Some thoughts having watched Andromeda

[Xon]

You are correct, it should be 150gees not 400gees. Managed to transpose those numbers. Also by that stage cap ship acceleration had started to creep up, ~5-8 million metric ton ships could pull ~400 gees and lighter ships where starting to hit ~600 gees.

Another point is the max acceleration of an Honorverse ship is dictated by inertia compensators efficiency and not on how much acceleration the wedge can impart. Missiles using a different style of inertia compensators unsuitable for living crew can hit ~90000 gees.

[Mr Bean]

Internal Dampeners are the weak link on Honorverse technology. It's note along with the missile example that using a wedge one could theoretically accelerate to near C instantly but any ship so doing would instantly tear itself apart along with smear the puny humans into paste. In fact in combat the number 2 killer is Inertia compensator failure during an attack, if a fusion engine lets go the ship is doomed and if the Interia compensator lets go or temporarily fails and pastes the crew. Under combat maneuvering/acceleration conditions the ships themselves can survive the 500g acceleration but the crew of course can not. It speaks highly of how tough Honoverse construction is that an entire ship can be exposed to 500g's and not instantly snap (Or rather the hull itself survives just fine the interior is normally trashed as things like crew quarters give you lots or projectiles to throw around.

(Note smaller ships WILL snap as will any commerical ships if exposed to their own max acceleration which tends to the 200-300g range it's only the battleships and above that are armored enough to withstand that kind of acceleration even temporary)

[Connor MacLeod]

Well, for one thing I do not believe the Honorverse has ever used missiles like the OMs at all due to their sensor/control limitations. That said, you are probably right that I am underestimating the damage a HV ship can take, but this gets really hard to elaborate given the lack of real numbers. I really would wish there would be one source like "having taken X missiles at X speed, the defences failed" etc. So while we can reasonably assume the rate of fire a XMC puts out, we do not really know how much a Honorverse ship can take. And considering the XMCs are not even the real shipkillers.....

you're right, they don't. They can hit sidewalls and wedges with impeller wedge stuff but that's because those things tend to be ridiculously huge and they're not hard to hit. The closest to "contact" hits I can ever recall is the man portable impeller-wedge anti-vehicle missiles they have (in which the wedge literally acts like a solid object, for all intents and purposes, leading me to bleieve that the "sidewalls" behave like literal intangible walls with a gravity sideeffect when projectiles hit them.) People have tried claiming in the past they can use impeller wedge missiles as physical impactors against a moving target but I have yet to see anyone prove otherwise.

And you're right. we don't know, but I see no reason to assume that this gives the XMC a magical ability to penetrate. From what I recall of THoTQ, those two impacts didn't do ANY discernable damage to the sidewall generators, so it's quite possible to say that they could withstand dozens of such repeated impacts before the sidewalls come down. All in all there's not much reason to believe that the XMC can simply batter them down with its missiles.

I fully believe the missiles struck the AP cannons instead of the tanks. For one, the Pax Magellanic had already vented her slipstream core, which raises the possibility of the AP tanks being empty or at least not in (full?) use. Also, given the close range, an AP strike was possible and likely more damaging than missile strikes. (And of course, there is the small matter of the Pax committing suicide, so she may very well have positioned herself for receiving maximum damage).

Fine, but the point is: without it's defenses up, Andromedaverse ships tend to be ludicrously easy to damage, at least by soft-sci fi standards. They rely on avoiding or intercepting hits (stealth, point defense, ect.) or rely on certain active measures to blunt their effectiveness (battle blades and AG fields)

No, but I just find the idea that the ship shape leaving open space a bit funny considering that apparently no other species believed in the same idea. Even if we accept a declining tech level, there is no reason for other, supposedly smart species, not to leave such spaces in their warships as well. Also, considering the fact that missiles in the Andromedaverse have amazing turnaround ratios (for example, in the episode D minus zero defensive missiles at high speed turn around and tumble in space in less than a millisecond) I really fail to see how having open space would help much. Thus, I find the other explanation of "shape helps stealth" much better.

I dont know why you fixated on one part of my comment (the "spread out" bit), but clearly ignored the rest of it (decentralization, redundancy, overpenetration, etc.) since it's all part of the same idea. To reiterate, since I apparently failed to get my point across before: They don't stick huge, thick, cumbersome slabs of armor on their ships and hope that the missile impact will be stopped by said armor (The way, say, the big, ungainly Warhammer 40K Space Cathedrals seem to do - eg like their prows.) They expect the missile to hit, convert itself and part of the hull into plasma due to the immense energies involved, and basically blow through the other side of the hull where most of that energy is wasted rather than doing nasty damage to the ship itself. They have multiple redundant systems, a decentralized structure and self repair capability so that single hits do not prove crippling even when they DO hit something important.

And of course, they have all the aformentioned avoidance and active defense measures to help avoid and mitigate hits (AG fields, battle blades, point defense, EW, etc.)

Do you understand what I am saying now?

Agreed in parts. They are amazing terror weapons and WMDs against planets as well as decent against large ships. The larger the ship, the better the targets as well, though note that PSPs have been used against such fast-moving and small targets like drones (episode 2x04, All Too Human, where a ship equipped with several PSPs quickly targets and shoots down Andromeda's sensor drones).

They eat a hole through the target, and pretty much keep on going, because you're required to shoot them at high velocities at the target (not enough time to "eat" - they shoot them at planets at a much lower velocity as I recall matters.) A kinetic impactor like an OM at least has the chance of creating some sort of secondary blast/explosive effects on impact (especially if they don't put a lot of momentum behind the impactor - hypervelocity and above impacts can be funny that way.)

And in what episode do we see this in?

We've seen fighters attacking starships have we not? While they use missiles like capital ships do they also do fire their energy weapons at the targets. Or are we assuming the glowy pulses also tend to be projectiles?

We do know that at least in several instances in D minus zero the missiles did strike the hull and had sufficient time to accelerate. Even moreso, we do know that enemy ships also suffered impacts from multiple XMC salvos (again, D minus zero) and survived.

Then of course there is the instance in Star Crossed, where Andromeda is completely dead in the water and we see at least eight missiles striking the hull. They also had several seconds to accelerate.

Several seconds isn't enough. I actually think I under-stated the acceleration figure last time, because I was thinking in Newtonian terms (EG no relativistic mass). at 90-95% you're looking at 2-3x increase in the mass of the projectile from the sheer amount of energy behind it, and that enregy does not just come from thin air. I suspect that alone will increase acceleration time quite a bit, nevermind having to accelerate against a moving, dodging target (both to track the target and to maintain the KE you need to do damage)

While we're at it: Assuming the missile accelerates for 2-3sseconds at max acceleration is going to be between 80,000 and 120,000 km/s - for a 1 kg missile you'll get something betwene 700-800 kilotons and a couple MT worth of KE. Not bad, but far from what they are capable of at top speed (and that's assuming that the 1kg mass of the missile is solid warhead - for all we know that part includes the antimatter fuel and propellant needed to push and guide said missile. Quite likely, considering that they're 20 MT on average and not 30-40 MT.) And I'm still assuming they fire on a completely immobile, non-reactive target.

Gravity sensors sure. But can they track objects/ships without a wedge?

They track the wedge by its gravity signature, much like they track any object emitting gravity (grav plates and the like.) Gravitics are passive, and track on a phenomena related to the peculiarities of Honorverse hyperspace. The only possible way they wouldn't be able to track any Andromeda verse use of gravity is if a.) the AG tech they use really isn't gravity, which seems unlikely, or b.) you assume for some reason honorverse hyperspace doesn't exist in Andromeda, which is absurd.

Detection is one thing however, the quality of detection is another matter entirely, since other universes will be lacking that huge, obvious wedge. A point I believe I've made sufficiently already.

Nevertheless, this seems to me like a pretty unusual tactic. We do not see them use it when it would suit them - like warp-strafing the Cardassian planetary defences or so in the Dominion war - which leads me to believe this tactic was either abandoned for good or had too much drawbacks/counters developed to it.

You're assuming that utilizing warp (or impulse with mass lightening) in combat would have absolutely no drawbacks, though. ST Mass lightening actually seems to have drawbacks to it unlike in Andromeda, where an XMC can "lighten" itself to the mass of a kilogram using megawatts of power from its GFG, accelerate up to a huge margin of the speed of light, and yet magically slam itself into a planet with all the KE it would have if it was a 100,000 ton starship moving at a huge chunk of lightspeed. All without apparently violating some rather fundamental conservation laws or generating free energy. One of those drawbacks of course is that, as a lighter ship, you're considerably easier to push around - stuff like weapons recoil (or weapons impacts) could have all sorts of nasty side effects for knocking you about (and we know ST doesn't turn photorps or other devices into Magical Mass Lightened KKV of doom, despite what certain pro trek fanboys have claimed in the past.)

Furthermore it generally gives them no decided advantage over the other side because they tend to have warp too (and the ability to track it.) It's also debatable you'd be able to fire phasers with much brute force with significant ML going on (recoil again.) but rely on the NDFIng to do damage.

Visuals are supposed to be ignored if they contradict the written material. Other than that, they can be used.

It also gives Andromeda fans an excuse to be arbitrary WRT evidence (eg "we can pick and choose which visuals are acceptable and which aren't.") It would be nice if they would be more consistent than that, but really it's never worth arguing over since it rarely helps them much (which does not make it any less arbitrary or logically inconsistent.)

Transporters however can easily be messed with in general. Jamming, gravity fields etc...all with the potential to mess with transporters.

Which, if you noticed, I freely admitted to already. "making more difficult" is not the same thing as "rendering totally useless" and in the sorts of ways I described using transporters I question whether accuracy is that crucial.

That might work, but space is very huge for things just to run into each other.

The Andromedaverse ships will have to chase the ST ships in order to actually engage them. That makes them somewhat predictable, until they get wise to it. These arent' tactics that will win wars, they win individual engagements.

I was assuming general knowledge on both parts. Because if not, where would the Empire know where to attack? Same thing why people assume both slipstream and hyperdrive will work in the respective universes.

The Empire is going to have the problem that the Andromeda universe is spread over several galaxies. Wiping them out totally in a short timeframe is going to be impossible for that reason alone, at least not without lots of times and a hell of alot more logistics than defneding the territory is. They probably wouldn't even realize the other galaxies exist unless they capture and can read information on the ships.

but at the same time the High Guard has what, 500,000 ships total? And I'm not even sure that's all warships. I've heard the Home Guard has more (someone on SB once quoted a number of upwards of some 2-3 million, but that's effectively unsourced.) The Empire has millions of ships, which includes tens if not hundreds of thousands of Star destroyers, all of them hyperspace capable. And that may not even include the local defense forces (short range warships and stuff, most of which is probably Clone Wars vintage but still useful.)

And yes, I imagine they could mount nova bombs on fighters to deploy them, but that would be an even more ridiculously easy target to destroy than a capital ship (and that assumes a nova bomb does not affect the flight performance of a slipfighter in any way. They aren't very large ships, as I recall.)

Unknown, but note that the Nietzcheans were able to built a huuuuge fleet in secret (30.000?) without anyone noticing.

Which is impressive for the Nietzcheans in general, but it really doesn't match up to DS level resources. "military buildups ins ecret" aren't exactly unknown in Star Wars (anything from the Separatist buildup, to the REbels, to stuff that happened in latter EU sources like the Corellian Trilogy or suchnot. It actually happens quite often in STar Wars for some odd reason.)

All of which can still not cross over from one galaxy into the next. And considering how internally fragile the empire is, one would usually only need to destroy a few core systems. I mean, an Empire losing Coruscant, Carida, Billbringi, Sluis Van and Kuat is pretty much done for, given historical precedent.

Great, you've proven that you are a significant enough threat that you can not only devastate much of the galaxy, but you can also completely wipe out their economy and infrastructure in short periods of time. This will perhaps be even more incentive to ruthlessly exploit droid technology, clone technology or whatever. Unless this massive depopulation attack you envision is somehow going to make all the material resources in the SW galaxy disappear automatically.

It also asumes that, like in ROTJ-era, other states will also not rise up and support the CW given that it is a far more tolerant nation and will have shown a capability to take on the empire.

They're going to rise up and support someone who is blowing up stars en masse and whose actions will in all probablility cause massive loss of life and guranteed economic chaos, if not collapse, across the galaxy? That will be quite a trick, and that's assuming they cross the language/communication barrier at that.

And even if that is not a given, I have no doubt that the empire will still fracture due to the infighting as happened in the post-ROTJ era. (I also have no doubt that Thrawn would eventually find a way to beat back the invaders and force a truce).

It probably will. But unless they manage to destroy Byss I doubt they're going to actually defeat Palpy (and how they know to destroy Byss? Good luck.)

[Connor MacLeod]

Internal Dampeners are the weak link on Honorverse technology. It's note along with the missile example that using a wedge one could theoretically accelerate to near C instantly but any ship so doing would instantly tear itself apart along with smear the puny humans into paste. In fact in combat the number 2 killer is Inertia compensator failure during an attack, if a fusion engine lets go the ship is doomed and if the Interia compensator lets go or temporarily fails and pastes the crew. Under combat maneuvering/acceleration conditions the ships themselves can survive the 500g acceleration but the crew of course can not. It speaks highly of how tough Honoverse construction is that an entire ship can be exposed to 500g's and not instantly snap (Or rather the hull itself survives just fine the interior is normally trashed as things like crew quarters give you lots or projectiles to throw around.

(Note smaller ships WILL snap as will any commerical ships if exposed to their own max acceleration which tends to the 200-300g range it's only the battleships and above that are armored enough to withstand that kind of acceleration even temporary)

Oh god. You had to remind me of the absurd way HV ship propulsion and inertial dampers are designed. BAsically the only thing saving the ship and its crew from instantly being killed is the compensator, and if that fails they're automatically doomed. The only thing saving it from being outright idiocy is that it's an intrinsic part of the way the magic sail drive analogue works.

[Connor MacLeod]

This is the time to go to general quarters/action stations, and warm up those insane "fusion" reactors they have to combat energy production levels and ramp particle shields up from standby mode to battle conditions and raise sidewalls.

Source? That's the first time I've heard of any such variables applied to HV wedge turn rates.

A single fusion reactor on a battlecruiser detonating vaporised the ship and the resulting particle cloud impacted ships ~600km away with enough force to sandblast large chunks of armor away through particle fields with the radiation release being deadly enough to kill >80% of the crew of a ship some what 'closer'.

And where is that from exactly? I don't remember honorverse fusion powerplants exploding catastrophically on a routine basis, much less with those sorts of ludicrous effects.

The secret source for both the insane fusion power plants and the super-efficient laser heads is the use of extreme gravitational lensing and compression. Modern laserhead have a gravity generator which activates milliseconds before the detonation of the bomb and generates a powerful enough gravity field to redirect significant percentage of the explosion onto the lasing rods rather than radiate in a sphere.

We still don't quite know the efficiencies on that. AS I recall there was still some variance in hwo much energy was pumped into the lasing rods per "shot" or something like that. It was still quite open ended despite things being made clear (and I remember fanboys still insisting it was near perfectly, magically efficient, despite the fact that in the first novel laser heads created a "shockwave" of some kind.)

Battlecruiser and above, fusion reactors use something similar where they use gravitational compression to pack more fuel into the reactor at higher densities and somehow achieve dramatically higher efficiencies in nuclear fusion. These reactors can power energy weapons which as an entire broadside armorment are hitting into the megaton to gigaton range for an alpha strike(destruction of large rocky asteriods),

are you referring to the Bellerophon bit, or is this something from one of the newer novels?

and are capable of powering hours of such combat.

Depends on what you're talking about powering. The wedge itself is partly fuelled by a hyperspace tap, with only a part of the energy being drawn from the reactors.

These same reactors can also push near megaton sized ships at ~400 gees linear acceleration using fusion-powered reaction thrusters for ~10 minutes. This actually drained the ship's reaction mass so low they would only enough fuel for a few hours of fighting compared to Honorverse ships never detailing being worried about fuel before.

The problem with trying to calc that is that we know neither the amount of propellant being thrown out nor the exhaust velocity of the engines to achieve that, since as a rule they don't routinely use reaction thrusters at that level or that powerfully.

[Xon]

This is the time to go to general quarters/action stations, and warm up those insane "fusion" reactors they have to combat energy production levels and ramp particle shields up from standby mode to battle conditions and raise sidewalls.

Source? That's the first time I've heard of any such variables applied to HV wedge turn rates.

This is about going from stand-by conditions to battle conditions, not turn rates.

And where is that from exactly? I don't remember honorverse fusion powerplants exploding catastrophically on a routine basis, much less with those sorts of ludicrous effects.

Apparently they have failsafes. Except this time it didn't fail very nicely.

The wedge was only beginning to form, still far too nebulous to interdict incoming fire, when eight remote graser platforms opened fire simultaneously. All eight scored direct hits, and beams that could have ripped through unprotected battle steel at three-quarters of a million kilometers smashed into her from less than two thousand. They punched straight through her hull like battering rams, shattering plating, tearing anyone and anything in their paths to splinters, and the battlecruiser's emissions signature spiked madly as the grasers shed energy into her. Her thrusters were still firing, turning her on her long axis, and the energy fire gutted her like a gaffed shark.And then, with shocking suddenness, her fusion plants let go.
Yang's visual display blanked as the dreadful, white-hot boil of fury overpowered the filters. Attila was less than six hundred kilometers from Farnese when she went, and the flagship's hull fluoresced wildly as the stripped atoms of her eviscerated sister slashed across her. Only her standard, station-keeping particle screens were up, and those were intended mainly to keep dust from accumulating on her hull. They had never been intended to deal with something like this, and threat receivers and warning signals wailed.
It was only later that Yang realized that only one of Attila's plants had actually let go. The fail-safes on the other two must have functioned as designed. If they hadn't, Attila would have taken Farnese and probably Wallenstein, as well, with her. As it was, the flagship's damage was incredibly light. Her starboard sensors, communications arrays, and point defense laser clusters were stripped away, half her weapon bay hatches were warped and jammed, up to a half meter of her armor was planed away in some places, and she lost two beta nodes out of her forward ring and three more out of her after ring, but her port side was untouched, and the sensors and com lasers on the roof and floor of her hull survived more or less unscathed. Had she dared contemplate resistance, she would actually have remained a fighting force. . . until the grasers which had killed Attila got around to her, at any rate.
Wallenstein was further away . . . and partially shielded by the heavy cruiser Hachiman. The big Mars-class cruiser took a savage beating from the explosion. She was much closer than Farnese had been, and the shock front smashed over her on the heels of the energy spike. The fact that any of her hull survived even remotely intact was an enormous testimonial to her designers and builders, but she was turned into a dead hulk, blasted and broken, and none of her people had been in skinsuits or expecting trouble of any sort. Two-thirds of them died almost instantly; of those who survived the initial blast, half took lethal radiation doses not even modern medicine could do a thing about.
But her sacrifice saved Wallenstein from Farnese's fate. She came through with only minor damage, and Kutuzov, MacArthur, and Barbarosa, Yang's other battlecruisers, were far enough out to escape without significant injury.

We still don't quite know the efficiencies on that. AS I recall there was still some variance in hwo much energy was pumped into the lasing rods per "shot" or something like that. It was still quite open ended despite things being made clear (and I remember fanboys still insisting it was near perfectly, magically efficient, despite the fact that in the first novel laser heads created a "shockwave" of some kind.)

It's from the latest anthology book which has an 'in-verse' description of the laserheads. I don't have access to my digital copy atm This thread has a bunch of quotes from it.

When the weapon fired, the generators spun up a few milliseconds before the warhead actually detonated, which was just long enough for the layered focal points of a gravitic lens to stabilize and reshape the blast from spherical to Gaussian, directing the radiological and thermal effects forward along the warhead’s axis. The result was to capture far more of the blast’s total effect and focus it into the area occupied by the lasing rods.

Simply put, the lasing rods get more energy than inverse square rule woudl normally let them get which drives the efficiency up because more of the energy is being used. Going that the 15 megaton fusion nuke and push ~petajoules to the target means that something on the order of ~10% of the energy from the nuke is being converted into x-rays and actually hitting the target. That is a hell of a lot more than what inverse square law would have reach lasing rods (which are tiny).

are you referring to the Bellerophon bit, or is this something from one of the newer novels?

Half from memory of the old old calcs, and that the new anthology has modern laser heads punching into the terajoule to petajoule range(quotes taken from here) for energy transfered to target and practically every ship which isn't a LAC have a lot more grazers than a laserhead has lasing rods.

[Xon]

getto edit: 1 petajoule out of 15 megatons is ~1.6% not 10%. 9.6% if that figure is per lasing rod, but need to check the original source.

[Dahak]

Where did the bit come from that compensator failure is the No. 2 reason for dead ships?
It is explicitly said that the previously used 80%-max-accel figure was increased because they found out that failure is far less likely than originally assumed?

[Connor MacLeod]

This is about going from stand-by conditions to battle conditions, not turn rates.

Sorry.

The wedge was only beginning to form, still far too nebulous to interdict incoming fire, when eight remote graser platforms opened fire simultaneously. All eight scored direct hits, and beams that could have ripped through unprotected battle steel at three-quarters of a million kilometers smashed into her from less than two thousand. They punched straight through her hull like battering rams, shattering plating, tearing anyone and anything in their paths to splinters, and the battlecruiser's emissions signature spiked madly as the grasers shed energy into her. Her thrusters were still firing, turning her on her long axis, and the energy fire gutted her like a gaffed shark.And then, with shocking suddenness, her fusion plants let go.
Yang's visual display blanked as the dreadful, white-hot boil of fury overpowered the filters. Attila was less than six hundred kilometers from Farnese when she went, and the flagship's hull fluoresced wildly as the stripped atoms of her eviscerated sister slashed across her. Only her standard, station-keeping particle screens were up, and those were intended mainly to keep dust from accumulating on her hull. They had never been intended to deal with something like this, and threat receivers and warning signals wailed.
It was only later that Yang realized that only one of Attila's plants had actually let go. The fail-safes on the other two must have functioned as designed. If they hadn't, Attila would have taken Farnese and probably Wallenstein, as well, with her. As it was, the flagship's damage was incredibly light. Her starboard sensors, communications arrays, and point defense laser clusters were stripped away, half her weapon bay hatches were warped and jammed, up to a half meter of her armor was planed away in some places, and she lost two beta nodes out of her forward ring and three more out of her after ring, but her port side was untouched, and the sensors and com lasers on the roof and floor of her hull survived more or less unscathed. Had she dared contemplate resistance, she would actually have remained a fighting force. . . until the grasers which had killed Attila got around to her, at any rate.
Wallenstein was further away . . . and partially shielded by the heavy cruiser Hachiman. The big Mars-class cruiser took a savage beating from the explosion. She was much closer than Farnese had been, and the shock front smashed over her on the heels of the energy spike. The fact that any of her hull survived even remotely intact was an enormous testimonial to her designers and builders, but she was turned into a dead hulk, blasted and broken, and none of her people had been in skinsuits or expecting trouble of any sort. Two-thirds of them died almost instantly; of those who survived the initial blast, half took lethal radiation doses not even modern medicine could do a thing about.
But her sacrifice saved Wallenstein from Farnese's fate. She came through with only minor damage, and Kutuzov, MacArthur, and Barbarosa, Yang's other battlecruisers, were far enough out to escape without significant injury.

Okay..
1.) It doesn't really come right out and say the ship whose fusion plant let out was vaporized. Even if it was, that could mean only parts of it were (only one plant goes off, and since fusion reactors don't explode, it would have to be damage from a large, dense mass of superheated plasma, which is not neccesarily going to be purely thermal even then.) Indeed, if the other two plants did not go off, as noted here, then there is at least a non-trivial amount of the ship's mass still intact.

It is just as likely that the "stripped atoms" came from the fusion reactor itself (loose radiation) rather than vaporized material.

2.) It's really not specified how the damage was done. in sme cases its implied to be thermal, whereas in others.. not so much obvious. I'm not even going to go over the oddity of a shockwave in space causing severe damage, because that is just.. silly. (I'm going to go out on a limb and say "blame it on their weird gravity.") There's also the possibility of hyper-velocity ship fragments (HV ships LOVE throwing out splinters. I imagine the splintering is much worse on the outside.) as there is of thermal effects, and the depiction tends to suggest a very uneven level of damage distribution on both vessels.

When the weapon fired, the generators spun up a few milliseconds before the warhead actually detonated, which was just long enough for the layered focal points of a gravitic lens to stabilize and reshape the blast from spherical to Gaussian, directing the radiological and thermal effects forward along the warhead’s axis. The result was to capture far more of the blast’s total effect and focus it into the area occupied by the lasing rods.

Simply put, the lasing rods get more energy than inverse square rule woudl normally let them get which drives the efficiency up because more of the energy is being used. Going that the 15 megaton fusion nuke and push ~petajoules to the target means that something on the order of ~10% of the energy from the nuke is being converted into x-rays and actually hitting the target. That is a hell of a lot more than what inverse square law would have reach lasing rods (which are tiny).

Even if it was say, 90% (which I am pretty sure at that rate means they can convert neutron radiation into x-rays) you have to divide that over however many lasing rods there are (20-30 IIRC) which is at best a few hundred kt per rod, and even then you have to assume 100% of the energy is directed forward in each rod.

I would further point out that nothing requires the capital ship energy weapons to be many many orders of magntiude more powerful than laser heads - the main difference betwene the two is potentailly the size of the beams (although this makes no sense, since an effective laser weapon will go for a narrower diameter, not a larger one) and effective range against sidewalls. In the latter case the difference, while significant, is not astronomical.. not much more than an order of magnitude. Meaning that you migth get megatons per gun. At that rate you're going to be very hard pressed to push a Superdreadnought into gigaton range firepower, much less a dreadnought or other ship.

you might get a few gigatons per broadside if one assumes all the energy guns pumped out (on average) several tens of megatons per second (100x more powerful than their laser heads), but that's all.

And really, that's probably being generous.. as I recall the short story featuring the Gauntlet and that female Grayson lieutenant, broadside energy mounts fire in a sustained/raking type mode where they track through space Shadow Slicer Beam style.

Half from memory of the old old calcs, and that the new anthology has modern laser heads punching into the terajoule to petajoule range(quotes taken from here) for energy transfered to target and practically every ship which isn't a LAC have a lot more grazers than a laserhead has lasing rods.

[/quote]
See above. It's ab it of a stretch to go from "petajoule" even to "gigatons". Megatons is more likely, and even then I'd say double digit is more likely than triple.

[Mr Bean]

Where did the bit come from that compensator failure is the No. 2 reason for dead ships?
It is explicitly said that the previously used 80%-max-accel figure was increased because they found out that failure is far less likely than originally assumed?

Counting battlefield causalities when a ship is knocked out of action it's either
1. Tiny shrapnel with one of it's fusion plants having exploded
2. A largely intact wreck with it's crew dead from the compensator failure
3. A combat killed wreck with typically still contains survivors but has no propulsion or weapons to defend herself

I'm speaking of DEAD... dead ships as Honoverse damage control is good enough as long as the fusion plants have not let go or everyone's not dead from compensator failure then the ship can be returned to semi-fighting condition by the crew. Ships in Honoverse are very tough to the kind of damage being thrown around as long as the compensator or fusion plants are not hit. Carve up 70% of the hull and there will still be humans alive onboard and trying to repair her. So a ship you pounded into scrap might be able to scavenge enough local power to launch missiles your way from one or two tubes or her grasers on one side might still be operation. They have redundancies to their redundancies and train not only in repair of their own weapon mounts but being able to scavanage from other weapon mounts and other ships systems to get anything running that needs running on the ship. Keep in mind that with prolog in operation (Honoverse lifespan is 300+ years long) military service is a standard twenty year contract and boot-camp and training is a full six year school for everyone including the grunts.

[Xon]

1.) It doesn't really come right out and say the ship whose fusion plant let out was vaporized.

You are right it doesn't explicitly state the ship was vaporised. I went for that interpretation of "stripped atoms" especially given the loving detail on the remains of all the ships and the complete lack of explaining that Attila was even in recognisable chunks or describing the ships colliding with parts of Attila. Especially when it describes ships being hit by a "shock front" in space physically causing damage, and the resulting matter moving fast enough to overcome the station-keeping particle fields and "half meter of her{Farnese} armor was planed away in some places".

Even if it was, that could mean only parts of it were (only one plant goes off, and since fusion reactors don't explode, it would have to be damage from a large, dense mass of superheated plasma, which is not neccesarily going to be purely thermal even then.) Indeed, if the other two plants did not go off, as noted here, then there is at least a non-trivial amount of the ship's mass still intact.

For a normal fusion reactor, yes it shouldn't explode. But they do use gravity generators to induce fusion in those reactors. Also it is noted is that if the two plants had gone off none of the ships would have survived even at 600km range, which means even more energy would have been released and the only difference is that 3 reactors would have been running rather than 1.

It is just as likely that the "stripped atoms" came from the fusion reactor itself (loose radiation) rather than vaporized material.

That is still stuff from inside the reactor punching through the Attila and hitting the Farnese hard enough that the hull fluoresced, and hit closer ships hard enough to physically break them.

2.) It's really not specified how the damage was done. in sme cases its implied to be thermal, whereas in others.. not so much obvious. I'm not even going to go over the oddity of a shockwave in space causing severe damage, because that is just.. silly. (I'm going to go out on a limb and say "blame it on their weird gravity.") There's also the possibility of hyper-velocity ship fragments (HV ships LOVE throwing out splinters. I imagine the splintering is much worse on the outside.) as there is of thermal effects, and the depiction tends to suggest a very uneven level of damage distribution on both vessels.

It describes an initial radiation pulse and then matter physically colliding with ships at high velocities. Weber spends three damn wordy paragraphs describing the physical damage various ships took, which is largely consistant with hit by a really fast expanding particle cloud. And then a few sentences that a shitton of lethal radiation through the hull of ships which instantly killed hundreds of people at a distance of at least several hundred km to 600km on one ship (after the impact of the shock front left over a thousand dead). No splinters scything loving through nameless people and internal structures, just bad shit hitting from outside the ship resulting in dead and battered ships.

The radiation + shockwave works if you accept that the gravity induced fusion to go off like a really big fusion bomb. As for the blast front, the Attila massed somewhere in the 1-2 million metric ton mark, so that it is a lot of mass to throw around with a rather large explosion.

Even if it was say, 90% (which I am pretty sure at that rate means they can convert neutron radiation into x-rays) you have to divide that over however many lasing rods there are (20-30 IIRC) which is at best a few hundred kt per rod, and even then you have to assume 100% of the energy is directed forward in each rod.

There are 6 lasing rods on the recent models, not +20. Also, since laser heads are pure-fusion devices;

Further change hinged on many years of work on practical miniaturization of gravitic generators in the commercial sector. Their introduction made possible the long sought after pure fusion warhead in the 1650s. This was a nuclear bomb whose only fuels were relatively common light elements like hydrogen and its isotopes. Cheap gravitic implosion made it economical to fit devices with previously unheard of yields into a missile body. The pure fuel made it possible to predict the output radiation of the bomb explosion precisely and ultimately control (to a small degree) the spectrum and duration of the explosion’s radiation. Since most nuclear weapon damage to space targets is caused by X-ray radiation from the explosion, the ability to tune that radiation, even slightly, made the defender’s problem significantly more difficult. Missile warhead yields of hundreds of megatons became commonplace in this time period and heavy weapons in the gigaton range were not unheard of.

I would further point out that nothing requires the capital ship energy weapons to be many many orders of magntiude more powerful than laser heads - the main difference betwene the two is potentailly the size of the beams (although this makes no sense, since an effective laser weapon will go for a narrower diameter, not a larger one) and effective range against sidewalls. In the latter case the difference, while significant, is not astronomical.. not much more than an order of magnitude. Meaning that you migth get megatons per gun. At that rate you're going to be very hard pressed to push a Superdreadnought into gigaton range firepower, much less a dreadnought or other ship.

Grazers have vastly larger focusing systems(which don't vaporise themselves milliseconds after they are used), and fire a larger beam(>80cm vs 0.06mm @ the emitter) with a smaller wavelength(ie not x-rays, but gamma rays which takes more energy to produce). Keep in mind energy torps (ie super-head plasma capable of gutting Honorverse ships) are also powered off the reactor.

While the same technology as the gravity focusing equipment, there are fairly big differences between how laserheads work and grazer's are implemented.

Note; the second half of this quote is describing 'sidewall burning'/'counter-sidewall' Not Laserheads. Damn infodump inside an infodump.

The development of another generation of powerful practical micronized grav generators marked the next evolutionary step in missile warfare in 1806 with the introduction of the first nuclear gravitically directed energy weapon (NGDEW). The key components were grav lens arrays derived from those that had dramatically increased shipboard laser/graser effectiveness roughly fifty years earlier. The very first of these arrays was called a “plate array” and simply reflected the bomb’s energy off a flat artificial grav wave similar to an impeller or sidewall behind the warhead. Research continually tightened the focus of the grav arrays as impeller missile standoff ranges grew from tens of hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers over the ensuing decades

There are going to be massive design constains on a system that is a single shot/pulse, and actually atomizes itself in nuclear fire after activation compared to a shipboard one with several times the room to play with and a fixed installation which fires multipule times and fires pulsed shots.

you might get a few gigatons per broadside if one assumes all the energy guns pumped out (on average) several tens of megatons per second (100x more powerful than their laser heads), but that's all.

Yeah, gigatons is probably being way too generous.

And really, that's probably being generous.. as I recall the short story featuring the Gauntlet and that female Grayson lieutenant, broadside energy mounts fire in a sustained/raking type mode where they track through space Shadow Slicer Beam style.

This probably sounds incrediably trite, but dial-a-yield isn't exactly out of the question for the weapon to be firing in substained mode compared to normally requiring significant time (ie seconds) between 'shots' (which are described as pulses). I mean, every other damn piece of tech on Honorverse ship appears to have multipule often contradictory possible settings. Recent honorverse missiles are platfroms which have 3 completely different roles they perform on demand which dramatically change how thier nuclear device is used.

Proposals had been circulating for several years within BuWeaps speculating on the possibility of a multifunction gravitational lens array (MGLA) and fusion warhead combination small enough for use in a CA/BC weight missile, yet flexible enough to support laser-head attack, detonate in a counter-sidewall role, or act as a contact nuke as the situation demanded. BuWeaps began work on the Mk-86 general purpose fusion warhead and the Mk-13 program was initiated to carry it.

Counter-sidewall role is really poorly defined, and the quote before this one is the best explanation of what I can find. It appears to amount to detonate a nuke, catching as much of the explosion in a grav wave pointed at the ship as posible with the express purpuse of causing damage to the unarmored sidewall generators rather than trying to kill the ship itself.

And found an actual description of what a sidewall penetrator does!;

In 1298, research yielded the first practical sidewall penetrator. The term actually describes a bewildering array of different methods and technologies of getting an attack through a sidewall. Early devices took many forms and it is not entirely clear even today which type came first. Research has uncovered at least seven unique “inventors” of the sidewall penetrator. Whoever invented it, the consensus among historians is that the first widely employed devices used a precisely timed reshaping of the missile’s own impeller wedge in the fraction of a second before contact to temporarily “flicker” the target’s sidewall and allow the weapon to pass through unimpeded. This approach had the downside of destroying the attacking missile’s own drive (and much of its afterbody) rendering it both unable to maneuver inside the target’s wedge and removing its primary means of killing the target. The answer was to merge the standoff nuclear weapon with the sidewall penetrator and use the inert missile front end to carry a nuclear charge into the sidewall perimeter. Careful control of the missile’s impeller power curve, proper construction of the afterbody, and a powerful pressor field which threw the payload clear prior to the impeller ring’s vaporization allowed the warhead portion to survive long enough to detonate within the target’s sidewall. Aside from the obvious improvements in understanding of gravitics, considerable advances in computing were also required to ensure that the nuclear explosive would properly detonate after the warhead was through the first sidewall and before the inert missile body was shredded by the intact opposite sidewall

[Xon]

God damnit, "In Fire Forged - An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design" has some horribly written sections with no respect for decent ordering of the facts they present to you. And never mind the constantly switching terminology for the same fucking thing, that induced

[Eternal_Freedom]

How exactly did an Andromeda thread turn into an Honorverse thread?

Not that I'm complaining, this is fascinating stuff, especially as I've never read any of the HH books.

[Dahak]

Where did the bit come from that compensator failure is the No. 2 reason for dead ships?
It is explicitly said that the previously used 80%-max-accel figure was increased because they found out that failure is far less likely than originally assumed?

Counting battlefield causalities when a ship is knocked out of action it's either
1. Tiny shrapnel with one of it's fusion plants having exploded
2. A largely intact wreck with it's crew dead from the compensator failure
3. A combat killed wreck with typically still contains survivors but has no propulsion or weapons to defend herself.

Restating it doesn't make it more valid (or less). Where is this mentioned in the book? I don't remember reading all that lot about battlefield compensation failures?

[Mr Bean]

Restating it doesn't make it more valid (or less). Where is this mentioned in the book? I don't remember reading all that lot about battlefield compensation failures?

Perhaps I did not make that clear, I went battle by battle and counted as in during the Battle of X or Battle of Y described causalities say that ships 1, 2 3 and air bleeding wrecks, ships 4-8 dead to fusion plants exploding and ships 9-12 are dead from compensator failure. It varies by battle but typically it's a mix of air bleeding wrecks, explosion from a fusion plant or compensator failure.

It says it no where in the books until you physically count the causalities and how they died and draw your conclusions thus.

[Xon]

Is that in order of occurance? What type of numbers did you count for them?

If so, exploding fusion reactors appear to be the primary ship killers.

[Mr Bean]

Correct the split seems to be roughly 60% Battered wreck which is either repaired or surrendered depending on who holds the field at the end of battle, 30% Fusion plant kaboom and 10% Compensator failure. It's very rare for simple weapons damage to destroy any ship above a cruiser. You see the occasional destroyer being ripped in half by a super-dreadnaught sized missile but otherwise things get hammered into scrap... but scrap that can still fight.

[Connor MacLeod]

Correct the split seems to be roughly 60% Battered wreck which is either repaired or surrendered depending on who holds the field at the end of battle, 30% Fusion plant kaboom and 10% Compensator failure. It's very rare for simple weapons damage to destroy any ship above a cruiser. You see the occasional destroyer being ripped in half by a super-dreadnaught sized missile but otherwise things get hammered into scrap... but scrap that can still fight.

I suspect that's a aftereffect of the "pre-pod" design era. I always got the impressions they tended to build DN and SD ridiculously durable (since they're designed to carry the brunt of fighting, that makes sense) compared to smaller ships (which were designed usually for mobility and/or independent operation first, then firepower..) Also, in general, HV seems to design along the lines of "we know we'll take damage whatever we do, so lets aim on limiting the effects of the damage as much as possible.) Easy to damage, in other words, but hard to actually cripple or knock out.

It may also reflect the difference between Energyvs Missile. Even with a vast increase in missile salvos (and targeted per ship) and the use of bigger laser heads, they're still largely depending on x-ray lasers that are, per shot, much less powerful than an equivalent energy mount. Especially Grasers, which are going to be both more energetic, bigger, and more penetrative. I dont think its just in terms of differences in raw energy either, but how its used. With mass missile spams you have large numbers of individual laser heads basically nibbling the ship to death, whilst Grasers (when they get in range) probably have less "widespread" devastationg but more or less brutally gut the ship when they hit (almost literally, since they tend to be raking attacks.) Sort of like the difference between a volley of shotgun blasts vs a machine gun.

as I recall there was one example (in At all costs, I think) where the Manties (I think) focused a massively huge missile salvo on an incredibly small number of ships (like half a dozen or a dozen vs thousands/tens of thosuands of missiles) and the salvo virtually obliterated the targets. But that was an exception to what you described.

[Connor MacLeod]

For a normal fusion reactor, yes it shouldn't explode. But they do use gravity generators to induce fusion in those reactors. Also it is noted is that if the two plants had gone off none of the ships would have survived even at 600km range, which means even more energy would have been released and the only difference is that 3 reactors would have been running rather than 1.

Hence my saying "blame it on the weird gravity" later on. And even then, the scene depends heavily on how you are interpreting the text (EG how the ships are destroyed/wiped out/crippled/ however you want to define "not survive" as.) - bearing in mind that a.) ships are not inert targets, even if they aren't in military mode and b.) it isn't hard to start inflicting damage on HV ships - they're designed around limiting damage, not preventing it.

That is still stuff from inside the reactor punching through the Attila and hitting the Farnese hard enough that the hull fluoresced, and hit closer ships hard enough to physically break them.

How hard? how much? This is all well and good, but unless it can be quantified in some way it's essentially meaningless as far as the larger scene is concerned. This is like saying "we know the ships jolt or shake when firing a broadside" but it doesn't really tell us how powerful said broadside is. "jolt" could mean anything from a milligees of acceleration being imparted to tens or hundreds of gravities.

It describes an initial radiation pulse and then matter physically colliding with ships at high velocities. Weber spends three damn wordy paragraphs describing the physical damage various ships took, which is largely consistant with hit by a really fast expanding particle cloud. And then a few sentences that a shitton of lethal radiation through the hull of ships which instantly killed hundreds of people at a distance of at least several hundred km to 600km on one ship (after the impact of the shock front left over a thousand dead). No splinters scything loving through nameless people and internal structures, just bad shit hitting from outside the ship resulting in dead and battered ships.

Setting aside issues of perspective and reliability of narrator (eg are we assuming a totally, absolutely omniscient narrator for the entire thing.) That still is pretty vague. And saying that "they don't describe it so it couldn't possibly happen" is a fairly silly thing to say, especially since we know that it CAN be a result of damage ships take.

The radiation + shockwave works if you accept that the gravity induced fusion to go off like a really big fusion bomb. As for the blast front, the Attila massed somewhere in the 1-2 million metric ton mark, so that it is a lot of mass to throw around with a rather large explosion.

Really? You've done calcs on it then, I assume, if you can confidently claim "it works?"

There are 6 lasing rods on the recent models, not +20.

Oh yeah, they scatter them out in a wide arc around the ship. That actually doesn't help much, unless they're magically focusing the explosion into six separate narrow beams of radiation to lase into the rods (as I recall it said it's in a cone, so there is still some energy lost in getting it to hit the rods)

Also, since laser heads are pure-fusion devices;

Further change hinged on many years of work on practical miniaturization of gravitic generators in the commercial sector. Their introduction made possible the long sought after pure fusion warhead in the 1650s. This was a nuclear bomb whose only fuels were relatively common light elements like hydrogen and its isotopes. Cheap gravitic implosion made it economical to fit devices with previously unheard of yields into a missile body. The pure fuel made it possible to predict the output radiation of the bomb explosion precisely and ultimately control (to a small degree) the spectrum and duration of the explosion’s radiation. Since most nuclear weapon damage to space targets is caused by X-ray radiation from the explosion, the ability to tune that radiation, even slightly, made the defender’s problem significantly more difficult. Missile warhead yields of hundreds of megatons became commonplace in this time period and heavy weapons in the gigaton range were not unheard of.

I'm not exactly following you. Are you claiming they have gigaton range laser heads for missiles or something?

Grazers have vastly larger focusing systems(which don't vaporise themselves milliseconds after they are used), and fire a larger beam(>80cm vs 0.06mm @ the emitter) with a smaller wavelength(ie not x-rays, but gamma rays which takes more energy to produce).

That makes them larger, but it also introduces some obvious problems from the standpoint of intensity and penetration (an 8 meter diameter for a laser is NOT very efficieint in laser terms, unless it's working as a heat ray. Using gamma radiation probably can offset this a bit, but not totally.) And where are you getting the "diameters" from anyhow?

Keep in mind energy torps (ie super-head plasma capable of gutting Honorverse ships) are also powered off the reactor.

And both also have vastly longer recharge times than point defense lasers, which are one shot every two seconds for (IIRC an 8 shot cluster. The recharge rate is actually worse than that from what I recall because clusters encompass multiple individual lasers) Laser heads have no "charge up" time, nor do they have to fire a sustained beam.

While the same technology as the gravity focusing equipment, there are fairly big differences between how laserheads work and grazer's are implemented.

That much is true.

There are going to be massive design constains on a system that is a single shot/pulse, and actually atomizes itself in nuclear fire after activation compared to a shipboard one with several times the room to play with and a fixed installation which fires multipule times and fires pulsed shots.

Again yes, but so? That doesn't neccesarily argue "massively powerful" beam weapons, since that depends entirely on HOW the beam weapons work. Thus far all we've determined is that energy weapons work differently, and probably have different advantages and disadvantages over the laser heads (some of which make them better, but others, like the beam diameter, which could actually hurt the weapon depending on how it operates.)

At this point it's entirely possible that beam weapons and laser heads have distinctly different damaging mechanisms (energy broadsides fire broad-focus, sustained beams, or sustained pulses of beams and probably do significant thermal as well as mechanical damage, whilst laser heads fire narrowly focused, brief bursts of power, although the nature in which they are created is inefficient compared to the energy mount.)

This probably sounds incrediably trite, but dial-a-yield isn't exactly out of the question for the weapon to be firing in substained mode compared to normally requiring significant time (ie seconds) between 'shots' (which are described as pulses). I mean, every other damn piece of tech on Honorverse ship appears to have multipule often contradictory possible settings. Recent honorverse missiles are platfroms which have 3 completely different roles they perform on demand which dramatically change how thier nuclear device is used.

I'm not above believing that HV ships have variable yields, and I'm willing to accept that the beams might have reduced output settings when tracking targets through empty space... but that only goes so far. They can't do that when they're trying to fire through a sidewall, because they have to guess at where the ship is IN the sidewall, much the same way they have to shotgun out laser head shots in order to have some chance of hitting the ship. That means when firing on the sidewall they have to put at least SOME power behind the shot, not only to ensure they penetrate said sidewall, but also to have hopes of damaging the target. And given the damn size of a sidewall, that can still have a huge impact.

Counter-sidewall role is really poorly defined, and the quote before this one is the best explanation of what I can find. It appears to amount to detonate a nuke, catching as much of the explosion in a grav wave pointed at the ship as posible with the express purpuse of causing damage to the unarmored sidewall generators rather than trying to kill the ship itself.

Perhaps. Or it is simply designed to just overload the generator ins ome manner akin to a grav lance or a sidewall penetrator. They all seem to be somewhat related technologies.

And found an actual description of what a sidewall penetrator does!;

In 1298, research yielded the first practical sidewall penetrator. The term actually describes a bewildering array of different methods and technologies of getting an attack through a sidewall. Early devices took many forms and it is not entirely clear even today which type came first. Research has uncovered at least seven unique “inventors” of the sidewall penetrator. Whoever invented it, the consensus among historians is that the first widely employed devices used a precisely timed reshaping of the missile’s own impeller wedge in the fraction of a second before contact to temporarily “flicker” the target’s sidewall and allow the weapon to pass through unimpeded. This approach had the downside of destroying the attacking missile’s own drive (and much of its afterbody) rendering it both unable to maneuver inside the target’s wedge and removing its primary means of killing the target. The answer was to merge the standoff nuclear weapon with the sidewall penetrator and use the inert missile front end to carry a nuclear charge into the sidewall perimeter. Careful control of the missile’s impeller power curve, proper construction of the afterbody, and a powerful pressor field which threw the payload clear prior to the impeller ring’s vaporization allowed the warhead portion to survive long enough to detonate within the target’s sidewall. Aside from the obvious improvements in understanding of gravitics, considerable advances in computing were also required to ensure that the nuclear explosive would properly detonate after the warhead was through the first sidewall and before the inert missile body was shredded by the intact opposite sidewall

Makes sense as much as anything else in the universe does.

[Batman]

Though if the idea behind sidewall penetrators is that the warhead actually goes off inside the sidewall, one wonders why they've continually tried to increase the standoff ranges of their laser heads. Unless wedges have gotten even more enormously huge since I've read the books, a laser head going off 50,000km out is decidedly not inside the sidewall.

[Connor MacLeod]

Though if the idea behind sidewall penetrators is that the warhead actually goes off inside the sidewall,

It would have to. Probably inside the space filled by ray and particle shielding.

one wonders why they've continually tried to increase the standoff ranges of their laser heads. Unless wedges have gotten even more enormously huge since I've read the books, a laser head going off 50,000km out is decidedly not inside the sidewall.

Prior to the MDMs the issue was mostly with point defense, since missile velocities were distinctly on the low side of light speed (under 50% of lightspeed or thereabouts as I recall.)

Once they started getting into two and three drive missiles, missile velocity shot up dramatically of course.

Also I'm not sure a sidewall penetrator is "guaranteed" to penetrate. A massless beam (like a laser) is generally more reliable at penetrating

[Ahriman238]

Prior to the MDMs the issue was mostly with point defense, since missile velocities were distinctly on the low side of light speed (under 50% of lightspeed or thereabouts as I recall.)

Once they started getting into two and three drive missiles, missile velocity shot up dramatically of course.

Also I'm not sure a sidewall penetrator is "guaranteed" to penetrate. A massless beam (like a laser) is generally more reliable at penetrating

Even before the MDMs, missile velocity was fairly impressive for pretty much the same reason you never jump out of a car doing highway speeds. Anything inside the wedge travels with the wedge in the same direction and speed as the ship, so missiles frequently have to adjust course in-flight, and they can go up to 80 PSL, while pre-Ghost Rider missiles have an acceleration rate of just under 5 KPS squared (4.93, if anyone wants to do precise calcs.)

In the early books, it's a mjor consideration of battles that missile ranges can vary greatly depending on the speed of the launching ships and the relative speeds between it and the target. In Honor of the Queen Honor is concerned that the Masadans will launch a c fractional strike, basically the ship ventures out past the hyper-limit and turns around. With a large running start, they can reach their max 80% c and launch missiles at extreme ranges that travel close enough to light speed as to make scare practical difference, much to fast for anyone's point defense to deal with. This is the explicit favored tactic for dealing with fixed orbital defences, shipyards and other orbital industry, but has yet to actually appear in the books (I believe so, I haven't read Torch, Mission of Honor, or Fire Forged yet.) That time, the Masadans were too inexperienced to destroy Grayson that way, never really explained why in all the attacks and raids and conquests of the following years nobody else tried it though.

[Batman]

For the reason repeatedly mentioned throughout the series-it's not worth it, because one missile goes off course even a little, and you just violated the Eridani Edict.
Not sure where you got the idea that is their preferred tactic for dealing with orbitals defenses from either-it isn't, as they don't dare risk accidentally hitting the planet instead (which is mentioned only about every other time they have to take out orbital installations), everything with sidewalls (and orbital defense stations DO have sidewalls) is pretty much ludicrously resistant to kinetic impactors (which those missiles would be by that time) and the reason Honor was worried about the Masadans ever trying a fractional c missile strike on the planet to begin with was because she knew those people were stark raving mad and might do it regardless of the consequences.

[Mr Bean]

Eridani Edict
For those who have not read the books the Eridani Edict is a Solarian League Law that is binding to all member nations and has been noted as there only real foreign policy. Stealing from Wiki

The Eridani Edict, or Epsilon Eridani Edict, was a unilateral prohibition passed by the Solarian League, aimed at preventing widespread slaughter of civilians. The edict laid out the exact conditions under which an attack could be made against an inhabited planet's surface, and gave the Solarian League Navy the authority to destroy "any government or star nation or rogue mercenary outfit" responsible for a violationary attack.

*Eridani
During a military conflict in the middle of the 2nd Millenium PD, a Solarian League-member world in the Epsilon Eridani System suffered a massive planetary bombardment by enemy forces which resulted in the death of over seven billion people. As a consequence, the Solarian League ruled that any star nation bombarding civilians on planetary surfaces without warning and military reason would face severe punishment through the Solarian Navy.

*Details
What the Edict did was place a ban on reasonably preventable civilian deaths. Indiscriminate destruction of a planet's non-combatant population and/or ecosystem was a violation of the Edict. What the Edict did not prevent were unavoidable collateral losses when targeting legitimate military targets. For example, if a planetary defense center was located in the middle of a metropolitan area, it was no violation of the Edict to destroy it, if the attacker does everything possible to restrain the effect of the attack on the population as a whole. So a precision orbital strike that destroyed the defense center and everything within a two block radius was allowable under the Edict; indiscriminate mass bombardment or unleashing a large scale bioweapon was not.

The majority of the onus of following the Epsilon Eridani Edict lay with the attacker. First, the attacker must control the system, such that the system had no hope of relief. Second, the attacker must call upon the planet to surrender before commencing any attack or bombardment. Thus, a raiding ship was not allowed to hyper in and launch a few missiles at the planet, for it neither controlled the system nor called upon the system to surrender.

As a corollary, any accidents which resulted in massive civilian deaths were considered a violation of the Edict. The Edict assumed that any such accident was preventable and that the nation that allowed it to happen was a rogue state.

The Edict had been enforced about five times since its inception.

The Short version
Kill a few billion civilians or destroy/permanently devastate a habitat world (Which is unthinkable crime for anyone in Honoverse) and the Solarian League will hyper in and fuck you up.

Think of it as instant Somalia, the Solarians come in and destroy/dismantle your entire military then arrest/try and execute a large part of your local government who let this thing happen and then they blockade your world to destroy your economy while also making your pay massive reparations to those you harmed.

[Ahriman238]

Not sure where you got the idea that is their preferred tactic for dealing with orbitals defenses from either-it isn't, as they don't dare risk accidentally hitting the planet instead (which is mentioned only about every other time they have to take out orbital installations), everything with sidewalls (and orbital defense stations DO have sidewalls) is pretty much ludicrously resistant to kinetic impactors (which those missiles would be by that time) and the reason Honor was worried about the Masadans ever trying a fractional c missile strike on the planet to begin with was because she knew those people were stark raving mad and might do it regardless of the consequences.

I got the idea from the Honor of the Queen, where they say it's the preferred tactic for dealing with fixed fortifications.

IIRC the Edict wasn't first mentioned until half a dozen books later. It's probably just some loose detail, even Weber has those.

What orbital defense stations are you talking about? The only defense stations I recall as having wedges and walls (and eventually spherical sidewalls) are the Star Forts guarding the Wormhole Junction. Those are twenty hours flight away from Manticore at it's closest, and generally as far from 'orbital' as you can get and remain insystem.