Mousetrapping vs Apollo

munroburton wrote:
The relationship between gravity and hyper limits is one of those things which doesn't quite hold up to close scrutiny.

Jupiter has a thousandth the mass of the Sun, but its hyper limit is quite clearly not a thousandth. More like a quarter or a fifth.

Please, no peeking behind the curtain.

cthia wrote:A. When textev talks of hypering in-system, it is referring to inside the star's limit and not inside the planet's hyper limit?

Technically, it's dropping out of hyperspace outside the hyper limit of the star. Attempting to drop out of hyper inside the limit was once compared to firing a hard boiled egg out of a pulse cannon at a brick wall - with your ship being the egg.

B. Is jumping and hypering synonymous?

Yes. You'll also see "translating" used pretty frequently.

C. Are layman's explanations to this subject matter, along with diagrams, found in House of Steel? David includes maps of his univese, but oddly no diagrams of this subject matter. Attempting it myself, I may find out why.

No. It's mostly scattered among all the books in little gems revealed in the text.

D. I'm attempting a 2D diagram for my own edification. I've traced a saucer in red ink on a piece of notebook paper to represent the hyper limit of Manticore's star. At the center of that huge red circle, I traced a dime (also in red ink) to represent the sun. I traced a quarter (black ink) inside the larger red circle to represent the hyper limit of the planet, happily orbiting it's sun. At the center of the quarter is a dot representing Manticore. So far so good?

Fairly accurate, as far as I know. Note that you can never get to the black circle without every having to cross the red circle as well. Ships have to drop out of hyper outside the red circle , so the black circle is largely irrelevant.

The gas giants of Manticore A would be soda-can-sized (-ish) circles outside the red circle. Ships can't drop out of hyper inside those circles either, but mostly it's asteroid mining and hydrogen mining from those gas giants that is located out that far. As far as we've seen there are no habitable planets located outside the hyper limit of their parent star (although some are much closer to that limit than others).

A. For sake of conversation, is entering or exiting hyperspace synonymous with Star Trek's entering and dropping out of warp?

More or less. A big difference between the two is that you can detect someone approaching through warp space in Star Trek but cannot detect anyone approaching in hyperspace.

B. Are you actually saying you can't enter (or exit) hyperspace while you're nside the hyper limit? Carrying the baggage of most sci-fi of not being able to go to warp while inside a planet's gravity well because lots of bad things can happen like the destruction of the planet and/or ship.

Correct. Hyper limits are giant no-fun zones for hyperspace travel.

To try to summarize how mousetrapping works, and then how it might apply to an Apollo equipped fleet.

The attacking fleet approached the star system in some convinient hyper band.
They then "hyper in" to the system by transitioning down through the hyper bands until they emerge in normal space (cross downward through the Alpha wall) outside of any hyper limit of the system's star, planets, termini, or other orbital bodies.

So if attacking Earth that means coming out of hyper somewhere beyond the Sun's hyper limit -- The pearls have a table showing that a G2 star like the sun would have a hyper limit at 21.12 LM. For reference Earth orbits at 1 AU [8.3 LM], Mars at about 1.5 AU [12.5 LM], the asteroid belt between 2.2 and 3.2 AU [between 19.1 and 26.6 LM], and Jupiter around 5.1 AU [42.4 LM]. The fleet would also need to be careful not to emerge within the hyper limit of Jupiter or any of the other outer system orbital bodies.

Incidentally this means that the closet the fleet could emerge to earth is 12.82 LM (~230 million km) - for reference Apollo's FTL control seems to only be capable of 5 or 6 LM (without preemplaced Mycroft-style relays)



Once the attacking fleet is in normal space their hyper generators are discharged - in the pearls RFC tells us that once back to standby readiness it takes an SD 4 minutes from when they press "go" until they actually transition in to hyper. (smaller ships take less time) And from powered down it would take that same SD 32 minutes (so 28 minutes from powered down to standby). RFC didn't specifically say, but a rough guess would be that it'd take around half that to recharge after using the hyper drive; so estimate 16 minutes before the fleet's SDs could flee even if the fleet remained outside the hyper limit. That alone gives time for a defending fleet in hyper to potentially drop into normal space within missile (or if very lucky even with energy) range while the attacking fleet's hyper generators are still recharging.

(Dispatch boat on standby needs just 30 seconds from standby to transition - and the fleet in hyper should need just 4 minutes to transition down into normal space. That leaves 11.5 minutes to get the messages, maneuver, reenter normal space, and get missile hits. Very tight, but not entirely impossible)

However normally you get mousetrapped after you move inside the hyper limit. In general each minute you spend accelerating in towards the star will add at least 2 minutes to the time it would take you to break back across the hyper limit. And even an Apollo equipped fleet would likely want to move closer to bring their targets withing FTL control range.



If the defending fleet waits in hyper until the attacking fleet has moved 30 minutes in-system, around 8 million km for an RMN fleet, then drops out directly behind them the attacking fleet can't avoid combat -- that's barely beyond single-drive missile range and is well within anybody's MDM range. (Heck, with a full up MDM you could fire them at their 3 minute full power settings). And even if you didn't accelerate in after them you'd be able to engage effectively for around an hour assuming the attacking fleet simply ran directly deeper into the system. (and if they reversed course towards you at the same acceleration it'd take them an hour charging towards you before they'd make it back across the hyper limit and could flee)
So this alone is a partial mousetrap (and may be the best you can do against an Apollo equipped attacker).

For a full mousetrap you'd also have at minimum a defensive force or pod emplacement nearer the planet strong enough the attacking fleet wouldn't be willing to tangle with it while still fighting the force that dropped in behind them. And, ideally, you'd have at least one additional force remaining outside the hyper limit that could microjump ahead of any vector the attacking fleet might adopt as their way back across the hyper limit. So one force keeping them clear of their target, one pursuing them across the hyper limit, and at least one remaining outside the hyper limit to cut them off no matter which way they try to flee.

Against a non-Apollo force that final blocking force would probably want to emerge early enough that the (now retreating) attack force would sheer off and build a side vector letting them slide past the block force while being simultaneously engaged by the original force that came out of hyper and has been chasing the attacker.
But against an Apollo equipped force, if it survived to break back across the hyper limit, the original force behind it is probably badly battered and the last thing you'd want to do is give it a new target at long range. Far better to wait until the escaping attack force is within 20 million km of the hyper limit before appearing in their path. That will minimize the advantages Apollo gives them.



Speaking of the Apollo advantages. How rough is mousetrapping such a force going to be on the defenders? Apollo gives 3 advantages:
1) FTL fire control (mostly effective at long range; 40 - ~100 million km)
2) Smarter AI (mostly effective when FTL fire control is not avalible; no Keyhole II units or beyond ~100 million km)
3) 8x fire control link multiplier (effective at all ranges under ~100 million km)

So the advantages are mostly at medium to long MDM ranges. At close range where the light speed lag isn't too bad Apollo's FTL and AI doesn't add much. Hence why you'd want to mousetrap a fleet equipped with such weapons at a range your MDMs are maximally effective (aka mutual annihilation range -- hope you brought a lot more ships than they did)
At that close range the 8x fire control link multiplier will help the Apollo fleet throw far heavier salvos for per ship; however it doesn't help pods deploy quicker. So to fully use that fire control you'd need predeployed pods tractored to your hulls. But if the defenders emerge within 3 minutes missile flight from the attacking fleet the attackers will start losing those tractored pods very quickly after 3 minutes. Once expended (or destroyed) the two fleets will be battering each other with pods as fast as they can roll them and Apollo no longer provides any significant advantage. Assume neither is defeated both fleets will likely exhaust their pods well before the Apollo equipped fleet can open the distance enough for the Apollo tech to recover it relative advantage.


So it'd be bloody to mousetrap an Apollo equipped fleet. And you'd do some somewhat differently than you would a non-
Apollo fleet. But the ability to drop out of hyper relatively close behind them after they've crossed inside the hyper limit allows you to initially dictate the combat range and prevents them from avoiding combat. It'll take a long time for the Apollo fleet to meaningfully open the distance; or to reverse course and attempt to blow their way through you to escape. Forcing the fight to happen at relatively close range minimized the Apollo advantages and gives the defenders their best chance to overcome them.

THANKS EVERYONE!

I don't know what to say, except you all have provided a wonderful example of how to give a crash course on the subject in a dozen posts or less. Actually, less. The memorable elementary school teacher I spoke of upstream, also had a wonderful quality of not continuing on until everyone got it, until it all sank in. She says she knew that, when everyone is smiling, and other assorted body language. Plus she'd ask, she wanted feedback. In the spirit of her memory, I'd like to say the class could have stopped with Galactic Sapper, who wrapped everything up. An amazing post GS. At that point I should have been able to take on a 5th grader. Every single post up to and including Galactic Sapper's was necessary before I got it and a smile formed on my face like a newborn baby after suckling. I'm pulling the string and patting you all on the back, and I hope you can feel it. I have tears forming in me eyes. Where was this thread when I first cracked open OBS!

@ Annachie. Your post anticipated one of my questions. In particular, how far out must a ship travel, that was previously in orbit about the planet, before it can enter into hyper. In the case of the Sol system, Jupiter! Again, thanks.

Eleven posts! Less than a dozen eggs to hatch a baby chick into a snotty, even if it is an SLN snotty. LOL

Again, for this kindergartner, everything up to, and including, Galactic Sapper's post is part of, and concluded, the main course. Everything else is icing on the cake . . .

Jonathan, thanks for the icing. Lest my memory fails me, the icing would be the even numbered exercises in the back of the book. The difficult problems. Thanks again Jonathan. The rest of the thread will be more icing. I'd like to be smarter than a Solly 5th grader. So, let's spread on the icing with more of those even numbered exercises . . .

Jonathan, you anticipated a lot of my questions and I'm in awe. I didn't think any enemy force could be successfully mousetrapped, without the use of three separate forces to pull it off. and you confirmed that. Even a 5th grader who played the old board game of Fox and Geese knows that, and at the BoM, Theisman, indeed, sent three fleets.

The out that I think I see for an Apollo equipped fleet, or any fleet actually, at this point, is that the force hypering in to close the trap (Tourville , iinm, at the BoM), is at a disadvantage because . . .

A. His arrival, downward translation, is visible.

B. His arrival suffers the effect of downward translations, nausea.

I was under the impression the nausea lasts some several minutes, in which time the trapping fleet can be targeted with internal tubes backed up with whatever pods are necessary to destroy it (saving the bulk of the pods for any force in-system). With the intention of destroying the force hypering in behind you, or at least targeting them and having your missiles on the way, before they can fight off the nausea and target you. Since it has never happened, I assume the tactic is flawed, but I don't know, why? Actually, the notion stands for any force hypering in trying to trap you, as they would be suffering a delay before they can stop puking their guts out too. That recovery time must be much shorter than I thought, thus too insignificant to be exploited.

Incidentally, this is why I enquired in another thread somewhere if Treecats suffer the same nausea from downward translations, wondering if they could be taught to Target any incoming enemy fleet trying to trap you or fire on you in-system. I know, it is most certainly way out of the capability of any cat. But certainly part of my primal need of wanting the Cats to get in on the fun.

Again, thanks for all of you brilliant teachers. I hope this thread will be as beneficial to any newbies, snotties, and kindergartners as it already has been for me.

Thank you all again, retroactively, and in advance.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

A. For sake of conversation, is entering or exiting hyperspace synonymous with Star Trek's entering and dropping out of warp?

More or less. A big difference between the two is that you can detect someone approaching through warp space in Star Trek but cannot detect anyone approaching in hyperspace.

Well - not when not in hyperspace yourself, anyway.
Ships in the same hyperspace band can see each other, so - in theory - you could post a 'hyperspace piquet' in the Alpha band around a system just beyond the hyper limit (or even up in the beta band as well if you had enough ships!).

Given how much space you'd have to cover to have a realistic chance of seeing an approaching enemy, and the fact that the piquet ships would have to translate back to realspace themselves in order to tell anyone what they saw, it's very questionable how much actual use such an idea would be - which is presumably why no-one actually does it.

The whole thing is a bit closer to hyperspace as shown in Babylon 5, if you ever saw that? Or jumpspace in traveller (the traveller '100 diameters limit' on jumping behaves kind of akin to the honorverse's 'hyper limit', though traveller ships can't encounter one another during jumps)

Equally note that remaining in hyperspace (outside grav waves, etc) takes no special technology once you're 'in' there - which is why LAC carriers can being their gunships and deploy them whilst in hyperspace, despite the LACs not being hyper-capable themselves.

The out that I think I see for an Apollo equipped fleet, or any fleet actually, at this point, is that the force hypering in to close the trap (Tourville , iinm, at the BoM), is at a disadvantage because . . .

A. His arrival, downward translation, is visible.

B. His arrival suffers the effect of downward translations, nausea.

I was under the impression the nausea lasts some several minutes, in which time the trapping fleet can be targeted with internal tubes backed up with whatever pods are necessary to destroy it (saving the bulk of the pods for any force in-system). With the intention of destroying the force hypering in behind you, or at least targeting them and having your missiles on the way, before they can fight off the nausea and target you. Since it has never happened, I assume the tactic is flawed, but I don't know, why? Actually, the notion stands for any force hypering in trying to trap you, as they would be suffering a delay before they can stop puking their guts out too. That recovery time must be much shorter than I thought, thus too insignificant to be exploited.

There is both 'jump shock' nausea, and the fact that the mousetrapping fleet is jumping in blind - whoever has called them in might have said "they're over there" and passed the latest picture of the battlefield at the point they translated but ultimately the trapping force can't see you until they drop into normal space. So any targeting data is at best narrowing down what direction to point the fire control systems in and isn't actually going to give workable firing solutions.

However.....yeah. Jump Shock isn't that bad. Taking Honor of the Queen as an example, Honor and Fearless' bridge crew seem to recover in seconds, so under normal circumstances there's no way a crew is going to be helpless for a meaningful portion of missile flight times.

jump shock probably contributed a bit to Admiral Pierre's battlecruisers getting murderised in Short Victorious War, but then in fairness they (unintentionally) translated in within energy weapons range of a ship six times their size. Being a few percent less effective was not meaningfully going to change the result of that fight beyond putting slightly more damage on Bellerophon than they managed in practice.

cthia wrote:Thanks for the reply TheEmile,*

<Snip>
BTW, I think it was lyonheart who first clued me in on your screen name. Until then, I read it as thee (archaic form of you, as used in the Bible), mile. At any rate, does it indeed refer to that treatise? If so, is the treatise worth it's weight in coins? I just got around to downloading the free PDF from Wikipedia, btw. Procrastination.

At any rate, thanks for being an educator. I hope more peoe with a grasp of the subject will chime in, keeping the fill weight off your shoulders. I don't mind substitute teachers.

Again, speaking for us kindergartners everywhere, thanks.

*Emile, or On Education (French: Émile, ou De l’éducation) is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the "best and most important" of all his writings.[1] Due to a section of the book entitled "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar", Emile was banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned in 1762, the year of its first publication.[2] During the French Revolution, Emile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education.

Yes, it is indeed from Rousseau. I read the book as a college Freshman for Honors English class. The book was last published in English 64 years earlier, and the text was difficult to find. ( It is truly amazing the number of works that have not been published or translated into English).

A classmate likened my varied activities and educational background to the main character, Emile, while noting the similarities between Emile's (failed) romantic life and mine. Later, I needed a new online handle, and after finding my old one wasn't unique on the growing internet, I tried TheEmile. And surprise, no one was using it. So, out has stuck.

And the connection between the early Honorverse stories and the French Revolution lit by Rousseau's slow match ( in the form of "the Emile, or on Education") was just irrestable not to use my Handle here. Even if most never saw the connection.

munroburton wrote:Jupiter has a thousandth the mass of the Sun, but its hyper limit is quite clearly not a thousandth. More like a quarter or a fifth.

That just means it doesn't grow linearly with mass.

The [url=https://honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Hyper_limit]Hyper limit[/url page on the wiki lists the radius according to the star's spectral class. An M9-type main sequence red dwarf masses only 7.5% of the Sun while an O9-type star, the smallest O, is starts at 17 M☉, or nearly 226x an M9. But the hyper limit between those two extremes is a mere 5.4x.

Similarly for gas giants: Jupiter has less than 0.1% the mass of the Sun (75x less massive than an M9) but only a third of an M9's hyper limit.

PS: Handy mnemonic to remember the classifications: "Oh, Be A Fine Guy/Girl: Kiss Me!"

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote:Jupiter has a thousandth the mass of the Sun, but its hyper limit is quite clearly not a thousandth. More like a quarter or a fifth.

That just means it doesn't grow linearly with mass.

The [url=https://honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Hyper_limit]Hyper limit[/url page on the wiki lists the radius according to the star's spectral class. An M9-type main sequence red dwarf masses only 7.5% of the Sun while an O9-type star, the smallest O, is starts at 17 M☉, or nearly 226x an M9. But the hyper limit between those two extremes is a mere 5.4x.

Similarly for gas giants: Jupiter has less than 0.1% the mass of the Sun (75x less massive than an M9) but only a third of an M9's hyper limit.

PS: Handy mnemonic to remember the classifications: "Oh, Be A Fine Guy/Girl: Kiss Me!"

If you want the hyper limit to be a 'drop dead' value where jumping suddenly becomes impossible, then it makes sense it wouldn't be a linear equation producing the radius anyway, since you'd want the hyper limit to be generated by a 'tending to 0' or 'tending to infinity' hyperbola.

cthia wrote:The out that I think I see for an Apollo equipped fleet, or any fleet actually, at this point, is that the force hypering in to close the trap (Tourville , iinm, at the BoM), is at a disadvantage because . . .

A. His arrival, downward translation, is visible.

B. His arrival suffers the effect of downward translations, nausea.

I was under the impression the nausea lasts some several minutes, in which time the trapping fleet can be targeted with internal tubes backed up with whatever pods are necessary to destroy it (saving the bulk of the pods for any force in-system). With the intention of destroying the force hypering in behind you, or at least targeting them and having your missiles on the way, before they can fight off the nausea and target you. Since it has never happened, I assume the tactic is flawed, but I don't know, why? Actually, the notion stands for any force hypering in trying to trap you, as they would be suffering a delay before they can stop puking their guts out too. That recovery time must be much shorter than I thought, thus too insignificant to be exploited.

The nausea isn't generally all that bad; more of an annoyance than being the sort of incapacitation that would give an enemy at huge advantage. It does vary considerably with the velocity the ship is carrying with it when it translates down, though.

If a ship has time to decelerate from the 0.6c they typically travel at in hyperspace, it puts a lot less wear on the ship and is much less unpleasant for the crew. It's common practice even for warships to decelerate some before translation, taking advantage of the fact that translating downward between bands absorbs a lot of the speed the ship has. Translating downward from say the Epsilon band, through Delta, Gamma, Beta, Alpha, then hitting normal space spreads out the energy loss and translation nausea to minimal levels by the time the ship hits normal space.

On certain occasions, however, absolutely minimizing the travel time is necessary, regardless of the cost to the ship's drives and crew. In these cases the ship will drop through hyperspace bands faster and accelerate to regain speed between drops. This is the sort of thing referred to as "crash" translations and nausea becomes a significant issue. This is the sort of thing rarely seen outside of combat scenarios where a ship is being chased or is chasing someone else.

The absolute worst case is when a ship needs to carry the absolute maximum velocity into real space: they'll drop to the Alpha band and reaccelerate back up to 0.6c before finally translating down. THAT is the sort of translation which will have your crew puking they guts out for the next several minutes and leave them less able to react to sudden threats. This is very rarely used as a surprise tactic to reach a target before defenders can react; the closest I can remember was the Icarus raid on Basilisk and even they weren't doing 0.6c when they translated.

And of course, as with everything else in life, not everyone is affected the same way or to the same extent. Even the worst translation is likely to see a few crew members affected less than everyone else, and less severe translations may still cause a few crew members to regret breakfast.

Galactic Sapper wrote:The absolute worst case is when a ship needs to carry the absolute maximum velocity into real space: they'll drop to the Alpha band and reaccelerate back up to 0.6c before finally translating down. THAT is the sort of translation which will have your crew puking they guts out for the next several minutes and leave them less able to react to sudden threats. This is very rarely used as a surprise tactic to reach a target before defenders can react; the closest I can remember was the Icarus raid on Basilisk and even they weren't doing 0.6c when they translated.

And of course, as with everything else in life, not everyone is affected the same way or to the same extent. Even the worst translation is likely to see a few crew members affected less than everyone else, and less severe translations may still cause a few crew members to regret breakfast.

As you said, quite rare. Normally the residual 8% of velocity you retain crossing the Alpha wall isn't worth spending extra time in the those bands building up your pretransition velocity.

Thanks to that 92% energy loss across the Alpha wall the max velocity a warship can carry over from the Alpha bands down to normal space is 14,390 km/s (0.048c). On the one hand that's a fair bit - it'd take a ship with 500 gees accel about 48 minutes to work up to that velocity, but on the other hand it'd take that same ship about 10 hours in the Alpha bands to work up to the 0.6c pretransition velocity necessary to carry that 0.048c into normal space. (assuming no handy grav wave)

That's a lot of time to spend to save yourself less than an hour of acceleration.

(Plus of course if you'd translating in just outside the hyper limit it'd take you a minimum of almost 2 hours after translation to reverse course and get yourself back beyond the hyper limit. A potential issue if you've miscalculated the odds and now want to break off your headlong plunge into the star system)