SD as pirate vessel

n7axw wrote:
They would have to find you first. The galaxy is a BIG place.

But in the main, I agree with your point.

Don

That isn't actually that hard. The amount of shipyards that could perform maintenance on an SD is rather limited, and noone's going to be able to build one without anyone noticing (unless we're talking about something on the scale of the MAlign or Haven here); at the very least, once your raiding spree starts, people are going to be very motivated to find you.

I could see SD's actually being viable longer than the DD/CL sized raiders.

Textev from as far back as Honor of the Queen, and maybe even On Basilisk Station, says any warship can run down any merchany or something to that effect.


Now excluding actually running said merchy down, you only actually need one or two missile launchers, and perhaps one laser to make the point to the merchy to heave-to and prepare to be boarded. Now your average Solly Scientist, has 32 missiles, 24 lasers, and 26 grasers. That's one helluva lot of spare weapons you can scavenge to only keep a small selection working.

Call it roughly, 1 missile tube on the bow, 2 more missile tubes on the stern (for deceleration warning shots). 2-3 tubes per broadside, and only a pair of lasers. Grasers are supposed to be just lasers with gravity focusing, so they should use the same parts, extending your time of scavenging. That gives a total of approximately 13 Grasers + 12 Lasers per broadside for part scavenging, and upto 16 missile tubes.


And with SD bunkerage, you'd only have to tank up once or twice, before even pirates manage to break enough guns to make it not worth keeping. But if you do a bargain buy, and pick up multiple squadrons worth of SDs. You (as the pirate) mothball the spares, and only operate 1 (or more if you're a pirate vest-pocket empire) SD until it's just totally broken. Scuttle it, and de-mothball the next.



And even excluding the ability to just scavenge the weapons that came with the hull... even Honor Harrington herself wouldn't take a heavy cruiser or battlecruiser into energy range of a pirate SD. Or at least, not before Grayson mixed things up, and started putting SD-sized grasers on their Courvosier II BC's. That relies pretty heavily on pirates being slack, to allow a full waller into energy range, just to nail a pirate.

Somtaaw wrote:Now excluding actually running said merchy down, you only actually need one or two missile launchers, and perhaps one laser to make the point to the merchy to heave-to and prepare to be boarded. Now your average Solly Scientist, has 32 missiles, 24 lasers, and 26 grasers. That's one helluva lot of spare weapons you can scavenge to only keep a small selection working.

Sure. Now consider how piracy in the Honorverse actually works. Most pirate intercepts happen while the target is travelling from the hyper limit to some destination down-well. A successful raider therefore has to be able to quickly match vectors with the target, raid it, and get past the hyper limit before defenders can scramble to intercept.

This is already not that easy using Destroyer- or Frigate-sized combatants, now consider that an SD, as a general rule, only has about 2/3 of the accel of a lighter vessel, which means more time needed to intercept the merchant and more time needed to get out again.
This is not desirable for a pirate.

Call it roughly, 1 missile tube on the bow, 2 more missile tubes on the stern (for deceleration warning shots). 2-3 tubes per broadside, and only a pair of lasers. Grasers are supposed to be just lasers with gravity focusing, so they should use the same parts, extending your time of scavenging. That gives a total of approximately 13 Grasers + 12 Lasers per broadside for part scavenging, and upto 16 missile tubes.

So what? You're still going to need an incredibly large crew, you're still not going to be more efficient than someone with a couple destroyers, and you're still going to draw a lot of attention from people who are better equipped than you.

This is like a streetgang buying an old Tank. Sure, they're gonna be a problem for a while, but they're also inviting a level of response they are not going to be able to deal with.

And with SD bunkerage, you'd only have to tank up once or twice, before even pirates manage to break enough guns to make it not worth keeping. But if you do a bargain buy, and pick up multiple squadrons worth of SDs. You (as the pirate) mothball the spares, and only operate 1 (or more if you're a pirate vest-pocket empire) SD until it's just totally broken. Scuttle it, and de-mothball the next.

And where exactly would a pirate get the funds, not to mention the legitimacy and the crews, to operate such vessels?

See, that's the big problem here: with the same amount of effort it takes to keep one SD flying, a pirate group could operate a dozen light vessels, each of which is more readily concealable, serviceable, and just as able to capture prizes than that single SD, which translates to higher earnings all around.

It makes no economic sense for a pirate to operate anything larger than a heavy cruiser. It's as simple as that.

And even excluding the ability to just scavenge the weapons that came with the hull... even Honor Harrington herself wouldn't take a heavy cruiser or battlecruiser into energy range of a pirate SD. Or at least, not before Grayson mixed things up, and started putting SD-sized grasers on their Courvosier II BC's. That relies pretty heavily on pirates being slack, to allow a full waller into energy range, just to nail a pirate.

Sure, she wouldn't. What she would do is fall back, and call in fleet reinforcement.

Single SDs are worthless. They're at best distractions. They need to be operated at least in division strength, with screen, to be effective. Even then though, they're not effective merchant raiders.

Y'know...

I suspect that if DW saw fit to comment on this thread, it would quickly join TWSTSNBN and new raiding/patrol frigates as a third rail.

dreamrider

The thing about using a SD as a pirate ship is the manpower costs. You could man most of Warneckies ships just to man one SD. IIRC Warneckie had 4 CAs, 3 or 4 CLs, and 4 or 5 DD/FF range ships.

SD crew 6500

Warneckie
CA 10-1200 each
CL 5-600 each
DD/FF 2-300 each

Plus one ship one system hit at a time, instead of 3 or 4 systems at a time.

The E wrote:Sure. Now consider how piracy in the Honorverse actually works. Most pirate intercepts happen while the target is travelling from the hyper limit to some destination down-well. A successful raider therefore has to be able to quickly match vectors with the target, raid it, and get past the hyper limit before defenders can scramble to intercept.

This is already not that easy using Destroyer- or Frigate-sized combatants, now consider that an SD, as a general rule, only has about 2/3 of the accel of a lighter vessel, which means more time needed to intercept the merchant and more time needed to get out again.
This is not desirable for a pirate.

---

So what? You're still going to need an incredibly large crew, you're still not going to be more efficient than someone with a couple destroyers, and you're still going to draw a lot of attention from people who are better equipped than you.

This is like a streetgang buying an old Tank. Sure, they're gonna be a problem for a while, but they're also inviting a level of response they are not going to be able to deal with.

---

And where exactly would a pirate get the funds, not to mention the legitimacy and the crews, to operate such vessels?

See, that's the big problem here: with the same amount of effort it takes to keep one SD flying, a pirate group could operate a dozen light vessels, each of which is more readily concealable, serviceable, and just as able to capture prizes than that single SD, which translates to higher earnings all around.

It makes no economic sense for a pirate to operate anything larger than a heavy cruiser. It's as simple as that.

---

Sure, she wouldn't. What she would do is fall back, and call in fleet reinforcement.

Single SDs are worthless. They're at best distractions. They need to be operated at least in division strength, with screen, to be effective. Even then though, they're not effective merchant raiders.

To address your points E.

1) On the topic of interceptions, piracy is also about just waiting until you get a good envelop. If the merchy doesn't translate practically on your lap, you can always stay a hole in space, and thus undetected until you do get a good hyper exiting merchy.

The average acceleration of Manticoran (so every merchy) seems to be a piss-poor ~150 gravities or so.
The average Scientist (which means slowest SD in the galaxy), is ~422 gravs.

So the slowest known SD in the galaxy, still has three times the speed of any merchy, and the merchy has the drawback of having downward Alpha translation velocity, and probably coasted inside the hyper limit. So they'd have to turn a minimum 90 degrees, and try to crab back out... while also suffering from having less acceleration than the SD.

2) On the topic of crews, pirates already have oversized crews on a ship for ship basis. Pirate destroyers had crews better suited to light cruisers, or even heavy cruisers. With Manticoran (maybe Havenite too?) computer automation taking up the slack, pirate DD's now have the crews of RMN/RNS battlecruisers. You don't have to crew the ship to the tactical requirements of a first-tier navy, you just need enough to crew a few guns, a couple missile tubes, and then your boarding shuttles.

I think there's a reference to crew needs during one of the Worlds of Honor books, Midshipwoman Harrington during an explanation about the energy weapon mounts. Think it was like 4 crew for the mount, probably the same for a missile tube. I believe I previously suggested an SD only really needs to keep 2-3 lasers, and about the same in missiles operational... so call it 24 crew for 3 laser mounts, and 3 tubes, on each broadside. Add in a few more for bow & stern weapons, and you're using less than 75 crew for covering all 4 arcs. That's the only 50% larger than one broadside of an Avalon or Kamerling light cruiser... which are the classes most likely to possibly meet a pirate.


3) On the topic of affording the ships at all.... Solarian League Navy officials already lose full battlecruisers that were designated to go to the breakers. You think they wouldn't also just lose full SD squadrons, if they were paid the equivalent of untraceable cash under the table?

It wouldn't be full value, but it was also covered in a Mandarin briefing, that the Solarian League can't afford to de-mothball their existing SDs, they can't afford to breaker them, and they can't afford to crew them even as missile decoys.

for the intelligence side of the pirates economically speaking, should only use CL to CAs, well we've also seen there are a LOT of stupid pirates. From Warnecke, to the pirates in Refuge attacking the Gauntlet, to just about any Silesian pirate who ever engaged Manticoran ships (in the books it's written that doing such basically becomes a death sentence)


4) For Honor (or anyone) calling in fleet support if they actually encountered, and then ran from a pirate SD, a solar system is a very large place to hide, and even with Ghost Rider recon drones, it can take a long time to thoroughly search a system to find things.

Pre-Ghost Rider, Admiral Parnell was suckered thoroughly in the Third Battle of Yeltsin, and had no idea Alliance ships were there, or in such force until they opened fire. He still pulled half his fleet out.

Admiral White Haven was almost suckered in one of the First battle of Nightingale, and the only reason he wasn't forced to surrender, was because the People's Navy admirals didn't have enough experience to stay in stealth until White Haven had zero chance to avoid them.

Ghost rider days, see the engagement where Jennifer Bellefeuille used smoke and mirrors to give a false force impression to the scouting Manticoran destroyers.


for detection, unless you bait deep into the system, which admittedly has worked at least once, most pirates would smell a rat and break off, before coming deep enough in, that a scout does an undetectable upward translation to call in a full task group.


And lastly, a single SD, could actually go for entire convoy's of merchies, because it's got the boatbay space to handle all the pinnace/assault shuttles to simultaneously board a chunk of the whole convoy, and two SD's could board entire convoys. Again, yes it's not as efficient, but pirates in Honorverse, have been proven to be very stupid, on multiple occasions.

Somtaaw wrote:Call it roughly, 1 missile tube on the bow, 2 more missile tubes on the stern (for deceleration warning shots). 2-3 tubes per broadside, and only a pair of lasers. Grasers are supposed to be just lasers with gravity focusing, so they should use the same parts, extending your time of scavenging. That gives a total of approximately 13 Grasers + 12 Lasers per broadside for part scavenging, and upto 16 missile tubes.

<bold mine>

No, they are not. A graser is a gamma-ray version of a laser. *All* warship-scale energy weapons in the Honorverse have grav-focusing to one degree or another, whether they are lasers or grasers. Grasers are also generally more powerful than equivalent-size lasers, grav-focusing notwithstanding.

LASER = Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

GRASER = Gramma Ray Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

A couple of reasons for multiple energy weapons types are:

1) Sometimes, a graser is too much weapon for the job.

2) Warship armor is designed to resist various types of energy. What may be armored well against a graser might be vulnerable to a laser, and vice-versa. I believe one of the books has an appendix regarding armor and its various layers and strengths/vulnerabilities.

MaxxQ wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Call it roughly, 1 missile tube on the bow, 2 more missile tubes on the stern (for deceleration warning shots). 2-3 tubes per broadside, and only a pair of lasers. Grasers are supposed to be just lasers with gravity focusing, so they should use the same parts, extending your time of scavenging. That gives a total of approximately 13 Grasers + 12 Lasers per broadside for part scavenging, and upto 16 missile tubes.

<bold mine>

No, they are not. A graser is a gamma-ray version of a laser. *All* warship-scale energy weapons in the Honorverse have grav-focusing to one degree or another, whether they are lasers or grasers. Grasers are also generally more powerful than equivalent-size lasers, grav-focusing notwithstanding.

LASER = Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

GRASER = Gramma Ray Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

A couple of reasons for multiple energy weapons types are:

1) Sometimes, a graser is too much weapon for the job.

2) Warship armor is designed to resist various types of energy. What may be armored well against a graser might be vulnerable to a laser, and vice-versa. I believe one of the books has an appendix regarding armor and its various layers and strengths/vulnerabilities.

Axtually I believe the lasers are X-Ray based Lasers not Light based Lasers. I used to think they were regular Lasers as well but someone quoted a section explain that they are X-Ray weapons by the time the main series takes place and I believe one of the stories set pre PD had ships of that era using X-Ray Lasers as well.

Roguevictory wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:
<bold mine>

No, they are not. A graser is a gamma-ray version of a laser. *All* warship-scale energy weapons in the Honorverse have grav-focusing to one degree or another, whether they are lasers or grasers. Grasers are also generally more powerful than equivalent-size lasers, grav-focusing notwithstanding.

LASER = Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

GRASER = Gramma Ray Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

A couple of reasons for multiple energy weapons types are:

1) Sometimes, a graser is too much weapon for the job.

2) Warship armor is designed to resist various types of energy. What may be armored well against a graser might be vulnerable to a laser, and vice-versa. I believe one of the books has an appendix regarding armor and its various layers and strengths/vulnerabilities.

Axtually I believe the lasers are X-Ray based Lasers not Light based Lasers. I used to think they were regular Lasers as well but someone quoted a section explain that they are X-Ray weapons by the time the main series takes place and I believe one of the stories set pre PD had ships of that era using X-Ray Lasers as well.

<shrug> Could be. Now that you mention it, I think I remember reading that as well. Either way, grasers are more powerful, but the x-ray lasers are probably easier to generate in a laserhead. If warship-grade lasers *are* x-ray lasers, then they'll be more powerful than regular lasers, and just goes along with my point 2 above.

MaxxQ wrote:<shrug> Could be. Now that you mention it, I think I remember reading that as well. Either way, grasers are more powerful, but the x-ray lasers are probably easier to generate in a laserhead. If warship-grade lasers *are* x-ray lasers, then they'll be more powerful than regular lasers, and just goes along with my point 2 above.

It was in the starship armor article. I think that was by Andy?