BC(P)

Tenshinai wrote:I wouldn´t count on those tech transfers to actually come from the SLN.

The tech transfers definitely weren't coming from the SLN. They were coming from transtellars (at least some of which were controlled or infiltrated by the Alignment) looking to get hold of Manty tech to reverse engineer and somewhere to sell off stuff that the SLN and Solly SDFs weren't interested in.

Grashtel wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:I wouldn´t count on those tech transfers to actually come from the SLN.

The tech transfers definitely weren't coming from the SLN. They were coming from transtellars (at least some of which were controlled or infiltrated by the Alignment) looking to get hold of Manty tech to reverse engineer and somewhere to sell off stuff that the SLN and Solly SDFs weren't interested in.

The Transtellars are the ones who build and supply the SLN. the SLN itself seemingly doesn't have it's own (private) manufacturign capability.

And even if they look at what technology Haven was most interested in buying, doesn't necessarily tell them how to duplicate Manticoran tech. It just tells them what Haven wasn't good enough at producing itself, which gives a partial insight but incomplete. They'd still have to learn what other technologies might be involved, and how to get it to work together.

And when you look at it, Manticore originally jumped way ahead, because of Gram and related programs, which started off by taking technology the League had already made, and advancing the crap out of it in the pressure of impending war.

The only places the SLN can't possibly have any insights to, would be the LACs, and Grayson inspired compensators. Haven only learned the Shrikes were fission-powered after signing with Erewhon and telling the League transtellars to take a hike. Grayson compensators increases were because Grayson had to develop it independently, nobody told them how "everybody else" makes compensators, and Manticore just merged the tech (also another place Haven learned off Erewhon, so that information is hard to learn)

Somtaaw wrote:The only places the SLN can't possibly have any insights to, would be the LACs, and Grayson inspired compensators. Haven only learned the Shrikes were fission-powered after signing with Erewhon and telling the League transtellars to take a hike. Grayson compensators increases were because Grayson had to develop it independently, nobody told them how "everybody else" makes compensators, and Manticore just merged the tech (also another place Haven learned off Erewhon, so that information is hard to learn)

I thought Haven's acceleration rates had finally started to rise just before Buttercup.
If so that means they'd made compensator breakthroughs before Erewhon joined them during the prolonged Ceasefire.

Yep, found the supporting quote in SoS

Shadow of Saganami: Ch 22 wrote:Bogey One's observed acceleration already exceeded the max her class had been capable of when they were first laid down, but Peep acceleration rates had been creeping upward even before the High Ridge cease-fire. With the latest pre-cease-fire version, a ship of her size could have pulled a maximum acceleration of six hundred and ten, which would have meant she was currently pulling a bit less than eighty-seven percent of her maximum possible acceleration. If she had the post-cease-fire compensator, her max theoretical acceleration should be about six hundred and thirty gravities, in which case she was pulling a bit under eighty-five percent.

Given the design accel of a Mars-B (from Jaynes and HoS) that shows that the latest pre-cease-fire version of a Peep compensator was good for 121.7% of what a pre-war compensator could do.
That's actually very good; a flight III-IV Reliant-class BC from that same year is has only a fairly narrow efficiency edge; it manages 126.5%.


That said, Haven still likely wasn't feeding that domestic and/or reverse engineering tech breakthrough back to their League supplies.

Rising compensator efficiency, sure that's going to happen anyways. But recall when Manticore first re-designed their compensators based on Grayson compensators?

There was a sharp spike in their effiency right away, and as they continued to work on the new, combined compensators they kept getting more efficient faster than Haven was trying to catch up.

Think it was Flag in Exile or so, with the mention about the new compensators, and despite being a bigger hull, that Honor's newest ship was even faster than her old one. Pretty sure it was about the HMS Nike, Reliant battlecruiser, being even faster accelerating than her older heavy cruiser Fearless. Something like 20 or 30% faster, and that was the first generation of combined Manticoran/Grayson compensators.


the League might get a little efficiency increase in their compensators, but then they'd be slightly faster, and maybe get their superdreadnoughts to approach the speeds of old-style Haven battleships

"gotta go fast to tactically advance in the opposite direction" - some Battle Fleet officer, upon learning Manticore just arrived.

Somtaaw wrote:<snip>

"gotta go fast to tactically advance in the opposite direction" - some Battle Fleet officer, upon learning Manticore just arrived.

"Sir, the refuse containers suddenly increased in mass by a factor of 10 when the Manty Fleet crossed the Hyperlimit - Permission to jettison them in a futile attempt to out run the Manties?"

Somtaaw wrote:Rising compensator efficiency, sure that's going to happen anyways. But recall when Manticore first re-designed their compensators based on Grayson compensators?

There was a sharp spike in their effiency right away, and as they continued to work on the new, combined compensators they kept getting more efficient faster than Haven was trying to catch up.

Think it was Flag in Exile or so, with the mention about the new compensators, and despite being a bigger hull, that Honor's newest ship was even faster than her old one. Pretty sure it was about the HMS Nike, Reliant battlecruiser, being even faster accelerating than her older heavy cruiser Fearless. Something like 20 or 30% faster, and that was the first generation of combined Manticoran/Grayson compensators.


the League might get a little efficiency increase in their compensators, but then they'd be slightly faster, and maybe get their superdreadnoughts to approach the speeds of old-style Haven battleships

"gotta go fast to tactically advance in the opposite direction" - some Battle Fleet officer, upon learning Manticore just arrived.

Echos of Honor mentions that up to 2nd generation compensatory only gave a 6% improvement. (Though by my math that only works out if they were all the ancient Ad Astra-class DNs). And Honor's HMS Nike, with the first Grayson derived compensator in the RMN, redlined her compensator at 515.5g (105.51% of pre-grayson performance) during shakedown tests. That was "three percent less than her last ship had been capable of, but HMS Fearless had massed only three hundred thousand tons."


It wasn't until a few years later, 1908 PD, that we see the first big jump; with the Edward Saganami-class – CA being capable of 592.2g (117.24% of pre-grayson performance). And we don't know how many compensator generations that represents; EoH was the long (IIRC) exception by mentioning that; other books just use vaguer terms like "newest" or "current generation". Unfortunately (for my accelerator curve spreadsheets) HoS doesn't directly give any specs for compensators, and virtually never give refit performance, so we only learn of new compensator capabilites when represented in the books (hard to get exact data out of it) or when a new class is designed (and so we can see it's design accel in HoS)

Jonathan_S wrote:Echos of Honor mentions that up to 2nd generation compensatory only gave a 6% improvement. (Though by my math that only works out if they were all the ancient Ad Astra-class DNs). And Honor's HMS Nike, with the first Grayson derived compensator in the RMN, redlined her compensator at 515.5g (105.51% of pre-grayson performance) during shakedown tests. That was "three percent less than her last ship had been capable of, but HMS Fearless had massed only three hundred thousand tons."


It wasn't until a few years later, 1908 PD, that we see the first big jump; with the Edward Saganami-class – CA being capable of 592.2g (117.24% of pre-grayson performance). And we don't know how many compensator generations that represents; EoH was the long (IIRC) exception by mentioning that; other books just use vaguer terms like "newest" or "current generation". Unfortunately (for my accelerator curve spreadsheets) HoS doesn't directly give any specs for compensators, and virtually never give refit performance, so we only learn of new compensator capabilites when represented in the books (hard to get exact data out of it) or when a new class is designed (and so we can see it's design accel in HoS)

hmm, ok so an immediate 5% jump less than a year after Grayson and Manticore sign their treaties (because it was only what, 2 years tops that Honor spent recovering from her Grayson injuries? and they almost had Nike finished and ready for builder trials) and 20% within 10-15 years or so. Not quite as drastic as I originally thought, but still a pretty hefty "secret" advance.

Somtaaw wrote:hmm, ok so an immediate 5% jump less than a year after Grayson and Manticore sign their treaties (because it was only what, 2 years tops that Honor spent recovering from her Grayson injuries? and they almost had Nike finished and ready for builder trials) and 20% within 10-15 years or so. Not quite as drastic as I originally thought, but still a pretty hefty "secret" advance.

By 1913 PD we saw the first few designs hitting 126-ish% with the Harrington/Medusa-class SD(P). Then, oddly, that same year the Courvosier II-class BC(P) set a new record at 143.47%, and the best we've seen was from SftS in 1920 PD was a formation containing refit Invictus-class SD(P)s could max out at 154.76%.

But Haven got a later start, and didn't have first hand access to Grayson's breakthroughs. And yet by 1915 PD they were within 5 percentage points of the best Manticore had; better than the GSN/RMN 1914 PD designs (but it must have been a major drastic breakthrough because as late as 2nd Hancock [EOH] (1913 PD) we have text-ev that Haven hadn't cracked the improved compensators yet; less than 2 years before they made up almost the entire gap.

Here's the quote

Echoes of Honor wrote:She chose not to complicate her little lecture by explaining that that was because the People's Navy had hoped that either they would have captured intact samples of the Manties' new inertial compensator technology or that their Solarian suppliers would have figured out how they worked by now. Neither had happened, which left the Mars-class ships ridiculously overpowered.

--snipping--

Jonathan_S wrote:Sure Aggies can beat up on anybody with MDMs/DDMs - especially if they have crappy missile defense.
But I think even there you're overstating their effectiveness. It's more deadly than any pre-pod SD; but it's not capble of taking out 16-20 SDs - not unless they came at it one by one without any mutual support.

For each pod salvo it rolls it can fire 4*14 = 56 Mk16s, and it can IIRC quad stack salvos. So up to 224 missiles at a time.
Very impressive, but fired against 16 Sphinx class SDs in a wall of battle they're flying into the face of 432 CM tubes, and 496 PDLCs. If those are pre-war defenses with no updates then the ECM power and the terminal velocity will be big surprises and outside the designed scope; but that's still a wall of CMs to get through. You're not likely to knock out an SD first salvo; you'll need to grind down their defenses.

But you've only got 20 (and a tad) quad-stack salvos worth of pods.
...

... and enough range to keep anyone without MDM's from ever getting close enough to fight back. Let's look at those quad stacked salvos, times two. Keep in mind how few missiles the SLN as able to stop with 70 SD's, etc.

That's 4x4x14 (x2 Aggies) missiles per stack, less ECM, call it 300 shipkiller -16G's per stack. Pick two non-Haven/non IAN's SD's per salvo, in eight salvo's you've likely put a pretty good hurt on 16 SD's. At that point, you've fired about half of your available loadout for the two ships. Now you start cleaning up the leftovers and any undamaged ships with smaller salvos. Still think the SDs would survive long enought to close before the BC(P)'s shot themselves dry?

Using Mk-16s means you are going to be receiving marginally effective return fire from the SDs. Now while they are slow cycling, there are quite a few of them firing quite a few tubes. So you get 512 missiles with cruiser scale warheads every 30 seconds or so, though by playing with the acceleration you should be able to get instead 2048 missiles every 2 minutes or so.

I suspect you'll get hits trading missiles at that scale.