Space Stations, Forts and Strategies

JohnRoth wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:It's a step. Then again, plenty of things can be destroyed just with a wedge even, and anything with a guidance system and a wedge represents a step toward automated warfare. I give you the humble counter-missile.

I think the next steps are automated units that deploy other units, and an automated unit with a hypergenerator. The first of those is dinky. The second is a lot larger, but it'd be the major one for really good remote detection duty along a system's periphery.

SWM wrote:That would be a logical progression, but it is almost certainly not going to happen in the Honorverse. While David has moved slightly in the direction of more automation, I'm confident that he will resist that level of automation.

So am I. It's an idea that's simply too powerful - completely automated and "sentient" ships would change the nature of the story completely. Therefore it isn't going to happen.

However, consider the Brixton Comet, the ship Anton and Yana took to Mesa. That's a civilian ship that's automated to where it only needs two people.

I'm as confident as the rest of you that it's not going to happen, but it wouldn't necessarily change the story that much. The core of it is just something smart enough to handle more data-processing centrally than a recon drone can "think" through; plot short hyperjumps around a single system periphery; and run, for perhaps a few weeks at a time, a simple automated craft to carry the drones and conduct those jumps, all under the oversight of bigger and better electronic brains and fleshy-meaty ones some longish FTL comms away.

It'd mean something that's vastly cheaper than a destroyer and (particularly) its trained crew, that you can use to chase down what is almost certainly each time nothing but could be the next Oyster Bay, in job lots that you can afford to lose to something that is actually able to fight it. (Although there's no reason it would have to be all that easy to spot to kill, or built with no defenses whatever - Keyhole II platforms, after all, have those.)

I'm really not sure it is necessary to have cheaper and more numerous units (especially a drone system) to go checking out sensor ghosts, for the following reasons:

1) I simply don't believe that automated drones in the Honorverse would be capable of reaching a target zone, laying out a search strategy, scanning the entire area, and actually recognizing a real target. I think it requires human interaction to recognize a stealthed signal.

2) Even if it did work, it could take an hour for the drone to send back a message to the attack squad that it found something, and another hour for the squad to arrive. The ship would be lost again, probably permanently.

3) If the sensors suddenly detected a surge of ghosts, the entire system would go on red alert. While they might not know where it is, but they know something is out there, and all sensors would be active within the hyper limit and around all sensitive areas. They would catch any bad guys on the way in. The stations would be protected by their bubble sidewalls. The current system is sufficient to deal with the situation if you know something is coming.

4) If the enemy just wants to jump around making sensor ghosts without actually sending anything inbound, let them have their fun. They can't keep it up forever, and they're just wasting their ships if they try it.

5) If your concern is about ballistic kinetic weapons against infrastructure, give up. There is nothing you can do to stop that; all you can do is have your sensors watching for inbounds and have your tugs and drones ready to put up blocking wedges. Manticore is already doing this. Manticore is confident that another attack Oyster Bay would fail.

6) The cost effectiveness of the proposed systems seems poor to me. That kind of attack from outside the hyper limit is almost never done. It seems wasteful to spend that much energy on something that happens once every few centuries, on average.

cthia wrote:
Hephaestus civilians represent the most knowledgable carbon based units in the 'Verse. Some projects may have been forever lost when Hephaestus was destroyed. The next best thing since Apollo itself could have been on the drawing board. That is waste. Besides, Manticore is wormhole rich! You have to spend the credits to make credits, and your irreplaceable, genius and child prodigy resources are not expendable. I can't help from wondering how much tech was forever lost with Hephaestus.

Hi cthia,

Certainly some projects and practical know how were lost when Hephaestus and Vulcan went up. But records of the actual tech and the R&D teams were on the ground on Gryphon when the attack on Weyland came down. So the tech itself was not lost. Manticore will have to take the research and re-develop the blueprints and train people to do the nuts and bolts of putting stuff together. What was lost was bad enough and will be expensive and time consuming to reassemble. But the concept stuff, the research behind it and the people who did that research are all still intact.

Don

n7axw wrote:Certainly some projects and practical know how were lost when Hephaestus and Vulcan went up. But records of the actual tech and the R&D teams were on the ground on Gryphon when the attack on Weyland came down. So the tech itself was not lost. Manticore will have to take the research and re-develop the blueprints and train people to do the nuts and bolts of putting stuff together. What was lost was bad enough and will be expensive and time consuming to reassemble. But the concept stuff, the research behind it and the people who did that research are all still intact.

David really underestimates how long and how hard this is in the real world. I give you FOGBANK as an example. It took 9 YEARS to recreate a working version of the foam, and they had a lot of documentation on this as well as an actual test plant. His absurd timeline for Mycroft is an example of his underestimation.

So yeah, nothing was lost, equipment built by newly trained techs on newly built production equipment based on designs made by people who were killed and then produced on another planet using a totally different manufacturers productions system will just work in the honorverse.

Hi SWM,

Kudos for the many excellent points.

However suppose lots of RD's are used, each with FTL coms and even better AI's than can coordinate lots of other drones to react to hits in minutes so the monitoring meat brains notice the increased number of sensor hits [exactly how that works I'll leave to RFC] and can dispatch more RD's etc.

The spider drive sharks etc are rather slow, so evasive action is far less than most targets.

I've suggested looking for the spider drive signature from the other side of the hyper wall using cheap scout ships [not frigates], which has its own set of problems but might keep the spider ship ignorant it was being searched for.

I'm curious about the basis of your light hour search radius, where did I miss that?

L

SWM wrote:I'm really not sure it is necessary to have cheaper and more numerous units (especially a drone system) to go checking out sensor ghosts, for the following reasons:

1) I simply don't believe that automated drones in the Honorverse would be capable of reaching a target zone, laying out a search strategy, scanning the entire area, and actually recognizing a real target. I think it requires human interaction to recognize a stealthed signal.

2) Even if it did work, it could take an hour for the drone to send back a message to the attack squad that it found something, and another hour for the squad to arrive. The ship would be lost again, probably permanently.

3) If the sensors suddenly detected a surge of ghosts, the entire system would go on red alert. While they might not know where it is, but they know something is out there, and all sensors would be active within the hyper limit and around all sensitive areas. They would catch any bad guys on the way in. The stations would be protected by their bubble sidewalls. The current system is sufficient to deal with the situation if you know something is coming.

4) If the enemy just wants to jump around making sensor ghosts without actually sending anything inbound, let them have their fun. They can't keep it up forever, and they're just wasting their ships if they try it.

5) If your concern is about ballistic kinetic weapons against infrastructure, give up. There is nothing you can do to stop that; all you can do is have your sensors watching for inbounds and have your tugs and drones ready to put up blocking wedges. Manticore is already doing this. Manticore is confident that another attack Oyster Bay would fail.

6) The cost effectiveness of the proposed systems seems poor to me. That kind of attack from outside the hyper limit is almost never done. It seems wasteful to spend that much energy on something that happens once every few centuries, on average.

lyonheart wrote:I'm curious about the basis of your light hour search radius, where did I miss that?

Max acceleration for 12 hours, which is the minimum time you will get, produces both a rather significant velocity and a quite large distance covered.

kzt wrote:

lyonheart wrote:I'm curious about the basis of your light hour search radius, where did I miss that?

Max acceleration for 12 hours, which is the minimum time you will get, produces both a rather significant velocity and a quite large distance covered.

Yep. Even their 'normal' max of 150g for a spider ship puts them over 76 light minutes away from their emergence point after 12 hours. That's over 1.3 billion km away - in any direction (also a velocity of 63,504 km/s).

At their 210g 'full' max a 12 hour run puts them just over 106 light minutes away (and up to almost 89,000 km/s). And if they went to their 'emergency' max of 310 they could be 157 light minutes away - though MoH says that they could only pull that "in emergencies, and briefly, at least" -- so probably can't hold 'emergency' that long.

Still, that's a lot of space to scan, and that's if they drop out only a single light month from the system. And additional distance only lengthens the time before the FTL hyper signature reaches the sysytem arrays and an investigation force can be dispatched.

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:Certainly some projects and practical know how were lost when Hephaestus and Vulcan went up. But records of the actual tech and the R&D teams were on the ground on Gryphon when the attack on Weyland came down. So the tech itself was not lost. Manticore will have to take the research and re-develop the blueprints and train people to do the nuts and bolts of putting stuff together. What was lost was bad enough and will be expensive and time consuming to reassemble. But the concept stuff, the research behind it and the people who did that research are all still intact.

David really underestimates how long and how hard this is in the real world. I give you FOGBANK as an example. It took 9 YEARS to recreate a working version of the foam, and they had a lot of documentation on this as well as an actual test plant. His absurd timeline for Mycroft is an example of his underestimation.

So yeah, nothing was lost, equipment built by newly trained techs on newly built production equipment based on designs made by people who were killed and then produced on another planet using a totally different manufacturers productions system will just work in the honorverse.

Yes, the text made clear that data--probalby from all the R&D sites-- got backed up dirtside twice a day.

I wasn't aware of Fogbank, but there was a lot of talk after the fact that someone at NASA had the plans for the Saturn V rocket destroyed, so no one could cancel the space shuttle (which was delayed, and over-budget). And so, when NASA decided they needed a high-altitude rocket, they couldn't build any more of them and pushed another Air Force rocket into service (Delta).

Although, it might have been urban legend, or even just political finger pointing back in the day. It could be the Delta was just a lot cheaper than Saturn.

Rob

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:
Yes, the text made clear that data--probalby from all the R&D sites-- got backed up dirtside twice a day.

I wasn't aware of Fogbank, but there was a lot of talk after the fact that someone at NASA had the plans for the Saturn V rocket destroyed, so no one could cancel the space shuttle (which was delayed, and over-budget). And so, when NASA decided they needed a high-altitude rocket, they couldn't build any more of them and pushed another Air Force rocket into service (Delta).

Although, it might have been urban legend, or even just political finger pointing back in the day. It could be the Delta was just a lot cheaper than Saturn.

Rob

My understanding it was some of the hardcopy print outs of the plans were destroyed, but there were (and are) microfiche copies of all of them.

But building a Saturn V again would still be more difficult that designing a new heavy lift rocket of the same class. Many of the "off the shelf" components specified are no longer made so you'd either have to get someone to make that exact nearly 50 year old component or you have to modify the plans to use a modern substitute (which won't have the exact same characteristic - and you have to analyze the impact of the changed characteristic they might have a major unintentional impact)

Then for the custom stuff the tooling wasn't (as far as I know) preserved, so you have to build the tools to build the tools, to build the 50 year old tech.

And from what I've heard tuning those giant F-1 engines to run smoothly and not generate hot spots that would eat the rocket bell was more art than science. None of them worked perfected straight off the line, they all needed individualized adjustments. But the people skilled and practiced in that art are long retired (or dead) and aren't in practice. So you might as well design a modern descendant of the engine since you've got to relearn all the tuning tricks anyway, so no reason to stick to 50 year old plans and materials since they don't give you "proven off the shelf capabilities" anyway.


To some extent Manticore will have the same problem. Unless the manufacturing was 100% automated and hands off there are guaranteed to be things that the experienced workers knew how to do better (or at least more efficiently) than people who are coming up to speed on it - even if they have the full plans and every mod or tweak to the design properly documented.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:I wasn't aware of Fogbank, but there was a lot of talk after the fact that someone at NASA had the plans for the Saturn V rocket destroyed, so no one could cancel the space shuttle (which was delayed, and over-budget). And so, when NASA decided they needed a high-altitude rocket, they couldn't build any more of them and pushed another Air Force rocket into service (Delta).

No, the plans all exist. The problem NASA has with the S5 is that the plans call for specific commercial parts made by specific vendors. Tens of thousands of different parts from thousands of vendors. Many of the vendors are no longer in business, almost none of the parts are still being made under that name, and very very few are still being made to the same specs.

And while there are complete plans for the vehicle, there are not design documents for every single commercial off-the-shelf valve, solenoid, transformer, 4 bit processor, bolt, etc.

So to build a new S5 you need to recreate the US industrial infrastructure circa 1960, or do a complete redesign based on the existing plans using equipment that is currently commercially available. A redesign requires full re-certification, which is a very long process due to the fact that huge rocket boosters carrying people are pretty obviously inherently dangerous and you need to do a very methodical step-by step part, assembly, module, entire system test program. And you can't even start testing a module until you have all the parts, so those custom parts that require you to build a new production facility are a bottleneck.

Does this suggest to you a possible issue with casually restarting production of Manticore's highest tech equipment on a totally different planet with virtually every one of the original part suppliers completely obliterated?