Thanks for the kind words lyonheart. I'm going split up parts of your post to reply directly to each, but it was interesting to consider your points. And I do look forward to what BuNine has in store for us in House of Lies.
lyonheart wrote:The cruiser bow and stern walls were only suspected by the RMN in SoS, expected only because the RHN had copied so much else, it being a fairly simple improvement.
Hmm, interesting. I'd always interpreted the quote as Mantie Intel knowing that some Havenite ships had been upgraded with bow walls, but rereading it I guess it could be taken as a hypothetical.
Here's the text:
Shadows of Saganami: Ch. 22 wrote:True, but if we're headed toward them, we've got our bow wall, and a ship as old as Bogey One doesn't. There's no way they could've refitted a bow wall without completely gutting her forward impeller rooms, and that brings us back to those fusion rooms of hers. If they were going to invest the time and money to refit bow wall technology, they'd've refitted those power plants at the same time, so without the one, they don't have the other
Terekhov didn't actually say any Havenite ships were known to have bow walls; he could have been saying that whether or not they had the tech it clearly wasn't present on this old Mars-class CA.
lyonheart wrote:We don't know the performance of RHN counter-missiles, but the lack of any discussion of a 'counter-missile gap' [
] has yet occurred in all the textev inclines me to believe this may be relatively moot, that one way or another Shannon Foraker has come up with another 'good enough' solution.
I though I recalled the PSN CMs were still ~1.5 million km birds; and then remembered I'd made a cheat sheet of text-ev on various missile performance. The quote was from War of Honor "Shannon Foraker's best efforts, even with reverse-engineered Solarian technology, had a maximum intercept range of little more than one and a half million"
And that's surprisingly low as the CM's the Starknight-class had before the 1st war were 60 seconds @ 900 KPS^2 = 1.6 million km range. But either is far short of the just over 2 million km Honor's fleet had at Sidemore during Thunderbolt or the 3.6 million km range the Mk31/Viper had a half year (or so) later.
So unless things changed significantly between Thunderbolt and now Haven does have a CM range gap.
lyonheart wrote:A dual drive missile at the RHN's known velocity capabilities would have a powered range of just over 27 million kilometers, almost 92.5% of the Mk-16; generally close enough I think given RHN numerical superiority, until the RMN discovered that fact.
They certainly could build a DDM. But remember that, last we heard, their MDMs were so large they only pod launched them - they didn't build broadside tubes for them. These are big capacitor powered beasts; and Haven's capacitors seem less energy dense than Manticores so they need more volume to store the same power.
Even a DDM built on that tech might be too big for anything but maybe a BC (or a Roland style spinal launch on, say, a CA) to lug around. But yes, it's certainly possible that Bolthole did develop and build at least a few DDM BCs even with the size penalties you'd pay for their missile tech.
