Honorverse ramblings and musings

Duckk wrote:Why risk poking the bear? Statistically, if Second Fleet fires, something is going to get through the near planet defenses, at which point you're going to lose much of the yards. If Tourville doesn't intend to fire to begin with, why provoke him into doing so? Third Fleet coming up behind has the strength to punch out the weakened Second Fleet by itself, so it doesn't need the system defense pods to chip in. The reward versus the risk isn't really worth it.

It does leave us with the question why system defense pods are put close enough to Sphinx so that the planet is in danger of return fire going astray. They'd got stupendous range relative to that distance, so they could have been put where they would leave Sphinx out of the affair. That does not go for the bases, stations, and fortresses stuck in actual Sphinx orbit, but they were not critically at issue.

Unless it's a matter of return fire on the system defense missile pods being directed at the bases sorta-kinda responsible for controlling those missiles, and those bases being ones stuck over Sphinx? Even then though, what forced that decision, or if it wasn't forced, what idiot made it?

It's not Kuzak's call in any of those cases though.

JeffEngel wrote:It's not Kuzak's call in any of those cases though.

Yes it is, though not directly. She's the CO of Home fleet.

"And so far they haven't invaded our home system, either," D'Orville shot back. The Manticoran tradition was that the Admiralty did not second guess a fleet CO when battle threatened—not even Home Fleet's commander. What D'Orville did with his fleet was his decision. Admiralty House might advise, might provide additional intelligence or suggest tactics, but the decision was his, and it wasn't like Thomas Caparelli to try to change that.

...

"Franklin, contact Admiral Caparelli. Tell him I recommend that the Sphinx defenses not fire on these people unless and until they launch against Sphinx."

That's just it, she recommends that they not fire - the implication here being that she cannot order them to do so. Granted, as CO of Third Fleet and the commander of the only force presently capable of persecuting the engagement, she has a certain amount of de facto authority. Nonetheless, since she specifically worded it that way, it appears to be that someone else is in tactical command of the near planet defenses, probably the senior fortress commander.

Yes, though David has never really explained how that works (at least to us). Nor do we have any real idea how much firepower is present, what the fixed defenses are and how effectively defended against missile attacks the whole of near-sphinx space is.

The decision to not engage with Sphinx is not unreasonable. Other decisions made during the end of AAC are far more worth of questioning.

kzt wrote:Yes, though David has never really explained how that works (at least to us). Nor do we have any real idea how much firepower is present, what the fixed defenses are and how effectively defended against missile attacks the whole of near-sphinx space is.

The decision to not engage with Sphinx is not unreasonable. Other decisions made during the end of AAC are far more worth of questioning.

But what is interesting is Tourville would still have to fight the Sphinx (then Manticore) defenses after he rearmed, as well as watching his back for any reinforcements coming from the Junction (such as O'Malley's 2 squadrons of SD(p)s) and Manticore B, as well as The Junction forts themselves. Even if Honor and 8th fleet were somewhere else, the Battle was far from over when Kuzak's 3rd fleet was destroyed.

Duckk wrote:

Hitler's regime gave us the jet engine.

Eh...jet engine development was fairly widespread in Europe for the first half of the twentieth century. The Germans were the first to get an operational combat plane. However, the English actually beat the Germans to the punch in patenting the jet engine, and their operational engine development basically occurred in parallel to the German efforts. They didn't use it in WWII because it was considered too unreliable for combat use. Nonetheless, the Germans shouldn't be considered the sole developer of the technology. Even if the Nazi regime never came to power, the limitations in prop driven planes were all too obvious by the 30s and 40s, so the Brits (or someone else) would have gotten there eventually.

Just for fun, I wend and did a quick google search and found the following bits of information.

The first patent for using a gas turbine to power an aircraft was filed in 1921 by Frenchman Maxime Guillaume. ," French patent no. 534,801 (filed: 3 May 1921; issued: 13 January 1922).[1] His engine was to be an axial-flow turbojet, but was never constructed, as it would have required considerable advances over the state of the art in compressors.


Sir Frank Whittle: While writing his thesis there he formulated the fundamental concepts that led to the creation of the turbojet engine, taking out a patent on his design in 1930. Despite limited funding, a prototype was created, which first ran in 1937.


Prior to the war, the Germans were way behind on this one.

That was discussed in the planning for Beatrice. Just found that when searching the text today. Anyhow, the RHN had a plan to do that. It is perfectly possible they would do what Honor did to Haven at least once, get forced to scuttle the platforms to avoid being bombarded.

saber964 wrote:

StealthSeeker wrote:I think I have finally come up with a good use for at least a hand full of the surrendered SLN SD's (I can't read the whole forum to see if it has been mentioned before.)

A few of them can be used as "plugs" for the worm hole terminus at Torch!

Does your system have a worm hole terminus that goes nowhere, but that you don't trust to not come from somewhere? Is your planet a little short on cash to build a couple of forts to keep an eye on it? Then I have a solution for you. For a low low price we can turn over a group of SLN SD ships to park in front of that worm hole terminus, right where ships would translate out, right where transiting ships could not avoid running in to them. You could build up an incredible chain reaction of crashing ships, wrecking each of the unwelcome ships as they came out of the wormhole.

Please don't speculate on the potential uses of SLN SD's. That particular horse has been beaten to death at least three or four or is it five times. RFC has already stated that the SD's in question, because of there obsolescence are only suitable for scraping.

It would be like a Wickes/Clemson (commissioned 1918) class destroyer taking on a Zumwalt class destroyer

Yes, I know it's been beaten to death. But in those discussions I didn't recall if this idea had ever come up.

And I hadn't even considered keeping their wedge powered up. In my concept they were be nothing more than large mobile asteroids.

My reading of Alexander's crash transit early in the series defined the transit point of a wormhole to have much smaller dimensions than those given by posters here. In Alexander's crash transit they were ready with ships and and maybe tugs to pull damaged ships out of the way so that others following wouldn't cause a pileup. So if the physical presence of a single ship or it's wreckage could prevent the safe transit of any ship that followed, the exit area of the wormhole would by necessity be fairly small. Apparently, if the other posters here are correct, I have been misled by the telling of that story.

So I was considering the SLN SD's to be nice convenient mobile boulders that could be parked in the path to cause that pileup. No powered up wedges, just putting a pile of rock to good use.

StealthSeeker wrote:[quote="Duckk"

Hitler's regime gave us the jet engine.[/quote

Eh...jet engine development was fairly widespread in Europe for the first half of the twentieth century. The Germans were the first to get an operational combat plane. However, the English actually beat the Germans to the punch in patenting the jet engine, and their operational engine development basically occurred in parallel to the German efforts. They didn't use it in WWII because it was considered too unreliable for combat use. Nonetheless, the Germans shouldn't be considered the sole developer of the technology. Even if the Nazi regime never came to power, the limitations in prop driven planes were all too obvious by the 30s and 40s, so the Brits (or someone else) would have gotten there eventually.

Just for fun, I wend and did a quick google search and found the following bits of information.

The first patent for using a gas turbine to power an aircraft was filed in 1921 by Frenchman Maxime Guillaume. ," French patent no. 534,801 (filed: 3 May 1921; issued: 13 January 1922).[1] His engine was to be an axial-flow turbojet, but was never constructed, as it would have required considerable advances over the state of the art in compressors.


Sir Frank Whittle: While writing his thesis there he formulated the fundamental concepts that led to the creation of the turbojet engine, taking out a patent on his design in 1930. Despite limited funding, a prototype was created, which first ran in 1937.


Prior to the war, the Germans were way behind on this one.

Try the work on liquid fueled rockets. Goddard was so far ahead of everyone else. If the U.S. military hadn't seen him as a crackpot. Think of what he could've done with government funding instead of just a Guggenheim foundation grant of $100,000 spread over IIRC 5 years. When Von Braun was debrief after the war he said that he got a lot of research information from Goddard in 1937-38.

StealthSeeker wrote:Yes, I know it's been beaten to death. But in those discussions I didn't recall if this idea had ever come up.

And I hadn't even considered keeping their wedge powered up. In my concept they were be nothing more than large mobile asteroids.

My reading of Alexander's crash transit early in the series defined the transit point of a wormhole to have much smaller dimensions than those given by posters here. In Alexander's crash transit they were ready with ships and and maybe tugs to pull damaged ships out of the way so that others following wouldn't cause a pileup. So if the physical presence of a single ship or it's wreckage could prevent the safe transit of any ship that followed, the exit area of the wormhole would by necessity be fairly small. Apparently, if the other posters here are correct, I have been misled by the telling of that story.

So I was considering the SLN SD's to be nice convenient mobile boulders that could be parked in the path to cause that pileup. No powered up wedges, just putting a pile of rock to good use.

Well in the case of the very tight sequential transit the next DD or CL was jumping in while the preceeding one was still in the 'lane'. They were, IIRC, going 10 seconds apart. But you can't exist that close to the terminus without active sails.

I imagine that in anything other than a mass simultaneous transit scenario that you'd tend to stick towards the center of the lane. But then your 300 km wide sails have to avoid running into the 300 km wide sails of the ship seconds ahead of you in the lane (and keep moving expeditiously to make room for the ship (and it's 300km wide sails) that'll be emerging seconds behind you.

Given the accleration limits RFC's old post gave for the Manticore Wormhole's termini lanes; a DD during that transit had a max safe accel within the lane of about 78g. So in the 10 seconds until the next ship emerged they'd have managed to displace about 38km. That's pretty close when dealing with sails which are 300km wide disks

But you couldn't park an inactive SD that close to the wormhole. Anything without active sails would be torn apart by grav shear if it entered that ~9,000 km wide by 26,000 km long lane. So it's trying to put an inert (or even active wedge) block across the end of that cylinder where the vast spaces come into play.