Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[Batman]

Those LAC missiles would also not need the lasing rods and gravity pinch to shape the blast (if you want to be anal about it they'd need a magitech mechanism that enables them to have EMP effects in empty space but if you want to discuss all the ways Honorverse nukes don't behave the way real world nukes do we'll be here all year) and could thus be considerably smaller.
And given the low shipkiller storage capacity of modern age LACs I am not prepared to rule out they can store this number of shipkillers sized as Simon posited (LACs might be tiny by Honorverse standards but they still outmass most noncarrier modern day warships), and that's with real world technology. The Honorverse []is[/i] the tiniest bit more advanced than that. I'm perfectly willing to accept they can put multimegaton (possibly double figure) warheads on LAC missiles.

[VhenRa]

Also to be fair, these nukes won't resemble our nukes at all either. Actually, the ones on the Triple Ripple will. Shipkillers are pure fusion, single stage affairs IIRC. Not Fission initiated.

[Simon_Jester]

With Honorverse gravitics, a pure-fusion nuclear device wouldn't really surprise me- being able to induce star-like conditions in the inside of a spherical compression chamber wouldn't be anything all that much weirder than what Weber has already claimed for them.

[Batman]

This is the Honorverse. Fusion reactors actually manage to explode when they lose containment. Now imagine that same technology being used to make more effective a device that is actually intended to explode.

[Ahriman238]

"Because they're altering course and acceleration every time we make a helm change, Skipper," Harris told her. "Whenever our vector changes, so does theirs. They're running a constantly updated mirror course on us."

"I don't suppose they happened to inform us of their intentions and you simply neglected to tell me about it, Mecia?" Ferrero said dryly with a glance at her com officer.

"No, Ma'am," Lieutenant McKee assured her.

Tracking drill, the latest in a series of provocations, each minor on their face, like kill-stealing the pirate.

It wasn't uncommon for a warship to run sensor and tracking drills on merchantmen and even the warships of other navies. But common courtesy—and common sense, as well—mandated that one inform another warship when one intended to track and shadow her. Unless, of course, one's intentions were less than friendly . . . which was the reason that practical-sense caution suggested that one request permission ahead of time. It was the only way to be certain of avoiding misunderstandings which could lead to unpleasant consequences, particularly at times when interstellar tensions were already running high.

Why you normally tell ships when you're going to try a tracking drill. So they know what you're up to and aren't wondering why their own base is targeting them.

Ma'am, they're almost seventeen light-minutes away from us," he reminded her respectfully. "But they're making their course corrections on average within three minutes of each of our helm changes."

Ferrero stiffened, and the tac officer nodded and tapped his display.

"I've been running a passive track on their impeller wedge for the last eighty minutes, Ma'am. The longest interval so far has been six-point-seven minutes. The shortest was less than two. The data's on the chip if you want to review it."

Someone is reacting to their course changes from extreme sensor range, faster than light, or a signal from a recon platform, could reach them. Unless the Andies somehow developed FTL comm and a recon sat stealthy enough to shadow a Manty ship but that'd be silly.... right?

Impeller signatures were the only normal-space phenomenon which propagated at what was effectively faster than light speed. That wasn't exactly what really happened, of course. What really happened was that the intense gravity distortion associated with an impeller wedge created a "ripple" along the interface between the lowest alpha band of hyper-space and normal-space. It was that ripple, which was actually little more than a resonance from a hyper-space signature, which a starship's Warshawskis picked up.

But the mechanics of what happened weren't really important at the moment. What was important was the fact that impeller signatures could be detected and tracked in real-time across the effective range of shipboard sensors. Which was all well and good, except that as Harris had just reminded her, they were well beyond shipboard detection range from the Andy cruiser. Which meant that it didn't matter that gravitic sensors were effectively FTL. For Hellbarde to be reacting that quickly to Jessica Epps's heading changes, the communications links between her and her remote sensor platforms had to be FTL, as well.

Which meant the Andermani Navy had not only managed to produce its own grav-pulse communicator, but also engineered it down to a size it could fit into something as small as a recon drone.

Well, crap. Also explanation for how gravitics work in FTL.

"Don't worry, Shawn," she reassured him. "I haven't lost my mind. But Ghost Rider's mere existence isn't on the Official Secrets List anymore. Everybody knows at least a little about its capabilities, and I'm sure Andy intelligence knows more than 'a little.' I don't intend to flash the system's full capabilities, but I want to know where those remotes are, and I want to find them without letting the Andies know how long it took us to realize they were out there."

The existence of Ghost Rider and some capabilities are general knowledge, but they're as many details as they reasonably can a secret.

"I'll 'swim' them out of the tubes and program them for a strength-one wedge after, say, ten minutes. If we could cut our accel to a couple of hundred gravities about four or five minutes after launch and leave it there for a while, that should be enough to let them make up on us gradually without generating a signature powerful enough to burn through their stealth systems."

'Swimming' recon platforms out missile tubes slowly to avoid an energetic and easily detected launch. The plan to ninja their stealth platforms with out stealth platforms.

"Yes. I need to keep an overly inquisitive Andie heavy cruiser from figuring out the real reason I'm about to reduce accel. So I've decided that what we need to do is to set up a series of exercises against one or two of our own small craft, and I want you to coordinate them. I know it's short notice, but I figure you can start by running a simulated Dutchman search. By the time we complete that, you can probably have at least another couple of problems worked out for the pinnace crews. And while you're at it, come up with some sort of interception exercise that will give us an excuse to deploy a couple of tractor-tether EW drones. Think you can manage that?"

Funny question since it's mostly the pinnaces that are involved n a Dutchman search, but are they really going to do this underway? And not even try and decelerate?

There were, indeed, four of the Andy drones, placed so as to bracket Jessica Epps regardless of any course changes the Manticoran cruiser might make. They were within a few thousand kilometers of where Ferrero would have placed them herself, which only underscored how difficult it had been for Harris to nail them down. They'd started looking for them where they'd expected to find them, and despite that it had taken almost four and a half hours for the tac officer to positively confirm locations on all of them. Even then, he might not have managed it if the Andies hadn't been forced to cycle in fresh drones to replace them as they exhausted their onboard power. He'd caught one of the replacement drones on its way in, and once he had its locus precisely defined, he'd managed to find the others by working his way out from there.

Which said some remarkably ominous things about the hellacious stealth technology the Andies had built into the damned things. At least their platforms' endurance time seemed to be lower than the RMN's, but that was rather cold comfort just at the moment.

Andy stealth recon platforms, at least as good, if not better than Manticoran.

"I don't know whether it's her idea or her superiors', but this 'Captain Gortz' is obviously trying to make a statement about the Andies' technical capabilities. That being the case, I think it's time we made a statement about our capabilities, too. So at the end of your seventy-nine-minute tracking period, I want you to bring both of our tethered platforms around so that their active sensors bear on the Andie drones. And then I want you to go to maximum power. I don't just want a radar hull map of those drones, Shawn. I want to be able to read the mag combinations on their service access ports. I want their frigging serial numbers and the fingerprints of the last tech to service them. And I especially want to reduce those things' passive sensors to slag. Got it?"

Brute force EW, in this case to make a statement.

The tractor-tethered electronic warfare remotes she'd had Llewellyn deploy as part of his "exercises," were scarcely new. They'd been around for generations, and they'd undoubtedly be around for generations more, because unlike even the most capable drones, they could be powered directly from the ship which had deployed them, which gave them effectively unlimited endurance. It also allowed them to mount extremely powerful decoy, jammer, and sensor systems, since they could draw directly on their mother ships for the energy to power them. So when she used them to take out Hellbarde's platforms, she would be using "old" technology.

But by the same token she would be showing Gortz that Jessica Epps had spotted Hellbarde's spies, hopefully without revealing precisely when or how that had been accomplished. That should remind Gortz that however good Andie technology might have become, the RMN continued to have the best hardware in space. Which, Ferrero devoutly hoped, was still true.

One advantage of old tractor tethered decoys/drones, they get power beamed to them from the mothership and thus effectively limitless endurance barring damage.

[Darth Nostril]

The manbat has a point, how many times has Fusion #whatever lost containment and an SD turns into an incandescent boil of light with bugger all survivors.
Who wouldn't weaponise that if they could?

[VhenRa]

The manbat has a point, how many times has Fusion #whatever lost containment and an SD turns into an incandescent boil of light with bugger all survivors.
Who wouldn't weaponise that if they could?

Those are gravity confinement reactors, they can't compact them down to Small Craft sizes. Shuttles, fusion powered missiles, all rely on magnetic confinement fusion last I remember.

[Simon_Jester]

Funny question since it's mostly the pinnaces that are involved n a Dutchman search, but are they really going to do this underway? And not even try and decelerate?

They might move at low speed.

Even then, he might not have managed it if the Andies hadn't been forced to cycle in fresh drones to replace them as they exhausted their onboard power. He'd caught one of the replacement drones on its way in, and once he had its locus precisely defined, he'd managed to find the others by working his way out from there.

Which said some remarkably ominous things about the hellacious stealth technology the Andies had built into the damned things. At least their platforms' endurance time seemed to be lower than the RMN's, but that was rather cold comfort just at the moment.

Andy stealth recon platforms, at least as good, if not better than Manticoran.

Except that they're capacitor-powered and not fusion-powered, which is an issue.

My impression is that everyone has roughly equally good stealth technology in the series. It's sensors that are the issue; prewar Havenites had terrible sensors, and until the Solarian technical transfers were assimilated in the interwar period, they couldn't keep up with RMN counter-sensor technology.

The Andermani started out with a technical base comparable with frontline Solarian hardware, I suspect, so it was easier for them to build the sneaky hardware they want and need.

And then I want you to go to maximum power. I don't just want a radar hull map of those drones, Shawn. I want to be able to read the mag combinations on their service access ports. I want their frigging serial numbers and the fingerprints of the last tech to service them. And I especially want to reduce those things' passive sensors to slag. Got it?"

Brute force EW, in this case to make a statement.

"Fried recon drones in hollandaise sauce, coming right up!"

One advantage of old tractor tethered decoys/drones, they get power beamed to them from the mothership and thus effectively limitless endurance barring damage.

And it takes fusion powered drones to recover the limitless endurance... and even then, the drone's fusion plant probably can't power as much hardware as a microwave beam from the mothership could.

[Ahriman238]

"Fried recon drones in hollandaise sauce, coming right up!"

More "our recon drones can ninja your recon drones."

[Simon_Jester]

I could have sworn "fried recon drones" was a quote from that scene; that's what I was referencing because it amused me greatly back in the day when this book was new.

[Highlord Laan]

Somewhat off topic, but ins't that something Aegis operators can do if something well and truly pisses them off? Focus the entire phased array on a single target and effectively flash fry it?

[Simon_Jester]

Somewhat off topic, but ins't that something Aegis operators can do if something well and truly pisses them off? Focus the entire phased array on a single target and effectively flash fry it?

Probably, but if so the capability is likely classified. The only source I have for such a thing is someone who would know, but who is a known bullshitter AND a man very conscious about not actually releasing classified information.

This is the Honorverse. Fusion reactors actually manage to explode when they lose containment. Now imagine that same technology being used to make more effective a device that is actually intended to explode.

Yes- if the gravitic technology exists to contain what is essentially a megatons/second ongoing fusion reaction, then surely the technology exists to initiate fusion without benefit of a fission primer.

The only possible catch is that fusion reactors are big (~1000 tons or larger) while missile warheads are small (~10 tons or smaller). But I actually agree with you.

[Batman]

Thing is, pretty much every time a fusion reactor is mentioned to go kablooey...it's because of the 'magnetic bottle' failing (unless you want to argue the 'mag' in 'mag bottle' is an acronym for 'marginally adequate gravitics' or something to that effect.) So at least as I see it they don't use gravitics to contain the fusion reaction, they use them to initiate it, we already know their gravitics tech scales down like nobody's business (gravitics-based sidearms anyone?) so gravitics-triggered pure-fusion warheads doesn't seem unreasonable.

[Ahriman238]

"I guess I just get a little crazy where Arnold is concerned. Mind you, I don't think for a moment that he'd hesitate if the opportunity for some old-style maneuvers came his way. At the moment, though, Denis and Kevin between them have pretty much taken that possibility off the board for anyone. Which is why he's coming at it from another direction. And it's also why we can't afford to let him control the information flow. He's using the existence of Bolthole as a wedge, Tom. Dribbling the facts out helps to establish his credentials as an insider, someone with access to the levers of power and the information that goes with it. And when he sits down to recruit someone who's already unhappy or concerned by the way the Manties have been stalling any meaningful negotiations, he can use the new ships to make my policy look even weaker. After all, if we've managed to make progress in equalizing our military capabilities, and we're still not prepared to press the Manties, then obviously we're too timid to ever press the issue."

Why the situation with Giancola is untenable.

"I realize that. But I think that situation is more controllable than letting Arnold ricochet around Nouveau Paris like an out of control null-grav bowling ball. At the very least, it's going to take the better part of a month for word of the press releases on Bolthole to reach Manticore. We'll time the diplomatic note announcing our new, firmer position to arrive a few days after it gets there, and we'll be careful to couch it in nonconfrontational terms."

"You're going to demand that they stop wasting our time in a 'nonconfrontational' way?" Theisman cocked a quizzical eyebrow, and she snorted.

"I didn't say they were going to like hearing about it. But we can be firm and make our point without sounding like some bunch of reckless lunatics who're just itching to try out their new military toys!"

The plan, announce the existence of Bolthole and Haven-built MDMs, podnoughts and LAC carriers, taking that bit of leverage out of Giancola's hands. At the same time, send a 'we're serious' note to the HRG timed to arrive at roughly the same time as the news.

"Still, I'd feel happier if Giancola weren't the Secretary of State. There's too much opportunity for him to put his own twist on anything we say to the Manties to make me happy."

"The same thought had occurred to me," Pritchart confessed. "Unfortunately, if we can't fire him and we can't indict him, then we're stuck with him. There are times I wish our system was a bit more like the Manties. Mind you, I think the stability of ours has its own major advantages—such as avoiding sudden, unanticipated shifts in government policy like what happened to them when Cromarty died. But since our cabinet officers require Congressional confirmation for specific posts, we can't just shuffle portfolios whenever it's convenient like they can. And as long as he's Secretary of State, we can't cut him out of the diplomatic channel.

"But by the same token, he already knows he's scarcely on my Christmas card list, however cordial our relationships have to appear in public. So I'm not going to lose any sleep over the possibility of hurting his tender feelings when I insist on reviewing any notes we send the Manties before they're dispatched." She snorted again, and this time there was an edge of true humor in her fleeting smile. "Who knows? Maybe he'll get offended enough to do us all a favor and resign!"

They acknowledge the possibility of Giancola monkeying with their diplomatic correspondence.

"As Admiral Reynaud just suggested," the astrophysicist told the reporter in his best, authoritative professorial mode, "each wormhole junction with which we're familiar has been a distinct and unique case. Our own Junction isn't quite like any of the others which have been explored, and none of the others are identical to one another, either. I've spent the better part of my adult life studying this particular field, and while I can speak with authority about the known junctions, that doesn't apply to new ones. Or even to previously unexplored termini of known ones. We're largely in the position of, say, the last century or so Ante Diaspora where gravity was concerned. They could describe, model, and predict it in considerable detail, but no one had a clue how to generate and manipulate it the way we can today. All of which means that while we've made certain working assumptions about this terminus based on the Junction's other termini and what we know about other junctions, they remain just that: assumptions. Until we can positively confirm their accuracy, the notion of sending a manned vessel through is out of the question."

Exploration of the wormhole.

"The present Government, aware of the absolute necessity of maintaining the momentum towards peace domestically, as well as internationally, sought an entire array of initiatives to, as the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer put it, 'build the peace.' Some were designed to ease the transition of military personnel back into the civilian economy, while others were intended to repair the ravages individuals and certain sectors of the economy—as in Basilisk, for example—had suffered during the fighting. And the creation of the Royal Manticoran Astrophysics Investigation Agency, with Admiral Reynaud as its head, was another. The Government saw this as an ideal opportunity to make a fundamental investment in the Star Kingdom's future. And, to be perfectly honest, the Government also saw the RMAIA and its audacious search as precisely the sort of peaceful challenge which would bring out the very best in a citizenry weary of the sacrifice and violence of a decade-long war. I'm very pleased, as, I'm sure, is every other individual associated with the Government in general, and the RMAIA in particular, that success has attended the effort with such unanticipated promptness."

In a totally non-partisan, non-politicized way, of course.

"I'll confine my own response to the first one. The simplest answer is that there was a flaw in the most widely accepted models of our Junction—one which Dr. Kare and his team at Valasakis University first identified only about six T-years ago. To be perfectly honest, it was his work there which led to his selection to head this project.

"The discrepancy they identified wasn't really a fundamental error, but it was sufficient to throw all of our predictions as to the probable loci of additional termini off to a significant degree. The Manticoran Wormhole Junction is a spherical region of space approximately one light-second in diameter. That gives it a volume of approximately fourteen quadrillion cubic kilometers, and any given terminus within the Junction is vastly smaller than that, a sphere no more than three thousand kilometers across. Which means that a terminus represents less than seven hundred millionths of a percent of the total volume of the Junction. So even a very small error in our initial models' predictions had an enormous impact. In addition, this terminus's 'signature' was extremely faint, compared to those of the termini we already knew about. Our theoretical studies had always suggested that would be the case, but that faintness meant we required further advances in the sensitivity of our instruments and their computer support before we could realistically hope to detect it."

Space is really big, so even narrowing the search area to a sphere a light-second across leaves a massive search area to find a faint gravitic signature. Hence why they had to rely on mathematical modeling over buzzing around with a ship and a scanner.

"Well, I thought Clarence did rather well," Baron High Ridge remarked as he held up his cup. He'd brought his own butler to the Prime Minister's official residence with him, and now that well-trained servant responded instantly with his coffeepot to the silent, peremptory command. High Ridge sipped the fragrant brew appreciatively. He did not, of course, thank the man or even acknowledge his existence.

Ah, the old school way of dealing with servants. Sometimes Manticore isn't really that pleasant or egalitarian.

"Oh, come now, Michael! He's the RMAIA's director, and however much I may dislike him, he obviously has a brain. I'm quite certain he can do simple math, and not even Melina can change the fact that he has access to his own books."

High Ridge set down his cup, and glanced over his shoulder at the butler. Descroix had a disturbing tendency to ignore the ears of servants. The Prime Minister was particularly aware of it because it was something he had to constantly watch in himself, but he'd seen too many examples of what ungrateful and resentful servants could do to their employers when those employers were careless about what they said in front of them. It wasn't a lesson he intended to forget, and although his butler had been in his employ for almost thirty T-years, there was no point in taking chances.

"That will be all, Howard," he told the man. "Just leave us the coffeepot. I'll buzz when we're done."

Mind the servants when it's time to discuss illegal dealings.

"On the other hand, I wasn't thinking about right this minute, or even any time in the next several months or even the next few years. But let's face it, Michael. You and I both know that eventually there's going to be a change of governments."

"Cromarty hung on to the premiership for the better part of sixty T-years with only three interruptions," High Ridge pointed out just a bit stiffly.

"And he had the enthusiastic support of the Crown the entire time. A happy state of affairs which," Descroix observed dryly, "scarcely obtains in our own case."

"If the approval of the Crown were critical to the survival of a government, we'd never have been permitted to form one in the first place!" High Ridge shot back.

"Of course we wouldn't have. But that's not really the point, is it? However temperamental the Queen may be, she's also an astute political observer, and she was right. Our differences in priorities and ideology—especially between you and me, on the one hand, and Marisa, on the other—are too fundamental for us to maintain our cohesion indefinitely. And that completely overlooks potential outside forces. Like that idiot Montaigne." Descroix grimaced. "I don't think she has a hope in Hell of pulling it off, but it's perfectly clear what she's up to with that dramatic renunciation of her title. And while I think the odds against her are high, I didn't expect her to win her precious little special election, either. So I don't have any desire to stake my own political survival on my faith that she can't do it after all."

Descroix, at least, knows this can't last forever, and is planning for the future.

"I think you're worrying unduly," the Prime Minister said after a moment. "There are always . . . irregularities of one sort or another, but neither side has any interest in making them public when the government changes hands. After all, as you've just pointed out, it will always change hands again at some point. If the incoming government smears its predecessors over every potential little discrepancy, then it invites the same treatment when it's time for it to leave office, in turn, and no one wants that."

"With all due respect, Michael, we're not talking about 'little discrepancies' in this instance," Descroix said coolly. "While I would be the first to argue that our decisions were completely justifiable, they hardly represent unintentional errors or sloppy paperwork. There's not much point in pretending that someone like Alexander couldn't exaggerate them all out of proportion and start some sort of witch hunt. And whatever he might want to do as a realistic and pragmatic politician, the Queen is going to want the biggest, noisiest witch hunt she can possibly arrange in our case. In fact," Descroix smiled thinly, "I'm pretty sure she's already stockpiling wood for the barbecue at Mount Royal Palace."

The Gentleman's Agreement between Manticoran political parties not to investigate the previous administration's financial irregularities too closely. Then again, this agreement has never seen a government as corrupt as the HRG.

"Eventually, someone's going to ask some very pointed questions, Michael. Elizabeth will see to that, even if no one else wants to. So it's occurred to me that this would be a very good time to begin establishing the documentary evidence to support the answers we're going to want to give."

"I see," the Prime Minister said slowly, leaning back in his chair and regarding her speculatively. And, he admitted, respectfully.

"And just how do you suggest we do that?" he asked finally.

"Obviously, we begin by seeing to it that any little . . . financial irregularities lead back to our esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary MacIntosh." She sighed. "How tragic! To think that such high-minded and selfless servants of the public weal should turn out to have actually been so venal and corrupt as to divert government monies into slush funds and vote-buying schemes. And how truly unfortunate that your own trust in the Liberal Party's well known probity prevented you from realizing in time what they were doing."

So they're prepping their knives for New Kiev's back. Nice. You know, even Rob Pierre felt guilt over the collateral damage he caused. When freaking Rob Pierre is an objectively better person than you, you've got problems.

They floated in orbit about the planet Sidemore, the space-going equivalent of a fleet anchored in a safe harbor, but she'd been pleased when she arrived to find that Rear Admiral Hewitt had insisted upon maintaining a heightened state of readiness. All of his vessels' parking orbits had been carefully arranged to avoid any problems with wedge interference if it was necessary to bring up their impellers quickly. And he'd also seen to it that at least one of his battle squadrons' impeller nodes had been hot at all times. The ready duty rotated among his squadrons on a regular basis, but his precaution meant that its units could bring up their wedges in as little as thirty to forty-five minutes.

Honor had not only told him how much she approved of his wariness but also maintained and extended his standing orders, including the dispersal of their orbits, to the units of Task Force Thirty-Four, as well. Which meant, of course, that even ships as stupendous as Werewolf or Alister McKeon's superdreadnought flagship Troubadour were the tiniest of models when she gazed at them with the naked eye.

Of course, not all naked eyes had been created equal, and Honor smiled despite her moodiness as she brought up the telescopic function of her artificial left eye and the distant, floating mountains of battle steel grew and blossomed magically.

Keeping a ready squadron of wallers with idling impellers at all times, and ships dispersed enough to bring up wedges and maneuver in a hurry if need be. Honor's eye is pretty impressive to pick out ships at least a thousand klicks out. Oh, and McKeon's first command was the destroyer Troubadour that got trashed in Second Yeltsin, now Admiral McKeon's flagship is an SD of the same name.

With the reinforcements she'd brought out from Manticore, she had eight full battle squadrons, plus Alice's understrength CLAC squadron, screened by five battlecruiser squadrons, three light cruiser squadrons, and two destroyer flotillas . . . which didn't even count the dozens of cruisers and destroyers scattered through the nearer sections of the Confederacy on anti-pirate duties. She had no less than forty-two ships of the wall under her command, which made her "task force" a fleet in all but name. It was also far and away the most powerful force which had ever been placed under her orders, and as she gazed out the viewport at the might and power ready to her fingertips, she supposed she ought to feel confident in the strength of her weapon if she should be called upon to use it.

Honor's command, the largest and most powerful she's ever had.

Alister and Alice had managed to sharpen Task Force Thirty-Four to a far keener edge than she'd allowed herself to hope for during the voyage here, and Hewitt's squadrons had managed to maintain a far higher degree of readiness than Home Fleet. No doubt because his captains, like he himself, had been altogether too well aware of how far from any other help they'd be if it hit the fan out here in Silesia.

But all the readiness in the galaxy couldn't change the fact that only six of her forty-two ships of the wall were Medusa-class SD(P)s and none of them were the even newer Invictus-class ships. Or that eleven of the others were mere dreadnoughts, scarcely two-thirds the size and fighting power of even her older, pre-SD(P) ships. She had no doubt Janacek and High Ridge would roll the number forty-two out in suitably weighty tones for the benefit of any newsy or member of Parliament who asked pointed questions about the state of Sidemore Station. And she had just as little doubt that neither of them would mention just how obsolescent and undersized some of those forty-two ships were. Or that she had been allowed only four of the eight CLACs she'd requested. Or that ONI's most recent estimate gave the Imperial Andermani Navy something in excess of two hundred ships of the wall.

They may have the best drilled crews in the slack peacetime navy, but they're awfully far out on the pointy edge without a ton of firepower.

She'd known when she accepted the posting that this was exactly what was going to happen, although, to be honest, she hadn't anticipated that even Janacek would be quite so blatant as to assign every single Manticoran dreadnought still in commission to her. But even if he'd replaced every one of them with pre-pod superdreadnoughts, her strength would still have been totally inadequate if the Andies truly were willing to push things to the brink of outright hostilities. So it probably made sense, from Janacek's viewpoint, to pile as many as possible of his obsolescent assets into the same heap. After all, if he lost them, it wouldn't be as if anything vital had gone with them. Except, of course, for the people aboard them.

That was more or less Janacek's thoughts when it came to Basilisk station decades ago, and the man hasn't changed all that much.

The silent, pinprick glory of the endless stars blazed before her, and the blue-and-white, cloud-swirled beauty of Sidemore filled the lower quarter of the port. With her cybernetic eye, she could make out the floating gems of the planet's orbital solar power collectors, and the smaller reflections of communications relays, orbital sensor arrays, and all of the other clutter of an industrialized presence in space.

Sidemore is getting some infrastructure in. Good, good. Weber seems to really like solar power sats that beam their output to ground stations. Any idea how practical this would be in a civilization that has both cheap and easy spacelift and viable fusion?

Sidemore wasn't in the same league as Grayson, but Honor was honest enough to admit that that was at least partly because Sidemore had never been as important to Manticore as Grayson was. The Star Kingdom had pulled out all the stops to build Grayson into the industrial powerhouse it had become, and for all the crudity of its pre-Alliance tech base, Grayson had been aggressively dragging itself up by its own bootstraps for well over sixty years before Manticore ever arrived in its neighborhood. And much as Honor loved her adopted planet and respected the industry and determination of its people, she was also honest enough to admit that it had been only Grayson's astrographic position which had attracted the Star Kingdom's notice in the first place.

Which was also true for Sidemore. But Grayson had been seen as essential to Manticoran security; Sidemore had simply been a convenience. And so Sidemore hadn't received the same loan guarantees, or been the subject of the same investment incentives and tax breaks, or been the site of major shipyards, as Grayson had been. Which, in its way, made what the Sidemorians had achieved even more impressive, despite how modest it appeared in the shadow of Grayson's accomplishments.

Honor was delighted to see the unmistakable signs of a planet whose industrialization process had taken on a self-sustaining life of its own. There were freighters building in Sidemore orbit these days, not just the light warships of the Sidemore Navy, and the planetary president had already conducted Honor on a proud tour of the planet's new orbital resource extraction facilities and smelters. Those facilities had grown almost entirely out of the RMN's need for them to support the orbital repair yard it had built here to service its ships on Sidemore Station, but they'd become self-perpetuating since then. The Marsh System wasn't going to be posing any threats to the Manticoran balance of payments with Silesia any time soon, but Honor was delighted to see how shrewdly and successfully the planet was exploiting its new industrial power by expanding into the Silesian trade. Unless something very unfortunate happened—like a war which brought the Andermani navy rampaging through the system—Sidemore would be able to sustain its new prosperity and expand upon it even if Manticore withdrew from the region.

They're no Kerbal Graysons, but considering Manticore has only been investing in them twelve years, and they started with less infrastructure and hordes of experienced spacers, they're doing alright.

And that's the only way we are ever going to turn the Confederacy into something besides an ongoing, low-level bloodbath, Honor thought with a touch of grimness. God knows we've tried to exterminate the pirates long enough! The only way to get rid of them in the end, though, is going to be by giving the people who live here the prosperity that'll create the capacity to squash the vermin themselves.

It's a pity the Confederacy's government is too corrupt to let that happen.

And that, she knew, as much as Manticore's interest in the system and the industriousness of its people, was why Marsh was succeeding in turning itself into a modern, prosperous star system. There were no Silesian governors to batten on the opportunities for graft and corruption and strangle any sustained industrial expansion at birth.

The thorny problem that is Silesia.


We end on Captain Bachfish requesting, and being granted, permission to dine with Admiral Harrington. He was her first captain, and has lots of local intel to spill, but that will have to be another post.

[Simon_Jester]

The plan, announce the existence of Bolthole and Haven-built MDMs, podnoughts and LAC carriers, taking that bit of leverage out of Giancola's hands. At the same time, send a 'we're serious' note to the HRG timed to arrive at roughly the same time as the news.

Well, I think they actually wound up announcing the SD(P)s and MDMs, while keeping as much of the other new military technology as possible under their hats.

Thus, the existence of CLACs was still a surprise to frontline LAC squadron commanders when Thunderbolt hit. And no doubt a distressing one. RMN LACs could probably dodge Havenite-built long range missiles all day, but their tactical doctrine becomes much less viable if the enemy has a solid LAC force of their own.

"The same thought had occurred to me," Pritchart confessed. "Unfortunately, if we can't fire him and we can't indict him, then we're stuck with him. There are times I wish our system was a bit more like the Manties. Mind you, I think the stability of ours has its own major advantages—such as avoiding sudden, unanticipated shifts in government policy like what happened to them when Cromarty died. But since our cabinet officers require Congressional confirmation for specific posts, we can't just shuffle portfolios whenever it's convenient like they can. And as long as he's Secretary of State, we can't cut him out of the diplomatic channel..."

They acknowledge the possibility of Giancola monkeying with their diplomatic correspondence.

In other news, the Havenites appear to have missed a trick in their system for cabinet appointments, which appear to operate on a similar system to that of the US ("advice and consent of the Senate").

In the US, if the president wants a cabinet official's resignation he can get it, and the position will be taken by his deputy until such time as a new person is appointed to fill the position.

In Haven, the president lacks the ability to force a cabinet secretary's resignation. Which is a really serious problem in this context because it means that powerful, ambitious men can wind up semi-permanently in charge of major government departments and cannot be removed. Somehow I can't imagine this is what the original authors of Haven's democratic constitution had in mind.

For that matter, it may have a lot to do with how Haven became an oligarchy in the first place. Once the cabinet secretaries responsible for running the welfare system had strong connections with the political machines that supplied the Dolist votes to Congress... there was basically no recourse. The cabinet secretaries can't be dislodged from either end; the president can't simply fire them and Congress can't simply throw them out, not without agreement by both sides.

"Well, I thought Clarence did rather well," Baron High Ridge remarked as he held up his cup. He'd brought his own butler to the Prime Minister's official residence with him, and now that well-trained servant responded instantly with his coffeepot to the silent, peremptory command. High Ridge sipped the fragrant brew appreciatively. He did not, of course, thank the man or even acknowledge his existence.

Ah, the old school way of dealing with servants. Sometimes Manticore isn't really that pleasant or egalitarian.

True, although other equally old families (i.e. the house of White Haven) are much nicer to their servants. It's probably more like "High Ridge himself is an asshole who likes being able to ignore and be rude to his servants, and his household managers are willing to spend considerable sums of money to find people willing to put up with that."

Given the sheer amount of money sloshing around the Manticoran economy, this is actually plausible. Servants getting paid pocket change isn't credible because there are too many other possible high-paying jobs, at least assuming you paid attention in school. But servants getting paid the equivalent of, say, 80000 USD a year to wait on a rude asshole hand and foot for forty hours a week... I bet you could find a lot of people willing to do that even today.

Sort of like how today, highly trained butlers command surprisingly high salaries, because their skills are in demand among a small group of very rich people. People who are perfectly capable of spending stupidly large amounts of money if that's what it takes to get something they truly want.

The Gentleman's Agreement between Manticoran political parties not to investigate the previous administration's financial irregularities too closely. Then again, this agreement has never seen a government as corrupt as the HRG.

Reminds me of the preNapoleonic status quo: government of men, not of laws. A certain amount of nepotism and graft were expected on the part of an enterprising civil servant- but it was certainly possible to get greedy and take too much.

This is another one of those things that probably wouldn't work in a society that wasn't kept afloat by massive infusions of cash from the magical Space Anomaly.

So they're prepping their knives for New Kiev's back. Nice. You know, even Rob Pierre felt guilt over the collateral damage he caused. When freaking Rob Pierre is an objectively better person than you, you've got problems.

Robert Pierre was rebelling against an old order of... well, frankly, people a lot like the Manticoran aristocracy. Rich, privileged people, with positions of hereditary power, many of whom were no doubt complete jackasses.

Honor had not only told him how much she approved of his wariness but also maintained and extended his standing orders, including the dispersal of their orbits, to the units of Task Force Thirty-Four, as well. Which meant, of course, that even ships as stupendous as Werewolf or Alister McKeon's superdreadnought flagship Troubadour were the tiniest of models when she gazed at them with the naked eye.

Keeping a ready squadron of wallers with idling impellers at all times, and ships dispersed enough to bring up wedges and maneuver in a hurry if need be. Honor's eye is pretty impressive to pick out ships at least a thousand klicks out. Oh, and McKeon's first command was the destroyer Troubadour that got trashed in Second Yeltsin, now Admiral McKeon's flagship is an SD of the same name.

Honorverse superdreadnoughts are roughly 1200 meters long and 200 meters across.

At a distance of seventy kilometers, seen broadside-on, they will subtend one degree of arc, roughly twice that of the full moon (but appear only one third as high as the full moon).

At 300 kilometers they're half the apparent width of the full moon, and about one twelfth the height- still fairly easy to see if they're well lit, but discerning structural features like the hammerheads could be difficult. 300 kilometers is about as close as you want to get if you're worried about the ship's wedge.

At more than two or three thousand kilometers I doubt they'd be visible as more than a dot of light in the sky.

They may have the best drilled crews in the slack peacetime navy, but they're awfully far out on the pointy edge without a ton of firepower.

Also, the IAN has two hundred of the wall, which is pretty impressive and suggests that they are in a state of at least partial military mobilization. Unlike the Solarians they haven't been sitting on their hands.

Even if the IAN has made no technological advances whatever, with two hundred of the wall they could probably roll right over Honor's fleet. Six SD(P)s physically don't carry enough long range missiles to kill that many capital ships, not unless the targets are totally, stupidly, hilariously incompetent at electronic warfare. Which we already know the IAN isn't.

That was more or less Janacek's thoughts when it came to Basilisk station decades ago, and the man hasn't changed all that much.

My impression is that back then Janacek thought Basilisk was a 'safe' place to send a ship unlikely to survive a battle, because, well... nobody had ever attacked the place. The duties of the prewar Basilisk Station consisted largely of policing merchantmen, and even a practically disarmed light cruiser can do that.

This is a somewhat different situation- Janacek is, as I recall, hoping that just sending a large capital ship force to Silesia will deter the Andermani, while at the same time simply not having enough modern units to actually win a naval war against the IAN and Haven simultaneously. So his sabre-rattling deterrent force is made up largely of obsolete units that are still probably about as good as their Andermani opposite numbers. Plus a handful of the modern superships that would probably be able to put a massive dent in the enemy's total numbers if war did break out, enough that the Andermani would be at a serious disadvantage when reinforcements did finally arrive.

It really isn't such a bad strategy. Committing more SD(P) forces and carriers would have been a good idea, but frankly, the High Ridge government does have logical reasons not to want to commit a much bigger chunk of their modern capital ships to defending against the Andermani.

The main error here is that Janacek is badly underestimating the odds of war breaking out.

Sidemore is getting some infrastructure in. Good, good. Weber seems to really like solar power sats that beam their output to ground stations. Any idea how practical this would be in a civilization that has both cheap and easy spacelift and viable fusion?

Well, it'd certainly be easy to get the satellites into orbit.

Solar power satellites could have a number of advantages over fusion:
-They're probably easier to build and maintain for a nation with a limited technological base. No elaborate force field containment required.
-Unlike modern highly energetic Honorverse fusion plants, they don't explode if something goes wrong.
-They can power space-based facilities as easily as ground-based ones. Maybe even easier.
-They can switch from powering one facility to powering another, without having to physically dismount a piece of heavy machinery and drag it over to the new facility.

[Mr Bean]

A thought about solar powered stations.
What if they are for remote instillation? Minimal manpower requirements and good enough power generation to run a few hundred people and machines. Not enough to require a city power class fusion setup.

[Ahriman238]

"From all I've heard that's a pretty severe case of understatement. And they tell me you have at least two armed merchantmen?"

"True," he said. "You're wondering how I managed it?" She nodded, and he shrugged. "Like everything else here in the Confederacy, it all depends on how deep your pockets are, what contacts you have, and who you know. Silesia may be a dangerous place to be a merchant skipper, but for that very reason, there's a lot of money in it if you manage to survive. And I've been out here long enough to've amassed quite a few debts and favors . . . and to learn where a few useful skeletons were buried." He shrugged again. "So, technically, Pirate's Bane and Ambuscade are auxiliary units of the Confederate Navy. Technically."

"Technically," Honor repeated, and he smiled. "And practically speaking?" she inquired.

"Practically speaking, the Confed Navy's official warrants are nothing but ways around the prohibition against armed merchantmen which are available to those with sufficiently well-placed government patrons. Everyone knows the auxiliaries will never be called upon in their naval capacity. For that matter, at least some of them are pirates themselves!" He seemed, she noted, to actually find that amusing, in a grim sort of way.

How to get your ship legally armed in the Confederacy, get it listed as a navy reserve. Also, Bachfish has been working for ONI this entire time.

"I hope you won't take this wrongly, Sir, but why did you stay out here in Silesia at all?" He looked at her, and she waved one hand in the air above her desk. "I mean, you've done well, but surely you had more and better contacts in the Star Kingdom then you did out here, and the Confederacy was scarcely the most law-abiding environment available."

"I suppose shame might have been a part of it," he admitted after a moment. "The language in which the court of inquiry couched its verdict was actually pretty moderate, but the subtext was clear enough, and there was a part of me which wanted sympathy about as little as it wanted condemnation. So there was certainly an element of starting over somewhere where I'd have a clean page.

"Then again, I was one of the Navy's old 'Silesian hands.' Like you, I'd been deployed out here several times in the course of my career, and there were people who knew me, either personally or by reputation. They don't get to see too many Manticoran officers of my seniority or experience in private service out here, so in some ways it was easier for me to write my own ticket in the Confederacy than it would have been in the Star Kingdom."

Bachfish's motivations for building a life for himself out here in the Confederacy.

"Not that I started out with any such connection in mind. Even if one had occurred to me, the circumstances which had gotten me placed on half-pay in the first place would have discouraged me from approaching anyone in the Admiralty. But ONI has always done its best to keep track of the Navy's officers, active-duty or not, and as my support base grew out here, ONI approached me. In fact, it was ONI which quietly greased the way for me to acquire official approval for Ambuscade's guns. And unless I'm very much mistaken, it was also ONI which even more quietly helped send the Bane in my direction when she was listed for disposal by the Andies. No one ever said so in as many words, but there were one or two coincidences too many in the way things came together when I put in my bid on her.

"And whether I'm right about that or not, Admiral Givens—or her minions, at least—were in fairly regular contact with me right up to the truce with the Peeps. I suppose that technically I was one of those 'HumInt' sources ONI keeps referring to when they brief officers for Silesia."

"You said ONI was in regular contact with you?" Honor asked, looking at him very thoughtfully, and he nodded.

"That's exactly what I said," he agreed. "And I meant precisely what you think I meant. Since Jurgensen took over from Givens, Intelligence seems to've cut back drastically on its use of human resources here in Silesia. I can't say what the situation might be elsewhere, but here in the Confederacy, no one seems to be paying much attention to old sources or networks. And, frankly, Honor, I think that's an enormous mistake."

No, it's definitely a general trend of cutting out sources that might contradict the ONI narrative. How Bachfish became a source for Naval Intelligence.

The "paint" used by the RMN and most other navies was liberally laced with nanotech and reactive pigments which allowed it to be programmed and altered, essentially without limit, at will. Unfortunately, as McKeon had just suggested, that was of strictly limited utility for a warship. After all, the distinctive hammerhead hull form of a warship could scarcely be mistaken for anything else, whatever color it might be. Besides, no one was likely to rely on visual identification of any man-of-war, which was one reason most navies also had a distinct tendency to choose one paint scheme—like the RMN's basic white—and leave it that way.

But merchantmen were another matter entirely. Even there, cruisers and pirate vessels alike tended to rely primarily upon transponder codes, but anyone who wanted to steal a ship's cargo had to come close enough to do it. And at that point, visual identifications—or misidentifications, in some very special cases—became the norm.

As covered in Honor Among Enemies, most honorverse navies do their ships in pure TOS white, except the Andermani who use grey. But everyone has smart paint that can change colors, even if it's not generally useful.

"You were with Her Grace when her Q-ships deployed out here several years back, weren't you, Admiral Truman?" he asked, turning to Honor's second-in-command, and shrugged when Truman nodded in agreement. "Well, then you know what happens to a merchant hull that takes a hit from any heavy shipboard weapon. So under the circumstances, neither my crews nor I are particularly interested in 'fair fights' with pirates. Which is why we practically never sail under our own transponder codes until we're actually ready to make port."

Yes, if I were a pirate I'd think four time at least before tackling ships named Pirate's Bane or Ambuscade.

I had a fresh crop of pirates to turn over to the Silly authorities in Crawford, but an Andy battlecruiser squadron was passing through the system and shortstopped my delivery. Not," he added wryly, "that the Confederate governor was at all happy about it. He seemed to feel the Andy admiral was being just a bit high-handed about the whole thing."

"Why am I not surprised?" McKeon murmured with a grimace. "Lord knows the only people the Sillies think are more arrogant and high-handed than the Andies are Manticorans, after all!"

"With all due respect, Admiral," Bachfisch told him, "and speaking as someone who's seen it from both sides, the Sillies have a point. From their perspective, both the RMN and the IAN are high-handed as hell. The fact that they know perfectly well, whatever they may choose to pretend, that they don't have the capability to police their own space lanes without outside interference only makes it worse, but how would you feel if foreign navies came sweeping into the Star Kingdom at will to police our commerce? Or if they took custody of criminals captured in our space because they distrusted the integrity of our legal system . . . or the honesty of our government officials?" He shook his head. "I know the situations are different, but the fact that our lack of confidence in them is justified so much of the time only makes them resent it even more. And too many Andy and Manty naval officers let their contempt for the locals show. For that matter, I probably did the same thing when I was on active duty!"

Again, it's more complicated than just "Neither navy trusts the locals to deal with pirates." Because their actions are consistently high-handed and dismissive of Silly sovereignty.

"On the other hand, I don't think he was especially pleased to realize he'd allowed anyone who might be connected with the Star Kingdom close enough to get a good look at the after hammerhead of his flagship. Under the circumstances, I didn't think it would be especially wise of me to pull out a pocket camera and snap a few shots, and the Andies were pretty careful to keep their bow towards the Bane after I got back aboard her, so I couldn't get any good visuals from her, either. But there were definitely some major differences between her construction and a regular battlecruiser's. My personnel shuttle crossed her stern at less than half a klick on the run to deliver our 'guests,' and it was obvious that she didn't have much in the way of conventional stern chasers. But what she did have was a great big cargo hatch."

"I don't much like the sound of that," McKeon observed unhappily.

"Well, I can see where a battlecruiser built on the pod format would have a lot of short term firepower," Wraith Goodrick replied. "But how sustainable would that firepower be? And how long could any battlecruiser's defenses stand up to a real ship of the wall, especially a pod design, if it came down to that?" He shook his head. "I don't know. It just doesn't sound like a really practical concept to me."

Honor and Brigham glanced at one another, and Honor gave her chief of staff a very small nod.

"Actually," Mercedes said then, turning to the rest of the table, "the Andies weren't the first ones to come up with the idea. Or, at least, if they've had it, the Graysons have, too, completely independently."

The first mention of the BC(P). There was a lot of discussion among navies that still care, as to how relevant a battlecruiser is in the modern, MDM podnoughts and CLACs universe. The BC is essentially a fast, heavily armed raider that can knock over the lightest defended systems by itself, recon by fore and even do a number on wallers if they time it carefully and the enemy is distracted. But those sorts of slashing attacks are much harder when the other side has MDMs, and now that systems can be defended with vast LAC swarms and clouds of MDM missile pods...

Two answers present themselves, the BC(P) is a pod-layer, giving it a serious offensive punch. The downside being it's fairly fragile compared to traditional BCs, and doesn't have a ton of endurance. Just because of space considerations, you cannot cram more than 300-350 pods inside, and there's only space for four rails to kick them out the back. Right now, Grayson has thirty to forty BC(P)s in active service, the Andies I believe have a dozen or so, Haven has none. I'm not sure about Manticore, the idea is a surprise to the purely Manticoran-service officers in the room, but in the next book Honor gets half a dozen or so which means they were probably being finished and worked up about now, right?

The second answer is the BC(L) or Large Battlecruiser. Basically they make something that pre-war would have been classed a small battleship, and load it with everything from the Saganami-C, bow walls, off-bore MDM launchers. then you get a ship that's actually faster than a pre-war BC with the latest compensators, but can unload 60 two-stage MDMs on any target it really wants gone. At present there is only one in existence, the prototype HMS Nike.

"At any rate," Brigham went on, returning her attention to McKeon, "the new Courvoisier II-class battlecruisers are a pod design. The Office of Shipbuilding reduced their conventional missile broadsides by over eighty percent, which let them build in superdreadnought-sized energy weapons." McKeon's eyes widened and turned suddenly thoughtful, and the chief of staff shrugged. "I think there was some pressure to go to something more on the lines of the Invictuses and suppress the broadside tubes entirely, but Shipbuilding decided against it. Still, Wraith is right that they can't sustain their maximum rate of missile fire for anything like as long as a pod superdreadnought. But then, a conventional battlecruiser design couldn't sustain the missile fire of a pre-pod ship of the wall, either. And the exercises we've conducted in Grayson certainly seem to suggest that the new design has a much better chance of surviving against ships of the wall."

The Grayson BC(P) still named for Raoul Courvoisier. Also, they cut down broadside missile tubes 80% to fit everything, another disadvantage. But the energy mounts got up-gunned to SD-scale which is...significant. Put it to you this way, a BC graser like the Shrikes mount has a bore size of 1.5-2 meters. An SD graser is 5-6 meters across.

"Against a pre-pod ship, a Courvoisier has a damned good chance, actually. She can roll enough pods to throw salvos that can saturate even an SD's missile defenses. Not a lot of them, maybe, but enough to do the job against one, maybe even two, of the older classes. And once she's beaten down the SD's offensive fire, she's actually got the energy weapons to get through its defenses, as well. And if two or three Courvoisiers concentrate on a single target, even an SD(P) will find herself in trouble. She'd have to get through to them and start killing them really quickly if she didn't want them to do exactly the same thing to her."

Goodrick looked shocked by the very notion, and Brigham grinned at him.

"Not only that, and not only are the Courvoisiers a hell of a lot more dangerous in energy-range, but the designers used the new automation systems even more heavily than they did in the design of the Harrington class, as well. The crews are really, really small. As a matter of fact, you can run one of the new ships with a few as three hundred people if you really have to."

The number of 300 crew (less than the original Fearless!) is more shocking to them than the idea that a BC(P) can take a waller one-on-one.

"Which was the real point of the design, when you come right down to it, Wraith," Honor put in. "Oh, not the energy broadside, per se, and not the ability to go toe-to-toe with superdreadnoughts, either. What the Graysons have built is a battlecruiser to do to older battlecruiser designs what the SD(P) can do to older superdreadnoughts. So if the Andermani have been pursuing the same design philosophy, the ships Captain Bachfisch has just described to us are going to be even more dangerous than anything we've predicted this so far."

Right, a BC(P) could conceivably take an SD, but the point is to be death itself to smaller ships.

"Have you seen—or heard anything about—proper pod-armed ships of the wall, Sir?" Lieutenant Commander Reynolds sounded more than a little anxious, and Bachfisch shook his head.

"No, I haven't, Commander. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they don't have any; only that if they do, I haven't seen them. By the same token, though, it occurred to me the other day that you can build battlecruisers a hell of a lot faster than you can build ships of the wall. It may be that they have SD(P)s in the final design stage or even under construction but not yet in commission."

-snip-

"Wraith and I are looking forward to examining those sensor recordings of yours, Captain," she said. "Especially the ones of the Andies' new LACs."

"I'm not surprised," Bachfisch told her with a small smile. "And, to be honest, I was very interested in the readings I got on your own LACs here in Marsh, Admiral. I haven't had the leisure to compare them exhaustively, but my initial impression is that your design is still faster and more powerful than anything of theirs I've seen."

"But you haven't seen any sign of Andy CLACs?" Truman asked.

"No, I haven't. But if I were the Andies, I'd probably be even more leery of showing off my CLACs than of letting out the fact that I had pod-battlecruisers. And it wouldn't be all that difficult to keep them a secret, either. You know how easy it would be to hide CLACs in some out-of-the-way star system while they worked up."

More speculation and info-sharing. Since others will spoil it, I'll go right ahead and say that the Andies have forty-odd podnoughts but only half a dozen carriers.

Wayfarer wasn't that huge for a merchie—a fast freight hauler configured for relatively small cargos (by the standards of the leviathans which roamed the interstellar deeps) and limited passenger service—although she still dwarfed LaFroye to minnow-status. But the minnow had teeth and the whale didn't, so the whale had better be extremely polite to the minnow. On the other hand, some merchies were more equal than others, and Wayfarer undoubtedly felt reasonably secure in her League registry. After all, no Manticoran captain in his right mind wanted to provoke a career-ending incident with the League. Which explained why, so far at least, Kanjcevic sounded wary but not truly concerned.

Operation Wilberforce, the Solarian-registered freighter Wayfarer is on Honor's list of known slavers she's told all her commanders to keep an eye out for. Meanwhile, Wayfarer's captain is pretty confident that no one is going to start trouble with a Solly ship.

"Just between you and me, Ma'am, it's pretty silly, actually. We've had reports of a rash of merchant losses in this sector over the last few months, and Intelligence has decided someone's using an armed merchant raider. So orders came down from Sidemore to make an eyeball check on every merchant ship we can." He shrugged. "So far, we've checked eleven without finding a thing." He did not quite, Ackenheil noticed, add "of course," but his tone made it superfluous, anyway. "Shouldn't take more than a few minutes for our pinnace to dock, come aboard, make sure you don't have any grasers hidden away, and let you go on about your business. But if we don't check it out, well . . ."

The excuse to board and inspect.

He'd already seen the imagery from the external cameras of the Marines who'd forced the hatches into Wayfarer's "passenger cabins." Even in Silesia and even aboard freighters with strictly limited personnel space, passengers were seldom packed in twelve to the cabin.

Of course, Wayfarer's crew had managed to save a little space for them in their quarters. After all, they didn't need much space to store their personal belongings when they didn't have any . . . including clothing of any sort.

The expressions of abject terror on the faces of those naked, hopeless "passengers" had been enough to turn a man's stomach. But the moment when they realized they were looking at Royal Marines, not the bully boy guards of the owners to whom they had been consigned, had been something else again. Indeed, seeing it had given him almost as much pleasure as the sick, stunned expression on Kanjcevic's face when she realized what had happened. And when she remembered that under the terms of solemn interstellar treaties, the Star Kingdom of Manticore equated violation of the Cherwell Convention's prohibitions on trafficking in human beings with piracy.

Which was punishable by death.

Manticore and Haven punish slave-carrying with death. They're also the only ones to adopt a proviso to the Cherwell Convention that any ship fitted as a slaver is a slaver, adopted when slavers started jettisoning their "cargo."

"Sorry to interrupt Her Grace's breakfast, Mr. MacGuiness. But the Captain asked me to inform her that Perimeter Security has just picked up an unidentified incoming hyper footprint. A big one, twenty-two light-minutes from the primary. According to CIC, there are over twenty major drive sources."

-snip-

"No, Ma'am," Jaruwalski replied. "They're accelerating in-system at a steady four hundred gravities, and they haven't said a word. CIC has managed to refine its data a little further, though. They make it twenty-two superdreadnoughts or dreadnoughts, eight battlecruisers or large heavy cruisers, fifteen or twenty or light cruisers, and what looks like four transports."[/quote]

The Protector's Own arrives comm-silent. Honor decides to turn it into an impromptu surprise drill.

Werewolf was a new ship, and she and her sisters had been designed from the keel out to serve as task force or fleet flagships, so her flag plot's holo sphere was at least two-thirds the size of CIC's master plot. It was less cluttered than the master plot because the automatic filters removed distracting items—like the Marsh System's civilian spacegoing infrastructure—which were both unnecessary and possibly confusing. They could be put back if Honor really wanted to see them, but at the moment she had eyes only for the red icons of unknown starships sweeping steadily inward from the system hyper limit.

Filters for distracting data.

Sheer, shocked disbelief had held him paralyzed as he read through the brief, terse communique and the attached copy of the official news release. None of it could possibly have been true! Except that even as he'd told himself that, he'd known that it was. Now the shock had worn off enough to lose its anesthetic edge, and he jerked up out of his comfortable chair with an abruptness which would have startled anyone familiar with the eternally self-possessed exterior he was always so careful to present to the rest of the universe. For a moment, he stood poised, looking almost as if he wanted to physically flee the damning information contained in the report. But, of course, there was nowhere to run, and he licked his lips nervously.

-snip-

There was no point even trying to suppress this information, he realized. It wasn't an agent report, or an analyst's respectfully-phrased disagreement with his own position which could be ignored or conveniently misfiled. In fact, it was little more than a verbatim transcript of Thomas Theisman's own news release. The high-speed courier the agent-in-charge in Nouveau Paris had chartered to get it to him as quickly as possible couldn't have beaten the normal news service dispatch boat by more than a few hours. Perhaps a standard day, at most. Which meant that if he didn't report it to Sir Edward Janacek—and thus to the rest of the High Ridge Government—they would read about it in their morning newsfaxes.

He shuddered at the thought. That prospect was enough to quash any temptation, even one as powerful as the auto-response defensive reaction which urged him to "lose" this particular report the way he'd lost others from time to time. But this one was different. It wasn't merely inconvenient; it was catastrophic.

No. He couldn't suppress it, or pretend it hadn't happened. But he did have a few hours before he would be forced to share it with his fellow space lords and their political masters. There was time for at least the start of a damage control effort, although it was unlikely to be anywhere near as effective as he needed it to be.

The worst part of it, he reflected, as his brain settled into more accustomed thought patterns and began considering alternative approaches to minimizing the consequences, was the fact that he'd assured Janacek so confidently that the Peeps had no modern warships. That was what was going to stick sideways in the First Lord's craw. Yet even though Jurgensen could confidently expect Janacek to fixate on that aspect of the intelligence debacle, he knew it was only the very tip of the iceberg of ONI's massive failure. Bad enough that the Peeps had managed to build so many ships of the wall without his even suspecting they were doing it, but he also had no hard information at all on what sort of hardware they'd come up with to put aboard them.

Admiral of the Green Francis Jurgensen, Second Space Lord and master of ONI gets the news about Bolthole, and this is how he responds. At least he figures he can't suppress it.

[Ahriman238]

In other news, the Havenites appear to have missed a trick in their system for cabinet appointments, which appear to operate on a similar system to that of the US ("advice and consent of the Senate").

In the US, if the president wants a cabinet official's resignation he can get it, and the position will be taken by his deputy until such time as a new person is appointed to fill the position.

In Haven, the president lacks the ability to force a cabinet secretary's resignation. Which is a really serious problem in this context because it means that powerful, ambitious men can wind up semi-permanently in charge of major government departments and cannot be removed. Somehow I can't imagine this is what the original authors of Haven's democratic constitution had in mind.

For that matter, it may have a lot to do with how Haven became an oligarchy in the first place. Once the cabinet secretaries responsible for running the welfare system had strong connections with the political machines that supplied the Dolist votes to Congress... there was basically no recourse. The cabinet secretaries can't be dislodged from either end; the president can't simply fire them and Congress can't simply throw them out, not without agreement by both sides.

Like Burdette's trial by combat, it's more a matter of timing. Traditionally, the President of the Republic can absolutely demand a cabinet member's resignation, but one proviso of the new Constitution is that the President requires Congress to authorize each of her powers under the old Constitution at least the first time she asserts those rights. That way each step of the way, Congress can ask "Is it really a great idea for the President to be able to do this?" Sacking Giancola simply isn't worth the hassle of a political battle in Congress and drawing all their problems with each other into the light. Yet.

They may have the best drilled crews in the slack peacetime navy, but they're awfully far out on the pointy edge without a ton of firepower.

Also, the IAN has two hundred of the wall, which is pretty impressive and suggests that they are in a state of at least partial military mobilization. Unlike the Solarians they haven't been sitting on their hands.

Even if the IAN has made no technological advances whatever, with two hundred of the wall they could probably roll right over Honor's fleet. Six SD(P)s physically don't carry enough long range missiles to kill that many capital ships, not unless the targets are totally, stupidly, hilariously incompetent at electronic warfare. Which we already know the IAN isn't.

200 wallers is still less than Manticore and Haven had in the immediate pre-war, but that was after extensive buildup. Likewise it's unlikely the IAN would commit it's entire wall to a single battle.

That was more or less Janacek's thoughts when it came to Basilisk station decades ago, and the man hasn't changed all that much.

My impression is that back then Janacek thought Basilisk was a 'safe' place to send a ship unlikely to survive a battle, because, well... nobody had ever attacked the place. The duties of the prewar Basilisk Station consisted largely of policing merchantmen, and even a practically disarmed light cruiser can do that.

This is a somewhat different situation- Janacek is, as I recall, hoping that just sending a large capital ship force to Silesia will deter the Andermani, while at the same time simply not having enough modern units to actually win a naval war against the IAN and Haven simultaneously. So his sabre-rattling deterrent force is made up largely of obsolete units that are still probably about as good as their Andermani opposite numbers. Plus a handful of the modern superships that would probably be able to put a massive dent in the enemy's total numbers if war did break out, enough that the Andermani would be at a serious disadvantage when reinforcements did finally arrive.

It really isn't such a bad strategy. Committing more SD(P) forces and carriers would have been a good idea, but frankly, the High Ridge government does have logical reasons not to want to commit a much bigger chunk of their modern capital ships to defending against the Andermani.

The main error here is that Janacek is badly underestimating the odds of war breaking out.

That wouldn't be bad reasoning, and as you say they are still technically at war with Haven. I just don't think that's what he's thinking. I believe Janacek has always regarded a certain percentage of the navy as more expendable, and the idea with Basilisk was that the system was doomed anyways in the event of a serious attack, so why send anyone you'd mind losing?

Sidemore is getting some infrastructure in. Good, good. Weber seems to really like solar power sats that beam their output to ground stations. Any idea how practical this would be in a civilization that has both cheap and easy spacelift and viable fusion?

Well, it'd certainly be easy to get the satellites into orbit.

Solar power satellites could have a number of advantages over fusion:
-They're probably easier to build and maintain for a nation with a limited technological base. No elaborate force field containment required.
-Unlike modern highly energetic Honorverse fusion plants, they don't explode if something goes wrong.
-They can power space-based facilities as easily as ground-based ones. Maybe even easier.
-They can switch from powering one facility to powering another, without having to physically dismount a piece of heavy machinery and drag it over to the new facility.

How productive could they really be, though? I keep hearing about the inefficiencies of solar power, sometimes a person covering their roof with solar panels and providing their own power needs, or a facility by putting up a lot of panels. Would sticking it in vacuum make it work better? How big would the collectors have to be to provide for, say, a small town?

[Simon_Jester]

As covered in Honor Among Enemies, most honorverse navies do their ships in pure TOS white, except the Andermani who use grey. But everyone has smart paint that can change colors, even if it's not generally useful.

One possible application is to foil observation of the ships while they are 'anchored' and/or in orbit.

An actively deceptive paint scheme could make it much harder to assess where the ship's sensors, missile tubes, and so on are located to a naked-eye observer. And since as we just discussed, these ships are fairly visible (a guy with a handheld telescope could see them from hundreds of kilometers off), there's a real danger of spies figuring out a lot about your ships that way. Like "holy shit, the Star Knight has two decks full of missile launch systems and can probably throw dozen-missile broadsides!"

Or "Gee, I wonder why the new Andermani SDs have so many communication transceivers. What do they expect to be talking to?"

Right, a BC(P) could conceivably take an SD, but the point is to be death itself to smaller ships.

Especially since most if not all the RMN ships now on station in Silesia do NOT mount the dual-drive Mark 16 missile. So they cannot begin to match the long range that a light podlayer could potentially manage.

I'd have to check, but I think the only light classes (destroyer and cruiser-weight) that can handle the Mark 16 are the Rolands and Saganami-Cs...

"But you haven't seen any sign of Andy CLACs?" Truman asked.

"No, I haven't. But if I were the Andies, I'd probably be even more leery of showing off my CLACs than of letting out the fact that I had pod-battlecruisers. And it wouldn't be all that difficult to keep them a secret, either. You know how easy it would be to hide CLACs in some out-of-the-way star system while they worked up."

More speculation and info-sharing. Since others will spoil it, I'll go right ahead and say that the Andies have forty-odd podnoughts but only half a dozen carriers.

Please tell me you laughed at that last sentence; it has to have been a joke on Bachfisch's part, because Truman, Alice Truman of all people, doesn't just know... she did it.

The Protector's Own arrives comm-silent. Honor decides to turn it into an impromptu surprise drill.

So, with the reinforcements (a dozen SD(P)s and six carriers, I think), Honor's force becomes a lot bigger and hairier than it would otherwise have been. The great increase in modern capital ship strength means they can now be confident of handling a swarm of Andermani conventional SDs.

Admiral of the Green Francis Jurgensen, Second Space Lord and master of ONI gets the news about Bolthole, and this is how he responds. At least he figures he can't suppress it.

Yeah.

Janacek was merely a bad choice to run the whole Navy.

Jurgensen was a really, horribly, transcendantly bad choice to run ONI.

Arguably, Janacek's single biggest mistake was tolerating having Jurgensen as an employee.

[Batman]

I'm dubious about how much 'smart paint' can do to camouflage distinct features like missile tubes, beam weapon mounts, sensor arrays and so on. As you say, it can do wonders to fool the naked-eye observer, but if said observer is the best intel you've got you're in serious trouble anyway. Anybody with halfway decent passive sensors (I'm inclined to say down to modern day optronics though that may be a tad optimistic) isn't going to mistake your gravitics array for anything else just because it's chartreuse for the time being.
Of course it in no small part depends on how expensive that 'smart paint' is. If financially, a single missile costs the same as three CA hull's worth of 'smart paint' (or worse) keeping it on the off chance that it might come in useful one day would cerainly be worth considering.

[Simon_Jester]

That wouldn't be bad reasoning, and as you say they are still technically at war with Haven. I just don't think that's what he's thinking. I believe Janacek has always regarded a certain percentage of the navy as more expendable, and the idea with Basilisk was that the system was doomed anyways in the event of a serious attack, so why send anyone you'd mind losing?

Well, at the time the RMN simply did not have large capital ship formations posted outside the home system so far as I can remember, so the fact that no such formations were posted to Basilisk was hardly unusual. Unless Janacek bulked up the picket to an unprecedented degree, it was inevitably going to be fairly weak. Even so, he did station two cruisers there, which would have been ample force to get everything done if Young hadn't been such an incompetent backstabbing ass.

Now, I totally grant the point that Janacek tends to think in terms of some ships being 'expendable' throwaway units that act either as a tripwire or a forlorn hope to wear the enemy down by attrition. Especially when, as is the case in the interwar period, he's consciously thinking "how do we get rid of all these obsolete irrelevant hunk-of-junk ships with their massive manpower requirements in favor of the leaner and infinitely meaner ships my brilliant but annoying cousin designed?"

Does this result in bad decisions? Yes. Is it gross stupidity? I would argue 'no.'

How productive could they really be, though? I keep hearing about the inefficiencies of solar power, sometimes a person covering their roof with solar panels and providing their own power needs, or a facility by putting up a lot of panels. Would sticking it in vacuum make it work better? How big would the collectors have to be to provide for, say, a small town?

Sticking the solar panels in vacuum is very helpful; the biggest problem with solar cells is that sometimes it's dark, and sometimes there are clouds in the way, and the surface of the ground isn't angled efficiently to capture sunlight except in the tropics. In space, all these things become irrelevant.

Based on current studies, a solar power satellite in orbit would need 20 tons of solar cells per megawatt of generating capacity with current technology, NOT counting the mass of supporting structures holding it together. Theoretically this might drop to more like one ton per megawatt with currently hypothesized technologies; that figure of one ton (maybe two tons) per megawatt is probably a good estimate for Honorverse technology, whose material science is advanced but not godlike.

Given Honorverse heavy-lift capabilities this is pretty trivial to put into orbit, and indeed they could probably get gigawatts of transmission power up in a few days assuming it was already present on the planet's surface. One cargo ship from elsewhere could dump out a terawatt worth of generating capacity, in ready-to-assemble modules, and be on its way in short order.

I'm dubious about how much 'smart paint' can do to camouflage distinct features like missile tubes, beam weapon mounts, sensor arrays and so on. As you say, it can do wonders to fool the naked-eye observer, but if said observer is the best intel you've got you're in serious trouble anyway. Anybody with halfway decent passive sensors (I'm inclined to say down to modern day optronics though that may be a tad optimistic) isn't going to mistake your gravitics array for anything else just because it's chartreuse for the time being.

It's not so much about hiding something by painting it chartreuse, as it is using dazzle camouflage to make it hard to tell exactly what structural features of the ship you're looking at, whether you're seeing the belly or the broadside of the ship, the bow or the stern, missile launch tubes or beam emitters, and so on.

With enough computer analysis you could probably see through such deception schemes, but it still introduces considerable ambiguity.

You could also routinely have your ships shift their paint subtly so that the ship never looks the same on any two occasions, which would make it even harder to confirm what the ship really looks like.

Of course it in no small part depends on how expensive that 'smart paint' is. If financially, a single missile costs the same as three CA hull's worth of 'smart paint' (or worse) keeping it on the off chance that it might come in useful one day would cerainly be worth considering.

Agreed.

[Batman]

Not gonna work. The camouflage stops at the skin of the ship, and you'll still know if you're looking at the flank or the top/belly or the bow/stern merely by the shape of the hull you're looking at. No amount of colour-changing can make a ship's broadside look like it's hammerhead bow. This works against the naked eye observer and possibly civilian-scale optical telescopes and nothing else. It's useless against any other warship (or at least against against any other warship with halfway current sensor technology).

[Terralthra]

Not gonna work. The camouflage stops at the skin of the ship, and you'll still know if you're looking at the flank or the top/belly or the bow/stern merely by the shape of the hull you're looking at. No amount of colour-changing can make a ship's broadside look like it's hammerhead bow. This works against the naked eye observer and possibly civilian-scale optical telescopes and nothing else. It's useless against any other warship (or at least against against any other warship with halfway current sensor technology).

Yeah, but we explicitly know that all relevant star nations use "bribe civilian freighter captain for sensor logs" as a tactic for getting intel.

[VhenRa]

Not gonna work. The camouflage stops at the skin of the ship, and you'll still know if you're looking at the flank or the top/belly or the bow/stern merely by the shape of the hull you're looking at. No amount of colour-changing can make a ship's broadside look like it's hammerhead bow. This works against the naked eye observer and possibly civilian-scale optical telescopes and nothing else. It's useless against any other warship (or at least against against any other warship with halfway current sensor technology).

Yeah, but we explicitly know that all relevant star nations use "bribe civilian freighter captain for sensor logs" as a tactic for getting intel.

You think historic merchantman didn't report what they saw to militaries? Of course they did.

[Simon_Jester]

Not gonna work. The camouflage stops at the skin of the ship, and you'll still know if you're looking at the flank or the top/belly or the bow/stern merely by the shape of the hull you're looking at.

It may, however, make you confused about whether you're looking at the belly or the roof, or the front or the back. It may make it very very hard to visually identify hatches and protrusions unless those protrusions are sticking out into space and 'skylined' against the background (in which case painting them black would make them less visible).

No amount of colour-changing can make a ship's broadside look like it's hammerhead bow. This works against the naked eye observer and possibly civilian-scale optical telescopes and nothing else.

Yes, but in some cases that is what you need: you're looking for the ability to park your cruiser in planetary orbit and not have it immediately obvious to everyone involved exactly how many missile tubes it has, what the surface area of the ship's new radar antenna is, whether the gribblies sticking out of your new cruiser's hull are fire control telemetry links or, I dunno, tractor beams or something.

It's not a 100% complete deception scheme that fools everyone in all situations. It won't make the ship invisible to radar, or make people believe it is moving when it is standing still. But fooling some of the people, some of the time, when they try to examine structural details of your ship casually, may preserve an important secret that will give you an unexpected advantage when the deceptively-painted ship enters combat.

Think about On Basilisk Station and the concealed military-grade impeller nodes on Sirius. They were concealed and it took considerable time, effort, and thought for Honor's crew to recognize them. A lesser crew might have been fooled.

You think historic merchantman didn't report what they saw to militaries? Of course they did.

Yes... which made visual concealment of the structural details of warships very relevant. The Japanese went to massive lengths to understate and conceal the Yamato-class battleships, for instance, to make sure none of their enemies knew just how big and heavily armed the ships really were.