new/old dead horse, futher beating requested

kzt wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:No, it's a viable tactic for taking out orbital infrastructure, which doesn't have wedges. That was the great fear in the battles defending Grayson, that the attackers would destroy the orbital farms. Also, even if someone commits an Eridani violation against the SEM, it won't retaliate with a violation of its own.

Want to bet the lives of everyone you know on the assumption that a ship CO can't possibly have a different opinion about what is a reasonable response?

What is with this epidemic-level assumption that everyone with a warship is an Eridani violation waiting to happen?

kzt wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:No, it's a viable tactic for taking out orbital infrastructure, which doesn't have wedges. That was the great fear in the battles defending Grayson, that the attackers would destroy the orbital farms. Also, even if someone commits an Eridani violation against the SEM, it won't retaliate with a violation of its own.

Want to bet the lives of everyone you know on the assumption that a ship CO can't possibly have a different opinion about what is a reasonable response?

Respond to whom??? I can't imagine the attackers broadcasting, "I am your local evil conqueror and I am located on planet X."

Also response would depend on whether or not the hyper drives have been removed on the SDs which I understand was part of the proposal with the "scare crow" ideal. If they have been, their operational area is going to be pretty much within the star system on impeller...

If I were setting the thing up, I would manage it so that if you had a miss on orbital infrastructure, the missile would go out into space rather than crashing into the planet.

Finally, in the honorverse, ships are killed by missiles all the time. Part of the object of the cee-fractional thing as was mentioned upthread is that you get the things up to a certain speed and then have them coast in with some time to maneuver when they arrive in the neighborhood of the target. And you send enough spread out in such a manner that the throat or the rear of the wedge is pointed at something when it goes off. In that respect its not so different from regular missile warfare.

Besides, how much time are you going to have to react by the time you know the thing is coming?

Don

n7axw wrote:Besides, how much time are you going to have to react by the time you know the thing is coming?

You can detect missile drives at absurd ranges. That's because they are absurdly strong gravity sources.

SDMs have the rather significant problem that they are SINGLE DRIVE missiles, so no, there is no terminal maneuvering. It's totally ballistic and, since the missile sensors are not designed to find targets at light hour ranges, just aimed at a point in space. Accuracy depends on how good the inertial guidance package on the missile is, and how good your prediction of the target location is.

The defender can see the really hot rock coming through space and maneuver to evade it. Or just move continually in varying directions. If you move a reasonable distance you are out of the sensor acquisition window (see the total confidence displayed in AAC), and certainly have no actual chance of being directly hit.

n7axw wrote:Respond to whom??? I can't imagine the attackers broadcasting, "I am your local evil conqueror and I am located on planet X."

I'd probably guess that the people who showed up to ask me to surrender or they would bombard the planet a few days are probably the ones bombarding the planet. Just a total wild guess, but there you go.

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:Respond to whom??? I can't imagine the attackers broadcasting, "I am your local evil conqueror and I am located on planet X."

I'd probably guess that the people who showed up to ask me to surrender or they would bombard the planet a few days are probably the ones bombarding the planet. Just a total wild guess, but there you go.

Cheopis wrote:Older warships in the real world, as a general rule with some exceptions, are used until they are pretty much falling apart. There is no reason to believe that Manticore can't find some governments that would like a few of them, even if they are just going to be used as orbital forts. Beowulf and her colonies (if her colonies wish to assist) could provide training crews.

Look at the history of Aircraft carriers from WWII. A great many of them were shifted around from country to country as loaners and sales long, long after they were anything even resembling state of the art.

Aircraft carriers are pretty much the exact opposite of SDs. With Aircaft carriers their primary armament is almost ludicrously easy to upgrade. Simply fly (or crane) the old planes off and fly improved ones on.

That's a bit of a simplification because you need to upgrade weapons storage and maintenance facilities to handle the new planes and may need to alter launching and landing mechanism to handle heavier and faster planes. But the primary weapons aren't buried into tons of armor.

As a real world counterpoint look at what happened to all the remaining (heavily armored) battleships post war. Almost all quickly put into reserve or just scrapped. No 2nd hand market in them, too difficult and expensive to modify due to all the armor. (The US is a partial counter-example but even there the Iowa were placed in reserve post war and except for emergency war duties they were really reactivated only after the USN pretty much wore out their remaining WWII era heavy cruisers and it was down to old BBs or nothing for that role.

kzt wrote:The total crew that was involved in fighting the Bellerophon was less than 10, all the weapons were run by computer. If 4 guys on the Thunder had been a bit better trained they would have crushed Fearless.

That was also an extremely atypical combat.

It happened so quickly, and at such short range, than missiles, CMs, ECM, decoys, etc, etc never got into play. The BCs emerged within energy range and died in a single energy salvo.

Get into a longer missile duel and you really don't want to leave your decoy, ECM, and missile targeting to canned computer programs. (That how someone like Rafe figures out how to exploit the canned program to slip impossible contact nukes past all your defenses). Not to mention you're going to be taking damage, so now you really do want at least trained damage control parties to keep small problems from growing to make major impacts on your fighting ability. (On mount crews might be a different issue)

Fighting for any length of time with only 10 well trained crew seems unrealistic in the Honorverse.

Dafmeister wrote:

kzt wrote:Want to bet the lives of everyone you know on the assumption that a ship CO can't possibly have a different opinion about what is a reasonable response?

What is with this epidemic-level assumption that everyone with a warship is an Eridani violation waiting to happen?

Remember Honor's reaction to Blackbird Station? She was stopped. Remember her reaction to when Tankersley was killed? She wasn't stopped. Sure she was much younger then, but many navies have lots of young commanders. You do something heinous to civilians and you risk that world's professional military becoming professional killers who are willing to set aside the "gentleman's" rules of war.

History has taught us nothing other than the most viable option for winning a war is to be decisive, brutal, and cold.

War is neither honorable nor glorious.

Certain actions can be honorable and glorious, but war in and of itself is certainly not. This leads many real generals, admirals in an actual war to pick the easiest and quickest route to victory. These actions are often seen to peace time civilians as "atrocities" via armchair generals, admirals, blowhard politicians, and retired or unemployed forum dipsticks.

Personally, I see a far greater atrocity being a protracted drawn-out war rather than a brutal short war.

Relax wrote:History has taught us nothing other than the most viable option for winning a war is to be decisive, brutal, and cold.

War is neither honorable nor glorious.

Certain actions can be honorable and glorious, but war in and of itself is certainly not. This leads many real generals, admirals in an actual war to pick the easiest and quickest route to victory. These actions are often seen to peace time civilians as "atrocities" via armchair generals, admirals, blowhard politicians, and retired or unemployed forum dipsticks.

Personally, I see a far greater atrocity being a protracted drawn-out war rather than a brutal short war.

I prefer Gen. Patton's quote when it comes to waging war.

'Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country, he won by making some other poor sonuvabitch die for his.'

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:Besides, how much time are you going to have to react by the time you know the thing is coming?

You can detect missile drives at absurd ranges. That's because they are absurdly strong gravity sources.

SDMs have the rather significant problem that they are SINGLE DRIVE missiles, so no, there is no terminal maneuvering. It's totally ballistic and, since the missile sensors are not designed to find targets at light hour ranges, just aimed at a point in space. Accuracy depends on how good the inertial guidance package on the missile is, and how good your prediction of the target location is.

The defender can see the really hot rock coming through space and maneuver to evade it. Or just move continually in varying directions. If you move a reasonable distance you are out of the sensor acquisition window (see the total confidence displayed in AAC), and certainly have no actual chance of being directly hit.

But, that's the fear. The attacker gets up to 80 % of light at a distance grav sensors cannot see them and fires his SDM. It is traveling close enough to the speed of light that visual and other lightspeed sensors of the target cannot see it until 10s of seconds before it strikes. Because it is out of the blue, reactions are slow, allowing it to be more deadly.

And because it was fired so far out, with no final error correction, its targeting will not be exact, so something aimed at the orbital infrastructure may miss entirely - or slam into the planet. And that uncertainty, that some unaccounted variable in the trajectory, gravity fields or particle density of the flight path will cause the missile to miss, is the reason it is not used more often. In addition, this is fired from so far out it is beyond the sensors of the attacker as well as the defender, so you are firing at where you think your target will be based on stored data, not observational data, which may be incorrect.

As for grav sensor range, we know shipborne sensors can see 10 light minutes or so, but definitely not light hours. Honor could not see the comings and goings at Urial in HoQ, and Foraker was able to blow away a Manty picket by translating in at the poles of a star, when she knew manties had long range sensors on the ecliptic alone, and was able to translate in out of shipborne sensor range.

Such a ballistic attack would not work on a planet which had long range arrays like Manticore, or a full shell of Manty sensor drones, but the rest could be vulnerable.