Medusa-C (The end of the SDP?)

The E wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Good example, the Solarian Navy can either be stupid and keep building even more of their really bad superdreadnoughts (quickly), or figure out how Manticore/Haven do it, draw up plans while employing legions of architects, and put their first SDP into space..... 3-4 years down the road.

They can't build their existing designs quickly though. Certainly quicker than new designs, but they're not set up for the kind of super-streamlined production pipeline the Manties had near the end of the havenite war; Think of the difference in US naval shipbuilding near the end of WW2 and what it is today. SLN shipyards are operating in a capability retention mode, which means that they build (at most) 2 or 3 SDs per decade. Ramping that up to what a Manty considers wartime production will likely take longer than the League has left to live....

On the one hand, you're absolutely right they can't really do all that much building... but on the other hand, Manticore also received a lot of handwavium "super building" rates for plot reasons. On a hull for hull basis, Manticore can build faster, but they can only put workers on so many ships before they lose that rate. Population reasons there, the League isn't constrained by population being so huge

The Solarian League has a lot of systems, and superdreadnought building was described as 'lucrative' and 'good for business and payoffs to friends', so there's probably a crapton of yards all over the place and varying from "ready to build the moment we get paid" to "we need to nuke this shipyard and rebuild it from scratch it's so old..."

But their existing design(s) for superdreadnoughts could be thrown at yards, and instructed to build them and they could get going right away, or spend a year or three fiddling with blueprints trying to make a new design that they know nothing about. Which is why they thought up the battlecruiser plan... if GA superdreadnought can wipe out SLN superdreadnought, then BC = SD for survival reasons = build BC's way faster and maybe have a chance.

Which is the opposite of when Manticore didn't design up DN(P)'s, because the cost of time to do the blueprint was more than it'd take to simply eat the risk of not getting ships in the field, to build the bigger SD(P)'s.

Somtaaw wrote:The Solarian League has a lot of systems, and superdreadnought building was described as 'lucrative' and 'good for business and payoffs to friends', so there's probably a crapton of yards all over the place and varying from "ready to build the moment we get paid" to "we need to nuke this shipyard and rebuild it from scratch it's so old..."

Yes, but there's a difference between a shipyard that punches out a few freighters per year and one that does the same for superdreadnoughts. It's a massive logistics problem: Even if you have the slipways to build the ships in, you don't have the impeller nodes, weapons, armor and god knows what other long-lead, high-complexity items a warship needs. Even if the people running the yards are willing to jump on SD contracts, they simply can't: The League's logistics net is currently being crippled by the RMMM withdrawal, and there's not enough slack in the system to compensate.

But their existing design(s) for superdreadnoughts could be thrown at yards, and instructed to build them and they could get going right away, or spend a year or three fiddling with blueprints trying to make a new design that they know nothing about. Which is why they thought up the battlecruiser plan... if GA superdreadnought can wipe out SLN superdreadnought, then BC = SD for survival reasons = build BC's way faster and maybe have a chance.

That is also a severe overestimation of the capabilities of the individual yards. Given how much manual labour is involved in Honorverse shipbuilding, going from civilian to military shipbuilding requires significant retraining of the people doing the work; Even if all the pipelines for the raw materials and parts are intact, no yard can hit the ground running and start building warships at optimal rates.

How long does Manticore plan to take to replace the ENTIRE industrial sector and be producing new warships after training an entirely new workforce? Why would you imagine it would take a core world even that long?

Somtaaw wrote:And that's essentially what Keyhole and Keyhole-II have done, SNIP

Ships can't truly give up their wedge, because wedge = TOTAL immunity to the top and bottom, spherical wedge can be penetrated everywhere. And we haven't exactly seen any evidence that a few sidewall penetrators can't do a COMPLETE drop of your spherical sidewall, so a repeat of either CL Fearless in Basilisk and/or Cardone's missiles against Saladin could result in a ship being naked to the next wave of missiles.


Additionally, are we 100% certain that fortresses actually use impeller's for their maneuvering, and not just a high-powered reaction thruster(s)?

When keyhole came out, DW initially said it was roughly the size of a LAC. ~20,000 tons. Once this was said, I among others, became a leading advocate that the SAG-C, to be an effective platform, would be far better off having a single keyhole, or only a partial keyhole, even at the expense of several broadside missile tubes and turning the ship into a 500,000+ ton ship. Why? Because anyone with a brain can do a simple rate equation and will notice that when the wedge if towards the oncoming missile, it cannot "ping" the ship in question to obtain a reading and therefore can ONLY rely on passive sensor readings when traveling at speeds greater than 0.5C.

RFC finally replied. He turned Keyhole I from 20,000 ton platform to a 65,000 ton platform and a KHII into double that.

Saying a ship cannot give up its wedge is pure nonsense. If it allows greater defense than retention; then you gladly forgo the wedge. End of story.

The only question is: Does constricting the number of CM's able to be thrown + wedge + Keyhole = better defense against a ravenous alpha swarm of missiles than no wedge + spherical sidewall with the ability to throw ~10X more counter missiles?

Well obviously current BuShips Weapons designers see the wedge + Keyhole being superior.

Lets look at trends that could upset this prevailing attitude within BuShips.

1) Offensive missiles are decreasing in size.
2) Offensive missiles are increasing in power.
3) Opponents will have FTL. Meaning CM doctrine just took yet another massive blow combined with alpha strike.
4) Keyhole may be shrinking in size over time or stay the same with increased control channels and defensive capabilities.
5) Counter missiles currently have no FTL component to even the playing field against Apollo

Lets assume #5 is addressed.
Still leaves #1 and #2 combined with stacked pods in an alpha strike without redress.

Keyhole helps very significantly against an alpha strike once missiles go into their terminal attack. But this does not address the ravenous hordes of missiles that are able to get through the paltry counter missile screen in the first place. It is also much easier to launch far more offensive missiles than defensive missiles. Without even bringing basic logic considering control links into the equation, Between Apollo, and tractored pods, one can literally fire 10X the number of offensive missiles compared to defensive.

Lets go with nice even numbers. Lets assume, an SD'P can "only" control 10X the number of a SAG-C. ~10,000 missiles. It can only fire in retaliation ~2000 CM's. CM's do not kill 1:1. It is not even 2:1.

So, a ship can fire 10,000 missiles but only has a prayer of killing 1000 before Keyhole. Lets assume Keyhole+PDLC takes care of 90% of the remainder. ~90-95++% of 9000 is still 500-1000 missiles able to hit your ship... DW said most SD class ships can only take ~150-250 hits... We have a massive problem.

On the other hand, if one can fire off 10X CM's by elminating the wedge. Now an SD'P in fortress mode + spherical sidewall which if you will recall is its MAIN ARMOR, can fire off 20,000 CM's against only 10,000 offensive missiles making it at least theoretically possible for the CM's to actually defend against its own offensive capability.

DO remember all of this scenario is predicated upon the Counter Missiles obtaining FTL guidance. Without this component, against FTL guided offensive weapons, it would not matter if an SDP could fire off 100,000 CM's. It would still die.

*** Predicated upon tonnage limit increasing as well ***

EDIT: PS, in the era of pod launch SDP/BCP it would be more logical to integrate the boatbays/Pod launch ports into the same space. An Assault shuttle is smaller than a pod. A pinnace is smaller yet.

If you go Spherical sidewall generators, you need to armor the dorsal and ventral surfaces accordingly. That cuts heavily into tonnage.

Basically, you're making a small fort with a hyperdrive.

The Wedge creates absolute invulnerability and blocks precise tracking of your hull's location against two aspects. With Keyhole, you can orient your wedge to be facing the concentration of enemy fire, denying the missiles a straight shot, forcing them to go for over/unders in the fraction of a second that they are crossing across the space between the ceiling and floor of the wedge, which is very hard on accuracy. A missile that makes it through your active defenses but cannot line up a clean shot or a well-aimed one is a missile that's unlikely to cause significant damage.

Relax wrote:
EDIT: PS, in the era of pod launch SDP/BCP it would be more logical to integrate the boatbays/Pod launch ports into the same space. An Assault shuttle is smaller than a pod. A pinnace is smaller yet.

Honestly, that's not a bad idea - all the parasites on a ship only take up the volume of a handful of pods. And when a boat bay is used, the pods will not, and when the pods are rolling, the parasites are going to be locked down.

I see 2 issues -

1) the boat bay will be a distance from the majority of the crew, so useless for evacuations when the ship is doomed.
2) How will RDs be handled? Currently RDs are a Boat Bay function. If the Boat bay is inside the pod bay, when the pods are rolling, no RDs can be ejected.

Perhaps move the main boat bay into the pod bay, and the RD bay and a smaller boat bay be left closer to the front.

If you have 5 SL shipyards that have been turning out one or two SDs a year, they might be able to ramp that up to 3 or 4 but the question is at what cost in terms of construction problems and flaws. Even Technodyne and building at the dedicated yard at Yildun is going to have problems doubling SD production (if the SLN wants SDs) because they would have to strip off so many workers from other classes. They could move to emergence war footing construction but would need money and materials and mostly trained people. The SL is going to have money problems shortly though Technodyne can probably take government "paper" in the form of notes and sell them or- and more likely- they can ask for payment in hard goods and materials which can be sold.

The bigger problem than even getting the people (and getting them up to speed) to handle that level of construction rate is what you are going to build. With just about everything in the present inventory of SL ships, they are starting with a massive tech and capability disadvantage against the more modern of the GA ships. Not all the GA ships since there are a lot of older classes, but anything into production by the time of the 2nd Haven war is going to be superior. Then there are the weapons. The SL may still have an advantage at energy range but the GA has no intention of getting into energy range.

How long is it likely to take the SLN (and people like Technodyne) to modify the existing designed to take the most modern/capable (nominally SLN) weapons like the Cataphracts in other than pods? Do they continue the construction on everthing under SDs (or under DNs because they just might still be building those for political reasons) to compleat as laid down and add only enhancements that fit within the existing frameworks and capasities of the physical layouts and capabilites? Do they think they are going to have 2 years to build out (after emergency design changes) the classes up to BC with what they have -either in-hand from Technodyne like Cataphract or Technodyne next step missiles- and so make the adjustments in size of everthing from tubes, magazines, loading systems, upgraded telemetry etc.?

Just who besides Technodyne (and probably Mannheim and other RF members who have but don't have them built or deployed) has the information and specs to actualy build Cataphracts and newer systems? That could be one more bottleneck in upgrading and providing ammunition to the SL and SL "allied" systems in putting higher performance ships into commission. Funny how that might creep up and bight the SLN in the butt.

You have shipyards. Manticore doesn't.

You have a modern industrial plant. Manticore doesn't.

You have a skilled workforce well trained in using your equipment. Manticore doesn't. Note that pretty much EVERYONE who was qualified to work in orbit or in a vacuum in Manticore is dead.

You have the design engineers for all the ancellary parts needed to build weapons and industrial equipment. Manticore doesn't.

And yet somehow manticore is supposed to building new SDs faster?

kzt wrote:And yet somehow manticore is supposed to building new SDs faster?

Not in the Manticore Binary System, no. In Bolthole and Beowulf, yes. Even taking transport times between Bolthole
and Beowulf, the GA can produce new SD(p)s faster than the League can even ramp up production of existing, obsolete, SD designs or outclassed smaller ships.

A thought occurred: How many moles does the MAlign have in Solarian shipyards? How big is the backdoor they have put into SLN self-destruct protocols?

Weird Harold wrote:

kzt wrote:And yet somehow manticore is supposed to building new SDs faster?

Not in the Manticore Binary System, no. In Bolthole and Beowulf, yes. /quote]
Really? Let me draw your attention to this quote from MoH:

"In effect, we've lost every ship under construction, the labor force which was building them, and the physical plant in which they were being built—and which was fabricating almost all the components the dispersed yards were assembling. That means that what we have in commission and working up at Trevor's Star now is all we're going to have for at least two T-years. For any capital ships, the delay will be more like four T-years. Minimum."

And I suspect that something very regrettable will happen to Beowulf in the near future. Worse, as Beowulf is going to be much more deeply penetrated than Manticore is (where the best they could do was plant an agent just as the goddamn foreign minister...), any tech given to Beowulf might as well be published on Mesa in the newspaper.