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Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC

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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by filbert   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 11:56 am

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Garth 2 wrote:so i'm just wondering how much does the jeune ecole school of though owe to Princess Roger?

It looks to me like he is basically the one person most responsible for the existence of the jeune ecole.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by solbergb   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 2:14 pm

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Well, him and Adcock.

Seriously, I didn't realize that MDM research went all the way back to King Roger. Cripes, no wonder everyone is having such trouble duplicating it. It makes Foraker's achievement all the more remarkable.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by kzt   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 3:20 pm

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solbergb wrote:Seriously, I didn't realize that MDM research went all the way back to King Roger. Cripes, no wonder everyone is having such trouble duplicating it. It makes Foraker's achievement all the more remarkable.

The fact that they did duplicate it that fast is why I expect that the SL will too.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by Master.Mind   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:24 pm

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The SLN doesn't even have samples of manticoran technology at best they have some footage of their units being utterly annihilated. Besides I believe that it will take a lot of time before the SLN even figures out how to (theoretically) build MDMs.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by Aleyoops   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:46 pm

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Master.Mind wrote:The SLN doesn't even have samples of manticoran technology at best they have some footage of their units being utterly annihilated. Besides I believe that it will take a lot of time before the SLN even figures out how to (theoretically) build MDMs.


Seems to me Technodyne aka MAlign already has MDMs. Filareta used them at 2nd Manticor. The problem is that those MDMs are monsters in size as they have not accomplished the fusion plant miniaturization that Manticor has. Those MDMs still rely on Capacitor rings for power while Manty MDMs have on board mini fusion plants.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by Aleyoops   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:47 pm

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Almost forgot those Technodyn MDMs were used in Monica as well as Congo.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by solbergb   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:49 pm

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Foraker found a way to build 3 stage MDMs with off the shelf technology, and while they were larger than Manticoran equivalents, they weren't THAT much larger. Haven always used oversized missiles anyway.

The battle of Torch and 2nd Manticore had the Cataphract MDMs, which are greatly inferior to what the Andies came up with (they made two-stage missiles as big as the Havenite 3-stage missiles but with no compromise on warhead size). So what Haven did is clearly something special, although yes, it was informed by better access to what Manticore did to them at Buttercup, while all the Andies and Mesans had to work with was observer reports and whatever their spies could come up with.

As for Monica...those weren't MDMs. Those were big single drive missiles with maybe 20% more range than normal. The RMN equivalent of that is the oversized non-MDM cruiser missile the Saganami-B fired (and that the Sollie forces were using in the Battle of Torch). Even though they're much smaller, the RMN effort would have probably outranged the Monican system defense missiles.

A lot of the Manticoran tech advantage is just that they are decades ahead of anyone else in gravitics research and in compensator technology. This means their impeller drives on missiles and ships alike are more efficient and in missiles in particular, can be made smaller. Superdense grav fusion bottles give them a stupidly high power budget for their size (but their capacitor missiles were also smaller and yet higher power budget than the rest of the universe). Most offensive and defensive targeting systems and EW use gravitics as the primary emission/thing to be detected, so they also get an advantage there. Finally grav lenses make all their beam weapons and warheads more powerful and/or smaller size.

Take away the gravitics advantage and they're just another Sollie polity, with a couple extra tricks involving safe fission plants and compensators learned from Greyson tech excursions.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by BrightSoul   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 6:25 pm

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Solbergb, Shannon had some advantages that the Sollies don't. Her Navy had actually faced them in combat and had a better idea of what they were doing. She may very well have figured out the baffles herself from wreckage or debris from the earlier conflict. Either that or she got the idea from Erewhon. On the other hand the Sollies have nothing to start with.

The Baffles I'm talking about were developed to protect the 2nd and 3rd stage drive nodes prior to their activation by Adcock, Hemphill and Roger's Project Gram.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by solbergb   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 6:40 pm

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The Sollies have an excuse. They were deliberately not paying attention (or being tricked into not paying attention)

The Andies though...they had an excellent spy network, didn't have to keep their budget black, had a higher tech base than Haven to begin with but just didn't do as well as Foraker. I have to think they didn't quite get the baffle concept but instead used physical distance to get some of the same effect. Otherwise the size of their dual drive missiles doesn't make a lot of sense. Or perhaps whatever they used as a baffle wasn't as effective as what Foraker (or the RMN at Buttercup) used.
Still they got a lot closer than the Mesans.

With the cataphracts I think they're doing an entirely different process...I'm not sure why there is an advantage to a weaker second stage (I would have thought that a weaker FIRST stage would be more likely to avoid node blow-out on the second stage) but the baffle concept doesn't lead you there. Which means the Mesans may be traveling down a dead end.

Bottom line though, you first need the right conceptual model, but even then engineering it into something small enough for even pods seems quite challenging. The tech base is there in the Solarian league (as Haven proved) to get enough range to outstrip your lightspeed fire control, but it does seem like even the theory of the baffle isn't obvious, and even when you get it there are significant engineering challenges.
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Re: Spoilers and possible Errors in House of Steel eARC
Post by BrightSoul   » Tue Feb 19, 2013 6:58 pm

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I rather got the idea that the Technodyne missiles have 2 missiles strapped together with the actual attack bird portion having a smaller sprint drive on it. Essentially, no wedge overlap on the actual drive nodes, two entirely separate drive systems that don't overlap instead of the overlap of the Manty system that requires the baffles.
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