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Tanks in the Honorverse

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Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by Dauntless   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 12:06 pm

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I'd totally missed that they still had tanks in the 20th century PD so I want to discuss two things.

what sort of weapons you think they might have

and

what sort of situations would they be used in.


first weapons: i'd admit to being of two minds here a big nasty energy weapon, i.e. graser or plasma cannon both are very cool and simplify the logistics as that is weapon that doesn't need ammo. but I can see the reactor needed for such a thing being large and thus making the tank slow and a big target.

on the other hand, a rail gun or scaled up pulser/tribarrell or maybe a Hyper velocity Missile like in the fury or starfire books, they could probably be powered easier leaving more power for other things, engine, point defence etc or just a smaller reactor.

deployment:

so far we've not seen any situation where the manties have had a need for a full scale tank. if the need that level of firepower they tend to use battle armoured marines and possible KEW strikes.

now if the fighting for the MAligns hidden worlds gets dirty enough they are a possible but generally I would have thought that it would be quicker, easier and less likely to cost people to use sir/orbital weapon strikes.

thoughts?
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by Somtaaw   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 12:23 pm

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We saw on one of the rebellions on a Solarian planet (instigated by Firebrand) that the tanks are armed with something resembling railgun for main armament (or very large pulsers), with smaller pulsers as co-axial and anti-personnel weaponry.


http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/M11_grav_tank - Army units only would use em, the Marines are more infantry and close air support. Take and secure a landing zone, the ground pounders would then drop from orbit into the cleared area, and move out from there.


There is also a lot of weapons, that anybody can use to kill tanks, and you don't even have to be in powered armor for the extra strength to use them. But if the tank gets a whiff you're there, they could probably kill you before you fire off what amounts to an advanced Javelin missile. It basically goes high up in the air, and then acts like a mini-KEW to destroy the tank. Don't recall exactly what the missiles were called, somewhere in the first half of Shadow of Freedom.
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by hanuman   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 12:53 pm

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But don't rail guns require a really large launcher to build launch velocity. I mean, a rail gun missile is essentially a javelin launched at a really tremendous speed, isn't it?

Would a tank be big enough to support such a launcher?
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by FLHerne   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 1:01 pm

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There's a relatively good description of tanks in "Deck Load Strike" (Worlds of Honor anthology).

Each of the six tank companies had eighteen tanks, old San Martin models marginally survivable on a really modern battlefield, but still generations ahead of anything Silvestria could have produced locally. The full force of these track-borne antiques mounted a hundred and eight 10-cm plasma guns, two hundred and sixteen flex-mounted pulsers, and several hundred launchers for grenades, flares, smoke bombs, and chaff.
They could carry all of this on a battlefield at up to seventy klicks an hour, with turbines burning anything from diluted tar or wood alcohol up to the hydrogen-enriched synthetics already in the dump. They even had silent low-speed atomic drives for stealth operations, running off power packs rechargeable from any commercial atomic grid.


All weapons including the main armament can be elevated enough to fire at aircraft, they carry aerosol grenades to counter laser weapons, and felling trees across roads is a viable delaying tactic.

In the same book there are APCs (tracked and hovercraft) and unpowered artillery.
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by Somtaaw   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 1:29 pm

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hanuman wrote:But don't rail guns require a really large launcher to build launch velocity. I mean, a rail gun missile is essentially a javelin launched at a really tremendous speed, isn't it?

Would a tank be big enough to support such a launcher?



Railguns in honorverse aren't very big. If I understand it properly, railguns which operate off electromagnetism acceleration, is basically the same thing as mass drivers. And pulsers operate off mass drivers, which are handheld, every day weapons.

A tank in honorverse wouldn't even need to be specially engineered for their railguns, let alone to equip plasma cannon or ultra-heavy tribarrels, which are just the descendant of gatling guns.
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by Dauntless   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 2:01 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:We saw on one of the rebellions on a Solarian planet (instigated by Firebrand) that the tanks are armed with something resembling railgun for main armament (or very large pulsers), with smaller pulsers as co-axial and anti-personnel weaponry.


http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/M11_grav_tank - Army units only would use em, the Marines are more infantry and close air support. Take and secure a landing zone, the ground pounders would then drop from orbit into the cleared area, and move out from there.


There is also a lot of weapons, that anybody can use to kill tanks, and you don't even have to be in powered armor for the extra strength to use them. But if the tank gets a whiff you're there, they could probably kill you before you fire off what amounts to an advanced Javelin missile. It basically goes high up in the air, and then acts like a mini-KEW to destroy the tank. Don't recall exactly what the missiles were called, somewhere in the first half of Shadow of Freedom.


I remember the tanks id I think shadow of freedom but had not really thogh of them as "tanks" per se as opposed to upgunned and uparmoured APCs
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by kzt   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 8:40 pm

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Pretty much everything in the Honorverse is gravitics. So I would bet that is how any sort of mass driver works.

Though there was a talk at honorcon about weapons and having tanks that used a small fusion charge to direct a plasma bolt was discussed, in addition to a variation where the plasma bolt drives a physical projectile at absurd velocities. Like 100km/sec, at which point the concepts of solids and fluids becomes a bit vague.
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by HB of CJ   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 11:26 pm

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I think that passage in "Deck Strike Load" pretty much nailed it. Why use a 16 pound slege hammer when a simple smaller and much cheaper 3 pound single jack hammer will work just as well?

Edit by HB; ... Or is the title "Deck Load Strike"? Yikes!

Some nations tend to hang onto their old military stuff. Russia comes to mind. Even through the material may be 45 years old, lots of good times and places to either use or sell it. Makes cents.
Last edited by HB of CJ on Mon Oct 05, 2015 1:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by kzt   » Sun Oct 04, 2015 11:31 pm

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I hate that story. In my not so humble opinion it's the worst in all the anthologies.
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Re: Tanks in the Honorverse
Post by crewdude48   » Mon Oct 05, 2015 12:51 am

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kzt wrote:I hate that story. In my not so humble opinion it's the worst in all the anthologies.


Worse that Grand Tour?
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