Honorverse ramblings and musings

crewdude48 wrote:Vector change is definitely normal done with the wedge. When first developed, the new LACs were noted as having oversize reaction thrusters so they can turn into the enemy with out using wedge forces when the bow wall is up. After a quick search, I am confidant that exactly how the wedge changes the vector is never stated.

And to answer another question, Accel is only sometimes affected when towing pods. If you can tow the pods inside of the wedge, it has no baring on your accel. But, there are only so many pods that internal tractors can tow inside of the wedge before you have to start dragging them along behind. Once you extend the tractor beams out of the kilt of your wedge, this will cause you to loose some speed. According to RFC, this is because sending the tractors out the back of the wedge forces the ship to adjust the relative angles of the wedge, reducing their efficiency.

The Donkey helps because you can tow a bunch of pods with only one single tractor, allowing you to tow many more inside your wedge, or have fewer tractors going out the back and therefor less reduction. The modern Manty pods, having internal tractors, basically allow you to have as many as you can fit inside of the actual volume of the wedge before it starts to affect accel.

At least what you've given us seems very close to definitive.

Thanks much for this post.

Every time I think back to War of Honor when Michelle was captured because Ajax was disabled, I kept thinking that navies should have barges on board for those type emergencies. I know that ships can't be towed in hyper - well LACs apparently can. But all AJax needed was more time to evacuate. If a barge had been there to tow, at best speeds, then Ajax could have saved many more people if I'm recalling the sitrep correctly.

Of course, I do not know the size of barges (though I get the idea that they're really small) nor do I know their max emergency tow speed.

Also, I remember that Ajax had problems with the hatches to launch the lifeboats. Why can't Honorverse ships be made to at least emergency dock with each other? Then pressurize particular compartments and run run run before enemy overtakes.

cthia wrote:Every time I think back to War of Honor when Michelle was captured because Ajax was disabled, I kept thinking that navies should have barges on board for those type emergencies. I know that ships can't be towed in hyper - well LACs apparently can. But all AJax needed was more time to evacuate. If a barge had been there to tow, at best speeds, then Ajax could have saved many more people if I'm recalling the sitrep correctly.

Of course, I do not know the size of barges (though I get the idea that they're really small) nor do I know their max emergency tow speed.

Also, I remember that Ajax had problems with the hatches to launch the lifeboats. Why can't Honorverse ships be made to at least emergency dock with each other? Then pressurize particular compartments and run run run before enemy overtakes.

'Tug' would be more the word you're after here than 'barge', since you're looking for something to tow things. Real-life tugs tend to be relatively small, because they're not built to contain much more than engines. Honorverse tugs... I'm not sure. I don't recall tonnage figures. They may need a fair displacement just to give them appropriate space for the impeller rings for their powerful wedges.

But anyway, fleets won't have lots of tugs around for the same reason they won't have lots of anything that isn't critical: scarcity of resources and higher priorities. A tug with the fleet will soak up more money, build time, and personnel for occasional use that could be going to a warship that would be in consistent use. Even a warship built with some powerful tractors and an overpowered wedge would get only rare use of those and be that much less capable as a warship for the loss. I suspect a standard warship could tow another at very low accel - consider Roland DD's gently altering the vector of crippled Scientist SD's - and while that's a useful emergency capability, it's not viable for ships fleeing oncoming late-model Havenite forces.

I'm sure warships can dock to one another in an emergency, but consider how difficult that would be. Both would need wedges down. They'd have to approach carefully before dropping them, and maneuver the rest of the way on thrusters, with final delicate maneuvers with sidewalls down too, weapons blocked, and with lots of risk of collision.

In this case, while under fire.

Ballistic missiles would have excellent chances of hits, without the protection of wedges or sidewalls or last-ditch maneuvers for the ships. They'd be so close that laserheads could hit either of them - heck, though this would take luck, shots that go through one could still plausibly hit the other on the far side!

And as a final insult, if you've got damaged hatches, you may well have lost the use of the ports you'd be using even when docked.

Warships will take damage. It's what other warships are built to do to them, and while avoiding, resisting, repairing, and getting around damage are all critical parts of warship design, success is never going to be total. People will die, people will be maimed, people will be just stuck, all under circumstances that could have been avoided... at prices that would often be prohibitively high given expectations, needs, and resources.

cthia wrote:Every time I think back to War of Honor when Michelle was captured because Ajax was disabled, I kept thinking that navies should have barges on board for those type emergencies. I know that ships can't be towed in hyper - well LACs apparently can. But all AJax needed was more time to evacuate. If a barge had been there to tow, at best speeds, then Ajax could have saved many more people if I'm recalling the sitrep correctly.

Of course, I do not know the size of barges (though I get the idea that they're really small) nor do I know their max emergency tow speed.

Also, I remember that Ajax had problems with the hatches to launch the lifeboats. Why can't Honorverse ships be made to at least emergency dock with each other? Then pressurize particular compartments and run run run before enemy overtakes.

Actually ships can be towed through hyper - as long as their structural integrity hasn't been compromised too much and as long as you clear of grav waves. And you don't need a dedicated tug; most any warship has enough tractors to tow another. But I have a vague recollection that Solon might have been in a grav wave - which means you can't tow anything from there in hyper.


Of course if the ship doesn't have a wedge, then it doesn't have a compensator and you'd better keep the accel down to something survivable to its crew. (If its grav plates are working 100 - 150g; other wise 1-3g).

That's way too low an accel to escape while your under fire, and the maneuverability of both ships is heavily compromised. They'd be sitting ducks.



Going back to a historical parallel. The carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) could have been towed back to Pearl Harbor after being disabled at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Even without a dedicated tug other Navy ships could have done so.
But without complete control of the seas it was considered far too risky. The two ships would be totally vulnerable to any attack. So instead one of the three fleet carriers in the USN was deliberately torpedoed and abandoned to sink.
(Contrast that to the USS Franklin a few years later when the IJN had been virtually wiped out. She was far more damaged that Hornet, and far further from home, and basically surpluss to the war effort (unlike Hornet); but was still towed back because the risk of attack in transit was now minuscule.

I like Emily. What a character inside. What a rare mettle she's made of. Emily is one person outside of Honor Harrington to be looked up to. No wonder she was so well liked.

Here's the thing. There's lots of old money in White Haven, even before Honor. So where is Emily's doctor? I don't recall ever hearing his name, just a vague mention of him in passing. A relative nobody.

Surely the Alexanders could afford the best medical care, yet I always got the impression that they were going to a free clinic for Emily's service. Even Allison gave her advice that Emily should have long since been told in a fashion she would have digested. Even psychiatric care seemed lacking. Why weren't both Harringtons recruited for Emily's care from the start? They're the best in their fields and Emily deserved the best. It seems there should have been a public outcry for the Harrington's service far beyond even the Harringtons own plea to help. Emily was a social icon and an HD diva. Well loved.

Allison for, well what Allison has already done for her. And Alfred to look into her paralysis. The Rev. Jesse Jackson would have pontificated...

"She can't be regenerated on but she can be operated on. I say forego the regeneration. I say, FOREGO the regeneration. I SAY FOREGO THE REGENERATION... ... for an OPERATION. Can I get a Amen!"

It's stated somewhere that Hamish spent a fair chunk of his fortune bringing specialists from Beowulf, Sol, etc., as well as the best Manticorans.

Emily's condition stabilised a long time ago. Her regular doctor is just that - a regular doctor.

as i understand it Emily's injuries are OLD.

at least a couple of decades was the vibe i got, it happened while Hamish was @ buships not long after Roger took the throne. elizabeth took the throne just before trevors star was taken and that was implied to be at least a decade/2 before OBS as well.

so lets say about 30 years before OBS as a rough guess. Alfred spent at least a decade and a bit as a navy doctor (as shown in analogy 6 when we see the actual story of how Honour and Nimitz met and bonded) and that assumes Honor came along not long after he qualified. once he retired from the Navy he had to build a rep in civilian medicine to go with his naval one.

In At All Costs one of the things that Theisman mentioned to Eloise was the Manty introduction of two new weapons. Apollo was the game changer for certain. But I liked...

"We're still evaluating the preliminary reports. From what we've seen so far, it looks like they used two new weapons on us. What makes it hurt worse is that both their new systems appear to be absolutely logical progressions from their damned Ghost Rider technology, and we never even saw them coming.

"We should have realized that sooner or later they were going to strap weapons onto their recon drones. They've demonstrated they can operate them deep inside our defended areas with virtual impunity, and they probably took a certain pleasure from applying a variant of the same technique Saint-Just used to destroy Elizabeth's yacht in Yeltsin. The bad news is how close they can get them; the good news—such as it is—is that, even so, they can't get them all the way into attack range in stealth. They still have to get into range to execute their attacks, and not even Manty stealth systems can hide them during the last hundred thousand kilometers or so of their runs. They don't have the sort of acceleration rates missiles do, either, and to be used properly, they have to attack virtually from rest, or else they can't loiter until the proper moment. So they have relatively low closing velocities when they come in, and they can be engaged by counter-missiles and standard point defense, now that we know they're out there. Our intercept probabilities won't be good, especially given how little warning we'll have between the moment their drives peak and the moment they reach attack range, but we can probably cope with the threat."

He paused for a moment, then shrugged.

"Actually, this part of it's largely my own personal fault," he said unflinchingly. "Shannon warned me from the beginning that the Moriarty platforms' stealth wouldn't be good enough to hide them if the Manties figured out what they should be looking for. She wanted to build them into purpose-built superdreadnoughts, or at least add them as strap-on components to larger, more heavily defended platforms. I overruled her because of the need to get Moriarty into service as quickly as possible. I shouldn't have. She was right."

To me, that was a dirty okie-doke trick of one upmanship of Sonja's. Rather humorous to me. I imagine Shannon was rolling her eyes on that one afterwards.

But, in the battles with the SLN, I kept looking for their Aegis system to be targeted and destroyed at will, in the same fashion, but it never happened. Of course, in the Second Battle of Manticore there was no need. Is the Aegis system less vulnerable than Moriarty?

And I missed that it was a variation of the tech used on Elizabeth's yacht in Yeltsin - which was SLN tech. I posited in another thread that that tech had merit. I was right.

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Dauntless wrote:as i understand it Emily's injuries are OLD.

at least a couple of decades was the vibe i got, it happened while Hamish was @ buships not long after Roger took the throne. elizabeth took the throne just before trevors star was taken and that was implied to be at least a decade/2 before OBS as well.

so lets say about 30 years before OBS as a rough guess. Alfred spent at least a decade and a bit as a navy doctor (as shown in analogy 6 when we see the actual story of how Honour and Nimitz met and bonded) and that assumes Honor came along not long after he qualified. once he retired from the Navy he had to build a rep in civilian medicine to go with his naval one.

Point taken, but I am surprised that the Alfred half of the Harrington team hasn't been recruited to at least look into it as he has promised to do with Nimitz' injuries.

munroburton wrote:It's stated somewhere that Hamish spent a fair chunk of his fortune bringing specialists from Beowulf, Sol, etc., as well as the best Manticorans.

Emily's condition stabilised a long time ago. Her regular doctor is just that - a regular doctor.

Thanks. I missed that.