Honorverse ramblings and musings

StealthSeeker wrote:I think I have finally come up with a good use for at least a hand full of the surrendered SLN SD's (I can't read the whole forum to see if it has been mentioned before.)

A few of them can be used as "plugs" for the worm hole terminus at Torch!

Does your system have a worm hole terminus that goes nowhere, but that you don't trust to not come from somewhere? Is your planet a little short on cash to build a couple of forts to keep an eye on it? Then I have a solution for you. For a low low price we can turn over a group of SLN SD ships to park in front of that worm hole terminus, right where ships would translate out, right where transiting ships could not avoid running in to them. You could build up an incredible chain reaction of crashing ships, wrecking each of the unwelcome ships as they came out of the wormhole.

Please don't speculate on the potential uses of SLN SD's. That particular horse has been beaten to death at least three or four or is it five times. RFC has already stated that the SD's in question, because of there obsolescence are only suitable for scraping.

It would be like a Wickes/Clemson (commissioned 1918) class destroyer taking on a Zumwalt class destroyer

saber964 wrote:

StealthSeeker wrote:I think I have finally come up with a good use for at least a hand full of the surrendered SLN SD's (I can't read the whole forum to see if it has been mentioned before.)

A few of them can be used as "plugs" for the worm hole terminus at Torch!

Does your system have a worm hole terminus that goes nowhere, but that you don't trust to not come from somewhere? Is your planet a little short on cash to build a couple of forts to keep an eye on it? Then I have a solution for you. For a low low price we can turn over a group of SLN SD ships to park in front of that worm hole terminus, right where ships would translate out, right where transiting ships could not avoid running in to them. You could build up an incredible chain reaction of crashing ships, wrecking each of the unwelcome ships as they came out of the wormhole.

Please don't speculate on the potential uses of SLN SD's. That particular horse has been beaten to death at least three or four or is it five times. RFC has already stated that the SD's in question, because of there obsolescence are only suitable for scraping.

It would be like a Wickes/Clemson (commissioned 1918) class destroyer taking on a Zumwalt class destroyer

You should have read a little more closely, instead of a knee-jerk reaction. In no way was there an application to use the SD's as any form of warship, transport, or any sort of ship.

If I'm reading it correctly, he's basically proposing a bunch of SLN SD's parked 90 degrees sideways and just running the impeller wedge while sitting directly in front of a hostile wormhole. It can't quite be applied to the Torch wormhole yet because we as readers know it's hostile, but the Torchites (Torchese? what were they called again?) believe it's simply another rogue, ship-eating wormhole.

The first hostile MAlign fleet would come through no problem, but after that the easiest way to mission kill any followup attacks is to essentially just park those useless SLN SD's, and deliberately entice the sort of pile-up crash that scared the crap out of Admiral Alexander when he did his crash Trevor Star-Manticore-Basilisk double-transit emergency run.


The closest analogy I can picture off-hand, would be the giant iron or steel beams that were setup off the D-Day beaches, that were designed to impede warships from approaching too closely, or risk being holed below the waterline.

cthia wrote:

cthia wrote:Is this simply a case of "for all the marbles," that explains why the CLACS are available targets? I thought a CLAC's tactical MO was to 'stop, drop and hyper.' And if already in-system, 'drop-n-scram.'

Or have I simply dropped a tactical thread?

kzt wrote:Remember how Kuzak took up smoking crack?

There were no good tactical decisions made by Kuzak this fight. Crack smoking is the obvious explanation, though the real answer is plot.

Kzt, you're cracking me up with this crack thought. One of my sisters is always accusing government officials and/or politicians of being on crack, then Washington D.C.'s Mayor Marion Barry's crack video came out -- "See? I knew it!"

I can't come close to matching that epiphany, but if Kuzak was on crack then surely Chin was on gin... 200 proof idiot...


At All Costs

Honor Alexander-Harrington's eyes were brown ice as Theophile Kgari, in a virtuoso display of astrogation, dropped the massed superdreadnoughts of Eighth Fleet exactly where she'd told him to in a single jump right out of the center of the resonance zone.

She didn't look at the pathetic remnants of Third Fleet's icons. Didn't even glance at the other icons, representing Lester Tourville's task force. She had attention only for Genevieve Chin's superdreadnoughts, and her voice was a frozen soprano sword.

"Engage the enemy, Andrea," Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington said.

* * *

Genevieve Chin's heart began beating once again, and her instant instinct to break off eased a bit as the range registered. At almost seventy-three million kilometers, the new arrivals were well outside even MDMs' powered range. Besides, there were only thirty-eight of them—less than half her own strength, even if all of them were wallers and not carriers.

"Turn us around, Andrianna," she said. "It looks like we've got some fresh customers."

* * *

Eighth Fleet released the five thousand Apollo pods which had been tractored to its SD(P)s' hulls, then spent another three minutes rolling additional pods. In all, it deployed a total of 7,776, almost exactly half its total ammunition allotment, given the Andermani ships' lighter magazine capacity.

Then it fired.

* * *

"What the—?" Andrianna Spiropoulo looked at the tracking report in disbelief. That didn't make any sense at all!

"Ma'am," she said, turning to Admiral Chin, "the Manties have just fired."

"They've what?" Genevieve Chin looked up from a discussion with Nicodème Sabourin.

"They've fired, Ma'am," Spiropoulo repeated. "It doesn't make any sense. They're still at least seven million kilometers out of range!"

"That doesn't make any sense," Chin agreed, walking across to stare at the preposterous missile icons in the master display.

"Maybe they're trying to panic us, Admiral," Sabourin suggested. She looked at him, eyebrows rising in disbelief, and he shrugged. "I know it sounds silly, Ma'am, but I don't have any better suggestion. I mean, we've just hammered two entire Manty fleets into so much scrap metal, and these people are outnumbered by at least three-to-one. Maybe they figure this is the only way to distract us from finishing off the system."

"I suppose it's possible," Chin said slowly, watching the icons come. "But it doesn't seem like a Manty sort of thing to do. On the other hand, I don't see what else they could expect to accomplish."

Chin wasn't on gin. It was a lack of one of David's infodumps:
Admiral Chin and the climax to the Battle of Manticore

And David said it was also due to an editing error on his part:
Admirals Chin and Kusak and the climax to the Battle of Manticore, part II

Somtaaw wrote:You should have read a little more closely, instead of a knee-jerk reaction. In no way was there an application to use the SD's as any form of warship, transport, or any sort of ship.

If I'm reading it correctly, he's basically proposing a bunch of SLN SD's parked 90 degrees sideways and just running the impeller wedge while sitting directly in front of a hostile wormhole. It can't quite be applied to the Torch wormhole yet because we as readers know it's hostile, but the Torchites (Torchese? what were they called again?) believe it's simply another rogue, ship-eating wormhole.

The first hostile MAlign fleet would come through no problem, but after that the easiest way to mission kill any followup attacks is to essentially just park those useless SLN SD's, and deliberately entice the sort of pile-up crash that scared the crap out of Admiral Alexander when he did his crash Trevor Star-Manticore-Basilisk double-transit emergency run.


The closest analogy I can picture off-hand, would be the giant iron or steel beams that were setup off the D-Day beaches, that were designed to impede warships from approaching too closely, or risk being holed below the waterline.

It's already been proposed, and shot down. The WH isn't a point, it's a zone tens of thousands of km across.

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:The closest analogy I can picture off-hand, would be the giant iron or steel beams that were setup off the D-Day beaches, that were designed to impede warships from approaching too closely, or risk being holed below the waterline.

It's already been proposed, and shot down. The WH isn't a point, it's a zone tens of thousands of km across.

So you'd need a whole lot of wedges - at which point, something far cheaper in manpower to operate would be necessary and something armed or armored would not be relevant enough. (Although armament could be useful as a back-up plan, and defenses for handling normal-space approaches.)

But building a lot of freighters, essentially, would be cheaper than refitting or operating for any significant period SLN SD's, for the sheer wedge count approach. If you want to upgrade the intended so that you're using honest fortresses instead (which are, technically, mobile units with wedges too), able to withstand normal-space attacks (and, perhaps incidentally by then, making transit dangerous by clogging the exit routes with the wedges), you're still better off with purpose-built units than the SLN SD's.

You can't have a running wedge while inside the transit lane. The grav eddies would blow out your wedge like a firecracker.

Duckk wrote:You can't have a running wedge while inside the transit lane. The grav eddies would blow out your wedge like a firecracker.

Yep. You'd have to use sails. But then your blockship are aure to get destroyed in the collision.

So you don't want any crew aboard them - but you need them powered up and nodes active to hold station... They can't do that for long without crew to perform maintenance.


You'd get much less dangerous (to you) wormhole defense from towing a pile of pods (even pods of old SDM laserheads) out to where they can cover the exit lane. There's no need to try to physically block the exit.

JeffEngel wrote:So you'd need a whole lot of wedges - at which point, something far cheaper in manpower to operate would be necessary and something armed or armored would not be relevant enough. (Although armament could be useful as a back-up plan, and defenses for handling normal-space approaches.)

Wouldn't need all that many ships actually. When you consider that it's a wormhole, and nobody knows wormholes better than Manticore. Yes the actual "lanes" are big enough that the multi megaton freighters have a very distinct entry and exit lane that allows both incoming and outgoing ships to travel without coming close enough to blow each others nodes.

But if you park what amounts to a wall of rolled superdreadnoughts, you'd only need a dozen-ish to complete a basic wall. Superdreadnought wedges how wide, in addition to being longer than the ship is (and SDs are what, damn near a klick long themselves?)

That makes the wedge something approaching 2 km long, and more than a few km wide. Parked in just far enough out that you don't need a functional hyper generator or sails, you can pretty well block off any incoming travel, without using a ridiculous amount of hulls.

Additionally, ships using wormholes don't go through with zero velocity, so things will coast (slightly). Even the exploratory destroyer for the Astro-whatever bureau it was again had some bleed, and it was creeping into the two wormholes at less than 1 gravity of acceleration, standard velocity is between 10 and 50 I think.

To use another reference, think of a wormhole like the Gates from Mass Effect, and in particular, the Omega Gate in Mass Effect 2. If you recall, the Normandy SR-2 just barely managed to dodge all the dead hulks after transiting, and only because it had a) low mass compared to a larger ship (its only a frigate after all, but in honorverse would be closer to a DD), and b) it had ridiculously overpowered engines (cruiser weight in ME, but it'd be more of a BC wedge on its DD hull)

I could try to dig up a youtube video of the actual clip I mean, but yeah... the Normandy SR-2 when it transited managed to dodge. But had it been a bigger ship (say, a superdreadnought or maybe even a full-up Lenny Det spider ship-fort), would have slammed right into stuff. And if that stuff is a running wedge, and you're only using a sail... I think the wedge mechanic trumps sail, and the incoming ship either gets disintigrated, or they both blow up. And if there's ships transiting behind the first, it turns into a nice big super chain reaction, that lost you one (useless) superdreadnought, with lots and lots of spares that could be slotted in (or cycled out for the minimal maintenance to keep the wedges running).


The only real issue would be occasionally having to use a pinnace to put a crew on ships, to maneuver them away from their picket position, and having enough ships to cycle them for that minimal maintenance.

Somtaaw wrote:The only real issue would be occasionally having to use a pinnace to put a crew on ships, to maneuver them away from their picket position, and having enough ships to cycle them for that minimal maintenance.

The real problem with using captured SLN ships or capturing the SLN Reserve to use as blocking ships in the Torch wormhole is that there are no former SLN ships in the Torch system (other than the BCs captured from the PNE, which are in use as BCs.)

Past discussions estimated that it would require a minimum of 2000 people for a ferry crew, and that estimate might well be low for a ferry to Torch from anywhere there are SLN ships up for grabs.

Somtaaw wrote:That makes the wedge something approaching 2 km long, and more than a few km wide. Parked in just far enough out that you don't need a functional hyper generator or sails, you can pretty well block off any incoming travel, without using a ridiculous amount of hulls.

A SD's wedge is about 300x300km. Even a missile's wedge is about 10x10km.

The Junction volume is "tens of thousands of kilometres across". Let's say 20,000km - but it could be easily 50 or 70 thousand, enough to pass a rocky planet through.

To form a single line so long would require about 66 SDs. Call it 60, as you can't have wedges touching each other. But a line isn't going to cut it - you need a wall. Because it's a spherical region, it's not quite 3,600 SDs to completely intersect the area - but you'd still need about 2,500 to be sure.

I get where the notion comes from. It's easy to think of HV wormholes as the space-borne equivalent of canals, somewhere narrowed which permits shorter travel times. Unfortunately, space is BIG and even narrowed space is enormous.

If you've read Starfire, think of one of a warp point's characteristics - impossible to mine directly(unless it's a closed type). The difference lies in size - a terminus is far larger, like Earth vs Jupiter.

That'd explain why terminus defenses(against assault transits) used laserhead minefields close in, with ready forts and later pods outside of energy range but within missile range. A laserhead's range is 50,000km, so two minefields on opposite sides of the terminus would have an overlap in the centre region.

Minefields are cheap. Way cheaper than even "free" surplus SDs, considering that each SD will require the employment of at least 1500 personnel, all those SDs will require support personnel(skeleton crews don't include doctors, cooks and so on) and none of those SDs are anywhere near Torch.

Torch is also in a different situation to Manticore. The latter had to keep the wormhole open so they could collect all those transit fees. Torch can surround its terminus with mines set on a hair trigger. It also has a lower maximum threshold for a mass simultaneous transit.