Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[SpottedKitty]

And if you place your Forts correctly, you are also going to get down the throat vectors.

Only if you're happy with plopping your forts down uncomfortably close to the normal arrival vector of all the traffic — from dinky little courier boats to multi-zillion-ton superfreighters — coming through the Junction, one minor course change glitch away from landing in your lap every few minutes. Maybe an acceptable risk for something like a Case Zulu declaration, though.

[VhenRa]

And if you place your Forts correctly, you are also going to get down the throat vectors.

Only if you're happy with plopping your forts down uncomfortably close to the normal arrival vector of all the traffic — from dinky little courier boats to multi-zillion-ton superfreighters — coming through the Junction, one minor course change glitch away from landing in your lap every few minutes. Maybe an acceptable risk for something like a Case Zulu declaration, though.

You can place them a million klicks away, thats like 3 times the distance between Earth and Luna... I am fairly sure they are going to stop beforehand. If they are going to continue plowing straight towards you despite having 900 thousand kilometres to stop... you can fairly justifiably gun them down with the Fort's grasers.

[Terralthra]

I believe VhrenRa meant 500,000 as in five hundred thousand not five hundred million.

Yeah... I did. -Facepalm-

I be fail at math, that isn't usual for me. Yeah, I meant 500k KMs being energy range. Its also stated energy range without a sidewall... is a million KMs. So park your Forts out around a million KMs... and you are within energy range and with your spherical sidewall, they aren't. And gun them down as they exit the wormhole, without sidewalls.

That's actually incredibly dumb, as is pointed out in the very first novel. Attackers through a wormhole will always have the advantage of surprise, and come through with targeting computers up and looking for targets. Defenders must delay targeting and firing, else they'd occasionally pot a megafreighter or superdreadnought with a malfunctioning IFF.

This is assuming a junction attack into fortifications is a valid strategem, which I don't actually think it is (as covered in depth in an earlier thread). A junction transit attack is valid against little to no fortifications, but against even minimal defenses, the maximum transit mass cap makes it a ruinously sacrificial stragem against even moderate fortification, let alone the massive forts the RMN has.

[VhenRa]

I believe VhrenRa meant 500,000 as in five hundred thousand not five hundred million.

Yeah... I did. -Facepalm-

I be fail at math, that isn't usual for me. Yeah, I meant 500k KMs being energy range. Its also stated energy range without a sidewall... is a million KMs. So park your Forts out around a million KMs... and you are within energy range and with your spherical sidewall, they aren't. And gun them down as they exit the wormhole, without sidewalls.

That's actually incredibly dumb, as is pointed out in the very first novel. Attackers through a wormhole will always have the advantage of surprise, and come through with targeting computers up and looking for targets. Defenders must delay targeting and firing, else they'd occasionally pot a megafreighter or superdreadnought with a malfunctioning IFF.

This is assuming a junction attack into fortifications is a valid strategem, which I don't actually think it is (as covered in depth in an earlier thread). A junction transit attack is valid against little to no fortifications, but against even minimal defenses, the maximum transit mass cap makes it a ruinously sacrificial stragem against even moderate fortification, let alone the massive forts the RMN has.

Yes, the initial vessels through will have time to activate their sidewalls... but the ones afterwards are basically flying into defenses where they will have fire inbound before they can in effect raise shields. And thats assuming a San Martin style situtation, if you have forces on the other side even a destroyer, you can drop a message buoy (Telling everyone the Wormhole is closed and any target attempting to cross will be shot on sight, even civilian hulls) and then have the destroyer flee through to tell the defenders on the other side that someone now controls that side of the wormhole. In that scenario... you then bring in your minelayers and mine the wormhole.

[Terralthra]

Yes, the initial vessels through will have time to activate their sidewalls... but the ones afterwards are basically flying into defenses where they will have fire inbound before they can in effect raise shields. And thats assuming a San Martin style situtation, if you have forces on the other side even a destroyer, you can drop a message buoy (Telling everyone the Wormhole is closed and any target attempting to cross will be shot on sight, even civilian hulls) and then have the destroyer flee through to tell the defenders on the other side that someone now controls that side of the wormhole. In that scenario... you then bring in your minelayers and mine the wormhole.

What "ones afterward"? The only reasonably effective way to go about a wormhole attack is to jump in the maximum wave, some 200 mtons, which locks the wormhole down for 17 hours. Your first wave gets obliterated, but takes out a bunch of forts. Then...you wait. The wormhole unlocks, but you keep waiting. Waiting for them to stand down their forces, because no military can keep that many personnel on high alert forever. Sooner or later, they'd have to stand some down, and when you predict that would happen, you send another 200 mton wave through.

[VhenRa]

Yes, the initial vessels through will have time to activate their sidewalls... but the ones afterwards are basically flying into defenses where they will have fire inbound before they can in effect raise shields. And thats assuming a San Martin style situtation, if you have forces on the other side even a destroyer, you can drop a message buoy (Telling everyone the Wormhole is closed and any target attempting to cross will be shot on sight, even civilian hulls) and then have the destroyer flee through to tell the defenders on the other side that someone now controls that side of the wormhole. In that scenario... you then bring in your minelayers and mine the wormhole.

What "ones afterward"? The only reasonably effective way to go about a wormhole attack is to jump in the maximum wave, some 200 mtons, which locks the wormhole down for 17 hours. Your first wave gets obliterated, but takes out a bunch of forts. Then...you wait. The wormhole unlocks, but you keep waiting. Waiting for them to stand down their forces, because no military can keep that many personnel on high alert forever. Sooner or later, they'd have to stand some down, and when you predict that would happen, you send another 200 mton wave through.

I am talking later ships in the same wave. First few will have surprise on their side, but you can rig macros and the like to automatically hose down ships coming through the wormhole at the flick of a switch. They don't send them through all at once, the sheer mechanics of it wouldn't work. There isn't enough space in space, is there? Your ships will kill themselves when they switch to Wedges.

[Terralthra]

I am talking later ships in the same wave. First few will have surprise on their side, but you can rig macros and the like to automatically hose down ships coming through the wormhole at the flick of a switch. They don't send them through all at once, the sheer mechanics of it wouldn't work. There isn't enough space in space, is there? Your ships will kill themselves when they switch to Wedges.

The Warshawski sail is no smaller in overall diameter than the impeller wedge, 200-300km or so for SDs. The central terminus itself is listed as being a spherical volume one light-second (roughly 299 Mm) in diameter. ~25 SDs can easily fit in that volume many times over, since an SD's "spherical wedge clearance" volume is approximately 9-10 orders of magnitude smaller than the terminus. (1.4 * 10^7 km^3 per SD, roughly, 1.3 * 10^16 km^3 for the terminus).

[VhenRa]

I was talking flying THROUGH the wormhole in one group.

[White Haven]

As opposed to what, feeding one superdreadnought at a time into the teeth of energy fire from massive, massively-parallel fortresses? A simultaneous transit at least has a shadow's chance in a blast furnace of using its own members as ablative armour to buy time to kill forts. Sending through a ship at a time in a sequential transit? The only advantage to a wormhole attacker is that they have the element of surprise, the initiative. The first ship emerges. Surprise! It pokes one fortress, might even kill it unawares. The second ship emerges. God's own energy batteries slice it to ribbons while it's still trying to reconfigure from Warshawski sails. Attacking the Junction forts is already the next best thing to a World War I infantry charge against machine guns; doing so without a maximum-mass transit is taking it one step beyond and charging a prepare position with machine-guns in a single-file line.

Terralthra hit it on the nose with his dubious stance about Junction transit attacks against Manticore. Consider that Haven spent years during the war with a direct hotline to the Manticore system, and they never once tried to use it before White Haven took it away from them. They tried to secure another terminus, because the mass limit is per-link and that would have theoretically allowed two mass-transit attacks at once, but even then, that would be a nightmare to coordinate between Trevor's Star and Basilisk. The real benefit to Haven from controlling Trevor's Star and, hypothetically, Basilisk, is the strain it puts on the already-manpower-starved Manticore from having to man enough forts to skullfuck any potential mass-transit attack, with enough extra crews that they can always have people at more-or-less-battle-stations. Haven wasn't stupid enough to actually attack, but the fact that they could forced Manticore to honor the threat.

[VhenRa]

I am saying, I thought maximum mass transit was sending them through one at a time with no waiting time. I don't' remember it described as them all coming through Starfire Archanids style. With a non-max being spending a few minutes between ships.

[Mr Bean]

Every time we've seen talk of the mass assault via Trevor's Star it's always been a two pronged attack with a mass transit of nothing but lightly manned Super dreadnaughts selected for the job an assumed lost combined with a traditional out of system attack via a normal fleet. The Wormhole attack lets you put a hundred odd capital ships in the heart of the Manticore system and since they have surprise it's not hard to spec them to fire at anything not a fellow ship with grasers, lasers and missiles. Yes they get torn to pieces but remember you need to build and man enough forts to stop close to one hundred super dreadnaughts. These forts must be manned and ready to go any second of the day on every day of the year.

Yes your tossing away a hundred ships, but because you are planning to throw away a hundred ships the defenders must have enough forts in enough places manned enough to stop a hundred ship attack and you don't built enough forts strong enough to just stop just that hundred ships your defenses need to be built worst case because the Wormhole has a ton of important stuff around it. If for nothing else than convenience space is crowded around that area.

So at the end of the day the reason why holding a wormhole is so important is simple, because if the enemy holds a wormhole you need to throw up enough defenses to stop any physically possible attack via the wormhole plus the fleet to defend those unimportant things called planets everyone lives on.

[White Haven]

A hundred-odd? Try thirty-ish.

And a simultaneous transit /is not/ a sequential transit. That's explicitly the difference between the two. White Haven bringing his entire fleet from Trevor's Star through Manticore to Basilisk? That's a sequential transit. Harrington saying 'Hold the screen and bring the rest through in one jump right now' is a mass transit.

[Mr Bean]

A hundred-odd? Try thirty-ish.

And a simultaneous transit /is not/ a sequential transit. That's explicitly the difference between the two. White Haven bringing his entire fleet from Trevor's Star through Manticore to Basilisk? That's a sequential transit. Harrington saying 'Hold the screen and bring the rest through in one jump right now' is a mass transit.

I thought Harrington brings 40 odd through by herself in the last book?

[White Haven]

Sixteen of her thirty-two superdreadnoughts were still in Trevor's Star, as were all of Samuel Miklos's carriers and thirty of her battlecruisers. She looked at the numbers for perhaps one heartbeat, then turned back to her staff.
"Mercedes, send a dispatch boat back to Trevor's Star. Inform Admiral Miller that he's in command and that he's to hold all of our battlecruisers there. Tell him he's responsible for covering Trevor's Star until we get back to him. Then instruct Judah to bring Admiral Miklos' carriers and all of the rest of the wallers through in a single transit."
<snip>
Besides, there were only thirty-eight of them--less than half her own strength, even if all of them were wallers and not carriers.

Sixteen superdreadnoughts brought through in sequentials, followed by a mass-transit of another sixteen superdreadnoughts and six carriers (22 capital ships, even allowing for the lower mass of first-generation Manticoran carriers) to round out the remainder of the 38 ships. Not even a maximum-mass transit.

[Terralthra]

I think the confusion here is over what a wormhole transit actually means. It's not a wormhole transit in the Star Trek sense, where there is literally a hole in space, a volume that if you fly through, you will go through a tunnel that ends at another volume further away through normal space than it was through your route.

A wormhole terminus in the Honorverse is a spot where there is such a massive grav wave distortion that if you go there in normal space with your Warshawski sails up (normally useless in normal space), there is enough of a wave front there that you can even get propulsion from it in n-space. If you're in that volume with your sails up and you activate your hyper generator, the wave front teleports you in an instant to the other terminus, hundreds of light-years away. When you hit your hyper generator to transit, the wave-front, in the process of teleporting you, destabilizes for a period of time proportional to the square of the mass transiting the wormhole. During that time, nothing else can transit that particular junction<->terminus connection.

There's also a ceiling on the absolute amount of mass you can bring through at one time: for the Manticoran junction, it's around 200 megatons of ship. Since there aren't any ships that mass 200 mtons, it's fairly obvious that multiple ships can get into the terminus volume and trigger their hyper generators at the same time for a simultaneous transit. The biggest ships around are bulk freighters and superdreadnoughts, both of which max out around 8 mtons, so one could theoretically send a wave of 25 or so freighters or superdreadnoughts in a single transit - which will lock down the junction for > 17 hours (remember, proportional to the square of mass; if you're trying to maximize transit mass per time, sending through individual ships will be faster if you have more than you can put through in a single transit).

That's why both Kuzak and Harrington were sending through individual capital ships until Chin's fleet pincered Kuzak, at which point Harrington said "put every capital ship left through at once, we'll make do without the remaining screen", because the need to have 8th Fleet's wall NOW outweighed the need to have the screen. In effect, it was a gamble that the cruisers still waiting for transit wouldn't contribute materially to the battle to such a degree that they were worth delaying moving out against Chin as soon as possible. Since Harrington never intended to take 8th Fleet into enemy range, she decided she could do without the missile defense thickening that the cruisers provided.

Nevertheless, the point is that at any time, a junction terminus held by the enemy could turn from empty space to a formation of 200 mtons of hostile warships, and there is no way at all to know they are coming. So, if you have your forts in energy range, they could get slaughtered by the hostiles in a dash into knife range, while holding them all outside energy range means they have time to at least come to full readiness while the first wave of missiles are in flight.

As I've said before, I am very dubious that any fleet would go through with the kind of attack plan this requires against an enemy who HAS fortified their junction. Manticore has hundreds of forts in the beginning of the war, meaning that even if Haven's SDs destroyed twice their weight in forts, it would take literally 6+ waves of superdreadnought crews willing to follow literal suicide orders in hopes that the 8th or 10th wave would achieve some level of victory. Even with two termini, that's still 4+ waves of double-transits of suicide. I have trouble buying that even the CPS would feed its fleet into the meat grinder that way. The goal of controlling the terminus was to make Manticore honor the threat of a terminus assault by fortifying it - tying up resources and manpwoer - not ever a realistic chance that they would attack into said fortifications.

---

Mind, I'm not sure that anyone has really taken note of how the SD(P) and the self-tractoring pod have changed the calculus of war when it comes to junction termini. 25 SDs in near energy range would take their mass in forts with them as they were blown away, maybe more. 25 SD(P)s with thousands of pods tractored to their hulls, thousands more floating inside their hyper generators' field, and enough pods in their core to sustain a minute or two of launches could probably destroy many times their mass of forts in the minute or so they have before return fire from the forts overkills them. They'd still get destroyed, and I have my doubts about any fleet who has SD(P)s ordering that sort of 100% suicide mission, but the kill ratio in terms of mass and lives would be ruinously in their favor.

[Mr Bean]

Okay so the size amount allowed to make a Junction Suicide run is far lower than I thought but the point remains (to a lesser degree granted) you need to have forts strong enough to take 30 super dreadnaughts in a surprise attack and win. Note that this only need be part of your strategy. It's quite possible for example to throw 30 SD away while sending ina fleet of 90 from outside the system as the surprise attack is a hell of a shocker.

Imagine the Battle of Manticore if Haven still held a terminus, when Tourville in and goes to make contact when 30 SD pop in an salvo MDM in all direction. Imagine 300,000 missiles suddenly targeting everything around Manticore as lightspeed weapons go on autofire at all targets... it's a hell of a mess in the time it takes for beam's and missiles to wipe them out. And given the intended use it makes sense to special purpose them as Terralthra points to. What could Haven do if they knew they were going to lose 30 SD's and had a few months of yard time to prepare? What could they strip out, repurpose or add on to make them that much more damaging or that much more survivable? The first thing that comes to mind is if you know your going in with sails then make a twin to the forts they will be firing, IE just enough propulsion to get them through the terminus and salvo their ammo load and use the space savings on better sensors/armor or what have you.

[Simon_Jester]

And if you place your Forts correctly, you are also going to get down the throat vectors.

Only if you're happy with plopping your forts down uncomfortably close to the normal arrival vector of all the traffic — from dinky little courier boats to multi-zillion-ton superfreighters — coming through the Junction, one minor course change glitch away from landing in your lap every few minutes. Maybe an acceptable risk for something like a Case Zulu declaration, though.

No, they're only uncomfortably close to the normal arrival vector of all the traffic coming to the Junction from that wormhole. Each wormhole has different arrival and entry vectors.

And if you're seriously worried about enemy capital ship formation jumping out of the wormhole howling for blood, then you probably don't have much if any normal traffic coming through that wormhole anyway. So I don't think it's a problem.

That's actually incredibly dumb, as is pointed out in the very first novel. Attackers through a wormhole will always have the advantage of surprise, and come through with targeting computers up and looking for targets. Defenders must delay targeting and firing, else they'd occasionally pot a megafreighter or superdreadnought with a malfunctioning IFF.

This is assuming a junction attack into fortifications is a valid strategem, which I don't actually think it is (as covered in depth in an earlier thread). A junction transit attack is valid against little to no fortifications, but against even minimal defenses, the maximum transit mass cap makes it a ruinously sacrificial stragem against even moderate fortification, let alone the massive forts the RMN has.

The catch is that you already know exactly where the attackers are, so finding them is trivially easy, and they don't have wedges or sidewalls because those don't work in the immediate environs of the wormhole mouth.

For a few minutes they have no means of defending themselves other than point defense lasers, active jamming from shipboard emitters only, and passive armor. They're screwed.

I am talking later ships in the same wave. First few will have surprise on their side, but you can rig macros and the like to automatically hose down ships coming through the wormhole at the flick of a switch. They don't send them through all at once, the sheer mechanics of it wouldn't work. There isn't enough space in space, is there? Your ships will kill themselves when they switch to Wedges.

You can either send 20-30 or so capital ships all at once (how this works with wedge activation I dunno), or you can send one at a time indefinitely, spaced a minute or two apart. The latter is obviously useless for battering through terminus fortifications.

I am saying, I thought maximum mass transit was sending them through one at a time with no waiting time. I don't' remember it described as them all coming through Starfire Archanids style. With a non-max being spending a few minutes between ships.

The physics of the junction impose waiting time between ships. Whereas you CAN send multiple ships simultaneously, up to a limit.

Mind, I'm not sure that anyone has really taken note of how the SD(P) and the self-tractoring pod have changed the calculus of war when it comes to junction termini. 25 SDs in near energy range would take their mass in forts with them as they were blown away, maybe more. 25 SD(P)s with thousands of pods tractored to their hulls, thousands more floating inside their hyper generators' field, and enough pods in their core to sustain a minute or two of launches could probably destroy many times their mass of forts in the minute or so they have before return fire from the forts overkills them. They'd still get destroyed, and I have my doubts about any fleet who has SD(P)s ordering that sort of 100% suicide mission, but the kill ratio in terms of mass and lives would be ruinously in their favor.

The catch is that the same technology of self-tractoring pods (do TRACTORS even work in the 'grav wave' conditions of the wormhole?) also allows you to build very cheap, low-manpower terminus fortifications. So the forts don't need to cost as much to build. Plus, impeller drive missiles have wedges and can't be launched immediately after emerging from the wormhole.

Imagine the Battle of Manticore if Haven still held a terminus, when Tourville in and goes to make contact when 30 SD pop in an salvo MDM in all direction. Imagine 300,000 missiles suddenly targeting everything around Manticore as lightspeed weapons go on autofire at all targets...

Note that the ONLY thing in range of the junction is the junction itself. There are no other relevant targets.

[Mr Bean]

Imagine the Battle of Manticore if Haven still held a terminus, when Tourville in and goes to make contact when 30 SD pop in an salvo MDM in all direction. Imagine 300,000 missiles suddenly targeting everything around Manticore as lightspeed weapons go on autofire at all targets...

Note that the ONLY thing in range of the junction is the junction itself. There are no other relevant targets.

You don't count the repair areas ammo storage, shipping or anything else within 50 million miles as a valid target? If there is nothing worth targeting why are the forts there instead of just mobile forces?

Keep in mind stated targeting ranges of 50 million+ for MDM's is 50% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. In other words even if the Junction is devoid of anything valuable besides the forts, if anything is within that 50 million range MDM fire can hit it. And since planets are pretty far from the Junction that means you can blind fire trusting in auto destruct to take care of anything outside say 200 million assuming your willing to let you MDM go ballastic which... considering you want to hit things like shipyards might be a great idea.

[Terralthra]

That's actually incredibly dumb, as is pointed out in the very first novel. Attackers through a wormhole will always have the advantage of surprise, and come through with targeting computers up and looking for targets. Defenders must delay targeting and firing, else they'd occasionally pot a megafreighter or superdreadnought with a malfunctioning IFF.

This is assuming a junction attack into fortifications is a valid strategem, which I don't actually think it is (as covered in depth in an earlier thread). A junction transit attack is valid against little to no fortifications, but against even minimal defenses, the maximum transit mass cap makes it a ruinously sacrificial stragem against even moderate fortification, let alone the massive forts the RMN has.

The catch is that you already know exactly where the attackers are, so finding them is trivially easy, and they don't have wedges or sidewalls because those don't work in the immediate environs of the wormhole mouth.

For a few minutes they have no means of defending themselves other than point defense lasers, active jamming from shipboard emitters only, and passive armor. They're screwed.

Based on the example of the collision of the two screening ships in Echoes of Honor, it's more like less than a minute, which is the flight time of missiles from the forts anyway. Plus, unless there's something truly bizarre about the warshawski sails, those are just as impenetrable as the wedges are, so smart ship handlers will be able to maneuvre to block incoming fire with those.

Mind, I'm not sure that anyone has really taken note of how the SD(P) and the self-tractoring pod have changed the calculus of war when it comes to junction termini. 25 SDs in near energy range would take their mass in forts with them as they were blown away, maybe more. 25 SD(P)s with thousands of pods tractored to their hulls, thousands more floating inside their hyper generators' field, and enough pods in their core to sustain a minute or two of launches could probably destroy many times their mass of forts in the minute or so they have before return fire from the forts overkills them. They'd still get destroyed, and I have my doubts about any fleet who has SD(P)s ordering that sort of 100% suicide mission, but the kill ratio in terms of mass and lives would be ruinously in their favor.

The catch is that the same technology of self-tractoring pods (do TRACTORS even work in the 'grav wave' conditions of the wormhole?) also allows you to build very cheap, low-manpower terminus fortifications. So the forts don't need to cost as much to build. Plus, impeller drive missiles have wedges and can't be launched immediately after emerging from the wormhole.

The mass drivers on the launchers will get them just as clear of the immediate transit zone as they get them clear of the wedge. If ships coming out of the terminus were really so helpless (no wedge, no missiles), then no one would be worried about a transit attack; a battle squadron could carve up an entire transit wave easily.

And if you really couldn't fire a wedge-based missile inside the anomaly, then the demonstrated method of getting a ship into it (fly in under power, switch half your wedge to sail, wait until the sail is getting power to accelerate the ship, then rig the aftersail) would result in blowed-up ships. The wedge can be used inside it, which means missiles work inside it too.

As for tractors, yes, those work inside it too, because in the aforementioned screening-ship collision, the vessels' consorts tractor them clear so they don't cause a pileup behind them.

I agree with you that the advent of "fortress = pod-launched missile swarm controller" makes the junction-transit assault incredibly suicidal for the attacker, but I thought it was suicidal to launch it anyway. The point is that you have to honor the threat, as you point out, regardless of the suicidal nature of the attack, and the vastly increased "instantaneous firepower" of the SD(P) makes the 200 mtons of warship that can transit much more deadly than it was around 1900 PD.

[VhenRa]

Thats what the current gen Manty forts are, from memory. Essentially SDPs writ large. Absurd amounts of missile pods, missile control of the gods, sitting far back, with enough pods floating/on tractor to let them throw out the most almighty salvo ever imagined. Fairly sure the Manties also mined the wormhole terminus, especially the San Martin lane during the 1st war.

[Simon_Jester]

Imagine the Battle of Manticore if Haven still held a terminus, when Tourville in and goes to make contact when 30 SD pop in an salvo MDM in all direction. Imagine 300,000 missiles suddenly targeting everything around Manticore as lightspeed weapons go on autofire at all targets...

Note that the ONLY thing in range of the junction is the junction itself. There are no other relevant targets.

You don't count the repair areas ammo storage, shipping or anything else within 50 million miles as a valid target? If there is nothing worth targeting why are the forts there instead of just mobile forces?

Excuse me, those were ill-chosen words.

What I meant to say is that the only thing located at the Junction is the infrastructure and defenses of the Junction itself. Destroying it would be Bad News for the Star Kingdom. But it wouldn't be a war-ending injury; you could literally blow up everything around the Junction and Manticore would retain the ability to wage war very effectively.

And since the attacking force coming through the Junction would still suffer 100% losses... well. Writing off three or four squadrons of capital ships with all hands as part of a decisive battle intended to win the war in an afternoon is difficult enough to justify. But now you're talking about trading three or four squadrons of capital ships for a raid against enemy infrastructure.

That's a very sharp downgrade in the expected payoff for the mission. And it's hard to imagine any military in which merely a stroke against the enemy logistics would be worth sacrificing two hundred thousand men and two hundred million tons of warship like so many spent ammunition cartridges.

Keep in mind stated targeting ranges of 50 million+ for MDM's is 50% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. In other words even if the Junction is devoid of anything valuable besides the forts, if anything is within that 50 million range MDM fire can hit it. And since planets are pretty far from the Junction that means you can blind fire trusting in auto destruct to take care of anything outside say 200 million assuming your willing to let you MDM go ballastic which... considering you want to hit things like shipyards might be a great idea.

The flip side of that is that the shipyards and other industrial targets are all within the hyper limit of Manticore proper... and therefore are tens of astronomical units away from the junction, safely outside of missile range.

For a few minutes they have no means of defending themselves other than point defense lasers, active jamming from shipboard emitters only, and passive armor. They're screwed.

Based on the example of the collision of the two screening ships in Echoes of Honor, it's more like less than a minute, which is the flight time of missiles from the forts anyway. Plus, unless there's something truly bizarre about the warshawski sails, those are just as impenetrable as the wedges are, so smart ship handlers will be able to maneuvre to block incoming fire with those.

1) Would you mind refreshing my memory? I've heard things that contradict that. Also, missiles could easily be emplaced less than a minute from the wormhole exit vector, especially with missile pods.

As to the 'use Warshawski sails to block incoming fire," they are impenetrable... but they also point at more or less right angles to the hull. So they're not very effective at stopping enemy fire from a laser head because they don't block the laser head very well.

The mass drivers on the launchers will get them just as clear of the immediate transit zone as they get them clear of the wedge.

True, but the ballistic phase involved is longer, making it easier to spot the missiles and possibly even engage them with beam weapons (or large, blast-effect mines) before they light off their drives. This is especially an issue if you are deploying the missiles very densely, say because of a thick cloud of missile pods.

If ships coming out of the terminus were really so helpless (no wedge, no missiles), then no one would be worried about a transit attack; a battle squadron could carve up an entire transit wave easily.

Prior to the laser head this was not really true- because the only way to rapidly carve up a ship was with beam weapons, and if you could get into beam range of an enemy capital ship exiting the Junction, it would be able to shoot back and at least stand a fighting chance.

And you'll note that the RMN's decision to heavily fortify the Junction was made before the laser head became an established and well understood part of doctrine.

And if you really couldn't fire a wedge-based missile inside the anomaly, then the demonstrated method of getting a ship into it (fly in under power, switch half your wedge to sail, wait until the sail is getting power to accelerate the ship, then rig the aftersail) would result in blowed-up ships. The wedge can be used inside it, which means missiles work inside it too.

The power level of the wedge may matter here; I wouldn't assume that. Note that ships operate at very low accelerations while maneuvering under impeller drive near a wormhole terminus.

As for tractors, yes, those work inside it too, because in the aforementioned screening-ship collision, the vessels' consorts tractor them clear so they don't cause a pileup behind them.

Well, the question is whether the tractors and wedges were being activated inside the 'anomaly zone' in which it is unsafe to use the wedge. Or whether they were activated later, only after each ship had emerged from that zone. Obviously once you clear the anomalous volume immediately around the terminus, you can use wedges all you like... but how long does it take to get clear?

I agree with you that the advent of "fortress = pod-launched missile swarm controller" makes the junction-transit assault incredibly suicidal for the attacker, but I thought it was suicidal to launch it anyway. The point is that you have to honor the threat, as you point out, regardless of the suicidal nature of the attack, and the vastly increased "instantaneous firepower" of the SD(P) makes the 200 mtons of warship that can transit much more deadly than it was around 1900 PD.

True, but as long as you have the means to ensure that the SD(P)s do not survive the attack, at worst you are trading the Junction infrastructure for three or four squadrons of the enemy's wall. Which may not actually be that bad a rate of exchange, though it'd still be a dark day in the history of the RMN... and that's before we take into account the swarms of LACs and probably fixed defensive installations capable of shooting down masses of missiles.

[Also, note that in this case the wormhole attackers are firing their MDMs from a point that is already in range of the enemy missile defenses at the time of launch. It's a 'boost-phase' interception problem, not the usual issue of dealing with missiles that have had thirty or forty million kilometers of running distance to build up to half the speed of light. This will make antimissile defense far more effective in shooting down a larger percentage of the MDM barrage].

[Terralthra]

For a few minutes they have no means of defending themselves other than point defense lasers, active jamming from shipboard emitters only, and passive armor. They're screwed.

Based on the example of the collision of the two screening ships in Echoes of Honor, it's more like less than a minute, which is the flight time of missiles from the forts anyway. Plus, unless there's something truly bizarre about the warshawski sails, those are just as impenetrable as the wedges are, so smart ship handlers will be able to maneuvre to block incoming fire with those.

1) Would you mind refreshing my memory? I've heard things that contradict that.

Thirty-nine destroyers hovered just beyond the terminus threshold. They'd come through in a steady stream, as rapidly and remorselessly as an old, prespace freight train, and Reynaud had felt like some small, terrified animal frozen on the rails as the train's headlamp thundered down upon him. But he'd handed each warship off to its own controller, cycling through the available list with feverish speed, and somehow—he still wasn't sure how—they'd managed to avoid outright collisions.

But not all damage. HMS Glorioso had been just a fraction of a second too slow reconfiguring from sails to wedge, and HMS Vixen had run right up her backside. Fortunately, perhaps, the second destroyer had gotten her wedge up quickly, for it had come on-line one bare instant before Glorioso's had, but without building to full power. Which meant that only Glorioso's after nodes had blown. The resultant explosion had vaporized two-thirds of her after impeller room, and Reynaud had no desire at all to think about how many people it must have killed when it went, but it hadn't destroyed her hull or her compensator, and the fail-safes had blown in time to save her forward impellers. Momentum, coupled with instantaneous and brilliant evasive action on Vixen's part, had been just sufficient to carry her clear of an outright collision, and two of her sisters had speared her with tractors and dragged her bodily out of the way of Vixen's next astern. But for all that, it had been impossibly close. A thousandth of a second's difference in when either wedge came on-line, a dozen meters difference in their relative locations, a single split-second of distraction on the part of Vixen's watch officer or helmsman, and not only would they have collided, but the next ship in line would have plowed straight into their molten wreckage in the beginning of a chain-reaction collision that could have killed thousands.

But they'd avoided it, and now the first superdreadnoughts were coming through. The huge ships were much slower on the helm, but they were almost as quick to reconfigure from sails to wedge, and their longer transit windows gave them precious additional seconds to maneuver. They were actually easier to handle than the destroyers had been, and Reynaud leaned back in his chair and mopped the skim of sweat from his forehead.

It certainly seems to imply, to me, that the amount of time getting a destroyer clear of the hypothesized no-wedge zone is not much longer than the transit window for a destroyer, based on the description, and SDs themselves take less time to get free of the zone than the transit window for an SD. Other relevant quotes:

His screening units, up to and including his battlecruisers, would each produce a ten-second blockage of the route for whoever came next in line, but his dreadnoughts would close the route for almost seventy seconds and each superdreadnought would shut it down for a hundred and thirteen. Which meant that cramming his entire fleet through would require a minimum of a hundred and eight minutes. Add in the time required just to reach the Trevor's Star terminus, and it would be over a hundred and sixty-six minutes—over two and three-quarters hours—before his last ship could possibly reach Basilisk.

Under normal circumstances, the minimum allowable transit window was one minute. Usually the windows actually ran considerably longer than that, since the number of ships awaiting passage was seldom large enough to cause ACS to push the minimum. But that limitation had been adopted for a very simple reason: to give people time to get out of the way.

A ship made transit under Warshawski sail. Those sails provided no propulsion in n-space, but a wormhole junction was best thought of as a frozen funnel of hyper-space which happened to connect to n-space at either end. That meant sails not only could be used in a junction transit, but that the transiting vessel had no option but to use them. And that, in turn, meant each ship had to reconfigure its impeller nodes from sail to wedge as it emerged from the far side of the wormhole. Its sails would leave it with some momentum, but not very much, and if the lead ship in a transit was even a little tardy reconfiguring and the one astern of it ran up its backside—

If a destroyer destabilizes the terminus for ten seconds, but got run over by another destroyer configuring to wedge, that would seem to imply that it takes less than ten seconds to get into the "wedge-allowed" zone, if such a thing exists.

What's the evidence for a no-wedge zone?

Also, missiles could easily be emplaced less than a minute from the wormhole exit vector, especially with missile pods.

They could be, but with no sidewalls, they'd be easy to target and blow away with the attacking force's formerly useless energy armament. If you do put sidewalls on them, you have to put a wedge on them, and now you have small fortresses...

Not sure if that's a win or a lose, really.

As to the 'use Warshawski sails to block incoming fire," they are impenetrable... but they also point at more or less right angles to the hull. So they're not very effective at stopping enemy fire from a laser head because they don't block the laser head very well.

They cover the front and back to a radius of a few hundred km, but you're right, they're certainly not as effective as the wedge and sidewalls.

The mass drivers on the launchers will get them just as clear of the immediate transit zone as they get them clear of the wedge.

True, but the ballistic phase involved is longer, making it easier to spot the missiles and possibly even engage them with beam weapons (or large, blast-effect mines) before they light off their drives. This is especially an issue if you are deploying the missiles very densely, say because of a thick cloud of missile pods.

Granted, depending on the size of this no-wedge zone.

If ships coming out of the terminus were really so helpless (no wedge, no missiles), then no one would be worried about a transit attack; a battle squadron could carve up an entire transit wave easily.

Prior to the laser head this was not really true- because the only way to rapidly carve up a ship was with beam weapons, and if you could get into beam range of an enemy capital ship exiting the Junction, it would be able to shoot back and at least stand a fighting chance.

Well, not if they're broadside on and there's a gap of time before the attacking force can bring up their wedges. Put a couple SDs broadside-on to the exit vector with sidewalls up somewhere between 500k and 1m km, and they can fire their energy weapons with impunity while their sidewalls laugh at incoming energy fire...if there's a huge length of no-wedge time. If ships on the other side can put up their wedges fairly quickly, then we'd see what we see now: energy-range is suicide.

And if you really couldn't fire a wedge-based missile inside the anomaly, then the demonstrated method of getting a ship into it (fly in under power, switch half your wedge to sail, wait until the sail is getting power to accelerate the ship, then rig the aftersail) would result in blowed-up ships. The wedge can be used inside it, which means missiles work inside it too.

The power level of the wedge may matter here; I wouldn't assume that. Note that ships operate at very low accelerations while maneuvering under impeller drive near a wormhole terminus.

True, but the difference in distortion/impenetrability is nil whether the ship is accelerating at 1g or 700g.

As for tractors, yes, those work inside it too, because in the aforementioned screening-ship collision, the vessels' consorts tractor them clear so they don't cause a pileup behind them.

Well, the question is whether the tractors and wedges were being activated inside the 'anomaly zone' in which it is unsafe to use the wedge. Or whether they were activated later, only after each ship had emerged from that zone. Obviously once you clear the anomalous volume immediately around the terminus, you can use wedges all you like... but how long does it take to get clear?

Seconds, if my interpretation is correct.

I agree with you that the advent of "fortress = pod-launched missile swarm controller" makes the junction-transit assault incredibly suicidal for the attacker, but I thought it was suicidal to launch it anyway. The point is that you have to honor the threat, as you point out, regardless of the suicidal nature of the attack, and the vastly increased "instantaneous firepower" of the SD(P) makes the 200 mtons of warship that can transit much more deadly than it was around 1900 PD.

True, but as long as you have the means to ensure that the SD(P)s do not survive the attack, at worst you are trading the Junction infrastructure for three or four squadrons of the enemy's wall. Which may not actually be that bad a rate of exchange, though it'd still be a dark day in the history of the RMN... and that's before we take into account the swarms of LACs and probably fixed defensive installations capable of shooting down masses of missiles.

The junction infrastructure is dozens of forts, each of which are at least twice as big as an SD and presumably crewed to match, if not exceed, given their always-at-ready-state. Trading 3 battle squadrons of SDs for 10 times their mass in forts has to be considered a horrendous victory, strategically, even if tactically the attack is "defeated".

Also, note that in this case the wormhole attackers are firing their MDMs from a point that is already in range of the enemy missile defenses at the time of launch. It's a 'boost-phase' interception problem, not the usual issue of dealing with missiles that have had thirty or forty million kilometers of running distance to build up to half the speed of light. This will make antimissile defense far more effective in shooting down a larger percentage of the MDM barrage].

Granted. I just think it comes down to the modern-battleship conundrum: these days, an SD(P) has orders of magnitude more firepower than it itself can withstand, making SD(P) combat at close range much like LAC combat used to be: eggshells armed with hammers. At long range, only the RMN has a hammer, which makes it even more ruinous for their opponents, but the junction lets the SD(P)s without Apollo get the same sort of hammer against the forts, which don't have the sort of engagement time and defensive depth that lets the RMN missile defense doctrine work.

Hell, if it's a suicide mission anyway, might as well just make a few squadrons of cheap-ass Q-ships a la Wayfarer 2.0 with all bays full of missile pods, set all bays to maximum shit-out-missiles with an overclocked hyper generator (possible, cf. HotQ) to take a cloud of pre-deployed pods with them through the junction anyway. Sacrifice way less actual combat material to get maximum missile launch off.

[Simon_Jester]

It certainly seems to imply, to me, that the amount of time getting a destroyer clear of the hypothesized no-wedge zone is not much longer than the transit window for a destroyer, based on the description...

Why? Who says there can't be three, four, or even many destroyers in the no-wedge zone at a time, all coasting ballistically outward from the wormhole mouth?

If a destroyer destabilizes the terminus for ten seconds, but got run over by another destroyer configuring to wedge, that would seem to imply that it takes less than ten seconds to get into the "wedge-allowed" zone, if such a thing exists.

That just means that the lead destroyer took ten seconds too long getting its wedge up and was overtaken by the ship behind it. It says nothing about how long the two ships spend coasting away from the wormhole under non-wedge conditions.

What's the evidence for a no-wedge zone?

I confess that I heard it in either a Weber infodump post or a third party thing, and would have to dig rather hard. If my source is wrong, then fine, the window of vulnerability is indeed much shorter.

Also, missiles could easily be emplaced less than a minute from the wormhole exit vector, especially with missile pods.

They could be, but with no sidewalls, they'd be easy to target and blow away with the attacking force's formerly useless energy armament. If you do put sidewalls on them, you have to put a wedge on them, and now you have small fortresses...

Not sure if that's a win or a lose, really.

The missile pods may well not be detected by the emerging ships until they've already fired; missile pods are stealthy and forming a coherent sensor picture takes time. Also, the maximum one-minute flight time for an Honorverse missile at high acceleration is considerably longer than viable beam weapon range; the beam might well still be tight enough to blow up a missile pod, but acquiring small, stealthy targets and hitting them reliably is going to be hard. Especially if the rest of the defenses are pounding on you with mines and blaring at you with jammers while you try to locate them.

Well, not if they're broadside on and there's a gap of time before the attacking force can bring up their wedges. Put a couple SDs broadside-on to the exit vector with sidewalls up somewhere between 500k and 1m km, and they can fire their energy weapons with impunity while their sidewalls laugh at incoming energy fire...if there's a huge length of no-wedge time. If ships on the other side can put up their wedges fairly quickly, then we'd see what we see now: energy-range is suicide.

Well, even with no wedge, the emerging ships would at least be able to fire with their chase armament into the ships attacking them. They'd accomplish something, and given that as you say, energy range is suicide, they might well manage to score a mission-kill on the defending ships, if not a catastrophic-kill.

And if you really couldn't fire a wedge-based missile inside the anomaly, then the demonstrated method of getting a ship into it (fly in under power, switch half your wedge to sail, wait until the sail is getting power to accelerate the ship, then rig the aftersail) would result in blowed-up ships. The wedge can be used inside it, which means missiles work inside it too.

The power level of the wedge may matter here; I wouldn't assume that. Note that ships operate at very low accelerations while maneuvering under impeller drive near a wormhole terminus.

True, but the difference in distortion/impenetrability is nil whether the ship is accelerating at 1g or 700g.

No, what I mean is that it may be possible to run an impeller wedge at low power in places where running it at high power gets you blown up. Since missile drives run at very high power and cannot easily change acceleration, they might not be safe in a place where a low-acceleration starship could function just fine.

The junction infrastructure is dozens of forts, each of which are at least twice as big as an SD and presumably crewed to match, if not exceed, given their always-at-ready-state. Trading 3 battle squadrons of SDs for 10 times their mass in forts has to be considered a horrendous victory, strategically, even if tactically the attack is "defeated".

Except that those massive forts have already been stood down well before the invention of the self-tractoring missile pod. They are being systematically replaced by what is, essentially, Manticoran!Moriarty and a host of missile pods.

In the pre-pod era you can't use missile spam to blow away the forts the minute your suicide attackers emerge from the wormhole. In the post-pod era you can... but the forts themselves are no longer such a juicy target in their own right because the defender is also using their own pod technology to enhance their ability to blow you away.

Granted. I just think it comes down to the modern-battleship conundrum: these days, an SD(P) has orders of magnitude more firepower than it itself can withstand, making SD(P) combat at close range much like LAC combat used to be: eggshells armed with hammers. At long range, only the RMN has a hammer, which makes it even more ruinous for their opponents, but the junction lets the SD(P)s without Apollo get the same sort of hammer against the forts, which don't have the sort of engagement time and defensive depth that lets the RMN missile defense doctrine work.

Debateable. The catch is that the missiles are flying a lot slower and would be much easier targets for all types of defensive weapons- it takes an MDM about as long to cross the first million kilometers of its flight path as to cross the last fifteen million kilometers. Also, the launch platforms all occupy a very concentrated space, so they're more vulnerable to massed counterfire.

You could literally build a 'wall in space' of ten thousand countermissiles forming a 'broom' about 10-20 thousand kilometers wide and flying straight into the teeth of the enemy missile salvo and be reasonably assured of getting a lot of them without even bothering to use guidance systems.

Hell, if it's a suicide mission anyway, might as well just make a few squadrons of cheap-ass Q-ships a la Wayfarer 2.0 with all bays full of missile pods, set all bays to maximum shit-out-missiles with an overclocked hyper generator (possible, cf. HotQ) to take a cloud of pre-deployed pods with them through the junction anyway. Sacrifice way less actual combat material to get maximum missile launch off.

The main catch is that these missiles (and, to an only slightly lesser extent, those fired from a true SD(P) in this situation) will have NO fire control telemetry, NO information on what they're attacking other than what their own seekers can detect spontaneously.

So, as another issue with the plan, the missiles that do launch without being blown up by mines, beams, or other close-in weapons will be... suboptimally distributed, to say the least. You could probably screw a lot of them up by just building big radar reflectors and stuff, and using that to decoy the relatively dumb missile seekers into attacking fake targets.

[Ahriman238]

Things I learned reading 'House of Steel.'

* Simon has mentioned a few times that one reason Manticore can get away with relatively low taxes is the government makes tons of money off their Magical Space Anomaly, HoSt seems to support that and actually explained how Junction fees work. You begin with a flat rate based on which of three categories your ship falls into; courier, freighter or passenger liner. The last two pay additional amounts based on mass and a surcharge for each ton of cargo or passenger onboard. Add 2.5% for every 100 light-years the wormhole takes them and you're done. Except that Alliance members pay half price and Manty-flag ships pay 40%. Erewhon both lost their Alliance discount and are getting whacked with punitive fees.

* The population of the Manticore Binary System is 3 billion. The estimated population of their acquisitions in San Martin, Talbott and Manticoran Silesia is about 27 billion. Even given 50-75 years of slow integration, I'd say anyone worried about 'Old Kingdom' Manticorans ultimately getting marginalized are only being prudent. Which must be interesting given how their own Constitution was written explicitly to preserve the exclusive rights of those who got their first.

* Marsh, in the Sidemore System is not a part of Manticoran Silesia and is not getting annexed. They remain close allies (no talk of cutting them loose) and site of a now-redundant naval station.

* Mark Sarnow had to depose only five Silesian planetary governors and replace them with his own appointees. I'd say things are going better than expected, considering there are 33 worlds in their half of Silesia. He also appears to be not just a military commander but the appointed Imperial Governor for all Manticoran Silesia.

* Speaking of annexation, it seems the plan was to offer the Medusans from the first book the option of joining the Star Kingdom and having all technology-transfer limits abolished fifty years after the events of the first book, or just thirty from the present. This is contingent on the various city-states forming a world government within that timeframe that can oversee any general plebiscite and it's anyone's guess if they're going to pull it off.

* Axelrod, it's been mentioned once or twice before but the context was nice. The Axelrod Corporation, a Solly firm, heard about wormholes when they were discovered not to be something physicists speculated over one day making, but a real phenomenon that exists naturally and right now went poring over the old system survey records looking for any spatial anomalies that they now understood meant 'wormhole.' Finding one in Manticore, a lightly defended system, they hired a bunch of mercenaries to seize the system and junction by force. At the time the RMN was in something of a slump, consisting of little more than a couple of destroyer flotillas, some frigates and a handful of aging Solly-built BCs (just heavy cruisers by contemporary measure) that were only saved from decomission because they were desperately needed. More, the Navy was having real trouble justifying their continued existence until the invasion fleet arrived and was defeated, having expected the BCs to be scrapped already. And this is how Manticore learned they had wormholes.

I'm sure there was more I'm forgetting. Oh well, I'll find it again I'm sure.

[VhenRa]

Actually, from what I understand. Those BCs were by that point considered to be Heavy Cruisers, let alone today.

Of course, the ships of that era were so bad that the GSN from before the events of Book 2 would look down their nose at them. Salamander-class DDs with only 210g acceleration and a grand total of 12 missiles for their 2 launchers and of course, no grav-plate technology. So they floated around except when in rotating sections.