Space Stations, Forts and Strategies

JeffEngel wrote:

kzt wrote:The Manticore approach of having your critical military construction nodes also be the break in bulk shipping node is terribly open to attack. You put a 100 mt grav pinch fusion bomb in a container and ship it to Manticore marked as electronics. As David has explained previously, modern grav fusion bombs are pretty much a bunch of electronics, no radioactive elements needed. Once it is on the station it goes bang, game over.

Until you resolve that there really isn't any purpose in designing your defenses to protect against massively more expensive and complex attacks.

And yet, wars have happened and those stations not gone up like popcorn, so there's indirect reason to think something's stopping that. What, I don't know, but either the author does or will make it up as needed.

The E wrote:It's a scale problem. In order to bring active defenses to bear against a c-fractional strike, you need to be able to detect it and boot your active defenses before the projectile does damage. This means that detection has to happen at a range of several lightminutes; a .99c projectile will be hot on the heels of the returning radar pulse, in order for a warning to be useful, it needs to come in a couple of minutes before the projectile is in range. In other words, detection needs to happen at 3 to 5 lightminutes at the latest, covering a shell that large with both sensor and defensive platforms takes time and resources.

It's not impossible to do this, mind you. It's just hilariously wasteful. Let's not forget, c-fractional strikes are incredibly rare, so you'd be expending massive efforts to guard against an attack that will probably never happen.
There are occasions where building such a defense system is justifiable. Grayson before HotQ, for example. But what occurs to me is that it's probably easier to build a navy to punch people preemptively (or to maintain a retaliation capability to act as a deterrent) than it is to try to maintain a supposedly impenetrable defensive screen.

And let's not kid ourselves here: Honorverse tech makes it incredibly easy to pull off attacks. No defense is absolute, and if an attacker is determined enough, such a defensive system would be only a minor inconvenience; after all, if you can launch one c-fractional projectile, chances are you're able to launch a hundred or a thousand or however many are necessary to overwhelm any given defense.

Theemile wrote:Everybody's forgetting the scale issue works against the attacker as well - if you are far enough out of the system that the defender cannot see you firing, you cannot see the defder to target him. Planets are easy - they are huge. Stations or construction slips are small. You are not going to target them with shipborne sensers from light hours or days out.

Before the MDM, a c fractional missile came in ballistic and a small miss was still a miss, as the missile slides past. But the chances of even a small miss was astronomical. An MDM makes it possible, as the missile can restart and have a guided attack stage, but missile sensors are myoptic, and need good terminal guidance, like the Ghost emplaced guidance platforms provided at OB.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:Everybody's forgetting the scale issue works against the attacker as well - if you are far enough out of the system that the defender cannot see you firing, you cannot see the defder to target him. Planets are easy - they are huge. Stations or construction slips are small. You are not going to target them with shipborne sensers from light hours or days out.

Before the MDM, a c fractional missile came in ballistic and a small miss was still a miss, as the missile slides past. But the chances of even a small miss was astronomical. An MDM makes it possible, as the missile can restart and have a guided attack stage, but missile sensors are myoptic, and need good terminal guidance, like the Ghost emplaced guidance platforms provided at OB.

It's in ORBIT. I can extremely accurately predict where the centroid of the station going to be in a minute, an hour, a week or a decade. So I aim at that. I don't need to see the actual target any more then an ICBM aimed at Vladivostok needs to see it from Great Falls Wyoming.

Theemile wrote:And yet items in orbit routinely use station keeping engines to maintain their orbit, changing their locations in said orbit, or changing their orbit altogether. So yes, you have the centroid, but not where the station is in a 40k km radius sphere, when it could be behind a planet or other orbital object. In a world with counter grav, who is to say that a station is even in orbit? Besides who is to say that the missile sensors aren't going to lock onto a freighter or orbital energy farm? You want precision, you need terminal guidance.

Theemile wrote:See the last paragraph of vince's post up-thred - he has text-ev of Manty planetary forts.

SWM wrote:Thanks. I misremembered the text.

n7axw wrote:
Distinguish between junction forts and planetary forts. We know from textev that they have the former. Do we have evidence for planetary forts?

Don

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 31 wrote:Eighth Fleet floated before him—two hundred ships in all, headed by thirty-seven Manticoran and Grayson SDs and twelve Erewhonese dreadnoughts—maintaining station forty-five light-seconds off the Trevor's Star terminus of the Manticore Junction while White Haven awaited the arrival of the last of his superdreadnoughts via the Junction. The massed, massive firepower of the fleet gleamed in the display like tiny, fiery sparks of reflected sunlight, nuzzling relatively close (in deep-space terms) to the terminus, but the star chart showed what else they shared the system with. Third Fleet's fifty-five SDs hung in San Martin orbit, permanently on guard to protect the system and the thick clutch of half-complete deep-space fortresses being assembled under their watchful eye. Eventually, half those forts would be left to cover San Martin while the other half were towed out to cover the terminus directly. They could have been finished long ago if the Peeps had done even a tiny bit less effective job of destroying San Martin's orbital industry before they gave up the system. As it was, the Alliance had been forced to ship in the equipment to build the facilities needed to assemble the prefabricated components of the bases. It was taking far longer than it should have, but current projections called for the first group of forts to be finished within six or seven T-months—at which point everyone would no doubt heave a sigh of profound relief. But for now the solid ranks of capital units held their watchful orbit, proudly protecting what had been won at such terrible cost in lives and ships, and White Haven let his eyes rest upon their icons.

War of Honor, Chapter 57 wrote:Her Third Fleet could be in only one place at a time, unless she wanted to accept an extremely dangerous dispersion of its strength. In theory, the forts could deal with most attacks on the terminus itself. Actually, calling them "forts" was something of a misnomer. To most people, the term "fort" implied a fixed fortification, something ponderous and immobile. But while the terminus forts were certainly ponderous, they were not—quite—immobile. Instead, they might be better thought of as enormous sublight superdreadnoughts. Ships so huge that their low acceleration made them totally unsuited to mobile operations, but which remained capable of at least minimal combat maneuvers . . . and which could generate the impeller wedges which were the first line of defense for any warship.

War of Honor, Chapter 57 wrote:"We can't stop them," he said softly and looked up to meet his chief of staff's equally shocked eyes at last. "Anything we send out to meet them will only end up giving them extra target practice," he grated. "And the same thing is true of the shipyards. Hell, we always depended on the mobile force for the system's real security. Why bother to upgrade the forts to fire MDMs? That's what the frigging Fleet was for! Goddamn that bastard Janacek."

***Snip***

Admiral Higgins stood like a statue of acid-etched iron on HMS Indomitable's flag bridge, waiting, as his task force's remaining units accelerated towards the Grendelsbane hyper limit. No one spoke to him. No one approached him. There was an invisible perimeter around him, a circle of pain and self-loathing none dared enter.

David Weber, The Grendelsbane yards vulnerability wrote:The Grendelsbane yards originally came into existence as a repair/refit facility for the extreme flank of the Manticoran Alliance. They were established not simply as a Manticoran facility, but to provide support for other navies operating in the area at a centralized location where economies of scale could be practiced. Remember that this logistics node was established initially during time of peace, before the war turned hot, and represented a perceived (and quite real) need to have an advanced repair and support complex in a critical region of the defensive glacis the SKM was building up. It was also the primary support base for the very powerful fleet which the SKM had stationed to cover that flank of its defensive perimeter. That both increased the need for capacity and put a powerful defensive force in position to cover it. Think of it as the equivalent of the Brits' Singapore, at least conceptually. (And if you think the similarity between what happened to Singapore in 1942, and what happened to Grendelsbane in War of Honor was sheer coincidence, I have some bottom land in Florida I'd like to sell you.)

As time progressed, more and more capacity was concentrated there. It made sense to the Powers That Were to put in fabrication nodes so that critical components could be produced on-site. And as the base became increasingly important, the commitment to its defenses — in both mobile and fixed units — grew to protect the investment. The fact that the defending fleet at the time of the actual attack was insufficient to the task says nothing at all about the capability of the defenses which had been in place earlier in the war. In particular, the base was defended by very powerful fixed fortifications — more powerful, in fact, than those being erected to cover the Trevor's Star terminus of the Junction. Unfortunately, those forts had been built with pre-Ghost Rider technology, and they hadn't been upgraded before the cessation of hostilities. Worse (and one of the reasons Janacek committed suicide), the Janacek Admiralty hadn't even assigned priority to getting large numbers of MDM pods to the forts there, which is the reason the Manty system CO didn't even consider trying to use them to defend the base when the Havenites turned out to have MDMs of their own. In Janacek's mind, however, Grendelsbane's location made it a "safe" sector, one which a covering force with a relatively small number of SD(P)s (with MDMs, which he didn't think the Havenites had) could easily protect. Even when he began to think in terms of a possible Havenite attack, his attention was fixed primarily on Trevor's Star because of the political consequences of an attack there.

But earlier than that, as both the capacity and the (then) toughness of the defenses grew, it also made sense to the Mourncreek Admiralty (this is one of the arguably poorer reasons, based on prewar logic, without the experience of actual, sustained operations) to spread out the SKM's production bottlenecks. Remember that the SKM was a single-system polity which had fought pirates and a few minor wars, but had never taken on an opponent of the PRH's size in a sustained war. One of the major concerns of the prewar Admiralty was the vulnerability of the RMN's yard capacity compared to that of the PRH, which had its capacity divided between multiple (well defended) systems. A single lucky PRH attack that managed to get into missile range of Hephaestus and Vulcan, for example, could have taken out something like 75% of the total building capacity of the SKM. By spreading out the targets, the RMN increased its defensive problems, but also put fewer of its eggs into a single basket.

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 21 wrote:Caparelli started to say something more, then closed his mouth with a click and gave White Haven a fulminating glance. The Earl only smiled back blandly. He'd passed on the information when it came to his attention the better part of nine T-months ago, but it had been evident from several things Caparelli had said that no one had routed a copy of White Haven's report to him. Well, that was hardly the Earl's fault. Besides, the shock of discovering just how far advanced the Grayson Navy really was ought to be good for the First Space Lord, he thought, and returned to his consideration of the differences between Grayson and Manticoran approaches to shipbuilding
The biggest one, he thought as their pinnace drifted closer to the ship Matthews was still describing, was that Grayson yards were far more decentralized. The Star Kingdom preferred putting its building capacity into nodal concentrations with enormous, centralized, and highly sophisticated support structures, but the Graysons preferred to disperse them. No doubt that owed something to the crudity of their pre-Alliance tech base, he mused. Given how incredibly manpower-intensive Grayson shipbuilding had been (by Manticoran standards, at least), it had actually made sense to spread projects out (as long as one didn't get carried away about it) so that one's work force didn't crowd itself. And one thing any star system had plenty of was room in which to spread things out.
But even though the Graysons now had access to modern technology, they showed no particular intention to copy the Manticoran model, and as White Haven could certainly attest from personal experience—not to mention discussions with his brother, who ran the Star Kingdom's Exchequer—there were definite arguments in favor of their approach. For one thing, it was a hell of a lot cheaper, both financially and in terms of start-up time.
The Graysons hadn't bothered with formal slips, space docks, or any of dozens of other things Manticoran shipbuilders took for granted. They just floated the building materials out to the appropriate spot, which in this case was in easy commuting range of one of their huge asteroid mining central processing nodes. Then they built the minimal amount of scaffolding, to hold things together and give their workers something to anchor themselves to, and simply started putting the parts together. It was almost like something from back in the earliest days of the Diaspora, when the colony ships were built in Old Earth or Mars orbit, but it certainly worked.
There were drawbacks, of course. The Graysons had saved an enormous amount on front-end investment, but their efficiency on a man-hour basis was only about eighty percent that of the Star Kingdom's. That might not seem like a very big margin, but considering the billions upon billions of dollars of military construction involved, even small relative amounts added up into enormous totals. And their dispersed capacity was also far more vulnerable to the possibility of a quick Peep pounce on the system. The massive space stations of the Royal Manticoran Navy were at the heart of the Manticore Binary System's fortifications and orbital defenses, with enormous amounts of firepower and—especially—anti-missile capability to protect them. The Blackbird Yard depended entirely upon the protection of the star system's mobile forces, and the incomplete hulls would be hideously vulnerable to anyone who got into range to launch a missile spread in their direction. On the other hand, the Graysons and their allies had thus far successfully kept any Peeps from getting close enough to damage their yards, and the people of Yeltsin's Star were willing to throw an incredible number of workers at the project, which more than compensated for their lower per-man-hour productivity.

David Weber, Shipyard types wrote: There's also the question of how you prioritize your available resources, manpower, and funds. During the long period of "King Roger's Build Up," the huge competing priorities were (1) mobile units for the battle fleet; (2) fixed fortifications for the central wormhole junction and the infrastructure around Manticore and Sphinx; (3) infrastructure expansion. Because they weren't actively at war, and because the forts' construction was effectively completed fairly early in the build up process (it had a very high initial priority), infrastructure expansion at Hephaestus and the other home system space stations was almost equal in priority to construction of starships "below the wall." Once the actual war began, priorities shifted. At that point, what was needed was the greatest possible number of ships built as quickly as possible. Initially, the Navy's building budgets were limited by the total amount of funds available, and the building slips associated with the existing space stations sufficed for all of the shipping the Cromarty Government could afford to lay down in the earlier period of the war. Money which had already been appropriated for infrastructure expansion was also raided for the new construction programs, but the expansion programs continued, albeit at a slower rate, which also expanded the available building slips supported by that infrastructure.

The E wrote:It's a scale problem. In order to bring active defenses to bear against a c-fractional strike, you need to be able to detect it and boot your active defenses before the projectile does damage. This means that detection has to happen at a range of several lightminutes; a .99c projectile will be hot on the heels of the returning radar pulse, in order for a warning to be useful, it needs to come in a couple of minutes before the projectile is in range. In other words, detection needs to happen at 3 to 5 lightminutes at the latest, covering a shell that large with both sensor and defensive platforms takes time and resources.

It's not impossible to do this, mind you. It's just hilariously wasteful. Let's not forget, c-fractional strikes are incredibly rare, so you'd be expending massive efforts to guard against an attack that will probably never happen.
There are occasions where building such a defense system is justifiable. Grayson before HotQ, for example. But what occurs to me is that it's probably easier to build a navy to punch people preemptively (or to maintain a retaliation capability to act as a deterrent) than it is to try to maintain a supposedly impenetrable defensive screen.

And let's not kid ourselves here: Honorverse tech makes it incredibly easy to pull off attacks. No defense is absolute, and if an attacker is determined enough, such a defensive system would be only a minor inconvenience; after all, if you can launch one c-fractional projectile, chances are you're able to launch a hundred or a thousand or however many are necessary to overwhelm any given defense.

JeffEngel wrote:
Bolthole boffins may be able to help those sensors, and work out something to pick up spider drive usage too. There may be some application for dedicated recon drone tender destroyers to check out those footprints - not built to fight much of anything, but to be an economical platform you can build and maintain in bulk to check out those footprints ASAP and flood the suspect area with recon drones. (I'd call it a frigate if not for fear of bringing the wrath of RFC down. But really, all the unit needs to be is a courier boat built up to support a load of drones and the gear to monitor and control them. If someone kills it, they've given up the stealth approach.)

If you have a suspect footprint, you could have some idea where a ballistic attack is coming from, and that could let you deploy mobile sensor platforms along that route to detect it. You could also deploy tugs or similar ships between that threat and likely targets - if you can put it in the right place, the impeller wedge will scotch any attack.