What is the |value| of captured enemy systems?

cthia wrote:

Joat42 wrote:I don't see a problem for coordinating an attack down to the second.

The TF's transits to their respective staging areas in advance, take stellar readings, compensate for distance between the different areas and calculate the time down to microseconds.

Absolutely Impossible.

cthia wrote:There are just too many opportunities for error to be introduced into any calculations, then comes error introduced by the conversion. And this is all dependent on a particular system's track of time to be dependable to your needs. Heck, Grayson's stubbornness to maintain Old Earth's A.D. Anno Domini is the type of problems you can expect. Then there's the error introduced by a second being added back in on Sol time, the actual revolution of Earth, yatta yatta yatta.

Consider this site and all of the potential pitfalls that can conspire to make you unfashionably late for the party. . .

What Is International Atomic Time (TAI)?

Joat42 wrote:I think you don't really grasp how you go about synchronizing clocks on a galactic scale. You don't care about what a particular systems track of time is - you just choose one to use as the common time reference. Then measure a couple of pulsars, they have a known decay rate measured in milli- and nanoseconds per day and that means you can compare their spinrates and pulse dispersion to get an accurate time comparable to an atomic clock - plus you get an accurate spatial position.

If you don't believe me, you can read about the basics in Binary and Millisecond Pulsars by Duncan R. Lorimer.

Joat42 wrote:I thought the Manticore system had an FTL-communication network? Then you can use the NTP-protocol to synchronize clocks. The protocol takes into account lag and round-trip times to keep clocks synchronized fairly accurately in the sub-second range. It also handles multiple source-clocks (stratum 0 in NTP-speak).

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:IINM, even textev in the Honorverse places a limit on the accuracy of Honorverse instruments. Remember, calculating complicated jumps out of the RZ Zone can be fatal and they're inputting data into high tech computers.

What was the total elapsed time of both BOMs?

My understanding is that hyperspace navigation is more an issue with position that with time. That said, relative time in the Honorverse probably is tricky.

The multiplicative effect of the hyper band should be irrelevant, that doesn't cause any relativistic effect. But the velocity you travel at does exert relativistic time dilation on your clocks. You'd be able to have extremely accurate count of the shipboard time, but attempting to convert that back into a common point of origin time relies on knowledge of your exact velocity for the entire trip.

With only inertial positioning, no outside sources to measure against, I suspect that there's some amount of error in their velocity measurments. Over time I assume that would accumulate, but I haven't tried crunching numbers to see how sensitive the final time is to errors in velocity estimation.


Obviously on some gross level they can do this just fine. They routinely track home system time, but for most purposes it probably doesn't matter much if that was even an hour out (though I'd guess the normal error would be more in the single digit minute range.


For a "simultaneous" wormhole assault being off by a minute or two probably isn't a that big deal, whichever force shows up first will get all the missiles launched at it and the delayed force will appear before they can hit. But more than, say, 6-9 minutes off and you risk your two forces being defeated in detail.

Kael Posavatz wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Still, in hindsight I don't think it would have been a military disaster if Haven had managed to seize it. Which is a good thing since the civilian government refused to allow the type of military defenses and fleet it would take to hold the system against a serious attack.

Allowing another nation to seize chunks of your territory effectively unopposed is pretty much the definition of a military disaster even if in so doing it wasn't disastrous for the military on the receiving end. You can't measure it in ships and lives lost, you have to consider the impact on your civilian population.

strength*will=capacity to resist

Whoever has one of the numbers on the left hit 0 first has lost.

Manticore had spent decades building up the RMN. It was a hugely expensive outlay. The RMN is supposed to protect the SKM (it's in the job description). Losing one cruiser wouldn't have been much to the RMN itself, but it would have been a huge blow to the national psyche (and the RMN's confidence), and at the same time given Haven a huge boost in confidence.

strength * will = capacity to resist

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:My understanding is that hyperspace navigation is more an issue with position that with time. That said, relative time in the Honorverse probably is tricky.

The multiplicative effect of the hyper band should be irrelevant, that doesn't cause any relativistic effect. But the velocity you travel at does exert relativistic time dilation on your clocks. You'd be able to have extremely accurate count of the shipboard time, but attempting to convert that back into a common point of origin time relies on knowledge of your exact velocity for the entire trip.

With only inertial positioning, no outside sources to measure against, I suspect that there's some amount of error in their velocity measurments. Over time I assume that would accumulate, but I haven't tried crunching numbers to see how sensitive the final time is to errors in velocity estimation.


Obviously on some gross level they can do this just fine. They routinely track home system time, but for most purposes it probably doesn't matter much if that was even an hour out (though I'd guess the normal error would be more in the single digit minute range.


For a "simultaneous" wormhole assault being off by a minute or two probably isn't a that big deal, whichever force shows up first will get all the missiles launched at it and the delayed force will appear before they can hit. But more than, say, 6-9 minutes off and you risk your two forces being defeated in detail.

Pardon me bold to call attention.

Why should that even be a problem? Isn't position and time related? A ly is a measure of distance, not time. You mean there's a problem getting an accurate enough fix on position in hyper as well? Which puts a finger on the limitations of man's instruments on the expanding expanse of the galaxy. All near anomalies, pitfalls and protocols.

Heck, are all chronometers on all ships on all Navies created equal? Do chronometers on SLN ships even work?

What kind of watch are people wearing on their wrist?

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:My understanding is that hyperspace navigation is more an issue with position that with time. That said, relative time in the Honorverse probably is tricky.

The multiplicative effect of the hyper band should be irrelevant, that doesn't cause any relativistic effect. But the velocity you travel at does exert relativistic time dilation on your clocks. You'd be able to have extremely accurate count of the shipboard time, but attempting to convert that back into a common point of origin time relies on knowledge of your exact velocity for the entire trip.

With only inertial positioning, no outside sources to measure against, I suspect that there's some amount of error in their velocity measurments. Over time I assume that would accumulate, but I haven't tried crunching numbers to see how sensitive the final time is to errors in velocity estimation.


Obviously on some gross level they can do this just fine. They routinely track home system time, but for most purposes it probably doesn't matter much if that was even an hour out (though I'd guess the normal error would be more in the single digit minute range.


For a "simultaneous" wormhole assault being off by a minute or two probably isn't a that big deal, whichever force shows up first will get all the missiles launched at it and the delayed force will appear before they can hit. But more than, say, 6-9 minutes off and you risk your two forces being defeated in detail.

Pardon me bold to call attention.

Why should that even be a problem? Isn't position and time related? A ly is a measure of distance, not time. You mean there's a problem getting an accurate enough fix on position in hyper as well? Which puts a finger on the limitations of man's instruments on the expanding expanse of the galaxy. All near anomalies, pitfalls and protocols.

Heck, are all chronometers on all ships on all Navies created equal? Do chronometers on SLN ships even work?

What kind of watch are people wearing on their wrist?

Galactic Sapper wrote:Position in hyperspace is an issue because long distance observation doesn't work there. You can't get a solid positional fix on pulsars - or even local stars - to fix your position with the same degree of confidence you can in normal space. The "sensor horizon" is measured in light minutes, not hundreds of light years the way it can be with optical sensors in real space.

There's no reason ships can't keep standard time for tracking the ship's log and comm traffic and such but reset local ship's time to adjust for planetary time or to synch between fleets when combining forces outside of a planetary time frame (think 10th fleet and 2nd fleet meeting to attack Mesa).