Do we actually need SD(P)s?

Vacuum is a pretty good insulator. You only have radiative cooling, which is very slow. It's also exponential, the cooler it gets it cools much slower due to the t^4 function used. So the pieces heated white hot by a nuke cools fast at first and then slower. But over a period of months to years a 4000K and a 295K object end up at roughly the same temp.

Assuming a 250cm sphere at 295K (room temp) after 100,000 hours (11 years) it will have a temperature of ~20K. At only a year it would be a ~45K.

Both of which are pretty easy to pick out from background for the Honorverse. I think it would be pretty easy for modern technology.

They take about a thousand years to cool to ~4K.

kzt wrote:Vacuum is a pretty good insulator. You only have radiative cooling, which is very slow. It's also exponential, the cooler it gets it cools much slower due to the t^4 function used. So the pieces heated white hot by a nuke cools fast at first and then slower. But over a period of months to years a 4000K and a 295K object end up at roughly the same temp.

Assuming a 250cm sphere at 295K (room temp) after 100,000 hours (11 years) it will have a temperature of ~20K. At only a year it would be a ~45K.

Both of which are pretty easy to pick out from background for the Honorverse. I think it would be pretty easy for modern technology.

They take about a thousand years to cool to ~4K.

Thank you for the correction. I thought they'd cool a lot faster. I agree that picking the difference between 4 and 45K should be easy, if you know where to look and you're close enough to have resolution.

But picking up from a hundred million km away in a sphere quadrillions of cubic km in volume? Even if you can locate pieces, you can't find out what the pieces are until you collect them. The chances are that you'll spend years or decades finding finger- to fist-sized chunks of armour before you find any usable piece of gravitonic baffle, lasing rod, or a compact fusion bottle.

It's highly unlikely the bottle will survive. Even if the self-destruct fails to vapourise the missile, the loss of containment will start with the bottle itself.

BTW, I don't agree with RFC (!!) that all missiles will properly and fully self-destruct. One that fails to engage or be engaged, sure. But a missile hit by a PD laser will have all kinds of failure modes, depending on just what angle the laser went through and the diameter of the beam.

Good thoughts...

--snipping--

Galactic Sapper wrote:It's not just the missiles you have to worry about. Some of the major fleet battles will have millions of tons of warship debris flying about the system at greater than escape velocity. Something like the Operation Beatrice will have created well over a billion tons of potential planet-crushing debris from exploded ships, spent pods, missile fragments, etc. Just because a missile self destructs or a ship's fusion reactors blow doesn't mean all the debris is reduced to ionized dust - and even a chunk of warship armor the size of your head moving at 200 km/s is close to a kiloton of kinetic energy.

Although it's a bit of authorial hand-wavium, my presumption has been that part of any after-battle thing in a system where the give-a-damn isn't busted has to do with that boring thing of system clean up. We see it a little bit in UH, but the only reason it's of interest is that with so many SDs to de-hulk, the RMN has found useful bits to keep, otherwise the wreckage gets towed to a smelter, etc.

That said, perhaps in the background they have tech for stuff like thi, but for a future book, RFC could authorially create something like a "gravitational scoop ship" (in my head) more like using a bit of carefully shaped bow wall to push the debris bits at a time into a slowly moving ship's overpowered wedge. I guess my question there is "would the wedge itself shred the debris bits into micro-meteorite size particles?

SharkHunter wrote:That said, perhaps in the background they have tech for stuff like thi, but for a future book, RFC could authorially create something like a "gravitational scoop ship" (in my head) more like using a bit of carefully shaped bow wall to push the debris bits at a time into a slowly moving ship's overpowered wedge. I guess my question there is "would the wedge itself shred the debris bits into micro-meteorite size particles?

If such a thing existed and did not irreparably shred the pieces into tiny bits, then the discussion above about recovering lost missiles and other pieces of tech becomes doable. It's still difficult to scoop quadrillions of cubic km, but it's orders of magnitude easier than rendezvousing with each piece of debris to figure out what it is.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:BTW, I don't agree with RFC (!!) that all missiles will properly and fully self-destruct. One that fails to engage or be engaged, sure. But a missile hit by a PD laser will have all kinds of failure modes, depending on just what angle the laser went through and the diameter of the beam.

Several thousand missile pods without activated reactors were inside SD(P)s that got blown up.

But you know how the Manties never make mistakes...

tlb wrote:

locarno24 wrote:If you're staying 'near' your own fleet, then there's a real question whether just using that volume to put fire control processing power on the ship, rather than putting it in an LAC, which sits in a bay, essentially giving you far less volume available for the volume invested.

Where an LAC - or drone, or whatever - near your own fleet is useful is as a relay. Firing missiles is a pain in the neck because a wall of gravetic wedges can't be easily seen through and it's hard to talk to

Relax wrote:Fire control "LAC's" are called.... Keyholes, RD's

If we agree that a LAC is manned, then it is qualitatively different than either a Keyhole or a RD. Even if a Keyhole were to cost more than a LAC; we would still make more effort to avoid losing the LAC, because we value people more than machines.

Actually, I agree with Relax. A Fire Control LAC held close to the firing ship is basically a Keyhole relay. If you have the latter, you'd never bother developing the former.

The difference is that if you don't have the latter, due to being a military-industrial complex with centuries of groupthink and inertia and not having Hemphill's band of merry minions creating the latest super-duper grav-bottle generators and tactical computers, a Fire Control LAC lets you get within spitting distance of the effect without needing any technology that's really 'new' (obviously it sucks to be the people crewing the LACs because even sat inside a wall's CM/PD network they're still vulnerable, just like a wall's screening units but even more so). Designing and building a bunch of new LACs is a (comparatively) pretty quick and easy task.



This is significant if you have huge capacity to produce existing designs or modified versions thereof, and/or a predisposed perception of human beings as comparatively expendable where there is genuinely no alternative due to being able to fabricate them on an industrial scale, and are looking for ways to make your utterly-useless-cannon-fodder capital units slightly less awful.

Keyhole allows you to better use the control channels you have and to fire at maximum cyclic-rate-of-fire without worrying about wedge 'blindness'. That's a nice-to-have, especially if you're stuck with broadside-based, rather than pod-based warships for a foreseeable period of possible conflict.


It's the same logic I was thinking behind a 'forward fire control' LAC - if you try and get close - by which I mean much inside "extreme standard missile range" you're dead meat. Because LACs are when confronted by incoming missile fire unless you've got Grayson Compensators and Fission Plants, Bow Walls, Manticoran-tech ECM and countermissiles. Which is why 90% of the time the goal when using them offensively is to use stealth to avoid getting shot at in the first place.

But when you're throwing full range MDM shots - or multi-stage missiles - we know that accuracy is officially "awful". Because however good your computers are, you're trying to do fire control and sending your orders down a light-speed link to the missile. To make matters worse, any non-gravetic sensor data (point defence firing sequences, thermal traces, etc) was also time-late when you got it!

That's why Apollo is such a game-changer. And - lacking FTL transmitters you can fit in a disposable asset, you can't duplicate it.

Therefore, the only way you can meaningfully improve the accuracy of a cataphract-equivalent salvo is to have someone sat with a fire-control desk closer to the target, like a modern 'spotter' with a laser designator.

They'd obviously be a priority target and would be shot to heck if they're spotted, so that's only viable if they can remain unobserved. Which limits them to passive sensors only, limits them to tight-beam communication with the missiles, and obviously pushes back how close they can risk getting to the enemy formation.

Whether you can get them close enough to provide a meaningful accuracy increase to a cataphract salvo whilst staying at a 'safe' range band is something I don't know but comms and stealth tech are two fields the Mesan Alignment and for that matter the Solarian League as a whole aren't dramatically behind Manticore/Haven on, certainly compared to stuff like warship and missile design.

locarno24 wrote:Actually, I agree with Relax. A Fire Control LAC held close to the firing ship is basically a Keyhole relay. If you have the latter, you'd never bother developing the former.

Very nice explanation.

I think there was a battle (which I cannot find now) where Haven had forward observer LAC's, using primitive FTL communication, and they were wiped out by RMN or Grayson LAC forces.

I have no doubt that the RMN is going to introduce a new DN which is to the SD(P) what the Nike BC is to the BC(P).

Consider the logistical issues. In HAE, Weber describes the Wayfarer retrieving expended missile pods to be reused. This suggests that they are expensive hardware. Weber does not describe or mention retrieval of pods in subsequent books. In most battles, the situation is far to dynamic for pod recovery to be possible.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I have no doubt that the RMN is going to introduce a new DN which is to the SD(P) what the Nike BC is to the BC(P).

Consider the logistical issues. In HAE, Weber describes the Wayfarer retrieving expended missile pods to be reused. This suggests that they are expensive hardware. Weber does not describe or mention retrieval of pods in subsequent books. In most battles, the situation is far to dynamic for pod recovery to be possible.

Perhaps you are correct, there may be some ship development discussed in whatever books follow. However I will be surprised if that occupies a major part of the remaining story, which I see as more of a dogged search for the threads leading to the Mesan Alignment and Darius. Certainly there will be naval actions included, maybe leading to a hoped for climax; but most of it will be detective work.

Why do you think a DN would replace an SD? Everything we have seen causes us to expect an increased size for any replacement ship.

tlb wrote:

locarno24 wrote:Actually, I agree with Relax. A Fire Control LAC held close to the firing ship is basically a Keyhole relay. If you have the latter, you'd never bother developing the former.

Very nice explanation.

I think there was a battle (which I cannot find now) where Haven had forward observer LAC's, using primitive FTL communication, and they were wiped out by RMN or Grayson LAC forces.

That is pretty much the entire 2nd Havenite war- or WoH and AAC

The Havenites could not fit a FTL Comm into their RDs, so they made a Drone Tender LAC - essentially it was a scout LAC with Feelers. I would imagine it sat 5-10 light seconds behind it's RDs - had a modicrum of forward processing power, and fired condensed reports over low pulserate FTL and more detailed reports over RF/laser.