A new kind of System defense Station

kzt wrote:System defense pods are smallish, stealthy, hard to find and deployed away from the planets they protect. How exactly stealthy works when it's been stated that you can only start the pod reactor from another running fusion reactor - hence system defense pods always have a running fusion reactor - seems to be left as an exercise for the reader.

And also pod reactors put out huge amounts of radiation that Honorverse tech is incapable of protecting people from (but somehow this exposure to insanely high levels of xray and gamma radiation has no impact on the reliability of atomic electronics that you would think might not work so well when being constantly ionized. But whatever).

LAC hangers are large and bulky and need to be deployed where people can live.

So these don't seem to be exactly comparable in operation.

kzt wrote:
System defense pods are smallish, stealthy, hard to find and deployed away from the planets they protect. How exactly stealthy works when it's been stated that you can only start the pod reactor from another running fusion reactor - hence system defense pods always have a running fusion reactor - seems to be left as an exercise for the reader.

And also pod reactors put out huge amounts of radiation that Honorverse tech is incapable of protecting people from (but somehow this exposure to insanely high levels of xray and gamma radiation has no impact on the reliability of atomic electronics that you would think might not work so well when being constantly ionized. But whatever).

LAC hangers are large and bulky and need to be deployed where people can live.

So these don't seem to be exactly comparable in operation.



On top of KZT'S POINTS, RFC posted on here a few years back that the modern fort design is a modular affair, being an oblate spheroid, designed with LAC tender modules, pod Bay modules, close weapons modules, etc. This allows the newest generation of forts to be rebuilt in the future if necessary as technology changes, and allowing a common design methodology for forts with different focuses. This design has 360 degree weapons and defenses, wedge for mobility, bubble sidewalls, and can be built larger if necessary

Maldorian wrote:
Thanks for the Feedback. I don´t know, that the existing forts already are so modular. Makes this post obsolet.

It should be remembered both that fortresses are not truly immobile and that their hull forms are significantly different from those of hyper-capable warships. Because they aren't hyper-capable, they don't require Warshawski sails, which means they don't require the "double-ended spindle" design of a superdreadnought. If they choose to drop the impeller wedges which give them mobility, they have an enormously greater field of fire than any superdreadnought, protected by sidewall bubble generators (and a few additional neat tricks the Manties have developed in the last few years), even though those wedges remain available if needed for protection as well as movement. Among other things, this gives them vastly more effective direct-fire anti-missile capability. They have much more volume (and usable surface area) for defensive systems, and they can be — and are — built with multiple MDM missile cores and very heavily armored deployment hatches. They carry more than twice as much ammunition, have a heavier volume of fire, are better protected, have four or five times as many counter missile launchers and point defense clusters, and require much smaller crews than superdreadnoughts half their size. In addition, fortresses, because they are fixed defenses that don't have to transport all of their war fighting capabilities with them, can be readily built (or reconfigured) to support multiple Keyhole platforms, including Keyhole-Two platforms, further augmenting their defensive firepower and providing enormously capable Apollo offensive fire control for all of those oodles and oodles of internal missiles they carry around with them . . . not to mention the system defense pods normally deployed in company with them.

Traditionally, fortresses have been designed and built with an eye towards refits and upgrades to a much greater extent than would be possible with a conventional warship. The pre-Havenite Wars Manticoran fortresses were built to then-current technological standards, however. In an era of MDMs — and especially Apollo — it was literally impossible to refit them radically enough to retain them as survivable and effective platforms, which is why the RMN completely redesigned them and started building from scratch. The new fortresses are built in modular sections which are transported to the point at which they will be needed and assembled in place (and which can be disassembled and moved somewhere else if that seems appropriate). They've also incorporated all of the new armor technologies, and their energy batteries have been arranged with an eye towards completely removing any of the (multiple) weapon decks (and the armor protecting them) in order to plug in new, upgraded weapons (or to change them out for additional CM launchers and point defense clusters, if that seems appropriate). They have enormous stowage capacity for missile pods and counter missiles, and their modular construction was deliberately designed to allow additional modules to be assembled into single platforms of up to 30 megatons. For that matter, they could be built even bigger than that, except that the Navy hasn't yet gotten around to designing a spinal structure to go to tonnages above that level. And they are fitted with armored LAC bays to provide them with large numbers of LACs for employment in local security functions and use in the new Manticoran anti-missile doctrines being developed.