What if: unmanned droneships against "Apollo"-carrying navy?

FLHerne wrote:More evidence that structural strength isn't much of a problem would be those LACs from HotQ - "No LAC crew could survive the sort of acceleration ships routinely pulled in hyper for the simple reason that their inertial compensator would pack up the instant they tried it." can't be referring to accel under impellers (because the LACs ought to be quicker than a BC in that case); the LACs must be being towed in a grav wave for at least part of the journey, complete with the multi-thousand-g accelerations involved.

Two nitpicks
1) We know from Honor Among Enemies, House of Steel (and the older Jaynes and SITS reference books) that no LAC before the ones Honor took to Selisia packed a powerful enough drive to max out its compensator. Those LACs (which would include the Masadan LACs) maxed out at about 409g - less than a most Superdreadnaughts.

But that's ok, a LAC under it's own impeller would still experience normal acceleration.

The second nitpick is that while the LACs were tractored, I don't think there was any grav wave between Masada and Grayson, nor do I think you could tow anything (other than a partially disabled starship that still had at least 1 sail) successfully along or through a grav wave.


But you're point that the hulls were stupidly strong is still correct. The text-ev is that they were, though like kzt I'm kind of at a loss for why they be build to strengths so far in excess of their needs. Sure sometimes construction is rigidity limited, not strength limited. To be stiff enough requires enough material to provide more strength than you need; but not thousands of times more...

If you lose the compensator I think the ship should behave like a 747 flown into a cliff, as every part would be massively overstressed at the same time. I have no idea what David's underlying reason for having them behave the way he does, but I assume there is some reason that makes perfect sense to him that he has thus far declined to discuss.

Easy, he ain't an engineer and it got cannonized very early and the "problem" is not a plot problem that needs fixed or becomes a glaring error. Just part of "science" fiction. Add it to the control link issue along with lack of power cords, or microwaved beamed power, or... in the Honorverses most "advanced" navy...

John Prigent wrote:First you'd need AI. And I think RFC has stated that AI won't appear in the Honorverse.
Cheers
John

Sort of correction, there´s already plenty good enough AI to run a drone warship.

BUT, it´s going to be a ridiculously ineffective warship against any kind of skilled opposition.



As to the acceleration limits, i doubt you could get an unmanned SD to much more than ~10 times normal. There´s just too many restrictions.

And building whole ships to missile standards(ie being able to stand extreme accelerations), that´s going to be expensive.

IF the SL could actually survive maybe 20 years more(and could take control of the economy), than they might actually still have a reason to build some kind of drone warships, but it would be a thing of desperation rather than any kind of "this is better". They could simply try to swamp the GA in soo many SD sized ships that they could win purely by soaking up missile hits and still have ships to throw into the fight.

Extremely inefficient and expensive, but workable under specific conditions.

The E wrote:

SWM wrote:While I agree with much of your post, I have to disagree about this. Suppose you have a ship that can accelerate at, say, 10,000 gees. At a time T0 the ship is at position X0. Given it's velocity vector at T0 and assuming zero acceleration, you can predict it's location X1 1 second later, at T1. If you then allow for acceleration, the ship could end up anywhere within a 50 kilometer sphere of that position X1. It doesn't matter what velocity the ship has at T0--the sphere that the ship can be in at T1 is about 50 kilometers radius of X1. The angle that the motion can be deflected is affected by the velocity at T0, but the potential displacement is not. And it is the potential displacement that is the critical factor in determining how hard the target is to predict.

Yeah, but 50 klicks of displacement is worthless given the accuracy and range of Honorverse weaponry. Honorverse laser heads have a standoff range of several tens of thousands of kilometers; at that range, the displacement needed to adjust for a 50 klick shift of the target can be measured in tenths or hundredths of degrees.

Also, the original proposal called for these drones to travel at missile speeds, meaning appreciable fractions of c, which in turn means that the possible displacement you can get is limited to a rather narrow cone.

But a lot of laser heads miss ships with only 700g or less acceleration, partly because the ships are maneuvering within their wedge.

While the idea is not feasible in the Honorverse, based on tech that has been made available by the author, as a "What If" scenario, robotic ships with tens of thousands of G of acceleration would be extremely dangerous.

In this scenario, every missile system becomes an Apollo analog because the ship can accelerate itself, including all of it's missiles, and then launch missiles before moving onto an evasion vector. The missiles would have the benefit of the main computers on separation, which would be the equivalent to the coasting stage of Apollo.

I would have to say that the battle would be won by the side with the better tactician. Don't assume that would be the AI. The AI will likely not be much more capable a fighter than the human-manned ships simpler AI.