Discussions on raiding...

Duckk wrote:I don't see how David could be any clearer in his opinion about people's ideas for Edict violations.

But when an obvious and open Edict violation got some makeup put on and was dressed up with a nice dress the SLN WAS willing to do it. And so yeah, I think they will when given another similar situation.

mmmmm...

Didn't realise you had copies of the Edict and associated statutes, regulations and case law. Do share!

kzt wrote:

Duckk wrote:I don't see how David could be any clearer in his opinion about people's ideas for Edict violations.

But when an obvious and open Edict violation got some makeup put on and was dressed up with a nice dress the SLN WAS willing to do it. And so yeah, I think they will when given another similar situation.

Neither Haven nor Manticore have any interest in being involved in EE violations. They really also don't want to be involved in fighting the systems of the SL worlds but they do have every need to keep the SLN far enough away from their home and member systems.

The League leadership- actual bureaucratic leadership not the "elected" officials with no power- can't see any way for themselves to survive (as in remain living not just keep their power and money) if they can't remove the problem of the GA and neighbors being able to ignore SL control of whatever it can get it's hands on.

As presently configured and with it's legal system, the SL can't be allowed to continue but no one has any hope of changing it without forcing changes- changes no one inside the system can see happening. That is the reason for the Harrington Doctrine. Have the SL/SLN break it's teeth against itself and shatter. Defend yourselves and provide what protection possible to anyone who is willing to arrive at negotiated trade and treaty agreements.

The commerce raiding- and don't think for a second that it would end up just being only commerce raiding as that isn't going to have the effects Kingsford thinks it will- won't break the GA. What it will do is drag a lot of other systems into the fray on the side of the GA if only by ending up nutral.

npadln wrote:What kind of crew does a ballistic missile the size of a battle cruiser need? If they really want to I am sure they could put their collective heads together and come up with a scenario that addresses your points and in a ruthless way no doubt. It has been said that civilization is only three meals away from total anarchy; correct me if I am wrong but isn't the SL going to be in a place they have never been before? New territory and a new set of pressures the Mandarins specifically have never experienced before? I get the subtext of your message, Duckk; it ain't going to happen. But that doesn't mean it's because the scenario is illogical. Irrational perhaps, immoral most definitely, but even the insane work from a place of logic.

You could achieve a dinosaur level, extinction event with a single missile, you don't need a ballistic "missile" of a battlecruiser to achieve that. Even Manticoran pre-MDM, missiles for their cruisers were weighing in at between 70 and 80 tons, their pre-MDM capital missiles weighed in at around 100-110 tons, and the MDMs weigh in at between 110 and 150 tons.

If you're going to pull an EE violation, you'd cross the Alpha wall well beyond the hyper limit of the star in question, with maximum possible velocity, charge in, fire off a salvo of missiles (chase or broadside), decelerate and pop back into hyper before your missiles have even crossed the hyper limit.

100t missile, launched at somewhere between 0.6 and 0.7c (max warship velocity), accelerated upto max even in the pre-MDM days should be around 0.9c or higher. Ballistic phase means they'll be damn near impossible to see, let alone intercept before they've impacted a missile. Could someone do the math there on what single 100t missile would be doing explosion wise?

A full battlecruiser probably wouldn't survive intact to hitting the surface but even a Homer's almost 800,000 tons, hitting at approximately 0.7c... that's not an extinction level impact, that's gonna be damn near a planet cracker.


Except that nobody, anywhere, except someone truly psychotic such as Warnecke would even contemplate EE violations. And even Warnecke wasn't quite that crazy to just go around blowing away planets. The SLN would mutiny in droves, and probably be begging the Grand Alliance to let them help drive their political commanders into the ground for those kinds of orders. The few who might consider it, would end up being shot by their fellow officers, rather than actually following through.

Somtaaw wrote:Except that nobody, anywhere, except someone truly psychotic such as Warnecke would even contemplate EE violations. And even Warnecke wasn't quite that crazy to just go around blowing away planets. The SLN would mutiny in droves, and probably be begging the Grand Alliance to let them help drive their political commanders into the ground for those kinds of orders. The few who might consider it, would end up being shot by their fellow officers, rather than actually following through.

Yep. Plus remember, what the EE did was replace the mutually assured destruction from competing orbital bombardments with an 800 lbs gorilla who promised that nobody would gain by trying one.

They went hundreds and hundreds of years without requiring a formal mechanism against it simply because it was insane to carry it out - for both moral and practical reasons.

And once someone was crazy enough to perform that kind of attack the SLN stepped in to prevent it escelating into mutually assured destruction; then the constitutional ammendment was passed formalizing their role in doing so in the future.

Just the spell out, for those people too stupid to realize that tit-for-tat means they'd have been likely vaporized later for attempting to vaporize their enemy's planet today, that nobody is allowed to benefit from EE violations. That the SLN would automatically step in to seize the offending system, capture and try anybody even remotely involved or responsible (which would include the planetary government even if it was a provable rogue military ops) and ensure they were replaced by somebody who wasn't crazy enough to break the rules like that.
(In later days that probably meant de-facto you'd end up an OFS puppet state - but one that wouldn't be indiscriminately bombarding people)

Without that external body planetary mass extinction is too easy given Honorverse tech - you basically can't ensure that a surviving victim (or offended bystander) will never be in a possible to return the favor if that's the only way they can see to stop you or achieve justice/revenge.


Showing that the SLN is toothless against the GA doesn't change the original logic, nor does it prevent them (for the moment) from acting against any non-GA (or possible non-MAlign) violators. And since the GA isn't insane they're not interested in pulling off an EE violation, even though the SLN can't militarily defeat them anymore. And if the SLN can't enforce the edict I can pretty much guarantee that the GA would step up to enforce a similar sanction. (And if even they didn't we've back to the ugly mutually assured destruction). All of that should still deter even a psychopath (or at least cause the people running a system to take away his military toys lest they suffer from his actions)

Somtaaw wrote:You could achieve a dinosaur level, extinction event with a single missile, you don't need a ballistic "missile" of a battlecruiser to achieve that. Even Manticoran pre-MDM, missiles for their cruisers were weighing in at between 70 and 80 tons, their pre-MDM capital missiles weighed in at around 100-110 tons, and the MDMs weigh in at between 110 and 150 tons.

If you're going to pull an EE violation, you'd cross the Alpha wall well beyond the hyper limit of the star in question, with maximum possible velocity, charge in, fire off a salvo of missiles (chase or broadside), decelerate and pop back into hyper before your missiles have even crossed the hyper limit.

100t missile, launched at somewhere between 0.6 and 0.7c (max warship velocity), accelerated upto max even in the pre-MDM days should be around 0.9c or higher. Ballistic phase means they'll be damn near impossible to see, let alone intercept before they've impacted a missile. Could someone do the math there on what single 100t missile would be doing explosion wise?

At 0.7c, you're packing 8.6 MT (36e15 J) per kilogram.
At 0.9c, it's 28 MT (116e15 J) per kg.

The Tsar Bomba had about 50 MT (210e15 J).
The Chicxulub event is estimated at 100e6 MT (420e21 J).

Somtaaw wrote:

jtg452 wrote:Here's a question, how does the SLN BC's sidewalls match up against those huge BC class spinal weapons mounted in the Shrikes? SLN doctrine already has their ships light on CM and PD and their sensors are pretty close to junk so how well could they stand up to a LAC 'mugging' (slip in close under stealth and make firing runs like they did against the Havenite BB's)?

Actually, we know from both pre-First War, and after Henke captured Byng's force at New Tuscany that Solarian ships actually aren't all *that* bad on the hardware side.

Where they truly come up short, on both sensors and their decoys, is the programming that operates that hardware is very much coming up short. SLN ships would still be light on PDLC batteries, and CM tubes, but if they fired a better/smarter CM, and their sensors and decoys were properly programmed, they could almost give as good as they get.

But just updating their sensor, for lack of a better term software drivers, and updating their decoy softwares since even HALO was almost as capable as RMN decoys, they could avoid an ultra close range LAC mugging that starts with complete surprise. No SLN ships are fast enough to avoid the mugging completely, but they should be able to detect the LACs far enough out to make them work for the mugging, instead of being completely ignorant of LAC presence.

At Saltash, one of the major factors was the Sollies not realizing that the Manties had captured a lot of ships intact, and had studied their hardware and software. So the Sollies' EW systems were still using their default settings. The equivalent of leaving their password as 'password'.... Obviously, that's something they can easily improve, once they think of it.

Bill Woods wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:You could achieve a dinosaur level, extinction event with a single missile, you don't need a ballistic "missile" of a battlecruiser to achieve that. Even Manticoran pre-MDM, missiles for their cruisers were weighing in at between 70 and 80 tons, their pre-MDM capital missiles weighed in at around 100-110 tons, and the MDMs weigh in at between 110 and 150 tons.

If you're going to pull an EE violation, you'd cross the Alpha wall well beyond the hyper limit of the star in question, with maximum possible velocity, charge in, fire off a salvo of missiles (chase or broadside), decelerate and pop back into hyper before your missiles have even crossed the hyper limit.

100t missile, launched at somewhere between 0.6 and 0.7c (max warship velocity), accelerated upto max even in the pre-MDM days should be around 0.9c or higher. Ballistic phase means they'll be damn near impossible to see, let alone intercept before they've impacted a missile. Could someone do the math there on what single 100t missile would be doing explosion wise?

At 0.7c, you're packing 8.6 MT (36e15 J) per kilogram.
At 0.9c, it's 28 MT (116e15 J) per kg.

The Tsar Bomba had about 50 MT (210e15 J).
The Chicxulub event is estimated at 100e6 MT (420e21 J).

100t missiles would be just under 91,000 kilograms, so a 100t missile impacting at 0.9c should be a 2,540,104 MT explosion?

Or did you already account for the 100t missile being converted into kilos?

Somtaaw wrote:

npadln wrote:What kind of crew does a ballistic missile the size of a battle cruiser need? If they really want to I am sure they could put their collective heads together and come up with a scenario that addresses your points and in a ruthless way no doubt. It has been said that civilization is only three meals away from total anarchy; correct me if I am wrong but isn't the SL going to be in a place they have never been before? New territory and a new set of pressures the Mandarins specifically have never experienced before? I get the subtext of your message, Duckk; it ain't going to happen. But that doesn't mean it's because the scenario is illogical. Irrational perhaps, immoral most definitely, but even the insane work from a place of logic.

You could achieve a dinosaur level, extinction event with a single missile, you don't need a ballistic "missile" of a battlecruiser to achieve that. Even Manticoran pre-MDM, missiles for their cruisers were weighing in at between 70 and 80 tons, their pre-MDM capital missiles weighed in at around 100-110 tons, and the MDMs weigh in at between 110 and 150 tons.

If you're going to pull an EE violation, you'd cross the Alpha wall well beyond the hyper limit of the star in question, with maximum possible velocity, charge in, fire off a salvo of missiles (chase or broadside), decelerate and pop back into hyper before your missiles have even crossed the hyper limit.

100t missile, launched at somewhere between 0.6 and 0.7c (max warship velocity), accelerated upto max even in the pre-MDM days should be around 0.9c or higher. Ballistic phase means they'll be damn near impossible to see, let alone intercept before they've impacted a missile. Could someone do the math there on what single 100t missile would be doing explosion wise?

A full battlecruiser probably wouldn't survive intact to hitting the surface but even a Homer's almost 800,000 tons, hitting at approximately 0.7c... that's not an extinction level impact, that's gonna be damn near a planet cracker.


Except that nobody, anywhere, except someone truly psychotic such as Warnecke would even contemplate EE violations. And even Warnecke wasn't quite that crazy to just go around blowing away planets. The SLN would mutiny in droves, and probably be begging the Grand Alliance to let them help drive their political commanders into the ground for those kinds of orders. The few who might consider it, would end up being shot by their fellow officers, rather than actually following through.

Yeah that would work but then as Duck has pointed out you would need the complicity of a ship's crew which according to him/her would be problematic. I'm merely pointing out in the scenario I described that with a surplus of otherwise useless capital ships it might be easier to avoid such problems by taking the crews out of the equation and using those white elephants in the place of missiles as an un-manned,c-fractional, ballistic device. My point was that the SLN doesn't militarily have much of anything going for it and knowing how a drowning man will grasp at anything a suggestion that they might in fact have one thing and one thing ONLY that could be a "game changer" would at the very least get their attention and once that happens, there it is for everyone to see and think about. And considering how few planets the SEM has and how little of that strategy it would take the temptation might be hard to resist. And no, Warnecke didn't blow away planets out of desperation; that would of been silly. No, he instead set off fusion explosions under urban population centers. Anyway this all academic and playing the devil's advocate. This isn't going to happen.

Bill Woods wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Actually, we know from both pre-First War, and after Henke captured Byng's force at New Tuscany that Solarian ships actually aren't all *that* bad on the hardware side.

Where they truly come up short, on both sensors and their decoys, is the programming that operates that hardware is very much coming up short. SLN ships would still be light on PDLC batteries, and CM tubes, but if they fired a better/smarter CM, and their sensors and decoys were properly programmed, they could almost give as good as they get.

But just updating their sensor, for lack of a better term software drivers, and updating their decoy softwares since even HALO was almost as capable as RMN decoys, they could avoid an ultra close range LAC mugging that starts with complete surprise. No SLN ships are fast enough to avoid the mugging completely, but they should be able to detect the LACs far enough out to make them work for the mugging, instead of being completely ignorant of LAC presence.

At Saltash, one of the major factors was the Sollies not realizing that the Manties had captured a lot of ships intact, and had studied their hardware and software. So the Sollies' EW systems were still using their default settings. The equivalent of leaving their password as 'password'.... Obviously, that's something they can easily improve, once they think of it.

Oh agreed, but between New Tuscany, Spindle, and Second Battle of Manticore, the Solarian defenses were examined thoroughly and it was determined that the base premise was the Solarian's only really needed to update their software and it'd be almost as good as anything Manticore had.

Rather than the password analogy you used, where the Solarian ships are coming up short is more like their OS, or the drivers. Their hardware's more or less fine (except their CMs could be better), and the Aegis/Halo systems are almost as good as the Ghost Rider's at the hardware level.

Obviously being able to slip in, knowing their password is password is one thing, but knowing their password, and also knowing they're running the equivalent of something like Windows 3.1 on a Cray supercomputer, while you're using the same Cray but using Windows 10.