Uncompromising honor snippet #10 (?)

Perhaps one of the tech geeks can answer this for me? If the wedge on a drone suffices to kill a freighter, why did earlier missiles (before laser heads) need contact nukes?

Daryl wrote:Perhaps one of the tech geeks can answer this for me? If the wedge on a drone suffices to kill a freighter, why did earlier missiles (before laser heads) need contact nukes?

Mostly because even missile wedges are too "deep" to reliably get through the open sides of a target's wedge. The band of vulnerability is too narrow to let a wedge through unless it's coming pretty much down the throat. (Might be able to pop in from the broadside if it was way, way, way far forward, but even that would be unlikely. Missile warheads are much smaller than that. They could "thread the needle' between the floor and roof of a target's wedge.

George J. Smith wrote:

cthia wrote:It seems the SLN still suffers from inexperience. No member of the GA would hyper into a potentially deadly system where enemy fire may be lurking and assume you've arrived first. Without sending in a pattern of drones into the inner system to clear the advance.

It is obvious that Vice Admiral Hajdu Gyôzô attained his rank by stealing from the poor and giving to the richly arrogant.

Eagleeye wrote:I don't know if I'd call it inexperience. It's more like an ingrained habit and a lack of imagination - or so I read it, at least. After all, at the time he arrives, Hypatia is still part of the Solarian League (even if Kolokoltsov and his cronies are afraid that the referendum will change that) - and so, in a way, friendly territory. And there's textev that he knew about the peculiarities of the systems policies - like, that they don't announce referendum results until the last ballot is truely accounted for, for example.

In addition, he simply couldn't imagine, that Hypatia would call for a manticoran presence in the system before the referendum was officially finished. Ok, that you could possible put under the headline of inexperience - after all, somehow one has to learn (and survive the experience) that even the most improbable events can actually happen, especially in a warlike situation like this. And the SLN didn't fought any war for several centuries, as we all know.

munroburton wrote:I would call it inexperience too.

Consider that Honor Harrington herself, as a Captain, fell victim to the same sort of problem - at Yeltsin's Star. Fearless returned to the system and was ambushed by a Masadan LAC.

Several years later, Commodore Harrington was again ambushed and captured at Adler. However, Prince Adrian was a vanguard scout for a cruiser squadron and a convoy - which escaped a superior force unharmed. If this convoy had come in fat and happy like the SLN does...

Prince Adrian was Alistair Mckeon's ship, Honor was a guest aboard the ship, so although she was the senior officer she was not in command.

runsforcelery wrote:In Hajdu's defense (can't believe I'm saying that) he did clear the volume between his arrival point and his planetary orbit)and cover the immediate volume of the planet with drones) as he came in. He also covered the perimeter of the system against people arriving after he did. He didn't cover a broad enough volume, but by the same token, he had no reason to believe the aforesaid hostile force might not only lying doggo light minutes away from the planet but might also be unknown to the citizens of the system as a whole. And, for that matter, I could have allowed him to sweep the entire system and still not find the Manties, given their superior stealth and ability to lie low. It takes a lot of drones (especially without Ghostrider tech) to cover an entire star system's volume.

Also. the ambush Honor suffered at Yeltsin wasn't because she didn't know the LACs were there, She picked them up easily before she entered their attack range, as a matter of fact. She simply had no reason to assume they might (a) be hostile and (b) be suicidal enough to attack a formation of modern warships.

Superior stealth which probably meant the enemy would not have detected an additional pool of GR platforms left by Kotouč large enough to actually take a real bite out of Solly crime?

What is really going on for the Hapless Hypatians to incur such wrath of the Souless Sollies. Surely this can't simply be about stemming the tide of secession. UC where R U in hyper!


Does the sneak peek include the completion of this battle?

cthia wrote:Does the sneak peek include the completion of this battle?

No. this snipped immediately follows the end of the sneak peak.

Randomiser wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:
If you want a spoiler, look at Tiny Snippet #5 - A Captain for Rose and Heather.

If you don't, then don't.

So it would seem, except that we have not yet seen a Sollie admiral called Yountz. Of course it may just be that he succeeded to command once the flagship was destroyed.

Rereading,

... I suppose you and I will find out how many more of your battlecruisers I can take out, one-by-one, until you — or your successor — finally figure out where I really am and manage to return fire.

[bold added] So, yeah, this Yountz is the senior surviving officer, not the original TF commander.

Bill Woods wrote:
Imagined conversation:
Admiral [noting yet another Manty tech surprise]:
XO, what's the budget for the ONI?
Vice Admiral: I don't recall exactly, sir. Several billion quatloos.
Admiral: ... What do you suppose they did with all that money?

Spent it on Frontier Fleet's need to identify domestic threats in the Protectorates and on petabytes of research and analysis proving thoroughly --- I mean thoroughly --- that the Invincible Solarian League Navy truly is the Invincible Solarian League Navy.

Well, that and the odd dacha on the Black Sea, the occasional bank account in Zurich, and a really nice 3-month vacation (all properly vouchered as "business expenses", of course) on New Riviera in the Hedonesia System.

Seriously, it's mostly a case of myopic focus on the problems its been dealing with forever (i.e., policing the Protectorates) and sheer hubris because ONI's analysts know (quite correctly, BTW) that the League is THE 800 kilo gorilla of the explored galaxy. And because no one in the League saw the shift in war-fighting paradigms coming out of Project Gram any more than the Legislaturalists did. The SLN's had the unquestioned lead in naval technology and a crushing numerical advantage for six hundred-plus years, and they only lost the tech edge in the last 20. And it's not like this was the era between, say, 1870 and 1914 (at least as far as the League's been concerned), when even major powers were sending observors to naval wars between minor powers because there was so much radically new and untested hardware in service that no one had ever seen used in action. The reason the Russo-Japanese War was so avidly observed and dissected was that no one had ever seen the weapons actually being used or had any real idea how well the various new and radical theories were going to hold up in real life.

But Solly ONI didn't realize that had suddenly become the case in the Honorverse, because the changes weren't introduced gradually across the platform of every navy in the Honorverse the way they were between wet navies on Earth in the runup to 1905 and Dreadnought. It's been only 8 years since Operation Buttercup, the first conclusive demonstration of the MDM, and it came as a total surprise even to the Peeps, The Sollies didn't have that proximity (or that knowledge they were going to be hanged in a week) to sharpen their focus on the barfnett System and there were no Solarian observers on hand to see Buttercup because the Manties wouldn't have permitted them and the Peeps had severed their ties with their Solarian suppliers (which, by itself, should have told someone tuned into the possibility of new tech that something had to be going on out there in the Haven Sector . . . but didn't). After multiple centuries of steady, gradual evolution of naval hardware, it's understandable how they might have failed to pick up on the fact that things had changed 5-600 LY from home. Not excusable, but understandable. Especially when the entire League has slipped into a sense that there's the Real World That Counts . . . and then there's everything outside the League.

runsforcelery wrote:The reason the Russo-Japanese War was so avidly observed and dissected was that no one had ever seen the weapons actually being used or had any real idea how well the various new and radical theories were going to hold up in real life.

The observers for the Russo Japanese war were the guys who led armies and army groups in the first world war. Very serious, very well thought of, highly capable officers destined for high command. And they learned, as far as can be determined, exactly nothing. When the first world war started they repeated nearly exactly the mistakes the Japanese had when they ran into the Russian machine guns, barbed wire and trenches.

kzt wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:The reason the Russo-Japanese War was so avidly observed and dissected was that no one had ever seen the weapons actually being used or had any real idea how well the various new and radical theories were going to hold up in real life.

The observers for the Russo Japanese war were the guys who led armies and army groups in the first world war. Very serious, very well thought of, highly capable officers destined for high command. And they learned, as far as can be determined, exactly nothing. When the first world war started they repeated nearly exactly the mistakes the Japanese had when they ran into the Russian machine guns, barbed wire and trenches.

Yeah,they learned more on the naval side, though even there some it was false lessons. In defense of the generals, the fighting on the mainland pretty much followed/confirmed the concepts of maneuver and firepower which were then in vogue. Casualties were massive when someone assaulted a prepared position, but they could find open flanks, supply lines to threaten, out march the enemy, etc. Around Port Arthur, the fighting devolved into siege warfare around a single objective which could only be attacked head-on, which was very different. The observers learned the lesson that maneuver worked in the field . . . and maneuver had never worked against fortresses, anyway, so Port Arthur was a surprise only in degree, not in kind. And, in fact, they were right.

In 1914-1918, maneuver did work on the Eastern Front, where the troop density, road network, and rail density were all low. It didn't work on the Western Front because no one had realized that industrialized nations could actually build a "fortress" 700 miles long that stretched all the way from the Alps to the North Sea, without an open flank. The mountain fighting between Italy and Austria-Hungary was a lot more like the Western Front, but then again, mountain warfare had always been more like siege warfare. Same for Gallipoli, which was basically a failed assault on the fortress of the Dardanelles. When you get into the field campaigns on the Turks' southern flank, though, you get back into maneuver warfare which worked, as Allenby proved in Egypt and Palestine.

I've always thought it was unfair of the generals' critics to fasten on the evidence of Port Arthur and ignore Liaoyang, the Yalu River, and Mukden. Port Arthur was --- very rightly --- seen by contemporary military professionals as a set of special circumstances. The failure of vision was the inability for a generation of soldiers and sailors who'd never encountered truly industrialized war to imagine that anyone could recreate those "special circumstances" across the entire width of Western Europe. And, in fairness, nothing that happened in the Russo-Japanese War suggested that anyone had the economic, industrial, and manpower strength to do that. Indeed, both combatants were at the point of economic collapse when the Treaty of Portsmouth brought hostilities to a close in late 1905, so the logistical "lesson," if any, was that operations could not be sustained at that level of intensity for years on end. And because the lesson was that maneuver, field guns, and rifles worked outside fortresses (and fortresses were a special case, unlikely to repeat in open field warfare), that was where doctrine and weapons procurement should be focused, not on super heavy artillery, barbed wire, and the armored fighting vehicles no one could have built in 1904-1905, anyway.

Nothing guarantees that just because someone is really smart and thinks about something really hard he's going to draw the correct conclusion.

Of course, in the Sollies' case (to bring this back to the Honorverse) the real root of the problems is that aside from a handful of people like al-Fanudhi (and Governor Barregos) none of the smart people had even glanced in the right direction to begin with.

runsforcelery wrote:But Solly ONI didn't realize that had suddenly become the case in the Honorverse, because the changes weren't introduced gradually across the platform of every navy in the Honorverse the way they were between wet navies on Earth in the runup to 1905 and Dreadnought. It's been only 8 years since Operation Buttercup, the first conclusive demonstration of the MDM, and it came as a total surprise even to the Peeps, The Sollies didn't have that proximity (or that knowledge they were going to be hanged in a week) to sharpen their focus on the barfnett System and there were no Solarian observers on hand to see Buttercup because the Manties wouldn't have permitted them and the Peeps had severed their ties with their Solarian suppliers (which, by itself, should have told someone tuned into the possibility of new tech that something had to be going on out there in the Haven Sector . . . but didn't). After multiple centuries of steady, gradual evolution of naval hardware, it's understandable how they might have failed to pick up on the fact that things had changed 5-600 LY from home. Not excusable, but understandable. Especially when the entire League has slipped into a sense that there's the Real World That Counts . . . and then there's everything outside the League.

I guess I kind of think while it may have suddenly became the case that the RMN (and RHN and IAN and GSN) had a big enough advantage over the SLN to possibly win a war with the League, a competent (or not systematically sabotaged by its enemies) SLN intelligence department ought to have noticed the Manties were starting to make radical breakthroughs in warfighting tech no later than the first large-scale use of "modern" missile pods at Hancock Station.

drothgery wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:But Solly ONI didn't realize that had suddenly become the case in the Honorverse, because the changes weren't introduced gradually across the platform of every navy in the Honorverse the way they were between wet navies on Earth in the runup to 1905 and Dreadnought. It's been only 8 years since Operation Buttercup, the first conclusive demonstration of the MDM, and it came as a total surprise even to the Peeps, The Sollies didn't have that proximity (or that knowledge they were going to be hanged in a week) to sharpen their focus on the barfnett System and there were no Solarian observers on hand to see Buttercup because the Manties wouldn't have permitted them and the Peeps had severed their ties with their Solarian suppliers (which, by itself, should have told someone tuned into the possibility of new tech that something had to be going on out there in the Haven Sector . . . but didn't). After multiple centuries of steady, gradual evolution of naval hardware, it's understandable how they might have failed to pick up on the fact that things had changed 5-600 LY from home. Not excusable, but understandable. Especially when the entire League has slipped into a sense that there's the Real World That Counts . . . and then there's everything outside the League.

I guess I kind of think while it may have suddenly became the case that the RMN (and RHN and IAN and GSN) had a big enough advantage over the SLN to possibly win a war with the League, a competent (or not systematically sabotaged by its enemies) SLN intelligence department ought to have noticed the Manties were starting to make radical breakthroughs in warfighting tech no later than the first large-scale use of "modern" missile pods at Hancock Station.

Except that there was "nothing new here, move along" from the Solly perspective. Missile pods had been used as area defense weapons in star systems for centuries. The only novel aspect of it (from the perspective of a Solly reading reports over his morning croissant and cup of coffee) was that the poor, pathetic Peep neobarbs were stupid enough to sail into reach of such an obsolescent weapon. Tsk-tsk! No Solarian officer would be stupid enough to do that!

And, I might point out, that assumes anyone in the League knew what had happened at Hancock. They had no observers aboard either side's ships and both sides had plenty of reason to black out all tactical details. An aggressive ONI might have been out beating the bushes and trying to find Manty or Peep naval personnel who were there and would talk about it (or corruptible staff officers they could bribe for the intel), but first it had to be concerned enough about potential threats to be aggressive. I go back to the USN between WWI and WWII, when all USN plans focused on Japan as our most probable opponent, and US analysts did't even realize the Nagato class ships were capable of 26 knots until after the North Carolinas had been launched and design studies on the South Dakotas were already advanced. Nor did they find out about the Long Lance torpedo or the 18.1" gun until the very end of the war. The USN knew it was probably going to end up fighting Japan and, despite that incentive, were caught with their trousers down in several critical instances. The SLN knew it wasn't going to have to fight anyone (it was, after all, the Invincible Solarian League Navy and everyone knew it), so it was far less worried about chasing down hairbrained tall tales and exaggerations about what a batch of neobarbs from the back of beyond might be up to, than you very much.