Honorverse Analytics: Why Manticore Won the War

I have a different question.

Why does any ship not designed with pods in mind, have any number of tractors greater than 2 or so? Say, one at each end and even then... why? Isn't that what boat bays are for? Oddball sized stuff for some oddball mission?

Theemile wrote:

Relax wrote:While discussing, SD Gryphons is nice, the RMN only had ~30 of them at the beginning of 1905 out of 186. Started the war with ~20 Bellerphon DN's out of 121.

Half of the RMN's capital ships were DN's, and effectively the same number of missile tubes as Honor's NIKE.... Half of the DN's were equivalent to the old SD's.

Half of the capital ships in RMN service were built/designed before missile combat or beginning of missile combat, so wouldn't have been optimized for it like the Gryphon(SD)/Bellerphon(DN) ships were to a greater extent.

So, no, a large portion of the RMN fleet wouldn't have had huge numbers of tractors, nor extra control links for missile pods. Would have had plenty, don't get me wrong, just not as much as shown in later battles during the 1st Havenite war.

What I really want to know is, If a Gryphon, an SD built with pods in mind, can only tow 15 or so pods via tractor, why can a Nevada BC, in a navy who was just gifted pods a month or two ago, tractor 24 per ship in SoV? It is another of those huge inconsistencies from Tremaine's battle which just does not make sense. The Nevada's should have been limited to towing 6-10 oversized missile pods (these were massive Cataphract-C models), similar to what a Reliant could in 1905.

I think the limitation was tractor beams (see chapter 33 of _Echoes of Honor_, about half way through).

Relax wrote:I have a different question.

Why does any ship not designed with pods in mind, have any number of tractors greater than 2 or so? Say, one at each end and even then... why? Isn't that what boat bays are for? Oddball sized stuff for some oddball mission?

Didn't they use tractor beams for the towed missile decoys off each sidewall? You'd want some redundancy on such a critical function (multiple tractor per broadside) even if you had no extra use for tractors.

A Nevada refit for Halo is designed to have dozens of towed platforms, which I assume gave them the happy benifit of being able to tow dozens of pods.

Theemile wrote:What I really want to know is, If a Gryphon, an SD built with pods in mind, can only tow 15 or so pods via tractor, why can a Nevada BC, in a navy who was just gifted pods a month or two ago, tractor 24 per ship in SoV? It is another of those huge inconsistencies from Tremaine's battle which just does not make sense. The Nevada's should have been limited to towing 6-10 oversized missile pods (these were massive Cataphract-C models), similar to what a Reliant could in 1905.

We don't know when the Nevada class was first commissioned. It's implied to be very recent, possibly in the 1915-1920 period, allowing for early reports from the "Havenite Wars" to feed something, however miniscule, into its design process.

At the same time, we don't know how often the SLN truly re-examines its design policies. Their BCs might have large numbers of tractors, because they had them in the previous era of pod-based combat, before launcher advancements made pods too expensive.

Relax wrote:I have a different question.

Why does any ship not designed with pods in mind, have any number of tractors greater than 2 or so? Say, one at each end and even then... why? Isn't that what boat bays are for? Oddball sized stuff for some oddball mission?

The main uses for tractors before 1905 were for docking, deploying remote drone arrays, and towing other starships, especially in a Grav wave. I would assume having multiple grab locations (from multiple tractors) would be "gentler" than having all the tractor force applied to one point, so for docking or towing other ships, multiple tractors would be used simultaneously to spread the force and have redundancy in case of failure.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:I have a different question.

Why does any ship not designed with pods in mind, have any number of tractors greater than 2 or so? Say, one at each end and even then... why? Isn't that what boat bays are for? Oddball sized stuff for some oddball mission?

Didn't they use tractor beams for the towed missile decoys off each sidewall? You'd want some redundancy on such a critical function (multiple tractor per broadside) even if you had no extra use for tractors.

A Nevada refit for Halo is designed to have dozens of towed platforms, which I assume gave them the happy benifit of being able to tow dozens of pods.

That is good thinking... However, I looked in ART, The Scientists of 11th fleet only carried 12 pods each, even though they also had a Halo installation. That could have been only a supply issue, but they should have been able to carry 30+ pods on an SD if the Halo system (which has more remote platforms on an SD) can also tow pods.

Also using the tractors for pods, instead of Halo, means you cannot have the Halo system working until AFTER you fire off the missile pods - or more importantly - after the enemy has already launched his missiles at you. And if the opponent has longer ranged missiles - it forces you to either abandon the pods or fire them with insanely long ballistic components so you can free the tractors for Halo.

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Didn't they use tractor beams for the towed missile decoys off each sidewall? You'd want some redundancy on such a critical function (multiple tractor per broadside) even if you had no extra use for tractors.

A Nevada refit for Halo is designed to have dozens of towed platforms, which I assume gave them the happy benifit of being able to tow dozens of pods.

That is good thinking... However, I looked in ART, The Scientists of 11th fleet only carried 12 pods each, even though they also had a Halo installation. That could have been only a supply issue, but they should have been able to carry 30+ pods on an SD if the Halo system (which has more remote platforms on an SD) can also tow pods.

Also using the tractors for pods, instead of Halo, means you cannot have the Halo system working until AFTER you fire off the missile pods - or more importantly - after the enemy has already launched his missiles at you. And if the opponent has longer ranged missiles - it forces you to either abandon the pods or fire them with insanely long ballistic components so you can free the tractors for Halo.

Good point on the SD towed pod numbers not lining up. Not sure why that would be.

But whether Halo and pods can't be deployed simultaneously would depend on whether there was any tractor redundancy built in.


For conventional towed decoys, normally 2 (or maybe 4 for SDs?) one off each sidewall you'd want at least two tractor emitters per broadside (100% redundancy) so you wouldn't lose the ability to deploy remaining decoys on that side due to a single unlucky hit on a tractor emitter.
With Halo, having so many more distributed platforms, I could see accepting less redundancy on tractor emitters because it maters less if some of the platforms can't be deployed. But even there I'd be a bit surprised if they had no redundancy. Even with 50% redundancy a ship deploying, say, 12 Halo platforms could use the backup spare tractors to haul 6 pods. Or you could mix and match depending on the tactical situation; leave some of the Halo platforms docked initially to tow more pods and deploy them as you fire off your initial salvo or two. Halo vs Pods need not be an all or nothing decision.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:
Though Honor's SD's at 3rd Yeltson had only 10 pods (100 missiles) each; apparently all they could tuck inside their wedges.

When you only have a couple of hundred cubic km of space available I can see how a dozen 0.000005 cubic km pods could fill it all up.

Not really so hard my friend, unless the pods have some kind of mechanism allowing them to latch to each other or the hull of the towing ship then the ship's tractors have to do the job. As I understand it that's where the limitation was at the time, early in the war if you wanted to keep the pods inside the protection of the impeller wedge and not interfere with each other or interfere with the ship's sensors or weapons.

Of course, that's how I remember it and I could easily be wrong.

Somtaaw wrote:I don't remember if they even had warning for BoMa, but they did get warning during McQueen offensives when it was still the CPS. Each time McQueen started preparing for an offensive, we had a little segment where Admiral Givens would mention something about losing track of X squadrons of Peep wallers/battleships and they haven't turned up anywhere. And while the active Havenite wall for the 1920 BoMa was larger than the entire Peep wall of battle in 1900-1905, I don't believe it was significantly larger?

And depending on issuing order timing, by the time Manticoran scouts would realize "hey, wait a second, aren't there supposed to be Peep warships here?" and then get back to their sector hq's or bases, and the HQs & Bases to send that intel back to Manticore... the bad news would have bypassed the intel, and Peep ships would already be occupying Manticore, Sphinx and Gryphon before the intel arrives.

The intel would likely get to Manticore first, especially if Trevor's Star was still open to civilian traffic. Even if it wasn't (I don't remember if it was closed prior to the war) the attack fleet would have to stage through Barnett and wait for the more far flung forces to arrive. Then there'd be a working up period so everyone could get used to working in a single fleet.

I think there'd be more than enough time for someone to notice that Haven's Home Fleet had disappeared and get word to Manticore.

noblehunter wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:I don't remember if they even had warning for BoMa, but they did get warning during McQueen offensives when it was still the CPS. Each time McQueen started preparing for an offensive, we had a little segment where Admiral Givens would mention something about losing track of X squadrons of Peep wallers/battleships and they haven't turned up anywhere. And while the active Havenite wall for the 1920 BoMa was larger than the entire Peep wall of battle in 1900-1905, I don't believe it was significantly larger?

And depending on issuing order timing, by the time Manticoran scouts would realize "hey, wait a second, aren't there supposed to be Peep warships here?" and then get back to their sector hq's or bases, and the HQs & Bases to send that intel back to Manticore... the bad news would have bypassed the intel, and Peep ships would already be occupying Manticore, Sphinx and Gryphon before the intel arrives.

The intel would likely get to Manticore first, especially if Trevor's Star was still open to civilian traffic. Even if it wasn't (I don't remember if it was closed prior to the war) the attack fleet would have to stage through Barnett and wait for the more far flung forces to arrive. Then there'd be a working up period so everyone could get used to working in a single fleet.

I think there'd be more than enough time for someone to notice that Haven's Home Fleet had disappeared and get word to Manticore.

This is a really good point. In all the books it is made quite clear that fleets need to be trained to work together and this actually mirrors experiance in real life.