Shannon Foraker

dreamrider wrote:Sonja's forte is picking a concept out of nearly thin air, and finding/managing the team of wonks to make a 3-drive missile out of it.

Shannon's forte is looking at what that missile did, maybe some fragmentary examples, and finding/managing the team of engineers who will find a way to build something 80% as good, at 120% the size, for 60% of the price.

Two different skillsets...which will cause them to complement each other nicely...while fighting like, um, marines and sailors.

dreamrider

Good observation...but now imagine where Shannon's mind might lead now that she won't be playing catch-up.

dreamrider wrote:Sonja's forte is picking a concept out of nearly thin air, and finding/managing the team of wonks to make a 3-drive missile out of it.

Shannon's forte is looking at what that missile did, maybe some fragmentary examples, and finding/managing the team of engineers who will find a way to build something 80% as good, at 120% the size, for 60% of the price.

Two different skillsets...which will cause them to complement each other nicely...while fighting like, um, marines and sailors.

dreamrider

Those differentiations are completely situational and probably says nothing about their actual abilities.

If your resources suck, then you do what you can with it, you don´t come up with less advanced stuff because that´s what you want, when you don´t.

Roguevictory wrote:

cthia wrote:Shannon Foraker vs Sonja Hemphill.

Elizabeth and Eloise are right. There will be problems to overcome for an alliance to succeed. Some may be insurmountable. Others hilarious. Some will be both, but they all have their measure of importance and must be solved.

Some problems are even unforeseen, like the first formal working day between Foraker and Hemphill. Sonja is brilliant no doubt, but she can have some weapons development flukes. Someone has to be the leader as far as which R&D projects should be pursued. Foraker would have questioned Sonja about gutting Fearless and installing a grav lance. "Really Sonja?"

Which is the most tech savvy?

In all fairness in the combat environment of the time, aka pre-missile pod and MDM, the gravlance was a good idea as long as it was put on a ship that could survive to close to effective range and maintain enough non grav lance weaponry to fight effectively like a DN or SDN, or probably a heavy BC. And in a fleet action even the grav lance modded light cruiser could be dangerous. Honor proved that in the war games, The thing was no one in their right mind would have deployed Fearless to fight alone if they had a choice and unfortunately Honor got put in a position where Fearless had to fight alone.

This is absolutely a fair assessment, although Sonja did know the better and improved missiles were en route and in the pipeline and so should have realized (in fact, did realize) that energy range combat was probably going to become less of the end-all and be-all of capital ship combat. However, some people seem to have missed the point at which Sonja personally apologizes to Honor for the one-hand-behind-her-back way she had to fight at Basilisk. Recall that she said then (and she was being honest) that she never intended the conversion as anything other than a real-life testbed for her armament theory. This was supposed to be a one-off, only used in maneuvers to see how it worked, weapons mix. And, for that matter, Sonja had nothing at all to do with having Fearless swept under the rug to Basilisk; that was Janacek, her cousin, looking out for the family name. She was pissed her brainchild wasn't working out better, and I think it's been established that tact was never her strong suit, especially before the war, so it's not surprising that Honor felt Hemphill blamed her [Honor] personally for what had happened, but that isn't actually the case if you go back and read carefully.

Keep in mind that in a fleet engagement, there would be groups of ships armed with TWTSNBN which might enable tactics that would enhance their survivability.

Also, such ships armed with TWTSNBN might have been reserved for decisive battles, perhaps THE decisive battle, where there would either be no surviving RHN ships to report back about the new weapon, the new weapon would enable the RMN to destroy enough RHN to equalize the numerical imbalance, or the RMN was toast. The most plausible such scenario was a massive raid on Manticore. A few squadrons of CA or BC sized ships equipped only with TWTSNBN plus energy torpedoes supported by conventional BCs or CAs for missile defense might be able to close with an RHN fleet that was fixated on engaging RMN DNs and SDs and really ream them. Do this once to the RHN and you have achieved a strategic victory.

Cheap equalizer. Unfortunately; the RHN was able to witness TWTSNBN in action in OBS so it became completely useless.

namelessfly wrote:Cheap equalizer. Unfortunately; the RHN was able to witness TWTSNBN in action in OBS so it became completely useless.

So, the RHN, can commune with the dead can it?

Didn't seem to help them any...

J6P wrote:

namelessfly wrote:Cheap equalizer. Unfortunately; the RHN was able to witness TWTSNBN in action in OBS so it became completely useless.

So, the RHN, can commune with the dead can it?

Didn't seem to help them any...

Otherwise they would have known the Navy had no hand in the Pierre coup. Maybe they were still experimenting at that stage of the war with this new tech?

namelessfly wrote:Keep in mind that in a fleet engagement, there would be groups of ships armed with TWTSNBN which might enable tactics that would enhance their survivability.

Also, such ships armed with TWTSNBN might have been reserved for decisive battles, perhaps THE decisive battle, where there would either be no surviving RHN ships to report back about the new weapon, the new weapon would enable the RMN to destroy enough RHN to equalize the numerical imbalance, or the RMN was toast. The most plausible such scenario was a massive raid on Manticore. A few squadrons of CA or BC sized ships equipped only with TWTSNBN plus energy torpedoes supported by conventional BCs or CAs for missile defense might be able to close with an RHN fleet that was fixated on engaging RMN DNs and SDs and really ream them. Do this once to the RHN and you have achieved a strategic victory.

Cheap equalizer. Unfortunately; the RHN was able to witness TWTSNBN in action in OBS so it became completely useless.

Unlikely to work out. It´s not like a fleet engaged in battle will just ignore other enemies than their primary.

For it to work, you would essentially have to put the naughty weapons in something that could get seriously close before being spotted, which would mean putting them in modern LACs focused even more on low visibility.

And those, doesn´t have even remotely close to the energy levels required for the weapons.
Not to mention are probably far too small to even mount the big naughty weapon.

The closest you can get is probably that energy torpedoes MIGHT have some chance at a future on LACs, IF you can get it a large enough power budget.

As supposedly, ETs are very high damage as long as they dont have to pass through sidewalls, so against ships without sidewalls added front or aft(which will probably become a new standard far too soon) it could potentially be devastating even if only a few LACs carried it, ie having the threat there means the enemy have to honor it if he knows about it, forcing him to react to what is mostly a ghost, and if the enemy does not know about, anytime those LACs can get a clean shot in would really ruin someones day.

It all depends on just how effective it is as a weapon compared to the graser they already carry. If it´s just twice as powerful or something, it´s never going to be worth it, but if it´s a LOT more than that...

Weeell, it could be one more nasty little mindgame to play with the opposition.

J6P wrote:

namelessfly wrote:Cheap equalizer. Unfortunately; the RHN was able to witness TWTSNBN in action in OBS so it became completely useless.

So, the RHN, can commune with the dead can it?

Didn't seem to help them any...

IRCC, there was an RHN dispatch boat that got it's wedge fried prior to battle but retained it's sensors.

namelessfly wrote:
IRCC, there was an RHN dispatch boat that got it's wedge fried prior to battle but retained it's sensors.

A dispatch boat is what you are going with? At near the Hyper limit? A couple hundred million kilometers distant? Okey dokey there.

Sure, a DB can see the ships wedge, but anything else? You have got to be kidding me.

Tenshinai wrote:

namelessfly wrote:Keep in mind that in a fleet engagement, there would be groups of ships armed with TWTSNBN which might enable tactics that would enhance their survivability.

Also, such ships armed with TWTSNBN might have been reserved for decisive battles, perhaps THE decisive battle, where there would either be no surviving RHN ships to report back about the new weapon, the new weapon would enable the RMN to destroy enough RHN to equalize the numerical imbalance, or the RMN was toast. The most plausible such scenario was a massive raid on Manticore. A few squadrons of CA or BC sized ships equipped only with TWTSNBN plus energy torpedoes supported by conventional BCs or CAs for missile defense might be able to close with an RHN fleet that was fixated on engaging RMN DNs and SDs and really ream them. Do this once to the RHN and you have achieved a strategic victory.

Cheap equalizer. Unfortunately; the RHN was able to witness TWTSNBN in action in OBS so it became completely useless.

Unlikely to work out. It´s not like a fleet engaged in battle will just ignore other enemies than their primary.


/quote]

Well the Fearless traded two Graser and 5 Missile tubes to get a Grav Lance and seven Energy Torpedo tubes, two Lasers, and two missile tubes per broadside IIRC. The Homer class BC in HOS comes with one grav lances in each broadside by default. It also has four Energy Torp tubes, eight Lasers, eight Grasers, and twenty Missile tubes per broadside. Mix some Grav Lance equipped BCs into each of your fleet deployed battlecruiser squadrons and when your enemies don't know what they can do they can inflict a lot of damage. Than once the enemy knows they are out there they will have to decide whether they should focus their fire on your capships or your BCs. That confusion and any fire shifted away from your capships helps you even if the Grav Lance BCs can't close to effective range. And even without counting her grav lances and energy torps a Homer has more conventional firepower than a Sultan.

Of course the shift to missile warfare and MDMs changed this a lot.

I'm not saying the Grav Lance was Sonja's best idea but I think it gets a lot more dislike than it should. It could be very effective with the right tactics. Even Fearless showed that in her first post refit wargame.

Sorry made a massive error on the Homer's weapons, didn't realize that they carried Grav Lances as standard issue at first.