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Solarian Military Catchup Attempts

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Excellent Answers And Thank You
Post by HB of CJ   » Sun Oct 19, 2014 6:16 pm

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Great thread also. You know the big boss is probably watching and some of your great observations, ideas and input just may end up in future HH novels? Now how would that make you feel? HB of CJ (old coot) Cm. :) I love this forum!
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Re: How Bad Do The Sollies Want To Destroy The Grand Allianc
Post by n7axw   » Sun Oct 19, 2014 10:51 pm

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npadln wrote:
But isn't that what the Mandarins apparently want? They control the spin and so THEIR citizens don't get the full truth (if any) about THEIR atrocities but they sure will hear about any apparent atrocity on the GA's side. Twisted thinking I know but by my eyes the only hope the SL has is to be able to rile up and convince the "man on the street" (be he civilian or military) to such a degree that he would be okay being mere cannon fodder in a strategy of quantity over quality where upon wave after wave of military numbers so vast that even the technical advantage of the GA could be overwhelmed. With their backs against the wall it would be quite simple then as long as you were prepared for huge losses of material and men (perhaps with an eye towards post war reparations to make the costs easier to swallow) positioning your forces to hit with the broad front of a hurricane rather than the narrow focus of a tornado; in multiple places in a system AND multiple systems at a time. So, win win?


Hi npadln,

The question floating around in my own mind about your comment is "which man in the street are you refering to?" If you are talking about the man on the street on earth, particularly Old Chicago, there is no doubt but what League propaganda can have a big impact.

But in a galaxy where your nearest neighbor is light years away, not so much. Frankly I doubt that anybody else is paying much attention to League propaganda. What they are paying attention to is that great sucking sound as their economies tank due to League screw-ups. And that pop you just heard in the background is that bubble the Mandarins have been living in bursting when those other worlds start reacting to the League attack on Beowulf...

Don
When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Solarian Military Catchup Attempts
Post by Theemile   » Mon Oct 20, 2014 7:26 am

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dreamrider wrote:Back to the original intent of the thread:

One thing I think we might see tried, at least in a system defense role, may be some very large guided weapons. And by very large, I mean VERY large. Think 500-1000T+ craft/torps, but with no human crews to limit the accel.

Brute force, with the space & power budget for very robust drives, wedges, and sidewalls of their own. Possibly big enough and robust enough to shrug off most CM wedge fratricide, but accel'ing hard enough to make the missile targeting more like attempting to target another missile rather than a small craft. Throw in a true drive, that could be turned on and off to frustrate gravitic tracking, and to allow a multitude of programmable (? or remote guided ?) attack profiles.

I could easily see something like this being a defense development for someone/someplace like Yilden.

Ok, tear it apart.

But I would like to request of the community that in addition to ripping up my flaws, forgotten bits of Honorverse HW physics, etc, you try to say how the concept COULD be improved/made workable, at least as a desperate SL-in-chaos 'make do'

dreamrider



It already exists, dreamrider - we call it a drone. They are usually limited to ~5000g, not the 48000/96000 of missiles.

Good thinking, though - how many more drones will we see with exotic weapondry though - that is the question. Missile toe is just the start.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Solarian Military Catchup Attempts
Post by kzt   » Mon Oct 20, 2014 4:28 pm

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David has posted (it's in the pearls) that you cannot build a missile that can shrug off a CM. I'd guess that a CM would do really bad things to small craft in that scale.

It seems pretty unclear what the mass limits of the missile impeller drive is. David doesn't like to talk about this kind of stuff.
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Re: Solarian Military Catchup Attempts
Post by Whitecold   » Mon Oct 20, 2014 5:57 pm

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kzt wrote:David has posted (it's in the pearls) that you cannot build a missile that can shrug off a CM. I'd guess that a CM would do really bad things to small craft in that scale.

It seems pretty unclear what the mass limits of the missile impeller drive is. David doesn't like to talk about this kind of stuff.


On top of that, what is the point of a 1000t missile that can shrug off one hit when you can have 10+ Mk23 instead? The missiles take 10 hits to destroy.
Also while we don't have any hard data on how big the difference in impeller strength has to be to shrug off wedge-on-wedge interference, CMs have overpowered wedges, so short of a LAC probably nothing will survive.
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Re: Solarian Military Catchup Attempts
Post by kzt   » Mon Oct 20, 2014 6:04 pm

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Whitecold wrote:On top of that, what is the point of a 1000t missile that can shrug off one hit when you can have 10+ Mk23 instead? The missiles take 10 hits to destroy.

Sure. And if you can't build the fusion reactor required for the Mk23 and need a MDM what approach would you suggest?

My suggestion is espionage. There are probably people in Haven and Manticore/ANI/GSN/BSDF who have knowledge and morals flexible enough that a few hundred million might help them remember how important the SL is to humanity, etc.

Failing that, honking big missiles produced as fast as you can in as many places as you can.
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Re: Solarian Military Catchup Attempts
Post by Jonathan_S   » Mon Oct 20, 2014 11:55 pm

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kzt wrote:
Whitecold wrote:On top of that, what is the point of a 1000t missile that can shrug off one hit when you can have 10+ Mk23 instead? The missiles take 10 hits to destroy.

Sure. And if you can't build the fusion reactor required for the Mk23 and need a MDM what approach would you suggest?

My suggestion is espionage. There are probably people in Haven and Manticore/ANI/GSN/BSDF who have knowledge and morals flexible enough that a few hundred million might help them remember how important the SL is to humanity, etc.

Failing that, honking big missiles produced as fast as you can in as many places as you can.
Well, a fusion plant isn't critical to an MDM; since Haven never had one and even the Manties started with capacitor powered MDMs. The real trick is the buffer to keep the nearby inactive drive nodes from taking damage.

But the easy answer to that is also espionage.
Cataphracts seem to be an inelegant solution which rely on distance (and possible placement) to keep the 2nd stages nodes from damage from the 1st stage drive.

Hmm, a drone drive could give you the range, but it's vastly slower and still vulnerable to CM fire (not to mention much larger than a normal missile; so you can carry far less). So, odds are your ships would be trashed before you first drone-missile wave reached their targets - and they'd be slow enough that they'd likely be dead meat for a modern point defense (designed to cope with pods of 0.6c+ MDMs) when they started their terminal targeting runs.
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Re: Solarian Military Catchup Attempts
Post by Carl   » Tue Oct 21, 2014 1:49 am

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Bear in Scotty did mention way back that he figured Haven could match capacitor powered MDM's with off the shelf component's. Like he said they'd be bloody big things, but in a system defense role at least that's not so important. And even on the offense the SLN technically has the numbers to match the GA to a large degree via huge numbers of ships to make up for the limited pod loads per ship. Hell if they do that, a 2 to 3 shot pod would probably be pininnce sized letting you put a piniance fusion plant on it and tractor.
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Re: Solarian Military Catchup Attempts
Post by Theemile   » Tue Oct 21, 2014 9:05 am

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Carl wrote:Bear in Scotty did mention way back that he figured Haven could match capacitor powered MDM's with off the shelf component's. Like he said they'd be bloody big things, but in a system defense role at least that's not so important. And even on the offense the SLN technically has the numbers to match the GA to a large degree via huge numbers of ships to make up for the limited pod loads per ship. Hell if they do that, a 2 to 3 shot pod would probably be pininnce sized letting you put a piniance fusion plant on it and tractor.


Carl, Pinnances are only 2-3 x the size of a capitol missile, or about the same size as a Capacitor MDM. The Pinnance fusion plant has enough juice to move 250 tons @500g, which is probably 1/20th the power needed to move the same sized object at 96000g. A the output of a pinnance/shuttle type fusion reactor (laser fused) is a magnitude too low to be used in a missile.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Solarian Military Catchup Attempts
Post by Zakharra   » Tue Oct 21, 2014 11:17 am

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Theemile wrote:
Carl wrote:Bear in Scotty did mention way back that he figured Haven could match capacitor powered MDM's with off the shelf component's. Like he said they'd be bloody big things, but in a system defense role at least that's not so important. And even on the offense the SLN technically has the numbers to match the GA to a large degree via huge numbers of ships to make up for the limited pod loads per ship. Hell if they do that, a 2 to 3 shot pod would probably be pininnce sized letting you put a piniance fusion plant on it and tractor.


Carl, Pinnances are only 2-3 x the size of a capitol missile, or about the same size as a Capacitor MDM. The Pinnance fusion plant has enough juice to move 250 tons @500g, which is probably 1/20th the power needed to move the same sized object at 96000g. A the output of a pinnance/shuttle type fusion reactor (laser fused) is a magnitude too low to be used in a missile.



The pinnace, like all space ships are limited by the need to keep acceleration within tolerable limits for the soft squishy, fleshy carbon based beings called humans alive and not a thin smear of paste on the back bulkheads of the ship. Missiles don't have that requirement and are able to accelerate at a much faster rate that would kill humans. It's also why ships can't outrun them.


kzt wrote:David has posted (it's in the pearls) that you cannot build a missile that can shrug off a CM. I'd guess that a CM would do really bad things to small craft in that scale.

It seems pretty unclear what the mass limits of the missile impeller drive is. David doesn't like to talk about this kind of stuff.


Did he address why you can't make a CM the size of a capital missile? Since CMs use their wedges (I believe) as their weapon, why not supersized more powerful CMs?
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