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The big problem of late Honorverse

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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Dec 04, 2019 7:15 pm

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Brigade XO wrote:The Alignment had structured it's plans such that Haven would take Manticore -Manticore was not supposed to be much of a bump in the Haven road- but it didn't go that way.

Alignment did a great job screwing around with the SLN at all levels, particuarly the intelligence and analysis areas and it would appear that a lot to the tech development that actualy made it's way to the SLN was comming from Technodyne. Technodyne being a conduit of Aligment tec to the SLN. Consider the Cataphracts. Sure, they got used 1st in the attack on Torch and were fed to Monica BEFORE the SLN showes them as something their warships are carrying.

That Haven had gotten so much better wasn't such a worry to the Alignment until th Peoples Republic of Haven got retaken by Prithart and friends and returned to being the Republic of Haven. The Alignment still wasn't too worried as the plan was still being moved to have Haven strike at Manticore and take the system....that didn't work out.
So, then Manticore has yet another weapons system- Apollo- rolled out and the Alighment still has hope that Haven- with an opening being offered to them (and because the Alignment has no idea that Harrington is going on a PEACE mission to Haven with her fleet parked just outside the hyperlimit as "encouragement"- and so they have continued the too early rollout of Oyster Bay to hit just Manticore and Grayson.

How was the Alignment supposed to figure on Pritichard offering an alliance with Manticore ----Zilwicky and friend having brought the information from Meas about the Aliance and all the data is starting to jell with the assination attemtempts (some successful, some not) susing the nannie- and suddenly the universe isn't the nice sandbox the Alignment has been carefully grooming for centuries.

The SLN, given it's absolute size, should have still been able to devistate though not conquer Haven after Haven broke itself taking Mantiore....but that war didn't do that to Haven and it has progressed through the combat with Manticore while the SLN was standing still. Worse, the SLN had been manipulated to not even attempt to learn from what was going on out in the Haven quadrant.

So, even having been give very improved Cataphacts, the SLN has no clue the kind of woodchipper it was about to feed it's combat forces into. Not only were it's communications lines too long, it was institutionaly incapable of looking at what it was getting (and that was being heavily doctored and misdirected) so it thought that all those SDs were still the key to dominating everything in space.

Oops. So 1st Manticore soundly defeats (though greatly outnumbered) everything they have thrown at them by the SLN - who gets effectively NO usable information back (no ships get home and only a couple of SLN officers set with notes from Manticore (and those get stuck at Gaynmead etc) and then the SLN goes for the Manticore system to find the GA there (and the Alignment sticks the knife into Fillerta) and ......Kingsford is presented with acceptable proof that the SLN has been suckered and it's not by Manticore
Harrington demonstrates that the SLN is little better than useless junk in modern combat and the SLN.....ISN"T going to explode but get reshaped.

The Alignment made a few too many miscalculations. Next round is 20+ years from now.

It occurs to me that the MAlign really can't have any strategist that have combat experience - so they may be missing the details on what make a current RHN, or especially RMN, ship so much more survivable and deadly than an SLN one.


After all if you look at the numbers the SLN small SDs don't mount that many fewer CM tubes and PDLCs per ton than the RMN or RHN designs. Realizing that each mount is vastly less effective both because the software isn't up to the task of modern missiles and because their cyclic rate is so much lower requires more in depth analysis than just looking at the basic numbers.

Could the MAligns own strategists have been overestimating the effectiveness of the SLN? Sure they had to know they weren't as good; but could they have thought that equalizing the missile range imbalance should be enough for the SLN to grind its way to a Soviet style victory? (Winning in no small part by having enough numerical superiority and cold bloodedness to be able and willing to suffer quite unfavorable loss rates until the enemy can't sustain their effort)
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by Galactic Sapper   » Wed Dec 04, 2019 7:38 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
TFLYTSNBN wrote:Assuming that conservation of momentum applies to grab drivers, what is the velocity of the missile pod after it launches its missiles?

What is the average acceleration applied to the missile pod?


Is the pod still being tractored at that point by the mothership? If so, then the momentum is conserved across the whole 8-million-ton body. If it's not, then you're right, the pod will be flying backwards due to the launch itself. But the pod launch mechanism isn't going to impart much momentum/velocity on the missiles: there's no reason for big rails to fling them out, as there's no wedge for them to clear in the first place. The missiles can bring up their wedges as soon as they're out of each other's range and accelerate themselves. At that point, you only conserve momentum with the alpha wall.

The problem here is that the pods have to be kicking the missiles out fast. Like, absurdly fast, given how launches are described. Each missile has to be 30ish kilometers away from any other missile to bring up its wedge and there's never a mention of coasting lag in a pod launch. Even if the missiles left the pod at 1 kps they'd have to coast upwards of 30 seconds before they could light off their wedges. If instead we assume 30 kps and one second coast time, the pod would be launched backwards at over 57 kps. This doesn't account for the pod tube needing to be slightly duck-footed for the grav drivers to impart that horizontal momentum needed for the missiles to separate.

By the way, given the figures for missile load mass, what's the mass of an empty SD(P)?

Presumably the masses listed in HoS are the empty masses; if those are loaded masses an empty Invictus is about 6.4 million tons instead of 8.8 million tons - even less if you consider the tens of thousands of counter missiles they're also carrying, weighing maybe 6-8 tons each (no source on that AFAIK).
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Dec 04, 2019 9:47 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:
The Short Victorious War Ch 17 wrote:The old pods' launchers had lacked the powerful mass-drivers which gave warships' missiles their initial impetus. That, in turn, gave them a lower initial velocity, and since their missiles had exactly the same drives as any other missile, they couldn't make up the velocity differential unless the ship-launched birds were stepped down to less than optimal power settings. If you didn't step your shipboard missiles down, you lost much of the saturation effect because the velocity discrepancy effectively split your launch into two separate salvos. Yet if you did step them down, the slower speed of your entire launch not only gave the enemy more time to evade and adjust his ECM, but also gave his active defenses extra tracking and engagement time.

So they're apparently throwing the missiles fairly hard.

Also they do want to get the 10+ missiles quickly spread far enough to safely bring up their wedges. And that's multiple km separation - even with 3 dimensions to work with quickly getting a multi-kilometer separation takes a fair bit of velocity - even if in the era of MDMs the base velocity of the missile became nearly irrelivant.


Hmm... that's a good point: the initial velocity should be the same in the entire salvo, whether launched form pods or from ships. From the text, it does seem that the pods meant to impart significant velocity to the missiles. But if the law of conservation of momentum holds and the missiles account for 80% of the mass of pod, then the pod will be sent flying backwards 5x the speed it imparted on the missiles All the more reason to fire while the tractor is still on.

As for the separation between missiles, that should be too big of a factor because the vector sum of those should mostly cancel themselves out. The distance from the pod doesn't matter much, it's the the distance from each other, so the pod would launch them all over the hemisphere facing the enemy, or within ±30° or 45° of the baseline.

You're also right that this became less of a problem later on. For one thing, if the problem is to get the same velocity on all missiles and the pods are limited, you don't step down the ship-launched missiles' settings, you just step down the launchers' settings. Probably required some refits, though.

How does off-bore launching work? I suppose the ship cannot be turned broadside towards the attack vector, since that would mean half the missiles are flying in the wrong direction. It needs to decelerate and re-accelerate, which counts against its mission clock. However, when it reaches the ship's position again, it will have the exact same velocity as the missiles that were launched from the other side.

If instead it turns the fore, aft, wedge floor or roof towards the enemy, then all broadside missiles have the same initial velocity component towards the attack: zero. And if it's wedge-on to the enemy, then the missiles from chase tubes also have the same velocity component.
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Dec 04, 2019 10:00 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:It occurs to me that the MAlign really can't have any strategist that have combat experience - so they may be missing the details on what make a current RHN, or especially RMN, ship so much more survivable and deadly than an SLN one.


In their defence (not that I want to come to their defence), there were no conflicts upon which to get experience of that level until the first war broke out. Up to that point, the PN had rolled over all adversaries almost unopposed, with technology on par with or slightly below that of the the SLN and using the same strategic and tactical doctrines. And all those events were of minor size. Aside from that, there were anti-piracy operations and we know pirates don't usually want to fight someone bigger than they.

The PN also learnt through great pains how to fight, through 10 years of war and still didn't win. The SLN wasn't given 10 years.

After all if you look at the numbers the SLN small SDs don't mount that many fewer CM tubes and PDLCs per ton than the RMN or RHN designs. Realizing that each mount is vastly less effective both because the software isn't up to the task of modern missiles and because their cyclic rate is so much lower requires more in depth analysis than just looking at the basic numbers.

Could the MAligns own strategists have been overestimating the effectiveness of the SLN? Sure they had to know they weren't as good; but could they have thought that equalizing the missile range imbalance should be enough for the SLN to grind its way to a Soviet style victory? (Winning in no small part by having enough numerical superiority and cold bloodedness to be able and willing to suffer quite unfavorable loss rates until the enemy can't sustain their effort)


Yes, as I've argued before, everyone overestimated the SLN's competence relative to the GA navies. Plus all the other shortcomings that were mostly the MAlign's doing in the first place. And you're right, they rushed the Cataphracts to the SLN because they thought it would at least give the SLN time. It wasn't enough.
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Dec 04, 2019 10:06 pm

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Galactic Sapper wrote:
By the way, given the figures for missile load mass, what's the mass of an empty SD(P)?

Presumably the masses listed in HoS are the empty masses; if those are loaded masses an empty Invictus is about 6.4 million tons instead of 8.8 million tons - even less if you consider the tens of thousands of counter missiles they're also carrying, weighing maybe 6-8 tons each (no source on that AFAIK).


I think those must be the laden weight. We heard early on that there's an upper limit on how big a ship can be and the wedges and/or compensators still reasonably work (haven't looked for the text to get the details). If an Invictus' dry weight is 8.8 million tons and it carries 2.2 million tons more of capital missiles, it would mass 11 million tons when fully armed and should not be able to keep its acceleration that high.

Ditto for freighters: when we hear that it's a 6-million-ton freighter, we don't assume the no-armour mess of struts and gantries to carry the cargo masses anywhere that much. The ship itself must be no more than a million unladen and is rated to carry 5 million more tons.
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Dec 05, 2019 1:40 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:How does off-bore launching work? I suppose the ship cannot be turned broadside towards the attack vector, since that would mean half the missiles are flying in the wrong direction. It needs to decelerate and re-accelerate, which counts against its mission clock. However, when it reaches the ship's position again, it will have the exact same velocity as the missiles that were launched from the other side.

If instead it turns the fore, aft, wedge floor or roof towards the enemy, then all broadside missiles have the same initial velocity component towards the attack: zero. And if it's wedge-on to the enemy, then the missiles from chase tubes also have the same velocity component.
They all seem to launch their broadside missiles perpendular to the enemy, but the exact method depends on their tube layout and fire control placement.

Avalon, Wolfhound, and Sag-C I think usually they point their bow or stern at the enemy and control the launch through their chase fire control links. (None of those classes have chase tubes so you don't need to try to sync their launch towards the enemy with the broadside tubes)
Also, at least for the initial launch if they wanted to send a double or triple salvo that might be more than they can control from just the hammerhead they could put their belly towards the enemy, pump out the missiles on delayed activation, then rotate down to expose their broadside control links as the missiles all perform a pre-programmed turn and activate.


Rolands of course are all chase tubes so they'd presumably normally face broadside on to the enemy and control the launch through their broadside fire control links. (Though in a chase or evasion maneuver they could achieve an approximate synchronization between the missiles fired towards and away from the enemy by staggering the launches. Or by making the missiles fired towards the enemy take some detours until the missile fired away caught up)

Keyhole equipped ships seem to prefer to put the belly (or roof) of their wedge towards the enemy and use their keyholes to control the launch. That orientation would let them syncronize chase and broadside launches; except Nike only has broadside tubes and the Agamemnon's don't have any.

I don't remember the GSN's Courvosier II BC(P)s ever getting refitted with keyhole, but as pod layers they probably don't bother bringing the far broadside into play - 6 tubes is probably enough to seed any extra support missiles into a pod salvo - so they could just keep a broadside pointed at the enemy.
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Dec 05, 2019 2:09 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:I think those must be the laden weight. We heard early on that there's an upper limit on how big a ship can be and the wedges and/or compensators still reasonably work (haven't looked for the text to get the details). If an Invictus' dry weight is 8.8 million tons and it carries 2.2 million tons more of capital missiles, it would mass 11 million tons when fully armed and should not be able to keep its acceleration that high.

Ditto for freighters: when we hear that it's a 6-million-ton freighter, we don't assume the no-armour mess of struts and gantries to carry the cargo masses anywhere that much. The ship itself must be no more than a million unladen and is rated to carry 5 million more tons.

We're told that the is an point at which the ships mass begins degrading it's acceleration. But the ships we see in the Honoverse seem to be volume limited on acceleration, not mass limited. (Also a peek at how RFC specs the warships we know the mass is explicitly assigned based on an average density multiplied by their volume; so it's based on "filled" mass because the volume calculation didn't exclude their pod bay volume)

I don't think you're right about the freighters being listed as their loaded weight. I'm using the numbers of the Starhauler class listed in the SITS books. A small modular freighter for Silesian trade is a 1.9 mton design, 767 m long, 128 m across, and 119 m tall. Based on those dimensions I figure that conservatively that should have at least 2 million cubic meters of cargo space. RFC mentions that interstellar shipping is cheap enough people ship grain. Wheat is 790 kg/m³, so filling the ship with wheat would be 1.74 million tons of wheat!. The ship can't possible be just 187,000 tons dry! (And that's with a fairly low density cargo; a load of paper is 1,201 kg/m^3 and steel is 7,750 kg/m^3 or more)
It wouldn't make sense for ships to be built where they'd bulk out before massing out even for light cargo.

(Actually the tons in the honorverse are a lot more more like Gross register tonnage (GRT), used for seagoing cargo ships, than it is their actual mass. With today's cargo ships you express their volume in GRT; where a GRT equals 100 cubit feet. So their listed tonnage doesn't tell you anything about how much they weigh/displace right now; or even what they weigh empty. Or rather there's a different measurement for that)


So Honorverse warships probably never get high enough density to incur the acceleration penalties; their acceleration remains limited by their compensated volume. And so their acceleration isn't affected by how many missiles they fire off because mass wasn't what was limited thing.
Honorverse freighters on the other hand probably do need to pay attention to their total mass for high density cargos - they're sturdy enough that limits to acceptable acceleration probably kick in before the cargo holds are physically unable to safely handle the mass. Again traveling empty won't make them any faster; because of their size; but packing them to the gills with lead ingots will probably make them unacceptably slower.
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by Somtaaw   » Thu Dec 05, 2019 4:33 pm

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Thought that was the whole point of the compensator tech though, anything within the hull = fully compensated while anything outside the hull/wedge is subject to the influence. So afaik, a 6 MT freighter or dreadnought, actually does mass upto 6 MT of metal, regardless of how much cargo (or munitions) are within the hull itself.



During HotQ when they were ferrying Masadan LACs into Yeltsin, they had to pull the crews off, because the Havenite ship hyper generators could be overloaded to be ship + extra but the compensators on the LAC's weren't upto the task. The LAC's also weren't notably slowing the Havenite ships while in hyper either.


Although contrary evidence from the "strap on pods" the Andermani used on their cruisers circa WoH and Manticoran flatpack pods, suggests it may be closer to "anything within the hull +/- 15 metres is fully compensated" and everything beyond that is uncompensated and actually slows the ship.


Still more evidence actually suggests that anything at all inside the wedge has zero impact on the ships acceleration, based on the Havenite Donkey and the Solarian independent variant the Huskey... their ships only slowed down AFTER those were outside their wedges, while they were still inside the wedge their ships accelerated at maximum rates.


That's 3 completely different, and often contrary bits of evidence, although it's also based on 3 different points in the story. Early (HotQ), middle (WoH) and end (AAC/UH)
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by Galactic Sapper   » Thu Dec 05, 2019 5:10 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:How does off-bore launching work? I suppose the ship cannot be turned broadside towards the attack vector, since that would mean half the missiles are flying in the wrong direction. It needs to decelerate and re-accelerate, which counts against its mission clock. However, when it reaches the ship's position again, it will have the exact same velocity as the missiles that were launched from the other side.

If instead it turns the fore, aft, wedge floor or roof towards the enemy, then all broadside missiles have the same initial velocity component towards the attack: zero. And if it's wedge-on to the enemy, then the missiles from chase tubes also have the same velocity component.

This would work, and probably did for the early versions of off-bore launches. Later ships explicitly state they can launch into all aspects not blocked by the wedge, or all aspects if they have keyhole. More likely the missiles are programmed to launch, rotate onto target, and stagger their wedge activation by milliseconds, such that missiles launched from the off broadside (or chase tubes if applicable) activate first followed by the on broadside in such a way that the missiles form a coherent salvo rather than two staggered launches. The match won't be absolutely perfect but it doesn't take much time at all at 46,000 gravities to reverse the initial velocity imparted by the off side launch tubes.

When they reach their target the on broadside missiles will have a fraction of a second longer left on their drives, but it shouldn't matter if the missiles are still under power when they reach the target. For out-of-range targets, the on broadside missiles would be shut down a few milliseconds before their drives actually died.
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Re: The big problem of late Honorverse
Post by Theemile   » Thu Dec 05, 2019 11:51 pm

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Compensators actually work on a volume of space, not an actual mass. It's just a ship of x mass fills said volume. Empty or full, everything inside the volume is compensated.

This is described in ACD, where we see the Sub-optimal havenite designs with spin sections, and slower speeds are accepted for a wider compensated volume.

The reason for the mass statements is the Great Resizing, where mass was the only dimension kept from the early books to the latter books.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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