Next Bolthole devellopment

ChronicRder wrote:Y'all, I apologize. I got my drives mixed up in my earlier posts about LACS. I meant to say Streak drives; not Spider drives.
For now, that's problematical as they are twice the size of normal hyper generators. But I believe our GA friends, esp the Manties, could work on reducing that size and expanding its output. They've done it so many times before, why should this be any different.

Scale, purpose.

Scale: LAC's are stuffed in order to be fast and a capable warship, without hyper-capability. Rather larger courier boats have no combat capability whatever in order to be hyper-capable databanks and the sundries required to keep a crew able to operate the drives and databanks. Conventional hypercapability is the chief thing - certainly the most important starting thing - a LAC loses relative to a typical warship in order to work. A double-size one would probably be larger than the current LAC itself. There's only so much to expect out of miniaturization.

Purpose: LAC's work by dividing labor. The LAC gets the important stuff for fighting; the CLAC's get the important stuff for maintaining and moving LAC's through hyper. Hyper-capable LAC's would effectively re-invent the frigate. Frigates aren't a useful part of typical modern fleets; Torch has a use for them precisely and only because they do not have only typical modern fleet problems. Even the latest destroyers or light cruisers are vastly larger than they used to be - and that with that miniaturization - just because the floor for a useful hypercapable warship has ramped up so much more. (And streak drives will ramp that up a bit more.)

Another thing that comes to mind about recon drones. I was rereading the Starfire books and it strieks me as odd that the Manties haven't come up with a drone capable of wormhole transit. In that series practically every battle was predicated by either a swarm of AI controlled recon drones going through a warp point, taking a quick scan, and transmitting a message back to their awaiting assault fleets or by some swarm of light craft performing that function. I find it strange that the Manties haven't come up with something similar to this yet. Afterall, simply because they control the grandest Junction ever discovered, doesn't mean every terminus will be friendly (like Trevor's Star at first or that menacing little Wormhole by Torch). Since Manticore can't do much researching and developing at the moment, the only place this can really come from is Bolthole, no?

These wormholes are different. Starfire wormholes toss you around a bit but you can just fall through one by accident. Honorverse wormholes are a grav wave concentrated down to a point. You need Warshawski sails used very carefully to navigate an Honorverse wormhole, so you need a hypergenerator, alpha nodes, and in general one large and complicated vessel.

Moreover, Starfire wormholes are the only practical form of interstellar travel. Honorverse wormholes are a massive convenience - heck, they're an additional convenience, over and above "normal" grav waves. Since these are fictional universes made for warfare, Starfire wormholes have to be things you can fight through when they're the only way to get from one system to another. Honorverse wormholes aren't under that defining requirement and they don't satisfy it. You'd succeed in an Honorverse wormhole assault pretty much only if it is not effectively held at all. If you want to seize a wormhole, you go the long way, at the very least to brush aside or lure away the defenders.

JeffEngel wrote:

ChronicRder wrote:Y'all, I apologize. I got my drives mixed up in my earlier posts about LACS. I meant to say Streak drives; not Spider drives.
For now, that's problematical as they are twice the size of normal hyper generators. But I believe our GA friends, esp the Manties, could work on reducing that size and expanding its output. They've done it so many times before, why should this be any different.

Scale, purpose.

Scale: LAC's are stuffed in order to be fast and a capable warship, without hyper-capability. Rather larger courier boats have no combat capability whatever in order to be hyper-capable databanks and the sundries required to keep a crew able to operate the drives and databanks. Conventional hypercapability is the chief thing - certainly the most important starting thing - a LAC loses relative to a typical warship in order to work. A double-size one would probably be larger than the current LAC itself. There's only so much to expect out of miniaturization.

Purpose: LAC's work by dividing labor. The LAC gets the important stuff for fighting; the CLAC's get the important stuff for maintaining and moving LAC's through hyper. Hyper-capable LAC's would effectively re-invent the frigate. Frigates aren't a useful part of typical modern fleets; Torch has a use for them precisely and only because they do not have only typical modern fleet problems. Even the latest destroyers or light cruisers are vastly larger than they used to be - and that with that miniaturization - just because the floor for a useful hypercapable warship has ramped up so much more. (And streak drives will ramp that up a bit more.)

Another thing that comes to mind about recon drones. I was rereading the Starfire books and it strieks me as odd that the Manties haven't come up with a drone capable of wormhole transit. In that series practically every battle was predicated by either a swarm of AI controlled recon drones going through a warp point, taking a quick scan, and transmitting a message back to their awaiting assault fleets or by some swarm of light craft performing that function. I find it strange that the Manties haven't come up with something similar to this yet. Afterall, simply because they control the grandest Junction ever discovered, doesn't mean every terminus will be friendly (like Trevor's Star at first or that menacing little Wormhole by Torch). Since Manticore can't do much researching and developing at the moment, the only place this can really come from is Bolthole, no?

These wormholes are different. Starfire wormholes toss you around a bit but you can just fall through one by accident. Honorverse wormholes are a grav wave concentrated down to a point. You need Warshawski sails used very carefully to navigate an Honorverse wormhole, so you need a hypergenerator, alpha nodes, and in general one large and complicated vessel.

Moreover, Starfire wormholes are the only practical form of interstellar travel. Honorverse wormholes are a massive convenience - heck, they're an additional convenience, over and above "normal" grav waves. Since these are fictional universes made for warfare, Starfire wormholes have to be things you can fight through when they're the only way to get from one system to another. Honorverse wormholes aren't under that defining requirement and they don't satisfy it. You'd succeed in an Honorverse wormhole assault pretty much only if it is not effectively held at all. If you want to seize a wormhole, you go the long way, at the very least to brush aside or lure away the defenders.

JeffEngel, I'm not saying it'd be a carbon copy of the Starfire series. I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised if something similar didn't happen in the Honorverse. And that I am surprised it hasn't been drawn up already. Granted, there's a star boat load more involved in Honorverse R&D and other little nifty gadgets like MDMs, Ghost rider, missile pods, Mistletoe, Moriarty, etc. etc. etc.

Then again, while we're talking about Starfire, what about developing something along the lines of that series's data-link? Some of the tactics used in the Honorverse hint that it's possible. I'm thinking of Honor's tactics at 1st Hancock prior to Young's insubordination. Her ships were in close enough that there were overlapping fields of fire. In many ways, those tactics were the precursor to the defense in depth system Foraker developed prior to Thunderbolt. The breadcrumbs are there.

ChronicRder wrote:JeffEngel, I'm not saying it'd be a carbon copy of the Starfire series. I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised if something similar didn't happen in the Honorverse. And that I am surprised it hasn't been drawn up already. Granted, there's a star boat load more involved in Honorverse R&D and other little nifty gadgets like MDMs, Ghost rider, missile pods, Mistletoe, Moriarty, etc. etc. etc.

Then again, while we're talking about Starfire, what about developing something along the lines of that series's data-link? Some of the tactics used in the Honorverse hint that it's possible. I'm thinking of Honor's tactics at 1st Hancock prior to Young's insubordination. Her ships were in close enough that there were overlapping fields of fire. In many ways, those tactics were the precursor to the defense in depth system Foraker developed prior to Thunderbolt. The breadcrumbs are there.

I believe RFC even said at one point that he'd rigged the Honorverse wormholes to avoid getting drawn into writing Starfire redux. The visibility and vulnerable time for anything traversing an Honorverse wormhole effectively precludes scouting defended termini. You have to throw dozens and dozens of courier sized ships to have a prayer that any survived long enough to hit the departure lane and cycle their hypergenerator. Minutes of being totally exposed to hostile fire...


As for the datalink, you don't need specialized ship for it. All honorverse warships already support networked offense and defense. See this infodump infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/163/0

Jonathan_S wrote:["C. O. Thompson"]I agree with this and I don't recall that the alliance has any drives... they do have the man that designed them however and that combining him with Hemphill and Shannon ought to put a variation of the drive into the alliance hands quickly... In the discussion thread about jobs for treecats, I theorized that 'cats ought to do well in highly stealthed ships as scouts and spies with that, I thought that modified LAC's could be dropped off like a few pods from a ship of the wall as they insert into a system and then do what cats do so well, slink around and report back when they find something hidden.

Some time in the next book, the navy will need to follow up on the exploration ship that went through the wormhole near Torch and got jumped and destroyed.

This would be the perfect place to use such observation ships and what poetic justice to smash the MAlignment with their own tech and methods.

To use a wormhole you have to use Warshawski sails and a hyper generator. And you'll be blatantly visibly (sail flare) when you emerge.
Normally ships transiting a hostile wormhole would get destroyed long before they got far enough away to drop sails and switch to wedge (or in this case spider).

The stealthiness of your in-system drive is pretty irrelevant if you have to emerge in a known place in a visible way.


I love the irony of turning an enemy's secret tech against them, but this isn't the scenario to do that in.[/quote]


I understand your point about the ability to defend a known transitional point... worm hole in this case and several others have used the jump point concept where defenders mine the area. I guess that I was thinking more in use where piracy had been a problem or that these small ship could be launched from a larger ship as soon as it entered a system. This would leave observers that could be in position for the next insertions. Hey... it is only a thought that popped into mind after reading posts on three or four of the forums

The big problem with that is that the Grand Alliance has no idea where the Torch wormhole leads to. Whether it leads to MA Central or inside the event horizon of a Black Hole is completely unknown. There is no way for the GA to send ships to drop off scouts in that system because they don't know where that system is.

The other thing is that people refer to the streak drive like a it's a propulsion system. It's not. The streak drive is a big hyper generator that allows ships to enter higher hyperspace bands, which serves to shorten the 'distance' they have to travel.

Does anyone have textev to clarify whether MA spider ships also have impeller/wedge capability as well? I know they certainly have hyper generators for getting in and out of hyperspace but cannot clearly recall whether they also have impeller nodes as well.

BobfromSydney wrote:The big problem with that is that the Grand Alliance has no idea where the Torch wormhole leads to. Whether it leads to MA Central or inside the event horizon of a Black Hole is completely unknown. There is no way for the GA to send ships to drop off scouts in that system because they don't know where that system is.

The other thing is that people refer to the streak drive like a it's a propulsion system. It's not. The streak drive is a big hyper generator that allows ships to enter higher hyperspace bands, which serves to shorten the 'distance' they have to travel.

Does anyone have textev to clarify whether MA spider ships also have impeller/wedge capability as well? I know they certainly have hyper generators for getting in and out of hyperspace but cannot clearly recall whether they also have impeller nodes as well.

It's not clearly stated; in fact RFC goes out of his way to leave that abiguous.

However in a 2012 thread Obsticles my notes show that on Sept 2nd he posted (in part) "(1) Spider drive ships can make transit into and out of hyper --- or through a wormhole --- just fine, thank you."

On the 3rd he followed up by explaining that it was only Beta nodes that force the pinched double-spindle hull layout for conventional ships. Though he goes on to say "Please note that none of the above should be construed in any way as describing exactly how a spider drive vessel works/does not work for hyper travel. It may (or may not) use something derived from the information I've just given you."


Like I said, going out of his way to avoid confirming their design. But he seemed pretty definative that you could run a spider ship through a wormhole just fine (though quite possibly not with every possible spider ship design)

Jonathan_S wrote:

BobfromSydney wrote:The big problem with that is that the Grand Alliance has no idea where the Torch wormhole leads to. Whether it leads to MA Central or inside the event horizon of a Black Hole is completely unknown. There is no way for the GA to send ships to drop off scouts in that system because they don't know where that system is.

The other thing is that people refer to the streak drive like a it's a propulsion system. It's not. The streak drive is a big hyper generator that allows ships to enter higher hyperspace bands, which serves to shorten the 'distance' they have to travel.

Does anyone have textev to clarify whether MA spider ships also have impeller/wedge capability as well? I know they certainly have hyper generators for getting in and out of hyperspace but cannot clearly recall whether they also have impeller nodes as well.

It's not clearly stated; in fact RFC goes out of his way to leave that abiguous.

However in a 2012 thread Obsticles my notes show that on Sept 2nd he posted (in part) "(1) Spider drive ships can make transit into and out of hyper --- or through a wormhole --- just fine, thank you."

On the 3rd he followed up by explaining that it was only Beta nodes that force the pinched double-spindle hull layout for conventional ships. Though he goes on to say "Please note that none of the above should be construed in any way as describing exactly how a spider drive vessel works/does not work for hyper travel. It may (or may not) use something derived from the information I've just given you."

Like I said, going out of his way to avoid confirming their design. But he seemed pretty definative that you could run a spider ship through a wormhole just fine (though quite possibly not with every possible spider ship design)

IIRC, the beta nodes are needed for a wedge and the alpha nodes for a sail, although I think alpha nodes can also contribute to a wedge. I doubt if they can create a wedge on their own, though.

JohnRoth wrote:IIRC, the beta nodes are needed for a wedge and the alpha nodes for a sail, although I think alpha nodes can also contribute to a wedge. I doubt if they can create a wedge on their own, though.

The relevant bits from that post:

(2) An impeller wedge can be generated by a single set of impeller nodes;

(3) A starship requires two sets of alpha nodes (located in the proper relative geometry) to generate Warshawski sails;

(4) A hyper-capable warship, which requires two rings of alpha nodes, also mounts two complete sets of beta nodes because it's generating a double impeller wedge, one inside the other, as a defense against hostile sensors which manage to analyze the grav differential of the outer wedge to be and also for redundancy's sake;

(5) Most hyper-capable freighters also mount two complete sets of beta nodes as a load sharing and security-through-redundancy measure, since they have to have the power runs and the installations for the alpha nodes, anyway;

(6) LACs, missiles, drones, and forts which are not hyper capable do not require two sets of alpha nodes, nor do they require a second set of beta nodes in order to generate a wedge;

So - you could make a wedge with alpha nodes alone, and some freighters (where redundancy is apparently valued less than extreme economy) do exactly that. (I seem to recall elsewhere mention that freighters built for use exclusively inside the Core tend to be very bare-bones since there is so much sense of safety.)

I would think that LAC's and forts at least would have a second set of beta nodes to generate a double wedge for the same security reasons hyper-capable warships do, though the point made there is that they do not need the second set to generate a wedge at all.

BobfromSydney wrote:The other thing is that people refer to the streak drive like a it's a propulsion system. It's not. The streak drive is a big hyper generator that allows ships to enter higher hyperspace bands, which serves to shorten the 'distance' they have to travel.

Yes... you can use a streak "drive", as opposed to a conventional hypergenerator, to reach hyperspace bands that allow faster apparent (practical) speeds. So, technically, it's not a propulsion system. But so, practically, it may as well be.

Is there any misunderstanding possibly invited by referring to the streak drive as a propulsion system? Is there any clarity gained by the pedantic insistence it it not? Sure, it's right. Woohoo. But when it's technically not a propulsion system and the whole effect of the thing is making you get places sooner, what possible point is served by that insistence?

JeffEngel wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:IIRC, the beta nodes are needed for a wedge and the alpha nodes for a sail, although I think alpha nodes can also contribute to a wedge. I doubt if they can create a wedge on their own, though.

The relevant bits from that post:

(2) An impeller wedge can be generated by a single set of impeller nodes;

(3) A starship requires two sets of alpha nodes (located in the proper relative geometry) to generate Warshawski sails;

(4) A hyper-capable warship, which requires two rings of alpha nodes, also mounts two complete sets of beta nodes because it's generating a double impeller wedge, one inside the other, as a defense against hostile sensors which manage to analyze the grav differential of the outer wedge to be and also for redundancy's sake;

(5) Most hyper-capable freighters also mount two complete sets of beta nodes as a load sharing and security-through-redundancy measure, since they have to have the power runs and the installations for the alpha nodes, anyway;

(6) LACs, missiles, drones, and forts which are not hyper capable do not require two sets of alpha nodes, nor do they require a second set of beta nodes in order to generate a wedge;

So - you could make a wedge with alpha nodes alone, and some freighters (where redundancy is apparently valued less than extreme economy) do exactly that. (I seem to recall elsewhere mention that freighters built for use exclusively inside the Core tend to be very bare-bones since there is so much sense of safety.)

You could be right, but I didn't read it that way. I read it as simply adding a second set of beta nodes for redundancy, the first being required. See point 4: if the alpha nodes could generate a wedge, warships wouldn't need the beta nodes at all.

JeffEngel wrote:I would think that LAC's and forts at least would have a second set of beta nodes to generate a double wedge for the same security reasons hyper-capable warships do, though the point made there is that they do not need the second set to generate a wedge at all.

I think that depends on the environment. If you get a node failure in hyper you're essentially dead unless you're in a convoy where another ship can call for help: redundancy is good.

Forts and LACs aren't going into hyper, and they're not going to be all that far away from either a repair ship or the CLAC.