Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Batman]

t's worth noting that doing this would be a really GOOD way to create an even more blatant international incident than they already have- a Peep ship blowing a Manticoran cruiser out of the ether because its captain is doing her job in Manticoran space is much more of a provocation than "a Peep ship was physically present in our system."

Err-I'd like you to elaborate on that. The Manticorans at the time, while feeling it was inevitable, still very much wanted to avoid that war, and the Havenites were going out of their way (however incompetently) to pretend they weren't the ones who started it.

[Terralthra]

The tactical board flashed as his ECM sprang from standby to active, and two fifty-ton decoys snapped out of their broadside bays, popping through specially opened portals in Fearless's sidewalls. Tractors moored them to the cruiser, holding the driveless lures on station to cover her flanks, as passive sensors listened to the incoming missiles, seeking the frequencies of their active homing systems, and jammers responded with white noise in an effort to blind them while fire control systems locked on the small, weaving targets.

The first, largely passive, defenses of a starship. ECM to screw up the enemy missiles sensors and telemetry, and decoys to sucker them off. Fearless' decoys are are impeller drives tractored by the ship but outside the wedge and mimicking it's wedge strength. They're also smaller than the SD missiles from before, but have a lot of endurance compared to missiles. Then again, they have like 1% the accel, like a ship would.

Not quite. The decoys are inside the wedge, and driveless (as the text says). They mimick the ECM signature of the ship, and are another layer of the "where exactly inside the wedge is the ship, and where exactly is it heading?" game.

Ten more minutes before she could return fire with any realistic hope of a hit, and her forward magazines held less than sixty missiles. She couldn't waste them hoping for a lucky hit as Sirius was doing, and she cursed Lady Sonja Hemphill with cold and silent venom. If Hemphill hadn't butchered her armament, she might have turned long enough to open her broadside and pump a full seven-missile salvo back at Sirius, just to test the limits of her point defense.

State of Fearless' post-refit magazines, with just 60 missiles.

Just 60 in the forward chaser magazines. The broadsides presumably have more, but are even more difficult to shift than the missiles from the chaser tubes to each other.

Echo-Seven-One was just about the simplest evasion pattern Honor had practiced with Killian, little more than an erratically timed barrel roll along the same vector. It only moved them a few dozen kilometers either side of their base course each time they rolled, but there wasn't a lot else Fearless could do to evade Sirius's fire. Not unless Honor wanted to angle far enough off the base track to interpose a sidewall, and that would give away too much of her acceleration advantage over the Q-ship. Yet it wasn't quite as useless as one might have thought, for she'd included Cardones and McKeon in the same drills. Now Cardones retained control of his active defenses, but McKeon took over the passive systems and began a deliberate jingle-jangle between the flanking decoys. Fearless's rolling progress swept them in a complete circuit about the cruiser, and the exec shifted their power levels in a carefully timed pattern which gave the impression that the ship's heading was veering from side to side, as well. It wasn't, of course, but, hopefully, Sirius's tactical officer would be forced to use up missiles covering the course changes the cruiser might be making because he couldn't be certain she wasn't

The joys of having a well-drilled crew. Also, Mckeon seems to have taken over electronic warfare for the duration of this fight, later in the war they'll get a dedicated tac officer for that.

Rafael Cardones is the tac officer (well, assistant tac officer, serving as tac officer since Venizelos is still on detached duty at the Junction). McKeon is stepping in to help: Cardones handles active EW, McKeon handles the passive (decoy maneuvers). Later in the war, RMN ships get a dedicated EW officer...and can you blame them? The amount of EW and ECM gets ridiculous once you consider Keyhole, Dragon's Teeth, Dazzlers, Mistletoe, Ghostrider, Apollo...

Honor flinched as Cardones finally missed an incoming missile. It darted in to twenty-two thousand kilometers; then it vanished in a brilliant eyeblink, and she bit her lip as her worst fears were confirmed. Sirius was using laser warheads, turning each missile into a remotely targeted cluster of bomb-pumped x-ray lasers.

22,000 km detonation and laser head. These are Excaliber-type missiles, which eject rods that sort of... for lack of a better simple term, channel some of that energy into a laser beam. The end result has only the tiniest percentage of the energy of a nuke, but has scatter and reach for several thousand klicks.

Yup. Known tech, but not really within reach of current tech, and moreover, not overly useful in terrestrial conflict

In universe, the events of this book happen on the tail end of a transition from nukes to laser heads. For a while it was a raging debate, the laser heads do very little damage, but the nukes have very little chance of actually hitting. Finally point-defense just reached the point where a missile actually contacting the ship simply wasn't happening, no way, no how. So the nukes go the way of the dinosaur and, IIRC this is the last book with straight-up nukes fired in anger.

Not quite.
Spoiler

Cardones sneaks a couple contact nukes in on MNS Thunder of God during the second engagement of Second Yeltsin. He's only able to do so because the shitlord Masadan officers, who mutinied Saladin's PN officers, leave their ECM on automatic. They reason that the computer will do a better job than their incompetent asses, but the computer turns out to be cyclicly predictable, and Cardones takes advantage of that to sneak nukes past it.

Wayfarer could beat up Sirius for it's lunch money, and made a much more convincing freighter to boot. Then again, Wayfarer couldn't have matched Sirius' ability to run.

Wayfarer could ambush Sirius[/b] for its lunch money, but remember that Wayfarer only has the throw weight it does because of the cargo holds full of missile pods. Without time beforehand to roll pods, she would get owned in a missile duel by any warship, because she didn't have the internal bulkheads and compartmentalization that a purpose-built warship has. It only takes a couple of hits in its second-to-last engagement to cripple her.

Without the alpha node, Fearless couldn't reconfigure her forward impellers for Warshawski sail. If Sirius broke through into hyper-space and reached the Tellerman, she would run away from Fearless at over ten times the cruiser's maximum acceleration . . . and Honor couldn't follow her into the wave on impellers alone, anyway.

Warshawski sail in a grav wave provides a ton more acceleration than ships can normally manage. How do the inertial dampeners cope?

This was mentioned earlier. The inertial compensators dump excess inertia into the wedge, under impeller drive, but under Warshawski sail, they can dump into the grav wave, providing a near infinite sump for acceleration.

Detonation at 1500 klicks, the ranges are all over the place here. Lasers goes through 6 compartments before hitting the bridge, sensibly buried in the middle of the ship. If it wasn't clear before, the bridge chairs have racks holding the helmet so you can reach up, slam it down over your head, secure it and be done.

It makes sense for the missile's onboard fire control to delay firing as long as possible. If the PD lasers has a predictable firing cycle, it's reasonable that the fire control computer could delay if it has the brains and eyes to detect the last-fired laser bursts and time detonation for just before the next one. Closer detonation = more beams can hit the target.

Even as Honor spoke, Cardones's hands flashed across his console, reprioritizing his loading schedule. Fifteen seconds later, a fresh laser warhead went scorching out of his single remaining tube.

15 seconds is consistent with the next shot, can rearrange the firing order of missiles inside the magazine.

If I remember right, the magazines for chasers and other small-throw-weight launchers are revolver-style turrets, so being able to rearrange the firing order is a simple matter of rotating the magazine a few more slots.

In fairness, it's sort of hard to claim to be a simple freighter with a half-wrecked warship in your wake. Still, he seems to be missing out on the important part, warning the fleet to stand down.

Fearless is still gaining on her through sheer momentum. If he slows up enough, Fearless will overtake, he can blow her apart, then heave back to, charge for the hyper limit, and still get to the PN battle squadrons in time. If I remember right, he's lost no alpha nodes, so he can still set Warshawski sail.

Sirius's side flashed with the fury of a Fleet battlecruiser, and Honor had cut her maneuver just a fraction of a second too late. Fearless's belly bands came up in time to intercept the missiles, but two of the lasers got through. The sidewall bent and attenuated them, but not enough, and the cruiser lurched as they ripped deep into her hull and smashed her single, unfired missile tube and two of her energy torpedoes.

Yet she survived . . . and so did her grav lance.

Invulnerable belly band is not a perfect defense.

More like, the impeller band has to be used right to block everything. In this case, she snap-rolls a bit too late, and the light-speed beam weapons blow throw the "bottom" edge of her sidewalls before the wedge interposes.

The sensors she had left couldn't track Sirius clearly through her belly stress band, and her current vector gave the Q-ship four options: retreat and break off the engagement, roll up on her own side relative to Fearless and shoot "down" through the starboard sidewall as she overflew the cruiser, cross her bow, or cross her stern. She might do any of them, but Honor was betting her ship—and her life—that Coglin would cross her bows. It was the classic maneuver, the one any naval officer instinctively sought—and he knew her forward armament had been destroyed.

But if he was going to do that, then he ought to be coming into position . . . just . . . about . . . now!

Can't see out through belly band with sensors.

Key note: as mentioned elsewhere, a ship can see out through its own bands by interpolated/descrambling data from the sensors. Weber makes explicit here that she can't see through her own bands with the sensors she has left.

She slammed the helm over, wrenching her ship still further round to port and rolling to swing the broadside she'd denied Sirius back towards her with blinding speed.

Lieutenant Commander Jamal blinked. It was only for an instant, only the briefest hesitation. There was no logical reason for Fearless to suddenly swing back, and for no more than a heartbeat, he couldn't quite believe she had.

And in that heartbeat, Rafael Cardones targeted his grav lance and fired.

Sirius staggered. Captain Coglin jerked upright in his chair, his eyes wide, face shocked in disbelief as his sidewall went down, and then Fearless's four surviving energy torpedo launchers went to rapid, continuous fire.

The armed merchant raider Sirius disappeared forever in a devastating boil of light and fury.

Sucker!

OK, there's really no way Coglin could have predicted that, but it's still a sweet moment in the book.[/quote]

But triumph at such cost. She bit her lip again, feeling the pain. One hundred and seven of her crew, more than a third of those aboard at the start of that terrible pursuit and slaughter, had died. Another fifty-eight were wounded, though the medics and base hospital teams would probably return most of them to duty in the next few months.

The cost in blood and pain had been terrible enough, but that had been fifty-nine percent of her total crew, even before detachments, including Dominica Santos and two of her three commissioned assistant engineers. She'd had barely a hundred and twenty uninjured people left for her repair parties, and Fearless had been a shambles. Her forward impeller nodes had failed completely within seconds of Sirius's destruction, and this time there had been no way to repair them. Worse, her after impeller ring had gone for over forty-five minutes, as well—three-quarters of an hour in which she had coasted another ninety-four million kilometers outward while damage reports flooded in to her airless bridge.

Ok, I'm glad they didn't just coast into deep space on their momentum and die, but how is a third the crew aboard, with several detached duty stations, the same as almost 60% of the crew before you started splitting them up?

107 was dead, and is over 30% of the crew aboard during the pursuit. Say it's ~40%. 58 more casualties would then be another ~25% of the crew during pursuit, which can sort of add up to 59% of total, assuming she isn't counting the marine detachment as part of the RMN crew (makes a certain amount of sense, they aren't naval crew). That means the only detached crew are the customs officers and crew at the Junction and in Medusa orbit, and given that Harkness is aboard (he's in some of the damage control/missile movement sequences), they probably pulled some of the Medusa orbit crew back aboard for the battle.

Honor's wounded ship had taken four more hours just to decelerate to rest relative to Basilisk, but her people had used the time well. McKeon and Rierson had continued their repair activities, bringing more and more of the internal control systems back on line, and Lieutenant Montoya (and thank God she'd gotten rid of Suchon!) and his medical parties had labored beyond collapse, dragging the wounded out and laboring over their broken bodies in sickbay. Too many of Montoya's patients had slipped away from him, far more than he would ever find it easy to live with, but it was thanks to him that people like Samuel Webster and Sally MacBride had lived.

And then there had been the long voyage home. The long, slow voyage that had seemed to crawl, for Fearless's communications had been out. There was no way to tell Dame Estelle or the Admiralty what had happened, who had won, or the price her people had paid. Not until Fearless limped brokenly back into Medusa orbit thirteen hours after she'd left it and a white-faced Scotty Tremaine brought his pinnace alongside her air-bleeding wreck.

Ok, so one more brief mention of Suchon. 4 hours to decelerate, suggesting the brakes are a lot slower than the gas for Honorverse ships, which the series seems to bear out. Then again, with this in isolation it'd make more sense to say that;s how badly they were damaged.

The brakes ARE the gas. It took that long to decelerate because they lost an asston of impeller nodes.

Two months during which the entire Home Fleet, summoned by her desperate Case Zulu, had conducted "unscheduled war games" in Basilisk—and greeted the three Havenite battle squadrons who'd arrived on a "routine visit" six days after Captain Papadapolous's Marines and Barney Isvarian's NPA had annihilated the rifle-armed Medusan nomads.

Honor's grief for her own dead would never fade entirely, yet it had been worth every moment of heartbreaking labor, every instant of self-doubt and determination, to witness that. To hear the hidden consternation in the Havenite admiral's voice as he acknowledged Admiral D'Orville's courteous welcome. To watch the faces of the Havenite officers as they endured the remorseless barrage of courtesy visits D'Orville had arranged to make them comfortable—and to drive home the warning that Basilisk was Manticoran territory and would remain so—before they were finally allowed to depart once more with their tails figuratively between their legs.

Resolution to the invasion, 3 Peep battle squadrons to secure the Junction. I wonder if these are anything like the BC squadron Honor was part of in the 3rd book? Just in the sense of being 8 BCs and screening elements.

Battle squadrons, as Weber uses the term, are squadrons of the wall of battle: dreadnoughts or superdreadnoughts. Even battleships (of which the PN has an absurd number) are specifically called out as not big enough to endure a wall battle with DNs or SDs.

And then, at last, there had been the voyage home, accompanied by an honor guard of an entire superdreadnought battle squadron while the Manticoran anthem played over every Navy transmitter in the system. Honor had thought her heart would burst when D'Orville's stupendous King Roger flashed her running lights in the formal salute to a fleet flagship as Fearless entered the terminus to transit home, yet under her pride and bittersweet joy had been a fear she dared not admit.

Very cool. Not sure it's actually appropriate for a flagship to do for a non-flagship, but it's no weirder than an SD squadron honor guard for a light cruiser.

It's not "appropriate" in terms of "regs demand/allow this or that", it's like an admiral giving a lieutenant a salute instead of vice versa. Sign of great respect.

Funnily enough, in later books and short stories, the Silesian anti-piracy patrol is looked at as a fine thing for a peacetime navy, letting the crews see a bit of action.

True, but this isn't a peacetime navy, this is a navy on a war footing, ready for conflict to break out at any moment. A captain with any hope of advancement wants to be out where the front lines will be, not shepherding freighters. Note that while many of her crew are green when Honor gets sent to Silesia, the assignment is considered, for her (a decorated combat veteran), a personal and professional insult.

Honor's report to the Weapons Development Board is something of a noodle incident, it's mentioned a couple times in the next few books, but never shown. When it is mentioned it's always in the context of "tactless Harrington sure made a lot of enemies that time at the Weapons Development Board." Or oblique references to publicly humiliating Admiral Hemphill. On the other hand, at least one person (Mark Sarnow, if you need a name) seems to think she was never less than polite and professional, and it's hardly her fault if her conclusions did not match some members of the board's.

Mark Sarnow says he was never less than polite and professional...while they served together. That's not the same as never less than polite and professional ever.

The last ditch defense, laser point defense weapons. In the (now gone) appendix to this book, it was said that a generation or two ago, ships had autocannon in the same role.

The equivalent of a very large pulser would probably be able to shoot down incoming missiles a few kilometers from the ship by putting a literal wall of flak/shrapnel/darts in its path. But given standoff distances of hundreds of kilometers, let alone thousands, the sheer volume that has to be saturated to defend against an attacking missile is so big that gunfire can't possibly do the job.

The best I've ever been able to figure out that would work in this context is guided flak rounds- in effect, you use a gun to supply initial velocity to a small guided missile which homes in on the targets path and blows up in its face.

Autocannon were only ever effective against contact nukes (some of the Grayson and Masadan ships in 1st Yeltsin and Blackbird have them; of note, the most recent Grayson/Masadan war before the one which takes place in The Honor of the Queen is fought with chem-burning rockets, not impeller wedge missiles). Closing velocity probably has a lot to do with why. Even a wing-shot against a missile closing at typical terminal velocity is going to knock it off course enough to miss.

Once wedge-driven missiles, especially, then standoff nukes, and finally bomb-pumped laser heads, became the first-order weapons of choice, autocannon were put aside like the obsolete option they had become.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I can't remember, did we ever see another sentient nonhuman alien race in the Honorverse besides the Medusans and the Treecats? It seems like a 'humans only' sort of place, but then why isn't a bigger deal made about the Medusans?

[Terralthra]

Others noted as sentient or semi-sentient include Alphanes, Amphor, Barthoni, Gilgamesh River Devils, and Grendel. Dolphins, too, were named as being sentient.

[Ahriman238]

AC on the bridge, nice to see someone thinking about cooling in space. Not very hard, clearly, but thinking about it all the same.

Honorverse definitely has magic radiators. Also, note that keeping a space like this air-conditioned to cold temperatures is a common response; it helps keep people alert and their metabolism active.

I didn't know that. Thanks Simon!

It's worth noting that doing this would be a really GOOD way to create an even more blatant international incident than they already have- a Peep ship blowing a Manticoran cruiser out of the ether because its captain is doing her job in Manticoran space is much more of a provocation than "a Peep ship was physically present in our system."

Maybe. She doesn't call and tell him to stop for something like half an hour, so they might be out of sensor range of the planet already.

It occurs to me that at a time like this, it would be very useful for Honorverse ships to carry a message drone, comparable to a recon drone but more intended to just physically fly from one place to another and send a message at close range. Or to act as a 'message in a bottle' for another starship to check out later.

Then again, Fearless only has so much space for drones, and if it did have such a message drone, Honor would probably have repurposed it to make it part of the sensor net back at the start of the book.

I was thinking something much the same, except I was thinking more like a relay sat they could drop and laser once it was out of jamming range.

Ranges were not adjusted, the maximum standoff range has always been 25000 km. Laser cluster ranges are or should be at least broadly comparable to the range of main battery beam weapons- on the one hand they're smaller, but this matters less than you might think for a laser beam, and the point defense lasers are shooting at MUCH softer targets.

However, at ranges of a light-second or more, I'd expect point defense lasers to flat out miss almost all the time. Because an Honorverse missile can easily sidestep far enough in one second that a tightly collimated laser beam fired at where it was two seconds ago will miss it entirely.

Hell, if it weren't for the generally slow-ass nature of impeller drive craft making turns, I'd bet on the missiles to be able to keep making such evasive maneuvers well into attack range of their target.

Okay, chalk it up to a bad memory on my part.

Wayfarer could beat up Sirius for it's lunch money, and made a much more convincing freighter to boot. Then again, Wayfarer couldn't have matched Sirius' ability to run.

Actually this is questionable. Wayfarer has much heavier armament, but is so much more vulnerable that she might be destroyed very easily. In a missile duel, Wayfarer's pod armament would let her get off a salvo powerful enough to totally destroy Sirius... but Sirius, firing broadside-on would in turn be able to launch several dozen missiles before being killed, and some of those could cause terrible damage.

Obviously in an ambush scenario, because Wyafarer didn;t have military drives, armor of compartmentilization. Just enough firepower to make an SD captain crap himself, and being a mini LAC carrier.

Warshawski sail in a grav wave provides a ton more acceleration than ships can normally manage. How do the inertial dampeners cope?

As you quoted earlier, the grav wave gives the inertial compensator a much stronger "sump" than a ship's own impeller wedge ever could.

You're right, file that one under "Ahriman's an idiot sometimes."

Death by impalement while in a skinsuit.

The skinsuit does not keep out "flying alloy spears" of fragments spalling from the ship's own walls. This is a much nastier problem than ordinary bullets, come to think of it.

It really doesn't, tons of people die that way. Doesn't help the ship's flying apart in killing splinters is another Napoleon Wars relic.

Apparently these are the 4 meter/13 foot wide lasers. I guess if they're blowing 4 meter holes through the ship, there's a lot of reason to be unhappy.

Exact diameter of a beam is a bit... negotiable; most realistic ways of doing this will create an Airy disc distribution of energy density. Also, the transfer of energy to a single point on the hull of the ship can cause it to vaporize explosively, blowing material out of the way that was never in the direct path of the beam.

Thanks again, Simon! I really do learn the most interesting things when I do these threads.

Ejection of fusion two. Note that the ejection doesn't immediately solve everything, there's a delay after jettisoning the hull plate, and there's still a large fusion explosion in close proximity to the ship, doing crippling damage.

True. But better than having a kiloton-range event happen inside the ship's armor belt.

True, but it's not an immediate 100% effective solution. Which just tickled my sensibilities as a contrast to Trek.

Well, one CAN do so, but not when one's sensor arrays have been shot to rags and the computers have been shaken, rattled, and rolled by the shock waves from multiple nuclear explosions and the ship getting blasted with lasers.

I stand corrected.

[Mr Bean]

Death by impalement while in a skinsuit.

The skinsuit does not keep out "flying alloy spears" of fragments spalling from the ship's own walls. This is a much nastier problem than ordinary bullets, come to think of it.

It really doesn't, tons of people die that way. Doesn't help the ship's flying apart in killing splinters is another Napoleon Wars relic.

That's and odd statement since the first time this was known was four hundred years (Or more if you count the Mongols) before Napoleon. And it's the main way people die today in ship to ship engagements aside from our old friend smoke inhalation. Metal hulls when struck produce lots of very nasty very high speed fragments that turn people into hamburger. But this is well known as even today a normal 500 pound warhead can produce chunks of metal that can piece through three people body armor or no and still have enough energy to go 1/3rd of the way through another wall.

Bullets are easy to stomp compared to two inches of what used to be hand railing propelled at a high speeds from an explosion. One of the stories I heard out of the Cole bombing was just such a chunk of debris from just such a source who was on the USS Hawes at the time and talked with one of the people who did clean up after. The explosion tossed said chunk through an undesign and a 2nd Class before hitting into the wall and burying itself there.

[Thanas]

It really doesn't, tons of people die that way. Doesn't help the ship's flying apart in killing splinters is another Napoleon Wars relic.

That's and odd statement since the first time this was known was four hundred years (Or more if you count the Mongols) before Napoleon.

Fact is, as soon as anything that hurled stones at high speed against wood was invented, you'd get terrible splinters in sea battles. We know of obvious splinter wounds even in antiquity.

[Ahriman238]

That's and odd statement since the first time this was known was four hundred years (Or more if you count the Mongols) before Napoleon. And it's the main way people die today in ship to ship engagements aside from our old friend smoke inhalation. Metal hulls when struck produce lots of very nasty very high speed fragments that turn people into hamburger. But this is well known as even today a normal 500 pound warhead can produce chunks of metal that can piece through three people body armor or no and still have enough energy to go 1/3rd of the way through another wall.

Bullets are easy to stomp compared to two inches of what used to be hand railing propelled at a high speeds from an explosion. One of the stories I heard out of the Cole bombing was just such a chunk of debris from just such a source who was on the USS Hawes at the time and talked with one of the people who did clean up after. The explosion tossed said chunk through an undesign and a 2nd Class before hitting into the wall and burying itself there.

OK, I do know this about wooden ships I meant "another carry over from the Naploenic Wars, which, you know, so much of the series (espeiclaly early on) is based on."

I didn't know that about modern ships getting fragmented. If you'd asked me to list the leading cause of death in modern warships in battle I'd likely have said explosion, smoke, then fire.

[Mr Bean]

OK, I do know this about wooden ships I meant "another carry over from the Naploenic Wars, which, you know, so much of the series (espeiclaly early on) is based on."

I didn't know that about modern ships getting fragmented. If you'd asked me to list the leading cause of death in modern warships in battle I'd likely have said explosion, smoke, then fire.

Smoke inhalation is one of the big killers far more so than fire. Also depending on the hit drowning is another big one since ships that sink fast tend to kill their entire crews. Blood loss is another big one since explosions tend to cause lots of spalling which tends to mean lots of nasty wounds that bleed out quickly. Dieing in a fire or the explosion itself is pretty rare in ships because firefighting capacity is so good for one, and explosive weaponry is so focused in modern times.

In the honorverse you can't drown in space and smoke inhalation is very unlikely since in any fire situation you simply vent the oxygen. Which leaves the main ways to die are from decompression, lack of oxygen and spalling generated from laser hits with the odd death from radiation or explosion when a fusion bottle lets go or a laser directly hit's someone.

[Ahriman238]

Not quite. The decoys are inside the wedge, and driveless (as the text says). They mimick the ECM signature of the ship, and are another layer of the "where exactly inside the wedge is the ship, and where exactly is it heading?" game.

Driveless I'll accept since it's in the text. Maybe it's just at this point since they had decoys imitate a fleet from light-minutes out in the third book.

How is it inside the wedge, if they kicked it out through the sidewall? And if it is outside, shouldn't it drag like a pod does?

Just 60 in the forward chaser magazines. The broadsides presumably have more, but are even more difficult to shift than the missiles from the chaser tubes to each other.

Makes sense.

The joys of having a well-drilled crew. Also, Mckeon seems to have taken over electronic warfare for the duration of this fight, later in the war they'll get a dedicated tac officer for that.

Rafael Cardones is the tac officer (well, assistant tac officer, serving as tac officer since Venizelos is still on detached duty at the Junction). McKeon is stepping in to help: Cardones handles active EW, McKeon handles the passive (decoy maneuvers). Later in the war, RMN ships get a dedicated EW officer...and can you blame them? The amount of EW and ECM gets ridiculous once you consider Keyhole, Dragon's Teeth, Dazzlers, Mistletoe, Ghostrider, Apollo...

That's what I meant, later they get a dedicated EW officer.

22,000 km detonation and laser head. These are Excaliber-type missiles, which eject rods that sort of... for lack of a better simple term, channel some of that energy into a laser beam. The end result has only the tiniest percentage of the energy of a nuke, but has scatter and reach for several thousand klicks.

Yup. Known tech, but not really within reach of current tech, and moreover, not overly useful in terrestrial conflict

Now, in Shadow of Saganami when they bring up the conventions against ship-deployed WMDs against planets, Weber says a laser head would be like "the finger of god." I freely admit I have no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean. My best guess back then was that the laser might bore deep enough into the planet to hit magma.

Not quite.
Spoiler

Cardones sneaks a couple contact nukes in on MNS Thunder of God during the second engagement of Second Yeltsin. He's only able to do so because the shitlord Masadan officers, who mutinied Saladin's PN officers, leave their ECM on automatic. They reason that the computer will do a better job than their incompetent asses, but the computer turns out to be cyclicly predictable, and Cardones takes advantage of that to sneak nukes past it.

Ah. OK then, I should get there in the not so distant future.

Detonation at 1500 klicks, the ranges are all over the place here. Lasers goes through 6 compartments before hitting the bridge, sensibly buried in the middle of the ship. If it wasn't clear before, the bridge chairs have racks holding the helmet so you can reach up, slam it down over your head, secure it and be done.

It makes sense for the missile's onboard fire control to delay firing as long as possible. If the PD lasers has a predictable firing cycle, it's reasonable that the fire control computer could delay if it has the brains and eyes to detect the last-fired laser bursts and time detonation for just before the next one. Closer detonation = more beams can hit the target.

That actually makes a great deal of sense. And my mind leaps immediately to finding an exploit, like secondary lasers clusters that engage if the missiles get inside their normal detonaiton range. Then again, if you're going to install extra lasers clusters, it probably makes more sense to have them engage normally.

If I remember right, the magazines for chasers and other small-throw-weight launchers are revolver-style turrets, so being able to rearrange the firing order is a simple matter of rotating the magazine a few more slots.

It's possible. The only missile launchers I remember being explicitly revolver style are for the carrier based (so I guess, what 4th Generation?) Shrike and Ferret LACS.

More like, the impeller band has to be used right to block everything. In this case, she snap-rolls a bit too late, and the light-speed beam weapons blow throw the "bottom" edge of her sidewalls before the wedge interposes.

Just so, perhaps I should have been more specific.

Ok, I'm glad they didn't just coast into deep space on their momentum and die, but how is a third the crew aboard, with several detached duty stations, the same as almost 60% of the crew before you started splitting them up?

107 was dead, and is over 30% of the crew aboard during the pursuit. Say it's ~40%. 58 more casualties would then be another ~25% of the crew during pursuit, which can sort of add up to 59% of total, assuming she isn't counting the marine detachment as part of the RMN crew (makes a certain amount of sense, they aren't naval crew). That means the only detached crew are the customs officers and crew at the Junction and in Medusa orbit, and given that Harkness is aboard (he's in some of the damage control/missile movement sequences), they probably pulled some of the Medusa orbit crew back aboard for the battle.

Huh. Didn't occur to me to count the wounded for some reason. They did pull back half the customs patrols to free up the pinnaces for the Marines.

The brakes ARE the gas. It took that long to decelerate because they lost an asston of impeller nodes.

I know. I sort of vaguely recall Honorverse ships being slower to brake than to accelerate, but I'm already taking quite a beating for going by old memories of the series. As we both noted, in this case this is almost certainly due to battle damage.

Very cool. Not sure it's actually appropriate for a flagship to do for a non-flagship, but it's no weirder than an SD squadron honor guard for a light cruiser.

It's not "appropriate" in terms of "regs demand/allow this or that", it's like an admiral giving a lieutenant a salute instead of vice versa. Sign of great respect.

Pretty much my exact thoughts.

Mark Sarnow says he was never less than polite and professional...while they served together. That's not the same as never less than polite and professional ever.

Really, Terralthra? You want to nitpick his precise phrasing? Fine. He said, and I quote:

"As for her appearance before the WDB, she addressed herself solely to the issues the Board had invited her there to discuss, and did so in a rational, respectful fashion. If the conclusions of the Board embarrassed it's chairwoman, That certainly wasn't her fault."

Which strikes me as a case for her having been both polite and professional about the whole thing.

Autocannon were only ever effective against contact nukes (some of the Grayson and Masadan ships in 1st Yeltsin and Blackbird have them; of note, the most recent Grayson/Masadan war before the one which takes place in The Honor of the Queen is fought with chem-burning rockets, not impeller wedge missiles). Closing velocity probably has a lot to do with why. Even a wing-shot against a missile closing at typical terminal velocity is going to knock it off course enough to miss.

Once wedge-driven missiles, especially, then standoff nukes, and finally bomb-pumped laser heads, became the first-order weapons of choice, autocannon were put aside like the obsolete option they had become.

That's pretty much exactly what it said, down to even a slight hit anihilating a missile traveling at the sort of velocities missiles do.

[StarSword]

Turns out our copy is the '93 printing with the appendix, though it's mostly about time systems.

[Batman]

If memory serves, the new LACs used revolver style launchers precisely because they had no magazine capacity worth mentioning nor any hope of surviving any engagement with real warships so it was essential for them to get all of their missiles out as quickly as possible. Can't recall any mention of revolver launchers on full-up starships.

[Xon]

Ejection of fusion two. Note that the ejection doesn't immediately solve everything, there's a delay after jettisoning the hull plate, and there's still a large fusion explosion in close proximity to the ship, doing crippling damage.

Honorverse ships have ludicrously energetic fusion reactors. Later on, one ship's reactor stackpoles so baddly it inflicts instantly lethal levels of x-rays to the crew of a ship 600km away. And this is with that ship being physically shielded by another ship.

I know Connor didn't particularly like that event because it was too energetic and instead quibbled about the language describing the one ship being sandblasted by atoms of the ship with the exploding reactor.

[Irbis]

In universe, the events of this book happen on the tail end of a transition from nukes to laser heads. For a while it was a raging debate, the laser heads do very little damage, but the nukes have very little chance of actually hitting. Finally point-defense just reached the point where a missile actually contacting the ship simply wasn't happening, no way, no how. So the nukes go the way of the dinosaur and, IIRC this is the last book with straight-up nukes fired in anger.

Not quite.
Spoiler

Cardones sneaks a couple contact nukes in on MNS Thunder of God during the second engagement of Second Yeltsin. He's only able to do so because the shitlord Masadan officers, who mutinied Saladin's PN officers, leave their ECM on automatic. They reason that the computer will do a better job than their incompetent asses, but the computer turns out to be cyclicly predictable, and Cardones takes advantage of that to sneak nukes past it.

One thing that bugs me. Thunder of God, an old BC, takes 4 nukes to the side, and isn't destroyed. Half a dozen books later, a whole fleet of largest and most advanced Superdreadnoughts ever built takes a single nuke hit per ship, and all are instantly vaporized. And that with cold reactors, so you can't even use excuse reactor exploded or something. Consistency? What's that?

Honor's report to the Weapons Development Board is something of a noodle incident, it's mentioned a couple times in the next few books, but never shown. When it is mentioned it's always in the context of "tactless Harrington sure made a lot of enemies that time at the Weapons Development Board." Or oblique references to publicly humiliating Admiral Hemphill. On the other hand, at least one person (Mark Sarnow, if you need a name) seems to think she was never less than polite and professional, and it's hardly her fault if her conclusions did not match some members of the board's.

You know, it's funny how much Honor and her clique hates on Hemphill's work when she is about 95% reason behind HH every success - just because Hemphill happens to be on wrong political side. Even in first book alone, had Harrington did not have broadside capable of destroying Q-Ship, she would be really dead before series even started

[StarSword]

One thing that bugs me. Thunder of God, an old BC, takes 4 nukes to the side, and isn't destroyed. Half a dozen books later, a whole fleet of largest and most advanced Superdreadnoughts ever built takes a single nuke hit per ship, and all are instantly vaporized. And that with cold reactors, so you can't even use excuse reactor exploded or something. Consistency? What's that?

I don't remember that. Which book are you thinking of?

[Irbis]

I don't remember that. Which book are you thinking of?

Spoiler

War of Honor, end of book when SKM commander tries to deny Grendelsbane ships technology to Haven.

[StarSword]

Ok, different one than I was thinking of, then; never got that far in the series. I thought you might have been misremembering Second Medusa.

On that, let no one say that David Weber isn't willing to sacrifice consistency for Rule of Drama.

[eyl]

I don't remember that. Which book are you thinking of?

Spoiler

War of Honor, end of book when SKM commander tries to deny Grendelsbane ships technology to Haven.

I think those were direct hits, while the hits on Thunder of God were proximity explosions (IIRC a "contact hit" in the Honerverse means the nuke contacted the sidewall, not the hull.

[Dahak]

22,000 km detonation and laser head. These are Excaliber-type missiles, which eject rods that sort of... for lack of a better simple term, channel some of that energy into a laser beam. The end result has only the tiniest percentage of the energy of a nuke, but has scatter and reach for several thousand klicks.

In universe, the events of this book happen on the tail end of a transition from nukes to laser heads. For a while it was a raging debate, the laser heads do very little damage, but the nukes have very little chance of actually hitting. Finally point-defense just reached the point where a missile actually contacting the ship simply wasn't happening, no way, no how. So the nukes go the way of the dinosaur and, IIRC this is the last book with straight-up nukes fired in anger.

Thanks to gravitic juju, most of the nuke explosion is focused into the lasing rods (and not just some small part of a spherical explosion), thus harnessing most of the nuke. This gravitic sorcery is what actually made them a viable alternative to nukes.

[Ahriman238]

I can't remember, did we ever see another sentient nonhuman alien race in the Honorverse besides the Medusans and the Treecats? It seems like a 'humans only' sort of place, but then why isn't a bigger deal made about the Medusans?

There's about half a dozen sentient or near sentient alien species, none of them remotely close to spaceflight capability. One short story, however, mentions ruins of a distinct interstellar civilization, the Alphane, of great interest to achaeologists. At present, there are no known, active, interstellar aliens.

Turns out our copy is the '93 printing with the appendix, though it's mostly about time systems.

Ah. All of mine are 2006 or later.

[Terralthra]

I don't remember that. Which book are you thinking of?

Spoiler

War of Honor, end of book when SKM commander tries to deny Grendelsbane ships technology to Haven.

If I recall correctly, the fleet at Grendelsbane is unfinished. With no sidewalls, rad shielding, or even a completed armor matrix, the nukes could detonate exactly where they'd do the most damage, as opposed to where they had the luck to be able to strike.

I don't remember why the admiral didn't set them to scuttle, though. RMN ships all have scuttling charges.

[Ahriman238]

Okay, propably superfluous since everyone reading seems to be at least as familiar with the series as I am, but after covering the first book I'd wanted to take a bit and explain the greater context these events play out in, examine the universe and the reigning political bodies.


The Star Kingdom of Manticore, (or Manties) as previosuly mentioned, is effectively Space England, complete with a Space Scotland (Gryphon) and a Space Ireland (Sphinx) in the same system. They have the same system of government, and many of the same traditions. At the begining of the series, Manticore is just a hair more technologically advanced than just about anyone. By this point, they're so far ahead, most people dismiss stories of their capabilities as fairy tales.

The People's Republic of Haven (Peeps, even after they stop being the People's Reublic) are the main antagonists for most of the series. Like we discussed, they're violently expansionist to prop up their socialist economy. They control about a hundred worlds at the start of the series. Their tech is a bit crappy, but one thing I love about this series is if they see a trick, they'll find a brute-force way to duplicate or improve on it.

The Solarian League (Sollies) is the enemy for the last couple of books. Counting their many protectorates and client states, they make up about 66% of all humanity, or about a thousand planets. Their government is centered on Old Earth, in the city of Chicago. The creaters of the League greatly feared a 'tyranny of the legislature' so they hobbled it by ensuring the president would be a figurehead and the legislative body could only ever do anything by unanimous vote. With over a thousand representatives. Really. So the crushing and elaborate beauracracy is the greatest power with a ton of little fiefs (much like the Imperium of Man) and all policy decisions are made by 4 or 5 Permanent Undersecretaries in smoke-filled back rooms. The Sollies are the gold standard which other military technologies are measured against at the start of the series, with the Manties a bit ahead and the Peeps far behind. Most of the Peeps' best hardware throughout the series is brought from the League.

The Mesans (Bastards) are the secret puppetmasters behind every bad thing that has ever happened in the series. They're actually remnants of a group of genetically enhanced humans who tried to take over the world, Khan Noonien Singh style. They're rebulit in secret and have made a lot of money peddling genetically-tailored slaves, funding their own rabid breakthroughs in technology. All governments have forbidden the slave trade, but only Manticore and Haven bother to enforce it, hence pushing the two to war with each other.

The Silesian Confederacy (Sillies) are an oddity in a Weber book, looking as much a parody of American Republican politics as Haven is Democrat. The Sillies are so hung up on states rights, the Confederate government is effectively powerless, and half a dozen large swathes of the place have de facto seceded, while most every local authority is ludicriously corrupt or crooked. A lot of trade goes through the Confederacy, which has voracious markets for eveything but is filled with pirates, including many supported by local government. It's also a bone of contention between the Manties and the Andies.

The Andermani Empire (Andies) is one of the most interesting states, to me anyways. It was originally a chinese seed colony that went bad, and faced starvation before being rescued by mercenary hero Gustav Anderman, a flamboyant figure who was firmly convinced he was the reincarnation of Fredick the Great. They made Anderman and his heirs Emperors, and have ever since had this blend of Chinese and German language and culture. That and an intelligence service that seems omniscient at times.

And yeah, those are the high notes. I didn't include Grayson or Erewhon yet, since they'll be Alliance soon and for most of the series and deserve more detail when I get to them.

[Batman]

I don't remember that. Which book are you thinking of?

Spoiler

War of Honor, end of book when SKM commander tries to deny Grendelsbane ships technology to Haven.

If I recall correctly, the fleet at Grendelsbane is unfinished. With no sidewalls, rad shielding, or even a completed armor matrix, the nukes could detonate exactly where they'd do the most damage, as opposed to where they had the luck to be able to strike.
I don't remember why the admiral didn't set them to scuttle, though. RMN ships all have scuttling charges.

Completed ships have scuttling charges. The ones at Grendelsbane were explicitly called half-finished.
And I don't know where Irbis gets 'one nuke per ship' from. There's no mention of exactly how many warheads were used in those ships' destruction that I can recall.

[Mr Bean]

And yeah, those are the high notes. I didn't include Grayson or Erewhon yet, since they'll be Alliance soon and for most of the series and deserve more detail when I get to them.

Don't forget the Beowulf conspiracy, the Anti-Mesan folks who wish nothing but ill to genetic slavery. It's a quiet thing that's not played it's card yet. But every book past book six mentions them.

[Ahriman238]

And yeah, those are the high notes. I didn't include Grayson or Erewhon yet, since they'll be Alliance soon and for most of the series and deserve more detail when I get to them.

Don't forget the Beowulf conspiracy, the Anti-Mesan folks who wish nothing but ill to genetic slavery. It's a quiet thing that's not played it's card yet. But every book past book six mentions them.

...

I don't remember them. At all. Beyond the odd mention of Beowulf, largely as the place with all the genetics knowledge where Honor's mom came from, that is. And, in later books, as pillars of bioethics and a tough place to imigrate to.

And you say they've been mentioned in every book following Flag in Exile?