Countering the Spider – Real World Inspirations

I have been doing a little research into early anti-submarine warfare (the WWII era U-boat campaign mainly) looking for an inspiration for how the GA can counter the MA’s Spider Drive. With Weber’s background as a naval historian it is easy to see that the Spiders are the Honorverse’s space going equivalent of submarines, so some parallel methods may arise. Of course there are massive differences to detecting/fighting ships in water and in space that will negate and alter many methods but I thought it a good starting point.

My theory is that eventually the Alignment will have to confront the GA again if they want to have any chance of incorporating systems closer to them into the Renaissance Factor. Whilst they are unlikely to use Oyster Bay style tactics against GA systems in the future, they may start using the Spider fleet as a sort of terror agent to manipulate systems into asking for Factor protection, or raiding to disrupt the new trading lines Manticore will start creating as part of the Harrington Doctrine. The GA will also have to counter the Solarian’s new Commerce Raiding strategy so combining methods will be essential.

Note: Real World examples are in bold

Counter-Measures
1) CAM ships and Merchant Aircraft Carriers, (merchant vessels equipped with aircraft and launch platforms) > LAC’s are now an important and cheap force multiplier, and as we all saw with the Trojan Q-ships it is fairly easy to adapt merchant vessels to carry them. Trading vessels, supply ships, and fleet auxiliaries could all be adapted to carry at least one LAC specific cargo bay, and with multiple ships in a convoy they could field a good number of LAC’s for screening or patrol. An alternative might be to equip convoys with their own long-range recon drones (maybe even armed variants) in order to spread their eyes and reach further than standard civilian grade equipment.
2) Escort carriers (underweight, mass produced aircraft carriers) > Both Haven and Grayson favour bigger CLAC's to carry more LACs for screening, while Manticore prefers smaller faster raiding variants. With the LAC doctrine now shifting more to screening than raiding, perhaps it is time to make some Escort variants, maybe battleship sized and outfitted with more numerous and longer ranged sensors and point defense. These can cover convoys and respond faster while being cheaper and faster to build, and avoiding the weaknesses inherent in adapted Q-ships.
3) High frequency direction finding (HF/DF) (locates an enemy submarine from its radio transmissions) > Given that the Spider-drive largely negates gravitic sensors, one alternative is to detect vessels by other passive means. Originally this was avoided because gravitic’s were FTL, so this maybe is where the long ranged FTL comm equipped recon drone may come into play.
4) Airborne/Seaborne Radar > Radar is old hat in the Honorverse, however once a method for locating Spiders is developed it would need to be equipped on as many vessels as possible. Since sensor tech has become more focused on long range recon drones, the tech maybe fitted onto them and given out as deploy-able packages, negating the difficulty of adapting new sensors directly into the ships themselves.
5) The Leigh light airborne searchlight, Magnetic anomaly detection, Diesel exhaust sniffers, Sonobuoys (all methods used to provide passive and active early warning for U-boats on approach) > All alternative methods that could inspire new detection methods, although as the Ghost-class scout ships show us, they might not all be so successful, but the GA does not yet know that.

Weaponry
1) Depth Charges (basic anti-sub weapon) > The Honorverse depth charge would most likely be a sort of omni-directional laser head, effectively a standard sized bomb carrying many more but shorter ranged focusing rods, allowing it to hit multiple targets in all directions rather than long range precision hits. The shorter range would limit collateral damage, while multiple missiles carrying large numbers of rods could saturate an area to ensure a hit.
2) Y-guns and K-guns (throw depth charges to the side of the vessel) > Not relevant in the Honorverse.
3) Hedgehog and the Squid (forward-throwing multiple charge launchers, allowing escort to stay in contact during an attack) > Pods already take care of this without needing radically new shipboard launcher designs, and self propelled pods do not work as many a discussion as determined.
4) FIDO air-dropped homing torpedo > I think we might see LAC’s or armed recon drones carrying newer and larger weapon variants to allow them even greater damage potential against new or hard to find hostiles.
5) Foxer acoustic decoy (counter to German acoustic homing torpedo) > Given that Mesan weapons can be stealthed already this maybe a hard hurdle to copy.

Tactics
1) Adjusting convoy defenses (overall size of a convoy is less important than the size of its escort, escorts can better protect a few large convoys than many small ones) > Well known fact already.
2) Mass-producing small warships for convoy defense > There has been many discussions over the possibility of reintroducing smaller ship classes and they have been hammered down emphatically. I won’t start another argument here. Manty destroyers and light cruisers are a terror all on their own now.
3) Support groups of escorts (reinforce convoys under attack, continue hunting submerged sub until it was forced to surface) > Spider drive vessels do not work in this way, but having some fast dispatch forces to hunt a detected threat while leaving what you want to protect sufficiently covered is going to be a major strategic hurdle. I suspect that use of armed recon drones, pod-based system defenses, and convoy specific LAC details will be the main methods to do this.
4) Hunter-killer groups (actively seek out enemy subs) > Given the Alignment is unlikely to go for using its precious Spiders in a massed raiding strategy from the very beginning, this tactic is more likely to be used as a deterrence against Solarian raiders.
5) Liberty Ships (mass-produced transports to replace losses) > Since it is possible that a so called "Tonnage war" might arise between all the parties involved this may become a necessary strategy on all sides, who is likely to win depends on other factors.
6) Air raids on the German U-boat pens > I think we can all agree that once the GA identify where the Mesan Alignments primary shipyards are located, their response will be quite a bit more ‘forceful’ shall we say than a simple little raid (Mosquito hunting with Bazookas comes to mind).

I have a few more sci-fi based ideas on how a Spider-drive detector might operate but I will save that for another time. What do people think of my current little essay?

-Valen123456

There was a thread on this topic quite a while back, David Weber AKA runsforceley noted you could detect emissions from a stealthed spider drive ship, not easily but possible. Given their slow speed and lack of wedge knowing where to shoot would give a kill in most cases.

runsforcelery wrote:
[quotes cut]

I might point out the following:

(1) Increased strategic mobility equals an effective increase in the size of your battle fleet. To quote that self-taught, racist military genius Nathan Bedford Forrest, victory goes to the one "who gets there firstest with the mostest." If your ships have a significant mobility advantage without sacrificing combat strength, that's you.

(2) The hyper drive is big enough to force a minimum size on a dispatch boat; it is not a significant mass/volume item for any warship bigger than a DD (old-style). It is a penalty in the sense that you can't put something else in the same space; it is not a significant penalty in that what you can't put there would add only trivially to your combat power if you could put it there.

(3) There are quite a few merchant ships which have "military-grade" hyper generators but civilian-grade impellers and particle screening. There are also those who have military-grade particle screens and civilian-grade compensators and/or impellers. Design tradeoffs depend on a particular customer's choices. With military hyper generators, you can reach higher hyper bands, so a lower subjective velocity equates to a higher apparent velocity. With military nodes and a military-grade compensator, you can accelerate faster, but not to a higher sustained velocity. With military screening, you can attain a higher sustained velocity. It all depends on what it is you want, and a streak drive in a merchant hull would shift it considerably higher in the hyper bands and make it substantially faster over interstellar distances with no other changes in its propulsion at all.

(4) I don't recall saying that the spider drive wasn't difficult to detect. In fact, I seem to recall specifically commenting that one of the Shark skippers had been aboard a Mesan vessel trying to track a spider drive ship in a training exercise and found it extremely difficult. What I have said (or at least implied) is that the drive is detectable if you know what you're looking for; I've never said it was easy to detect and it is,m in fact, much, much, much stealthier than an impeller drive.

Just saying.

http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2603&start=10 second quote.

Poker

pokermind wrote:There was a thread on this topic quite a while back, David Weber AKA runsforceley noted you could detect emissions from a stealthed spider drive ship, not easily but possible. Given their slow speed and lack of wedge knowing where to shoot would give a kill in most cases.

runsforcelery wrote:
[quotes cut]

I might point out the following:

(1) Increased strategic mobility equals an effective increase in the size of your battle fleet. To quote that self-taught, racist military genius Nathan Bedford Forrest, victory goes to the one "who gets there firstest with the mostest." If your ships have a significant mobility advantage without sacrificing combat strength, that's you.

(2) The hyper drive is big enough to force a minimum size on a dispatch boat; it is not a significant mass/volume item for any warship bigger than a DD (old-style). It is a penalty in the sense that you can't put something else in the same space; it is not a significant penalty in that what you can't put there would add only trivially to your combat power if you could put it there.

(3) There are quite a few merchant ships which have "military-grade" hyper generators but civilian-grade impellers and particle screening. There are also those who have military-grade particle screens and civilian-grade compensators and/or impellers. Design tradeoffs depend on a particular customer's choices. With military hyper generators, you can reach higher hyper bands, so a lower subjective velocity equates to a higher apparent velocity. With military nodes and a military-grade compensator, you can accelerate faster, but not to a higher sustained velocity. With military screening, you can attain a higher sustained velocity. It all depends on what it is you want, and a streak drive in a merchant hull would shift it considerably higher in the hyper bands and make it substantially faster over interstellar distances with no other changes in its propulsion at all.

(4) I don't recall saying that the spider drive wasn't difficult to detect. In fact, I seem to recall specifically commenting that one of the Shark skippers had been aboard a Mesan vessel trying to track a spider drive ship in a training exercise and found it extremely difficult. What I have said (or at least implied) is that the drive is detectable if you know what you're looking for; I've never said it was easy to detect and it is,m in fact, much, much, much stealthier than an impeller drive.

Just saying.

http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2603&start=10 second quote.

Poker

I am a relative newcomer to the Honorverse Forums, I missed that one, thanks for the heads up.

I have my own theories that the GA may soon create their own Spider detector using their experience in FTL communications. Spiders do not create ripples along the Alpha wall but I wonder if the "holes" its grav beams create in the alpha wall might somehow be used to pinpoint its location, similar to how Active Sonar or Lidar detect physical objects by directing energy waves and listening to the echos. My theory is that by creating a sufficiently powerful grav-pulse (like an explosion used in Geophysical Surveying) you might pick up echos off from the tiny "holes" the spiders grav beams create. An alternative method might be more like a laser detection grid, aim a grav pulse towards a receiver and get a steady signal, however when a spider drive passes through the pulse its signal is distorted by the same holes raising the alarm. Both of these however are likely to be susceptible to natural grav wave distortions.

This is all just theorizing on my part as part of the wait for the next novel.

PS. Has runsforcelery ever mentioned how a spider is supposed to work in hyperspace? Do they carry an Alpha node only impeller ring for use in Wormhole and Hyperspace transits? The MA might have a completely different normal space propulsion method and a more advanced Hyperdrive, but they probably still need to obey normal Honorverse physics for other things.

Valen123456 wrote:I have been doing a little research into early anti-submarine warfare (the WWII era U-boat campaign mainly) looking for an inspiration for how the GA can counter the MA’s Spider Drive. With Weber’s background as a naval historian it is easy to see that the Spiders are the Honorverse’s space going equivalent of submarines, so some parallel methods may arise. Of course there are massive differences to detecting/fighting ships in water and in space that will negate and alter many methods but I thought it a good starting point.

[snip]

I have a few more sci-fi based ideas on how a Spider-drive detector might operate but I will save that for another time. What do people think of my current little essay?

-Valen123456

That was an interesting review. I would point out that there are some issues applying the CAM or escort carrier models to the Honorverse and Spider Ships.

(Well first, CAM were mostly used to drive off or kill the long range recon planes, Condors, that spotted for the uboats. Because the aircraft couldn't be recovered it wasn't practical to use them for sub spotting work)
But for a lot of the war the big thing that aircraft did (whether land based or from an escort carrier) was they forced the submarines to stay submerged which hindered their ability to recharge their batteries and massively slowed their top speed.

Given how short the detection range against a spider ship would be I don't see escort LACs having the same kind of effect of forcing spider ships to further reduce speed or acceleration.


Plus of course planes had more or less an order of magnitude speed advantage over ships, combined with a wider circle of observation, so they could suppress subs over a much wider area than a surface ship and could relatively rapidly respond to sighting reports.

The LACs don't have the same kind of speed advantage over the ships they're escorting (compared to even a merchant ship maybe a 3-3.5x acceleration advantage, but only a 20% advantage in top speed. And no top speed advantage over a ship with military grade particle shielding).


Finally a airplane circling a convoy could spot subs approaching on the surface from well beyond effective torpedo range, but Catapract (or even SDM) missile range significantly exceeds the range LAC can hope to spot a spider ship with current sensors. Instead of a couple of planes circling the convoy to drive subs under you'd need a huge number of LACs in a spherical shell to hope to get a comparable chance of detection


So in the Honorverse I'm don't think you'd get the same effect from bringing LACs along. They're still useful against normal raiders, and if they're in the right position they can help thicken anti-missile defense against a missile attack from a spider ship; but I think that's about the best we can hope from them - at least until better spider detection sensors come along.

Valen123456 wrote:1) CAM ships and Merchant Aircraft Carriers, (merchant vessels equipped with aircraft and launch platforms) > LAC’s are now an important and cheap force multiplier, and as we all saw with the Trojan Q-ships it is fairly easy to adapt merchant vessels to carry them. Trading vessels, supply ships, and fleet auxiliaries could all be adapted to carry at least one LAC specific cargo bay, and with multiple ships in a convoy they could field a good number of LAC’s for screening or patrol. An alternative might be to equip convoys with their own long-range recon drones (maybe even armed variants) in order to spread their eyes and reach further than standard civilian grade equipment.

generally a good idea though the CAM ships were anti-air ships and unable to recover the fighters they launched to counter the enemy air attack, so old worn out fighters, patched together for “one last run” were used, usually Hurricanes. A use of this may be to simply expand the merchies existing small-craft bay into the cargo area to accommodate 1 LAC and give them an old 1st gen boat as they are replaced with newer models on the line(particularly useful tactic for the Andies & Solies who are behind in carrier/LAC production)

Valen123456 wrote:2) Escort carriers (underweight, mass produced aircraft carriers) > Both Haven and Grayson favour bigger CLAC's to carry more LACs for screening, while Manticore prefers smaller faster raiding variants. With the LAC doctrine now shifting more to screening than raiding, perhaps it is time to make some Escort variants, maybe battleship sized and outfitted with more numerous and longer ranged sensors and point defense. These can cover convoys and respond faster while being cheaper and faster to build, and avoiding the weaknesses inherent in adapted Q-ships.

Also as I’ve pointed out a use for the Solie hulls (yea yea yea…) – yank the Solie weapons & mags and free up room for LACs with military (yea Solie military but still better than civilian) drives and pop in a few GA weapons for defense. Can be done by a tender – don’t even need yard space as you would need for full scraping.

Valen123456 wrote:3) High frequency direction finding (HF/DF) (locates an enemy submarine from its radio transmissions) > Given that the Spider-drive largely negates gravitic sensors, one alternative is to detect vessels by other passive means. Originally this was avoided because gravitic’s were FTL, so this maybe is where the long ranged FTL comm equipped recon drone may come into play.

Not really applicable. The U-boats were communicating with HQ not each other & there’s no way they could be communicating back to Mesa/HQ from another system. Anyway most of the “HF/DF” detection was really just a cover for the decoded messages from Ultra which told them where to look.

Valen123456 wrote:4) Airborne/Seaborne Radar > Radar is old hat in the Honorverse, however once a method for locating Spiders is developed it would need to be equipped on as many vessels as possible. Since sensor tech has become more focused on long range recon drones, the tech maybe fitted onto them and given out as deploy-able packages, negating the difficulty of adapting new sensors directly into the ships themselves.

the ships already have radar systems they just aren’t relied on as much as the gravitics.

Valen123456 wrote:5) The Leigh light airborne searchlight, Magnetic anomaly detection, Diesel exhaust sniffers, Sonobuoys (all methods used to provide passive and active early warning for U-boats on approach) > All alternative methods that could inspire new detection methods, although as the Ghost-class scout ships show us, they might not all be so successful, but the GA does not yet know that.

You could have something here. A modified recon drone that goes out ahead and around the “target” at a range greater than the expected attack range of the enemy & then periodically strobes a massive field of energy (EM pulse or a “wave”, gravity perhaps) and the escorts monitor for missing “gaps” absorbed by the spider ship. Maybe even the Honorverse “sonar” the escort ship sends out a periotic “wave” of gravity and uses its gravitics to detect “holes” in the wave caused by the spider drives “holding” onto that point in space, this could even mimic the deficiencies in Sonar, namely that the escort doing the gravity “pinging” may not be able to have its wedge at full power or it’ll “drown-out” its own “ping” so it can’t be accelerating at “high speed” while searching.

Valen123456 wrote:2) Y-guns and K-guns (throw depth charges to the side of the vessel) > Not relevant in the Honorverse.

offhand I agree, but let’s not discount some equivalent out of hand.

Valen123456 wrote:3) Hedgehog and the Squid (forward-throwing multiple charge launchers, allowing escort to stay in contact during an attack) > Pods already take care of this without needing radically new shipboard launcher designs, and self propelled pods do not work as many a discussion as determined.
4) FIDO air-dropped homing torpedo > I think we might see LAC’s or armed recon drones carrying newer and larger weapon variants to allow them even greater damage potential against new or hard to find hostiles.

or smaller weaker weapons that saturate an area

Valen123456 wrote:2) Mass-producing small warships for convoy defense > There has been many discussions over the possibility of reintroducing smaller ship classes and they have been hammered down emphatically. I won’t start another argument here. Manty destroyers and light cruisers are a terror all on their own now.

ditto

Valen123456 wrote:4) Hunter-killer groups (actively seek out enemy subs) > Given the Alignment is unlikely to go for using its precious Spiders in a massed raiding strategy from the very beginning, this tactic is more likely to be used as a deterrence against Solarian raiders.

never really successful by anyone – the U-boats hide from them and just go elsewhere to attack though everybody attempts them, at-least at first (Even the RN at the beginning of WWII after all their experience in WWI.)

Valen123456 wrote:6) Air raids on the German U-boat pens > I think we can all agree that once the GA identify where the Mesan Alignments primary shipyards are located, their response will be quite a bit more ‘forceful’ shall we say than a simple little raid (Mosquito hunting with Bazookas comes to mind).

A given I think!

Jonathan_S wrote:So in the Honorverse I'm don't think you'd get the same effect from bringing LACs along. They're still useful against normal raiders, and if they're in the right position they can help thicken anti-missile defense against a missile attack from a spider ship; but I think that's about the best we can hope from them - at least until better spider detection sensors come along.

I was thinking as I read this - regarding my prev post - if a grav-wave "sonar" were produced, it could be (initially) to big/power intensive (what ever) to fit on a LAC, but later, a new "reduced" model is developed that can fit on a LAC and the smaller/less powerful wedge would allow them to maintain a higher accel while "pinging" allowing them to fan out and screen an area.

Valen123456 wrote:Has runsforcelery ever mentioned how a spider is supposed to work in hyperspace? Do they carry an Alpha node only impeller ring for use in Wormhole and Hyperspace transits? The MA might have a completely different normal space propulsion method and a more advanced Hyperdrive, but they probably still need to obey normal Honorverse physics for other things.

I believe the smaller ghost class ships were carried in by transport, I don't think they have Hyper drives. I don't believe it dose work in hyper - the larger ships building I believe have a streak drive.

MAD-4A wrote:

Valen123456 wrote:4) Hunter-killer groups (actively seek out enemy subs) > Given the Alignment is unlikely to go for using its precious Spiders in a massed raiding strategy from the very beginning, this tactic is more likely to be used as a deterrence against Solarian raiders.

never really successful by anyone – the U-boats hide from them and just go elsewhere to attack though everybody attempts them, at-least at first (Even the RN at the beginning of WWII after all their experience in WWI.)

Valen123456 wrote:6) Air raids on the German U-boat pens > I think we can all agree that once the GA identify where the Mesan Alignments primary shipyards are located, their response will be quite a bit more ‘forceful’ shall we say than a simple little raid (Mosquito hunting with Bazookas comes to mind).

A given I think!

That was quite true when the hunter killer groups were just destroyer sweeps.
Better to use those to escort convoys where the uboats have to come to you to be effective. (Or if you want to kill uboats, as opposed to primarily just fend them off, you attach a killer group to a convoy and they detach and aggressively prosecute uboats once they've been detected attempting to attack the convoy)

But by the late war you had hunter killer groups that were centered around an escort carrier, launching planes that had centimetric radar and homing anti-submarine torpedoes, that were getting steered after uboats based on radio direction finding or ultra decrypts. The range of the planes, combined with the effectiveness of the radar, allowed them to surprise uboats on the surface and drop depth bombs or FIDO homing torpedoes on them as they dove (or rockets and guns if the uboat didn't dive quickly enough)

The change in technology, as well as intelligence from intercepts, make the hunter killer group more effective. (Especially when vectored after force multipliers like milch cows)


But I assume nobody in the Honorverse is likely to make the same mistake of sending ships to roam the depths of hyper hoping to stumble across a spider ship at random. If nothing else the shear volume of space dwarfs that of the ocean and should convince people it's a waste of effort.

I'm curious as to where this theory that the spider drive won't work in hyperspace comes from. Wouldn't the 'legs' simply latch onto the wall to the next-highest hyper band? So in n-space they use the alpha wall, in the alpha band they use the beta wall etc.

The streak drive doesn't provide any motive power, so strictly speaking it's not a 'drive' at all. It's an improved hyper generator that lets you survive translation through the iota and kappa walls, giving you a higher effective n-space speed by travelling in higher hyper bands than everyone else can access.

MAD-4A wrote:I believe the smaller ghost class ships were carried in by transport, I don't think they have Hyper drives. I don't believe it dose work in hyper - the larger ships building I believe have a streak drive.

They were, but that was to cover the translation signature, not because they can't. They hypered out once their mission was done.