Honorverse ramblings and musings

Vince wrote:

cthia wrote:Thanks for the info Theemile, now I'm not so astounded by complete Solly ignorance.

About those designs, that's news to me. I know that the LAC platform was a Solly design, though the RMN shot a dose of steroids into it. You say that BBs were a Solly design and I'm going to assume that Sollies designed the first SDs.

Is the only somewhat new platform the Haven Q-ship? Or is that not new either? Is there a totally Haven sector platform?

Yes, there are. CLACs and the pod-layer BCPs and SDPs.

I wasn't sure the pod layers should be counted since they're just hollowed out platforms of the same. I didn't think those bigassed Manty BBs, or whatever the hell they are (SLN sentiment), should be either since they're just... well... biGGer!

I assumed the SLN had CLACS if they had LACs. In hindsight, they could have utilized freighters. Though why go through the trouble to transport such a laughable piece of junk is beyond me.

What would Solarian LACs have been good for? Respect would have been given their reputation, not their LACs.

David essentially wants to violate physics in order to produce the shrikes etc. As the critical issue with LACS was their bunkerage and IIRC fusing to helium about 200 liters of H2 has more potential energy yield than an entire shrike composed of 100% refined bomb-grade plutonium, it's kind of unclear how the whole advanced fission reactor business is anything other then handwaving.

So it's understandable how the SL didn't produce anything like the shrike, as they didn't have the power of plot behind them.

cthia wrote:I assumed the SLN had CLACS if they had LACs. In hindsight, they could have utilized freighters. Though why go through the trouble to transport such a laughable piece of junk is beyond me.

Until Alfredo Yu's engineer had his brainstorm about tractoring Masadan LACs, nobody transported LACs -- at least not serviceable ones expected to be combat ready when they arrived.

Until then, LACs were slow, under-powered, lightly armed, local defense forces only, warships. If you have a very broad definition of "warship."

SLN LACs probably were transported in freighters from the manufacturer to the customer, (where they weren't locally built,) but that would have been without fuel, weapons, or crew, and possibly in pieces. They would have required a good deal of prep to make them combat capable.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:I assumed the SLN had CLACS if they had LACs. In hindsight, they could have utilized freighters. Though why go through the trouble to transport such a laughable piece of junk is beyond me.

Until Alfredo Yu's engineer had his brainstorm about tractoring Masadan LACs, nobody transported LACs -- at least not serviceable ones expected to be combat ready when they arrived.

Until then, LACs were slow, under-powered, lightly armed, local defense forces only, warships. If you have a very broad definition of "warship."

Even after that engineer's brainstorm, the LAC's weren't worth the transport. Yu was twitching and grinding his teeth at the waste of time the Masadans demanded. On their side, maybe some of it was in response to how scared they were by what the rest of their navy had suffered in Grayson, but most (maybe all) of it was to get their people in place to seize the BC.

So the "first CLAC" was a neat trick, and interesting for the future, but didn't represent anything particularly encouraging for the future of LAC's or CLAC's. What did was Hemphill's drive to build overwhelming attrition units to break the classical tactical stalemate, combined with the Gram-derived advances in power system miniaturization and new fast LAC speeds.

The SLN had no interest, at all, ever, in overwhelming attrition units: the classical tactical formalism worked for them, with their overwhelming numbers of star systems and capital ships. The League just shows up til you quit.

SLN LACs probably were transported in freighters from the manufacturer to the customer, (where they weren't locally built,) but that would have been without fuel, weapons, or crew, and possibly in pieces. They would have required a good deal of prep to make them combat capable.

To the extent that they were. I doubt the League Navy used LAC's for a long, long time. It can do customs patrol with pinnaces, cutters, other shuttles, and destroyers, to the extent that's not a system government responsibility. It's got the destroyers to do the little work. Where it is committed to defending single systems seriously - where non-hypercapable units have a lot of point - it can do it with massive fortresses and hypercapable units anyway, or again, leave that in some part to the system government.

Faster LAC's may have been leaking out among other system defense forces, inside the League too. Certainly any SDF using them would be getting faster ones as soon as it could - Nuncio, somehow, had them. (Unless we dismiss that as a simple error, which is sorely tempting.) If they've been able to get the faster LAC's, the SLN may have the ability - and the motivation! - to get them now, although Nuncio's aren't likely good enough in other respects to draw the SLN's enthusiasm. They could be the basis of an improved design, but there's only so much time the League has.

JeffEngel wrote:Faster LAC's may have been leaking out among other system defense forces, inside the League too. Certainly any SDF using them would be getting faster ones as soon as it could - Nuncio, somehow, had them. (Unless we dismiss that as a simple error, which is sorely tempting.) If they've been able to get the faster LAC's, the SLN may have the ability - and the motivation! - to get them now, although Nuncio's aren't likely good enough in other respects to draw the SLN's enthusiasm. They could be the basis of an improved design, but there's only so much time the League has.

IIRC (don't have time to go dig up the reference again) Nuncio's LACs were much heavier (more tonnage; ]15-18 ktons]) than the 'classic' LACs (Highlander-class [11.25 ktons], Program 13-class [10.25 ktons], Faith-class [10.25 ktons], Mazur-class [12.25 ktons]) we've seen elsewhere.
I suspect that they may have devoted some of that into at least a Beta + Beta set of impeller rings; if not actually an Alpha + Beta layout. That logically should allow them accelerations more like a small starship, even without any breakthrough in node physics / design. (IOW w/o Beta-squared nodes or their Peep equivalent)

Or it might just be an error.
There is one other seeming error in that text. Abigail though that NNS Wolverine [15 ktons] was "not that much smaller than the LACs we had when Lady Harrington took out Thunder of God."
But the Faith-class is 11.25 ktons; and even HotQ describes the Grayson LACs as "the largest massing barely eleven thousand tons". 15 doesn't seem "not much smaller than" 11...

Jonathan_S wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:Faster LAC's may have been leaking out among other system defense forces, inside the League too. Certainly any SDF using them would be getting faster ones as soon as it could - Nuncio, somehow, had them. (Unless we dismiss that as a simple error, which is sorely tempting.) If they've been able to get the faster LAC's, the SLN may have the ability - and the motivation! - to get them now, although Nuncio's aren't likely good enough in other respects to draw the SLN's enthusiasm. They could be the basis of an improved design, but there's only so much time the League has.

IIRC (don't have time to go dig up the reference again) Nuncio's LACs were much heavier (more tonnage; ]15-18 ktons]) than the 'classic' LACs (Highlander-class [11.25 ktons], Program 13-class [10.25 ktons], Faith-class [10.25 ktons], Mazur-class [12.25 ktons]) we've seen elsewhere.
I suspect that they may have devoted some of that into at least a Beta + Beta set of impeller rings; if not actually an Alpha + Beta layout. That logically should allow them accelerations more like a small starship, even without any breakthrough in node physics / design. (IOW w/o Beta-squared nodes or their Peep equivalent)

I think we could rule out alpha nodes on anything not able to get into hyper. But unusually large beta nodes or a second set - either way, a remarkable and desirable innovation, for the tech base - could account for it.

Or it might just be an error.
There is one other seeming error in that text. Abigail though that NNS Wolverine [15 ktons] was "not that much smaller than the LACs we had when Lady Harrington took out Thunder of God."
But the Faith-class is 11.25 ktons; and even HotQ describes the Grayson LACs as "the largest massing barely eleven thousand tons". 15 doesn't seem "not much smaller than" 11...

Well - it is not the case that they are much smaller, when it is the case that they are in fact larger. But that's not a normal use of English. I suppose they could be vastly denser and she's referring to volume, but that's also unlikely.

Certainly if you have to build things some 35-40% larger, getting starship-comparable acceleration out of the deal is entirely a good deal.

Maybe the Nuncio LAC's belonged to a different design philosophy: build the LAC as a very short range, hyper-incapable frigate, instead of the classic pinnace/destroyer hybrid that tended to get the worst of both worlds in critical ways. Why it wasn't a universally accepted design philosophy is hard to grasp; how it could represent a technological advance out in backward, poverty-stricken Nuncio is just as hard.

Nuncio had a few LACs but they were the old, standard kind. They were NOT the RMN versions that could shred small warships on their own
They were ok as mobile gun platforms doing doing customs work but not what you would call real SDF. Running up (or down on) civilian unarmed freighters to inforce in-system laws doesn't take much more than more speed and a couple of light weapons.

Brigade XO wrote:Nuncio had a few LACs but they were the old, standard kind. They were NOT the RMN versions that could shred small warships on their own
They were ok as mobile gun platforms doing doing customs work but not what you would call real SDF. Running up (or down on) civilian unarmed freighters to inforce in-system laws doesn't take much more than more speed and a couple of light weapons.

They were probably the old kind, but they were 36+% bigger than any other old style LAC we'd seen (15-18 ktons vs 11.25 ktons) but also 22% faster (500g vs 409g).
Though still far more sluggish that a full starship their size is predicted to be (around 543g). For that matter more sluggish than the smallest cannon starship we know of; the 38 kton Facteur-class DB; 537.5g

So there's something unusual about them... (But they seem no better armed that any other old-style LAC)

Vince wrote:

cthia wrote:Thanks for the info Theemile, now I'm not so astounded by complete Solly ignorance.

About those designs, that's news to me. I know that the LAC platform was a Solly design, though the RMN shot a dose of steroids into it. You say that BBs were a Solly design and I'm going to assume that Sollies designed the first SDs.

Is the only somewhat new platform the Haven Q-ship? Or is that not new either? Is there a totally Haven sector platform?

Yes, there are. CLACs and the pod-layer BCPs and SDPs.

And am I correct that the Q-ship is a totally Haven design? Which would make me incorrect in stating that all of their tech was "effect" tech, or "counter" tech.

cthia wrote:And am I correct that the Q-ship is a totally Haven design? Which would make me incorrect in stating that all of their tech was "effect" tech, or "counter" tech.

There's been several hundred years of warfare and low-level conflict with the same general tech base. It's unlikely that Haven's Q-ships were the first of their kind, not taking the kind as broadly as "ship built/refitted/modified to look like a harmless freighter when it is in fact dangerous". Where it started along those lines - for that matter, if the type wasn't around in a recognizable form since hyperspace shipping piracy started - we just don't know. It's certainly not recent.