Hey, isn't this the GA construction plan?

Silverwall wrote:It should also be mentioned that none of the ships being crash built are new designs, all are well estabished with existing production lines which had the Janacek downtime to work out most of the design and component kinks.

The Havenite SD(P)s being built at Bolthole and shipping to Manticore for installation of Beowulf built Keyhole II platforms to control salvos of San Martin built Apollo/Mk-23 flatpack pods, are "well established with existing production lines?" Good to know that. Gonna save oodles of shakedown time for the GA.



The GA doesn't have any proven GA designs yet, and probably won't have for a couple of years.

kzt's complaint is that Haven and Manticore aren't building proven Havenite or Manticoran designs, they're building a composite design that hasn't gone further than a general description in textev and expect to put the "Bolthole Specials" into service immediately -- without the year or two of testing and operational training normally required for new ship types.

Hutch wrote:I would add to pnakasone and silverwalls' congent comments that the computer modeling and testing has probably improved somewhat in the two millenia since the Diaspora. I mean, one reason we (and others) are doing without nuclear testing is that computer programs can model the systems and results without making the things go BOOM.

I suspect that any changes to the on-board systems have been modeled and run through literally hundreds of simulations, each more testing and data-producing than actual flight, using computer analysis of a depth that we can not yet aspire to.

Just my two cents...which may be devalued as discussion goes along.

It'd be good to know what percentage of a ship from 'gin to end' is or isn't automated.

BobfromSydney wrote:The RMN does use test-bed platforms to see how new technology performs in practice before mass production as well.

3 examples (Honor had the 'pleasure' of skippering two of them)
1. Fearless (CL)
2. Wayfarer (Q)
3. Nike (BCL)

Fearless and Nikes were sort of 'one-off' units (until Nike was proven, at least).
Warfarer was one of four, but its shortcomings were recognised and it wasn't sent into a 'real' warzone.

I think the Graysons are a little bit keener at cranking out new untested designs, but so far it has worked out okay with the Courvoisier II's and Katanas.

McKeon did way more testing than Honor did, and if I recall right, he tested the compensator that was put into the Reliant Nike (BC-413) that Honor commanded. BC-413 Nike was 'retired' and headed for the breakers (renamed) so the Nike name could be assigned to BC-562 (the first Nike-class BCL), commanded in action by Captain Oversteegen.

Wayfarer was a rushed, off-the-cuff design, strictly for deployment in Silesia and just happened to feature some of the newest (at the time) tech for test-bedding. If there'd been available (real) warships to be sent, they would have been.

And Fearless (CL) wasn't a test-bed, the grav lance was pretty well understood at the time. It was Hemphill's belief to make every ship carry them, and the Fearless was going to be her "proof of concept".


In Enemy Hands, right about the time McKeon's ship is about to enter the system where Tourville was lying in wait to ambush, is when he admits to Honor about the depth of his test-bed experience. If McKeon hadn't died during BoMa, he would have been the perfect field officer to send alongside Hemphill to Bolthole.

Silverwall wrote:It should also be mentioned that none of the ships being crash built are new designs, all are well estabished with existing production lines which had the Janacek downtime to work out most of the design and component kinks.

You mean those factories in Manticore, the ones that all blewed up? So now their systems are being made by people who have no experience in building anything even vaguely similar, on newly build manufacturing line built by people who have never successfully built Manticoran factory equipment before and are to be integrated with equipment built by people in a facility hundreds of light years away. Equipment that can't actually be tested until you have both the newest products of the newly built Beowulf production facility and the new designs of a Manticoran desgn team implemented by a Haven production team. Yeah, I can't see how this could possibly go wrong.

Hutch wrote:I suspect that any changes to the on-board systems have been modeled and run through literally hundreds of simulations, each more testing and data-producing than actual flight, using computer analysis of a depth that we can not yet aspire to.

These would be the computers that are demonstrably worse in many regards than those of the present?

For example, a Manticoran warship can't even carry all the known information about enemy officers. In the present, you could fill a server rack with HDDs and store a biography of every single person in the Honorverse.

In the Honorverse, it takes hours to download a few hundred (mostly) text messages. Present? Eyeblink. Oh, and in the future they're not even prioritised automatically.

Computers can't even do trivial heuristics without being asked (it should not take human intervention to spot that the enemy's ECM is looping, or that two ships you have close-up military sensor info on are actually the same one). There are shipfuls of networked sensors and cameras, but damage control is done by telephoning each workstation. The umpteen tons of futuristic molycircs on a cruiser (Star Knight or Sag-C) somehow require human assistance to point countermeasures at incoming missiles, or to transit a wormhole, or find a route between two points...basically to do anything whatsoever.

If you need humans in the loop for any repetitive task, especially ones that need precision timing, your computers are worse than those existing now. And the Honorverse is full of that sort of thing.

kzt wrote:

Silverwall wrote:It should also be mentioned that none of the ships being crash built are new designs, all are well estabished with existing production lines which had the Janacek downtime to work out most of the design and component kinks.

You mean those factories in Manticore, the ones that all blewed up? So now their systems are being made by people who have no experience in building anything even vaguely similar, on newly build manufacturing line built by people who have never successfully built Manticoran factory equipment before and are to be integrated with equipment built by people in a facility hundreds of light years away. Equipment that can't actually be tested until you have both the newest products of the newly built Beowulf production facility and the new designs of a Manticoran desgn team implemented by a Haven production team. Yeah, I can't see how this could possibly go wrong.

I am not sure what your gripe here is. Given both Haven and Manticore have very established ship building industries I am not sure why you feel that there will be huge issues. Just because of currect military procurement idocy does not mean that this has to be a thing. Even with the devistation of Oyster bay both have them have shipbuilding capability reminiscent of the RN 1890-1914 or the USN in WW2 a period when both sides was able to mass produce massivly complex ships with only minimial issues.

Also we have no text-evidece that the alliance has been a thing long enough to do more that gather the techs and put them on a ship to bolthole. Seriously it's been less than 6 months in story time from the creation of the GA and the events of the latest book. It may seem longer to us because of how many side projects have been delaying RFC but we are currently experiancing RL time at a rate several times faster than story time.

Silverwall wrote:

kzt wrote:You mean those factories in Manticore, the ones that all blewed up? So now their systems are being made by people who have no experience in building anything even vaguely similar, on newly build manufacturing line built by people who have never successfully built Manticoran factory equipment before and are to be integrated with equipment built by people in a facility hundreds of light years away. Equipment that can't actually be tested until you have both the newest products of the newly built Beowulf production facility and the new designs of a Manticoran desgn team implemented by a Haven production team. Yeah, I can't see how this could possibly go wrong.

I am not sure what your gripe here is. Given both Haven and Manticore have very established ship building industries I am not sure why you feel that there will be huge issues. Just because of currect military procurement idocy does not mean that this has to be a thing. Even with the devistation of Oyster bay both have them have shipbuilding capability reminiscent of the RN 1890-1914 or the USN in WW2 a period when both sides was able to mass produce massivly complex ships with only minimial issues.

Also we have no text-evidece that the alliance has been a thing long enough to do more that gather the techs and put them on a ship to bolthole. Seriously it's been less than 6 months in story time from the creation of the GA and the events of the latest book. It may seem longer to us because of how many side projects have been delaying RFC but we are currently experiancing RL time at a rate several times faster than story time.

I think the point kzt is getting at, would be loosely related to the United States Navy suddenly getting chummy with the Russian Navy, both of whom working hand-in-hand with China. Three vastly different entities, with their own general concepts of ship building, and customs, idiosyncrasies, and expecting no problems to arise.

Yes, the odds are good Haven, Manticore, and Beowulf are 'pretty close' otherwise the war wouldn't have taken what, around 30 years in two different wars, covering three different administrations (on both sides, four if you want to count Saint-Just as a full administration instead of an extension of Pierre)

But close, doesn't mean there won't be stunning 'teething' issues, between getting hardware from three different nations to play nicely with each other.

FLHerne wrote:For example, a Manticoran warship can't even carry all the known information about enemy officers. In the present, you could fill a server rack with HDDs and store a biography of every single person in the Honorverse.

every single person in the Honorverse.... that we know of. When you consider however, that there's a few thousand+ of virtually every flag rank we haven't been introduced to? And you not only need a face, but for an "intelligence file" you'd want anything notable. Previous tactics that officer has used, medals with citations, relationships with others (are they abrasive? do they build an Honor-style family with their subordinates?) and so on and so forth. And I'm probably only scratching the surface of the information you'd want to keep... I can point to Flag in Exile, where it was lucky Honor's ship had a precis on Tourville and that he had written articles about "How to Commerce Raid, Intelligently". and it probably also included the article itself for source (how big was the article? was it a big, 400-500 page document or a pitiful 2 pager? We dont know)

FLHerne wrote:In the Honorverse, it takes hours to download a few hundred (mostly) text messages. Present? Eyeblink. Oh, and in the future they're not even prioritised automatically.

How often are you dealing with encrypted files? Depending on how they were getting encrypted, and probably compressed to boot, yeah I can see it taking a few hours to de-compress and un-encrypt a few hundred messages. Don't know where you're getting the mostly text portion, most messages we've seen delivered are full video+audio. For example, the messages that were sent to a Rear Admiral.... Triko (something or another) by his diplomat wife, he had to play the message back more than once to really catch all meanings, and implications. The only time we've really seen "text only" was a few brief messages from StateSec Shilo HQ to Hades (the courier update message).

FLHerne wrote:Computers can't even do trivial heuristics without being asked (it should not take human intervention to spot that the enemy's ECM is looping, or that two ships you have close-up military sensor info on are actually the same one). There are shipfuls of networked sensors and cameras, but damage control is done by telephoning each workstation. The umpteen tons of futuristic molycircs on a cruiser (Star Knight or Sag-C) somehow require human assistance to point countermeasures at incoming missiles, or to transit a wormhole, or find a route between two points...basically to do anything whatsoever.

Dunno about you, but unless the alarm for "hey, your enemy is a total flipping idiot and is using automated looped ECM" is particularly obnoxious to call attention, I'd be a little more concerned with the immediate fight. Rafe picked it out pretty fast when he realized something was fishy about the Thunder of God's ECM, but it's not something that officers are going to waste time looking for, especially one of Honor's family of officers. They all train expecting the enemy to be tougher (and thus NOT stupid) so even if the computer was pointing it out he wasn't noticing it (because it's stupid to focus on that "enemy is stupid" light, hoping it turns on)




For the course plotting, did you notice that the computers are used for that stuff, but that Middies were told to do it (by hand) for their training? Or that it's a Navy, which like modern militaries, have something of a fetish for insisting a human must always be in the command decision loop, especially when there's weapons being controlled. Have you seen the, relatively recent, remake of Robo-cop? How they weren't happy with Officer Murphy's response time compared to the 100% robotic troops doing the same "enter and clear" thing, until they used drugs to suppress his mind, making him act like a robot (with the faster time)


Not totally disagreeing that Honorverse computers could be acting smarter, but they definitely are not as stupid, or dumb, or low-storage as you're making them out to be.

Somtaaw wrote:

FLHerne wrote:For example, a Manticoran warship can't even carry all the known information about enemy officers. In the present, you could fill a server rack with HDDs and store a biography of every single person in the Honorverse.

every single person in the Honorverse.... that we know of. When you consider however, that there's a few thousand+ of virtually every flag rank we haven't been introduced to? And you not only need a face, but for an "intelligence file" you'd want anything notable. Previous tactics that officer has used, medals with citations, relationships with others (are they abrasive? do they build an Honor-style family with their subordinates?) and so on and so forth. And I'm probably only scratching the surface of the information you'd want to keep... I can point to Flag in Exile, where it was lucky Honor's ship had a precis on Tourville and that he had written articles about "How to Commerce Raid, Intelligently". and it probably also included the article itself for source (how big was the article? was it a big, 400-500 page document or a pitiful 2 pager? We dont know)

Text, and these bios would primarily be text, is tiny. A 333 page RTF ebook (Honor Among Enemies) is a piddling 2338 KB (and 17% of that is the 2 pictures; cover page & star chart)[/size]

Without doing anything super-dense, or exotic, you could fill a standard 42U rack[1] with 1512 TB of disk space - enough to store 646.7 million copies (uncompressed w/ pictures) of that 333 page ebook.[2]

Ok 215.3 billion pages (uncompressed) isn't enough for a Bio for every person in the Honorverse. But it seems plenty for a reasonably detailed bio on every person in Haven's fleet.

Plus of course
a) there's no reason not to use compression for something that's rarely accessed.
b) Molycirc should be way denser that 2015-era desktop hard drives[3].
c) Warships are huge and can easily find space for multiple racks of storage space if there's any benefit to doing so.


I totally agree with FLHerne that there's no logical reason to exclude enemy commander bios just because of storage space reasons.

----------------
[1] For those who aren't familiar that's approximately the size of a home refrigerator.
[2] Calculated using 21 12-bay 2U NAS enclosures; with each bay taking a 6TB hard drive - all of which could be ordered today from a place like NewEgg
[3] After all, even today, you can get 0.5TB on a compact flash card the size of a couple postage stamps - far denser, around 40x, storage than a desktop hard drive

I'd disagree on any bio's being only text, and short. I again point to how during her command of the Wayfarer, Honor picked up exactly how Giscard was operating in Silesia for commerce raiding. [previously I had called him Tourville, but it was Giscard who was the expert] That means that over and above the "bare bones" bio on him (which iirc, was pretty tiny because before the Committee of Public Safety, he was barely a commander, and thus a 'small fish' not worth bioing) it included the article he wrote about "How to Commerce Raid a hostile nation" [not the real article name, we were never really given that] and picked up exactly how he advocated deploying. That requires more than a precis, but the full up actual document... which again leads to the question of how large was the article?

Let's also examine how during Honor's command on Hell, Honor discovered that she literally could not use the data from a smaller ship (with its corresponding smaller databanks) to properly operate a larger ship that had its computers lobotomized. Which would give the general indication that the majority of a ships molycirc storage space is actually devoted to running the ship, and her weapons.

That means to just operate your ship, beyond the actual operating system of the ship, you're using a lot of space to store all codes for your encrypted military data, codes for your missiles command and control + self-destruct commands, codes for your Ghost Rider (or equivalent RDs), and the million and one other needs for military encryption over and above the bare bone Operating System to make the ship even 'turn on'.


Of course, you also need to be handling information on known planets (and their orbital patterns) because you wanna drop out of hyper on least-times, not clear across the system right?

Orbital data on the stars themselves, cause they move too.... data on hyper waves (think this data's a little more important than bio's on commanders you probably wont ever encounter... such as your enemies home fleet CO, while you're a dinky CO of a picket in the backend of nowhere)

Then there's the data on your mechies, which would require not just size/displacement and thrust, but their trade routes, their identification signatures, etc. In a related manner, we have directly seen captains also get deployed (to Silesia) with allied & non-friendly merchy data. Honor receieved all the information regarding Silly and Andy merchy stuff, not just when she deployed with the Wayfarer, but as Admiral Harrington commanding Task Group Sidemore.

Could a modern warship in the USN carry every piece of data that the Pentagon has stored that might be useful, in addition to all the data it needs simply to operate it's own systems and weapons? I rather doubt it, it gets loaded with the data it needs, plus some of the data it might, and that's with real-time access to HQ for updates as necessary.