Alternate history: PRH-Solarian War

Jonathan_S wrote:Some of those seem pretty unlikely. In 1910 the MDMs, Ghost Rider drones, and SD(P)s would have still be under discussions at BuWeaps. Their report agreeing to them was brand new when Honor talked to White Haven on Grayson (before heading out to get captured). I wasn't able to find a date for that talk, but she was "executed" in Jan 1912 and I don't think it was over a year from her leaving Grayson until her "execution".

The first Harrington-class SD(P) was completed for the first aniversity of the execution of Honor, there were 11 SD(P)'s for Second Battle of Basilisk which was sometime in 1913 but before battle of Cerebrus which was in October 1913. So early 1913 because people captured during Operation Icarus were brought to Cerebrus, spend time with the liberated prisoners and participated in the battle of Cerebrus.

Since the Harrington class were commissioned in 1913 it is conceivable that some of those SD(P)'s were captured under construction in 1910-1911.

As for MDM's there is always a chance to capture some designs and/or prototypes but even if they were to say only hear about them or see them in battle when the RMN rushes them into production out of desperation they can come up with their own quickly enough. They went from no MDMs and SD(P)'s to a lot of MDMs and SD(P)'s in a short bperiod between the first and second war.

Sigs wrote:Do you need to fire off the pods from right next to the SD's in question? Or can you have the pods 10,000,000 km from your SDs and fire them?

You can have your SD's in the inner system and have missile pods in different approaches, as far as I understand it the pods don't have to be collocated with the SD's.

They are SDMs. You can't provide targeting at absurd ranges.

Sigs wrote:The first Harrington-class SD(P) was completed for the first aniversity of the execution of Honor, there were 11 SD(P)'s for Second Battle of Basilisk which was sometime in 1913 but before battle of Cerebrus which was in October 1913. So early 1913 because people captured during Operation Icarus were brought to Cerebrus, spend time with the liberated prisoners and participated in the battle of Cerebrus.

Which alternate timeline are you citing? The first SD(P) were not used until White Haven blew out the peeps in Buttercup.

"GNS Honor Harrington, the lead ship in this class, had the distinction of being the galaxy’s first warship designed from the keel out as a podlayer, commissioned one year to the day after the reported death of Admiral Harrington."

kzt wrote:

Sigs wrote:The first Harrington-class SD(P) was completed for the first aniversity of the execution of Honor, there were 11 SD(P)'s for Second Battle of Basilisk which was sometime in 1913 but before battle of Cerebrus which was in October 1913. So early 1913 because people captured during Operation Icarus were brought to Cerebrus, spend time with the liberated prisoners and participated in the battle of Cerebrus.

Which alternate timeline are you citing? The first SD(P) were not used until White Haven blew out the peeps in Buttercup.

"GNS Honor Harrington, the lead ship in this class, had the distinction of being the galaxy’s first warship designed from the keel out as a podlayer, commissioned one year to the day after the reported death of Admiral Harrington."

Mostly right. That text is very clear that GSN Honor Harrington wasn't commissioned until a year after her reported death (datestamped "23:31:05 GMT, 01:24:1912 P.D." [EoH]; so the 1st SD(P) would have commissioned Jan 1913. And the discussion at Blackbird where Caparelli found out the GSN was building SD(P)s included [quote}"But we only finalized the design thirteen T-months ago!" Caparelli protested.
"Yes, Sir. And we laid this ship down a year ago. She should commission in another two months"[/quote]
So assuming Blackbird yards hit their schedule of 14 months from lay down to commissioning then she would have been laid down November 1911; with plans finalized in October 1911. (They presumably decided to call her GNS Honor Harrington after she was already laid down; since her lay-down predated Honor's "execution")

So a 1910 surrender significantly predates finalized SD(P) design, much less any on the stocks to be captured.



However Buttercup wasn't quite their first use; during the nearly 2 years between her commissioning (early 1913) and Buttercup (end of 1914) they were used in some limited ways; the first major use coming when White Haven rushed his 8th fleet from Trevor's Star to Basilisk to block the 2nd half of the Peep's Thunderbolt pincer attack there.

And they'd seem very limited use in frontier pickets shortly before Buttercup - but under strict rules not to reveal their capabilities for MDM or podlaying. (There was one vignette we were given of IIRC GNS Isiah McKenzie and her fellow SD(P)s pretending they and their ghost rider decoys were part of a group of SDs all towing pods.

kzt wrote:

Sigs wrote:Do you need to fire off the pods from right next to the SD's in question? Or can you have the pods 10,000,000 km from your SDs and fire them?

You can have your SD's in the inner system and have missile pods in different approaches, as far as I understand it the pods don't have to be collocated with the SD's.

They are SDMs. You can't provide targeting at absurd ranges.

So they have to be right next to the SD's to fire them? They are essentially mines, the first batch are fired blindly or limited control and control improves as the SLN gets closer. In Second Battle of Manticore, 11th Fleet could fire 30 missiles/broadside per SD, so assuming that they send 1,000 SD's to Haven, one broadside from them would be 30,000 missiles and I highly doubt the SLN would consistently and rigorously train in fleet engagement with 50,000-100,000 missiles aimed at them in successive waves. Even if those missiles are launched blindly and the SLN manages to knock off even 95% of all the missiles in the first few launches they will still get hurt and the closer they go to Capital Fleet they go, the more accurate the fire gets. Stagger the launch, go from multiple directions increase the size of launches etc... by the time it gets to a point where the SD's in Capital Fleet can fire off their own internal missiles and the nearby pods the SLN fleet would have suffered horrendous casualties. They will go from walk in the park scenarios of 50-60 SD's vs 50-60 SD's with pre-determined winner and loser to defending against 100,000 missile launches all the way into the system. With a little bit of luck and with improved accuracy as they enter better ranges the numbers would be much closer if not significantly in favour of the PN. It would be a whole different equation if the SLN practiced with pods on regular occasion and practiced defending against heavy waves of missile but highly doubt it.

Jonathan_S wrote:
So a 1910 surrender significantly predates finalized SD(P) design, much less any on the stocks to be captured.

A military disaster, or losing the war might have forced the hand of the RMN to introduce SD(P)'s earlier hoping for a miracle. If things are not going well the Alliance might pull all the stops for force multipliers even if untested. They will likely not get huge numbers in 1910 but it could be under construction especially if the war lasted 5 years till 1910 and continually went from bad to worse for the MA.

kzt wrote:Which alternate timeline are you citing? The first SD(P) were not used until White Haven blew out the peeps in Buttercup.

"GNS Honor Harrington, the lead ship in this class, had the distinction of being the galaxy’s first warship designed from the keel out as a podlayer, commissioned one year to the day after the reported death of Admiral Harrington."

Yeah SD(P)'s participated in 2nd Basilisk. And quite a few smaller engagements between 1913 and 1914. But with a worsening military situation I can imagine quite a few Hail Mary projects as the situations worsens.

Sigs wrote:Do you need to fire off the pods from right next to the SD's in question? Or can you have the pods 10,000,000 km from your SDs and fire them?

You can have your SD's in the inner system and have missile pods in different approaches, as far as I understand it the pods don't have to be collocated with the SD's.

kzt wrote:They are SDMs. You can't provide targeting at absurd ranges.

Sigs wrote:So they have to be right next to the SD's to fire them? They are essentially mines, the first batch are fired blindly or limited control and control improves as the SLN gets closer.

I think he is saying the pods have to be near the SD that controls and supplies targeting information to them to have a good chance of hitting the target. That is nothing like mines, which work more like a proximity fused shell. But it is true that targeting becomes better as the range decreases; however the enemy targeting also becomes better, so there is a trade-off.

SDM's are controlled by light speed signals, so you do not want to introduce unnecessary delays by placing them too far from the ship that provides targeting information.

tlb wrote:I think he is saying the pods have to be near the SD that controls and supplies targeting information to them to have a good chance of hitting the target. That is nothing like mines, which work more like a proximity fused shell. But it is true that targeting becomes better as the range decreases; however the enemy targeting also becomes better, so there is a trade-off.

SDM's are controlled by light speed signals, so you do not want to introduce unnecessary delays by placing them too far from the ship that provides targeting information.

By mines I meant that they are to be programed to fire off when they enter a certain range, flood them with missiles even if those missiles are not under direction by a ship or a fort. Sending 50,000 missiles or 100,000 even without direction other than the SLN is that-a-way will still generate hits, will be significantly better when they face 10 or more successive waves of 50,000-100,000 with each wave getting successively better targeting. Even if only 2.5% of the first wave get through that's still 1,250-2,500 missiles hitting the SLN SD's, imagine 10 successive waves of that get progressively more accurate plus with each successive wave their anti-missile shield being degraded with every ship damaged or destroyed. Fire off 1,000,000 missiles in 10 waves with 2.5% hits average that is still 25,000 hits how many SLN SD's are going to be left at the end?

Hell Fire off all 1,000,000 missiles in a blind mass, imagine 1,000,000 missiles from multiple directions dividing the attention and fire of the SLN SD's even with 2% accuracy that would be 20,000 hits in a force of 1,000 SD's. How many SD's are going to be left combat worthy in that case?

SDM's have a max range of 10 million KM. So you'd start out at nearly the max range that the communication links are designed to handle. They are also not designed to communicate to ships that are not basically 'behind' them where their antenna points.

SDM pods are basically towed by BCs and above to provide a single heavy salvo. (CAs can tow about two)I don't believe any example of using them for system defense exists, as SDM capacitors require charging with plasma and it seems unlikely that this will hold for days or weeks.

"Sarnow glanced at Corell, who nodded in confirmation. A few people—notably Commander Houseman—looked skeptical, but Honor felt a trickle of satisfaction. The concept might be a tactical antique, yet its very outdatedness should keep the Peeps from expecting it in the first place.
"A parasite pod was nothing more than a drone slaved to the fire control of the ship towing it astern on a tractor. Each pod mounted several, usually a half-dozen or so, single-shot missile launchers similar to those LACs used. The idea was simple—to link the pod with the ship's internal tubes and launch a greater number of birds in a single salvo in order to saturate an opponent's defenses—but they hadn't been used in a fleet engagement for eighty T-years because advances in antimissile defenses had rendered them ineffective."
...
"But the point at hand was that the same improvements could be applied to parasite pods, and, despite Hemphill's objections, they had been. Of course, the new pods—with ten tubes each, not six—were intended for ships of the wall, which had plenty of redundant fire control to manage them, not battlecruisers. But it sounded like Turner was finding the answer to that, and their missiles were actually heavier than the standard ship-to-ship birds. With the new lightweight mass-drivers BuShips had perfected, their performance could equal or even exceed that of normal, ship-launched missiles, and their warheads were more destructive to boot. The pods were clumsy, of course, and towing them did unfortunate things to a warship's inertial compensator field, which held down maximum accelerations by twenty-five percent or so. They were also vulnerable to proximity soft kills, since they carried neither sidewalls nor radiation shielding of their own, but if they got their shots off before they were killed, that hardly mattered."


This is all before the RMN's magic invisible LACa who can magically tow two million tons of pods invisibly at 700 magical g's.