Terralthra wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:On the other hand, it could still be orbiting some nondescript red-orange dwarf star, accessed through a route providing plausible deniability like Bean describes.
No, it couldn't. I already posted this link, but I guess no one read it...
David Weber wrote:("Bolthole," by the way, is simply the code name assigned to
a system which already had a fair population -- well up in the hundreds of millions -- before the yard was moved in.
That is not mutually exclusive with my statement.
Let there be a rather boring and irrelevant planet, orbiting a "nondescript red-orange dwarf star." One whose sole claim to fame is that it is somewhere in the vicinity of the shortest grav wave route between Haven and a major Havenite base- they have a lot of major bases, after all. There are plenty of worlds like that- Grayson was a rather boring and nondescript place until it
just happened to be on the least-time approach route from Manticore to Haven. It didn't even profit meaningfully from that, because no one bothered to pass near Grayson when they could use the Trevor's Star Terminus to get to Haven (or Manticore).
For historical reasons, let us call this system "Bennett," because that's what Doc Smith called it when
he thought of Bolthole first.
Bennett is a perfect place to put Bolthole, but it is also a nondescript and unimportant place, which is exactly the point.
Vehrec wrote:Ugh, you guys are missing my point about the League. It doesn't make sense, and there is no reason for it to EVER FORM. How do you get the benefits of 10,000 dreads, when they don't exist? How can it form a bureaucracy when it's legislative system is so pants-on-head retarded that no budget could ever be passed? The Qing dynasty makes sense in comparison, there is a historical precedent, the conquest of the Manchu, the middle kingdom, the fact that the Chinese needed nothing from the outside world. All that leads to the opium wars, and it had the Taiping rebellion and Muslim uprisings, and it still rallied and recovered from that. Haven't you heard of the Self Strengthening Movement?
Yes. This is
just happening in the modern Solarian League. The first hint of the Self Strengthening movement
And I'm not envisioning a single missile circling around to get another hit- that's impossible, and I accept that. The salvos are huge. They must be dense if they arrive all at once. And a sufficiently large wedge could wipe out multiple missiles at once. If they are spread out temporally, well that just allows us to bounce from target cluster to target cluster with our survivable super-missile. But instead I'm betting that we can turn side on and catch two or three missiles on the side of each countermissle wedge. Of course, that's all part of a comprehensive defense in depth that has successive waves of ablative drones, battle-riders, and unmanned anti-missile platforms guarding the actual strike platforms.
It's probably
possible to catch multiple missiles with one big honking wedge as a giant "broom" sweeping through the missile salvo. But when you actually sit down and do the math, I suspect you'll find that doing so isn't worth doubling or tripling the size of your missile, and thus reducing the number you can fire.
For example, a typical non-stacked pod combatant salvo between two SD(P) squadrons might have... let's say something close to 500 missiles from six to eight SD(P)s. Stacking increases that to as much as a few thousand- and that's part of the threat environment.
So two thousand missiles are headed your way. How big an area of sky are they spread out in? The only restriction on where they can fly is that they must be in attack range of your formation when they get to closest approach. So the set of all practical trajectories would look sort of like a pointy-ended cigar- they must START at the enemy launchers, can spread out in midcourse, but have to converge into attack range when they get close. For MDM launch ranges, which are huge relative to the standoff range of the warhead, they have to be pretty much fully converged by the time they reach countermissile range.
Now, your SD(P)s observe a separation distance of.... I'd say one thousand kilometers is plausible, much more seems unlikely. But the enemy warheads really only need to have trajectories flying within 25000 kilometers of your fleet. So draw a circle 25000 kilometers in radius, centered on the center of your fleet, lying in a plane perpendicular to the missile's line of flight. It's got to pass somewhere through that circle.
In other words, all 2000 missiles will occupy a (slightly tapered) cylinder that is fifty thousand kilometers across when they come boring in for their attack run. If all the missiles lie in the same plane, that means that there are two thousand missiles distributed among nearly two billion square kilometers of surface area.
You have one million square kilometers per missile, and wedges are no more than a few hundred kilometers across... yeah. Sure, sometimes by sheer chance there might be two or three missiles clumped tightly enough that it's worth throwing one huge wedge to blot them all out. But it won't happen often enough to count on.
If the salvo density increases to, say,
fifty thousand missiles, you will start to see more clumping, but even then it's kind of marginal.
Slybrarian wrote:Frankly, the League's political structure as described makes no sense. In particular I find it impossible to believe that these powerful, corrupt mandarins supposedly running things aren't in a position to shower money upon any defense contractor willing to bribe them a bit. If there are people who can order the invasion of Manticore without it being blocked by Beowulf, there are also people who can order Space Lockheed-Martin to build a fleet of (overly expensive, overly capable, and seemingly unnecessary at the time) Space F-35s and do research into wave motion cannons. They're not especially going to settle for obviously outdated technology while Manticore and Haven are off building, er, PAK-FAs or Gripens or whatever the equivalent is in this metaphor.
Solarian ships were totally a match for Manticoran ships at roughly one-to-one odds until about 1913 PD, when advanced LACs, Ghost Rider EW systems and the MDM were first deployed. They were more than a match for Havenite ships; Haven was actively importing Solarian technology and specialists to
improve their weapons.
A Solarian fleet might have been at a slight disadvantage in missile duels, but nowhere near bad enough to be decisive in the face of the absurd Solarian numbers- and also the fact that virtually all their capital ships are very bulky superdreadnoughts, which are just plain
bigger than a lot of the ships Manticore fielded in the First Havenite War.
So a realistic threat estimate would say "nope, nothing seriously wrong here, we are matching them in technological developments" until 1913.
In the intervening seven to nine years, several Solarian firms HAVE been actively developing new and better weapons. The government's failure to react suggests a lack of military intelligence, which we can discuss in more specific detail if you like.
And no, you can't say that the Sollies - a nationality which appears to be in some sort of quantum state, either existing or not existing depending on whether it's narrative convenient for the author - are going to ignore what's going on when the war is literally taking place a couple day's travel from Sol and the other core worlds. The moment the first SD(P) appeared, every shipyard and military firm in the League started screaming about how the League is defenseless against the neobarbs who want to rape our spouses and we need not just 2,000 centuries-old dreadnoughts but 2,000 - nay, 20,000! - brand new, deliciously expensive pod super-monitors.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
