Honorverse ramblings and musings

Brigade XO wrote:Wayfarer was a mostly expedient move to purely kill what were though to just be regular pirates. Any sane pirate would just not engage with a warship- even a DD, and an older one a that like Hawking- but would slink away. Honor's job was not to scare the pirates off, it was to crush them, obliterate them and not just chase them away from the normal trade routes. Throwing DDs, CA, and BCs at the pirates would mostly have just moved them around, not killed them all. Nobody at Manticore realized that most if not all of the piracy they were throwing the Q-ships at was actual PRH warships. It they had, they probably found the Crusiers and BCs to deal with the problem. We were shown what happened to Honor's ship even with the help of the reasonably well armed and equipped Haupmann Star Liner which could at least try to both defend itself and throw missiles at the PEEPS along with the Q-ship.

Or you can build the Honorverse equivelent of Cussler's Oregon and activly go looking for trouble but now you are getting back into the Sirius's mission profile.

I worry that that the forum may be going too far in the con-Q-ship direction in its zeal to suppress excessively pro-Q-ship sentiment.

One plausible way for the fall of the League to play out is old Silesia times twenty: lots of corrupt little governments, a powerless or deceased central government, lots of system independence movements and intra-system revolutionary ones, combined still with ever so much to steal on and between worlds. So piracy, privateer, and raider suppression will be a major, perhaps the major, naval operation - if we count convoy escort under that umbrella.

Cruisers and other warships behaving like cruisers, whatever name(s) get attached to them, will be the primary tool for that. But that doesn't mean that Q-ships will be not even a niche tool in addition. If there are respectable Q-ship designs that can mimic, up to a reasonably close inspection, a given common class of freighter, pirates will be that much less inclined to attack that class of freighter, or do so less aggressively. Even if it doesn't mean kills, it can make piracy that much less appealing. If you can take the time and effort to design the Q-ships to be truly effective mimics for that freighter type, and sufficiently dangerous and crew-economical, you've got a useful tool to catch some pirates you might not otherwise and make many others change careers or let some of that freighter class go on account of approaching them too carefully. When the region in which you may plausibly be operating that class of Q-ships is the entire volume of the old Solarian League, one such Q-ship can represent a concern for a huge number of pirates.

Personally, I worry that the GA may be nibbling on more than it can chew. There are going to be hiccups. First, I think that quintet of Mandarins are going to bail out faster than our troubled banking systems. They'll take with them as much money as they can. And they'll champion illegal trades and deals to make even more fast money. They will be the source of misappropriated SLN hardware. Why shouldn't they?

And just what will the MAlign have to say regarding the GA's wishes for piracy suppression to go "as planned." I can't discount the MAlign stealthily proxying piracy. They have the money and the technological prowess. They don't have to build or buy ships showcasing their own technologies. Simply current tech, with enough upgrades to give the GA a headache.

JeffEngel wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Wayfarer was a mostly expedient move to purely kill what were though to just be regular pirates. Any sane pirate would just not engage with a warship- even a DD, and an older one a that like Hawking- but would slink away. Honor's job was not to scare the pirates off, it was to crush them, obliterate them and not just chase them away from the normal trade routes. Throwing DDs, CA, and BCs at the pirates would mostly have just moved them around, not killed them all. Nobody at Manticore realized that most if not all of the piracy they were throwing the Q-ships at was actual PRH warships. It they had, they probably found the Crusiers and BCs to deal with the problem. We were shown what happened to Honor's ship even with the help of the reasonably well armed and equipped Haupmann Star Liner which could at least try to both defend itself and throw missiles at the PEEPS along with the Q-ship.

Or you can build the Honorverse equivelent of Cussler's Oregon and activly go looking for trouble but now you are getting back into the Sirius's mission profile.

I worry that that the forum may be going too far in the con-Q-ship direction in its zeal to suppress excessively pro-Q-ship sentiment.

One plausible way for the fall of the League to play out is old Silesia times twenty: lots of corrupt little governments, a powerless or deceased central government, lots of system independence movements and intra-system revolutionary ones, combined still with ever so much to steal on and between worlds. So piracy, privateer, and raider suppression will be a major, perhaps the major, naval operation - if we count convoy escort under that umbrella.

Cruisers and other warships behaving like cruisers, whatever name(s) get attached to them, will be the primary tool for that. But that doesn't mean that Q-ships will be not even a niche tool in addition. If there are respectable Q-ship designs that can mimic, up to a reasonably close inspection, a given common class of freighter, pirates will be that much less inclined to attack that class of freighter, or do so less aggressively. Even if it doesn't mean kills, it can make piracy that much less appealing. If you can take the time and effort to design the Q-ships to be truly effective mimics for that freighter type, and sufficiently dangerous and crew-economical, you've got a useful tool to catch some pirates you might not otherwise and make many others change careers or let some of that freighter class go on account of approaching them too carefully. When the region in which you may plausibly be operating that class of Q-ships is the entire volume of the old Solarian League, one such Q-ship can represent a concern for a huge number of pirates.

That's exactly what I was trying to suggest. And I'd build Q-ships on every freighter platform. Not a rushed design, but a well thought out next-gener. Even if just one of each freighter platform.

The GA are about to be impacted up the wazoo in pirates. They are going to have to venture outside of the box. The big bad League turned to ashes is going to have a negative effect on the suppression of piracy.

The 800-lb gorilla may not have represented any real threat or fear to GA ships, but they sure as hell maintained respect from pirates. And that represented a lot of ships. Pirates are just going to go where the booty is good. The brotherhood of the traveling marauder.

cthia wrote:...Piracy can be too lucrative a business hitting wayward convoys ...

Convoys are an anti-piracy measure -- or anti-commerce raiding -- so it can be expected that pirates will avoid attacking convoys, even if there is no significant escort. A convoy would have to have a very high value cargo to make a pirate attack.

I think you've gotten a distorted picture of piracy in the Honorverse. We've seen extraordinarily well equipped pirates on-screen, and most of those have been commerce raiders or privateers rather than simple pirates. Commerce raiders and privateers attack convoys, Pirates don't.

Consider the prates of Somalia and their equipment and tactics -- they don't attack ships in convoy and they don't show up in cruisers or destroyers. They attack single ships with fishing boats and "Zodiac" type semi-rigid motor boats.

Other pirates around the world operate similar boats with a very occasional "coast guard cutter" sized gunboat. (Frigate size or smaller in Honorverse terms.)

cthia wrote:But how do you accomplish that, realistically? How can you prevent the revolving door of system governments? Piracy is like the drug trade. Kill one, another gladly takes its place. Piracy can be too lucrative a business hitting wayward convoys from rich systems like Manticore. And if Manticore tries to assimilate or handshake with as many broken League parts that I imagine will want it to, there's going to be lots of convoys long hauling. The GA simply doesn't have the necessary ships to adequately fight piracy in such an expanded area of influence. Does anyone doubt that pirates and corrupt system governors are privy to this fact as well?

With the guillotine swinging ever so closely to the League's neck, I imagine corrupt system governors are encouraging piracy on a whole new scale to be ready for "expanded horizons." Recruitment is at an all-time high. Even retired pirates are interested.

I'm curious as to the future state of the Cherwell Convention. It was one of the most stringent of the League's anti-piracy treaties. How will it hold up in the face of a fallen League? How will it be amended in the light of an absent signatory and amended to deal with piracy on steroids? I see the Silesian Confederacy morphing into an even worse hell-hole.

Well given that Silesian is now firmly under the control of Manticore and the Andermandi, with their internal oversite closely watching the few remaining pre-annexation elected governments, and each systems patrolled/secured by RMN and IAN units I don't see that area backsliding.

Now parts of the ex-League might morph into Silesia 2.0; but Silesia itself seems well in hand as protectorates of Manticore and the newest part of the Andermandi Empire.


As for suppressing piracy, within the League it might not be possible to crack down on all the corrupt governments who are supporting or profiting from pirates. You can go in and make an example or two, but the Grand Alliance doesn't have the troop or interest to take over, occupy, and police an endless series of corrupt ex-League worlds.
OTOH most of the League wasn't as corrupt as Silesia used to be (or at least not in the same ways) so hopefully there will be less governments that jump to taking money to at least look the other way while companies in their system(s) profit from working with pirates.

But also remember that with extremely rare exceptions (which, with 2 examples, are heavily over-represented in the books) it's not practical to intercept even a freighter while it's in hyperspace. Piracy is, for all intents and purposes, an n-space problem. So if the merchant marines of Manticore or the GA restrict their trading to ex-League systems that either have sufficient SFDs to mount adequate anti-piracy patrols then trade their is quite safe even if the ships aren't in an escorted convoy.

The volume of trade dictates whether you need less units to secure just the end points, or whether it takes less ships to ties them up in month+ long convoy duty. But unlike on Earth your ships, for all practical purposes, aren't getting attacked and taken in the deep ocean - so you don't really need escorts there except if that's how you ensure you have escorts on-hand as you approach the next port.

cthia wrote:I'm curious as to the future state of the Cherwell Convention. It was one of the most stringent of the League's anti-piracy treaties. How will it hold up in the face of a fallen League? How will it be amended in the light of an absent signatory and amended to deal with piracy on steroids? I see the Silesian Confederacy morphing into an even worse hell-hole.

I wouldn't worry about Cherwell too much. The League was never as hell-bent on enforcing it as Manticore and Haven were - and with Mesa's conquest, the slave trade has taken a serious blow. Indeed, there's a relatively new player even more vigorous about enforcing the Convention: Torch. The GA and its associated powers are all better(and more consistent) than the League - which arguably helped to faciliate slave trade at times, especially by tolerating Mesa's existence for so long.

IIRC, Cherwell appeared to merely extend some previously existing interstellar agreement concerning pirates to include slavers. That older agreement has pretty much been static and probably ingrained in "interstellar law" for literally centuries, possibly even millennia, to the point that Admiral Gold Peak had the legal right to execute every Solarian crewer in Crandall's task force.

The other named agreement I can think of are the Deneb Accords - more or less an overhauled Geneva Convention. This does not rely on the League's continued existence any more than the Geneva Conventions rely on Switzerland's existence.

The only thing disturbed by a League collapse is the Eridani Edict, which was an unilateral declaration specifically authorising the SLN to take action against people who bombed planets without first controlling the orbits and calling for its surrender.

Jonathan_S has got it right about Silesia; it can't possibly backslide, not with Admiral Sarnow and the forces at his disposal - he has a substantial portion of the RMN's legacy subwallers leavened with modern cruisers and system-defense LACs. And he's only covering half - his Andermani counterpart has the other half, probably covered by an even heavier Andermani force. Unless the SEM and AE goes to war, Silesia would be a good place to ride out the League war.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:...Piracy can be too lucrative a business hitting wayward convoys ...

Convoys are an anti-piracy measure -- or anti-commerce raiding -- so it can be expected that pirates will avoid attacking convoys, even if there is no significant escort. A convoy would have to have a very high value cargo to make a pirate attack.

Well - if the convoy members had even minute individual firepower, they'd represent a deterrent to piracy without an escort. Otherwise, without an escort, they're an anti-piracy measure in the sense that they give the pirates far fewer places where they can find a freighter per unit time. That's crucial, but if they do find a convoy anyway, if it hasn't anything to fight them off, then it's still at least one prize there for the taking.

Still though, if you're going to bother with a convoy at all, assigning it some kind of escort - if only one barely-armed freighter among the lot - is trivially easy and almost inevitable anyway.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:...Piracy can be too lucrative a business hitting wayward convoys ...

Convoys are an anti-piracy measure -- or anti-commerce raiding -- so it can be expected that pirates will avoid attacking convoys, even if there is no significant escort. A convoy would have to have a very high value cargo to make a pirate attack.

I think you've gotten a distorted picture of piracy in the Honorverse. We've seen extraordinarily well equipped pirates on-screen, and most of those have been commerce raiders or privateers rather than simple pirates. Commerce raiders and privateers attack convoys, Pirates don't.

Consider the prates of Somalia and their equipment and tactics -- they don't attack ships in convoy and they don't show up in cruisers or destroyers. They attack single ships with fishing boats and "Zodiac" type semi-rigid motor boats.

Other pirates around the world operate similar boats with a very occasional "coast guard cutter" sized gunboat. (Frigate size or smaller in Honorverse terms.)

Thanks for reminding me of the distinction, and of RFC's own visit to the ...One-Liners thread explaining to me the difference between pirates, slavers and raiders. I had a stubborn tendency to lump them all together -- *related to their shared ugly tactics of flushing victims out of the airlock like so much discarded trash.

My apologies for not clarifying, but in this case, I was referring to convoys of freighters only "carpooling" without an escort with the "safety in numbers" adage in mind. I suspect there's going to be a lot of that in the new age of the "buck and a quarter soaking wet" gutted League because there just won't be enough ships to go around.

And if that Demon Murphy kickstarts a new war after the League falls, like a confrontation with the MAlign -- well, then the promise of convoy protection will go out the airlock as well and piracy suppression will be left completely up to the Andermani -- and the celebration parties of pirates.

I'm conceiving of a new age of booty-lootin' whereby piracy has become so lucrative, without the fear of the League and a GA that has destroyed most of each other's military that even pirates have stepped up their game because it has become so lucrative. Steal from the rich and sell to the poor. If the average pirate manages to expand the number of ships at its disposal to that of privateers, and privateers have become small navies by early era standards... ? All from misappropriated ships and crazy-mad revenue. And a target-rich environment.

*The technical difference between pirates and privateers seem to be a lack of a system sponsor. To be sure, are privateers and commerce raiders subject to the Cherwell Convention as well?

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:...Piracy can be too lucrative a business hitting wayward convoys ...

Convoys are an anti-piracy measure -- or anti-commerce raiding -- so it can be expected that pirates will avoid attacking convoys, even if there is no significant escort. A convoy would have to have a very high value cargo to make a pirate attack.

JeffEngel wrote:Well - if the convoy members had even minute individual firepower, they'd represent a deterrent to piracy without an escort. Otherwise, without an escort, they're an anti-piracy measure in the sense that they give the pirates far fewer places where they can find a freighter per unit time. That's crucial, but if they do find a convoy anyway, if it hasn't anything to fight them off, then it's still at least one prize there for the taking.

Still though, if you're going to bother with a convoy at all, assigning it some kind of escort - if only one barely-armed freighter among the lot - is trivially easy and almost inevitable anyway.

This represents an opportunity to operate outside the box. In the face of a fallen League, piracy is going to get out of hand unless the GA does something significantly "more." Include a LAC or two, here or there, with convoys just to get the message out to the criminal element.

Fasten them onto freighters somehow.

Freighters don't have tractors do they?

cthia wrote:Freighters don't have tractors do they?

Every ship has tractors - it's how they dock.