Post-Yawata Strike Yeltsin

The Blackbird yards were mostly the dispersed types, around a central node. Didn't save them from getting blown apart.

Manticore having three separate semi-dispersed yards also did not prevent them being destroyed.

Haven? Well, they have considerably more shipyard dispersion than anyone else, with multiple yard locations within multiple systems, as well as the secret Bolthole. And yet the original Oyster Bay plan was to hit the known ones - all of them, simultaneously with Grayson and Manticore.

This is the problem with surprise attacks. Regardless of how you prepare your defensive arrangements, any attacker can always prepare to overcome or bypass those - and with the element of surprise, can be devastating.

Any shipyard arrangement that worked efficiently in the past is best - because in order to block surprise attacks of the Yawata Strike type, you need vast amounts of patrol ships and point defense platforms constantly actively scanning a 2 million km sphere around each yard locus, as well as maintaining an even more vigilant hyper-watch than the RMN used to. Forever.

Not only is that a lot of manufacturing to do, it's also a lot of regular maintenance. The difference between grandma's car and a taxi, basically.

The issue with scanning constantly for attackers is that you have to be able to respond very, very fast. Assume you are looking for a highly stealthy target coming in a .2C, so get a valid radar return at 200,000 km. This give you 3.3 seconds to kill it if it is going for a contact hit. Minus the .6 seconds of the radar return, so the total engagement has to conclude in under 2.6 seconds.

Which means the PDLCs must be running in autonomous weapons free mode, This means anything that isn't absolutely know to be friendly and the computer decides it might be a threat will be immediately engaged without any warning.

You cannot permit normal civilian traffic to enter the volume protected by a system in weapons free mode as at least some of it will inevitably match the parameters of a threat per the computer system and will be promptly obliterated.

Hence you probably don't want this within multiple light seconds of your main planet and it certainly can't operate as a civilian port.

kzt wrote:The issue with scanning constantly for attackers is that you have to be able to respond very, very fast. Assume you are looking for a highly stealthy target coming in a .2C, so get a valid radar return at 200,000 km. This give you 3.3 seconds to kill it if it is going for a contact hit. Minus the .6 seconds of the radar return, so the total engagement has to conclude in under 2.6 seconds.

Which means the PDLCs must be running in autonomous weapons free mode, This means anything that isn't absolutely know to be friendly and the computer decides it might be a threat will be immediately engaged without any warning.

You cannot permit normal civilian traffic to enter the volume protected by a system in weapons free mode as at least some of it will inevitably match the parameters of a threat per the computer system and will be promptly obliterated.

Hence you probably don't want this within multiple light seconds of your main planet and it certainly can't operate as a civilian port.

Chances are you'll have losses to friendly fire even among very careful military traffic. Instrument failures happen, after all.

You may be able to reduce them having a much more careful assessment of the threat value - maybe even a human in the loop! - in case of things moving much, much more slowly and/or with no stealth whatever. If you've got time to confirm something isn't hostile, best to use it.

If you don't have the time, yeah, your automated systems ought to take that shot.

Firstly I think a 200,000km detection range seems outrageously low for Honorverse tech active radar/lidar scanning. Manticoran technology should be able to detect stealthy stuff out to at least 1,000,000km if it is actively scanning. I would imagine they would have a pretty solid 'bubble' around their shipyards, space stations and planets from now on.

As to the problem of false positives it can be addressed by having 'safe lanes' marked through the active defence sphere. These safe lanes can be more closely monitored/scanned to ensure they are not used as 'weak points' to slip weapons through. They could involve 'kink' manoeuvres so that they do not represent a straight flight path. Civilian traffic would need licensed pilots to fly through these paths, who would be trained on the importance of proper ship-keeping and on what procedures to follow in case something goes wrong.

There should be some facility for manual overrides in these kinds of cases as well.

No, my point was that an object covered with RAM and properly shaped will return much lower returns. So while you might get detection against some reference target at a million KM, a stealthy target will need to get a lot closer to be picked up as radar signals decrease at the 4th power of the range. As the target closes the return signal will eventually break through the noise floor. This also makes the amount of power you need to emit to get detection at a million KM pretty spectacular too.

kzt wrote:No, my point was that an object covered with RAM and properly shaped will return much lower returns. So while you might get detection against some reference target at a million KM, a stealthy target will need to get a lot closer to be picked up as radar signals decrease at the 4th power of the range. As the target closes the return signal will eventually break through the noise floor. This also makes the amount of power you need to emit to get detection at a million KM pretty spectacular too.

That's a pretty good point.

Although you can't be absorbent at every part of the spectrum I imagine the science of refractive meta-materials will have improved by leaps and bounds as well.

I suppose it comes down to relying on gravitics in that case.

But the other thing I'm thinking is that it seems difficult to create a weapons platform that is able to be chilled down to near absolute zero and stay cold enough to be 'invisible' on infra-red and still perform its terminal function.

If it uses some form of technological stealth 'field' then that may be detectable somehow as well.

BobfromSydney wrote:

kzt wrote:No, my point was that an object covered with RAM and properly shaped will return much lower returns. So while you might get detection against some reference target at a million KM, a stealthy target will need to get a lot closer to be picked up as radar signals decrease at the 4th power of the range. As the target closes the return signal will eventually break through the noise floor. This also makes the amount of power you need to emit to get detection at a million KM pretty spectacular too.

That's a pretty good point.

Although you can't be absorbent at every part of the spectrum I imagine the science of refractive meta-materials will have improved by leaps and bounds as well.

I suppose it comes down to relying on gravitics in that case.

If we're talking about things going ballistic at that point - having been accelerated from far, far away some time before - gravitics won't tell you a thing. If we're talking about things accelerating by spider drive, current gravitics won't tell you a thing, though there's hope for progress there at least.

But the other thing I'm thinking is that it seems difficult to create a weapons platform that is able to be chilled down to near absolute zero and stay cold enough to be 'invisible' on infra-red and still perform its terminal function.

If it uses some form of technological stealth 'field' then that may be detectable somehow as well.

It doesn't seem that Honorverse stealth systems are themselves detectable - it's that they fail when the sensors are close enough or sensitive enough, or the impeller wedge is sufficiently powerful, or some combination of the above. (And all that depending in degree on how good the stealth itself is, too.)

Staying cool in space is one of the sore spots in Honorverse tech - bring it up and the discussion is likely to warm right up. Starships seem to be able to recycle waste heat phenomenally well, and impeller wedges will suck up even more. But neither of those will necessarily help a spider drive or ballistic missile.

Grayson had three Task Forces with Harrington against Filerta, two were regular GSN and one was the Protector's Own. While not specificaly mentioned, that would constitute an agreement by Grayson that it was now at war with the SL. There is the possibilty that political factors at home will get the amount of future particiapion changed, probably in a defensive only mode.

We don't know what Grayson has been up to as far as rebuilding its shipyard manufacturing capasity or the defence of same. We can guess that they are getting help -via Manticore- from Beowulf and probably Haven. How much and in what specific areas is not yet mentioned. They have some surviving manufacturing primarily due to the orbital farming and related industry that was not moved out to Blackbird and continues to turn out equipment, machines and all that stuff that would be needed for the maintenance and growth of the orbital food production along with anything else it was more practical to keep close to the planet.

We have been shown that there is some active political manuvering going on on Grayson with Steadholders shifting around their support and stances. That "should" be shown as at least pieces of the next main-line novel but we won't know till we get it.

We also don't have a good handle on how far away any of Grayson's neighbors are or what the current (and changed since they came into the Manticorian Alliance). There was trade, Grayson had a (we believe small) merchant fleet so they were trading with somebody but how far we don't know. They do have the fleet capasity to provide some protection and patroling "nearby" inhabited systems with which they now or will have treaty arrangements. Keep in mind that we have not seen ANY actual treaty arrangements between Grayson and other systems other than Manticore or - through Manticore- any other members of the former Manticoretian Alliance. They probably have some, they just haven't been germain to the story/plot lines.

We don't know if there are any uninhabited systems relativly near Grayson that would be worthwhile for them to set up extraction industries (and have to protect) at this point since they will desperatly need to focus on the rebuilding within the Home System.

JeffEngel wrote:Staying cool in space is one of the sore spots in Honorverse tech - bring it up and the discussion is likely to warm right up. Starships seem to be able to recycle waste heat phenomenally well, and impeller wedges will suck up even more. But neither of those will necessarily help a spider drive or ballistic missile.

I always just figured that they had a unobtainium heat sink in the heart of the ship. During normal operations, the heat sink is kept as cold as possible, with excess heat radiated in to space, and while under stealth, any heat that can't be put into the wedge to be sent into hyper is sent into the heat sink. :Shrug:

JeffEngel wrote:

drothgery wrote:Honestly, Grayson has a much bigger and better navy than it needs unless Manticore is being run by idiots and/or that alliance breaks down. While there is clearly some chance of that (High Ridge did happen, after all), I'm not sure how much even Graysons need to hedge for that possibility.

The RMN needs to get its yards rebuilt because it didn't come close to bringing its entire fleet up to Buttercup-level tech before Oyster Bay. The GSN, though, was mostly built in the intra-war era (or at least its wall of battle was). And it's a ~50-system polity these days. Grayson's a single system without a wormhole junction; with Masada a Manticoran protectorate and the Manticore-Haven wars over, they'd be fine with a BC-level navy in the long run. That level of downsizing isn't likely to happen, Graysons being Graysons, but it arguably would make a lot of sense.

It would, though I think Grayson will need to see the Solarian League as no longer a threat either before it can stand down from the outsized fleet.

Alternatively, it could grow into a larger power given the fleet, its good relations with other local minor powers, and a society that takes well both to challenges and hostile environments. I could easily see it establishing a leadership role among the single system states between the Empire and the Republic, based on that fleet, diplomacy, and perhaps dispersed extraction operations among the belts and system bodies in systems not otherwise exploited in the region.

But back to the point immediately at hand - I don't recall anything about Grayson's reconstruction plans. I'm re-reading books in that era, so I may come across something. I do agree that they may well go for dispersed yards in a well-defended zone (or several such), as opposed to hardened conventional yards. It'd also be something for that outsized navy to keep defending.

Maybe some of the systems that got handed back an forth between Haven and Manticore would like to have Grayson as a senior trading partner. We have textev that some of those systems had either held or were planning to hold referendums ( or whatever their political system uses ) to stay with Manticore after the war.
Now that Haven and Manticore are getting to be BFF's maybe some of those smaller single systems would want someone who had been in their position around as a bodyguard.