Where (or whether) to put criticism on Uncompromising Honor?

Frank777 wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Now you can argue that someone should have thought of that risk and mobbed every ship emerging anywhere near the planet with the reaction forces and RDs they planned to use for the hyper emergency ghosts - but given the likely traffic of Beowulf you'd need many hundreds of destroyers doing nothing but swarming legit traffic to search for ultra-stealthy items they might have dropped; whether before or after you intercepted them. You rapidly run into resource limitations trying to monitor every single ship to that level.

Most of what you write is sensible, but here we disagree. The only thing needed was to put some form of defense next to the Mycroft systems. After all, Honor Harrington once shot down similar Republican systems using lasers added to their explorer drones.

What kind of defense do you envision that's going to survive what seems to be a CL level grazer seemingly materializing out of nowhere? At the likely range it's going off that's dumping a lot more power than a laserhead.

Active defenses are pointless (and the Keyhole II half of the Mycroft platform is already covered with PDLCs. But it's vaporized before it can return fire. If you had a separate defense platform floating out there I guess it could kill the Silver Bullet drones in retaliation - but since the Mycroft blows up with the first shot your FTL network is still dead...

About the only thing I can think of that would work is to wrap each one in a small fort with very thick passive defenses and a bubble sidewall. That should survive single grasers - but would increase the cost and manufacture time sufficiently that Beowulf wouldn't have had their Mycroft system built and installed yet when the attack came...
Is there some defense I'm overlooking that would have kept the platforms alive after each was hit with a total surprise attack?



Basically the way I look at it Beowulf and Manticore knew that Apollo alone with lightspeed control would be adequate against most imaginable attacks, but Mycroft would reduce the number of missiles you needed to expend to defeat any given attack. So go for the quick lash-up deployment and if it works, great, if it fails or if it gets taken out you've still got all those Apollo pods that can function adequately even at extreme ranges. Then over time improve Mycroft and make it more redundant and defensible.
I don't think there's anybody in the know in Manticore of Beowulf who would have said the system they had when the SLN came over the wall was final or ideal. It was just the quickest they could get an interim upgrade field deployed. Sometimes that works amazingly and sometimes that blows up in your face -- but as long as you don't require it to survive it can still be worth trying good now versus perfect later.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Now you can argue that someone should have thought of that risk and mobbed every ship emerging anywhere near the planet with the reaction forces and RDs they planned to use for the hyper emergency ghosts - but given the likely traffic of Beowulf you'd need many hundreds of destroyers doing nothing but swarming legit traffic to search for ultra-stealthy items they might have dropped; whether before or after you intercepted them. You rapidly run into resource limitations trying to monitor every single ship to that level.

Not only inspect every ship, but follow it to and from it's destination; at any time it could dump it's stealthy cargo.

Several of us argued several years ago that the original Oyster Bay could have been carried out BETTER with just with ordinary freighters - the Graser torps (of which the attack ships could only carry 18 for the attack on Manticore A) could have been deposited by any freighter (or multiple freighters) in mass quantities, and spent weeks circling around the system getting into position for their attack run. Given the number of freighter who only enter the Manticore system to cross-trade cargo at the terminus warehouses or simply pass through the terminus, let alone those visiting the Manticore system itself, you could easily find a legimitate reason to enter Manticore space, and drop off a handful of the stealthy drones before anyone noticed.

With the Silver Bullet drones giving the sensor platform to watch for Mycroft updates, and to top off a Gtorp's power for months, an attack could happen SEASONS after the weapons were dropped off.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Frank777 wrote:
Most of what you write is sensible, but here we disagree. The only thing needed was to put some form of defense next to the Mycroft systems. After all, Honor Harrington once shot down similar Republican systems using lasers added to their explorer drones.

What kind of defense do you envision that's going to survive what seems to be a CL level grazer seemingly materializing out of nowhere? At the likely range it's going off that's dumping a lot more power than a laserhead.

Active defenses are pointless (and the Keyhole II half of the Mycroft platform is already covered with PDLCs. But it's vaporized before it can return fire. If you had a separate defense platform floating out there I guess it could kill the Silver Bullet drones in retaliation - but since the Mycroft blows up with the first shot your FTL network is still dead...

About the only thing I can think of that would work is to wrap each one in a small fort with very thick passive defenses and a bubble sidewall. That should survive single grasers - but would increase the cost and manufacture time sufficiently that Beowulf wouldn't have had their Mycroft system built and installed yet when the attack came...
Is there some defense I'm overlooking that would have kept the platforms alive after each was hit with a total surprise attack?



Basically the way I look at it Beowulf and Manticore knew that Apollo alone with lightspeed control would be adequate against most imaginable attacks, but Mycroft would reduce the number of missiles you needed to expend to defeat any given attack. So go for the quick lash-up deployment and if it works, great, if it fails or if it gets taken out you've still got all those Apollo pods that can function adequately even at extreme ranges. Then over time improve Mycroft and make it more redundant and defensible.
I don't think there's anybody in the know in Manticore of Beowulf who would have said the system they had when the SLN came over the wall was final or ideal. It was just the quickest they could get an interim upgrade field deployed. Sometimes that works amazingly and sometimes that blows up in your face -- but as long as you don't require it to survive it can still be worth trying good now versus perfect later.

The moment you turn on any sidewall - bubble, buckler, or normal - every Grav sensor in the system will see your drone. same with active ECM systems. Want radar to guide your pdlcs or CMs, same thing - the radiation will guide in ant attackers in the system, defeating stealth. So any active defense system can only be turned on AFTER attacks start, so stealth is out the door.

You either hide or defend - not both.

Theemile wrote:As mentioned above, Mycroft at Beowulf was a pre-production version. In modern software terms it was probably a Alpha version. Later versions will be tweaked with lessons learned from the initial installation - like self defenses and randomized motions to stealth exact locations.

Well, how carefully will you test a system that control thousands of devices across an entire solar system, any one of which capable of killing a few billion people?

Would you feel comfortable deploying in operation a program you and your best friends wrote in weekend to control communications, authorization and the launching of Minuteman missiles? After you find faults or bugs you just incrementally improve it, right? What could possibly go wrong?

Theemile wrote:
Not only inspect every ship, but follow it to and from it's destination; at any time it could dump it's stealthy cargo.

Totally agree. (I had something about that but edited it out for lenght - though tailing it should be less resource intensive than sanitizing space near it's emergence. The later requires you deploy enough active sensors to detect any conceivable stealthy object that could have had X minutes to accelerate away -- so a pretty darn large area. In contrast monitoring for fresh drops after you've rendezvoused with it you're focusing just on the tiny area of space around the ship)

Theemile wrote:Several of us argued several years ago that the original Oyster Bay could have been carried out BETTER with just with ordinary freighters - the Graser torps (of which the attack ships could only carry 18 for the attack on Manticore A) could have been deposited by any freighter (or multiple freighters) in mass quantities, and spent weeks circling around the system getting into position for their attack run. Given the number of freighter who only enter the Manticore system to cross-trade cargo at the terminus warehouses or simply pass through the terminus, let alone those visiting the Manticore system itself, you could easily find a legimitate reason to enter Manticore space, and drop off a handful of the stealthy drones before anyone noticed.

With the Silver Bullet drones giving the sensor platform to watch for Mycroft updates, and to top off a Gtorp's power for months, an attack could happen SEASONS after the weapons were dropped off.

I'd forgotten (or missed) those debates but it doesn't surprise me. Though I would say that for Oyster Bay the MAlign seemed reluctant to fully trust the graser torps. They targeted most things with torps and pods of Cataphracts -- so if the torps turned out to be combat ineffective they'd still tear things up with the more conventional 2-stage missiles; and of course vice versa.

Going with the freighter approach I'm not sure they could have coasted the pods of Cataphracts into position so they'd have had to rely entirely on the graser torps...

Jonathan_S wrote:I'd forgotten (or missed) those debates but it doesn't surprise me. Though I would say that for Oyster Bay the MAlign seemed reluctant to fully trust the graser torps. They targeted most things with torps and pods of Cataphracts -- so if the torps turned out to be combat ineffective they'd still tear things up with the more conventional 2-stage missiles; and of course vice versa.

Going with the freighter approach I'm not sure they could have coasted the pods of Cataphracts into position so they'd have had to rely entirely on the graser torps...

It was not a preferance, it was a limitation. The Sharks carried the Gtorps EXTERNALLY, and were limited to ~3 torps per ship (18 gtorps were targeted on Hesphateus, there were 4 attack groups with a total of 27 Sharks, or about 6-7 Sharks per target). The Sharks were testbeds designed to carry the pods internally. Only the incomplete Leonard Detweilers could carry the Gtorps internally. There was internal discussions in the book of the planning board lamenting about the few Gtorps available for the attack and how best to use them.

So using what they had, the OB attack was a mixed attack that focused on the pods, which were carried in larger quantities, and used the Gtorps for the targets that had to be killed.

Using 8-Mton freighters with holds you could lose a Nimitz class carrier in, there was no such limitation on size. Heck, the dozen or so of the ~45 Kton Ghosts were delivered that way with no issue (as well as the dozens or hundreds of larger Silver Bullets at Beowulf).

The whole double bleep ghost signal, the 3 month long silent run in, all could have been replaced by a handful of normal freighters dropping off a planet's worth of inflatable Santa Sleigh dioramas (Blessed by the Space Pope of Virgon Six!!) and universal tractor parts to one of Manticore's terminus warehouses, who - oops - "accidentally" dropped that mystery cargo in bay 5 in the middle of space.

But then you could't show off as much of the new fancy drive.

Theemile wrote:UNLESS there was a major breach of the Mycroft system and the exact # of sats was known, which doesn't seem correct given the text.

The MAlign had a number of agents in Beowulf, not just the one named guy on the gamma station. The specs and deployment pattern of Mycroft was given to the MAlign before Beowulf even finished building them.

You deliver a 500gt package to each station. You figure out some sort of reasonable story and what the usual handling delays are so all are present on the stations at once. You can use a series of ways to arm it and prevent removal or disarming. There are going to be solutions that would allow you to render it safe, but they are the sort of thing that, as it converts some 5000 tons of cargo to plasma in a millisecond, with likely both do rather extensive damge to the station and rather limit the forensics you can perform, so they won’t be the first thing you try.

kzt wrote:I pointed out years ago that combining your naval base, your manufacturing, and your main break in bulk shipping center together was totally insane from a security point of view. You can’t screen the cargo from an 8 mt freighter, whose cargo bay is large enough to lose a Nimitz class carrier in, in any reasonable fashion. The cargo doesn’t even have to be designated for you, it just needs to unloaded so they can get to the cargo you need. So I’ll just park this 10mx10mx40m container of very stable lithium hydroxide here for a few minutes, I’ll be right back...

But yeah, we have been talking about the series for some time.

It also likely has the problem (depending on how interstellar law is written in the Honerverse) of makng the stations - including their civilian aspects - valid military targets.

Frank777 wrote:1. Thinking up counterpoints is standard research practice; the moment scientists gather and one has a nice new theory, the other will try to make holes in it. Falsification is standard scientific thinking. I think it would happen even when one person was involved.
2. Not with the manpower numbers used in the Manticore constellation. There are simply too many people, their research facility completely survived the Mesan strike. They must have protocols, enemy-simulation groups, whatever that are standard part of any idea development. And with this kind of approach, 6 months is an eternity.
3. This kind of thinking is everywhere in the series; it is the laser-and-shield approach, the missile-and-counter missile game, the huge-space-ship-and-small-shrike attack match. It is everywhere in the books, in this universe. And suddenly, with a new technology, they would not consider counter measures?

We know that Manticore doesn't always rely on comprehensive simulated tests before deployment - if they had, Fearless would never have been modified as it was in the first book. And I imagine it's even more rushed in war time, with systems being operationally deployed without sufficiently thorough testing.

Jonathan_S wrote:What kind of defense do you envision that's going to survive what seems to be a CL level grazer seemingly materializing out of nowhere? At the likely range it's going off that's dumping a lot more power than a laserhead.

Active defenses are pointless (and the Keyhole II half of the Mycroft platform is already covered with PDLCs. But it's vaporized before it can return fire. If you had a separate defense platform floating out there I guess it could kill the Silver Bullet drones in retaliation - but since the Mycroft blows up with the first shot your FTL network is still dead...

About the only thing I can think of that would work is to wrap each one in a small fort with very thick passive defenses and a bubble sidewall. That should survive single grasers - but would increase the cost and manufacture time sufficiently that Beowulf wouldn't have had their Mycroft system built and installed yet when the attack came...
Is there some defense I'm overlooking that would have kept the platforms alive after each was hit with a total surprise attack?

Instead of trying to harden the platforms, I'd go for redundancy instead, bearing in mind that the platform were detected by their active emissions (communications).

Deploy platforms in pairs, with one being the primary and the other the backup, situated far enough from each other that detecting one with radar or such doesn't reveal the other. The primary functions normally; the backup, however, routes all of its communications through the primary via a LOS laser link. The odds against anyone picking that up are astronomical (although it did happen in book 3 IINM). If the primary is disabled for whatever reason, the backup replaces it, communicating normally.

The Silver Bullet package was deployed into the Beowulf from a freighter on a legitimate merchant visit.
Space is large. Merchant shipping is relatively small in terms of size of a Star System. The ship came in just like it should have from it's last port of call and had cargo for Beowulf. It would have been assigned a travel path from the system's Astro Control which would be designed to de-conflict the freighter in time and location from all other known civilian and military traffic. That is vast distances and more than just a few minuites of time compaired to current air traffic control on Earth.

So, running under impeller power at normal speeds (per regulations and withing norms for a freighter of it's size and class) it was where it was supposed to be. It slipped out- without thrusters that could be seen at the distances involved (either visual or with normal in-system sensors). Then the package used Spider Drive -and at probably really low power- to aim for the probable area where the guidence node for Mycrof would be located to control the defensive pods and thier missiles.

This is a highly stealthed object with a propulsion system that is almost undetectable by the people who built it. It is using passive sensors to locate FTL (gravatonic pulses) communications , at least from where they originate and where they seem to be going. Then it sneaks in- at low power from said undetectable drive system- and parkes just inside the range of it's lightspeed Graser weapon from the place all that apparently tactical information (all sorts of FTL communication being sent to what is apparently a hole in space) and, when the SLN ships ( 100 odd Solly warships which would stand out on passive dectectors like so many massive torches in a cavern) the Silver Bullet fires, based on the SLN attack plan that had been provided for it.
Yeah, tough to defend against.