Yeah, there's a significant incompatibility here, or I think there is one. Casualty statistics suggest something like 100-200 men per ship, given that most ships are totally blown to bits during a battle under conditions that make surviving unlikely... hmm.

One issue is- what proportion of ships are actually destroyed when a fleet is 'crushed' the way that two FPA fleets were 'crushed' at Astarte? Does the evidence support consistent near-100% losses among the fleet, or can a fleet of 10000 ships be "destroyed" with only half its actual ships being lost, much as a ground combat unit might be effectively "destroyed" by such tremendous casualties? What about surrenders, mission-kills that leave rescuable people alive, that sort of thing?

I don't know; it feels awkward as a fudge factor, but it's something to consider when we try to compare stated crew figures to stated casualty-per-ship ratios and get different answers.

As to fleet composition, let's see, Eihendorf's fleet was staging a reconnaissance in force near Iserlohn, right? That suggests a fairly 'generic' fleet composition, because on the one hand you don't want something so light it's easily defeated, but on the other hand you're not going to commit a disproportionate number of heavy units to an operation that's basically hit-and-run.

Also only 40-50 billion total for a group that spans a good fraction of the galaxy? That implies either few planets with lots of spacing, or lots of sparsely-inhabited planets.

The galactic map only shows a few dozen dots, at most, representing planets. So it seems there are very few habitable planets in the galaxy.

Which I would find strange though. Habitable panets must be hugely valuable if they are so rare, yet earth is a backwater planet. I remember something about the population being decimated by a big wars on regular time though.

I think habitable or quasi-habitable planets are fairly common but industrial infrastructure is sparse. This is probably in large part the result of centuries of conditions bad for economic growth- the rise of the Galactic Empire involving the emperors concentrating economic power on a handful of worlds they could control, and the extremely long FPA-Imperial war resulting in a constant drain of economic resources to the front.

So it may be that habitable worlds are common, but except for a handful of worlds that had already been developed for hundreds of years, the money to turn rural worlds with a handful of farm estates into industrial powerhouses capable of supporting populations in the billions simply isn't there. Birth rates may also be a factor, influenced by the war and (again) by the Empire's old eugenics policies.

This is why so many of the 'remote' planets we see are largely rural: they're settled, but there's no assets to invest in them.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

One of the more disturbing aspects of the universe that never really gets touched on directly is that at the founding of the Empire, the population was in the hundreds of billions while at the time of the show it's only 27 billion. So assuming this wasn't through loss of habitable planets, the Empire does have room to grow, but their society's ultra-conservatism is probably curtailing that.

Wealth and resources being concentrated on a few planets seems rather likely, as Odin, Phezzan, and Heinessen appear to be the three most important planets by a large margin.

[takemeout_totheblack]

Of course there's always the possibility for translation error. I don't know the first thing about japanese numerical but is it possible that trillion was mistaken for billion? Because 20-40 trillion would sound about right considering the area they occupy and scale on which they wage war.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

If the Empire has 27 thousand million subjects, even if their armed forces numbered 200 million (which they might not; they didn't even reach the hundred million troop invasion force called for by the slogan after a mass enlistment) that would be less than 1% of the population. If it were less than .001%, the effects of the war on the population would be so negligible that their mention would be very out of place.

[Vympel]

Destroyer crews aren't that small, though- not small enough to turn the average crew ratio down to 100 men per ship.

Probably not. Wish there was an exact figure.

Yeah, there's a significant incompatibility here, or I think there is one. Casualty statistics suggest something like 100-200 men per ship, given that most ships are totally blown to bits during a battle under conditions that make surviving unlikely... hmm.

One issue is- what proportion of ships are actually destroyed when a fleet is 'crushed' the way that two FPA fleets were 'crushed' at Astarte? Does the evidence support consistent near-100% losses among the fleet, or can a fleet of 10000 ships be "destroyed" with only half its actual ships being lost, much as a ground combat unit might be effectively "destroyed" by such tremendous casualties? What about surrenders, mission-kills that leave rescuable people alive, that sort of thing?

I don't know; it feels awkward as a fudge factor, but it's something to consider when we try to compare stated crew figures to stated casualty-per-ship ratios and get different answers.

As to fleet composition, let's see, Eihendorf's fleet was staging a reconnaissance in force near Iserlohn, right? That suggests a fairly 'generic' fleet composition, because on the one hand you don't want something so light it's easily defeated, but on the other hand you're not going to commit a disproportionate number of heavy units to an operation that's basically hit-and-run.

Yang said at Astarte that even if a fleet is considered soundly defeated, its highly unlikely that it'll be entirely destroyed. But again, the Black Lancer and Fahrenheit ship / men casualties (I only gave the initial total strength, but it gives the casualties immediately after) again support ~120 men per ship on average.

But then again - casualty, which is the word the translation continually uses, isn't the same as death. And though most ships we see are blown up completely, that isn't always the case, and in combat between tens of thousands of ships per side, it could be said we're only seeing the most spectacular bits. After all, in several battles we see the inside of damaged ships and the carnage that results.

Crew figures may or may not be fixed. You could have cases where you have to operate it at minimum efficient or even skeleton levels, and others where you want large crews (replacements for casualties, running multiple shifts, ship defense, etc.)

They probably are quite automated (that thought occured to me as well) but there may be cases where the automation either fails or can't work alone (from what I've been reading on the wiki, here, and SB, they run that "EW renders alot of computer stuff ineffective so weapons and shit have to have som emanual control ot offset" theory.

Another possibility is the crew complmenents include some equilvaent to Marines or soldiers (security, to contribute for ground forces, etc.)

Yeah, ships that are boarded (flagships specifically) clearly have troops aboard to repel boarders (though the crew itself will get in on the action). A regiment of ground troops board a particular flagship in one of the final battles, and though we don't know the strength of the regiment, it suffers losses stated to be devastating, with "only 204 survivors".

[Simon_Jester]

Of course there's always the possibility for translation error. I don't know the first thing about japanese numerical but is it possible that trillion was mistaken for billion? Because 20-40 trillion would sound about right considering the area they occupy and scale on which they wage war.

I would be rather surprised at such a translation error; there's no real evidence for it, I think. And I'm pretty sure the Japanese don't use the long-scale numbers that would make such a slip possible.

As noted, the scale of the manpower commitment of the two sides of the war makes a population in the millions-of-millions range unthinkable when compared to stated manpower figures.

Populations in the thousands-of-millions range are already quite large compared to the proportion of men under arms, but consider:

1) This war consumes vast amounts of industrial resources- a battle that kills a million men also destroys something like hundreds of millions of tons' worth of warships. Thus, the labor force committed to replacing ship losses probably places the national economies much closer to maximum-effort strain than the military enlistment alone would lead us to expect.

2) The war has been going on for a very long time. This has probably had demographic effects which make the drain on manpower more significant than it would be in a sudden war where all males between, say, 18 and 35 were alive, healthy, and available to be conscripted into service.

3) The Empire, at least, has a large population of agrarian rural types who may well not be useful as a large-scale supply of manpower to the fleet, because they don't have the technical background to master the job.

[takemeout_totheblack]

Something I've wondered, what keeps the Honorverse from mass production? They probably have the industrial capacity, and the technology (as far as I know) doesn't seem to involve the use of rare or finite resources a la Star Trek's dilithium crystals and Babylon 5's Quandium-40. Is there an in-universe explanation for four digit fleets?

[Xon]

Honorverse uses massive automation and asteriod mining & refining using multi-megaton mining ships. Most of Manitcore's ship building power is actually in the Manitcore system itself, hidden shipyards are also used to develop & manufacture the initial first wave of prototype weapons systems that Manitcore pulls out of it's ass every 6 months to a year.

The primary consideration for shipyards is a) physical security b) the time to build them. Physical security because fixed instalations are incrediably vulnerable to first-strike RRV attacks while being ignored by the laws which forbit the same against planets, and they are very big. Honorverse shipyards can pump out dozens of the superdreadnoughts per run, and pump out utterly stupid number of missiles.

[Simon_Jester]

Something I've wondered, what keeps the Honorverse from mass production? They probably have the industrial capacity, and the technology (as far as I know) doesn't seem to involve the use of rare or finite resources a la Star Trek's dilithium crystals and Babylon 5's Quandium-40. Is there an in-universe explanation for four digit fleets?

The limiting factor on how many they can build is a combination of population and GDP.

Population is an obvious factor. Manticore, for instance, simply could not supply trained crews for several thousand superdreadnoughts; they don't have the population base to put that many millions of technical specialists into the fleet. Remember, too, the "tooth to tail" ratio: for every crewman on the ship, there will be others manning various bases and logistics commands.

As to GDP, the ships are that expensive- they weigh millions of tons and use large amounts of materials which are difficult to fabricate and difficult to work, requiring that setting's equivalent of semiconductor fabrication plants (you know, the kind that cost billions of dollars per plant and there are only a few of them in the world?). While there is nothing in theory preventing an Honorverse power from spamming von Neumann machines to turn out gigantic fleets, it's never been done, and trying to do it on short notice would almost certainly fail horribly. The existing industrial base simply isn't up to the task, and the civilian economy of Honorverse powers does not and cannot supply enough demand to create such an industrial base.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Also, Honorverse ships are slow to build because their construction involves the use of nanotechnology to "grow" a lot of the ship, like the armor. That takes a long time.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yeah, ships that are boarded (flagships specifically) clearly have troops aboard to repel boarders (though the crew itself will get in on the action). A regiment of ground troops board a particular flagship in one of the final battles, and though we don't know the strength of the regiment, it suffers losses stated to be devastating, with "only 204 survivors".

The slogan mentioned called for 100 million men, but do we know for certain that they were the SOLE crew for the starships? If they have a sizable number of soldiers who, say, survived/escaped the destruction of other starships, the 100 million may simply be considered a supplemental figure.

Another possibility is that at that point they had developed suffiicent automation to reduce crew requirements. With their seemingly small populations, they can't face as much attrition I imagine, so cutting down on crew sizes (and losses) would be paramount.

This begs an interesting question. When ships are crippled/damaged/destroyed do they kill everyone on board, or are there inevtiably survivors (and how many?) What sorts of damage control/escape measures are there?

BTW we're certain that the number is accurate, or that these aren't ground troops?

PS Also: Was that "million starships" in addition to the stuff they already had, or were they rebuilding their fleet from scratch? That might provide a useful hint at industrial capabilities.

Double PS: here they mention 8 fleets, 200,000 ships, and 30 million men. That's around 150 per ship. It also suggests that fleet sizes increased quite a bit from the 13,000 number I saw elsewhere (Yang's fleet being only half the size of a normal one.) Or it might be some "separate continuity" thing (I'm still leery of that.)

Speaking of Yang... here they mention he had 6400 ships and only.. 70,000 personnel. Which is a grand total of around 10 persons per ship.

you also mentioned the Black Lancers and I looked at that here and it mentions the black lancer fleet.. I'm a bit confused now. It lists casualties as ~2 million but not the total fleet size (it implies maybe close to 15k ships lost with 2 million casualties total..) but you implied the 2 million thing was only for the Lancer fleet.

[Connor MacLeod]

As far as populations and number of planets go.. I found this which mentions 200 planets and 50 million inhabitants conquered. This would seem to gel with what Simon mentioned already.

Furthermore, this is apparently a minor territorial loss. If we extrapolate from the perviously mentioned population figure and "short" billion, that,s some 200,000 systems as a possible upper limit. I'd say its probably quite generous, since the distribution is going to be more varied (millions per world seems more typical, and I'd bet there are at least a few tens/hundreds million worlds) so we're probalby looking at high thousands/low tens of thousands as a more accurate ballpark than hundred thousand. Thousands again would also fit with the loss of 200 seemingly minor systems.

All that said, I'm still going to argue that these should be taken with a massive grain of salt. At best, we treat them as ballpark figures. WE don't know much about LOGH census taking, and even if there are no translation errors, there's still potential for it to be imprecise (That they're fighting a long term war can indeed negatively impact their population growth, Iwon't deny that, but I would also point out that it probably means they aren't focusing on exploration, census taking, or other minor matters as much either. Assuming they have competent census takers to begin with.)

but since we have a small statistical sample of fan translation dialogue, and no "official" dialogue exists, I'm going to advocate caution in reading too much into it. That doesn't mean throw it out or ignore it, but use it with an expectation that it can (and might) be flawed. Especially given what Vympel already told me re: their energy weapons.


re: Industry. We know they can throw around truly immense amounts of resources in reasonable periods of time (tens or hundreds of thousands of warships that must weigh tens/hundreds of thousands of tons at a bare minimum, multi-trillion ton orbital facilities, a hypothetical milllion starship fleet, etc.) as well as tremendous amounts of energy (The asteroid attack on the ARtemis necklace.) so their industrial potential is prodigious, and whether it is "centralized" or "decentralized" won't really change that. In fact, if they do have a high level of automation, they probably don't have to go anywhere near planets or their populations to get ships made (why they use them to crew them is another story but there could be any number of reasons for that that have nothing to do with logic. Also, having the bulk of the hulls and shit constructed in orbit doesn't mean that other systems, like computers and such, wouldn't be built elsewhere, or on planet.) In fact keeping much of it in orbit probably fits their security concerns quite a bit. We'd actually need to know more about this to make any concrete assessment, though. I vaguely recall some of the big orbital stations having shipyards or doubling as shipyards or something like that, but that's all. And Yang's fleet demonstrates some measure of orbital "mining" capability as well.

As to why they bother with planets at all... well.. that requires delving more into the economy and politics of LOGH. I haven't concerned myself with that yet

[Connor MacLeod]

Also, Honorverse ships are slow to build because their construction involves the use of nanotechnology to "grow" a lot of the ship, like the armor. That takes a long time.

As I recall Theismen and Foraker got shipbuilding down to about a year or two for podlayers. And that was still considered slow to Manticoran standards.

Of course shipbuilding times aren't eternally fixed, and lots of factors could lengthen or shorten it (cutbacks to staff or funding, for example, could result in a slower build time. If corruption or bureacracy become a factor, that could slow things down as well.)

That said, I don't think building in the "conventional" way the Honorverse does against say, HAven, will work against LOGH. They need to focus on numbers and volume, and that means a.) lots of easy to reload/replace missile launchers, with lots of links (Thats why podnaughts are potentially dangerous, but they're too slow ot build) to take advantage of their long range, and b.) lots of LACs (thousands or tens of thousands.)

They might focus on destroyers and some cruisers to build to support LACs, but I wouldn't put too much in that. They might also build more LAC carriers to give the LACs more operational range.

The key here is to make systems such incredibly tough nuts to crack that the LOGH would consider it suicide to simply throw themselves into an attack. It's unlikely they can strike offensively (or at least decisively) at the LOGH universe - the size and distances are too big to strike in any reasonable timeframe) and it's unlikely they can match their sheer industry. They'd have to either a.) exhaust their populations through sheer attrition, and that means they wipe out fleets to the last man or b.) provide such an immense deterrent to attack that it becomes unthinkable or wearing. I'm banking on B.), since A.) is probably only going to work for the larger honorverse polities (the League or perhaps Haven.)

[Simon_Jester]

Also, Honorverse ships are slow to build because their construction involves the use of nanotechnology to "grow" a lot of the ship, like the armor. That takes a long time.

That's not unique to nanotech- the problem is that the materials that go into the armor belt are very difficult to work. Hence the need to use relatively slow processes (capable of turning out 'only' a billion tons or so of warship per year per major power ) to manufacture the stuff.

Also, to be quite blunt, these things are big. It is easy for us to underestimate the challenges in producing large numbers of multi-million ton objects, or to assume by default that every science fiction universe will have long since resolved them. But not every setting is Grand Galactic Space Opera in which fleets of millions clash, blow each other up, and are replaced by the middle of next week.

[takemeout_totheblack]

Just how efficient could laser warheads be? I know that unlike the actual weapon theory they are based off of, the laser-heads in Honorverse have a gravity focusing thing that aims the blast into a gaussian or bell-like shape, thus ensuring a much larger fraction of the blast is focused onto the lasing rods. But just how efficient could they be?

The following info is Honorverse-Wiki based, so feel free to correct.

Let's use the Manticoran Mk 23 as an example. 40 megaton warhead (~170 PJ) and with six 500x40 cm long lasing rods that are quote '[positioned] about hundred meters in front of the missile's nuclear warhead' end quote.
Given these perimeters, what kind of power are we getting from each laser blast? A megaton? Two? More? Less?

[Simon_Jester]

Well, I wouldn't expect efficiency of more than, oh, a percent or so... but I'm sure Weber envisions them being more powerful than that.

[takemeout_totheblack]

Well, the laser-head is seen as very inefficient by naval personnel when compared to shipboard lasers (HV-wiki again) so they can't be much more than 5% per rod, or 2Mt (8PJ).

Considering LoGH shielding appears to be based off of a set deflection* rather than capacitance, if those lasers aren't hitting hard enough, they aren't going to do jack shit.

Connor calculated that the beams were carrying enough clout to melt a significant amount of metal, the same amount of standard iron requiring 80-435TJs of energy to do the same (and LoGH ships almost certainly aren't made from conventional materials). And that's assuming that the damage was from melting and not vaporization, in which case the number would almost certainly be higher. So the potential maximum based off of capacities seen is *probably* in the low to medium single digit petajoules (2-?, not more than 10, probably) In order for the beam to get past the shields and do the damage it did it would have to have this yield combined with whatever it takes to overcome the shielding system.

Might I also add that according to the LoGH wiki, LoGH ships seem to have two sets of shields, one that's on all the time and a more powerful one that can only be activated for short periods before requiring a cool-down period. This may be another case of wiki-syndrome, but it would explain why sometimes close range full-power shots can be blocked while 6 million km bloomed-as-fuck shots cannot.


*say the shields are rated at 1000 whateverjoules, a blast of 1001 whateverjoules will permit 1 whateverjoule to penetrate. This theory helps to explain the battle of Amlitzer, where the battle takes place literally spitting distance from a star. Since the amount of energy hitting the ships did not exceed their primary shields limit, it did not harm the ship.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Let's see, there's tech stuff in the back of In Fire Forged. There's a description of the laser head missile the Manticorans started the series with. The Mark 13 Cruiser/battlecruiser missile has a 15 megaton warhead. There are 6 laser head submunitions; each lasing rod can deposit "the better part of a kiloton" on the target.

From the back of Storm From the Shadows I see they are up to Mark 16. As for the newest cruiser warheads, here's a clip from the infodump:

But now, thanks primarily to fallout from the Star Kingdom's ongoing emphasis on improving its grav-pulse FTL communications capability, BuWeaps had completed field testing and begun production of a new generation of substantially more powerful gravity generators for the cruiser-weight Mark 16. In fact, they'd almost doubled the grav lens amplification factor, and while they were at it, they'd increased the yield of the missile warhead, as well, which had actually required at least as much ingenuity as the new amplification generators, given the way warheads scaled. They'd had to shift quite a few of the original Mark 16's components around to find a way to shoehorn all of that in, which had included shifting several weapons bus components aft, but Helen didn't expect anyone to complain about the final result. With its fifteen megaton warhead, the Mark 16 had been capable of dealing with heavy cruiser or battlecruiser armor, although punching through to the interior of a battlecruiser had pushed it almost to the limit. Now, with the new Mod G's forty megaton warhead and improved grav lensing, the Mark 16 had very nearly as much punch as an all-up capital missile from as recently as five or six T-years ago.

Producing the Mod G had required what amounted to a complete redesign of the older Mark 16 weapons buses, however, and BuWeaps had decided that it neither wanted to discard all of the existing weapons nor forgo the improvements, so Admiral Hemphill's minions had come up with a kit to convert the previous Mod E to the Mod E-1. (Exactly what had become of the Mod F designation was more than Helen was prepared to guess. It was well known to every tactical officer that BuWeaps nomenclature worked in mysterious ways.) The Mod E-1 was basically the existing Mod E with its original gravity generators replaced by the new, improved model. That was the only change, which had required no adjustments to buses or shifting of internal components, and the new warheads could be fused seamlessly into the existing Mark 16 weapons queues and attack profiles. Of course, with its weaker, original warhead it would remain less effective than the Mod G, since its destructiveness was "only" doubled . . . while the Mod G laser heads' throughput had increased by a factor of over five.

[takemeout_totheblack]

So each lasing rod it spitting out multi-kiloton level lasers? Hmm. Maybe sidewalls have a energy/per/area weakness. Like a 15Mt proximity burst will only do so much, whereas a 20cm wide 5 kiloton laser will penetrate?

LoGH probably has the same issue, I'll have to defer to the experts for that one though.