?

cthia wrote:I don't think OWPs exist. Home Fleet can accomplish what an OWP can do. They were clearly not available during OB. Besides, I'm not certain you'd want a platform so close to Home Fleet. If a key personnel(s) falls under compulsion, an unsuspecting Honor Harrington can die a sad death getting bynged.

And since they'd be manned by personnel taking advantage of being so close to the planet constantly visiting their families opportunities for nanite injection is high.

Home Fleet rarely ever sits in orbit. During Oyster Bay, the Battle of Manticore and the position that they pretended to be in the Second Battle of Manticore, they were far from orbit. Home Fleet's objective is to intercept an invader well short of planetary orbit. If it's sitting there, it's not doing its job.

Especially in a time of war, you want to keep your enemy guessing where you'll be, to avoid trapping you against a target you must defend.

However, the space stations are in orbit. They could be targets.

Then again, I suspect arming weapons cannot be done by a single person. That's a solution that's been in place sine at least the 1960s: you need to turn two keys that are further apart than arm's width.

Filareta's Chief of Staff fired weapons after they were all armed and ready to go.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I disagree. I do not think it's possible for an LD to get to within half a million km of one of the Big 5 planets. I'm assuming that under 300,000 km (1 light-second), the chances of it being detected grow exponentially. And any of the Big 25 planets has enough ships going about that the chance of one of them spotting the LD is too high. The Big 5 will also have scanning platforms deployed around the planet. It doesn't even take that many to create a shell a million km in radius and leaving no gap more than 30,000 km between them.

Probably. The Ghost-class ship Apparition was a bit nervous about a Sag-C passing within 2 light minutes. Being 160 times closer would raise that from moderate but actually unwarranted concern to what's likely a real problem. And even at that range the Captain was unconvinced his Ghost could remain hidden if the Sag-C had deployed a flight of recon drones - such that they got multiple views, from widely divergent angles, of the bit of space he was trying to pretend to be.

The MAlign stealth system does a great job of echoing EM radiation out the far side of the ship to avoid occluding stars or creating radio/radar shadows. But it's not a perfect holographic system - it can't spoof multiple targets that have overlapping but divergent views of the ship.

We can probably comfortable assume that a Lenny Det, being described as significantly heavier than an SD(P) is at least 1.5 km long (compared to the Invictus at 1.39 km). At the 300,000 km range you mentioned that means (if I didn't screw up my math) that it covers a visable arc of over 1 arc second. That's a noticeable amount of sky to occlude when the background might include the planet, star, moons, stations, other ships and the EM traffic may include various radars, poorly directional radio transmissions, etc. Now we're not taking about something occasionally occluding a distant star.

Point of comparison the ISS seen directly overhead is only about 55 arc seconds - and its structure can readily be made out with a basic set of binoculars. (Of course it's brightly lit and not trying to hide) A warship's sensor probably wouldn't have too much trouble noticing discontinuities against the background just 55 times smaller. And that close in such a high traffic, and sensor heavy, area it'd be very hard for a spider ship to avoid getting between any military sensor and a large background object.

I find it far more likely that they'd hang way back and let their expendable torps maneuver in that close if they wanted to engage targets in planetary orbit. Way less risk for the giant, and seemingly quite vulnerable once located, stealth attack ships.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't see what more they could do. I saw the suggestion above of using OWP to shoot debris, but I don't think that's effective. Especially against large pieces. The graser beam is needle width. Unless you time the shot perfectly against a tumbling piece of debris, the chances are that you're not even going to shoot through the thickest section. Either way, the beam is simply going to go through. The material will become plasma but it'll also shoot through longitudinally the beam hole. It will expand and cause some fractures, but that'll likely create more pieces of debris, which in turn can make matters worse.

And I'd expect any forts to be positioned in orbit further out that the stations so that they can protect them as well as the planet. If so debris from the stations would have the planet as backstop - making extra hard to do anythign about it (and ensuring the forts aren't in a good possition to interdict debris with their wedges or grab it with tractor beams.

So I wouldn't necessarily expect forts to be useful against Oyster Bay or it's aftermath. But if there were forts around Manticore I would expect a mention that the MAlign didn't expend any of their limited weapons on such relatively tough targets -- and then that they watched helplessly as the debris rained down.

And if Sphinx had had them I'd have expected mention again during the Battle of Manticore - not just a mention that it's planetary defense pods were held back. Even just a passing mention like the pods were held back because they didn't want to risk return fire near the planet that the forts might not be able to stop.

Lack of mention during those 2 events implies to me that if there were forts previously they also got disbanded as obsolete and - unlike the junction forts - never got replaced by modern pod laying ones.

Jonathan_S wrote:But if there were forts around Manticore I would expect a mention that the MAlign didn't expend any of their limited weapons on such relatively tough targets -- and then that they watched helplessly as the debris rained down.

Yup. It's a perfect PoV to see the attack. David is pretty good with avoiding having the universe mutate per the needs of the plot, but I'm not sure about this. There just should be some mention of them. Instead it seems like the only military defense stuff in orbit is all on the platform.

I truly cannot see pods in orbit. System defense pods are rarely fired because "We don't want to give the enemy a reason to engage them for fear of civilian deaths." With that kind of anxiety, why emplace something around a planet that beckons return fire?

In UH, textev describes forts as deep-space objects.

cthia wrote:I truly cannot see pods in orbit. System defense pods are rarely fired because "We don't want to give the enemy a reason to engage them for fear of civilian deaths." With that kind of anxiety, why emplace something around a planet that beckons return fire?

In UH, textev describes forts as deep-space objects.

Which basically leaves the mobile forces as the single greatest defence a planet has. It appears to be how RFC has envisioned it and he'd probably make the RMN argue that the expense in constructing, manning and running ships pays off better than forts. Until the MAlign, there was no possible way an enemy could close with a planet before crossing paths with the fleet. And worse comes to worst, you can just park that fleet in orbit.

But if the Junction is important enough to have a fort defence, why not a planet? What makes it so much different? Is it that its hyperlimit is so much shallower that even pre-MAlign enemies could close with the asset within a couple of minutes, instead of the hours of the planetary system?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:I truly cannot see pods in orbit. System defense pods are rarely fired because "We don't want to give the enemy a reason to engage them for fear of civilian deaths." With that kind of anxiety, why emplace something around a planet that beckons return fire?

In UH, textev describes forts as deep-space objects.

Which basically leaves the mobile forces as the single greatest defence a planet has. It appears to be how RFC has envisioned it and he'd probably make the RMN argue that the expense in constructing, manning and running ships pays off better than forts. Until the MAlign, there was no possible way an enemy could close with a planet before crossing paths with the fleet. And worse comes to worst, you can just park that fleet in orbit.

But if the Junction is important enough to have a fort defence, why not a planet? What makes it so much different? Is it that its hyperlimit is so much shallower that even pre-MAlign enemies could close with the asset within a couple of minutes, instead of the hours of the planetary system?

A wiff of Grapeshot has 2 Forts in Haven orbit

AAC has the Gryphon forts getting the Apollo upgrade first. then the other planets.

All the Manticore planets have forts, they just havn't been seen yet - David has confirmed this in forum. They are the control center for the pods, and part of any planet's defense. Their size and # is unknown. Most likely they were brand new - High Ridge poured all the money earmarked for completing the Grendlesbane fleet and the 35 Invictuses at Manticore into infrastructure projects in Basilisk and Manticore, including replacement of the pre-war forts (WoH) as works projects.

They didn't engage, because any return fire would send missiles towards Sphinx (as mentioned), but any fleet further attacking the system would have to deal with them, and their pods (which never seems to have reached the RHN calculations).

Jonathan_S wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I disagree. I do not think it's possible for an LD to get to within half a million km of one of the Big 5 planets. I'm assuming that under 300,000 km (1 light-second), the chances of it being detected grow exponentially. And any of the Big 25 planets has enough ships going about that the chance of one of them spotting the LD is too high. The Big 5 will also have scanning platforms deployed around the planet. It doesn't even take that many to create a shell a million km in radius and leaving no gap more than 30,000 km between them.

Probably. The Ghost-class ship Apparition was a bit nervous about a Sag-C passing within 2 light minutes. Being 160 times closer would raise that from moderate but actually unwarranted concern to what's likely a real problem. And even at that range the Captain was unconvinced his Ghost could remain hidden if the Sag-C had deployed a flight of recon drones - such that they got multiple views, from widely divergent angles, of the bit of space he was trying to pretend to be.

The MAlign stealth system does a great job of echoing EM radiation out the far side of the ship to avoid occluding stars or creating radio/radar shadows. But it's not a perfect holographic system - it can't spoof multiple targets that have overlapping but divergent views of the ship.

We can probably comfortable assume that a Lenny Det, being described as significantly heavier than an SD(P) is at least 1.5 km long (compared to the Invictus at 1.39 km). At the 300,000 km range you mentioned that means (if I didn't screw up my math) that it covers a visable arc of over 1 arc second. That's a noticeable amount of sky to occlude when the background might include the planet, star, moons, stations, other ships and the EM traffic may include various radars, poorly directional radio transmissions, etc. Now we're not taking about something occasionally occluding a distant star.

Point of comparison the ISS seen directly overhead is only about 55 arc seconds - and its structure can readily be made out with a basic set of binoculars. (Of course it's brightly lit and not trying to hide) A warship's sensor probably wouldn't have too much trouble noticing discontinuities against the background just 55 times smaller. And that close in such a high traffic, and sensor heavy, area it'd be very hard for a spider ship to avoid getting between any military sensor and a large background object.

I find it far more likely that they'd hang way back and let their expendable torps maneuver in that close if they wanted to engage targets in planetary orbit. Way less risk for the giant, and seemingly quite vulnerable once located, stealth attack ships.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't see what more they could do. I saw the suggestion above of using OWP to shoot debris, but I don't think that's effective. Especially against large pieces. The graser beam is needle width. Unless you time the shot perfectly against a tumbling piece of debris, the chances are that you're not even going to shoot through the thickest section. Either way, the beam is simply going to go through. The material will become plasma but it'll also shoot through longitudinally the beam hole. It will expand and cause some fractures, but that'll likely create more pieces of debris, which in turn can make matters worse.

And I'd expect any forts to be positioned in orbit further out that the stations so that they can protect them as well as the planet. If so debris from the stations would have the planet as backstop - making extra hard to do anythign about it (and ensuring the forts aren't in a good possition to interdict debris with their wedges or grab it with tractor beams.

So I wouldn't necessarily expect forts to be useful against Oyster Bay or it's aftermath. But if there were forts around Manticore I would expect a mention that the MAlign didn't expend any of their limited weapons on such relatively tough targets -- and then that they watched helplessly as the debris rained down.

And if Sphinx had had them I'd have expected mention again during the Battle of Manticore - not just a mention that it's planetary defense pods were held back. Even just a passing mention like the pods were held back because they didn't want to risk return fire near the planet that the forts might not be able to stop.

Lack of mention during those 2 events implies to me that if there were forts previously they also got disbanded as obsolete and - unlike the junction forts - never got replaced by modern pod laying ones.

Ghosts are mentioned as "Frigate Sized" - so 40-75Ktons

Theemile wrote:Ghosts are mentioned as "Frigate Sized" - so 40-75Ktons

We only have stats on 1 frigate, but that's 325 meters long - so a bit shorter than early destroyers. Making a Lenny Det probably at least 5 times as large.

I looked at how much sky a Lenny Det might fill, a Ghost should be able to sneak closer being ~1/5 the size. But either has issues when multiple observers have overlapping views of their hulls as their fancy stealth is best when directed at one known enemy.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But if the Junction is important enough to have a fort defence, why not a planet? What makes it so much different? Is it that its hyperlimit is so much shallower that even pre-MAlign enemies could close with the asset within a couple of minutes, instead of the hours of the planetary system?

One key difference is defensive depth. The Junction does have it's own hyper limit- but it's less than a million kilometers radius. That means in theory an attacker could emerge already within single-drive missile range, and less than 10 minutes from energy range!

Compare that even Sphynx, which is unusually close to a habitable star's hyper limit, but still a bit over 14 million km from the nearest point on that hyper limit. Manticore, is a somewhat more common 188 million km from the nearest point of the hyper limit.


Dunno if that difference along is enough to explain why the Junction appears much more heavily fortified. But it is a significant difference.

It seems I was swallowing textev too quickly and it went down the wrong pipe. Mom always told me to chew my food slowly . . .

UH wrote: Prime's five billion citizens had never found it necessary to build or maintain deep-space forts or anything resembling an actual navy.

Rereading, I think it infers that forts are not ONLY deep-space objects but might also be emplaced elsewhere.

It's still all too simple filtered thru my logic . . .

Fort is short for "fortification." They provide a fortified position away from home base. Home Base (the planet) is fortified by traditional means. It's navy.

Let's break things down into smaller pieces to make the logic easier to follow. We'll use one of the oldest strategic and tactical teaching tools on the planet. The chess board . . .

The most valuable thing in the MBS is Manticore, her Queen, it's government and the people. Not the junction. But the junction is important. So you utilize massive installations to deal with any threat to it, in absense of the fleet, who is tasked with looking after the greater prize. On a chess board, you surround your Queen by your pieces. In this case, your navy.

I don't agree that Home Fleet don't spend a lot of it's time sitting in orbit. That's exactly where they belong. Sure, they exercise their legs and sharpen their brains a lot. But then return to orbit. Just like on a chess board, you don't want to be caught out of position being cocky, not knowing what the enemy will do. Let's imagine you're away from the planet, and the enemy dupes you into chasing or maneuvering on them, pulling you out of position even further.

Wasn't it Tourville who said you can tell the mettle of the Commander by how long it takes him to come after you?

Sitting in orbit contemplating the fresh red icons that just entered your system is where Home Fleet belongs.

I'm not saying there aren't any planetary forts controlling pods. But that fort and it's pods are deeper in space. There is waaay too much stuff in orbit already, and waaay too much stuff happening in orbit for it to be littered with pods. Heck, one obvious reason would be if huge chunks of wreckage tumbles into orbital pods and causes the planet to be shattered with red hot metal. Plus, it's easier for unsavory elements to commandeer a fort than a warship. I wouldn't want to live on a planet with pods hanging over my head. Can we say "A frigid Cold War" all over again?

cthia wrote:Fort is short for "fortification." They provide a fortified position away from home base. Home Base (the planet) is fortified by traditional means. It's navy.

Sorry, that doesn't follow. Most forts from the Age of Sail are in the coastal cities, often capitals, that they were meant to protect. As an example, see the Akershus Fortress in downtown Oslo. It's not in downtown because the city grew around it, it's there because downtown was always there. And that's also defence in depth because to attack Oslo (older, Christiania), you have to go up the Oslofjord, which had gun emplacements on both sides and in the middle. See the Nazi invasion of Norway in WW2 for more information on a more modern fortification.

The most valuable thing in the MBS is Manticore, her Queen, it's government and the people. Not the junction. But the junction is important. So you utilize massive installations to deal with any threat to it, in absense of the fleet, who is tasked with looking after the greater prize. On a chess board, you surround your Queen by your pieces. In this case, your navy.

In chess, you surround your king with pieces. The best of which is the queen. Also, you don't spread all your pieces out. Some stay behind to protect the king, often a barrier of pawns and a bishop and/or a rook, especially if you castle the king behind said rook.

I'd equate the rook to a fort and the paws to OWPs.

I don't agree that Home Fleet don't spend a lot of it's time sitting in orbit. That's exactly where they belong. Sure, they exercise their legs and sharpen their brains a lot. But then return to orbit. Just like on a chess board, you don't want to be caught out of position being cocky, not knowing what the enemy will do. Let's imagine you're away from the planet, and the enemy dupes you into chasing or maneuvering on them, pulling you out of position even further.

This is why this isn't a chess game. The Home Fleet must patrol, must exercise. You also don't want it close to prying eyes, and a planet with so much traffic as Manticore will have a lot of it. And since it must protect two targets, not just one, it must be prepared to defend that other one too. Sitting in Manticore's orbit doesn't help Sphinx.

And you don't keep all your pieces back in chess. If you don't attack, you'll be mated.

I'm not saying there aren't any planetary forts controlling pods. But that fort and it's pods are deeper in space. There is waaay too much stuff in orbit already, and waaay too much stuff happening in orbit for it to be littered with pods. Heck, one obvious reason would be if huge chunks of wreckage tumbles into orbital pods and causes the planet to be shattered with red hot metal. Plus, it's easier for unsavory elements to commandeer a fort than a warship. I wouldn't want to live on a planet with pods hanging over my head. Can we say "A frigid Cold War all over again?"

I can turn the argument around: if the orbit is already littered with things, you don't want Home Fleet near it. It would need to keep sidewalls up at all times, in case someone managed to sneak up a graser close by.

Also look at the US Navy: where are the carriers? Out patrolling or sitting in port twiddling their thumbs?