Reserve destruction

pnakasone wrote:We must assume that they have developed ways of minimizing the infrared out put of their military craft. We are doing it for our fighter craft to make them less vulnerable to IR missiles and sensors.

Think of task of monitoring the volume of sphere 80 AU or more in diameter. Now in that volume you have tens of thousands of natural objects giving off or reflecting EM emissions of various intensities. Then add all the human made sources of EM emissions of various intensities that are not trying to hide from you. Now try finding someone who is deliberately doing things to avoid standing out in all of that noise.

Atomic Rockets says everything needed.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... h_In_Space

There are things to hide in or behind. There are ways to be more stealthy in one direction than in others. However, any fictional account of actual stealth in space is going to be liberally salted with handwavium and bullshittium.

Weber has gravity tech and hyperspace to use for the, err, exotic elements required to create stealth in space. However, even those things don't make a lot of sense, because they can't. DW has never indicated that he's intentionally abandoning all reasonable physics. He's just indicated that we can't understand what's happening.

But the people in the Honorverse who DO understand these things should be able to detect wherever it is that the waste energies are being pushed.

If you are pushing energy into the first layer of Hyperspace, sensors in Hyperspace should be able to detect it.

Holographic systems simply cannot and will not work, because they can be trivially defeated by parallax detection, unless you create some sort of bullshittium out of particles that are smaller than particles, allowing infinite fidelity at infinite angles. And even then, it's questionable.

If you DO detect something in space, and you can move faster than light through hyperspace, you just need to get ahead of the event's light signature, which is traveling at the speed of light, and look at it again.

You can literally watch the same exact event occur several times in progressively less resolution as the event wave of light expands.

Keeping track of everything that *should* be making 'noise' in space is something we already do. That's how Radio Telescopes can get worthwhile data. They have to filter out all the known signals to get the interesting signals.

Getting back the reserve, I want Manticore to leave it in one piece. That way when the Mandarins attempt to reform the League into something that can survive we get to see idiot politicians objecting because it was really that serious, they'd activate the Reserve. It's not like the Mandarins could admit every last one of those ships is barely worth the missiles it'd take to blast them to cinders.

noblehunter wrote:Getting back the reserve, I want Manticore to leave it in one piece. That way when the Mandarins attempt to reform the League into something that can survive we get to see idiot politicians objecting because it was really that serious, they'd activate the Reserve. It's not like the Mandarins could admit every last one of those ships is barely worth the missiles it'd take to blast them to cinders.

They're not useless. The ships are just as capable as they were before at keeping the thumb on their rebellious systems.

Just because they're little more than targets to the GA ships doesn't mean they aren't effective against others.

Loren Pechtel wrote:They're not useless. The ships are just as capable as they were before at keeping the thumb on their rebellious systems.

Oh yes they are useless.

We're talking about the reserve fleet, not the active SLN fleet(s). I'd be very surprised if 10% or the reserve fleet could power up a wedge and get out of its own way.


Assuming you could find Cadre, Crew, and parts, you might get one out of the yards and worked-up to a level of competence that could defeat a construction suit armed with a super-soaker(tm) in about two or three years.

Weird Harold wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:They're not useless. The ships are just as capable as they were before at keeping the thumb on their rebellious systems.

Oh yes they are useless.

We're talking about the reserve fleet, not the active SLN fleet(s). I'd be very surprised if 10% or the reserve fleet could power up a wedge and get out of its own way.


Assuming you could find Cadre, Crew, and parts, you might get one out of the yards and worked-up to a level of competence that could defeat a construction suit armed with a super-soaker(tm) in about two or three years.

Let's be realistic. Some were built last year and placed directly into reserve. Some were rotated out of the active fleet last year, updated, and placed into reserve after 100? years of service. Some units have been in the Reserve for ~250 years. Some of the oldest have been upgraded to new spec.

Most have not, or their upgraded spec is far out of date.

So in any reserve formation you will find a portion almost ready to go, as , and a much larger portion which will vary in capability and readiness, up to 250 years out of date.

DW once said that Bribery is rampant in the SLN, but magnitudes below that in the Silesian Navy, and there are no missing ships - but that's not to say that all the upgrade work was properly inspected, tested, and signed off on and being what was speced and requested.

3 years can be a little much for some ships in the reserve. For the ships just placed in reserve or upgraded in the last couple of years, they can probably be worked up and in full fighting trim in 6-15 months. (We've never been given firm numbers, but I've figured each year 24 new in the reserve, 24 active into the reserve, and 24 reserve ships upgraded to new.) I'd assume at least the formerly active units to be available quickly, though the new builds and especially the upgrades may take some remediation.

For the rest, I would have to agree with you. Depending on the upgrades needed, it may take longer to upgrade a SD than to build one (5-6 years iirc for the SL), so it could take 7 years to properly field the worst kept craft in the reserve.

Weird Harold wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:They're not useless. The ships are just as capable as they were before at keeping the thumb on their rebellious systems.

Oh yes they are useless.

We're talking about the reserve fleet, not the active SLN fleet(s). I'd be very surprised if 10% or the reserve fleet could power up a wedge and get out of its own way.


Assuming you could find Cadre, Crew, and parts, you might get one out of the yards and worked-up to a level of competence that could defeat a construction suit armed with a super-soaker(tm) in about two or three years.

Said it before, mothball reserve of a spaceship is pretty darn simple. Pump down atmosphere, power down all reactors and walk away.

With no oxygen circulating to corrode anything, and no active reactors, anything short of a) corrupt officials either sneaking in and stealing stuff or outright selling the ship itself, or b) some form a calamity and an asteroid shower punching through the battle steel hulls at near C velocities... those ships would be perfectly intact.

Admittedly, almost the entirety of the Solarian fleet, active and Reserve waller are going to be pretty damn bad in missile combat, but a waller is still a waller. If they ever get into range of something with their energy batteries, it's going to hurt.


Not that many people are going to actively have done the heavy research into the laserhead missiles, from what HoS indicates. Manticore researched the crap out of it to prepare for anti-Haven operations, Haven bought the same basic design that Manticore got in cyber-magazines, Andermani stole it (or did they buy it too).

The Solarian Navy seems to have very very light usage of them, but they seemingly aren't all that advanced off that initial basis Manticore used as a springboard for Gram.

Who else uses laserhead warheads boils down to pirates who buy them off the blackmarket, and Technodyne (meaning Mesa, since TIY really does whatever MAlign operatives have suggested for operations), and that's really it.


I'm specfically excluding Grayson and other anti-Haven Alliance members like Zanzibar and company, because they only got laserheads due to alliance with Manticore, not because they actually researched them on their own. Grayson was still using contact nukes in their wars with Masada with no standoff until the surprise attack on Admiral Courvosier.


TL:DR... the Solarian Reserve wallers are still useful because with sufficient numbers, and that most systems probably haven't researched into laserhead missiles, it's possible to bullrush and use their energy batteries to compel surrenders.

IIRC, Andies bought the basic design, followed by the Peeps a score or so years later. Manticore built their design from first principles.

kzt wrote:IIRC, Andies bought the basic design, followed by the Peeps a score or so years later. Manticore built their design from first principles.

So about what I thought. But I'm more or less correct in my general assumption, that laserhead missiles aren't really as wide-spread as we're assuming. It's not even been a century since it was originally invented and fielded even by the Solarian scientists who conceived it.

And then from there, the few empires that have bought (or otherwise acquired it) have taken it to pretty high standards, while the League basically yawned and stuffed it into a filing cabinet with very limited deployment. And since most League members relied on their Navy to handle things, it's very low odds that any League members (other than those crazy Beowulfans) have done research on their own.


So those lots and lots of big, bad Reserve superdreadnoughts with their big assed energy batteries, and skimpy missile defences are definitely a valid threat... to anyone that doesn't have laserhead warheads, which means pirates or a Haven sector pocket empire are the only ones who wouldn't be scared by Reserve ships.

The problem with sending the Reserve out on suppression missions is that the GA has the inside track. Since the GA can still use the wormhole network it would be a simple matter for them to position forces to intercept. Especially once they get intelligence assets in place.

Any time those SDs went out they'd run the risk of finding a flotilla of cruisers waiting for them. Once they crossed the hyper limit their only choice would be surrender or die.

noblehunter wrote:The problem with sending the Reserve out on suppression missions is that the GA has the inside track. Since the GA can still use the wormhole network it would be a simple matter for them to position forces to intercept. Especially once they get intelligence assets in place.

Any time those SDs went out they'd run the risk of finding a flotilla of cruisers waiting for them. Once they crossed the hyper limit their only choice would be surrender or die.

I believe there is not a single person on this forum stating that the reserve would be used against GA or GA aligned planets.

Therefore the proposition is anyone who has not been able to suborn SLN(BF or FF) units will go after the reserve as their next best option for a short term "fix" before they can attain a design themselves and start building from the ground up. So, the reserve is to be stolen, or bought etc by the roughly several thousand planets that have absolutely nothing other than obsolescent LAC's and maybe a CL or two to be used in the short term.

How successful such actions may be is rather problematic as many have discussed in this thread.