questions about Honor among enemies.

n7axw wrote:If I recall correctly, and am pretty sure I do, up until that door jammed, Wayfarer was rolling pods and launching missiles. She took out that first BC with a missile launch... So please clarify...

Don

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Wayfarer was in the Selkir rift (outside of any gravity wave) when she went up against the PRN ships. So there was no problem launching missiles.

I believe about the time that Honor explains to her crew, after going through the rapid-fire captain to captain talk with Caslet the fiddly bits were mentioned.

From the wiki, which is also in that boiled down chat...

The Selker Rift was a hyperspace rift about twenty light years short of the Sachsen System.

It was essentially a volume between two prominent grav waves. It was unavoidable for starships traveling between the Anderman Empire and the Silesian Confederacy on the Triangle Route. Most ships crossed it under impeller drive at a speed of .16 c to allow them to dodge a dangerous rogue wave known as the Selker Shear. This extended the travel time through the rift to about five t-days, leaving freighters exposed to piracy.

In 1910 PD, the Battle of the Selker Rift took place in the area. (HH6)

So ships travelling the Selker Rifts, are doing so on impellers although this could be interpreted as strictly non-hyper, ships do travel outside of the waves. The reason most travel is done along the waves, include faster, less fuel, and less wear and tear to ships & crew for crossing Alpha wall.

Other notables:
-the Selker Rift has rather low 'particles', which gives ships a much longer sensor range than usual in hyper.
-not being a grav wav, sidewalls, missiles, LACs, decoys and escape pods can be used without being instantly destroyed the moment they leave the 'safety' of an intact sail-using ship.


Another great example of this, is one of the battles of Hancock, Second I think, when the original Shrikes were hounding the Havenite Battleships. The Peeps knew that the LACs were only firing those grasers into them to cripple their Alpha nodes, and would instantly cease attacking a ship as soon as an Alpha was destroyed. The chasing superdreadnoughts could then flick up into hyper and drop down right on top of the battleships, regardless of any other distance or escape maneuvers used by the battleships.

And a great counter-example of not being able to escape without intact (with alpha nodes) ships, would be when Honor had to cut and run from Michelle Henke during one of the Cutworm (or similar) offensives during the Second War (Solon I think). Michelle's BC(p) suffered alpha node damage, and the system in question was in the middle of a grav wave. So the ONLY way to escape was to use sails, and prior to the surprise, Honor had been musing that she was uncomfortable attacking this particular system, and attributed it to the the grav wave-only escape. And another tidbit from that same thought is that most admirals seem to be more on edge when attacking those types of systems, because it becomes a "win or lose heavily" situation.

n7axw wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Glad we were able to help.

And it's not like there aren't one or two real inconsistencies hiding in Honor Among Enemies... The part where Atimis observed Hawkwing bring up sidewalls and deploy missile decoys, and then missile while in a grav wave comes to mind. Oops.

I seem to recall later printing of the paperback cleared up some of this; switch Hawkwing from launching missiles to firing energy weapons; but still left the erronious raising sidewalls and deploying decoys. I know you can't do the former in the 'wave, and I'm pretty sure the later would be torn apart by grav shere almost immediately. But my ebook reference still has her launching missiles; another impossible feat in a grav wave.

If I recall correctly, and am pretty sure I do, up until that door jammed, Wayfarer was rolling pods and launching missiles. She took out that first BC with a missile launch... So please clarify...

Don

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The part I was complaining about was earlier in the book; when Hawkwing ran an unannounced drill on the slow convoy Hauptman invited to tag along with her and Artimis.
At that point they were all deep in a grav wave.

Another couple of things... the Artemis liner was unable to escape from the ambushing Havenite ships due to her early damage, when the Heavy Cruiser thought Artemis was actually a battlecruiser.

To properly escape, she only had to do one of two things.... a crash translation downwards, even clear through the Alpha wall into normal space... or hop upwards into the bands she was capable of going. Either way would have been able to clear her well past the band the Havenite were ambushing in (probably Beta band, since they were trolling for merchies, not warships).

When the LAC's that were supposed to be guarding Artemis were initially launched from Wayfarer (should have been instant destruction), Honor requested Artemis take their crews off "prior to any translating", which suggests they were in hyper. And after they were sent out to search for Wayfarer's wreck, Artemis herself dropped a band (or more), and according to the view from Honor as they returned rose from the depths like some form of submersible in a display of pinpoint astrogation.


The only other real bit of 'hyper' combat we've ever seen, was when then-Commander Theisman was advising some podunk Legislaturalist Commodore, ambushing a Manticoran squadron.... in the middle of a grav-wav. And that excludes the final hyper combat we've seen, the final battle of Captain Helen Zilwicki, who fought to cripple as many Havenite warships as possible to save her convoy transports.

No missiles, only beams were used in both engagements, nor were decoys, lifepods, or anything else used from the Battle of Selker Rift were deployed.

Jonathan_S wrote:The part I was complaining about was earlier in the book; when Hawkwing ran an unannounced drill on the slow convoy Hauptman invited to tag along with her and Artimis.
At that point they were all deep in a grav wave.

The section of the Selker Rift they were ambushed in, is a multi-day zone to cross. And while David doesn't exactly put in time-stamps for each chapter, we can hazard a guess that they did that drill early on in the Rift. Then anywhere from a few hours later, to 3 days, they hit the Havenite ambushers, and we got to see the final actions. That's my guess anyways.

Somtaaw wrote:The section of the Selker Rift they were ambushed in, is a multi-day zone to cross. And while David doesn't exactly put in time-stamps for each chapter, we can hazard a guess that they did that drill early on in the Rift. Then anywhere from a few hours later, to 3 days, they hit the Havenite ambushers, and we got to see the final actions. That's my guess anyways.

No, David pretty much admitted it's an oopsie.

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:The section of the Selker Rift they were ambushed in, is a multi-day zone to cross. And while David doesn't exactly put in time-stamps for each chapter, we can hazard a guess that they did that drill early on in the Rift. Then anywhere from a few hours later, to 3 days, they hit the Havenite ambushers, and we got to see the final actions. That's my guess anyways.

No, David pretty much admitted it's an oopsie.

Yep, which is why there was the (partial) correction. The problematic text includes multiple references to being in a wave (and one to the higher accel derived from being there). No real way to read that as being in the rift.

Point of order:

These are the same occasion: Zilwicki and Theisman were on opposite sides of the same fight.

Somtaaw wrote:< snip >
The only other real bit of 'hyper' combat we've ever seen, was when then-Commander Theisman was advising some podunk Legislaturalist Commodore, ambushing a Manticoran squadron.... in the middle of a grav-wav. And that excludes the final hyper combat we've seen, the final battle of Captain Helen Zilwicki, who fought to cripple as many Havenite warships as possible to save her convoy transports.

No missiles, only beams were used in both engagements, nor were decoys, lifepods, or anything else used from the Battle of Selker Rift were deployed.