No Scorched Earth-Effects of a Living McBryde

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Missiles that lose lock seek targets on their own--nowhere near as well as if they're being controlled. While I'm not picturing using actual missiles the seekers should still work. The hull is covered in lasing rods that point at anything they can see. That should basically clear out anything near the wormhole.

No, the missile seekers ability to find and lock onto a 3 meter diameter black object covered in RAM and cooled to background is very, very limited. And that is what a mine is.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Then the mine has no sensors that can detect a ship.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Missiles that lose lock seek targets on their own--nowhere near as well as if they're being controlled. While I'm not picturing using actual missiles the seekers should still work. The hull is covered in lasing rods that point at anything they can see. That should basically clear out anything near the wormhole.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Missiles that lose lock seek targets on their own--nowhere near as well as if they're being controlled. While I'm not picturing using actual missiles the seekers should still work. The hull is covered in lasing rods that point at anything they can see. That should basically clear out anything near the wormhole.

The thing is, the way RFC stacked the deck there's no reason for a defender to be close enough to the terminus to get damaged by energy fire. So even if we take your idea to the extreme and say you packed it with enough lasing rods to destroy any ship within 400,000 km of the terminus that likely still won't kill any defenders. (And that's generously granting you ship-mounted energy range, not the 30-50,000 km a laser head's lasing rod us effective for)

There are asymmeties to the engagement that overwhelmingly benifit the defender.
The first asymmetry that screws an attacker is that defenders get to have sidewalls and attackers don't. Not until they clear the grav sheer of the entry lane - which takes upwards of a minute. An energy mount can pierce a sidewall at around 400,000 km. But it's effective against bare armor out to about 1,000,000 km. So a defender wanting to engage attackers with lasers or graders would almost certainly position themselves back about 650,000 km far enough to be immune to return energy fire but still smash through the bare armor or the attacker who can't yet raise a sidewall.

The second asymmetry that the defender benefits from is the whole the grav sheer is powerful enough to virtually instantly destroy any missile or decoy the attacker might try to use (and prevent the use of wedge or sidewalls), and long enough to take minutes to run clear of, it narrow enough for laserheads to engage ships within it. Their 30-50.000 km standoff range slightly exceeds the radius of the grav sheer cylinder. So defenders can stay even further back (though close enough the attackers can't run clear of the grav sheer before the missiles arrive) and wreck the largely defenseless attacker using laserheads. I say largely defenseless as they can still use PDLCs and onboard ECM against the defender's fire - but no sidewalls, CMs, decoys, screening LACs, etc.
This is especially effective if the defenders have missile pods.

So, it seems to me, that it's quite secondary whether someone might be able to engineer a way around RFC's "no unmanned transits" rule since the giant lasing rod equipped flying bomb won't affect any half-competent defender even if it did get through.

JohnRoth wrote:I'm kind of scratching my head at some of the replies. I always thought that the entry and exit lanes were safe paths where you could use your wedge and have your sidewalls up, and that you had to drop them in order to configure the sails to transit the actual wormhole. Like a corridor with a door at the end. That maneuver, and the reverse when you drop the sails and bring up the wedge, take a significant amount of time, which is when you're vulnerable.

Now some of the comments suggest that you can't have your wedge and sidewalls up while you're in the entry and exit lanes at all, which doesn't seem right. You'd simply be going ballistic until you brought the sails up at the end. They'd be useless before then because there's no grave sheer in the entry and exit lane to use to use them on.

What am I missing?

runsforcelery wrote:You come through the terminus. You have no impeller wedge. You cannot drop your Warshawski sails and reconfigure to wedge until you are clear of the grav wave running through the terminus. This takes anywhere from about 20 seconds to as much as 3 minutes, depending on the terminus. (Actually, it can take even longer for some termini because the nature of their internal stresses imposes a very, very low transit velocity.) Until you're clear of the grav wave, none of the ships you plan on launching away from the mothership can bring up their wedges, either, nor can they survive in the gravity wave without using Warshawski sails of their own, which means that the instant they separate from the mothership and began attempting to move independently, they get ripped apart by the aforesaid gravity wave, without even worrying about what any defenders might do to them.

So let's say it takes one minute to clear the gravity wave, and then it takes another 4 minutes to bring up your parasite ships' hyper generators (you can't turn off the mothership's hyper generator until she's clear of the gravity wave, which is an extension of hyper-space into normal-space), so you have basically 5 minutes in which your ship is mother naked as far as any form of passive defenses other than armor are concerned and has to move on the exact exit vector imposed by the terminus. (You do remember my talking about the defined traffic lanes for the Junction, yes? I believe I started doing that in On Basilisk Station.) The hyper footprint when you come through is unmistakable and is enough, all by itself, to absolutely localize your ship, even if you had all the active EW and stealth systems in the universe covering you at the moment of your emergence (which they won't be), and your course from that point is 100% predictable until you clear the gravity wave and can begin maneuvering freely under impeller drive. The energy batteries (or the mines, which are basically the same thing as really, really, really big capital missile laser heads) know exactly where you are and where you will be at the instant they fire, without even the distortion of a sidewall to protect you, and they will tear you apart before you ever manage to launch the parasites. (And, by the way, I'd be interested in seeing the design which is going to permit you to launch these scores or hundreds of small, hyper-capable starships without sail or wedge fratricide wiping them all out.) If you do manage to clear the gravity wave, drop your mothership's Warshawski sails, switch off her hyper generator, separate the parasites, and somehow move them away from the mothership without their destroying one another with their impeller wedges, the defenses are still going to have a perfect track on you at the instant you separate and they're going to be firing light-speed weapons at insanely short (for the Honorverse) ranges at vessels which have to be so small and so lightly armored that a point defense cluster would eviscerate them.

Jonathan_S wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:I'm kind of scratching my head at some of the replies. I always thought that the entry and exit lanes were safe paths where you could use your wedge and have your sidewalls up, and that you had to drop them in order to configure the sails to transit the actual wormhole. Like a corridor with a door at the end. That maneuver, and the reverse when you drop the sails and bring up the wedge, take a significant amount of time, which is when you're vulnerable.

Now some of the comments suggest that you can't have your wedge and sidewalls up while you're in the entry and exit lanes at all, which doesn't seem right. You'd simply be going ballistic until you brought the sails up at the end. They'd be useless before then because there's no grave sheer in the entry and exit lane to use to use them on.

What am I missing?

You're missing the context of several posts RFC made a few years ago in threads like "Defending a Wormhole Juncton/Terminus" and "SPOILER - Finding the Torch Wormhole's Destination". A previous, persistent, round of advocating for assaulting through the wormhole led him to significantly elaborate on why this isn't Starfire and it wasn't going to happen. In the process we learned a lot more about the mechanics of wormhole exit.

Here's part of a good example from 13-June-2012

runsforcelery wrote:You come through the terminus. You have no impeller wedge. You cannot drop your Warshawski sails and reconfigure to wedge until you are clear of the grav wave running through the terminus. This takes anywhere from about 20 seconds to as much as 3 minutes, depending on the terminus. (Actually, it can take even longer for some termini because the nature of their internal stresses imposes a very, very low transit velocity.) Until you're clear of the grav wave, none of the ships you plan on launching away from the mothership can bring up their wedges, either, nor can they survive in the gravity wave without using Warshawski sails of their own, which means that the instant they separate from the mothership and began attempting to move independently, they get ripped apart by the aforesaid gravity wave, without even worrying about what any defenders might do to them.

So let's say it takes one minute to clear the gravity wave, and then it takes another 4 minutes to bring up your parasite ships' hyper generators (you can't turn off the mothership's hyper generator until she's clear of the gravity wave, which is an extension of hyper-space into normal-space), so you have basically 5 minutes in which your ship is mother naked as far as any form of passive defenses other than armor are concerned and has to move on the exact exit vector imposed by the terminus. (You do remember my talking about the defined traffic lanes for the Junction, yes? I believe I started doing that in On Basilisk Station.) The hyper footprint when you come through is unmistakable and is enough, all by itself, to absolutely localize your ship, even if you had all the active EW and stealth systems in the universe covering you at the moment of your emergence (which they won't be), and your course from that point is 100% predictable until you clear the gravity wave and can begin maneuvering freely under impeller drive. The energy batteries (or the mines, which are basically the same thing as really, really, really big capital missile laser heads) know exactly where you are and where you will be at the instant they fire, without even the distortion of a sidewall to protect you, and they will tear you apart before you ever manage to launch the parasites. (And, by the way, I'd be interested in seeing the design which is going to permit you to launch these scores or hundreds of small, hyper-capable starships without sail or wedge fratricide wiping them all out.) If you do manage to clear the gravity wave, drop your mothership's Warshawski sails, switch off her hyper generator, separate the parasites, and somehow move them away from the mothership without their destroying one another with their impeller wedges, the defenses are still going to have a perfect track on you at the instant you separate and they're going to be firing light-speed weapons at insanely short (for the Honorverse) ranges at vessels which have to be so small and so lightly armored that a point defense cluster would eviscerate them.

For some reason that series of highly informative posts never made it over onto the infodump site; which is a shame.

War of Honor, Chapter 34 wrote:"Very well." Zachary acknowledged, and looked back down at the face on the small screen beside her left knee. "Prepare to rig foresail for transit, Mr. Hooja," she said formally, precisely as if Arswendo hadn't been prepared to do just that for the last twenty minutes.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Standing by," he replied with equally redundant formality.
"Threshold in three-zero seconds," Thatcher informed her captain.
"Stand ready, Chief Tobias," Zachary said.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Tobias responded, and Zachary consciously reminded herself not to hold her breath as Harvest Joy's icon continued to creep ever so slowly forward.
"Threshold!" Thatcher announced.
"Rig foresail for transit," Zachary commanded.
"Rigging foresail, aye."
To a visual observer, nothing about Harvest Joy changed in any respect as Hooja threw the switch down in Main Engineering, but Zachary's instruments were another matter entirely. Harvest Joy's impeller wedge dropped instantly to half strength as her forward beta nodes shut down and the matching alpha nodes reconfigured. They no longer generated their portion of the survey ship's normal-space stress bands; instead, they projected a Warshawski sail, a circular disk of focused gravitational energy, perpendicular to Harvest Joy's long axis and extending for over three hundred kilometers in every direction.
"Standby to rig aftersail on my mark," Zachary murmured, and Hooja acknowledged once again as Harvest Joy continued to creep forward under the power of her after impellers alone and another readout flickered to life. Zachary watched its flashing numerals climb steadily as the foresail moved deeper and deeper into the Junction. The normal safety margin was considerably wider than usual because of the survey ship's relatively low acceleration and velocity, but that didn't make Zachary feel any less tense.
The numbers suddenly stopped flashing. They continued to climb, but their steady glow told her that the foresail was now drawing sufficient power from the grav waves twisting down the invisible pathway of the Junction to provide movement, and she nodded sharply.
"Rig aftersail now," she said crisply.
"Rigging aftersail, aye," Hooja replied, and Harvest Joy twitched as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and a second Warshawski sail flicked into life at the far end of her hull from the first.
Zachary looked up from her displays to watch Chief Tobias take the ship through the transition from impeller to hyper sail. The maneuver was trickier than the experienced petty officer made it look, but there was a reason Tobias had been chosen for this mission. His hands moved smoothly, confidently, and Harvest Joy slid through the interface into the terminus without so much as a quiver. He held the survey ship rock-steady, and Zachary grimaced around a familiar wave of queasiness.

Jonathan_S wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:I'm kind of scratching my head at some of the replies. I always thought that the entry and exit lanes were safe paths where you could use your wedge and have your sidewalls up, and that you had to drop them in order to configure the sails to transit the actual wormhole. Like a corridor with a door at the end. That maneuver, and the reverse when you drop the sails and bring up the wedge, take a significant amount of time, which is when you're vulnerable.

Now some of the comments suggest that you can't have your wedge and sidewalls up while you're in the entry and exit lanes at all, which doesn't seem right. You'd simply be going ballistic until you brought the sails up at the end. They'd be useless before then because there's no grave sheer in the entry and exit lane to use to use them on.

What am I missing?

You're missing the context of several posts RFC made a few years ago in threads like "Defending a Wormhole Juncton/Terminus" and "SPOILER - Finding the Torch Wormhole's Destination". A previous, persistent, round of advocating for assaulting through the wormhole led him to significantly elaborate on why this isn't Starfire and it wasn't going to happen. In the process we learned a lot more about the mechanics of wormhole exit.

Here's part of a good example from 13-June-2012

runsforcelery wrote:You come through the terminus. You have no impeller wedge. You cannot drop your Warshawski sails and reconfigure to wedge until you are clear of the grav wave running through the terminus. This takes anywhere from about 20 seconds to as much as 3 minutes, depending on the terminus. (Actually, it can take even longer for some termini because the nature of their internal stresses imposes a very, very low transit velocity.) Until you're clear of the grav wave, none of the ships you plan on launching away from the mothership can bring up their wedges, either, nor can they survive in the gravity wave without using Warshawski sails of their own, which means that the instant they separate from the mothership and began attempting to move independently, they get ripped apart by the aforesaid gravity wave, without even worrying about what any defenders might do to them.

So let's say it takes one minute to clear the gravity wave, and then it takes another 4 minutes to bring up your parasite ships' hyper generators (you can't turn off the mothership's hyper generator until she's clear of the gravity wave, which is an extension of hyper-space into normal-space), so you have basically 5 minutes in which your ship is mother naked as far as any form of passive defenses other than armor are concerned and has to move on the exact exit vector imposed by the terminus. (You do remember my talking about the defined traffic lanes for the Junction, yes? I believe I started doing that in On Basilisk Station.) The hyper footprint when you come through is unmistakable and is enough, all by itself, to absolutely localize your ship, even if you had all the active EW and stealth systems in the universe covering you at the moment of your emergence (which they won't be), and your course from that point is 100% predictable until you clear the gravity wave and can begin maneuvering freely under impeller drive. The energy batteries (or the mines, which are basically the same thing as really, really, really big capital missile laser heads) know exactly where you are and where you will be at the instant they fire, without even the distortion of a sidewall to protect you, and they will tear you apart before you ever manage to launch the parasites. (And, by the way, I'd be interested in seeing the design which is going to permit you to launch these scores or hundreds of small, hyper-capable starships without sail or wedge fratricide wiping them all out.) If you do manage to clear the gravity wave, drop your mothership's Warshawski sails, switch off her hyper generator, separate the parasites, and somehow move them away from the mothership without their destroying one another with their impeller wedges, the defenses are still going to have a perfect track on you at the instant you separate and they're going to be firing light-speed weapons at insanely short (for the Honorverse) ranges at vessels which have to be so small and so lightly armored that a point defense cluster would eviscerate them.

For some reason that series of highly informative posts never made it over onto the infodump site; which is a shame.

JohnRoth wrote:
Yup, I read that, and I thought that's what I said. Let me clarify. The issue is the entry and exit lanes. Are we talking about the entire entry and exit lane being a single, straight line to the actual "doorway" where you have to have your sails up to transit or you'll be ripped to cosmic dust bunnies, or is the transit lane longer and possibly twistier than this?

My impression is the latter. This is the Harvest Joy's transit to Lynx. Notice that the wedge doesn't get dropped until after the first sail is up.

War of Honor, Chapter 34 wrote:"Very well." Zachary acknowledged, and looked back down at the face on the small screen beside her left knee. "Prepare to rig foresail for transit, Mr. Hooja," she said formally, precisely as if Arswendo hadn't been prepared to do just that for the last twenty minutes.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Standing by," he replied with equally redundant formality.
"Threshold in three-zero seconds," Thatcher informed her captain.
"Stand ready, Chief Tobias," Zachary said.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Tobias responded, and Zachary consciously reminded herself not to hold her breath as Harvest Joy's icon continued to creep ever so slowly forward.
"Threshold!" Thatcher announced.
"Rig foresail for transit," Zachary commanded.
"Rigging foresail, aye."
To a visual observer, nothing about Harvest Joy changed in any respect as Hooja threw the switch down in Main Engineering, but Zachary's instruments were another matter entirely. Harvest Joy's impeller wedge dropped instantly to half strength as her forward beta nodes shut down and the matching alpha nodes reconfigured. They no longer generated their portion of the survey ship's normal-space stress bands; instead, they projected a Warshawski sail, a circular disk of focused gravitational energy, perpendicular to Harvest Joy's long axis and extending for over three hundred kilometers in every direction.
"Standby to rig aftersail on my mark," Zachary murmured, and Hooja acknowledged once again as Harvest Joy continued to creep forward under the power of her after impellers alone and another readout flickered to life. Zachary watched its flashing numerals climb steadily as the foresail moved deeper and deeper into the Junction. The normal safety margin was considerably wider than usual because of the survey ship's relatively low acceleration and velocity, but that didn't make Zachary feel any less tense.
The numbers suddenly stopped flashing. They continued to climb, but their steady glow told her that the foresail was now drawing sufficient power from the grav waves twisting down the invisible pathway of the Junction to provide movement, and she nodded sharply.
"Rig aftersail now," she said crisply.
"Rigging aftersail, aye," Hooja replied, and Harvest Joy twitched as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and a second Warshawski sail flicked into life at the far end of her hull from the first.
Zachary looked up from her displays to watch Chief Tobias take the ship through the transition from impeller to hyper sail. The maneuver was trickier than the experienced petty officer made it look, but there was a reason Tobias had been chosen for this mission. His hands moved smoothly, confidently, and Harvest Joy slid through the interface into the terminus without so much as a quiver. He held the survey ship rock-steady, and Zachary grimaced around a familiar wave of queasiness.

By the way, as far as I can tell, nothing from this site has ever been posted to the snippets. I think everything there is from the Bar. I have no idea why.

(By the way, a little earlier in this scene, it says there were no wormholes from which no one ever came back - contradicting the statement later that there was one known killer wormhole.)

Jonathan_S wrote:For some reason that series of highly informative posts never made it over onto the infodump site; which is a shame.