Legend of Galactic Heroes vs. Honorverse

[Lord of the Abyss]

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?

A laser beam will deliver energy much more efficiently than an omnidirectional nuclear explosion at the same range, and can therefore do damage from much farther away than the warhead can. And it's very hard to get a "contact nuke" into close enough range for it to be useful; it happens only a few times in the series to a ship that isn't already crippled. Although if you can get the nuke that close and its sidewall penetrators disrupt the wall, then they do lots of damage; they trash that side of the ship if they don't destroy it outright.

[Vympel]

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.

I wouldn't read anything into the slogan at all. Its just a recruiting slogan, really.

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?

Ships definitely get damaged and not everyone is killed, because there are hospital ships that accompany fleets. We see lots of internal carnage in struck ships. In most external combat shots, we see ships explode completely in short order, most of the time. Its a mix, really. We don't see much of damage control (they do carry out repairs on the battlefield, though, in lulls between combat) but as for escape measures, there's shuttles and escape pods.

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

I'm fairly confident that Central Anime's translation is accurate in terms of the numbers. I really wouldn't be concerned that they're getting simple Japanese wrong - its Japanese translators who are doing this. That's not to say there aren't subtitle typos, I've spotted some, but no reason to assume them without good reason.

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.

Refer above. Its just a slogan from the context, really.

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.)

To clarify on several points:-

* In terms of the anime, the only seperate continuity is the visuals of Golden Wings, a discrete movie where nothing looks like what we see in the main series of 110 continuous episodes, or the Gaiden, which are all 100% gold certified I guarantee one continuity. So don't worry about that

Basically:-

*My Conquest Is a Sea of Stars (pilot movie)
*Overture to A New War (expanded retelling of first two episodes of the series)
*Main Series (4 seasons)
*Gaiden series (2 seasons, prequels)

are all one continuity

Golden Wings:- not part of the continuity in terms of visuals, but story acknowledged as occuring (in the Gaiden).

Questions?

* A word on fleets:- the 200,000 ship fleet is a combination of 8 seperate Alliance fleets (3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, and 13th) into one large invasion fleet. They split up in enemy territory. This would imply 25,000 warships per fleet, but given the 112,700 combat ships / 41,900 support ships (engineering, hospital, supply) of a later invasion fleet, that 200,000 figure definitely includes support ships.
* Fleet sizes vary depending on the rank of the commanding officer. Rear Admirals can command 1,000 - 2,000 ships. A Vice Admiral might command anything from 10,000 - 15,000 ships or so (i.e. several Rear Admirals under them). There's some overlap with Admirals here. High Admirals (Empire-only rank, no Alliance equivalent) command 15,000 - ~30,000 ship fleets (Rear Admirals, Vice Admirals, Admirals under them). Fleet Admirals command multiple of these fleets. So its not a matter of fleet sizes increasing, you're just seeing multiple fleets come together to accomplish something big. Note these numbers vary from fleet to fleet, but the entire franchise is very consistent within these ranges.

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.

That's a typo. The anime clearly states 6400 ships and 700,000 men. Personally, I don't really think the books are worth worrying about right now, given the available translation isn't even complete (probably never will be), and we know the anime differs from them in several respects. Besides, if you're reading those chapters of the books, you might as well read the first page of the battles thread - its more accurate

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.

Someone's fucked that article up. Damn amateurs, editing stuff from memory.

As I said earlier, the Black Lancers were 15,900 ships in 800 UC (that's a year), and they had "695,700 casualties from among its 1,908,000 soldiers."

(again don't trust wiki articles with no citations. Its a WIP fixing stuff just thrown in at random in the old wiki).

EDIT: I think whoever wrote that article is combining the casualties of the Black Lancers and the Fahrenheit Fleet - but they sitll didn't exceed 2,000,000. Its just sloppy writing.

[SylasGaunt]

That is another thing to consider.. are the honorverse ships going to have to use laser heads? After all they primarily use them because unless you get extremely lucky, the other ship is crippled, or run by amateurs it's almost impossible to land hits with contact nukes.

[takemeout_totheblack]

Seeing as how without gravitics to use and the intense form of jamming and ECM used by LoGH, accurate targeting i.e. the kind you'd need to make a contact nuke efficient, is likely going to be severely hampered/nearly impossible at long range. Laser heads are probably going to be their best bet at focusing meaningful amount energy on LoGH ships outside of enormous spray and pray volleys.

[DrStrangelove]

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?

Awhile back on SB I calced a missile with a 40MT warhead and six 40*300cm lasing rods would output just over a megaton combined or about 192 kilotons per individual laser. It is a gross upper limit as it assumed 100% efficiency between absorbed and lased energy, and IIRC the actual standoff distance is 150m and I used 100.

[Xon]

The ones where you calculated the laser divergance at 25000km to be larger than the ship they where firing at despite the various quotes of laser head shots from similar distances describing those shots as only impacting a few square metres of hull rather than either hitting the entire ship or well over half for cap ships? The one where you completely ignore that the only reason laser heads are a threat is the use of gravitational lensing to focus enough energy into the laser rods and shape the emitted beams?

You never did actually answer this post where it actually decsribes several laser-head impacts.

The single missile shrieked in to twenty-four thousand kilometers before it detonated, directly astern of Wayfarer, and sent five centimeter-wide x-ray lasers ripping straight up the wide-open after aspect of her impeller wedge.

Wayfarer's megaton bulk bucked as energy seared through her unarmored plating with contemptuous ease. Beta Node Eight of her after impeller ring took a direct hit, and Nodes Five, Six, Seven, and Nine blew up in a frenzy of energy that took Alpha Five with them. Generators exploded in Impeller Two, killing nineteen men and women and sending mad surges of power crashing across the compartment like caged lightning. Point Defense Nineteen, Twenty, and Twenty-Two were blasted away, along with Radar Six, Missile Sixteen, and all the men and women who'd manned those stations.

Bolding mine. Simply put, while your calcs may be technically correct they are wrong for calcs of Honorverse weapons.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that I don't think Weber's ever heard of the diffraction limit- he just throws figures for beam diameter in there gratuitously.

Unless we assume that the entire mechanism of the lasing rods and whatnot is pure magic (which defeats the purpose of having used a well-understood system like an X-ray laser in the first place), you can get a decent estimate of the total power which enters the lasing rods, if you make the right assumptions about the blast geometry.

That won't do you any good when it comes to calculating beam diameter figures- but the beam diameters are being decided by a blind idiot god* here, and I'd rather use sensible numbers for firepower and let beam diameter take care of itself than use sensible numbers for neither.

*This is my new nickname for scientifically under-literate authors who create annoying problems for people trying to understand what the %(&#%$ is going on in their stories by accidentally writing Things That Should Not Be.

[Battlehymn Republic]

I've read that the author of LoGH attempted to rationalize why the ships only fight two-dimensionally. Does anyone know why?

[Xon]

You can't even use the standard inverse law calcs for lasers passing through an Honorverse sidewall since it assumes flat spacetime, which a sidewall sure as hell isn't.

Unless we assume that the entire mechanism of the lasing rods and whatnot is pure magic (which defeats the purpose of having used a well-understood system like an X-ray laser in the first place), you can get a decent estimate of the total power which enters the lasing rods, if you make the right assumptions about the blast geometry.

Honorverse laserheads have a gravity generator capable of defecting virtually the entire blast towards the target and focusing an unknowable part of the radiation release at the lasing rods. Another section from the latest honorverse anthology involves detonating a nuke inside a tunded gravity wave to focus the explosion down the gravity wave at the target through the sidewall.

Magic is a damn good way to describe some of it.

I've read that the author of LoGH attempted to rationalize why the ships only fight two-dimensionally. Does anyone know why?

Probably a wonky sideaffect of thier FTL drive system is my guess.

[takemeout_totheblack]

I've read that the author of LoGH attempted to rationalize why the ships only fight two-dimensionally. Does anyone know why?

I think the rationalization here is if both side's ships have roughly equal acceleration/deceleration and roughly equal X-Axis/Y-Axis control, the third dimension isn't going to matter much barring a surprise attack.

The thing is, if you can see your opponent is going down and pitching up, you can safely guess that they are trying to increase your profile and decrease your ability to fire back with your axial guns by shifting the attack plane. The solution? A 30 degree tilt and presto! You are once again fighting on a 2-D plane in as much that the ships are facing one another.

The 3rd Dimension isn't much of an issue in space combat barring an extremely flexible FTL that allows you to zip around the battle-sphere or a much more maneuverable ship compared to the one being attacked. The 3rd dimension is a minor asset at best when facing an equally maneuverable foe, useful only under intense sensor jamming where they cannot pin down your ship movements or in a surprise attack.

[KlavoHunter]

I've read that the author of LoGH attempted to rationalize why the ships only fight two-dimensionally. Does anyone know why?

I think the rationalization here is if both side's ships have roughly equal acceleration/deceleration and roughly equal X-Axis/Y-Axis control, the third dimension isn't going to matter much barring a surprise attack.

The thing is, if you can see your opponent is going down and pitching up, you can safely guess that they are trying to increase your profile and decrease your ability to fire back with your axial guns by shifting the attack plane. The solution? A 30 degree tilt and presto! You are once again fighting on a 2-D plane in as much that the ships are facing one another.

The 3rd Dimension isn't much of an issue in space combat barring an extremely flexible FTL that allows you to zip around the battle-sphere or a much more maneuverable ship compared to the one being attacked. The 3rd dimension is a minor asset at best when facing an equally maneuverable foe, useful only under intense sensor jamming where they cannot pin down your ship movements or in a surprise attack.

Thank you, that explains it far more eloquently than I was going to.

You see the third dimension being used often still, most often during any full englobement-style siege of a cornered enemy fleet.

Furthermore, when operating with fleets this huge with this ECM environment, simpler orders are often better, so that all ships can respond smoothly and quickly, rather than getting confused and maneuvering into an ally's field of fire or worse.

[Connor MacLeod]

I wouldn't read anything into the slogan at all. Its just a recruiting slogan, really.

you don't have to read too deeply to draw information from it. A million ships and 100 million soldiers isn't an unrealistic benchmark from their observed capabilities. Do we even know their absolute fleet numbers anyhow? (not like it would matter, since numbers can fluctuate at any give time for any number of reasons.) In terms of ballpark figures (SOP for sci fi) a million is not far off from a couple hundred thousands.

And as I already pointed out, we know they pretty much can hurl around non-trivial amounts of mass and energy, and without too much effort. Or are the huge ass, liquid-metal armoured bases some sort of rare, one of a kind, super-duper hard to produce things?

Ships definitely get damaged and not everyone is killed, because there are hospital ships that accompany fleets. We see lots of internal carnage in struck ships. In most external combat shots, we see ships explode completely in short order, most of the time. Its a mix, really. We don't see much of damage control (they do carry out repairs on the battlefield, though, in lulls between combat) but as for escape measures, there's shuttles and escape pods.

It doesnt look like they completely vaporized (EG the way some SW starships or the Death STars do in the movies when destroyed) so there's bound to be lots of debris and stuff. Depending on how they design their ships, its quite possible crews survive in the intact portions until rescue. And if they have small crew complemtns, they almost certainly rely on a large amount of automation, which probably includes some damage control. Alternately, they just rely on a great deal of redundancy and decentralized ship design (they take hits or damage, but can still function in some measure unless blown apart.)

I'm fairly confident that Central Anime's translation is accurate in terms of the numbers. I really wouldn't be concerned that they're getting simple Japanese wrong - its Japanese translators who are doing this. That's not to say there aren't subtitle typos, I've spotted some, but no reason to assume them without good reason.

I'm not sure I'm getting the distinction here. I don't know anything about the fansubbing process at all. I just know that sometimes translations can be odd or weird if taken too literally, and that changes may be made (to suit cultural references, slang, informal or colloquial language, etc.)

* A word on fleets:- the 200,000 ship fleet is a combination of 8 seperate Alliance fleets (3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, and 13th) into one large invasion fleet. They split up in enemy territory. This would imply 25,000 warships per fleet, but given the 112,700 combat ships / 41,900 support ships (engineering, hospital, supply) of a later invasion fleet, that 200,000 figure definitely includes support ships.

That's still going to be something on average of 18-19 thousands warships per fleet, unless the support ships form a drastically greater ratio (more than half, probably closer to 60% of the fleet.) Is that likely?

* Fleet sizes vary depending on the rank of the commanding officer. Rear Admirals can command 1,000 - 2,000 ships. A Vice Admiral might command anything from 10,000 - 15,000 ships or so (i.e. several Rear Admirals under them). There's some overlap with Admirals here. High Admirals (Empire-only rank, no Alliance equivalent) command 15,000 - ~30,000 ship fleets (Rear Admirals, Vice Admirals, Admirals under them). Fleet Admirals command multiple of these fleets. So its not a matter of fleet sizes increasing, you're just seeing multiple fleets come together to accomplish something big. Note these numbers vary from fleet to fleet, but the entire franchise is very consistent within these ranges.

Is that the same for the Empire and FPA, or do they approach it differently? They clearly approach ship design and warship conventions differently, after all.

That's a typo. The anime clearly states 6400 ships and 700,000 men. Personally, I don't really think the books are worth worrying about right now, given the available translation isn't even complete (probably never will be), and we know the anime differs from them in several respects. Besides, if you're reading those chapters of the books, you might as well read the first page of the battles thread - its more accurate

You're not the numbers guy like I am, and in my experience it pays to look at all the available evidence, even if you consider it secondary or tertiary canon. At the very minimum it gives you inspiration/insight into mindset or interpretations (much like the "behind the scenes/artiest comments/etc." Curtis always relied on more than say, WEG material.). And you never have enough evidence in sci fi (and can never have too much.)

[Connor MacLeod]

Awhile back on SB I calced a missile with a 40MT warhead and six 40*300cm lasing rods would output just over a megaton combined or about 192 kilotons per individual laser. It is a gross upper limit as it assumed 100% efficiency between absorbed and lased energy, and IIRC the actual standoff distance is 150m and I used 100.

It's probably more like 15-20 meters or less here since capital missiles are what.. 30 m? And that was before the resizing, so the scale probably goes far lower. At ten metres, and ignoring the fact its a cone shaped blast (which is going to increase the energy by at least a factor of six, probably closer to 10) you're looking at some 130 TJ per square meter. As I recall cruiser weight missiles had something like 5 m long, .4 cm wide rods, which gives you an area of ~2 meters. The radiation won't strike it perfectly (but I'm neglecting the rear, which should help a little) and there are inffeficinecies, but arguably more than half of the radiation absorbed should hit the target. so between 150-200 TJ at least, to upwards of quite possibly several PJ per laser head shot.

The ones where you calculated the laser divergance at 25000km to be larger than the ship they where firing at despite the various quotes of laser head shots from similar distances describing those shots as only impacting a few square metres of hull rather than either hitting the entire ship or well over half for cap ships? The one where you completely ignore that the only reason laser heads are a threat is the use of gravitational lensing to focus enough energy into the laser rods and shape the emitted beams?

You never did actually answer this post where it actually decsribes several laser-head impacts.

The single missile shrieked in to twenty-four thousand kilometers before it detonated, directly astern of Wayfarer, and sent five centimeter-wide x-ray lasers ripping straight up the wide-open after aspect of her impeller wedge.

Wayfarer's megaton bulk bucked as energy seared through her unarmored plating with contemptuous ease. Beta Node Eight of her after impeller ring took a direct hit, and Nodes Five, Six, Seven, and Nine blew up in a frenzy of energy that took Alpha Five with them. Generators exploded in Impeller Two, killing nineteen men and women and sending mad surges of power crashing across the compartment like caged lightning. Point Defense Nineteen, Twenty, and Twenty-Two were blasted away, along with Radar Six, Missile Sixteen, and all the men and women who'd manned those stations.

Bolding mine. Simply put, while your calcs may be technically correct they are wrong for calcs of Honorverse weapons.

You do know that lasers aren't perfectly parallel, cylindrical beams from emitter to target, don't you? They actually do narrow down to a small point at the impact area. So for it to go from 40 cm to 5 cm isn't impossible (although I'm going to echo Simon and think its probably "magic" rather than something that will make sense with hard, complicted numbers.)

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Or are the huge ass, liquid-metal armoured bases some sort of rare, one of a kind, super-duper hard to produce things?

While Iserlohn is the only example seen of a gigantic and fully-armoured base, there are several armoured fortresses of comparable size to Iserlohn within the Empire (though all smaller and less equipped). At one point in the series, the Empire makes plans to construct two new fortresses, each comparable or larger than (I forget which) Iserlohn, and it's implied they would be completed before too long.

[Simon_Jester]

You can't even use the standard inverse law calcs for lasers passing through an Honorverse sidewall since it assumes flat spacetime, which a sidewall sure as hell isn't.

Yeah, but the spot size of an Honorverse laser head is still small even in the absence of the sidewall.

Unless we assume that the entire mechanism of the lasing rods and whatnot is pure magic (which defeats the purpose of having used a well-understood system like an X-ray laser in the first place), you can get a decent estimate of the total power which enters the lasing rods, if you make the right assumptions about the blast geometry.

Honorverse laserheads have a gravity generator capable of defecting virtually the entire blast towards the target and focusing an unknowable part of the radiation release at the lasing rods. Another section from the latest honorverse anthology involves detonating a nuke inside a tunded gravity wave to focus the explosion down the gravity wave at the target through the sidewall.

Magic is a damn good way to describe some of it.

Tuned gravitational fields for focusing don't explain either the generation of X-ray beams from a nuclear warhead, or how you beat the diffraction limit to get extremely narrow spot sizes on a target at a range of thousands of kilometers. Those are physical processes that have nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with electromagnetism.

The mere fact that the lasing rods are needed to produce the beams from a detonating 'laser head' tells us a lot about the process- and suggests that even with gravitics focusing the blast in the general direction of the rods, there will still be a good deal of wasted energy that doesn't go into the X-ray beams.

You get better efficiency, in terms of energy dumped on target, by not bothering with the lasing rods and just flying the missile close to the target and blowing it up- the whole blast of the shaped charge, a majority of the warhead energy, goes into the target. But that doesn't get you a tightly collimated beam, and has the obvious problems of getting close enough to engage the enemy in light of their point defenses. Though it's something to bear in mind when talking about Honorverse "contact nukes:" they are, in all probability, shaped the same way the laser heads are rather than being purely omnidirectional.

I've read that the author of LoGH attempted to rationalize why the ships only fight two-dimensionally. Does anyone know why?

Probably a wonky sideaffect of thier FTL drive system is my guess.

I've read that the author of LoGH attempted to rationalize why the ships only fight two-dimensionally. Does anyone know why?

I think the rationalization here is if both side's ships have roughly equal acceleration/deceleration and roughly equal X-Axis/Y-Axis control, the third dimension isn't going to matter much barring a surprise attack.

The thing is, if you can see your opponent is going down and pitching up, you can safely guess that they are trying to increase your profile and decrease your ability to fire back with your axial guns by shifting the attack plane. The solution? A 30 degree tilt and presto! You are once again fighting on a 2-D plane in as much that the ships are facing one another.

The 3rd Dimension isn't much of an issue in space combat barring an extremely flexible FTL that allows you to zip around the battle-sphere or a much more maneuverable ship compared to the one being attacked. The 3rd dimension is a minor asset at best when facing an equally maneuverable foe, useful only under intense sensor jamming where they cannot pin down your ship movements or in a surprise attack.

Right. I gave this issue a good deal of thought in recent months; it seems to me that the best way to think about space combat is in terms of spherical polar coordinates.

It doesn't really make much difference whether the enemy is flying "above" you or "to the left" of you; what matters is whether they are directly in front of you, behind you, or off to one side. The difference between "dorsal" and "starboard" is just a matter of rolling the ship about its long axis, after all.

Now, if the enemy disperses into multiple groups of targets/threats, you have to keep track of three dimensions, in that you may have enemy fire coming at you from several different axes at once... but LoGH fleets don't do this very often, and even when they do they usually don't split into enough groups that it becomes an issue.

There may also be a certain amount of data-compression going on in the portrayals we see on flag officers' tactical plots. They may be building the display in 2D and training the officers to read the details of position in the third dimension from detailed information beyond the gross position of objects. I know I'd be tempted to do it that way, depending on how flexible my free-air holography was.

And as I already pointed out, we know they pretty much can hurl around non-trivial amounts of mass and energy, and without too much effort. Or are the huge ass, liquid-metal armoured bases some sort of rare, one of a kind, super-duper hard to produce things?

The huge-ass ones are exactly that. A fort like Iserlohn (with said liquid metal armor, and about the size of a modest asteroid, ~60 km) is a major capital investment for the people who build it; they can't just spam dozens of the things, and based on the fact that none are constructed during the course of the main series I suspect they take many years to build. It's certainly doable, but it's not something that can be done in a year or two.

I'm fairly confident that Central Anime's translation is accurate in terms of the numbers. I really wouldn't be concerned that they're getting simple Japanese wrong - its Japanese translators who are doing this. That's not to say there aren't subtitle typos, I've spotted some, but no reason to assume them without good reason.

I'm not sure I'm getting the distinction here. I don't know anything about the fansubbing process at all. I just know that sometimes translations can be odd or weird if taken too literally, and that changes may be made (to suit cultural references, slang, informal or colloquial language, etc.)

The fans doing the subbing may screw things up, but they're not likely to misrepresent the numbers. Since the numbers more or less hang together (national populations in the 10-100 billion range, overall fleets in the hundreds of thousands, with some tens of millions or low-hundreds of millions of men under arms on each side), I don't see any reason to pick nits at them.

* A word on fleets:- the 200,000 ship fleet is a combination of 8 seperate Alliance fleets (3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, and 13th) into one large invasion fleet. They split up in enemy territory. This would imply 25,000 warships per fleet, but given the 112,700 combat ships / 41,900 support ships (engineering, hospital, supply) of a later invasion fleet, that 200,000 figure definitely includes support ships.

That's still going to be something on average of 18-19 thousands warships per fleet, unless the support ships form a drastically greater ratio (more than half, probably closer to 60% of the fleet.) Is that likely?

Yes. Ten to twenty thousand ships is a typical strength for the numbered fleets of the FPA; it is also a reasonable figure for the strength of Imperial fleets under the command of an admiral of comparable rank.

The Imperials' structure is looser in that fleets are typically identified with their commanders, perhaps not surprisingly given that it's feudal. There are a few exceptions, but almost invariably a battle would be fought between, say, "the Wahlen Fleet" on the Imperial side and "the 6th Fleet" for the FPA. But there's rough parity between the size of the fleets assigned to, say, a vice admiral on either side. And yes, ten to twenty thousand ships is about average for that.

Is that the same for the Empire and FPA, or do they approach it differently? They clearly approach ship design and warship conventions differently, after all.

Well, the basic design paradigm is the same on both sides- large ships with high block coefficients, fixed axial main guns, and vectored thrust. Though there are details- for instance, Imperial fighters have large pintle-mounted guns that unfold from the sides while Alliance fighters are big boxes whose weapons have a somewhat more restricted firing arc.

You're not the numbers guy like I am, and in my experience it pays to look at all the available evidence, even if you consider it secondary or tertiary canon. At the very minimum it gives you inspiration/insight into mindset or interpretations (much like the "behind the scenes/artiest comments/etc." Curtis always relied on more than say, WEG material.). And you never have enough evidence in sci fi (and can never have too much.)

True to a point, but I wouldn't want to use information from the (incompletely translated, probably permanently incompletely translated, possibly entirely different from the TV series) books to contradict numbers in the complete translation of the TV series. Especially since, as noted before, those numbers hang together.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

There may also be a certain amount of data-compression going on in the portrayals we see on flag officers' tactical plots. They may be building the display in 2D and training the officers to read the details of position in the third dimension from detailed information beyond the gross position of objects. I know I'd be tempted to do it that way, depending on how flexible my free-air holography was.

This is at least partially the case. One of the two sides' tactical displays is a flat, "top-down" view while the other display is 3D images. I seem to recall an envelopment seen from both kinds of display; in the 2D display it's shown as a simple pincer envelopment, while in the 3D display it looks more as if, for lack of better description, the enveloped fleet is being stuffed into a pita.

[Connor MacLeod]

Ugh, I forgot one more thing to add. I'll respond to Simon later.

Honorverse laserheads have a gravity generator capable of defecting virtually the entire blast towards the target and focusing an unknowable part of the radiation release at the lasing rods.

Another nitpick but.. its ALL radiation. I know Weber sometimes makes the mistake alot of sci fi authors do and assume there's a 'blast' effect (It hpapens alot in 40K too) but its all radiation of some kind (EM, particles, etc.) and it only varies in the kind and proportion. Weber apparently had his contact nukes designed to be some sort of Orion-drive like "plasma warhead" which might be the "blast" in space I suppose, but that's not the sort of thing you want to use in a laser head. Any "blast" in that regard is likely to be a minor expansion of plasma from the vaporized warhead/missile.

[Xon]

You do know that lasers aren't perfectly parallel, cylindrical beams from emitter to target, don't you? They actually do narrow down to a small point at the impact area. So for it to go from 40 cm to 5 cm isn't impossible (although I'm going to echo Simon and think its probably "magic" rather than something that will make sense with hard, complicted numbers.)

The problem was his calcs suggested the spot size was a circle with a radius of 998metres.

Another nitpick but.. its ALL radiation. I know Weber sometimes makes the mistake alot of sci fi authors do and assume there's a 'blast' effect (It hpapens alot in 40K too) but its all radiation of some kind (EM, particles, etc.) and it only varies in the kind and proportion. Weber apparently had his contact nukes designed to be some sort of Orion-drive like "plasma warhead" which might be the "blast" in space I suppose, but that's not the sort of thing you want to use in a laser head. Any "blast" in that regard is likely to be a minor expansion of plasma from the vaporized warhead/missile.

nitpick of the nitpick( ); The same warhead can be used as a laserhead or a contact nuke according to "In Fire Forged" with the only apparent difference a software setting. Throw that onto the file of shit which doesn't make much sense.

Yeah, but the spot size of an Honorverse laser head is still small even in the absence of the sidewall.

To be honest it was a jab at DrStrangelove's other calcs for an omni-directional explosion outside a sidewall.

Tuned gravitational fields for focusing don't explain either the generation of X-ray beams from a nuclear warhead, or how you beat the diffraction limit to get extremely narrow spot sizes on a target at a range of thousands of kilometers. Those are physical processes that have nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with electromagnetism.

The nuclear warhead is a pure fusion device using gravity implosion to induce fusion, and the gravity field shaping the explosion at the lasing rods could also be focusing the released x-rays if the field is big enough and they have enough control over the field.

Further change hinged on many years of work on practical miniaturization of gravitic generators in the commercial sector. Their introduction made possible the long sought after pure fusion warhead in the 1650s. This was a nuclear bomb whose only fuels were relatively common light elements like hydrogen and its isotopes. Cheap gravitic implosion made it economical to fit devices with previously unheard of yields into a missile body. The pure fuel made it possible to predict the output radiation of the bomb explosion precisely and ultimately control (to a small degree) the spectrum and duration of the explosion’s radiation. Since most nuclear weapon damage to space targets is caused by X-ray radiation from the explosion, the ability to tune that radiation, even slightly, made the defender’s problem significantly more difficult. Missile warhead yields of hundreds of megatons became commonplace in this time period and heavy weapons in the gigaton range were not unheard of.

But you are right, the unnatural focused x-rays from the lasing rods are definitely wonky.

Though it's something to bear in mind when talking about Honorverse "contact nukes:" they are, in all probability, shaped the same way the laser heads are rather than being purely omnidirectional.

This is nothing likely about it. The nuclear warhead uses gravity induced fusion, shaping it is just a matter of controlling the gravity field which they need todo for a laserhead anyway.

[Mr Bean]

nitpick of the nitpick( ); The same warhead can be used as a laserhead or a contact nuke according to "In Fire Forged" with the only apparent difference a software setting. Throw that onto the file of shit which doesn't make much sense.

Traditional contact nukes are in the low hundreds of megatons. We have examples of both eighty megaton nukes for contact's and up to half a gigaton (Mounted on a drone not a typical missile head) meanwhile standard laserheads are only low teen's.

So software wise it makes sense if your contact nuke is 120 megaton monster while your laserhead is 12 megaton's since the contact nuke does not need all the stuff in there to deploy the X-ray laser setup and what not.

[Vympel]

you don't have to read too deeply to draw information from it. A million ships and 100 million soldiers isn't an unrealistic benchmark from their observed capabilities. Do we even know their absolute fleet numbers anyhow? (not like it would matter, since numbers can fluctuate at any give time for any number of reasons.) In terms of ballpark figures (SOP for sci fi) a million is not far off from a couple hundred thousands.

We have a fairly good idea - the total forces for the Empire (including those forces of the high nobles) didn't exceed 250,000 ships or so. The Alliance was probably around the same, before strings of defeats early in the series whittled their forces down significantly* There are more minor "patrol" and "defence" fleets which are hastily thrown together in emergencies to form full 'regular' fleets for lack of a better term.

* At the very start of the series, the 4th and 6th fleets are annihilated at Astarte by Rienhard, and the 2nd fleet suffers damage (they originally totalled 40,000 ships together). They're all amalgamated into the 13th Fleet, which as you saw, only started out with 6,400 ships - though it was reinforced later into a 'full' fleet after Yang's promotion from Rear Admiral to Vice Admiral. The 11th Fleet suffered a devastating defeat several years before (Gaiden, Season 2) but we don't know if it was kept back from the invasion to guard Alliance territory or it was still in the process of reconsituting its strength. The 1st Fleet is stationed in Alliance territory on a permanent basis. But yeah, this is the reason why the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 11th and 1st fleets weren't part of that force.

And as I already pointed out, we know they pretty much can hurl around non-trivial amounts of mass and energy, and without too much effort. Or are the huge ass, liquid-metal armoured bases some sort of rare, one of a kind, super-duper hard to produce things?

Yeah as was stated, the fortresses are undoubtedly expensive, but there's no indication they're difficult to build.

It doesnt look like they completely vaporized (EG the way some SW starships or the Death STars do in the movies when destroyed) so there's bound to be lots of debris and stuff. Depending on how they design their ships, its quite possible crews survive in the intact portions until rescue. And if they have small crew complemtns, they almost certainly rely on a large amount of automation, which probably includes some damage control. Alternately, they just rely on a great deal of redundancy and decentralized ship design (they take hits or damage, but can still function in some measure unless blown apart.)

Yeah you see battlefields filled with scrap a lot, so that's possible.

EDIT: oh, and I just remembered, in one episode we see a scene aboard a damaged Alliance ship where a crewman gets past a door and it closes down behind him - two more guys run over to the door and pound on it to no avail until an explosion occurs and they're cooked up against the door, so they definitely have dicrete sealable compartments.

I'm not sure I'm getting the distinction here. I don't know anything about the fansubbing process at all. I just know that sometimes translations can be odd or weird if taken too literally, and that changes may be made (to suit cultural references, slang, informal or colloquial language, etc.)

What I mean is that the fleet / crew numbers used throughout the series are all consistent with each other. I'm not sure how the scripts for fansubbing are done (I assume from listening to the show, since the timing is always perfect) but the chances of them ballsing up say, "one million nine hundred and eight thousand" would be about the same as anyone listening to English and getting it wrong.

Typos, however, are easy to spot - in one Gaiden episode, a fleet of 1,000 ships is said to take 1/3 losses- and then we see the relevant Admiral say he just lost "30" ships. Clearly when they were tpying out the transcript they left out a 0 - that sort of stuff is easy to spot. (its also pretty much the only obvious error I've ever seen).

Also, tech terminology is vague and doesn't permeate the series - we know "warp" means "warp" because they're clearly saying "warp" in the dialog in English - same with "energy" and "missiles".

That's still going to be something on average of 18-19 thousands warships per fleet, unless the support ships form a drastically greater ratio (more than half, probably closer to 60% of the fleet.) Is that likely?

I'm not sure. Given all the Admirals are Vice Admirals, it seems excessive for them to have that many warships each, so they may well have a greater proportion of support ships. One problem with that battle is that the strength of the Imperial fleet that goes to meet them (eight fleets themselves, also all commanded by Vice Admirals) is never explicitly stated, save that at least two of them were confirmed to be more numerous than their opponents.

Is that the same for the Empire and FPA, or do they approach it differently? They clearly approach ship design and warship conventions differently, after all.

They appear to do things the same way. They're the same in terms of warship convention though not ship design, IMO. Both sides have one type of fighter (Valkyrie and Spartanian) destroyers, cruisers, battleships, fighter carriers, and unique flagships. Where they differ is the Empire has 'fast battleships' and gunships in addition to its Valkyrie fighters.

You're not the numbers guy like I am, and in my experience it pays to look at all the available evidence, even if you consider it secondary or tertiary canon. At the very minimum it gives you inspiration/insight into mindset or interpretations (much like the "behind the scenes/artiest comments/etc." Curtis always relied on more than say, WEG material.). And you never have enough evidence in sci fi (and can never have too much.)

True that. As we were disucssing in the PM, one of the reasons the handful of novel chapter translations don't do it for me is that they're so raw and inelegant.

[Vympel]

Oh, I can confirm warships are fusion powered. In Episode 51 there's an explicit reference to the Lubeck's fusion reactor being damaged.

Also in that episode, after the Lubeck is destroyed, Muller transfers from regular battleship to regular battleship twice (from the Lubeck to the Neustat, then the Neustat to the Offenburg, then the Offenburg to the Helten), and has the opportunity to abandon each when they're successively damaged/ destroyed. So there's that.

[Simon_Jester]

You do know that lasers aren't perfectly parallel, cylindrical beams from emitter to target, don't you? They actually do narrow down to a small point at the impact area. So for it to go from 40 cm to 5 cm isn't impossible (although I'm going to echo Simon and think its probably "magic" rather than something that will make sense with hard, complicted numbers.)

The problem was his calcs suggested the spot size was a circle with a radius of 998metres.

That's probably because he did the math right.

I'd rather stick with his estimate of laser head beams being in the 100-kiloton range and accept that Weber's never heard of diffraction than throw the figures out the window when there's nothing to replace them with.

[Xon]

That's probably because he did the math right.

Actually he managed to fuckup his radians to degree conversion (which wasn't even required), the correct answer is actually exactly 1km. Not some irrational transcendental value of aproximately 998km. Also it doesn't matter if the maths is right when it doesn't describe what actually happened.

I'd rather stick with his estimate of laser head beams being in the 100-kiloton range and accept that Weber's never heard of diffraction than throw the figures out the window when there's nothing to replace them with.

Except those figures don't remotely model what is happening, so those figures are suspect to worthless.

We do have in-universe declaration that a 15MT bomb-pumped laser head can deliver terajoules to petajoules to the target(also from "In Fire Forged") and we know those x-ray lasers are only poking small holes in the ships and not bathing the entire ship in X-rays at once because Weber explicitly tells us.

[Simon_Jester]

That's probably because he did the math right.

Actually he managed to fuckup his radians to degree conversion (which wasn't even required), the correct answer is actually exactly 1km. Not some irrational transcendental value of aproximately 998km. Also it doesn't matter if the maths is right when it doesn't describe what actually happened.

Protip: Errors of 0.2% only matter when there are adverse consequences to making the error. When there are no such consequences and we are otherwise trapped in an information vacuum, people who have to do serious work on difficult subjects are often glad to get even one significant figure off of limited information and an incomplete model. Let alone two and a half.

Given how utterly shitty the available data is- stuff thrown together over a twenty year period by an author with at best a limited technical education and a bad habit of neglecting important physical parameters of his ships including their mass and volume, let alone the energy output of their main battery- there is no way in Hell I expect to get more accurate results from a calculation than a bracket an order of magnitude across- say, "100 to 1000 kilotons." Which Strangelove has done, quite well as far as I can tell without being linked to the calculations.

Him slipping up by a few thousandths because he applied pi to three decimal places in one spot and infinity decimal places in another is not enough to cancel out that success.

I'd rather stick with his estimate of laser head beams being in the 100-kiloton range and accept that Weber's never heard of diffraction than throw the figures out the window when there's nothing to replace them with.

Except those figures don't remotely model what is happening, so those figures are suspect to worthless.

We do have in-universe declaration that a 15MT bomb-pumped laser head can deliver terajoules to petajoules to the target(also from "In Fire Forged")...

Which is ~250 kilotons if you interpret that as "around one petajoule," which is so close to Strangelove's figures by the standards of what we've got to work with that it's rather impressive.

There's a lot of potential for spread, mind, because it's a really vague figure- the number 'could' also be 2 terajoules or about half a kiloton, which is inconsistent with the stated effects of the weapon; or it could be 500 petajoules or about 125 megatons, in which case the lasing rod is a free energy device.

But if we pick the middle of the range like sensible people, it supports Strangelove's figures for weapon energy much better than it supports you flipping your shit and trying to trash them.

and we know those x-ray lasers are only poking small holes in the ships and not bathing the entire ship in X-rays at once because Weber explicitly tells us.

Yes, which is evidence that according-to-Weber something very strange is going on.

Whatever it is does not necessarily have any effect on the amount of X-ray radiation that goes into a lasing rod.

[Connor MacLeod]

nitpick of the nitpick( ); The same warhead can be used as a laserhead or a contact nuke according to "In Fire Forged" with the only apparent difference a software setting. Throw that onto the file of shit which doesn't make much sense.

Then its yet another case of Weber changing his mind retroactively. It's not going to bother me, although radiation weapons in space are a bit silly. I aint' gonna buy he turns plasma into x-rays by making each lasing rod into a miniaturized FEL though.

Except those figures don't remotely model what is happening, so those figures are suspect to worthless.

We do have in-universe declaration that a 15MT bomb-pumped laser head can deliver terajoules to petajoules to the target(also from "In Fire Forged") and we know those x-ray lasers are only poking small holes in the ships and not bathing the entire ship in X-rays at once because Weber explicitly tells us.

Could you try to be a bit more flexible about this? I'm with Simon on this, and Weber's words leave enough wiggle room for variation in the bomb pumping process (even he has flat out said they can't controll it perfectly), and we STILL hve to make everything fit with everything else even if he's being internally inconsistent, which isn't the first time something like this has occured (ship masses/volumes being fucked up, the general nature of the Impeller wedge being something that could kill everyone onboard if it isn't held down to a certain acceleration, etc.)

The calc in question, or any other (Such as mine) are not precise figures, they're "order of magnitude" figures. Which can fit well within the "terajoules to petajoules" estimate you cite, once allowanve for all the variables are made. Just because it doesn't fit with the letter of what Weber says doesn't mean its bad (Besides, most weberverse fans don't seem to mind doing that when it comes to the Impeller wedge turn rates