Legend of Galactic Heroes vs. Honorverse

[General Mung Beans]

Perhaps the Empire instituted mandatory sterilization or something like that for most of the population or simply not let them reproduce a la the One Child Policy.

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[takemeout_totheblack]

Perhaps...also perhaps they would have mentioned such a phenomenally cruel and inhuman act while they were listing off the atrocity roster that made up the majority of that segment.

It's pretty clear a zero was either dropped or added somewhere.

[Simon_Jester]

The only description of how a ship-mounted grazer works involves gravity lenses, and the "In Fire Forged" quote about gravitic lens array like that are in laserhead missiles to direct more of the exploding bomb into the lase rods and at the target. I guess you could inject material into an alternating gravity field which causes light to be emitted as the particles are violently accelerated inside the gravity wave.

Honestly, it would make as much sense to use magnets- you've just described a free electron laser- but given how liberally the Honorverse uses extremely intense gravitics, I don't see anything wrong with that description.

Oh, and a quote on Honorverse EM signal processing and computational speed;

Charles nodded. "Right. Well, what the Echo system does is tie in your passive sensors with your own active sensors and communications array so that when a wave packet strikes the hull and starts back, your own active sensors send out a perfectly matched packet that's shifted a hundred eighty degrees out of phase."

Tyler grunted. "Won't work," he said. "Your phase-inverted packet can't catch up with the reflected pulse, which means that the leading edge of the reflection will still make it back intact."

"You would be right," Charles agreed, "if the sensors were embedded directly into the hull. But if you'll check your specs, you'll see that your sensor arrays extend anywhere from three to ten meters out from the main hull. That gives the Echo enough lead time—about three nanoseconds per meter—to analyze the packet and create and kick out the phase-shifted duplicate."

I'm more impressed by the power switching that generates the signal on such short notice than I am in the processing power...

Oh, a further note - I asked a question on the CA forum re: clarification of the line in Episode 40 where the documentary says the "population ratio" between the Empire, Alliance and Phezzan is 25 billion to 13 billion to 2 billion - whereas in the same episode it says the population of the Empire alone at the beginning of Rudolf's reign (i.e. the founder) was 300 billion. Heibi2 (who is responsible for production of the fansub, much thanks to him) advised that two seperate Japanese translators looked at this line and confirm those are the numbers spoken - he indicated that it may well be a script mistake on the writer's part of a recording mistake on the voice actor's part - this has apparently happened on other shows before.

Suffice to say, the context of the episode simply does not reasonably allow for humanity's population to go from 300 billion to 40 billion without any sort of comment, so this appears likely. Including "billion" may well have been the mistake - i.e. perhaps a misunderstanding of how to represent a ratio?

[/quote]Hmm.

Could Phezzan be a highly industrialized and settled planet, in which case we could (in principle) scale all those numbers up by ten?

Or could we drop a zero from the other figures, to bring them down into line with the galactic population having never been more than a few tens of billions?

In this case, the negative evidence (had the Empire's population shrunk by a factor of 12 during its existence, we really really really should have noticed at some point in the history of the series) is strong enough that it makes me incredibly reluctant to accept numbers that could so very easily be a flat mistake. Even when said mistake is repeated.

It's like the infamous "curious matter of the dog in the night" from Sherlock Holmes.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yup Grendel is firing there- the Battle of Legnica is the only engagement where the beam weapons are fired in atmosphere, so I guess in atmosphere they came out red (later in the pilot movie they're blue in space).

Odd thing. I count around 36 beams, the bulk of which are firing forward and to starboard, only a handful seem to be firing on the other side. IIRC that kinda exceeds the supposed beam weapon counts on a given axis. So either they have some VERY wide fire arcs on the side mounts (possible, but interesting to explain if they do since they look recessed on the starboard side) or they have alot more guns than listed.

Morholt is turning.

This might be quantifiable in some way but I'm not sure how. Those turning jets look pretty tiny thought and hnot firing very hard. That suggests they wouldn't turn very quickly. Perhaps the main thrusters use some sort of electromagnetic steering for broad turning, and the smaller thrusters are just for fine control (or for close in to places like stations and the like)

From other angles, Beowulf is more "slab sided" than the curvy Tristan, and also Beowulf has two fins coming out the back of the dorsal hull which Tristan lacks (not visible there).

that's still pretty cosmetic. Given that and alot of the superficial differences between other "similar" starships it tends to suggest they have a very interesting means of ship construction. I dont' want to say nanotech, but its along the lines of what I am thinkin. Such an answer might even be neccessary, since I'm willing to bet that there's some inconsistency in ship scaling due to artwork and such (in fact, based on my expeirence scaling b5 and SW ships, I'll guarantee it.)

Might also be a question of overheating too - we see the ships fire their guns in a full alpha strike, as well as staggered firing from groups at a time.

There's a dinstinct lack of any visible cooling apparatus on the starships (not unusual for the softer sorts of sci fi, but still) either they have some technobabble "neutrino radiator" like mechanism or they have some incredibly efficient power generation and transfer systems (or possibly, both.)

Recharge rate and targeting can also be issues for delays. I guess it depends on how the guns are controlled (manually, by computer, or computer-assisted manual aiming, etc.)

I'm not sure which ships were intended to be prototypes apart from Brunhild and Wagensiel's Barendown. One more candidate, which looks very similar to Barendown, is Admiral Droisen's "Kucrain", also seen late in the series, according to the Japanese fansite. These are both much smaller than Brunhild so it may be that Brunhild was never intended to be a protoype for a standard battleship, but instead a technology testbed.

Testbeds might be interesting to discuss later for the sorts of tech they are testing. It makes me wonder if they planned to refit or upgrade existing starships (which could say some interesting things about shipbuilding and repair again) or if they were going to build a whole new class.

Yeah. I love it Though as I said, the ones near the bottom (you can run the page through google translate, sub-headings work well enough) in both instances are historical ships from decades prior to the main series.

I noticed some civilian ships as well. That implies either civilians have to be very well connected, or civilian shipbuilding exists as well, and is an industry.

It depends on the ship. With Alliance ships, it looks almost like, part of the fighter is kept in the ship and then docks with the rest of the fighter's body held semi-externally (you can see fighter launch points at the bottom of most Alliance ships, though in the case of flagships like the Hyperion, you might've seen at the start of Episode 15 that they launch from the side), it seems. Whereas in Imperial ships, they dock outside of destroyers, but all the other ships they're kept in what can only be called tubes along the sides of the ships, true all the way up to carriers.

Maybe Imperial fighters are smaller. I dunno since I haven't scaled them yet. looking on the wiki the carrier looks just like a battleship, only a bit more top heavy, and with small holes that look like gunports. I don't see any "tubes" or apertures for such on any starship though unless they are recessed somewhere.

Here'a an Imp destroyer with fighters out the back:-

They don't look too deeply recessed in though. Most of the fighter bulk looks to be outside it. Do all the starships recess them in the back of the ship?

Fighters are freaking deadly in LOGH. We see them get close to warships and slice them up, destroying them outright, on many occasions. No evidence of fighter shields, and they only carry beam weapons. Spartanian beams are turreted (though only in the up-down axis, IIRC), Valkyrie beams are similar except they're mounted on their own 'wings' that can swivel an entire full circle it seems, and pitch left or right a bit as well. My idea is that fighters get under the shields of warships (or get em from vulnerable angles).



(Valkyrie attacking a cruiser, its cockpit is the semi-bulb at the front of the top half of the hull).

They dont look like they have much in the way of barrels, so they may be powerful, but very short ranged, needing to get in close as well as to pierce shields. Just doing a rough scaling I'd guess they mass many hundreds of tons (The Spartanian, anyhow.) That's quite big to pack alot of firepower (if it were firing a massless beam it theoretically output hundreds of terawatts without recoil being a problem.)

Yeah. This is 2 years before the main series starts. Or 1 year, I forget.

That.. makes it harder to estimate losses. I still am not sure what constiutes a "major" and "minor" fleet battle in LOGH terms. And I'm not sure if that includes things like raiding and small-group skirmishes (Stuff that may involve individual ships or small handfuls of ships, or just between cruisers and destroyers and the like.)

There's definitely instantaneous comms between fleets in different systems in the series. We do see one instances where there's a time relay in information as well - Reuenthal's progress reports from Iserlohn were delayed because they were relayed to the main fleet at Fezzan through Odin (the Imperial capital), creating a delay in days. But yeah, their comms are FTL no doubt.

Is that the only example?

[Connor MacLeod]

Said pulses travel at 64c, FTL but slow enough to cause noticeable transmission delays even in-system- fire one up in Earth orbit to talk to someone on Mars and you can expect at least a few seconds' signal lag.

Actually you just brought up something I completely failed to realize. If the grav pulses are limited to that speed, that means that the impeller wedges, whilst technically FTL, are not neccesarily instantaneous either. You'd have to be within about a light minute or so for it to be "realtime", but outside that it would take a few seconds to track. Not a significant difference perhaps, but it still matters some.

It also tells us the Honorverse is used to at least SOME lag in their FTL stuff, which should translate to other passives.`

My impression is that the effectiveness of Honorverse defenses against high-velocity particles of any kind starts to drop off as particles become highly relativistic. I can imagine reasons for this to be true, ones no more contrived than sidewalls and wedges are in the first place (say, because "particle shielding" is built around static electric fields that can only absorb so much momentum from an incoming particle before it punches through the zone the field occupies and hits you on the nose).

The radiation shielding covering a warship's bow is considered "safe" at, say, 0.7c, but not at 0.9c. Now, we can say this is because of the risk of solid impactors being in the ship's path... but on the one hand the risk of encountering such an impactor is small, and on the other hand there's a question of relative mass. Getting hit by a two-gram chunk of space gravel at 0.7c hurts more than getting hit by a one-gram chunk of space gravel at 0.9c... but Honorverse shielding is considered in-universe to be adequate protection against the former and not the latter.

Ah, well, wouldn't be the first kind of shielding in SF whose performance is velocity-dependent.

Well another thing to consider I suspect is intensity, and this applies for both the sidewalls and the radiation/particle shielding. To put it simply HV ships seem to do better against (for lack of a better word) "area" attacks contrasted to concentrated ones. EG nuke detonations, even if shaped, still are less effective at penetrating compared to x-ray lasers, even if the former can be vastly more powerful. The same is almost certainly true of "matter" weapons, and a particle beam is without a doubt going to have superior intensity to any macroscopic impactor (the latter having a vastly bigger surface area to interact with.) And it goes without saying that the properties of the material will have to matter.

Damn, I think it sounds like you're persuading me more to your line of thinking.

Of course, I repeat, this is not a test of sidewall performance. But sidewalls are explicitly described as using a force which does not distinguish between charged and uncharged particles- and ultrarelativistic charged particles aren't that much more strongly deflected by gravity than photons are.

I know, we're just trying ot make sense of them. I have no problem with that.

In the extreme limiting case, there isn't much difference between a relativistic impactor and a particle beam: the kinetic energy of individual atoms is much greater than the potential energy binding the atoms together, and more to the point, the kinetic energy of individual subatomic particles is much greater than the potential energy binding the particles together.

So the difference between a solid hunk of iron traveling at 0.5c and a tight bundle of very cold* iron plasma traveling at 0.5c really isn't going to be all that noticeable. Sort of like how the difference between falling head-first into water from 10000 feet and falling head-first onto concrete from 10000 feet isn't all that noticeable.

*"Cold" plasma means plasma where the individual particles have low thermal velocity and thus do not disperse much. This is the one noticeable difference- while a blob of iron plasma will be spreading out in three dimensions at some calculable rate, a chunk of solid iron is not. But at equal density and velocity, the difference just isn't going to matter much.

True, although technically I would only very loosely call plasma a sort of "particle beam" Plasma has properties that make it somewhat different than botha physical impactor and a coherent beam of particles. And, like I pointed out above, surface area/intensity may matter like it does with "photonic" type weapons (ignoring that not all nukes in HV are photonic as well...)

That leads me to wonder about the mateiral properties again,, would a blob of say, "silicon" plasma or "lead" plasma be much different from an iron plasma? This is another reason I hesitated at labelling E-torps as a PBW.

Very possible; I think there's a secondary belt which generates dispersion of shot which does pass through- a relatively tight, coherent beam (of any kind) which passes through the sidewall comes out more spread out than it went in. This may reduce the effect of a direct hit, hopefully reducing the intensity of the beam weapon to something the ship's armor scheme can survive with minimal permanent damage.

It could very well explain that velocity limit aspect - anything beyond .8c cannot be slowed down or turned aside enough to prevent it from damaging/destroying the ship. In such a case I'd say for a particle beam to penetrate it needs both significant energy as well as velocity. Possibly intensity as well.

I should relaly go back and re-read alot of the HV stuff, esp WRT how the wedges interact - much of what I recall stems from a time when I took text far more literally than what I do now.

Nope. It would just travel very fast.

A proton travelling at 0.9c carries more kinetic energy than it does rest-energy: the E=mc2 component is smaller than the extra boost to its energy from how fast it's going. Granted, not a lot smaller... but you can get it a lot smaller. As you start tacking on extra nines to that 0.9, the kinetic energy of the particle approaches infinity... and the particle starts behaving more and more like a (very energetic) photon for practical purposes. Except when it interacts with an electromagnetic field where its status as a charged particle matters.

Now, that exception makes a major difference when it comes to the effect on a solid target, where a primary mechanism by which energy transfers from the moving particle to the target is electromagnetic. But it doesn't make much difference to the particle's ability to pass through an intense gravitational field. Gravity does not care about electric charge; the protons and neutrons of a falling rock are treated alike.

For this reason, I would argue that a gravity-based sidewall which fails to stop a beam of X-rays should not be able to reliably stop a beam of highly relativistic particles of comparable intensity.

Ah, I see what you're saying now, and yeah you're right. Then again if it was really gravity based I doubt a sidewall, much less a wedge, would stop anything relativistic from breaching if its "only" hundreds of thousands of gravities, even double-banded.

Well, if you really want to you can cheat- again, the higher the particle velocity the higher the effective range. There are a number of ways to describe what happens, but perhaps the easiest goes like this:

Imagine a bunch of charged particles. They repel each other, and spread outward... but it takes time to spread.

Now, take those same particles and throw them at .9, or .99, or .999c (for reference, the LHC beam takes this out to about five or six nines). Time dilation becomes really really really important, because you are looking at a relativistic gamma of five, ten, a hundred, a thousand... (the LHC runs at gamma ~= 3500).

Time dilation increases the perceived lifetime of the beam from the perspective of an outside observer, because the beam only experiences some fraction of a second per second observed from outside.

Get it going fast enough, and it will hit the target before it has, in its own frame of reference, enough time to disperse very far.* The value of "enough" depends on more parameters than I'm at all inclined to sit down and do a calculation on, though it's something you could in principle solve analytically given... hm.

1) Type of particle,
2) particle velocity,
3) current density of the beam (how many particles fly through a given unit area per second),
4) range to target...

And note that given either (2) or (3) and a figure for beam power in watts, you can calculate the other one of that pair.

Yeah. It's doable. The answers will not be especially encouraging unless you go to really high particle velocities though, with correspondingly high relativistic gamma.

The other way to explain this involves invoking the effect of a Lorentz transform on electromagnetic fields, which is something I'm not entirely sure I trust myself to explain.

*The same effect can also increase the observed lifetime of unstable particles such as muons as measured in the laboratory frame. A muon has a half-life of 2.2 microseconds... but time dilation can easily stretch this from the point of view of a guy sitting in the lab and watching the muons roar past.

Hm. Isn't your ability to pull this off dependent upon the quality of your particle acceleration technology? Or if not, at least on how big you're willing/capable to build and/or how long you wait to accelerate the beam to a desired velocity? Some universes I can think of that would work for, but not others.

Also, what sort of range were you thinking for your PBW? I'm curious.

Now, all this being the case, there are still damn good arguments for a neutral particle beam if you can make one. This is one argument in favor of relativistic mass drivers- you get a large amount of mass moving very fast without having to worry about internal repulsion pushing the round apart. A neutron beam would be very helpful too; I know of no way to generate one that isn't painfully cost-ineffective and prone to irradiate the hell out of your ship, but that's why this is soft-SF territory.

[Notably, a neutron beam would tend to be very effective at penetrating solid materials, and almost immune to any type of shielding which relies on electromagnetism- though it would react to a sidewall exactly as a proton beam would, because again, sidewalls shouldn't give a damn whether the particles striking them are charged or not]

Neutrons are also going to be hellishly dangerous to any organic being even if the weapon does no physical damage, since it's ionizing radiation. As you say, it would irradiate your ship if you couldn't do it safely (but it does seem LOGH can do it safely, so that's not a problem.) It also points out they have force fields capable of interacting with and/or deflecting said particle beams, which tells us more about their shields, methinks.

Moreover, like I poineted out to Vympel, they seem to have "neutron" munitions of some kind. I suspect its some sort of PBW though rather than a "radiation" weapon like we are used to (although it might be that, I don't think a omnidirecitonal burst of neutrons would get through shields at any range.)

Now, I will not speculate on why this is not used in the Honorverse- I don't know how they generate high-intensity lasers (including gamma ray lasers). But it will be a relevant concern if Honorverse ships are being shot at by people who do use effectively-lightspeed particle beam weapons. I would argue that their sidewalls and wedges should be expected to perform about as well against such beams as they do against equivalent Honorverse laser weapons of equal power and intensity.

Heh. I'm starting to think that for whatever reason they just completely disregarded PBW technology in favor of everything else. From what I recall and gather, their capital scale energy mounts aren't bomb pumped, but they rely on their aforementioned "gravitic lensing" or some gravity-like magic to help them pump up the lasers to the x-ray/gamma ray level. I dont remembe where I heard that or read it though, so it probably shoudl be taken with a grain of salt.

[Connor MacLeod]

It occurs to me a possible reasons why comms were delayed between Reuenthal reporting to the rest of Impeiral forces at Phezzan - Reuenthal was in the Iserlohn Corridor, Lohengramm was in the Phezzan corridor. Whatever blocks navigation of space in between Alliance / Imperial space (except for the corridors) might also block comms signals.

Again ti depends on how the FTL tech and signals work but.. if FTL is blocked between the Empire and FPA for some reason, save along these specific "routes" then it stands to reason that the FTL may be blocked as well. In such cases, you'd probalby have to use relays or satellites to "bounce" the signal around whatever the obstruction is, and that can indicate delays. That's hardly unreasonable.

This only reinforces my belief that LOGH Warp has alot in common with 40K warp, IF they're not careful GW will sue them!

EDIT: also, re: the nature of the war, Episode 40 (the historical infodump documentary episode) indicates that there were times of false peace between the Empire and the Alliance, so it wasn't continuous battle.

Any idea how long the peace(s) were?

Oh, a further note - I asked a question on the CA forum re: clarification of the line in Episode 40 where the documentary says the "population ratio" between the Empire, Alliance and Phezzan is 25 billion to 13 billion to 2 billion - whereas in the same episode it says the population of the Empire alone at the beginning of Rudolf's reign (i.e. the founder) was 300 billion. Heibi2 (who is responsible for production of the fansub, much thanks to him) advised that two seperate Japanese translators looked at this line and confirm those are the numbers spoken - he indicated that it may well be a script mistake on the writer's part of a recording mistake on the voice actor's part - this has apparently happened on other shows before.

Suffice to say, the context of the episode simply does not reasonably allow for humanity's population to go from 300 billion to 40 billion without any sort of comment, so this appears likely. Including "billion" may well have been the mistake - i.e. perhaps a misunderstanding of how to represent a ratio?

EDIT: but in Episode 86, its clearly stated (in the fansub and the native Japanese subtitles) that the population of the Empire is 40 billion to 940,000 at Iserlohn. So that would appear to shut the door and indicate that 40 billion it is.

But. Then it says that 1/425000 of humanity upholds the flag of democracy. 425000 x 940,000 = 399.5 billion. Not 40 billion.

So, big fat internal inconsistencies abound, and nothing to do with fansub issues. I've even checked google translate using the 'listen' function, and everything checks out!

All up, I'd have to say the 40 billion number (or 25/13/2 billion as it was divided up earlier in the series) probably has the most support. Maybe there was some sort of huge disaster, I dunno - even if one would think it should be mentioned.

I'll have to touch on this some more later after giving it some thought, but I'll point out 3 things:

1.) I checked my (crappy) translations in ep 86 and it implied that the 1/425,000 was relative to humanity as a whole (throughout the scope of the galaxy they have settled, rather than just one specific faction.) That is an important distinction.

alternately its quite possible that it was an error and it meant to be 1/42500, which would be aorund 40 billion, but its the same in both I'm inclined to buy it.

If we only had a third source to check up from (just kidding)

2.) Phezzan is a single system/planet, right? From what I read on the wiki it's nominally part of the Empire, but more like a protectorate or client state or something. If they really DO have 2 billion, that introduces some real oddidities as far as the population is concerned (least of which being that Phezzan's population makes up a HUGE percentage of the Empire's total population...) That gives the the glimmerings of some idea but I'll have to think. This is really something I should probably pester Publius about.

3.) Numbers, especially from dialogue aren't absolutes, like I've said before. For all we know the census takers of the Empire and FPA fucking suck. And if there is a large "independent/neutral" portion of humanity outside the two main factions (even if they are minor relative to the other two) that opens up alot of complications: emigration and immigration, conquest and colonization, etc. could all be going on but not neccesarily reported to any central authority. And even if it is reported, it may not be immediately processed. And in Wartime I imagine you could get alot of population shifts or changes that are simply too big to cope with or process/enumerate properly.

Even more esoteric may be if there is some sort of prejudice involved. Think of Roman citizen ship and similar practices. Something like that exists with the TOG in Renegade Legion.

[Simon_Jester]

Well another thing to consider I suspect is intensity, and this applies for both the sidewalls and the radiation/particle shielding. To put it simply HV ships seem to do better against (for lack of a better word) "area" attacks contrasted to concentrated ones. EG nuke detonations, even if shaped, still are less effective at penetrating compared to x-ray lasers, even if the former can be vastly more powerful. The same is almost certainly true of "matter" weapons, and a particle beam is without a doubt going to have superior intensity to any macroscopic impactor (the latter having a vastly bigger surface area to interact with.) And it goes without saying that the properties of the material will have to matter.

Damn, I think it sounds like you're persuading me more to your line of thinking.

Hah.

That said, wide-area attacks may be ineffective against sidewalls... but they're quite effective against radiation shielding in-setting; ships can't handle a 500 kW per square meter flux of .9c particles, on the bow, basically. That, or the very low probability of hitting something massive enough to have significant impact energy at those speeds is considered a serious threat.

As to relative impact area of a solid projectile versus a particle beam, that depends so heavily on the dispersion of the particle beam- we can't really know. LoGH beam weapons seem to leave damage tracks multiple meters wide by the time they leave their targets; the spot sizes aren't that narrow.

True, although technically I would only very loosely call plasma a sort of "particle beam" Plasma has properties that make it somewhat different than botha physical impactor and a coherent beam of particles. And, like I pointed out above, surface area/intensity may matter like it does with "photonic" type weapons (ignoring that not all nukes in HV are photonic as well...)

Intensity will always matter.

The working definition of a particle beam in beam physics is that a beam is a special case of a plasma, in which the plasma has a very high average velocity in one direction, and relatively low velocity spread in other directions. Many of the analytical techniques are shared, or partly shared, between generalized plasma physics and the physics of beams.

That leads me to wonder about the mateiral properties again,, would a blob of say, "silicon" plasma or "lead" plasma be much different from an iron plasma? This is another reason I hesitated at labelling E-torps as a PBW.

Material properties won't be that different, I'd think. At the kind of energies I'm talking about, chemistry doesn't happen- the difference may well be academic. I might be wrong about that, but I don't expect to be.

Hm. Isn't your ability to pull this off dependent upon the quality of your particle acceleration technology? Or if not, at least on how big you're willing/capable to build and/or how long you wait to accelerate the beam to a desired velocity? Some universes I can think of that would work for, but not others.

Also, what sort of range were you thinking for your PBW? I'm curious.

Er. PBW -> Particle Beam Weapon, yes?

Range depends on how fast you can get the beam running, and how wide a dispersion of the beam you're prepared to accept at the target; there really are no other important parameters. Doubling the relativistic gamma of the particles will, roughly, double the distance the beam travels before internal space-charge repulsion spreads it out to a given diameter.

For a given level of technology you can do this readily enough by doubling the barrel length and just using twice as many of whatever the heck you used to accelerate the particle in the first place. Even though the apparent velocity of the beam doesn't change much (say, it is now traveling at "c minus ten meters per second" instead of "c minus ten point three meters per second" or whatever), the effective range increases dramatically, as does the intensity-on-target at any given range.

On a side note, when I try to write stuff myself, this leads predictably to multikilometer ships built around spinal particle beams. Write what you know.

The advances in acceleration technology required to make this work at usefully weaponizable power outputs are significant, but they are in many respects a logical scaling-up of existing technology- as opposed to things like super-intense gravitational fields.

Given a barrel length, a number for the kind of energy gradient you've got, (say, GeV that can be imparted to a proton per meter of acceleration line it passes down), beam diameter as it travels down the beamline and a figure for power output, you can calculate beam dispersion as a function of distance down range.

But it's a bit complicated; there are differential equations involved and I really really don't have the inclination to dig into it myself at the moment. As in, sift through specialist physics text briefly for the differential equation describing beam envelopes, plug in parameters, and work out a solution method that doesn't involve an undue amount of arithmetic.

Now, I will not speculate on why this is not used in the Honorverse- I don't know how they generate high-intensity lasers (including gamma ray lasers). But it will be a relevant concern if Honorverse ships are being shot at by people who do use effectively-lightspeed particle beam weapons. I would argue that their sidewalls and wedges should be expected to perform about as well against such beams as they do against equivalent Honorverse laser weapons of equal power and intensity.

Heh. I'm starting to think that for whatever reason they just completely disregarded PBW technology in favor of everything else.

That's about the size of it.

Particle beams really are a fairly logical choice for soft-SF weaponry; they have a lot going for them if you can manage the acceleration gradients required to generate a usefully fast beam in an acceptably short barrel.

[Vympel]

Odd thing. I count around 36 beams, the bulk of which are firing forward and to starboard, only a handful seem to be firing on the other side. IIRC that kinda exceeds the supposed beam weapon counts on a given axis. So either they have some VERY wide fire arcs on the side mounts (possible, but interesting to explain if they do since they look recessed on the starboard side) or they have alot more guns than listed.

The thing about My Conquest Is A Sea of Stars is that it has a bit of a "this is the pilot" going about some of the weapons systems, particularly in relation to the standard battleship. I recently did a recount of all the holes that constitute cannons by reference to the fleet files, its 22 on each side (not 16), not including the front weapons. However, there's also forward facing holes in the engine 'nacelles' that fire beams in the pilot, that in the main show are never seen to fire beams again, but the "photon torpedo" copies. There's also two lasers that fire out the bottom protrusion forward (though their angle could conceivably change) that we never see fire again.

I also just noticed in that picture that four beams are coming out the front, but their position is such that they can only be firing out of the two (larger) cannon holes, not the other six.

These are all issues I plan to cover in a "background" section on the page for the standard Imperial battleship in general.

This might be quantifiable in some way but I'm not sure how. Those turning jets look pretty tiny thought and hnot firing very hard. That suggests they wouldn't turn very quickly. Perhaps the main thrusters use some sort of electromagnetic steering for broad turning, and the smaller thrusters are just for fine control (or for close in to places like stations and the like)

Yeah, you don't see those thrusters fire every time a ship turns either, though it happens very often. You do see them in use for reversing / slowing though!

that's still pretty cosmetic. Given that and alot of the superficial differences between other "similar" starships it tends to suggest they have a very interesting means of ship construction. I dont' want to say nanotech, but its along the lines of what I am thinkin. Such an answer might even be neccessary, since I'm willing to bet that there's some inconsistency in ship scaling due to artwork and such (in fact, based on my expeirence scaling b5 and SW ships, I'll guarantee it.)

Yeah, the main difference is forward armament - Beowulf has 6 conventional guns, Tristan has a structure with some sort of large aperture that may be a big-ass death-cannon like on Fahrenheit's mighty Asgrim, but we never see it fire. Tristan has no forward armament as such, but in relation to your earlier comment re beam weapon axis, it can fire its side facing guns on the bow forward.

I noticed some civilian ships as well. That implies either civilians have to be very well connected, or civilian shipbuilding exists as well, and is an industry.

Yeah there's heaps of civilian shipbuilding. Phezzan's merchant marine is stated to outnumber the ships of the Imperial fleet in one episode.

There's a dinstinct lack of any visible cooling apparatus on the starships (not unusual for the softer sorts of sci fi, but still) either they have some technobabble "neutrino radiator" like mechanism or they have some incredibly efficient power generation and transfer systems (or possibly, both.)

Recharge rate and targeting can also be issues for delays. I guess it depends on how the guns are controlled (manually, by computer, or computer-assisted manual aiming, etc.)

Guns are aimed via gunners seated in chairs watching a radar-style display (either in front of them on a transparent screen or on their helmet, depending on Alliance / Empire). This is a gunner's station (there are many) on Brunhild:-




(there's lots of interference on the display because the gas giant atmosphere is futzing with the sensors - the display is clear when we see it in space). No more detail apart from that.

Testbeds might be interesting to discuss later for the sorts of tech they are testing. It makes me wonder if they planned to refit or upgrade existing starships (which could say some interesting things about shipbuilding and repair again) or if they were going to build a whole new class.

Hopefully the Fleet File Collection books shed some light. I'll get em translated one day.

Maybe Imperial fighters are smaller. I dunno since I haven't scaled them yet. looking on the wiki the carrier looks just like a battleship, only a bit more top heavy, and with small holes that look like gunports. I don't see any "tubes" or apertures for such on any starship though unless they are recessed somewhere.

The tubes are on the top of the huge structure that looks like its been grafted onto the battleship hull (in terms of size, carriers resemble the high noble command ship, which looks very much like a dramatically upscaled standard battleship, only with significantly more foreward armament). You may see two types of carriers are displayed - the one with the doors along the side is the gunship carrier.

Here's a pretty (and accurate) CGI render:-

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... ier-w2.jpg

And the gunship carrier, for comparison:-

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... rier-r.jpg

(both are seen in the show - the gunship carrier is first seen in my upcoming battle post)

Whilst we're at it-

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... leship.jpg

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... ship-l.jpg

There's a look at the standard 677m battleship from two angles - you can see it has 22 side-facing guns (you have to look at both because three of them are obscured on each due to angle). In fact, you can even see the two tubes on the bottom protrusion (where the sensors are located, if Brunhild is any indication) which we see firing only in MCISS. I'm going to have fun when I get around to writing a full treatment of the standard ships.

For comparison, here's a typical high noble command ship, the Ostmark:-

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... stmark.jpg

Those two things on either side? Completely unconnected seperate ships, whoose sole job is to protect the command ship from enemy fire. Bloody high nobles.

They don't look too deeply recessed in though. Most of the fighter bulk looks to be outside it. Do all the starships recess them in the back of the ship?

Just destroyers. All other Imperial ships launch them via tubes that are flush with the hull. They're arrayed along either side of the bottom engine protrusion on Imperial battleships, for example:-

http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/1118 ... h03m35.jpg (Fahrenheit's Darmstadt launches fighters)

Inside the tube, doors open:-

Launching:-

They dont look like they have much in the way of barrels, so they may be powerful, but very short ranged, needing to get in close as well as to pierce shields. Just doing a rough scaling I'd guess they mass many hundreds of tons (The Spartanian, anyhow.) That's quite big to pack alot of firepower (if it were firing a massless beam it theoretically output hundreds of terawatts without recoil being a problem.)

Yeah that would fit with what we see.

That.. makes it harder to estimate losses. I still am not sure what constiutes a "major" and "minor" fleet battle in LOGH terms. And I'm not sure if that includes things like raiding and small-group skirmishes (Stuff that may involve individual ships or small handfuls of ships, or just between cruisers and destroyers and the like.)

Same. We've seen tiny destroyer actions between handfuls of patrol ships, a few thousand ships at a time, ten thousand ships at a time, and up and up. Most of the time in the show its the big-ass ones.

Is that the only example?

Yeah, can't think of any other delay examples.

Again ti depends on how the FTL tech and signals work but.. if FTL is blocked between the Empire and FPA for some reason, save along these specific "routes" then it stands to reason that the FTL may be blocked as well. In such cases, you'd probalby have to use relays or satellites to "bounce" the signal around whatever the obstruction is, and that can indicate delays. That's hardly unreasonable.

This only reinforces my belief that LOGH Warp has alot in common with 40K warp, IF they're not careful GW will sue them!

Heheh, that's a good idea actually

Any idea how long the peace(s) were?

Nope unfortunately.

I'll have to touch on this some more later after giving it some thought, but I'll point out 3 things:

1.) I checked my (crappy) translations in ep 86 and it implied that the 1/425,000 was relative to humanity as a whole (throughout the scope of the galaxy they have settled, rather than just one specific faction.) That is an important distinction.

The only faction that exists is the Empire at this time. There's no one else. Basically, it is humanity.

alternately its quite possible that it was an error and it meant to be 1/42500, which would be aorund 40 billion, but its the same in both I'm inclined to buy it.

If we only had a third source to check up from (just kidding)

Need the damn book badly

3.) Numbers, especially from dialogue aren't absolutes, like I've said before. For all we know the census takers of the Empire and FPA fucking suck. And if there is a large "independent/neutral" portion of humanity outside the two main factions (even if they are minor relative to the other two) that opens up alot of complications: emigration and immigration, conquest and colonization, etc. could all be going on but not neccesarily reported to any central authority. And even if it is reported, it may not be immediately processed. And in Wartime I imagine you could get alot of population shifts or changes that are simply too big to cope with or process/enumerate properly.

Even more esoteric may be if there is some sort of prejudice involved. Think of Roman citizen ship and similar practices. Something like that exists with the TOG in Renegade Legion.

Possibly for the Empire, but that seems unlikely for the Alliance. Remember the 40 billion figure matches up seamlessly with the 25/13/2 population for the Empire, Alliance and Phezzan earlier in the show.

Here's what Heibi2 said on the CA forum:-

I can always ask him to confirm the numbers again. Maybe another script writer error, or a misheard number. Japanese numbers beyond the 100,000 type numbers are always a pain.
...

Here's his answer:
I double-checked, and all the numbers are correct in terms of what the narrator says in the original: the empire population, 40 billion ("400 oku" = "40 billion"), Iserlohn population, 940,000 ("94 man" = 940,000), 1/425,000 of the total population ("42 man 5 sen" = 425,000).

The problem, of course, is that the math wouldn't add up. The population numbers seem accurate from what we've been seeing so far; the entire population at the start of the show is roughly 40 billion (Empire 25 billion, Alliance 13 billion, and Phezzan 2 billion), so it's reasonable to think that the Empire now boasts the population of roughly 40 billion. Also, it's hard to think that Iserlohn Republic could have as low a population number as 94,000, and 940,000 sounds more reasonable. (Through I couldn't track down the official population number for the Iserlohn Republic, 94,000 seems awfully too small to operate the many battleships that they have, given that?some battleships require several ten-thousands people to operate.) So my guess is that either the author or the screen writer didn't do the math right, and that 1/425,000 should actually be 1/42,500.

To rephrase: the number that looks most certain is the Empire population (40 billion). The numbers that can be questioned are the Iserlohn population (940,000) and the population ratio (1/425,000). Of the two, I'm more inclined to think that the Iserlohn population is legit and that the population ratio is more suspect for the reasons above.

I'm inclined to agree. Battleships don't require that many crew as we've discussed, but 94,000 is still nowhere near enough for the Iserlohn Republic to operate its fleet. That'd be impossible, trust me.

[Xon]

Honestly, it would make as much sense to use magnets- you've just described a free electron laser- but given how liberally the Honorverse uses extremely intense gravitics, I don't see anything wrong with that description.

The biggest reason to use gravity control is Honorverse doesn't actually pay the energy costs for generating the force effect, just the realspace<->hyperspace interaction costs. This also has the potential sideaffect of uncoupling a starship mounted grazer's energy output and it's energy requirements. Which neatly explains how the hell they can have enough battery power next to each grazer emitter capable of powering a few 'shots' if the emitter is cut off from main power if the grazer is outputing kilotons of energy.

As well "In Fire Forged", it outright states thier "lasers" can be rather wongy;

When these beams consist of light of a single color, they fall under the archaic heading of “laser” beams. This term was originally an acronym standing for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Only some classes of modern beams rely upon the “stimulated emission” principle and the bomb-pumped laser is one of them
...
Indeed, modern space weapon lasers are so commonly X-ray lasers that the term “laser” is generally synonymous with “xraser” in naval parlance. Their rarer gamma emitting cousins are called “grasers.” Both of these words have their obvious origin with the ancient “laser” though the fact that many such weapons do not operate on the principle of “stimulated emission” is generally forgotten

I'm more impressed by the power switching that generates the signal on such short notice than I am in the processing power...

Or that it doesn't require special hardware but thier generic military grade active/passive sensors are good enough for this and just needs a specialized control unit.

[Simon_Jester]

It's not the sensor acuity, or the control software- the former I'd already assumed, and the latter may well actually be achievable using near-future technology. It's the power switching to generate the output waveform on ten or twenty nanoseconds' notice.

[Simon_Jester]

On further examination of the story, Xon, it is revealed that the aforementioned system for canceling out sensor pulses does not, in point of fact, work. Or rather, it does work in one sense but is useless in general against an opponent with more than one radar dish.

This somewhat decreases the degree to which I am impressed by this piece of Honorverse technology.

[Lord of the Abyss]

On further examination of the story, Xon, it is revealed that the aforementioned system for canceling out sensor pulses does not, in point of fact, work. Or rather, it does work in one sense but is useless in general against an opponent with more than one radar dish.

This somewhat decreases the degree to which I am impressed by this piece of Honorverse technology.

Well, the character IS a con artist. And one who specializes in technological fraud, at that. Probably not the best guy to get accurate technical specifications from.

[Connor MacLeod]

As to relative impact area of a solid projectile versus a particle beam, that depends so heavily on the dispersion of the particle beam- we can't really know. LoGH beam weapons seem to leave damage tracks multiple meters wide by the time they leave their targets; the spot sizes aren't that narrow.

In some cases yeah, but in others they cause damage far larger than the beam itself. I think they can operate in multiple modes. Or maybe they're completely different (or different kinds) of beam weapons - We're still debating whether the beams are particle beams, lasers, or some combination after all. In that case the visible beams are merely some sort of tracer or byproduct.

The working definition of a particle beam in beam physics is that a beam is a special case of a plasma, in which the plasma has a very high average velocity in one direction, and relatively low velocity spread in other directions. Many of the analytical techniques are shared, or partly shared, between generalized plasma physics and the physics of beams.

Hmm. I wonder how applicable that would be to military particle beams. IIRC not all types of particles for a hypothetical particle beam have the same properties. Neutral particles are more penetrative for example, but because matter is empty space they don't interact as readily as charged PBs do, from my long ago reading of SDI material (My local library had an AWFUL lot of material on that...) A plasma-based particle beam weapon makes me think of a particle beam composed of, oh, alpha raridation rather than say, neutrons or charged particles. Might do alot of damage, but the penetration *sucks*.

The bit about velocity is a good point, even if my mind starts veering off into "depending on your tech capability" territory like I did before.

Material properties won't be that different, I'd think. At the kind of energies I'm talking about, chemistry doesn't happen- the difference may well be academic. I might be wrong about that, but I don't expect to be.

I don't think you are either, but one can never be sure

Er. PBW -> Particle Beam Weapon, yes?

Yup. Sorry I wasn't clear.

On a side note, when I try to write stuff myself, this leads predictably to multikilometer ships built around spinal particle beams. Write what you know.

Isn't that true? technically though, given what I've seen, LOGH not only has some magical means of accelerating neutrons to near-c velocities, but the weapons themselves appear to be pretty damn compact too, given numbers and placement in the anime. Of course, this might also mean that not ALL beams are particle beams... though an X-ray laser (or just an x-ray beam) would not automatically be smaller than a Particle Beam (especially if they are using FELs).

The advances in acceleration technology required to make this work at usefully weaponizable power outputs are significant, but they are in many respects a logical scaling-up of existing technology- as opposed to things like super-intense gravitational fields.

TBH I have long come to the idea that alot of so called "gravity" devices or "antigravity" tech and all that related stuff may not be manipulating gravity, but some sort of forcefield that simply mimics some or all of the properties of gravity. Saves alot of headache IMHO (like in the honorverse.)

But it's a bit complicated; there are differential equations involved and I really really don't have the inclination to dig into it myself at the moment. As in, sift through specialist physics text briefly for the differential equation describing beam envelopes, plug in parameters, and work out a solution method that doesn't involve an undue amount of arithmetic.

Naw, you provided a good explanation as is. Getting too technical in this can tend to be a drawback anyhow, I just worry about the broad details. Thanks

Particle beams really are a fairly logical choice for soft-SF weaponry; they have a lot going for them if you can manage the acceleration gradients required to generate a usefully fast beam in an acceptably short barrel.

Particle beams are probably my favorite weapon. Dunno why, the way they operate just seems so damn neat to me. Pity they're so dangerous as a hand weapon (or so I hear.) unless you're heavily armored.

[Connor MacLeod]

The thing about My Conquest Is A Sea of Stars is that it has a bit of a "this is the pilot" going about some of the weapons systems, particularly in relation to the standard battleship. I recently did a recount of all the holes that constitute cannons by reference to the fleet files, its 22 on each side (not 16), not including the front weapons. However, there's also forward facing holes in the engine 'nacelles' that fire beams in the pilot, that in the main show are never seen to fire beams again, but the "photon torpedo" copies. There's also two lasers that fire out the bottom protrusion forward (though their angle could conceivably change) that we never see fire again.

I also just noticed in that picture that four beams are coming out the front, but their position is such that they can only be firing out of the two (larger) cannon holes, not the other six.

These are all issues I plan to cover in a "background" section on the page for the standard Imperial battleship in general.

It's not a big deal. It's just I come to expect these sorts of inconsistnecies because they're usually inevitable (its hard to get visuals and dialgoue to always match up perfectly. Hell it can be hard to get text to often mesh with other text, esp in shared universes.)

The simple explanation is also one that already exists - variations on the basic battleship design. Since its a flagship, its not that unreasonbale to expect it might be more heavily armed than a typicalb attleship. Or it may have a different armament scheme entirely. Lots more smaller guns, as previously mentioned, would improve point defense. Good for a flagship.

Hell, for all we knwo about their industrial capability, they reconfigure weapons designs on a semi-regular basis, even if those ships don't look very modular.

Yeah, you don't see those thrusters fire every time a ship turns either, though it happens very often. You do see them in use for reversing / slowing though!

It cna depend on where they are fighting. In open space would be different than, close to or in around a planet (since as I mentioned, it seems pretty obvious they have anti-gravity of some kind.)

Yeah, the main difference is forward armament - Beowulf has 6 conventional guns, Tristan has a structure with some sort of large aperture that may be a big-ass death-cannon like on Fahrenheit's mighty Asgrim, but we never see it fire. Tristan has no forward armament as such, but in relation to your earlier comment re beam weapon axis, it can fire its side facing guns on the bow forward.

Maybe its like the latest Halo bits on the forerunners and they use magic forcefields to simulate real matter, and they routinely change the design to different configurations.

Yeah there's heaps of civilian shipbuilding. Phezzan's merchant marine is stated to outnumber the ships of the Imperial fleet in one episode.

That doesn't surprise me. It's pretty true in real life and most other sci fi. Ender once commented to me that Britian's civilian/shipping fleets were 10x bigger than its naval force. That has tended to be my rule of thumb in 40K (although I have reason to believe that there.) and for Star Wars.

Guns are aimed via gunners seated in chairs watching a radar-style display (either in front of them on a transparent screen or on their helmet, depending on Alliance / Empire). This is a gunner's station (there are many) on Brunhild:-




(there's lots of interference on the display because the gas giant atmosphere is futzing with the sensors - the display is clear when we see it in space). No more detail apart from that.

Well, individual gunners would explain why guns don't always seem to fire simultaneously, although I still expect they have some sort of centralized fire control to coordinate and direct guns when needed.

Hopefully the Fleet File Collection books shed some light. I'll get em translated one day.

you mean it has more than just ship sizes?

The tubes are on the top of the huge structure that looks like its been grafted onto the battleship hull (in terms of size, carriers resemble the high noble command ship, which looks very much like a dramatically upscaled standard battleship, only with significantly more foreward armament). You may see two types of carriers are displayed - the one with the doors along the side is the gunship carrier.

Here's a pretty (and accurate) CGI render:-

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... ier-w2.jpg

Having them on top has some interesting implications, since when you showed me the vid of crewmen getting onboard, they were running normally. I wonder how they pull off the antigrav orientation onboard the ship.

And the carrier looks just like a battleship they decided to stick a carrier box on top of. Much different from the smaller carriers in fact (which looks like a box with engines.)

And the gunship carrier, for comparison:-

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... rier-r.jpg

(both are seen in the show - the gunship carrier is first seen in my upcoming battle post)

The gunships are what that previous page you showed me must call torpedo boats, or something, then. The carrier still has hatches on top, though.

Whilst we're at it-

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... leship.jpg

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... ship-l.jpg

There's a look at the standard 677m battleship from two angles - you can see it has 22 side-facing guns (you have to look at both because three of them are obscured on each due to angle). In fact, you can even see the two tubes on the bottom protrusion (where the sensors are located, if Brunhild is any indication) which we see firing only in MCISS. I'm going to have fun when I get around to writing a full treatment of the standard ships.[/quote]

Yeah, I think I can see the tubes. Not many figthers then, for a battleship. I wonder if that is meant to be the LOGh equivalent of float planes or helicopters for recon and fire control purposes, or something (or maybe just to take out incoming fighters.)

Now that I'm looking at it, the biggest thing I notice is how the guns are consistently and oddly placed on the sides of the ship. I mean there is some pattern but.. it makes me wonder if they really do carry several differnet kinds of beam weapons and the different patterns mean different kinds, or something.

For comparison, here's a typical high noble command ship, the Ostmark:-

http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~mercy/galle ... stmark.jpg

Those two things on either side? Completely unconnected seperate ships, whoose sole job is to protect the command ship from enemy fire. Bloody high nobles.

What class are those? They're the most ugly looking Imperial ships, and I dont see why they need special designs rather than just using a few extra battleships. Unless they somehow combine to form Voltron, or something.

Just destroyers. All other Imperial ships launch them via tubes that are flush with the hull. They're arrayed along either side of the bottom engine protrusion on Imperial battleships, for example:-

http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/1118 ... h03m35.jpg (Fahrenheit's Darmstadt launches fighters)

I've seen something like that before, though I thought they fired missiles.

And I already commented on how oversized the fighter bays seem on Imperial vessels.

Same. We've seen tiny destroyer actions between handfuls of patrol ships, a few thousand ships at a time, ten thousand ships at a time, and up and up. Most of the time in the show its the big-ass ones.

From reading up the stuff you gave me, it also looks like they have "cruiser squadrons" or some equivalent (I saw mention of cruiser flagships on one of those links, I am pretty sure.)

Yeah, can't think of any other delay examples.

Probably are others in the series. It's alot of data to go through, after all.

The only faction that exists is the Empire at this time. There's no one else. Basically, it is humanity.

Well yeah in the GE there was ONLY the GE (technically), although in practice you had alot of self-governing polities that basically paid tribute to the Empire. We're getting into politics and geography, and that is a topic that is historically prone to exaggeration or outright misrepresentation (US history is full of it, especially when it comes to shit like political representation and voting and states rights and all that silly crap.)

Need the damn book badly

Need more information in generla. Its possible there are more examples to pull from the anime, if we just look. I already anticipate having to watch and rewatch episodes at least twice back to back, with both versions of the sub, just to get a bigger picture of what's going on.

Sooner or later though, yeah, you'll want ot try to make an effort to get more of the textual data I have a suspicion we're only getting part of the numerical picture from the anime.

Possibly for the Empire, but that seems unlikely for the Alliance. Remember the 40 billion figure matches up seamlessly with the 25/13/2 population for the Empire, Alliance and Phezzan earlier in the show.

Well if that's how you feel about it, then go with the smaller number and treat the 400 billion as an error. I know it's not perfect, but as I already told you over MSN, there's going to be no nice, neat answer to this. It will likely come down to either picking one number over another, or trying to find some answer that will satisfy both (which will likely be convoluted and probably not fit the the strict interpretation of the dialogue in either case.)

I'm going to break up the CA replies to respond individually, I'll color code them blue.

I can always ask him to confirm the numbers again. Maybe another script writer error, or a misheard number. Japanese numbers beyond the 100,000 type numbers are always a pain.

Yah, thats what I thought. I'm not going to say that IS the only problem, since we both know (as Ia lready mentioned) that even if the translation is accurate, the japanese writers/animators/etc could have fucked things up in the script or somewhere. hell on my dubs I saw a chinese translation.. that only makes me more concerned about that whole angle.

Anecdotally I remember one bit in Hellsing manga where the Japanese have some number that doesn't neatly translate into a precise, english definition, and the "official" licensed translation just made some shit up to fix it.

Here's his answer:
I double-checked, and all the numbers are correct in terms of what the narrator says in the original: the empire population, 40 billion ("400 oku" = "40 billion"), Iserlohn population, 940,000 ("94 man" = 940,000), 1/425,000 of the total population ("42 man 5 sen" = 425,000).

The problem, of course, is that the math wouldn't add up. The population numbers seem accurate from what we've been seeing so far; the entire population at the start of the show is roughly 40 billion (Empire 25 billion, Alliance 13 billion, and Phezzan 2 billion), so it's reasonable to think that the Empire now boasts the population of roughly 40 billion. Also, it's hard to think that Iserlohn Republic could have as low a population number as 94,000, and 940,000 sounds more reasonable. (Through I couldn't track down the official population number for the Iserlohn Republic, 94,000 seems awfully too small to operate the many battleships that they have, given that?some battleships require several ten-thousands people to operate.) So my guess is that either the author or the screen writer didn't do the math right, and that 1/425,000 should actually be 1/42,500.

Similar to what I alluded to. I agree that 94,000 seems unlikely, so if you were going to "correct" it, it would be the ratio.

Of course, by this point we're unsure where the numbers lie, so it could be some other error too. I suspect this won't be resolved without further information of some kind, either that may still exist in the anime (which I suspect there may be) or in the other text (if and when it can be acquired.)

To rephrase: the number that looks most certain is the Empire population (40 billion). The numbers that can be questioned are the Iserlohn population (940,000) and the population ratio (1/425,000). Of the two, I'm more inclined to think that the Iserlohn population is legit and that the population ratio is more suspect for the reasons above.

I'm inclined to agree. Battleships don't require that many crew as we've discussed, but 94,000 is still nowhere near enough for the Iserlohn Republic to operate its fleet. That'd be impossible, trust me.

[/quote]

One point. They wouldnt need to crew JUST battleships and oyu already mentioned the ratios of ships isn't something we're aboslutely clear on either, but that still doesnt mean the 94,000 would fit, so the change would be 1/425,000.

That does leave certain other bits, like the 300 billion population figure. Dropping down to 40 billion impiles some pretty major catastrophies happening at some point in history. I mean we're talking 85-90% of a population just disappearing, that's not tirvial and you can't really write it off as military casualties either.

At the same time, whilst they clearly have the capability, I don't see either side willngly or regularly depopulating the other side's planets to win the war. Not if they've been fighting it for over a century.

[Vympel]

It's not a big deal. It's just I come to expect these sorts of inconsistnecies because they're usually inevitable (its hard to get visuals and dialgoue to always match up perfectly. Hell it can be hard to get text to often mesh with other text, esp in shared universes.)

The simple explanation is also one that already exists - variations on the basic battleship design. Since its a flagship, its not that unreasonbale to expect it might be more heavily armed than a typicalb attleship. Or it may have a different armament scheme entirely. Lots more smaller guns, as previously mentioned, would improve point defense. Good for a flagship.

Hell, for all we knwo about their industrial capability, they reconfigure weapons designs on a semi-regular basis, even if those ships don't look very modular.

Eh, I don't think so. Fleet File Collection Vol. 1R covers both Grendel and Morholt, they're the same as any other battleship in every respect save for the crests denoting who they belong to. I figure anything they can do, any other battleship can do as well. Their armament the times we see their sides/ front etc doesn't appear to differ either.

Maybe its like the latest Halo bits on the forerunners and they use magic forcefields to simulate real matter, and they routinely change the design to different configurations.

Well, individual gunners would explain why guns don't always seem to fire simultaneously, although I still expect they have some sort of centralized fire control to coordinate and direct guns when needed.

They do, if Yang's targeting order in Episode 21 (posted earlier, the 6.4 light seconds shot) is any indication.

you mean it has more than just ship sizes?

Yeah, there's like two-three pages of fluff text per ship.

Having them on top has some interesting implications, since when you showed me the vid of crewmen getting onboard, they were running normally. I wonder how they pull off the antigrav orientation onboard the ship.

And the carrier looks just like a battleship they decided to stick a carrier box on top of. Much different from the smaller carriers in fact (which looks like a box with engines.)

I should double check to see that the guy doing it didn't add embellishments nonetheless. I could be mistaken about it being entirely accurate. In the case of the fighter carrier (which has the long thin dark lines running down either side of the fighter bay area) we see Kempf take his Valkyrie back and it doesn't appear to go for the top.

Yeah, I think I can see the tubes. Not many figthers then, for a battleship. I wonder if that is meant to be the LOGh equivalent of float planes or helicopters for recon and fire control purposes, or something (or maybe just to take out incoming fighters.)

Nah, the tubes are invisible. If Fahrenheit's battleship launching Valkyries is any indication, it looks like they can carry in excess of 50.

Now that I'm looking at it, the biggest thing I notice is how the guns are consistently and oddly placed on the sides of the ship. I mean there is some pattern but.. it makes me wonder if they really do carry several differnet kinds of beam weapons and the different patterns mean different kinds, or something.

I think thats accurate. There's also hidden beam weapons that don't reveal themselves until hatches open - we see a turreted weapon pop out of a hatch on a cruiser in Episode 27, and in Episode 52 we see a pair of beam weapons open up and shoot from the hull at incoming fighters on a battleship (both Imperial).

What class are those? They're the most ugly looking Imperial ships, and I dont see why they need special designs rather than just using a few extra battleships. Unless they somehow combine to form Voltron, or something.

The ships along either side? Japanese fan site google translate fu calls them "shield ships". The Ostmark, Berlin and Wilhelmina are all identical - however the Ostmark and Berlin are accompanied by these insipid "shield ships" on either side, because they're high noble ships. By contrast the Wilhelmina (seen in the pilot movie, and later appropriated by a high noble flunky) was Fleet Admiral Muckenburger's ship before he retired and didn't have shield ships, but was otherwise identical to Ostmark and Berlin. We also saw a regular battleship, Staaden's Augsburg, equipped with its own, shorty shield ships, at Astarte (Overture to A New War version):=



Later in the series his ship lacks them, though.

From reading up the stuff you gave me, it also looks like they have "cruiser squadrons" or some equivalent (I saw mention of cruiser flagships on one of those links, I am pretty sure.)

I'm not sure about 'cruiser flagships', but they do have groups of the smaller warships in patrol capacities.

Anyway we've talked about the population / numbers issue heaps on MSN already, you know to sum up I basically think there's no easy answer. 400 billion sounds more correct and has decent support, 40 billion sounds wrong but also has support. Bah!!!!

[Connor MacLeod]

Eh, I don't think so. Fleet File Collection Vol. 1R covers both Grendel and Morholt, they're the same as any other battleship in every respect save for the crests denoting who they belong to. I figure anything they can do, any other battleship can do as well. Their armament the times we see their sides/ front etc doesn't appear to differ either.

Except that you don't know whether that's because its actually that way or if they did it just because "eh its a battleship they probably are all the same" laziness. Both happens in spinoff sources (look at WEG and WOTC and various stuff like ISD armament n shit. Or Escort frigates carrying 2 fighter squadrons.)

They do, if Yang's targeting order in Episode 21 (posted earlier, the 6.4 light seconds shot) is any indication.

Didn't someone mention 20 ligth seconds ranges earlier as well?

Yeah, there's like two-three pages of fluff text per ship.

I dont know if you have one of those scanners that can read text and convert it to pdf form, but maybe a cheap (if probably inaccurate) way to do it is scan the text, and plug it into an online translation program or something. It won't be good like I said but it would give you an idea if there's any good stuff in there (at least the gist of it, since those tend to be horribly literal minded)

Nah, the tubes are invisible. If Fahrenheit's battleship launching Valkyries is any indication, it looks like they can carry in excess of 50.

That'll take up alot of internal volume, especially given how much space those individual bays consume.

I think thats accurate. There's also hidden beam weapons that don't reveal themselves until hatches open - we see a turreted weapon pop out of a hatch on a cruiser in Episode 27, and in Episode 52 we see a pair of beam weapons open up and shoot from the hull at incoming fighters on a battleship (both Imperial).

That's even weirder. Why would some be hidden and others not?

The ships along either side? Japanese fan site google translate fu calls them "shield ships". The Ostmark, Berlin and Wilhelmina are all identical - however the Ostmark and Berlin are accompanied by these insipid "shield ships" on either side, because they're high noble ships. By contrast the Wilhelmina (seen in the pilot movie, and later appropriated by a high noble flunky) was Fleet Admiral Muckenburger's ship before he retired and didn't have shield ships, but was otherwise identical to Ostmark and Berlin. We also saw a regular battleship, Staaden's Augsburg, equipped with its own, shorty shield ships, at Astarte (Overture to A New War version):=



Later in the series his ship lacks them, though.

Status symbol or cannon fodder?

Anyway we've talked about the population / numbers issue heaps on MSN already, you know to sum up I basically think there's no easy answer. 400 billion sounds more correct and has decent support, 40 billion sounds wrong but also has support. Bah!!!!

It's possible 40 billion is wrong as well. It depends on where the number comes from and who did it. When you work with "billions" and such it can be very easy to make errors, unless you make a habit of it.

[Vympel]

Except that you don't know whether that's because its actually that way or if they did it just because "eh its a battleship they probably are all the same" laziness. Both happens in spinoff sources (look at WEG and WOTC and various stuff like ISD armament n shit. Or Escort frigates carrying 2 fighter squadrons.)

Yeah, its possible, but I don't really think its necessary to conjecture sub-variants of standard ships based on a single scene, especially where there's no good reason to assume that other battleships don't have the same firepower - visible armament is identical to every other ship after all. Maybe the fluff text will have something different to see, but given the crew figures are all identical, I doubt it.

Didn't someone mention 20 ligth seconds ranges earlier as well?

Yup, Episode 22, Lutz Fleet, 6 million km effective range. He's fired on from outside this range to no effect.

I dont know if you have one of those scanners that can read text and convert it to pdf form, but maybe a cheap (if probably inaccurate) way to do it is scan the text, and plug it into an online translation program or something. It won't be good like I said but it would give you an idea if there's any good stuff in there (at least the gist of it, since those tend to be horribly literal minded)

Scanners can scan Japanese in a copy/pasteable form? Didn't even know that.

That'll take up alot of internal volume, especially given how much space those individual bays consume.

Well that bay I showed you was in a carrier. It may be they have more internal space to use for more efficient servicing or something.

That's even weirder. Why would some be hidden and others not?

No clue. Obviously they're for point defence, but I don't see what hiding them gets them. OOU, I'd say so the animators/ artists can magic them into existence when needed, as opposed to complicating their task of reproducing the warships with extra surface details over multiple episodes

Status symbol or cannon fodder?

I'd say both. They serve to ensure both Braunchweig's and Littenheim's escape from capture/death on two seperate occasions. But really, I'm speculating. Ships in the series, with the exception of Brunhild, are never talked up or elaborated on. They're just "here we are!"

[Lord of the Abyss]

That's even weirder. Why would some be hidden and others not?

No clue. Obviously they're for point defence, but I don't see what hiding them gets them. OOU, I'd say so the animators/ artists can magic them into existence when needed, as opposed to complicating their task of reproducing the warships with extra surface details over multiple episodes

Perhaps ease of maintenance? Weapons that spend most of their time inside the ship are easier to work on than ones you need go EVA to fiddle with. As for why some and not others; perhaps some weapons require more maintenance than others, so they build the more maintenance intensive ones inboard. Or they simply can't fit them all inside.

Or for an alternate explanation, they could be weapons that have components that don't react well to the environment outside the ship, so spend most of their time inside and protected to make them last longer.

[takemeout_totheblack]

Here's something interesting. Evidence of FTL sensors AND a possible candidate for LoGH sublight speed numbers.
Episode 107: Battle of Shiva Starzone. Sensors detect enemy formations at a distance of 106.4 Lightseconds* or 31,920,000 km. They then go on to say that the earliest ETA to enemies 'Red Zone'** is 188 seconds, putting what I assume to be average non-combat cruising speed at a bit over .56c or somewhere around 170,000 kilometers per second.

*Dub Flub: The dub I watched mistakenly said 'light years' instead of 'light seconds' but followed it up with the 31,920,000 km number so it was obvious what they meant.

**'Red Zone' is what I assume to be the very limit of the enemy's gun-range.

[Vympel]

Interesting. From Vermilion, we know that the "Yellow Zone" is fully within gun range.

(btw, I informed CA of a typo error in their fansub in Episode 70 - 800,000km in the subtitles was mistakenly written down as 80,000km. As Heibi2 of CA said, it happens. Something to keep in mind when watching that episode, but he'll put up a revised version of it shortly, if he hasn't already - for DDL, not torrent)

Perhaps ease of maintenance? Weapons that spend most of their time inside the ship are easier to work on than ones you need go EVA to fiddle with. As for why some and not others; perhaps some weapons require more maintenance than others, so they build the more maintenance intensive ones inboard. Or they simply can't fit them all inside.

Given the weapon on the cruiser we see in Ep 27 is mounted on a turret with a (presumably) more complete range of movement, and more moving parts, this could be a plausible explanation.

[takemeout_totheblack]

What would be the absolute range of LoGH guns? The 20 lightsecond range is the upper limit against shields, but I've heard hearsay of maximum ranges up to 40 light seconds against lightly shielded or non-shielded targets.

[Vympel]

What would be the absolute range of LoGH guns? The 20 lightsecond range is the upper limit against shields, but I've heard hearsay of maximum ranges up to 40 light seconds against lightly shielded or non-shielded targets.

40 lightseconds was me misremembering the 20 light second scene. But obviously, the range against non-shielded targets must be in excess of 20 light seconds, from that scene.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yeah, its possible, but I don't really think its necessary to conjecture sub-variants of standard ships based on a single scene, especially where there's no good reason to assume that other battleships don't have the same firepower - visible armament is identical to every other ship after all. Maybe the fluff text will have something different to see, but given the crew figures are all identical, I doubt it.

I thought it already got mentioned that the crew figures are variable to begin with?

And it need not be a "sub-variant". For all we know it was an in-field repair or a temproary modification. If they can rig engines to asteroids, that shouldn't be beyond them. All I'm saying is that the numbers (which I gather are all from the fleet file) look suspiciously repetitive to me, and I doubt they went in and actually did pixel scaling.

Yup, Episode 22, Lutz Fleet, 6 million km effective range. He's fired on from outside this range to no effect.

Define "no effect" were the shots totally deflected by the shields, or did they just not penetrate, or both?

Scanners can scan Japanese in a copy/pasteable form? Didn't even know that.

Maybe. I never tried it with PDFs myself, but I know it can be done with English. I don't see why not with Japanese, but I could be wrong. Given this I'd say its at least a possibility.

Hell, maybe someone in japan has already scanned the LOGH novels into an ebook format and they're available in japanese.

[Vympel]

I thought it already got mentioned that the crew figures are variable to begin with?

The crew figures are, but the absolute numbers given by the FFC aren't

And it need not be a "sub-variant". For all we know it was an in-field repair or a temproary modification. If they can rig engines to asteroids, that shouldn't be beyond them. All I'm saying is that the numbers (which I gather are all from the fleet file) look suspiciously repetitive to me, and I doubt they went in and actually did pixel scaling.

Well naturally, its a hand-drawn animation, if they pixel scaled all sorts of minor differences would appear. For example, the Grendel and Morholt look different when we see them in the Season 1 Gaiden (produced after the main series was over, but a prequel to the events of the pilot) - in that, they look how standard battleships looked in Season 3 and Season 4 of the main series. Obviously this is because the art style evolved and improved over the show's run. You can note a similar difference in the standard battleship Sindur between Season 2 and Season 3.

But in terms of their essential features - particularly in terms of number of visual weapons, there's never any change in the standard battleship. Basically, there's every reason to think these ships were always intended to be identical to the standard vessels.

Define "no effect" were the shots totally deflected by the shields, or did they just not penetrate, or both?

Ping uselessly against shields.



(interestingly, this is one of the very few times when LOGH beams don't appear to be travelling at least high fractions of c, since we can see them traverse from the edge of the frame to the ship).

Scanners can scan Japanese in a copy/pasteable form? Didn't even know that.

Maybe. I never tried it with PDFs myself, but I know it can be done with English. I don't see why not with Japanese, but I could be wrong. Given this I'd say its at least a possibility.

Hell, maybe someone in japan has already scanned the LOGH novels into an ebook format and they're available in japanese.[/quote]

Something to look into. My iPhone has an app called Word Lens but so far it only translates Spanish

[Connor MacLeod]

Here's something interesting. Evidence of FTL sensors AND a possible candidate for LoGH sublight speed numbers.
Episode 107: Battle of Shiva Starzone. Sensors detect enemy formations at a distance of 106.4 Lightseconds* or 31,920,000 km. They then go on to say that the earliest ETA to enemies 'Red Zone'** is 188 seconds, putting what I assume to be average non-combat cruising speed at a bit over .56c or somewhere around 170,000 kilometers per second.

Several problems:

1.) It doesn't neccesarily indicate FTL sensors. Alot of that depends on what sorts of sensors are picking them up and what they are picking up. It oculd just be passive emissions and that need not be FTL. ACtive sensors? Then it might be.

2.) The combat speed has to account for whether or not both fleets are closing, or just one side is. It looked like the Imperial fleet was moving as well, in which case it would be a "combined closing speed" involving both ships. It could be that one side, or the other, was travelling at different speeds (one moving faster than the other, I'd guess the Imperial fleet was moving sloweR) but we have no way to account fo rthat, so the average of the two fleets would be ~.28c. Which is still pretty darn fast (and alot more plausible for fusion driven starships, even with magic fusion.) It also leads to far less insane acceleration calcs and all the implicatons thereof (power generation, etc.)

You also didn't account for the weapons range, which could be a small or large chunk of it (for example if they engage at 20 LS they both crossed a combined distance of some 86 LS, rathre than 106)

*Dub Flub: The dub I watched mistakenly said 'light years' instead of 'light seconds' but followed it up with the 31,920,000 km number so it was obvious what they meant.

It's quite possible that the time is off as well. The (crappy) sub I have says 1,880 seconds. Which, to be honest, fits with my conceptions of LOGH's capabilities thus far. There's several implications for acceleration and such in that episode, and I somehow doubt they decelerated to a complete stop in a couple of minutes. (And we have to allow for scene cuts in that whole battle no matter how you fudge it due to weapons fire, the speech, etc. , so no point in saying 1,880 seconds is too long.) 1,880 seconds would be "only 2-3% of c average for both fleets, but that's still damn fast by starship standards.

**'Red Zone' is what I assume to be the very limit of the enemy's gun-range.

I'd figure its maybe the range for serious penetration (red usually means danger/warning) and range affects the odds of penetration. How close that means.. *shrugs* Less than 20 light seconds I'd say.

I'd note if we DID take everything quite literally in that scene (EG the battle starting right oafter Reinhard's speech, which took no more than a minute), then the fleets would have engaged each other at a range in excess of 80 light seconds, which would in turn mean (among other things) that beam weapon firepower ramped up considerably since the "20 LS" range Vympel mentioned.

I think they mentioned being outside Thor Hammer range as well, if that affects matters at all.