No Scorched Earth-Effects of a Living McBryde

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Then the mine has no sensors that can detect a ship.

Well, true if you don't have a huge gravity anomaly around your ship. Of course if you don't have your sail deployed you are turned into very finely divided dust by the grav shear of the WH, but it's up to you.

If the mine is at ambient it has no power source.

JohnRoth wrote:Yup, I read that, and I thought that's what I said. Let me clarify. The issue is the entry and exit lanes. Are we talking about the entire entry and exit lane being a single, straight line to the actual "doorway" where you have to have your sails up to transit or you'll be ripped to cosmic dust bunnies, or is the transit lane longer and possibly twistier than this?

My impression is the latter. This is the Harvest Joy's transit to Lynx. Notice that the wedge doesn't get dropped until after the first sail is up.

Certainly the books seem a bit more cavalier about the grav wave's extension into n-space or at least heavily compresses the time to make the description "on page" move quicker.

I guess it boils down to what we're calling the "lane"; which is basically what Louis R already said.


I've been using it (and terms like "grav sheer" to try to refer to just the bit where the grav wave intrudes into n-space strongly enough that you must use your sail. That's some length away from the terminus itself, because RFC says it takes (depending on the ship and on the terminus) 20 seconds to as much as 3 minutes from the time you rig sails until you reach to "doorway" where the hypergenerator can jump you to the far terminus (or going the other way, it's that long after emergence before you're out the end of the grav wave enough to switch over to wedge). It's that time under sail where the ships are extremely vulnerable to defenders.

However there is also a space traffic control "lane" through n-space which Astro control requires ships to follow. That part is just an semi-arbitrary path through space and a ship can freely use wedges, sidewalls, missiles, etc while approaching the spot where they have to raise sails. The only increased vulnerability in that "outer", or "distant",lane is that the ships are moving down a very known and predictable path to a fixed point (so it could be heavily mined even past the end of the grav portion; where you can switch from sails back to wedge).

Loren Pechtel wrote:If the mine is at ambient it has no power source.

Grav sensors are apparently not exactly power hogs. And remember, this is the magical honorverse where pods of missiles full of plasma at star core temp can be used as stealthy system defense launchers.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Then the mine has no sensors that can detect a ship.

kzt wrote:Well, true if you don't have a huge gravity anomaly around your ship. Of course if you don't have your sail deployed you are turned into very finely divided dust by the grav shear of the WH, but it's up to you.

Loren Pechtel wrote:If the mine is at ambient it has no power source.

The Honorverse has exceedingly capable thermal manipulation capability. Admittedly, I suspect that most of the (waste) thermal energy is getting run through a (probably) handwavium converter system to useable energy. As for the rest ... the "stealth fields" and other stealth systems are apparently exceedingly good, and can redirect nearly all emissions into a narrow arc, of just a few degrees.

That arc - actually, it's a cone, or at least some solid shape, since we're operating in 3D - must have an extremely high surface brightness. Something that's implied in the Nuncio ambush when the Kitty maneuvers an RD into the zone, apparently at rather long range, and is easily able to read the emissions and ID the ship from something as extremely elusive as a neutrino spectrum. So stealth isn't quite as magical as people like to imply - it's very effective, but at the price of making you detectable at _extremely_ long ranges if you have the bad luck [or lousy judgement] to point your keyhole at someone's sensors.

A point to be kept in mind during the endless 'you can't see a spider' debates.

Kytheros wrote:The Honorverse has exceedingly capable thermal manipulation capability. Admittedly, I suspect that most of the (waste) thermal energy is getting run through a (probably) handwavium converter system to useable energy. As for the rest ... the "stealth fields" and other stealth systems are apparently exceedingly good, and can redirect nearly all emissions into a narrow arc, of just a few degrees.

Louis R wrote:That arc - actually, it's a cone, or at least some solid shape, since we're operating in 3D - must have an extremely high surface brightness. Something that's implied in the Nuncio ambush when the Kitty maneuvers an RD into the zone, apparently at rather long range, and is easily able to read the emissions and ID the ship from something as extremely elusive as a neutrino spectrum. So stealth isn't quite as magical as people like to imply - it's very effective, but at the price of making you detectable at _extremely_ long ranges if you have the bad luck [or lousy judgement] to point your keyhole at someone's sensors.

A point to be kept in mind during the endless 'you can't see a spider' debates.

Kytheros wrote:The Honorverse has exceedingly capable thermal manipulation capability. Admittedly, I suspect that most of the (waste) thermal energy is getting run through a (probably) handwavium converter system to useable energy. As for the rest ... the "stealth fields" and other stealth systems are apparently exceedingly good, and can redirect nearly all emissions into a narrow arc, of just a few degrees.

It's probably a cone. But, that is largely besides the point.
The mines probably aren't going to be pointing the "keyhole" of their stealth systems towards the transit lanes. Against threats coming in from normal space, the mines are worthless whether or not they're stealthed. The mines are only useful against undesirables coming through the wormhole.

And as for finding spiders, space is big, and the keyholes are relatively small. Sure, you can get lucky like that but the alternative to being lucky is lots of sensor platforms being out there.

And if you're not looking at the keyhole, the Honorverse does have very good stealth systems available to it.

Something occurred to me related to a living McBryde: the effect it would have on Solarian opinions and actions. Specifically, that of Massimo Filareta.

If McBryde is giving out his testimony to Parliament and Congress, talking about how Mesa has been manipulating things from behind the scenes, that information is going to get out into the Solarian League very quickly, and I imagine that Filareta would see a copy of that so that he's "fully informed" of the situation. Now, Filareta, as we've already seen from canon, has doubts about the whole "Operation Raging Justice" in the first place, and is aware that the Alignment is pulling his strings. So it might be possible that when he hypers into the system, instead of getting mousetrapped, he tries talking to Honor instead of of threatening, and maybe gives the GA another angle to explore.

To a lesser extent, this might also occur with Verrochio and, especially, Hongbo, out in Meyers.