Congratulations! The war is over! Now what?

Loren Pechtel wrote:The SLN doesn't have coast-capable missile tech. Their DDMs are crude with nowhere near the range of GA DDMs.

Please provide a cite for that.

David Weber will do what he will do. Remember that. And do not forget the Mesans. Whatever the Mesans have and did, consider the Sollies will be able to do. The GA does not have a chance in hell. Yep!. Less than 5 years.

Imagine 10,000, no, 100,000 small new construction high tech Mesan designed Sollie built death ships with Mesan stealthed kinetic impact weapons. One thousand per inhabited GA planet. Do the math. Yikes! Ouch!

You GA lovers need to burn through this pesky fact. The Sollies will roll over the Grand Alliance. The entire Manticore system will resemble a big burned out trash pile. Honor needs to consider a good bolt hole. Yep.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The SLN doesn't have coast-capable missile tech. Their DDMs are crude with nowhere near the range of GA DDMs.

Please provide a cite for that.

I'm pretty sure we've never seen discussion of Cataphracts having a coast phase. But perhaps that's just because even their powered range is too far for accurate targeting?

HB of CJ wrote:David Weber will do what he will do. Remember that. And do not forget the Mesans. Whatever the Mesans have and did, consider the Sollies will be able to do. The GA does not have a chance in hell. Yep!. Less than 5 years.

Imagine 10,000, no, 100,000 small new construction high tech Mesan designed Sollie built death ships with Mesan stealthed kinetic impact weapons. One thousand per inhabited GA planet. Do the math. Yikes! Ouch!

You GA lovers need to burn through this pesky fact. The Sollies will roll over the Grand Alliance. The entire Manticore system will resemble a big burned out trash pile. Honor needs to consider a good bolt hole. Yep.

The SLN officers who are aware of the tech imbalance seem considerably less confident. Do you know something that they don't? Building a new fleet from a standing start in less than five years seems ... optimistic.

Meanwhile, it's the Malign that seems to be heading for a hole to hide in.

munroburton wrote:1) The total number of known inhabited systems is about 4,000. 1800 of them are League members, with "hundreds" of protectorates in the Verge.

Where do you get the total number of inhabited systems is about 4,000? Please supply your citation.

manticore is 500 LY from sol, was colonized a thousand years ago, and is nowhere near the outer edge of the verge.

With manticore being 500LY from SOL there is no way that the SL, including the verge, is more than a 400LY radius. That includes a volume of 268 million cubic light years

500 LY includes a volume of 524 million cubic light years. If the distribution of habitable systems is even, that would mean that at the time of the founding of manticore there would have been at least 3,910 habitable planets.

In order for there to be only 4,000 colonized worlds, that would mean that for the last 800 years since manticore was founded there has been almost zero colonization.

This type of growth tends to be linear as to distance. If we count from when the manticore colony ship left earth and figure in hyper travel, we could be looking at 256,000 colonized worlds.

Another option would make it a doubling function. 4,000 colonies or normal space colony ships in 500 years, 32,000 colonies in 2,000 years.

The actual number of colonies is what RFC says it is. I recall somewhere that there is supposed to be 10,000 human settled worlds. whether that is from RFC or someone else, I don't know, but was unable to find the reference in a quick search.

HB of CJ wrote:Imagine 10,000, no, 100,000 small new construction high tech Mesan designed Sollie built death ships with Mesan stealthed kinetic impact weapons. One thousand per inhabited GA planet. Do the math. Yikes! Ouch!

Why would the MAlign provide new ship designs to the League when their goal is to destroy the league. The MAlign does want to destroy Manticore, Haven and Grayson as well, but they need them to destroy the League first. They may provide Cataphract missiles or similar tech because while they are better than SLN tech, the MAlign knows they are inferior to MAnticore tech -- even Erewhonese "Manticore Lite" tech.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The SLN doesn't have coast-capable missile tech. Their DDMs are crude with nowhere near the range of GA DDMs.

Please provide a cite for that.

Well the 2nd half of that is true, at least if you're talking about powered range. We know their powered range from rest is 16.6 million km [Torch of Freedom: Ch 58]. That's far less than a Mk-16's powered range from rest 30 million km), and barely equal to a Mark 14 ERMs range.

However I'm confident that the first part is wrong.
A Cataphract has two distinct drives.
There has to be some delay between shutdown of the 1st stage's and the activation of the 2nd stage's (otherwise they'd mutually destroy each other). If you can delaying for a heartbeat why not arbitrarily?

Also the same chapter of Torch of Freedom was running down the limitations of the Cataphract design (at least as perceived by the People's Navy in Exile) and doesn't say anything about no ballistic phase.


All MDM/DDM ranges are quotes as powered range from rest, even though all known MDM/DDM designs can add ballistic coast phases to increase that. So I don't think you can read anything into the Cataphract's range also being quoted that way.
(Now whether the smaller sensor you can mount on the smaller terminal bus of a CM powered missile is good for much at even greater range is a different question; but the drive mechanism should be good for a ballistic phase)

Jonathan_S wrote:(Now whether the smaller sensor you can mount on the smaller terminal bus of a CM powered missile is good for much at even greater range is a different question; but the drive mechanism should be good for a ballistic phase)

There is no exhaust from an impeller drive. The CM pretty much has to be on the rear of the main missile. So you use the warhead and target seeker of the main missile.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:(Now whether the smaller sensor you can mount on the smaller terminal bus of a CM powered missile is good for much at even greater range is a different question; but the drive mechanism should be good for a ballistic phase)

There is no exhaust from an impeller drive. The CM pretty much has to be on the rear of the main missile. So you use the warhead and target seeker of the main missile.

That's not how I interpreted the description from ToF.

Torch of Freedom: Ch 58 wrote:they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.
[snip]
Compared to standard missiles of their size, their warheads were light, and the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids which could be stuffed into such a size-restricted terminal bus were limited.

Now it's true that they didn't actually say which end of the missile the CM drive unit was grafted onto. But there are three reasons I think it's the front end.

1) All renderings and diagrams we have of normal and MDM missiles put the drives at the rear so the standard missile drive (first stage) would be back there; and we know that without the baffle tech nearby inactive nodes are destroyed by active impeller nodes. So you need significant physical separation. (And they obviously don't have the baffle tech or they could build normal MDMs). That seems to put the CM drive near the front which is as far away as you can get on only a 20% longer body.

2) It also seems to talks about cramming the laserhead and the CM drive onto the same end of the missile; plus it talks about the restricted terminal bus. If you had the standard missile up front you'd have a standard sized terminal bus because the CM would be grafted onto the aft end and the front end shouldn't need to be changed.

3) This is more speculative, but unlike MDM and DDM which normally talk about 1st, 2nd, and 3rd drives the Cataphract descriptions talk about 1st and 2nd stages. I suspect that the standard missile body is actually discarded letting the CM drive push a smaller diameter 2nd stage. That could fit with the terminal bus limitations; and I've previously speculated that being positioned within the working diameter of an impeller ring might be a relative "quiet zone" in terms of the destructive interernce they normally cause with inactive nodes; though I admit theres no real text-ev I've found to support that.

Jonathan_S wrote:Now it's true that they didn't actually say which end of the missile the CM drive unit was grafted onto. But there are three reasons I think it's the front end.

There is only one bit of textev that convinces me that the CM Drive is the final stage -- and likely mounted forward -- is that the second stage is called the "sprint stage:"

Torch of Freedom
Chapter Fifty-eight wrote:X-Ray-Charlie Three was still coming fully online. There hadn't been time to complete the redeployment it envisioned, but the cruisers responsible for managing Hammer Force's defensive fire in the outer defense zone were up and tracking. Counter-missiles raced outward, using their hugely overpowered impeller wedges to sweep holes in the incoming fire. But the sudden burst of speed from the Cataphracts' second-stage "sprint drive" had taken Rozsak's tactical officers by surprise. None of the fire control solutions had allowed for it, and kill percentages in the outer zone were less than half of what they ought to have been. Far too many of the first salvo's shipkillers broke past the outer intercept zone, and more counter-missiles erupted from the destroyers tasked to back up the cruisers as they raced into the middle intercept zone.