Where where the Beowulf Super Dreadnoughts built?

And their replacements will be built at Bolthole until their yard(s) can tool up to produce their own SD(p)s

olddatsunfan wrote:Are the Beowulf Super Dreadnoughts built to Solarian designs or Mantiocorean designs. Where they built in the Beowulf system or elsewhere?

Every time I read the title of this thread, I think...

Olddatsunfan, perhaps you should have put SPOILER! in the title. At least for Beowulf's sake. Shhhhh! LOL

That's the one contention, the one nerve, the one thread, the one bone that I think the League has to pick with Beowulf.

• They seem to know of the enemy's tech w/o sharing the intel.
• They seem to have access to said tech! At least in a limited fashion.

How are they not complicit in treason when they haven't yet officially left the League?

cthia wrote:

olddatsunfan wrote:Are the Beowulf Super Dreadnoughts built to Solarian designs or Mantiocorean designs. Where they built in the Beowulf system or elsewhere?

Every time I read the title of this thread, I think...

Olddatsunfan, perhaps you should have put SPOILER! in the title. At least for Beowulf's sake. Shhhhh! LOL

That's the one contention, the one nerve, the one thread, the one bone that I think the League has to pick with Beowulf.

• They seem to know of the enemy's tech w/o sharing the intel.
• They seem to have access to said tech! At least in a limited fashion.

How are they not complicit in treason when they haven't yet officially left the League?

In Beowulf's defense: Plausible deniability. There is no Manty design or weapons or any tech in their ships, indeed their ships construction pre-date pretty much all of the Manty designs, improvements over SL tech, or weapons.

Best case their ONI has indeed sent observers and seen (and reported); Yout ONI buried the reports. "See, here's our original texts to your ONI, dated and archived. What you did with them is beyond our control."

"Yes we do regular joint exercises with them. We do share a terminus, after all, and yes our merchant ships frequent Manty space. So would yours if you had any. Doesn't mean we're given the $5.00 tour of all the classified equipment. I can assure you the 50 cent tour only covers the bridge, crew quarters, and the galley.

cthia wrote:

olddatsunfan wrote:Are the Beowulf Super Dreadnoughts built to Solarian designs or Mantiocorean designs. Where they built in the Beowulf system or elsewhere?

Every time I read the title of this thread, I think...

Olddatsunfan, perhaps you should have put SPOILER! in the title. At least for Beowulf's sake. Shhhhh! LOL

That's the one contention, the one nerve, the one thread, the one bone that I think the League has to pick with Beowulf.

• They seem to know of the enemy's tech w/o sharing the intel.
• They seem to have access to said tech! At least in a limited fashion.

How are they not complicit in treason when they haven't yet officially left the League?

pappilon wrote:In Beowulf's defense: Plausible deniability. There is no Manty design or weapons or any tech in their ships, indeed their ships construction pre-date pretty much all of the Manty designs, improvements over SL tech, or weapons.

Best case their ONI has indeed sent observers and seen (and reported); Yout ONI buried the reports. "See, here's our original texts to your ONI, dated and archived. What you did with them is beyond our control."

"Yes we do regular joint exercises with them. We do share a terminus, after all, and yes our merchant ships frequent Manty space. So would yours if you had any. Doesn't mean we're given the $5.00 tour of all the classified equipment. I can assure you the 50 cent tour only covers the bridge, crew quarters, and the galley.

"We've got plausible deniability too, don't you think?"

"You're plausibly deniable! Plausibly deniable! Plausibly deniable! ..."

I think it is safe to say that the beowulf SDs are basically Spinx or Gryphon SDs (first Gryphon commissioned in 1900, twenty years ago. more then enough time for beowulf to copy the design or at least build something close) but without any ghost rider mods that might have been included in late first war models.

that alone makes them 3 times as good as any SLN SD ever built. Solly electronics were good enough to help the peeps almost match the RMN's pre ghost rider ECM etc and that was just the stuff that the solly designers had on hand without the pressurized wartime R&D, i'm sure Beowulf has even better options then that.

so beowulf's 30SDs can probably punch out twice their number of SLN junk heeps. more then that is probably a stretch unless they've got their own missile pods but again it has been 20 yeas since Honor demonstrated just how useful they can be.

i'd be stunned if someone like beowulf hadn't noticed the benefits, even if they chose not to build podlayers.

I also doubt the mighty SLN will have noticed anything under the wall, so who says beowulf doesn't have some of those fast minelayers that both the Heavenites and RMN use, stuffed with missile pods. send a couple of them along with any BW SDs and drop pods for them to tractor and fire. boom! SLN ships converted from mobile junk to drifting debris.

all of that is doable without using any of the RMNs best tech and would raise zero interest from ONI, (assuming ONI was competent to begin with.)

pappilon wrote:
Or just go lower tech and assemble a few of the forts with bubble sidewalls the Manties use to protect their side of the Sigma Draconis wormhole Junction. What was that text ev? Something like the forts at Lynx could destroy Crandall's fleet in minutes?

I was thinking of using this as a trap to blow up commerce or a hapless military fleet, not a long term defense. I don't think we've actually seen any hyperdrive or impeller equipped forts, but even if you could build one their time moving between bands would probably be horrible. The real question is how you would assemble the things without anyone noticing.

If you want to go low tech a good spread of energy mines would probably work until someone got smart actually, as long as they don't waste themselves over killing merchants. Maybe a slightly upgraded version of those assassin drones and some stealthy destroyers. Few things would be funnier than a handful of obsolete Solarian destroyers and energy mines doing massive damage to the GA fleet. The best part is their sensors wouldn't be calibrated when they got hit so they wouldn't know what hit them! Publish a "scientific" paper on the dangers of over using hyperbridges before hand and you just might perpetrate the 3rd greatest hoax in human existence! (The first being psychic space cats and the second being the Malign of course. )

quite possibly a cat wrote:I was thinking of using this as a trap to blow up commerce or a hapless military fleet, not a long term defense. I don't think we've actually seen any hyperdrive or impeller equipped forts, but even if you could build one their time moving between bands would probably be horrible. The real question is how you would assemble the things without anyone noticing.

One correction, almost all forts have impellers. Even the first book, chapter 5, mentions this

On Basilisk Station wrote:the "forts" in the outer rings had to be able to move to fill in the gaps and mass upon an attacker. Their maximum acceleration rates were low, well under a hundred gravities, but their initial positions had been very carefully planned. Their acceleration would be enough to intercept attacking forces headed in-system, and their engines were sufficiently powerful to generate impeller wedges and sidewalls to protect them.

They don't have hyper generators, or Alpha nodes / warshaski sails, but they do have a single ring of Beta nodes which allows them their low acceleration (which is still far quicker than any 20th century manned vehicle)

Still you can't hang them out in hyper.

The other issue with placing an ambush force in hyper in the number of hyper bands you'd have to cover. David hasn't gone into detail how how sensors work across the apparent subbands of, say, the Alpha bands. Sometimes he seems to describe hyper space like there are only 8 usable bands; but other times he talks about how high a ship went within the Theta bands (Alice Truman's run for help in HOTQ). Can a ship in the middle of the Theta bands see, and attack, as ship in the highest Theta bands? Can you see across even 1 "subband"? How many subbands are there within each of the major 8 hyper bands?

Anyway, at minimum if you're looking to ambush even a freighter you might need forces parked in 4 different major bands (Alpha bands, Beta bands, Gamma bands, Delta bands). Though to be fair if the merchie isn't expecting an ambush sitting in the Delta bands is probably plenty. You'd miss any military traffic, but those are the breaks.
But if there are a dozen subbands within Delta you might need to park ships in each of them, or a third of them; we just don't know. So going for a high probability of ambushing forces within hyper might suck up a disproportionate amount of light units.

Dauntless wrote:I think it is safe to say that the beowulf SDs are basically Spinx or Gryphon SDs (first Gryphon commissioned in 1900, twenty years ago. more then enough time for beowulf to copy the design or at least build something close) but without any ghost rider mods that might have been included in late first war models.

that alone makes them 3 times as good as any SLN SD ever built. Solly electronics were good enough to help the peeps almost match the RMN's pre ghost rider ECM etc and that was just the stuff that the solly designers had on hand without the pressurized wartime R&D, i'm sure Beowulf has even better options then that.

so beowulf's 30SDs can probably punch out twice their number of SLN junk heeps. more then that is probably a stretch unless they've got their own missile pods but again it has been 20 yeas since Honor demonstrated just how useful they can be.

i'd be stunned if someone like beowulf hadn't noticed the benefits, even if they chose not to build podlayers.

I also doubt the mighty SLN will have noticed anything under the wall, so who says beowulf doesn't have some of those fast minelayers that both the Heavenites and RMN use, stuffed with missile pods. send a couple of them along with any BW SDs and drop pods for them to tractor and fire. boom! SLN ships converted from mobile junk to drifting debris.

all of that is doable without using any of the RMNs best tech and would raise zero interest from ONI, (assuming ONI was competent to begin with.)

This mention of the Peeps using Solarian electronics in the first war reminds me of something I seem to remember reading. It was someone saying something like, "civilian Solarian electronics are better than what the SLN is using."

The implication being that either the SLN never bothered to update their electronic equipment or that they actually built new ships with outdated tech. If the later, probably, because of kickbacks or some other form of graft.

Now as I said, I don't recall where I read this, so I might have imagined it. But it does seem to fit with how the SLN operates.

As an aside, does anyone know how often RL navies update the electronics on their ships?

glott wrote:This mention of the Peeps using Solarian electronics in the first war reminds me of something I seem to remember reading. It was someone saying something like, "civilian Solarian electronics are better than what the SLN is using."

The implication being that either the SLN never bothered to update their electronic equipment or that they actually built new ships with outdated tech. If the later, probably, because of kickbacks or some other form of graft.

Actually bureaucracy and military standards are more than enough to make military electronics lag behind civilian ones. It constantly the case in the US military, and probably all other militaries. Even if the electronics were cutting edge when the plane, ship, etc is designed by the time you get the first one built they're a couple years behind civilian electronics, and then you can't risk breaking changes so you keep making the planes or ships with that same exact electronics fit for years (as it gets more and more out of date) until you finally design a midlift electronics upgrade and over years bring the entire fleet up to not as obsolete tech.

But its even worse because the military (and to a lesser extent space hardware) requires electronics that work in conditions of temperature, shock, and particle emissions far in excess of what a civilian chip needs to handle. Ruggedizing the electronic components is a slow and costly process so even if you take a cutting edge chip by the time you've made it rugged enough for military use and started manifacturing them it's several years obsolete (and then it gets incorporated into a design that's again years away from initial production that will probably be getting cranked out for over a decade).

Its inevitable that anything the military takes from the civilian side will be obsolescent by the time it makes it into a deployed military device.



But the SLN was even worse, because their computer code was woefully underutilizing the basic hardware. So not only were their computers and electronics lagging behind what the civilian sector could do (for all the reasons mentioned above) they weren't even using what they had effectively. (In the Torch books the People's Navy in Exile, hardly the sharpest knives in the drawer, got major improvements from ex-SLN hardware by basically copying and pasting the St. Just ceasefire era Havenite computer programs onto the SLN computers. Not optimized at all for the hardware yet still significantly more effective than the theoretically optimized SLN software.

Jonathan_S wrote:

quite possibly a cat wrote:I was thinking of using this as a trap to blow up commerce or a hapless military fleet, not a long term defense. I don't think we've actually seen any hyperdrive or impeller equipped forts, but even if you could build one their time moving between bands would probably be horrible. The real question is how you would assemble the things without anyone noticing.

One correction, almost all forts have impellers. Even the first book, chapter 5, mentions this

On Basilisk Station wrote:the "forts" in the outer rings had to be able to move to fill in the gaps and mass upon an attacker. Their maximum acceleration rates were low, well under a hundred gravities, but their initial positions had been very carefully planned. Their acceleration would be enough to intercept attacking forces headed in-system, and their engines were sufficiently powerful to generate impeller wedges and sidewalls to protect them.

They don't have hyper generators, or Alpha nodes / warshaski sails, but they do have a single ring of Beta nodes which allows them their low acceleration (which is still far quicker than any 20th century manned vehicle)

Still you can't hang them out in hyper.

The other issue with placing an ambush force in hyper in the number of hyper bands you'd have to cover. David hasn't gone into detail how how sensors work across the apparent subbands of, say, the Alpha bands. Sometimes he seems to describe hyper space like there are only 8 usable bands; but other times he talks about how high a ship went within the Theta bands (Alice Truman's run for help in HOTQ). Can a ship in the middle of the Theta bands see, and attack, as ship in the highest Theta bands? Can you see across even 1 "subband"? How many subbands are there within each of the major 8 hyper bands?

Anyway, at minimum if you're looking to ambush even a freighter you might need forces parked in 4 different major bands (Alpha bands, Beta bands, Gamma bands, Delta bands). Though to be fair if the merchie isn't expecting an ambush sitting in the Delta bands is probably plenty. You'd miss any military traffic, but those are the breaks.
But if there are a dozen subbands within Delta you might need to park ships in each of them, or a third of them; we just don't know. So going for a high probability of ambushing forces within hyper might suck up a disproportionate amount of light units.

I stand corrected on the impellers!

There are a lot of bands, but you don't just go straight from N-space to the delta bands. You go N-space to Lowest Alpha band. Similarly you go from the lowest Alpha band to N-space.