Hypothetical Tactical Option Question.

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:However, system defense pods seem to have pretty damned high endurance, and their reactors have to be running otherwise they couldn't spool up the missiles mini-reactors.

No, you don't need the pod reactor running until you need to prepare the missiles to launch. And as reactors are very hot this would severely interfere with stealth. So logically you would use a honking big battery pack connected that gets rechecrged or swapped out every so often. Spooling up the pod reactor would only be done once you have made a launch decision as that would immediately localize the pod on any IR sensor.

Have to disagree here... even IR sensors are going to have a pretty hard time localizing pods unless you already have an idea where to look. Going as far back as the Armed Merchant Cruisers (for Ghost Rider pods), we saw they still couldn't even get a 100% recovery rate (unless Ginger Lewis's recommendation for an RF beacon addition to the pods was taken)

Gravitic sensors looking for wedges is the 90%+ way to detect anything, and everything. Again, a nice bit of textev on that.... Battle of Cerberus, Honor came in against an enemy (okay, yes they were StateSec and pretty dumb) that anticipated at least a few hostile ships and it was Peep ship vs Peep ship.... they didn't see a thing until too late.

To steal from the Dahak universe

The only real threat was optical detection, and he'd noticed that while his peers gave lip service to the importance of optical systems, they relied on more sophisticated sensors. He'd started to mention that during the critique of the last field exercise, but then he'd remembered he would be leading this one . . . and that the Academy didn't give out prizes for losing.

To paraphrase for Honorverse... most tactical officers only give lip service to other sensors, but they rely almost exclusively upon gravitic sensors.

For example, look at the Battle of Solon... even when they were actively looking for pods, they didn't entirely catch everything. And that's only counting the pods that were actively deployed in sysdef mode, not rolled by Bogey One. Missile pods, unless they're being tractored by a ship are pretty damned stealthy on both sides of the Haven wars, and finding them in sysdef mode basically is "where would I hide pods if I were the defender?" and hoping you guessed right.

Detection is made a lot harder if you do not have a 50 million degree reactor running inside your hull heating the hull to a few hundred degree or thousand degrees above ambient. As they are not instantly spotted by the casual onlooker an obvious reason is they don't have a running reactor when they playing cold hole in space.

kzt wrote:Detection is made a lot harder if you do not have a 50 million degree reactor running inside your hull heating the hull to a few hundred degree or thousand degrees above ambient. As they are not instantly spotted by the casual onlooker an obvious reason is they don't have a running reactor when they playing cold hole in space.

Everyone and their mentally challenged sister function off the fusion reactors, so IR and even neutrino's would be a great way to track at least traces that "yup, we had a ship pass by"

except they don't. Even when it's an intruder (drones or ship) messing around in your solar system, not one system has used IR as any form of "well X hours ago, we had a hit off the IR sensors that there was something at X,Y direction at Z distance"

Not even Smoke and Mirrors Bellefeuille, nor Honor have pulled something off like that. So... one would think, that IR (and radiation sensors) are totally useless. Even if you're just trying to backtrace where the ship was, hours ago, when those slower than light signals eventually make their way to your scanners.

By extrapolation, that means the Honorverse craft (pods and ships) have absolutely RIDICULOUS cooling systems and stealth equipment that they can operate full up fusion reactors, and nobody can detect them beyond literally tripping over the source.

Somtaaw wrote:Everyone and their mentally challenged sister function off the fusion reactors, so IR and even neutrino's would be a great way to track at least traces that "yup, we had a ship pass by"

except they don't. Even when it's an intruder (drones or ship) messing around in your solar system, not one system has used IR as any form of "well X hours ago, we had a hit off the IR sensors that there was something at X,Y direction at Z distance"

Not even Smoke and Mirrors Bellefeuille, nor Honor have pulled something off like that. So... one would think, that IR (and radiation sensors) are totally useless. Even if you're just trying to backtrace where the ship was, hours ago, when those slower than light signals eventually make their way to your scanners.

By extrapolation, that means the Honorverse craft (pods and ships) have absolutely RIDICULOUS cooling systems and stealth equipment that they can operate full up fusion reactors, and nobody can detect them beyond literally tripping over the source.

Bit of elaboration here.... a pod (full up sysdef, or standard pod) is going to be pretty close in size to the Ghost Rider drones deployed by Alliance ships (soon to include Haven ships).


Deployed against Haven, GR drones were still pretty damned hard to detect, and coupled with their speed, were physically impossible to intercept. We also know GR drones have fusion reactors powering them, which is what gives them their ridiculously long endurance, and speed. They also have pretty good stealth built directly into the hull (reflective paint, low absorption hull materials, etc)


Now, again... by your logic, IR sensor, voila GR drones suddenly just lost virtually all their stealth because that toasty hot reactor inside is radiating like a micro sun as it zips around trying to be stealth.... except they aren't all that detectable even against their own builders.

And pods, whether they actually ARE as small (relatively speaking of course) as a Ghost Rider drone, are also built around:
1) a small fusion reactor
2) reflective/absorbing hull paints and materials for as low a signature as possible
3) damned hard to track


So..... unless you're tripping over them, both Ghost Rider drones, and missile pods are for all intents invisible to IR, otherwise GR drones wouldn't all that stealthy because you could track where they were, in the past, by where you had heat spikes.

David has decreed that with a running wedge you can dump heat to hyperspace. His universe, his rules. So objects with wedges are hard to spot.

So things without wedges need to be concerned with thermal signatures. And heat is really really hard to hide against the 4 K background even in the Honorverse, which is why the MAN ghost tactical teams worried a lot about who could see their radiators.

Pods trying to be a hole in space don't have a wedge, so they need to concerned with thermal signature.

kzt wrote:David has decreed that with a running wedge you can dump heat to hyperspace. His universe, his rules. So objects with wedges are hard to spot.

So things without wedges need to be concerned with thermal signatures. And heat is really really hard to hide against the 4 K background even in the Honorverse, which is why the MAN ghost tactical teams worried a lot about who could see their radiators.

Pods trying to be a hole in space don't have a wedge, so they need to concerned with thermal signature.

There's also a note somewhere that ships at least perform (to me mind-boggling) feats of catching and using would-be waste heat. That's really probably the core of Honorverse stealth, though sucking up even more with wedges where available is another. Given that they are as stealthy as they are, either without wedges sometimes or without wedges ever, we should assume that whatever makes ships such wildly efficient heat wizards applies to drones and pods too.

I'm sure IR signature is still the chief concern for anything offering no gravitic signature - absorbing radar would be relative child's play, for instance. But there's that reason to think that it's not going to be giving things away trivially.

(And, come to think of it, if you're recycling heat, the pods and drones could power themselves a bit in the process of just cooling down from starship bay temperatures after launch.)

kzt wrote:David has decreed that with a running wedge you can dump heat to hyperspace. His universe, his rules. So objects with wedges are hard to spot.

So things without wedges need to be concerned with thermal signatures. And heat is really really hard to hide against the 4 K background even in the Honorverse, which is why the MAN ghost tactical teams worried a lot about who could see their radiators.

Pods trying to be a hole in space don't have a wedge, so they need to concerned with thermal signature.

Ok, I guess I can understand that. But then either the Battle of Cerberus is either handwavium plot reasons, or an inconsistancy.

Honor pulled her do-or-die horribly, no wedge maneuver to attack StateSec General Chernock... yes she attacked out of the sun, so to speak. But that was mostly for cover against the ejecta plume from having used thrusters for the battle maneuver, and she did come out from the sun.

And after Honor came out from the sun, she spent something between 4 and 8 hours drifting, with all wedges down at stand-by readiness. Wedge down means that her fusion reactors don't have a wedge to magically dump heat into, so IR sensors should have started screaming that something was drifting towards the combined StateSec/People's Navy task group.


So I can only guess inconsistency, or handwavium which would explain how full up ships, which not only have their fusion reactors but also living breathing people adding to the heat generation, along with a much bigger hull to radiate from.

I don't have the reference to hand, but there's textev that a ship's smart paint can be used to radiate waste heat in specific directions, so Honor could keep her ships' IR emissions pointed away from the Statesec ships at Cerberus. Against an enemy with system-wide sensor coverage, that wouldn't work, but the Peeps hadn't had time to cover the system with recon drones (not that they could have maintained such coverage for long, given that Peep drones didn't have the same endurance as their RMN counterparts).

Dafmeister wrote:I don't have the reference to hand, but there's textev that a ship's smart paint can be used to radiate waste heat in specific directions, so Honor could keep her ships' IR emissions pointed away from the Statesec ships at Cerberus. Against an enemy with system-wide sensor coverage, that wouldn't work, but the Peeps hadn't had time to cover the system with recon drones (not that they could have maintained such coverage for long, given that Peep drones didn't have the same endurance as their RMN counterparts).

AFAIK, the only ships with directional waste heat radiating capability, are the Sharks, and possibly the Lenny Dets. Which means only MAlign ships can directional radiate... everyone else hasn't focused on that form of stealth.

Somtaaw wrote:Ok, I guess I can understand that. But then either the Battle of Cerberus is either handwavium plot reasons, or an inconsistancy.

...

And after Honor came out from the sun, she spent something between 4 and 8 hours drifting, with all wedges down at stand-by readiness.

The Battle of Cerberus is where the observation that lazy scanner techs only watch the gravitics detectors came from. IOW, it is explicitly stated that the only reason the ENS wasn't spotted is that nobody bothered to look for anything smaller than a wedge.