Tech they ought to have.

Somtaaw wrote:
Well that one actually makes sense. The mass drivers used in missile launchers, is to get the physical missile as far away from the ship, in as short a time as possible, so it can activate it's own wedge without getting fried by the launch ship.

If it weren't for that tidbit of wedge mechanics, you're totally right there's no need to have a mass driver missile launcher, when almost throwing them out a cargo hatch does the job just as well.

No you kick them out of a hatch they will fall through the skirt of the wedge in something like 10 seconds, at which point they are clear of the ship wedge.

munroburton wrote:
At 5 kps^2(~510g), it only takes five or six seconds for something dropped out of the rear to clear the wedge perimeter of a SD(150km from center to edge).

So nothing stops a warship from launching both its broadsides, waiting six seconds and boom, double-stack salvo on its way.

The purpose of the mass-driver launchers may be simply to scatter the missiles widely enough that they can all activate without wedge fratricide. But this is easily solvable with staggered activations.

The only other reason I can think of for needing that additional five seconds gone is perhaps during hard defensive maneuvering - to prevent the wedge from sweeping them up. However, again, I don't think honorverse warships turn or roll that quickly(a DD takes 100sec to turn 90 degrees)... and the rear opening of the wedge is the widest anyway.

Actually the rear opening is the smaller one. IIRC an SDs forward opening is 190 km tall while its rear is 'only' 40 km high. Still though it's high enough you don't have a significant risk of clipping the missile with the wedge.

Otoh I think you'd have to kick the missiles far enough away to clear the compensator field. Otherwise it experienced 0 accel relative to the ship.

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:
Well that one actually makes sense. The mass drivers used in missile launchers, is to get the physical missile as far away from the ship, in as short a time as possible, so it can activate it's own wedge without getting fried by the launch ship.

If it weren't for that tidbit of wedge mechanics, you're totally right there's no need to have a mass driver missile launcher, when almost throwing them out a cargo hatch does the job just as well.

No you kick them out of a hatch they will fall through the skirt of the wedge in something like 10 seconds, at which point they are clear of the ship wedge.

Only really works in a 1v1 ship fight though. Second you have two maneuvering Task Groups, let alone entire fleets involving dozens to hundreds of ships impellers, and hard maneuvering you risk losing much of your missiles.

Wall formation, anything at the front would be destroyed by just the second line, and so on and so forth until you get towards the back. Sphere would be out, line is just a wall that isn't stacked vertically so that's out too.

Punching missiles out of the mass drivers though allows more than single ships to get those missiles in space, and clear from wedges in the fastest possible time, not counting waiting for the slugs to clear the compensator so wedge acceleration clears the distance.

The wall is a 3D object, it's easy to arrange so they are clear behind.

kzt wrote:The wall is a 3D object, it's easy to arrange so they are clear behind.

yes and no. a space wall that slants too far means all the ships at the far end from the enemy are contributing less and less to their more exposed sisters, and also have more difficulty getting their beams into play. Of course, that's all assuming tech closer to the OBS days, when wallers mounted heavy beams because that was the only sure-fire way to kill waller, and from before the extended range CMs were designed and fielded as well.

With the new missile heavy designs, slanting your wall would allow the missiles without sacrificing too much, but that's something that really only recently became possible. And only for Haven Sector entities that have CM's with a 2mil plus engagement range.

GabrialSagan wrote:Disclaimer: I recognize that RFC set out with certain intentions with the Honorverse novels and certain technologies would get in the way of the story he is trying to tell. But with that being said...

I have always found it interesting that for all the amazing wonders of technology in the Honorverse that there are still certain pieces of technology that humanity does not have 2000 years in the future. Mind-Machine interfaces and cybernetic computer implants are completely absent. The ability to copy a human mind into a synthetic substrate and immerse a human consciousness into a virtual landscape completely eludes humans even after mastering counter-gravity and FTL travel. Never is there any mention of android servants or anti-matter being used as either a weapon or an energy source.

Again I am not criticizing as I imagine many of these technologies would make it difficult for Mr. Weber to tell the story he wants to tell. But it does make one wonder. What tech would you think humanity would have 2000 years from now that seems to be absent from Manticore, Old Terra, and the other worlds humanity has settled?

Some of technology you mentioned may exist but was dropped as impractical or not main stream.

There may be technological barriers to being able download someones mind in to a computer. While it would possible to make a computer as physically as complicated as the brain. The copying of everything that makes up a persons consciousness may be problematic as no two persons brains work a like.The brain dos not store memories in a fashion that makes any sort of technological sense. Of course a more practical issue is why any one who did that interact with the physical world when they can be a god of an artificial one.

Androids may be a case of the slavery taboo. The do have other types of household and industrial robots that work very well so why bother with an android?Of course Androids could exist they just can not mass produce them enough to make the economical compared to buying a flesh and blood slave or going to home appliance store and buying limited function robot off the shelf.

With the high level fusion tech available anti-matter tech may be seen as more trouble then it is worth. You have to manufacture it as well as it requires special storage and handling. Nuclear weapons, lasers, and kinetic strikes they do have are capable of dealing insane amounts of heavy damage with out the troubles of dealing with the storage requirements of antimatter.

GabrialSagan wrote:Mind-Machine interfaces and cybernetic computer implants are completely absent. The ability to copy a human mind into a synthetic substrate and immerse a human consciousness into a virtual landscape completely eludes humans even after mastering counter-gravity and FTL travel.

Do you have any idea just how difficult that actually is? To get an accurate result, you need to be able to scan every damn subatomic particle down to EXACT location, spin and vector.

Which according to science as we know it so far, isn´t even possible...

Theories for FTL travel? There´s dozens of those already today, i have a few myself that should work just fine, IF we can ever get the technical stuff needed to implement them working.


Mind-machine interfaces and cybernetic implants already exists, they just pretty much suck(compared to the "real thing"(ie the original bodyparts)). It´s only really when there has been severe damage to someone, that it is truly useful.

Oh yeah, like you know, Honor´s prostethics...
So those ARE INCLUDED already. They´re just not very visible, because what does exist is clearly nothing worth spending a lot of time fawning over.

GabrialSagan wrote:Never is there any mention of android servants or anti-matter being used as either a weapon or an energy source.

Antimatter has a lot of potential energy yes, but handling it is VERY precarious and troublesome, to the point where once you take into account all the safety measures needed, the higher energy density you get in theory is suddenly not so much greater than that of hydrogen used for fusion, which is a GAS that can be stored under pressure already today.

Androids? Who cares about androids, gynoids sounds so much more fun.



Anyway, robots are currently a novelty thing and big news, but they´re really not economical or very useful beyond publicity stunts.

It´s quite possible that that remains the same in the future, anything that isn´t done by industrial robotics, needs the "human touch" so robotics of the android type are just not useful enough to be worth their pricetag.

Relax wrote:Have computers that easily fit in an artificial hand/eye allowing it to work, yet CM's and RD's cannot communicate with each other with very simple information in a layered defense... Something we could have done in the early 80's and had even proposed for over the horizon swarm tactics without the use of satellites. Might notice, but this has been repurposed by DARPA again...

Why don´t you go check just what the obstacles are that is the reason why modern ships still have interception limits counted in SINGLE DIGITS?

And that´s while playing in a 2.5 dimensional area counted in meters or km, not thousands or millions of km.

Pods that can't fire CM's to counter an alpha strike This one is just obstinate obstreperousness on RFC's part.

IIRC, RFC has already said that they CAN, they will just be bloody useless.

Why missile tubes need to "fire missiles at all" instead of just dump them out the back when you are accelerating at 500+ G's..... Math? Say what?

Oh dear, maybe beacuse otherwise the ship would be locked from maneuvering, oh my...

The absurdity that there is actually a defense officer of more than a single person who does anything other than flip an ON switch... As if a person can do anything constructive that hasn't already been pre programmed weeks, months, years in advance.

That´s such a stupid comment that it just shows off how completely ignorant you are of the subject.

A computer assisted by a human always beats a computer that runs on set programming.

Why it takes a "genius" to build ships using computer control who 3d build the danged things on the nanoscale to begin with... Even someone with a dunce cap should be able to do so. How hard is it to hit "GO". Should have had built many 10's of thousands of ships instead of a couple hundred over many years.

Do you have any clue about what undermanning a ship can do to it? Especially when involved in combat? A very common result even on Earth´s oceans, is a ship sinking, drifting or destroyed because there was a lack of redundancy.
Remember that concept, because surprise surprise! It´s one of the most basic parts of military operations.
Something ALWAYS go wrong somewhere, and if you then have not enough redundancy built into your forces and plans, you LOSE.

Very very quickly.

Somtaaw wrote:

kzt wrote:The wall is a 3D object, it's easy to arrange so they are clear behind.

yes and no. a space wall that slants too far means all the ships at the far end from the enemy are contributing less and less to their more exposed sisters, and also have more difficulty getting their beams into play. Of course, that's all assuming tech closer to the OBS days, when wallers mounted heavy beams because that was the only sure-fire way to kill waller, and from before the extended range CMs were designed and fielded as well.

With the new missile heavy designs, slanting your wall would allow the missiles without sacrificing too much, but that's something that really only recently became possible. And only for Haven Sector entities that have CM's with a 2mil plus engagement range.

A slanted wall takes up all of a couple kklicks even with hundreds of ships out of ~2Mil km... You get 3 dimensions you know...

Somtaaw wrote:

Relax wrote:The absurdity that there is actually a defense officer of more than a single person who does anything other than flip an ON switch... As if a person can do anything constructive that hasn't already been pre programmed weeks, months, years in advance.

And this actually makes sense as well. If you have an idiot operating it, who relies on canned software, versus someone who is operating the same software but operating on training and intuitive leaps... the operator wins.

Canned software is only good, as long as things don't change, and during a battle, things are going to change quickly and in ways you cannot always predict you can almost count on that.

Now we saw this all in the books already, and it does hold together. Thunder of God was being operated by a bunch of idiots, who were barely able to operate it at all, and never had been comprehensively trained by Theisman.

On the other side, you had Cardones who spent years on Sagananami Island in the tactical schools, then his middy cruise, goes on to Basilisk Station (and that particular battle), and finally goes on a two year patrol in Silesia before winding up fighting Thunder.

Cumulatively, that works out to something between 6 to 10 years of operating the tactical panel, and learning to do tricks while also surviving hostile fire. Versus whatever a planet-bound programmer can think up, without ever having to improvise while also limited to situations he can think up and computer simulations to test it.


And that's also not counting what happens if your computer storage gets damaged, and those pretty canned defense strategies gets wiped, which I will concede would be a pretty freak hit. But considering how often we see a hit to a boat bay, that goes on to destroy CIC (probable location of canned software), then flag bridges or real bridge or the fusion cores... yeah I'll take a live tactical console operator over "computer, activate defense plan..." anyday of the week.

Turn brain on, turn off DW baloney... Then reconsider what actually happens and HOW fast it happens.

If a multi redundant computer gets fried, then YOU, can't do anything anyways. A manual operator on mount can, but you sitting in C&C can't as that means by definition you are cut off from said CM tube, or all CM tubes. It is called redundancy... It is impossible to have one node of a computer crash take out your system. All nodes must be down. Without said node you have no access to said CM to upload said data...

Why you have 5 computers and 4 sets of wiring in an airplane that is flown by wire... Your interface to your controls goes THROUGH all 5 computers and 4 sets of wiring. It only takes one set of wires and one computer to fly...

EDIT: Math time:Showing how stupid it is to say a human can do Jack Diddle__________________-
Assume sensors far out see one blob and fires 1 CM when in reality it is 2. 1) When do you know it is 2 missiles? and 2) Can a human operator tell it is 2 before a computer, let alone see it and fire off another CM

1) Solve in reverse. Time to get a CM to minimal interception range from the ship. Assume the firing key has already been depressed and its in the tube ready to go via C&C loop etc.

What is its initial Velocity? 1000km/s via mass driver?
Go with a wedge depth from ship of 50KM or so(small ship)
If 1000km/s v0 then requires essentially no time just to clear the ships wedge. t ~ 0.05

Lets go with ~0s for best scenario.

What is minimal distance before you do NOT fire and rather use PDLC? 100,000km?

Assume best scenario: v0 = 1k km/s, a = 10kmpss

t = time to clear wedge(0s) and get to 100k km = 13s

Distance at which you need to determine if one "blob" = two missiles. Assuming you do not know how many missiles were fired to begin with... which the books all say is rather apparent so we are left to believe a computer all of a sudden can't count to 20 without taking its socks off... and likewise can't put CM's in line with each other... Now add reaction time of a human who has to select the missed missile and hit fire instead of the computer doing it... As if the computer doesn't already know Friend from Foe Missiles aren't exactly stealthy you know...

V incoming, Best case scenario, SDM, 13s @100,000km intercept, is 1,000,000km @0.25c for distinguishing between 1 and 2 missiles. Assuming you have spare CM's that were not already launched for some odd reason... Its not like you don't already know that CM's miss incoming targets...

This is the equivalent of saying a human in a wet navy today should be in charge of using the CIWS/SEARAM... You might have noticed but no navy on earth is that stupid...