So now that we are through the manditory filler books.....

Weird Harold wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:IIRC [though probably not], RoH has only crude FTL, not enough bandwidth for missile control or even ship to ship communication.

In WoH, the RHN had FTL comm to and from recon LACs probing towards the Trevor's Star terminus. They hadn't reduced it enough to put in the recon drones so they configured a LAC to manage a swarm of drones in light-speed range and relay coded updates to Giscard's TF.

I'm sure that they have reduced the size and increased the bandwidth since then, but even the rudimentary FTL comm they had then would suffice for FTL communications between Moriarity control nodes.

And with a bit of help from Sonja Hemphill and crew, It won't take long to develop. Deployment is yet another can of worms. Even without FTL, Moriarty was formidable. Adding it to take on Solly Cruisers and Battle cruisers is overkill. At least until someone escapes to warn the others.

And since the source of that sneaky "commerce raiding" strategy is none other than the mythical MA, it was doomed to failure without Moriarty upgrades. It will take several iterations of SLN doctrine and hardware to even spot and defend against Mycroft/Moriarty. By then, I'm sure the GA systems will have Mistletoe drones swanning around the system to pick off SLN recon drones, too.

The thing is deploying these raiding forces meant, the home regions are drained of naval forces. Which makes them vulnerable to rebellion and revolutions.
With an improved system protections, they can deploy their naval assets to cripple the league ships and infrastructure.

SYED wrote:The thing is deploying these raiding forces meant, the home regions are drained of naval forces. Which makes them vulnerable to rebellion and revolutions.
With an improved system protections, they can deploy their naval assets to cripple the league ships and infrastructure.

Also to just drain FF&BF of additional hulls. They are bound to lose ships with each incursion into GA systems. I mean, unless/until they get smart enough to drop one hull way out system or even polar and drop recon drones. Which, again means they have to drastically upgrade their sensors.

WeirdlyWired wrote: Also to just drain FF&BF of additional hulls. They are bound to lose ships with each incursion into GA systems. I mean, unless/until they get smart enough to drop one hull way out system or even polar and drop recon drones. Which, again means they have to drastically upgrade their sensors.

They'd need to upgrade their stealth systems on the drones, too. Even if they slip the ship insystem, the drones will give away its' presence.

If I remember correctly, the stealth on their drones is lagging as far behind as most of their other tech. I seem to remember a Solly TO complaining about not being able to get drones in close enough to get a good look at Many ships before they were being taken out.

On the other hand, Manty recon drones are capable taking the Honorverse versions of 'hull shots' (close up pictures of the hull of enemy ships- basically a submariner's version of counting coup). In the last book or the one before that, wasn't there a conversation with a Solly Admiral where the Manty captain said something about one of her ships needing to do something about a faulty beta node during their comm exchange as a way to show the Solly that they knew everything about the Solly ships and had decided there wasn't anything to worry about?

jtg452 wrote:If I remember correctly, the stealth on their drones is lagging as far behind as most of their other tech. I seem to remember a Solly TO complaining about not being able to get drones in close enough to get a good look at Many ships before they were being taken out.

Which is odd, as the RMN was unpleasantly surprised not to long ago at how effective the SLNs stealth systems were.

the last time solly stealth really caught out the RMN was on Gauntlet's visit to Tiberian (Abbigail Hearns' middy cruise)

and that was solly ships that had been sold off. while it was never said exactly who those pirates were working for i've always assumed it was a MA op to try and destabilise the new haven government.

if this is true I can see MA using them as a test bed for some of the early stealth tech used on the spider drive ships.

prior to that it was the drones that killed the PM and while those were solly tech it was said that the SLN had rejected them and that St-just had bought them from the firm when they were trying to recoup their development costs.

Dauntless wrote:the last time solly stealth really caught out the RMN was on Gauntlet's visit to Tiberian (Abbigail Hearns' middy cruise)

and that was solly ships that had been sold off. while it was never said exactly who those pirates were working for i've always assumed it was a MA op to try and destabilise the new haven government.

if this is true I can see MA using them as a test bed for some of the early stealth tech used on the spider drive ships.

prior to that it was the drones that killed the PM and while those were solly tech it was said that the SLN had rejected them and that St-just had bought them from the firm when they were trying to recoup their development costs.

I believe there was also an incident at the Battle of Monica.

Well the League Navy also still doesn't quite believe that 'neo-barbs' could possibly be a real threat to their ships. It's still not trickling through, so their sensor techs are bound to be busy goofing off playing Galaga or something, instead of actually watching their sensors.

Essentially the same thing that Honor relied upon in Battle of Cerberus, knowing that the only sensor anybody really looks at, is their gravitics, and since drones don't ever max their drives out (thus not appearing to even half-blind gravitics), they don't truly believe drones are capable of getting as close as RMN/RHN routinely operate nowadays.

And that's totally ignoring the fact that Solarian RD's are still pre-1900 era, so no mini fusion cores so their RD's have at best a few hours of use before they exhaust their capacitors. Meanwhile, the RMN drones can last for upto a maximum of a day of continual use, and weeks in the case of mostly shutting down (such as the RDs left behind in New Tuscany). We have no real data on the Republican RDs, we just know that thanks to the Erewhon alliance flip, Republican drones got at least early-gen Ghost Rider upgrades which would put them somewhere between First Grayson and Buttercup performance minimum.

To the Sollies, RD's have to be almost worse than useless, by the time they might be useful, your wallers have already gotten so close they're almost in weapons range and committed to a passing engagement (assuming equal Solarian missile ranges on both sides), so why both upgrading RD stealth or endurance? Or at least that appears to be their logic, if they even applied any, after all nobody would ever dare fight the League now would they?

JohnRoth wrote:

Dauntless wrote:the last time solly stealth really caught out the RMN was on Gauntlet's visit to Tiberian (Abbigail Hearns' middy cruise)

and that was solly ships that had been sold off. while it was never said exactly who those pirates were working for i've always assumed it was a MA op to try and destabilise the new haven government.

if this is true I can see MA using them as a test bed for some of the early stealth tech used on the spider drive ships.

prior to that it was the drones that killed the PM and while those were solly tech it was said that the SLN had rejected them and that St-just had bought them from the firm when they were trying to recoup their development costs.

I believe there was also an incident at the Battle of Monica.

been a while since i reread shadow of sagnami but i don't recall the trio of monican (ex SLN) BC really catching terekov etc unaware.

after all hexapuma did mange to use much of her extended range against them.

Dauntless wrote:been a while since i reread shadow of sagnami but i don't recall the trio of monican (ex SLN) BC really catching terekov etc unaware.

after all hexapuma did mange to use much of her extended range against them.

Short answer is that they didn't really; it's just David gave them enough of a head start that the Manties couldn't evade or hold the range open once the stealthy BCs were detected.



The Manties had the bad luck to pick an approach that crossed the vector of the ballistically coasting BCs (who were out there practicing hide and seek against the station defenses)

So they're coasting basically straight towards the Manties future position, from an unexpected direction, even before the Manties enter the system. So the book first shows them to us 58.7 million km out, zipping along at 41,572 km/s (0.13c) (or 23 minutes away) with drives down. SLN sensors are not expected to see BCs in that flight profile until about 5 million km (well within even SDM range).
The ghost rider drone that picked up a whiff of them was only about 3.3 million km from the BCs (11 lightseconds) - but the shell of drones was far enough out that this was 57.6 million km from the Mantie Ships (so less than 30 seconds after the BC command crew had their discussions about how much closer they could expect to coast before being detected ).

On the one hand the sensors on the Ghost Rider drone were less effective than the SLN would expect those of an SLN warship to be (3.3 million vs 5 million km detection range) but on the other hand the drone shell was big enough that they were still picked well beyond the continuous powered range of Mexapuma's Mk-16s; in fact about 80% of the way to a 3-drive MDM's continuous powered range.

Then dealing with Eroica Station's pods took enough time that the range was down to 30.9 million km before Hexapuma engaged the BC's. Close enough they didn't need a ballistic segment from the Mk16s. OTOH it meant that they only had a few minutes of firing before the BCs got into their own missile range and returned fire.


But that's because David, in part, "cheated" by having the Manties walk in front of the bus. If the BCs had been out of position the Manties probably would have seen them much sooner as they accelerated to build intercept vector, and then altered their own course to keep it a long range running battle. Well, at long range the BCs probably could have hidden a low powered wedge, even from Mantie sensors - but they'd be hard pressed to build a useful intercept vector while doing so.