Felix junction, key aspect of the story (possible spoilers?)

kzt wrote:

SYED wrote:Could a carrier survive transition long enough to deploy LAC? I could see a. Bunch of them capable of dealing with the mannerheim ships guarding the wormhole.

No. You are in a grav wave. It’s instant destruction for the LACS

No, the LACs can deploy once the CLAC got through... remember, ships reconfigure almost immediately from sails to wedge (mere seconds), so a CLAC only has to survive 3-5 seconds to start punching out LAC's.

A Rising Thunder, Ch 26 wrote:“Transit complete,” she announced.
“Thank you, Helm. Well done!” Talmadge said, but most of his attention was back on the sail interface readout, watching the numbers twinkle downward even more rapidly than they’d risen. “Engineering, reconfigure to impeller.”
“Aye, aye, Sir. Reconfiguring to impeller now.”

Otter folded her sails back into her impeller wedge and moved forward more rapidly, accelerating steadily out of the Stine Terminus, five and a half light-hours from the G5 primary of the Stine System.

“Five hundred gravities, Senior Chief,” Talmadge said.

From the way Laocoon II was implemented, and the second ship appearing an estimated 30 seconds afterwards. Wormholes destabilize for only 10ish seconds for destroyers, and nearly 90 seconds for a superdreadnought, so a Saganami-C should only be approximately 30 seconds, and Otter was already well clear as her squadron mate came out the wormhole behind.


Really depends if the CLAC has any form of 'catapult launch system' or if it's 100% thruster based, and most importantly whether or not the catapult can be computer controlled. It's not that different in nature to Naval ships doing crash translations leave their point defense on AI control while they're busy puking (I was going to grab the quote, but apparently that nugget wasn't where I thought in Echos of Honor, Operation Icarus Task Group 12.4.2, but it was somewhere else)


Launching too early might kill off a few LAC's, launching too late all of them. But it's definitely possible to do, if highly unlikely the CLAC would survive long enough to get their LAC's away, without some form of catapult launch.

Somtaaw wrote:

kzt wrote:No. You are in a grav wave. It’s instant destruction for the LACS

No, the LACs can deploy once the CLAC got through... remember, ships reconfigure almost immediately from sails to wedge (mere seconds), so a CLAC only has to survive 3-5 seconds to start punching out LAC's.

You're confusing the compressed narrative with actual time in the inbound lane. The timing is more like 30-50 seconds. (it might be as high a 300-500 seconds, because the actual time is never given.)

LACs can't be launched for the same reason that missiles can't be used -- the "inbound lane" is effectively a grav wave in normal space.

Weird Harold wrote:You're confusing the compressed narrative with actual time in the inbound lane. The timing is more like 30-50 seconds. (it might be as high a 300-500 seconds, because the actual time is never given.)

LACs can't be launched for the same reason that missiles can't be used -- the "inbound lane" is effectively a grav wave in normal space.

not that compressed, we had a heavy cruiser, followed by another heavy cruiser, working almost exactly like White Haven transiting from Trevor's Star to Basilisk.

Echoes of Honor, Ch 37 wrote:His screening units, up to and including his battlecruisers, would each produce a ten-second blockage of the route for whoever came next in line, but his dreadnoughts would close the route for almost seventy seconds and each superdreadnought would shut it down for a hundred and thirteen.

-- snip --

A ship made transit under Warshawski sail. Those sails provided no propulsion in n-space, but a wormhole junction was best thought of as a frozen funnel of hyper-space which happened to connect to n-space at either end. That meant sails not only could be used in a junction transit, but that the transiting vessel had no option but to use them. And that, in turn, meant each ship had to reconfigure its impeller nodes from sail to wedge as it emerged from the far side of the wormhole. Its sails would leave it with some momentum, but not very much, and if the lead ship in a transit was even a little tardy reconfiguring and the one astern of it ran up its backside—

If the Saganami's in Laocoon II had gone for absolute minimum, they could come through 10 seconds after the one in front. Even accounting for some form of nausea, or other temporarily debilitating condition, that puts the maximum time to shift from wormhole sails, to impeller wedge at 5 seconds or less. White Haven's crash double translation defense he sent his ships through at minimum POSSIBLE, so a heavy cruiser going through every 10 seconds and he didn't have a single accident until he was sending DNs/SDs through.

However for Laocoon it wasn't a tactical priority to get that many ships through so quickly, so generously giving them 30 seconds, a Saganami-C has more than sufficient time to have drifted out of the wormhole grav wave, changed to sails and moved out of the way.


A CLAC's quite a lot of ship, even if you have firing angles into its unarmored roof and belly, it's possible it'd survive long enough to start punching LACs. Especially if CLAC's are even remotely like modern sea carriers with a catapult launch system, it should have enough time to get some LAC's off.

Somtaaw wrote:not that compressed, we had a heavy cruiser, followed by another heavy cruiser, working almost exactly like White Haven transiting from Trevor's Star to Basilisk.

Ten second intervals just means that there is more than one ship in the "inbound lane" at the same time.

Think of it as like an escalator; you don't have to wait for the person ahead of you to get off the escalator before you start down. The only time there's a problem is if somebody ahead of you steps off but doesn't move our of the way of the next person.

Can you transit with full ecm and stealth on? That way at least the enemy missiles might not be as deadly as they could be. They will still be aware ships have arrived, it is just locking on them with weapons would take time.

SYED wrote:Can you transit with full ecm and stealth on? That way at least the enemy missiles might not be as deadly as they could be. They will still be aware ships have arrived, it is just locking on them with weapons would take time.

I doubt that would help much. You don't need to see or lock on to a target that is at a known range and bearing.

IMHO, if a ship arrives with fill ECM/Stealth engaged, it should be assumed to be hostile and the inbound lane should immediately be filled with as many weapons beams as can be brought to bear.

Weird Harold wrote:

SYED wrote:Can you transit with full ecm and stealth on? That way at least the enemy missiles might not be as deadly as they could be. They will still be aware ships have arrived, it is just locking on them with weapons would take time.

I doubt that would help much. You don't need to see or lock on to a target that is at a known range and bearing.

IMHO, if a ship arrives with fill ECM/Stealth engaged, it should be assumed to be hostile and the inbound lane should immediately be filled with as many weapons beams as can be brought to bear.

Hmm, I wonder if a SD/BC transiting simultaneously with a flotilla of CL/DDs could use their ECM systems to mess with the defenders' targeting processes for their first strike.

I'm not advocating such a tactic, mind you. It worked at long range during Fourth Yeltsin, but failed shortly into missile range - and wormhole transits involve ranges much closer than that.

munroburton wrote:Hmm, I wonder if a SD/BC transiting simultaneously with a flotilla of CL/DDs could use their ECM systems to mess with the defenders' targeting processes for their first strike.

I'm not advocating such a tactic, mind you. It worked at long range during Fourth Yeltsin, but failed shortly into missile range - and wormhole transits involve ranges much closer than that.

IIRC, Fourth Yeltsin involved a lot of hiding wedge strength, amplifying wedge strength, and hiding big wedges behind smaller wedges...

Wormhole transits, and specifically exit lanes, don't permit active wedges without destruction of the wedge generator -- ie ship, missile, drone, ECM decoy, etc.

Weird Harold wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:not that compressed, we had a heavy cruiser, followed by another heavy cruiser, working almost exactly like White Haven transiting from Trevor's Star to Basilisk.

Ten second intervals just means that there is more than one ship in the "inbound lane" at the same time.

Think of it as like an escalator; you don't have to wait for the person ahead of you to get off the escalator before you start down. The only time there's a problem is if somebody ahead of you steps off but doesn't move our of the way of the next person.

I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree here.

Whether it was White Haven's crash defense against Icarus, Honor and her Armed Merchies, or Laocoon II, every occasion of multi-ship transits, the first ship to go through has always switched from sails to wedge and is maneuvering clear well before the next ship in line comes through.

All of those cases, and whichever ones I'm forgetting indicate the grace period from sail to wedge is mere seconds. Yes some story compression may be happening, but even if the normal delay is 1 minute between ships, the cases of White Haven's defense and Laocoon prove that naval ships are easily able to do it considerably faster when they want/need to.

-Manticoran, Havenite, Grayson, Andermani and probably even Beowulfan ships, are all going to be capable of rapid transiting.

-Solarian, Silesian, and similar navies are not capable, they've never had to do rapid redeployments, whether through wormholes or not. The Solarian Navy especially has spent so long with gimme sims they've never had to practice 'hard maneuvering', even Frontier Fleet helmsmen I believe unlikely to be capable of even First War Havenite capability [Such as when Hamish was attacking Nightgale, and was run off by a Peep task group that was already maneuvering like a Manticoran one, mere months after the war start]

-Mesan Alignment helmsmen may, or may not, currently be skilled enough for rapid wormhole transiting. The only time we've ever seen them do something that required some skill was when the dozen or so Sharks performed their Alpha translation, tractored together, outside Manticore... the various some MAlign navies such as Mannerheim are completely unable to be assessed yet. [Have not yet read Uncompromising, so I may have missed some newer datums, but if I have I don't think its going to be enough to change the assessments]

SYED wrote:Can you transit with full ecm and stealth on? That way at least the enemy missiles might not be as deadly as they could be. They will still be aware ships have arrived, it is just locking on them with weapons would take time.

And this is a definite no.

Wormhole translations are both faster & weaker than normal Alpha translations, but they're not completely undetectable; particularly at the close range a Fortress is at which is some unspecified distance somewhere between 1 million and 3 million kilometers. At that range a camera is all the detector you require, because sails visibly bleed their energy.

Even the moronic computers in Honorverse could easily be programmed as a sentry for a wormhole simply by attach a standard camera to your computer, and setting it to analyze for a burst of light. If the burst of light is more powerful than X, then it automatically triggers an alarm. If you used one of the buoy's Honor did in OBS (these are able to maintain station for months), you could maintain a watch on even (allegedly) untransitable wormholes for years without 'wasting' crew or more effort than twice a year overhauling the buoy and replacing a power source.


To use my prior example of White Haven's defense of Basilisk by double transiting from Trevor's Star, the Peeps were kept blind to what was happening by Fort jamming, otherwise they'd have detected White Haven's hundreds of ships transiting the wormhole; and the related sail energy bleedoff.

Somtaaw wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:
Ten second intervals just means that there is more than one ship in the "inbound lane" at the same time.

Think of it as like an escalator; you don't have to wait for the person ahead of you to get off the escalator before you start down. The only time there's a problem is if somebody ahead of you steps off but doesn't move our of the way of the next person.

I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree here.

Whether it was White Haven's crash defense against Icarus, Honor and her Armed Merchies, or Laocoon II, every occasion of multi-ship transits, the first ship to go through has always switched from sails to wedge and is maneuvering clear well before the next ship in line comes through.

All of those cases, and whichever ones I'm forgetting indicate the grace period from sail to wedge is mere seconds. Yes some story compression may be happening, but even if the normal delay is 1 minute between ships, the cases of White Haven's defense and Laocoon prove that naval ships are easily able to do it considerably faster when they want/need to.

-Manticoran, Havenite, Grayson, Andermani and probably even Beowulfan ships, are all going to be capable of rapid transiting.

-Solarian, Silesian, and similar navies are not capable, they've never had to do rapid redeployments, whether through wormholes or not. The Solarian Navy especially has spent so long with gimme sims they've never had to practice 'hard maneuvering', even Frontier Fleet helmsmen I believe unlikely to be capable of even First War Havenite capability [Such as when Hamish was attacking Nightgale, and was run off by a Peep task group that was already maneuvering like a Manticoran one, mere months after the war start]

-Mesan Alignment helmsmen may, or may not, currently be skilled enough for rapid wormhole transiting. The only time we've ever seen them do something that required some skill was when the dozen or so Sharks performed their Alpha translation, tractored together, outside Manticore... the various some MAlign navies such as Mannerheim are completely unable to be assessed yet. [Have not yet read Uncompromising, so I may have missed some newer datums, but if I have I don't think its going to be enough to change the assessments]

SYED wrote:Can you transit with full ecm and stealth on? That way at least the enemy missiles might not be as deadly as they could be. They will still be aware ships have arrived, it is just locking on them with weapons would take time.

And this is a definite no.

Wormhole translations are both faster & weaker than normal Alpha translations, but they're not completely undetectable; particularly at the close range a Fortress is at which is some unspecified distance somewhere between 1 million and 3 million kilometers. At that range a camera is all the detector you require, because sails visibly bleed their energy.

Even the moronic computers in Honorverse could easily be programmed as a sentry for a wormhole simply by attach a standard camera to your computer, and setting it to analyze for a burst of light. If the burst of light is more powerful than X, then it automatically triggers an alarm. If you used one of the buoy's Honor did in OBS (these are able to maintain station for months), you could maintain a watch on even (allegedly) untransitable wormholes for years without 'wasting' crew or more effort than twice a year overhauling the buoy and replacing a power source.


To use my prior example of White Haven's defense of Basilisk by double transiting from Trevor's Star, the Peeps were kept blind to what was happening by Fort jamming, otherwise they'd have detected White Haven's hundreds of ships transiting the wormhole; and the related sail energy bleedoff.

How much time from bringing up the wedge until you can bring up the sidewalls? Plus you still don't know you are losing ships to enemy action. Textev is, well, textev. And all I can find is that transiting into the defended side of a WHJ is suicide. And if you are transiting into a natural ship killer, you still don't live long enough to get a message back through.