Honorverse ramblings and musings

Dauntless wrote:badly phrased but i think Citha meant why are no navy ships permanently assigned to guard Sphinx or Grphon.

to which the answer would there are guard ships. they are just so incredibly slow and non hyper capable to they are called forts.

It is implied, though only circuitously in the text, that there are orbital forts around each of the 3 planets.

Dauntless wrote:I think partly it comes down to why would an attacker go after anything but manticore.

war as per always is politics using violence and unless you are someone like the malign who want to replace humanity then the political centre of the binary system is manticore.

after all if you take manticore's orbitals and demand surrender then you have the surrender of the entire kingdom/empire.

take sphinx or gryphon and all you have are hostages, so generally speaking taking anything but manticore is only worth doing to draw forces away from manticore making it easier to take it and thus the kingdom/empire.

now RFC has mentioned before that although not mentioned often (he does have so many other things to wants to tell us about) each planet of the original kingdom has forts in orbit, i think there is a passage in at all costs about how the sphinx forts could have fired on the havenites but that would have invited retaliation and anything that they didn't shoot down could miss them and hit Sphinx.

so why are there no guard ships? because they are not needed. Home fleet responds to any major threat that threatens the binary system, it has happened twice in 500 years.

oyster bay was closer to a terrorist attack then anything the forts or home fleet are made to stop. even them it is the sort of attack you can only do once.

Do pardon my boldness to call attention.

What about the present case of the schoolyard bully who just wants to hurt the one he's afraid of, but can't? So he hypers in system and makes a beeline for the friend/ally. And I got the impression that Tourville could have ripped up the system long before the RMN could respond.

In the SLN's case, what's preventing them from pulling it off "in a drive by shooting" then exiting the system like a scalded dog?

In chess, it reminds me of failing to support the pawn of a left oblique aligned en appui.

kzt wrote:

Dauntless wrote:badly phrased but i think Citha meant why are no navy ships permanently assigned to guard Sphinx or Grphon.

to which the answer would there are guard ships. they are just so incredibly slow and non hyper capable to they are called forts.

It is implied, though only circuitously in the text, that there are orbital forts around each of the 3 planets.

There were also LACS - lots and lots (and Lots) of LACS, which sortied out to join Home Fleet in the defense of Sphinx.

Also, Shoals of pods. The decision was made not to engage Tourville "at this time" with the forts and pods because it would encourage him to exchange fire with them at extreme range, and nobody wanted an unguided RHN MDM flying towards Sphinx, let alone 10,000,0000. However, after dealing with Home Fleet, 3rd fleet and 8th Fleet, if he wanted to take any of the planets, he would still have to deal with the Forts and pods, and any LACS not already engaged (at Manticore and Gryphon).

As for the Forts, the ones around Gryphon are mentioned twice in text I believe and all the planetary defense were to be upgraded to Apollo, which indicated the addition of KHII modules - which require a firecontrol center - hense, a fort.

cthia wrote:
What about the present case of the schoolyard bully who just wants to hurt the one he's afraid of, but can't? So he hypers in system and makes a beeline for the friend/ally. And I got the impression that Tourville could have ripped up the system long before the RMN could respond.

In the SLN's case, what's preventing them from pulling it off "in a drive by shooting" then exiting the system like a scalded dog?

depending upon where sphinx is in its orbit in relation to the junction getting close enough to do such damage can be tricky.

plus there are all those lovely forts that might have struggled with havenite missiles but will simply chew sollie missiles to pieces.

sphinx is not without teeth to use it its defence. plus as others have said there are lots of LACS around to help with missile interception.

so they could try and do a drive by shooting but the defences are such that damage is not going to be great and once they've shot their loads they are dead meat for the forts or home fleet whose SDs have a 50% accel advantage over solly SDs and while the rate isn't as good against BC
, it would still be roughly 33% more then they could do. which will be more then enough to keep them in range of ship launched pods if they do not want to use the system defence pods.

Dauntless wrote:sphinx is not without teeth to use it its defence. plus as others have said there are lots of LACS around to help with missile interception.

There was a rather horrific attrition rate in the LACs. Not sure how effectively they were replaced considering the other demands and the crew training cycle.

Can anyone recall the range of TWTSNBN?

A chilling thought occurred to me. What if the MAlign is privy to the weapon and they incorporate it into their stealthed ships allowing them to get close enough to disable GA sidewalls?

And what if they added to the formidable arsenal a new and improved version of the Crippler? As a result of spies in the henhouse passing them discarded RMN tech.

That would make the Lenny Dets a quite formidable arachnid.

cthia wrote:Can anyone recall the range of TWTSNBN?

A chilling thought occurred to me. What if the MAlign is privy to the weapon and they incorporate it into their stealthed ships allowing them to get close enough to disable GA sidewalls?

And what if they added to the formidable arsenal a new and improved version of the Crippler? As a result of spies in the henhouse passing them discarded RMN tech.

That would make the Lenny Dets a quite formidable arachnid.

Forget.

About.

It.

NOW.

cthia wrote:Can anyone recall the range of TWTSNBN?

A chilling thought occurred to me. What if the MAlign is privy to the weapon and they incorporate it into their stealthed ships allowing them to get close enough to disable GA sidewalls?

And what if they added to the formidable arsenal a new and improved version of the Crippler? As a result of spies in the henhouse passing them discarded RMN tech.

That would make the Lenny Dets a quite formidable arachnid.

Both the grav lance and the crippler require an active impeller wedge to generate the powerful gravitic pulse used to overload systems on the target ship. Spider-drive ships can't generate a wedge and so would not be able to use either.

As for range, it's absurdly low. Grav lances have about a quarter of a graser's range. Well within detection range, I dare say, even for their fancy stealth systems.

munroburton wrote:

cthia wrote:Can anyone recall the range of TWTSNBN?

A chilling thought occurred to me. What if the MAlign is privy to the weapon and they incorporate it into their stealthed ships allowing them to get close enough to disable GA sidewalls?

And what if they added to the formidable arsenal a new and improved version of the Crippler? As a result of spies in the henhouse passing them discarded RMN tech.

That would make the Lenny Dets a quite formidable arachnid.

Both the grav lance and the crippler require an active impeller wedge to generate the powerful gravitic pulse used to overload systems on the target ship. Spider-drive ships can't generate a wedge and so would not be able to use either.

As for range, it's absurdly low. Grav lances have about a quarter of a graser's range. Well within detection range, I dare say, even for their fancy stealth systems.

I assimilate that as an inference that the wedge is a piece of tech that can generate enough juice to power the gravitic pulse. But that is not to say that the MAlign cannot conceive of an alternate power source and tech. There's usually more than one way to skin a cat — so saith Tester's Graysons. Which, realistically, would make the MA as resourceful as the Graysons.

What's important is that a technologically capable navy has been shown what's possible.* What's more, has the time to come at the problem from many different angles. It is the same notion that the GA faces at the moment, trying to reverse engineer/conceive of MA tech.

I seem to be the only one who can conceptualize that an entity who has centuries to play with, and sit back and design tech, without the pressure of war and death, is going to introduce some game changing tech that will close the gap between their tech and the RMN's even more than the Peeps were able to accomplish. If not exceed it in some areas — as they were able to do with their stealth technology. The MA may not be a one trick pony.

THE LENNY'S ARE COMING! THE LENNY'S ARE COMING!

Everything good doesn't have to be "Manty Made. Grayson improved."

BTW, is as much inside information given on Andermani tech as the GA? As in fully represented in Jayne's? Or SITS?

This also means that the MA has been shown a particular weakness in GA tech. And how to exploit it.