How To Abandon Ship?

Jonathan_S wrote:[quote=“drothgery”]

cthia wrote:Probably worth noting is that all previous Manticoran Royal Yachts (and the current Haven One) were essentially civilian craft; HMS Duke of Cromarty is undoubtedly the most heavily armed -- both offensively and defensively -- vessel explicitly set aside as a head of state / government transport in the Honorverse.

Why was that exactly? I mean like, why was she ever placed in an eggshell screaming "Wait! Don't shoot! This is the hive that holds our Queen!?"

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Speaking of how to abandon ship. Can anyone tell me where the scene with Ajax is? I perused War of Honor several times but caught no joy. It is when I finally found the elusive tidbit on EMP.

I'm wanting to reread the trap that was set up for the Peeps. IINM, Ajax dropped her wedge indicating surrender? Yet fired on the Peeps? I thought that was dirty and sneaky and it could have opened a can of wormy tits for tat.

I believe you're looking for the retelling of the Battle of Solon from Chapters 1 & 2 of Storm from the Shadows.

(Though unlike what Maxxq said, in this case the orderly phased evacuation of the ship - lifepods first and then later once damage control finally managed to clear the way to the single remaining boat small craft much later - seems to have been done while the drive was up (on just the forward rings) and Ajax was still running from the Havenites)

Ajax never dropped her wedge, that we saw. She'd rolled pods and left them behind her as a field expedient mine field, and kept running, even while everyone who could got off. She ran for over an hour after rolling the pods, until the chasing force almost ran over them. When the Mk16s launched it forced the Havenites to fire on Ajax and destroy the still running (but nearly evacuated) BC(P).

cthia wrote:I knew it! Another thing I was going to look for. But I wanted to be certain that it is as I remember it.

Thanks for the coordinates.

Jonathan_S wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:As for incoming missiles, well, that's the chances you take. Lightspeed limitations would cause issues with sending a self-destruct command, or a command to veer off, even with FTL comms.

Do you think any navy would add special programming to their missiles that would attempt to alter target if their primary target's wedge went down?

Obviously from far enough out if the wedge goes down the missile loses lock, but in close enough to have the target ship on non-gravimetric sensors I guess you could build a missile targeting parameters to attempt to automatically recognize a dropped wedge as a surrender attempt and try to avoid shooting at it.


Though that doesn't help you survive the EMP from 'nearby' laserheads targeting other ships in your fleet. Life pods are probably pretty EMP hardened, but skinsuits could have a rougher time if you had to do a manual bailout.

cthia wrote:Question.

If a missile has lost lock and her final drive has run dry, does she still detonate if she "accidentally" hits a sidewall. Let's say as a result of some desperate maneuvering by a busy ship which runs into orphaned missile? I'm assuming a single coaster w/o drives is hard to see in a desperate and panicked situation?

I'm thinking the answer is yes. After all, ballistic launches are nothing new. But I'm not sure if the missile has to be "set up" for that beforehand. Lest there be complications like in The Hunt for Red October when Sean Connery employed a tactic to turn into the oncoming torpedo thus closing the distance too quickly denying the missile time to arm itself, because the settings were not correct beforehand.

"Oh the baggage I carry from other hairy situations," says Harry.

In Fire Forged, An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design wrote:The gods that govern arms races abhor imbalance, and the sidewall’s impenetrability did not last long. In 1298, research yielded the first practical sidewall penetrator. The term actually describes a bewildering array of different methods and technologies of getting an attack through a sidewall. Early devices took many forms and it is not entirely clear even today which type came first. Research has uncovered at least seven unique “inventors” of the sidewall penetrator. Whoever invented it, the consensus among historians is that the first widely employed devices used a precisely timed reshaping of the missile’s own impeller wedge in the fraction of a second before contact to temporarily “flicker” the target’s sidewall and allow the weapon to pass through unimpeded. This approach had the downside of destroying the attacking missile’s own drive (and much of its afterbody) rendering it both unable to maneuver inside the target’s wedge and removing its primary means of killing the target. The answer was to merge the standoff nuclear weapon with the sidewall penetrator and use the inert missile front end to carry a nuclear charge into the sidewall perimeter. Careful control of the missile’s impeller power curve, proper construction of the afterbody, and a powerful pressor field which threw the payload clear prior to the impeller ring’s vaporization allowed the warhead portion to survive long enough to detonate within the target’s sidewall. Aside from the obvious improvements in understanding of gravitics, considerable advances in computing were also required to ensure that the nuclear explosive would properly detonate after the warhead was through the first sidewall and before the inert missile body was shredded by the intact opposite sidewall. It was not uncommon in this period for these “sidewall contacting nuclear weapons” or “contact nukes” (as they came to be known) to detonate on the opposite side of the target from the sidewall that they pierced.1 Weapons that detonated prematurely outside the sidewall still had a chance to overload the generators by the sheer amount of energy dumped into the sidewall by the explosion. This had the happy effect (for the attacker) of weakening the sidewall for follow on attacks. The invulnerability of the sidewall had lasted less than fifty years and was ended forever.

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 33 wrote:Nine missiles charged through space, and Thunder of God’s computers blinked in cybernetic surprise at their unorthodox approach. They came in massed in a tight phalanx, suicidally tight against modern point defense . . . except that the three lead missiles carried nothing but ECM. Their jammers howled, blinding every active and passive sensor system, building a solid wall of interference. Neither Thunder nor their fellows could possibly “see” through it, and a human operator might have realized there had to be a reason Fearless had voluntarily blinded her own missiles’ seekers. But the computers saw only a single jamming source and targeted it with only two counter missiles.
One jammer died, but the other two survived, spreading out, varying the strength and power and shape of the transmissions that baffled Thunder’s follow-up counter missiles. They charged onward, and then, suddenly, they arced up and apart to expose the six missiles behind them.
Last-ditch point defense lasers swiveled and struck like snakes, spitting rods of coherent light as the computers finally recognized the threat, but the jammers had covered them to the last possible moment, and the attack missiles knew exactly what they were looking for. One of the six died, then another, but the final quartet came on, and an alarm screamed on Lieutenant Ash’s panel.
The lieutenant’s head whipped around in horror. He had less than a single second to realize that somehow these missiles had been programmed to use his EW systems, as if his decoys were homing beacons, not defenses, and then they rammed headlong into their target.
Two of them vanished in sun-bright fireballs that shook Thunder to her keel as twin, 78-ton hammers struck her sidewall at .25 C. For all their fury, those two were harmless, but their sisters’ sidewall penetrators functioned as designed.

Vince wrote:

cthia wrote:Question.

If a missile has lost lock and her final drive has run dry, does she still detonate if she "accidentally" hits a sidewall. Let's say as a result of some desperate maneuvering by a busy ship which runs into orphaned missile? I'm assuming a single coaster w/o drives is hard to see in a desperate and panicked situation?

I'm thinking the answer is yes. After all, ballistic launches are nothing new. But I'm not sure if the missile has to be "set up" for that beforehand. Lest there be complications like in The Hunt for Red October when Sean Connery employed a tactic to turn into the oncoming torpedo thus closing the distance too quickly denying the missile time to arm itself, because the settings were not correct beforehand.

"Oh the baggage I carry from other hairy situations," says Harry.

I think the answer is no, even if the missile is set up not to detonate automatically at the end of its powered run (to avoid the remote chance of accidentally hitting something you didn't want to beyond the target--things like, oh, inhabited planets).

Consider how difficult it is to set off a nuclear bomb today and actually get a nuclear yield, rather than just a high explosive detonation. The individual explosives surrounding the nuclear material are timed to insanely small periods of time where if even one goes off either early or late outside of that incredibly tiny window of time, the implosion produced is not uniform and you don't get a nuclear yield.

Now Honorverse nukes don't rely on explosives to get a nuclear yield, instead using gravity generators to uniformly squeeze the hydrogen down to insane pressures (higher than found in most stellar cores), but if a ballistic missile with its wedge down suffers damage by running into an intact sidewall, the gravity generators won't apply that uniform implosion and you won't get a nuclear yield.

A missile's sidewall penetrator requires an active missile wedge to work, so a ballistic missile with its wedge down doesn't have a chance to get through the sidewall:

In Fire Forged, An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design wrote:The gods that govern arms races abhor imbalance, and the sidewall’s impenetrability did not last long. In 1298, research yielded the first practical sidewall penetrator. The term actually describes a bewildering array of different methods and technologies of getting an attack through a sidewall. Early devices took many forms and it is not entirely clear even today which type came first. Research has uncovered at least seven unique “inventors” of the sidewall penetrator. Whoever invented it, the consensus among historians is that the first widely employed devices used a precisely timed reshaping of the missile’s own impeller wedge in the fraction of a second before contact to temporarily “flicker” the target’s sidewall and allow the weapon to pass through unimpeded. This approach had the downside of destroying the attacking missile’s own drive (and much of its afterbody) rendering it both unable to maneuver inside the target’s wedge and removing its primary means of killing the target. The answer was to merge the standoff nuclear weapon with the sidewall penetrator and use the inert missile front end to carry a nuclear charge into the sidewall perimeter. Careful control of the missile’s impeller power curve, proper construction of the afterbody, and a powerful pressor field which threw the payload clear prior to the impeller ring’s vaporization allowed the warhead portion to survive long enough to detonate within the target’s sidewall. Aside from the obvious improvements in understanding of gravitics, considerable advances in computing were also required to ensure that the nuclear explosive would properly detonate after the warhead was through the first sidewall and before the inert missile body was shredded by the intact opposite sidewall. It was not uncommon in this period for these “sidewall contacting nuclear weapons” or “contact nukes” (as they came to be known) to detonate on the opposite side of the target from the sidewall that they pierced.1 Weapons that detonated prematurely outside the sidewall still had a chance to overload the generators by the sheer amount of energy dumped into the sidewall by the explosion. This had the happy effect (for the attacker) of weakening the sidewall for follow on attacks. The invulnerability of the sidewall had lasted less than fifty years and was ended forever.

Now the missile might still be able to detonate (as a standard nuke) outside the sidewall and thereby inflict damage on the ship's sidewall generators, but given the speeds the missiles travel (especially DDMs and MDMs) compared to the speeds the ships can accelerate, the ship can't get out of the attacking missile's stand-off range when it detonates using the lasing rods as a laser head.

It should be noted that standard nukes detonating even right next to the sidewall do far less damage to a ship than a laser head:

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 33 wrote:Nine missiles charged through space, and Thunder of God’s computers blinked in cybernetic surprise at their unorthodox approach. They came in massed in a tight phalanx, suicidally tight against modern point defense . . . except that the three lead missiles carried nothing but ECM. Their jammers howled, blinding every active and passive sensor system, building a solid wall of interference. Neither Thunder nor their fellows could possibly “see” through it, and a human operator might have realized there had to be a reason Fearless had voluntarily blinded her own missiles’ seekers. But the computers saw only a single jamming source and targeted it with only two counter missiles.
One jammer died, but the other two survived, spreading out, varying the strength and power and shape of the transmissions that baffled Thunder’s follow-up counter missiles. They charged onward, and then, suddenly, they arced up and apart to expose the six missiles behind them.
Last-ditch point defense lasers swiveled and struck like snakes, spitting rods of coherent light as the computers finally recognized the threat, but the jammers had covered them to the last possible moment, and the attack missiles knew exactly what they were looking for. One of the six died, then another, but the final quartet came on, and an alarm screamed on Lieutenant Ash’s panel.
The lieutenant’s head whipped around in horror. He had less than a single second to realize that somehow these missiles had been programmed to use his EW systems, as if his decoys were homing beacons, not defenses, and then they rammed headlong into their target.
Two of them vanished in sun-bright fireballs that shook Thunder to her keel as twin, 78-ton hammers struck her sidewall at .25 C. For all their fury, those two were harmless, but their sisters’ sidewall penetrators functioned as designed.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

And since the stand-off range of the laser head exceeds by a minimum of 30,000km the distance a standard nuke has get to a sidewall, the laser head will have time to deploy its lasing rods and detonate (unless stopped by PDLC fire), so I would consider the whole idea of a ballistic missile impacting a sidewall a non-starter---the conditions for it happening simply wouldn't exist if the missile is still functioning normally---the missile would deploy its laser heads and detonate before it would close the distance to the sidewall.

cthia wrote:Thanks Vince. You Sag Isle graduates are the best!

However, I remember a few times in storyline, when the Peeps were first confronted with extreme missile launches, they always piped in with something like, paraphrasing, "Surely they don't expect to hit anything at this distance as we won't be there." Or, "They can't expect anything to be left on their drives. It's a desperation launch." The same thoughts came again when Harrington? launched from outside the RZ? in BoM. The thoughts seemed to be on being able to close the distance and find a target without time left on the drive. But it seemed that the worry of destruction was still there. Also, when Mercedes Brigham arrived with Hamish, as the cavalry, but much too late to help Fearless he fired anyways from outside his missile range hoping to hit something. He didn't seem to be concerned there would be no detonation. "Fire anyway! Maybe we'll get lucky!"

Seems textev is misleading? Or, some explosion is better than none?

cthia wrote:Thanks Vince. You Sag Isle graduates are the best!

However, I remember a few times in storyline, when the Peeps were first confronted with extreme missile launches, they always piped in with something like, paraphrasing, "Surely they don't expect to hit anything at this distance as we won't be there." Or, "They can't expect anything to be left on their drives. It's a desperation launch." The same thoughts came again when Harrington? launched from outside the RZ? in BoM. The thoughts seemed to be on being able to close the distance and find a target without time left on the drive. But it seemed that the worry of destruction was still there. Also, when Mercedes Brigham arrived with Hamish, as the cavalry, but much too late to help Fearless he fired anyways from outside his missile range hoping to hit something. He didn't seem to be concerned there would be no detonation. "Fire anyway! Maybe we'll get lucky!"

Seems textev is misleading? Or, some explosion is better than none?

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 34 wrote:Sword Simonds held himself rigidly still as the medical orderly put the last stitch into the gash in his forehead, then waved aside the offer of a painkiller. The orderly retreated quickly, for he had more than enough to do elsewhere; there were over twelve hundred dead men in Thunder of God’s hull, two-thirds of them soldiers who’d brought no vac suits aboard.

***Snip***

“Astrogation, I want a straight-line course for Grayson.”

***Snip***

“Assume we get our remaining after impellers back in ten minutes. Where can we intercept Saladin?”
She felt her bridge crew flinch at the word “intercept,” but DuMorne only bent over his console, then looked back up at her.
“On that basis, we can make a zero-range intercept one-five-two million klicks short of the planet in just over one-five-seven minutes, Ma’am. Velocity at intercept will be two-six-zero-six-eight KPS.” He cleared his throat. “We’ll enter missile range eleven minutes before intercept.”
“Understood.” Honor pinched the bridge of her nose, and her heart ached for what she was about to do to her people. They deserved far better, but she couldn’t give it to them.
“Bring us around to your new course, Steve,” she said. “Chief Killian, I want the belly of our wedge held towards Saladin.”

***Snip***

Neither of the maimed, half-blind ships any longer had the capability to look beyond the other even if they’d wanted to. And because they didn’t, neither of them noted the wide-spaced hyper footprints as sixteen battlecruisers and their escorts suddenly emerged from hyper 23.76 light-minutes from Yeltsin’s Star.
* * *
“That’s it, My Lord,” Captain Edwards said. “Tracking’s got good reads on both impeller signatures. That’s the battlecruiser at three-one-four; the one at three-two-four has to be Fearless. There’s no sign of Troubadour.”
“Understood.” Hamish Alexander tried to keep his own emotions out of his voice as he acknowledged his flag captain’s report. If Reliant couldn’t see Troubadour, that meant Troubadour was dead, yet all the way here, he’d known they were almost certain to arrive too late, despite the risks he’d run with his hyper generator settings. Now he knew they hadn’t, and a sense of elation warred with the blow of the destroyer’s loss.
He’d spread his battlecruisers by divisions, spacing four separate formations about Grayson’s side of the primary as they translated from hyper to give himself the best possible coverage, and brought them into n-space in a crash translation. He could hear someone still vomiting behind him, but he’d carried the highest possible velocity across the alpha wall with him, and it was as well he had.
Reliant’s own division had come in with Grayson directly between them and Yeltsin, covering the most important arc of the half-circle, and the vectors projecting themselves across his plot told their own tale. Alexander’s ships were not only ahead of the two warships on his plot but cutting their angle towards Grayson. That gave him an effective closing velocity of almost twenty thousand KPS, and the range to Saladin was barely twelve light-minutes, which meant Reliant would cross her course five-point-six light-minutes short of Grayson . . . and enter extreme missile range three minutes before that.

***Snip***

He raised his eyes to Alice Truman, and for the first time since she’d come aboard Reliant, some of the strain had faded from her face. She’d brought the relief force to Yeltsin two full days before it should have been possible . . . and that meant Fearless would live.

***Snip***

“Captain Edwards!”
“Yes, My Lord?” Reliant’s captain’s voice was hushed, as he, too, watched tragedy unfold before him.
“Bring the division ninety degrees to starboard. I want broadside fire on Saladin right now.”
“But—" Edwards began in shock, and Alexander cut him off harshly.
“Do it, Captain!”
“At once, My Lord!”
Byron Hunter looked sidelong at his admiral and cleared his throat.
“Sir, the range is over a hundred million klicks. There’s no way we can score at—"
“I know the range, Byron,” Alexander never turned away from his own display, “but it’s all we’ve got. Maybe Harrington will pick them up on radar—if she still has radar—as they close. Or maybe Saladin’s suffered sensor damage of her own. If she isn’t trying to break off because she doesn’t know we’re here, either, maybe she will if we let her know we are. Hell, maybe we’ll actually score on her if she holds her course!”
He looked up at last, and his chief of staff saw the despair in his eyes.
“It’s all we’ve got,” he repeated very, very softly as Battlecruiser Division 17 turned to open its broadsides and went to rapid fire.

***Snip***

A massive salvo hurtled through space, eighty-four missiles spawned by four battlecruisers from a base closing velocity of thirty thousand KPS. Another came behind it, and another, but the range was impossibly long.
Their drives had burned out three minutes and twelve-point-three million kilometers after launch, at a terminal velocity of almost a hundred and six thousand KPS. Now they tore onward, riding a purely ballistic course, invisible on Hamish Alexander’s plot, and his stomach was a lump of iron. Thirteen minutes since launch. Even at their velocity, they would take another four minutes to enter attack range, and the chance of their scoring a hit raced downward with every second of flight time.

***Snip***

“Missiles entering attack range . . . now!” Captain Hunter rasped.
* * *
A proximity alarm flashed on Lieutenant Ash’s panel, a warning buzzer wailed, and a shoal of crimson dots appeared on his radar display.
The lieutenant gaped at them. They were coming in at incredible speed, and they couldn’t be there. They couldn’t be there!
But they were. They’d come over a hundred million kilometers while Thunder of God moved to meet them, and their very lack of drive power had helped them evade all of Thunder’s remaining passive sensors. Ash’s radar had a maximum range against such small targets of just over a half million kilometers, and that was less than five seconds at their velocity.
“Missiles at three-five-two!” he cried, and Simonds’ head jerked towards his secondary plot.
Only five of them were close enough to attack Thunder, and they no longer had any power to adjust their trajectories—but Thunder had held her undeviating course for over two hours. They raced across her bow and rolled on attitude thrusters, bringing their laser clusters to bear down the unprotected throat of her wedge, and all five of them detonated as one.
Thunder of God bucked like a mad thing as half a dozen lasers ripped into her port beam, and Matthew Simonds went white with horror as he saw the second incoming broadside racing down upon him.
“Hard a starboard!” he shouted.
The coxswain threw the helm hard over, wrenching Thunder’s vulnerable bow away from the new menace, and Simonds felt a rush of relief.
Then he realized what he’d done.
“Belay that helm order!” he screamed.
* * *
“He’s turning!” Rafe Cardones shouted, and Honor jerked upright in her chair. It couldn’t be! There was no-
“Roll port! All batteries, engage!”
* * *
“Engage with forward batteries!” Simonds yelled desperately.
He had no choice. Thunder was too slow on the helm, and he’d compounded his original mistake. He should have completed the turn, gotten around as quickly as he could to interpose his wounded port sidewall while he rolled to block with the top or belly of his wedge; instead, his helmsman obeyed the orders he’d been given, checking the turn to come back to port in the same plane, and Thunder hung for a few, short seconds bow-on to Fearless.
The battlecruiser’s forward armament spat fire, two powerful spinal lasers blazing frantically at the target suddenly square across her bow. The first salvo wasted itself against the belly of Fearless’s wedge, but the cruiser was rolling like a snake. Thunder fired again, pointblank energy fire ripped through her sidewall, and armor was no protection at that range. Air and debris vomited into space, but then her surviving broadside came to bear.
Four lasers and three far more powerful grasers went to continuous rapid fire, and there was no sidewall to stop them.
Matthew Simonds had one flaming instant to know he’d failed his God, and then HMS Fearless blew his ship apart around him.

At All Costs, Chapter 68 wrote:"What the—?" Andrianna Spiropoulo looked at the tracking report in disbelief. That didn't make any sense at all!
"Ma'am," she said, turning to Admiral Chin, "the Manties have just fired."
"They've what?" Genevieve Chin looked up from a discussion with Nicodème Sabourin.
"They've fired, Ma'am," Spiropoulo repeated. "It doesn't make any sense. They're still at least seven million kilometers out of range!"
"That doesn't make any sense," Chin agreed, walking across to stare at the preposterous missile icons in the master display.
"Maybe they're trying to panic us, Admiral," Sabourin suggested. She looked at him, eyebrows rising in disbelief, and he shrugged. "I know it sounds silly, Ma'am, but I don't have any better suggestion. I mean, we've just hammered two entire Manty fleets into so much scrap metal, and these people are outnumbered by at least three-to-one. Maybe they figure this is the only way to distract us from finishing off the system."
"I suppose it's possible," Chin said slowly, watching the icons come. "But it doesn't seem like a Manty sort of thing to do. On the other hand, I don't see what else they could expect to accomplish."
* * *
Honor watched her own plot, sitting very still in her command chair. Nimitz sat upright in her lap, leaning back against her chest. She wrapped her right arm about him, holding him, and felt his cold, focused determination—an echo of her own—as his grass green eyes followed the same icons, watched the missiles speeding outward.
Apollo had done several things. It provided something verging on genuine real-time control of her missiles even at this range. By using the Apollo birds to control the other missiles from their pods, it effectively multiplied the number of MDMs each ship could control by a factor of eight. And it provided her tactical officers with unprecedented control over their missiles' fight profiles.
Eighth Fleet was the only formation in space fully equipped with the new system, and Honor and her captains had spent long, thoughtful hours exploring Apollo's ramifications. Now she was prepared to use them.
* * *
"They can't be serious," Spiropoulo said in exasperation as every single impeller signature disappeared simultaneously from her plot, six minues after launch. She glared at the plot with an affronted sense of professionalism, then punched a radical course change into the fleet tactical net.
Fifth Fleet obeyed the order immediately, rolling through a skew turn which would take it over thirty thousand kilometers from its predicted position by the time the Manticoran missiles reached it.
"What is it, Andrianna?" Chin asked, looking up from her com display and a hasty conference with her squadron commanders.
"Ma'am, you aren't going to believe this," Spiropoulo said, "but they're sending their birds in ballistic."
"What?" Chin looked back down at her com. "Excuse me for a moment, please," she told the flag officers on its compartmentalized display. "I think I need to see this for myself."
She climbed out of her command chair and walked over to stand beside Spiropoulo, her eyes seeking out the missile icons. She found them, but they were rapidly strobing flickers, not the steady light of the hard position fixes active impeller drives would have provided.
"They boosted for six minutes at forty-six thousand gravities, Ma'am," Spiropoulo said. "Then they just shut the hell down. I altered course as soon as their impellers went down, which they have to know is going to play hell with whatever accuracy they might have achieved. And that's not the only screwy thing they're up to. Look at this."
The ops officer punched a macro, and Chin frowned as an additional cluster of impeller signatures blinked into existence. For some reason known only to itself and God, the Manty task force ahead of them had just fired another pattern of pods—one pattern of pods, with less than sixty missiles in it. And it hadn't fired them at Chin's ships; the missile vectors made it obvious the Manties had fired at Second Fleet, almost 150,000,000 kilometers away from them, inside the resonance zone.
"Well, at least now we know how they think they can get them to make attack runs once they get them into range," Sabourin said.
"I suppose," Chin said, but her expression was troubled.
Actually, it was their only real option, assuming they were going to fire from such a long range in the first place. At 46,000 g, their missiles had accelerated to almost 162,400 kilometers per second and traveled 29,230,000 kilometers before they'd shut down. That left the MDMs' third stage available for a powered attack run when they reached their targets. In sixty seconds of maximum acceleration, the remaining drive would add another 54,000 kilometers per second to the missiles' velocity. Or they could go for half that much power, and add another 81,000 over the space of three minutes. More importantly, it would permit the oncoming missiles to maneuver to engage their targets. She understood that. What she didn't understand was how they could believe it was anything but an utter waste of their missiles. They'd had to establish the targeting parameters when they launched. That meant they were gong to be looking for targets where Fifth Fleet would have been on its original heading and acceleration, and Spiropoulo's course change during the long ballistic portion in their flight profile's center would hopelessly compromise the weapons' already poor accuracy at long range.
She glanced at the time display while she did some mental math. Assume they waited until the birds were, say, eighty seconds out and then kicked in the last stage at 46,000 gravities. That would give them eighty seconds of maneuver time, for however much good that would do them at this extended range.
If they let the missiles come all the way in ballistic, flight time from shutdown would be about four and a half minutes. But they won't. So say they do bring the drives back up eighty seconds out—that would put them about three minutes before attack range on a straight ballistic profile—they'd still have about 13,000,000 kilometers to go. So if they kick the remaining drive at 46,000 gees at that point, they'll shave maybe seven seconds off their arrival time, and they'll be coming in somewhere around 200,000 KPS. But their accuracy will still suck. And what the hell do they think they're doing with this other little cluster?
Andrianna was right. It didn't make sense, unless Nicodème was right and they were trying to panic her. But if Third Fleet was what they'd just finished destroying, then these people had to be Eighth Fleet, which meant Honor Harrington. And Harrington didn't do things that didn't make sense. So what—?
Her eyes opened wide in horror.
"General signal all units!" she shouted, spinning towards her com section. "Hyper out immediately! Repeat, hyper out—"
But it had taken Genevieve Chin two minutes too long to realize what was happening.
* * *
"Drives going active . . . now, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said, and the missiles thirteen million kilometers short of Fifth Fleet suddenly brought their final drive stages on-line. Their icons burned abruptly bright and strong once again as they lit off their impellers . . . and hurled themselves at their targets under full shipboard control.
They blazed in across the remaining distance, tracking with clean, lethal precision, and their ballistic flight had dropped them off of the Republic's sensors. Chin's ships knew approximately where they were, but not exactly, and their supporting EW platforms and penetration aids came up with their impellers. They hurtled in across the Republican SD(P)s' defensive envelope at over half the speed of light, and the sudden eruption of jamming, of Dragon's Teeth spilling false targets, hammered those defenses mercilessly.
The fact that the missile defense crews aboard those ships had known, without question, that the attacking missiles would be clumsy, half-blind, only made a disastrous situation even worse.
Eighth Fleet had deployed almost eight thousand pods. Those pods launched 69,984 missiles. Of that total, 7,776 were Apollo birds. Another 8,000 were electronic warfare platforms. Which meant that 54,208 carried laser heads—laser heads which homed on Genevieve Chin's ships with murderously accurate targeting.
Fifth Fleet's missile defenses did their best.
Their best was not good enough.

cthia wrote:Thanks again Vince! Marvelous textev.

I'm almost there. Again, thanks to the both of you. Jonathan. Vince. The hole remaining for me is this. Re: A coaster that has lost lock. Can it reacquire or acquire the ship that has aimlessly wandered onto its path? Even though its drive is down and it cannot go after the newly acquired ship, would it conceivably still have the ability to acquire another ship, such as the unfortunate idiot that has wandered onto its path? "Yea, keep on coming you idiot. I "see" you. I've reacquired, and you're the new target." Then of course it can detonate at its standoff range.

One other question born from the included textev. Maneuvering on attitude thrusters is simply a roll, right? Certainly thrusters cannot significantly change vector of missiles with such speed. But they can "roll" the missile toward its optimum blast front? Is what I'm getting. That correct?

BTW, where is all of this technical stuff found? Jaynes and HoS?

And do forgive my mixing up Brigham and Truman.