Question: Battle of The Selker Rift

Vince wrote:

Duckk wrote:The point was to draw out the chase as long as possible, in order to 1) get farther away from Artemis' drop off point, and 2) give the damage control teams as much time as possible to get the pod rails up. Opening up for a broadside engagement does not serve either of those goals.

Remember, Achmed didn't go barreling in for an energy engagement until they IDed the decoy. They started with a probing missile duel to see if the Q-ship still had pods. Opening up the broadsides would have confirmed that Wayfarer had been crippled by Kerebin in the previous engagement. Honor needed to keep the BC guessing, because Wayfarer could not win a broadside missile engagement at Achmed's optimal range. With a maximum range duel with just the chasers, Honor was gambling that she could keep going long enough to get the pod rails back up, plus she could keep the Peeps from getting a look at her Artemis decoy. And it very nearly worked.

And at the time of Honor Among Enemies, the RMN had not yet developed off-bore firing control capability for its missiles. Wayfarer would have had to turn one of its broadsides to face Achmed for fire control if Honor had wanted to engage with the missile tubes.

And one last point: According to House of Steel, the Wayfarer only has 10 Countermissle Launchers and 10 Point-Defense Laser Clusters in her broadside, which is not a lot (for comparison, the Reliant-Class BC has 18 CM's and 18 PDLC's in each broadside on a ship 1/7th the size of the Wayfarer--and I would think a Sultan would have as many (or even more) than that).

So even if Honor had turned for a missile duel, and had the heavier weapons, the chances she would take several hits to her 'eggshell' ship was a high enough risk (along with the excellent points made above) that she decided to wait until she knew the engagement would be decisive.

IMHO as always. YTMMV.

Vince wrote:

Duckk wrote:The point was to draw out the chase as long as possible, in order to 1) get farther away from Artemis' drop off point, and 2) give the damage control teams as much time as possible to get the pod rails up. Opening up for a broadside engagement does not serve either of those goals.

Remember, Achmed didn't go barreling in for an energy engagement until they IDed the decoy. They started with a probing missile duel to see if the Q-ship still had pods. Opening up the broadsides would have confirmed that Wayfarer had been crippled by Kerebin in the previous engagement. Honor needed to keep the BC guessing, because Wayfarer could not win a broadside missile engagement at Achmed's optimal range. With a maximum range duel with just the chasers, Honor was gambling that she could keep going long enough to get the pod rails back up, plus she could keep the Peeps from getting a look at her Artemis decoy. And it very nearly worked.

And at the time of Honor Among Enemies, the RMN had not yet developed off-bore firing control capability for its missiles. Wayfarer would have had to turn one of its broadsides to face Achmed for fire control if Honor had wanted to engage with the missile tubes.

Yeah, I knew that, but she knew she was eventually going to turn anyway, to use her grasers. She also had better sensors, countermissiles and EW, and the crappy conditions in the Rift make that an advantage for her. I wanted to time everything to light off their drives as close to that moment as possible. And if she had gotten the pod doors open, she would have done a missile attack.

If she'd had the off-bore capability, then with the number of control links Wayfarer had, she could have hammered Achmed as hard as the first ship, without worrying about the pod doors. I forget if the ammo loadout was given for the tubes, but istr the word "generous." But she didn't have the off-bore capability, which is why I didn't include it.

But the real important factor was distance. She needed Achmed out of comm range of the other Havenites before she attacked it; I forgot that bit. And without off-bore capability, she couldn't have gotten a dense enough salvo even with delayed timing on the drives. Also, with those crappy sensor conditions, she couldn't be sure Achmed couldn't communicate--she couldn't see far enough. So, as Duckk pointed already out, she did what worked.

And, I am now happily re-reading the book again anyway.

Rob

Snipped for brevity

Hutch wrote:
And one last point: According to House of Steel, the Wayfarer only has 10 Countermissle Launchers and 10 Point-Defense Laser Clusters in her broadside, which is not a lot (for comparison, the Reliant-Class BC has 18 CM's and 18 PDLC's in each broadside on a ship 1/7th the size of the Wayfarer--and I would think a Sultan would have as many (or even more) than that).

So even if Honor had turned for a missile duel, and had the heavier weapons, the chances she would take several hits to her 'eggshell' ship was a high enough risk (along with the excellent points made above) that she decided to wait until she knew the engagement would be decisive.

IMHO as always. YTMMV.

Usually, your opinion is pretty good. But the stats you gave are for a ship not built until 1915.

The Reliant Flight II was still being made then; just 10 countermissiles, 10 pdlc. I think the Sultan was closer to the original Reliant; but Haven could likely modify the design after Yeltsin and add more defenses. We'll know when the next Companion comes out.

Regards,

Rob

Duckk wrote:The point was to draw out the chase as long as possible, in order to 1) get farther away from Artemis' drop off point, and 2) give the damage control teams as much time as possible to get the pod rails up. Opening up for a broadside engagement does not serve either of those goals.

Remember, Achmed didn't go barreling in for an energy engagement until they IDed the decoy. They started with a probing missile duel to see if the Q-ship still had pods. Opening up the broadsides would have confirmed that Wayfarer had been crippled by Kerebin in the previous engagement. Honor needed to keep the BC guessing, because Wayfarer could not win a broadside missile engagement at Achmed's optimal range. With a maximum range duel with just the chasers, Honor was gambling that she could keep going long enough to get the pod rails back up, plus she could keep the Peeps from getting a look at her Artemis decoy. And it very nearly worked.

Vince wrote:And at the time of Honor Among Enemies, the RMN had not yet developed off-bore firing control capability for its missiles. Wayfarer would have had to turn one of its broadsides to face Achmed for fire control if Honor had wanted to engage with the missile tubes.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:Yeah, I knew that, but she knew she was eventually going to turn anyway, to use her grasers. She also had better sensors, countermissiles and EW, and the crappy conditions in the Rift make that an advantage for her. I wanted to time everything to light off their drives as close to that moment as possible. And if she had gotten the pod doors open, she would have done a missile attack.

If she'd had the off-bore capability, then with the number of control links Wayfarer had, she could have hammered Achmed as hard as the first ship, without worrying about the pod doors. I forget if the ammo loadout was given for the tubes, but istr the word "generous." But she didn't have the off-bore capability, which is why I didn't include it.

But the real important factor was distance. She needed Achmed out of comm range of the other Havenites before she attacked it; I forgot that bit. And without off-bore capability, she couldn't have gotten a dense enough salvo even with delayed timing on the drives. Also, with those crappy sensor conditions, she couldn't be sure Achmed couldn't communicate--she couldn't see far enough. So, as Duckk pointed already out, she did what worked.

And, I am now happily re-reading the book again anyway.

Rob

Actually the conditions in the Selkar Rift are better than most of hyperspace. Particle density is lower, so sensor reach (and presumably communications distance) is further.

Your point about having Achmed out of communications range is definitely correct, but it actually makes it even more important that when Wayfarer engages, it must be decisive and over with as quickly as possibly, without giving Achmed a chance to temporarily break off the engagement (open the range beyond missile range) and sound the alarm to the other PRN units. Honor was hoping to do this with missile pods they way she took out the first BC (why damage control was frantically working to repair the pod bay doors), but the missile that executed the up the kilt shot doomed that option, leaving only Fire Plan Hawkwing left to engage with.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:Snipped for brevity

Hutch wrote:
And one last point: According to House of Steel, the Wayfarer only has 10 Countermissle Launchers and 10 Point-Defense Laser Clusters in her broadside, which is not a lot (for comparison, the Reliant-Class BC has 18 CM's and 18 PDLC's in each broadside on a ship 1/7th the size of the Wayfarer--and I would think a Sultan would have as many (or even more) than that).

So even if Honor had turned for a missile duel, and had the heavier weapons, the chances she would take several hits to her 'eggshell' ship was a high enough risk (along with the excellent points made above) that she decided to wait until she knew the engagement would be decisive.

IMHO as always. YTMMV.

Usually, your opinion is pretty good. But the stats you gave are for a ship not built until 1915.

The Reliant Flight II was still being made then; just 10 countermissiles, 10 pdlc. I think the Sultan was closer to the original Reliant; but Haven could likely modify the design after Yeltsin and add more defenses. We'll know when the next Companion comes out.

Regards,

Rob

Yeah, I was using the Flight III/IV Reliant data from PD 1915, so it may be less.

But given that Haven learned very quickly that they were out-tech'ed by Manty missiles, they may have beefed up their missile defenses during refits of their ships.

At least that's my story and I'm sticking too it...

Not sure if we really hit the question directly as to, why not just blow the cargo door s to get back into action more quickly? I doubt that the doors open outward on simple hinges, because a high G turn would rip them off the ship. So they're likely basically "rolling" to the side or opening similar to how a C-130 or the Star Trek universe shuttle bays open.

Having just re-read the pertinent section, I'm thinking that it was a no-go because a shaped charge wouldn't help, it'd likely deflect back into the ship, or worse make it harder to clear a launch path. Even if you blow part of the doors out of the way, if the opening is even a millimeter too small = bad things happen to your ship when you attempt to fire pods.

That's a design weakness they I don't think BuShips has solved even in later books with with the SD(p)'s and Aggies later on, if offensive fire takes out the pod launch doors or rails, that ship is butt-naked offensively.

Although that does lead me to a different engineering type question. There's a lot of battle damage listed where "the control runs" got mangled by shrapnel, so why isn't there an "uber" PD19XX wifi method for redundancy? I mean, we're still receiving battery powered signals from Mars for goodness sake, getting useful signals to the butt end of a damaged ship less than 2Km in length (all ships in the Honorvers) should be child play no matter what wires get whacked between point "ship bridge" and point "damaged ship part I want to control".

Thoughts?

The long and short of why they didn't take the doors off is because repairing them was going to take less time than getting the proper explosives into the proper places or getting the necessary cutting equipment into place to torch them off. Unfortunately, as soon as they were repaired, fresh damage took them out again. That particular issue has been partially fixed in the SD(p)s by giving them 6 doors on the back instead of two, so if one door is knocked out, you only loose one rail, not 4.

Just so you know, according to David Weber, aka runsforcelery or RFC, hinges don't exist in the Honorverse.

As for why they don't use wireless; would you really want to go into combat with a ship that can have systems shut down from outside the ship?

SharkHunter wrote:Not sure if we really hit the question directly as to, why not just blow the cargo door s to get back into action more quickly? I doubt that the doors open outward on simple hinges, because a high G turn would rip them off the ship. So they're likely basically "rolling" to the side or opening similar to how a C-130 or the Star Trek universe shuttle bays open.

Having just re-read the pertinent section, I'm thinking that it was a no-go because a shaped charge wouldn't help, it'd likely deflect back into the ship, or worse make it harder to clear a launch path. Even if you blow part of the doors out of the way, if the opening is even a millimeter too small = bad things happen to your ship when you attempt to fire pods.

That's a design weakness they I don't think BuShips has solved even in later books with with the SD(p)'s and Aggies later on, if offensive fire takes out the pod launch doors or rails, that ship is butt-naked offensively.

Although that does lead me to a different engineering type question. There's a lot of battle damage listed where "the control runs" got mangled by shrapnel, so why isn't there an "uber" PD19XX wifi method for redundancy? I mean, we're still receiving battery powered signals from Mars for goodness sake, getting useful signals to the butt end of a damaged ship less than 2Km in length (all ships in the Honorvers) should be child play no matter what wires get whacked between point "ship bridge" and point "damaged ship part I want to control".

Thoughts?

SharkHunter wrote:Although that does lead me to a different engineering type question. There's a lot of battle damage listed where "the control runs" got mangled by shrapnel, so why isn't there an "uber" PD19XX wifi method for redundancy? I mean, we're still receiving battery powered signals from Mars for goodness sake, getting useful signals to the butt end of a damaged ship less than 2Km in length (all ships in the Honorvers) should be child play no matter what wires get whacked between point "ship bridge" and point "damaged ship part I want to control".

Thoughts?

Control runs is probably a short hand for data, power, hydraulics, etc. In a lot of cases it's probably more than just the equivalent of an ethernet cable. So if you lose the control runs to your pod doors (for example) sending a wifi signal isn't going to help because they (presumably) don't have power to listen and react.

But there's a big difference between millions of miles of empty vacuum and 2 km packed solid with armor, high energy electronics (which inevitable put out radio interference; especially when damaged), and then subject to nearby nuclear explosions and impact of high energy gamma rays.

Radio signals don't like going though solid metal (like armored bulkheads), and the RF energy spike when you take weapons damage are likely to fry any sensitive radio receivers (like your wifi transceivers). I imagine the data part of any control runs are not only hard-lines but has heavily shielded from stray RF gigawatt broadband 'noise' as practical.

crewdude48 wrote:The long and short of why they didn't take the doors off is because repairing them was going to take less time than getting the proper explosives into the proper places or getting the necessary cutting equipment into place to torch them off. Unfortunately, as soon as they were repaired, fresh damage took them out again. That particular issue has been partially fixed in the SD(p)s by giving them 6 doors on the back instead of two, so if one door is knocked out, you only loose one rail, not 4.

Just so you know, according to David Weber, aka runsforcelery or RFC, hinges don't exist in the Honorverse.

As for why they don't use wireless; would you really want to go into combat with a ship that can have systems shut down from outside the ship?

Part of the question is why there aren't multiple control runs, sufficient that the destruction of all of them effectively means that the ship itself is toast. The second part is about using wireless signals. If your receiver is what gets damaged, you are out of business anyway, so it's not clear that is any help. I really doubt that the signals are going to be shut down from outside the ship however, since I would expect such signals to be heavily encrypted, and the signal strengths such that an enemy ship would have to be inside your wedge in order to override them - which seems to be an unlikely scenario.

Good luck trying to getting signals out of and into a successive series of Faraday cages.