?

Jonathan_S wrote:BTW I can't actually find anything in the books that states Haven has minefields (and just a mention or two of it having forts); though I'm sure they do.

The only systems I can find mines specifically mentioned for are Maticore's Junction, Cerberus, Hancock, and Barnett. Heck I didn't find a mention of minefields at the Lynx or Basilisk termini defenses; but it'd be inconceivable that the forts Manticore put in weren't backed by the same kinds of minefields that help protect the Junction. Though it is mentioned that "Minefields were a part of almost any area defense plan" [AoV]; but they appear so commonplace that they're not worth of mention in the books unless they affect the story.

As I wrote above and others have too, minefields aren't useful for defending a volume as large as a star's hyperlimit, much less the entire system. The examples above are all about much smaller targets: a junction, a planet, or a base in interplanetary space. And note how neither Cerberus nor Hancock had civilian traffic; Barnett had a habitable planet with a civilian population, but its main purpose was to support the base.

A minefield through which civilians need to pass is a recipe for disaster. Neither Manticore (or Sphinx or Gryphon), nor Haven nor Beowulf nor Earth are likely to have minefields surrounding the planet. Forts, yes, possibly a lot of them. But not mines. A poorly-maintained freighter that strayed into the minefield could get blown to bits. I suppose it's possible to mitigate most of these risks, but I find it reckless.

The Junction is an interesting story, though. It's a tightly regulated environment and you don't get to approach the minefield at all before passing under the guns of the forts and any warships that may be defending it. There's also no planetary gravity around that would force the mines to either orbit or expend fuel to keep station. Finally and crucially, if the ship can't get onto a specific vector, it's not transiting in the first place anyway. The ships transiting the Manticoran Junction probably line up to go through all the way out of the minefield (in the "economy lane" at least).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:BTW I can't actually find anything in the books that states Haven has minefields (and just a mention or two of it having forts); though I'm sure they do.

The only systems I can find mines specifically mentioned for are Maticore's Junction, Cerberus, Hancock, and Barnett. Heck I didn't find a mention of minefields at the Lynx or Basilisk termini defenses; but it'd be inconceivable that the forts Manticore put in weren't backed by the same kinds of minefields that help protect the Junction. Though it is mentioned that "Minefields were a part of almost any area defense plan" [AoV]; but they appear so commonplace that they're not worth of mention in the books unless they affect the story.

As I wrote above and others have too, minefields aren't useful for defending a volume as large as a star's hyperlimit, much less the entire system. The examples above are all about much smaller targets: a junction, a planet, or a base in interplanetary space. And note how neither Cerberus nor Hancock had civilian traffic; Barnett had a habitable planet with a civilian population, but its main purpose was to support the base.

A minefield through which civilians need to pass is a recipe for disaster. Neither Manticore (or Sphinx or Gryphon), nor Haven nor Beowulf nor Earth are likely to have minefields surrounding the planet. Forts, yes, possibly a lot of them. But not mines. A poorly-maintained freighter that strayed into the minefield could get blown to bits. I suppose it's possible to mitigate most of these risks, but I find it reckless.

The Junction is an interesting story, though. It's a tightly regulated environment and you don't get to approach the minefield at all before passing under the guns of the forts and any warships that may be defending it. There's also no planetary gravity around that would force the mines to either orbit or expend fuel to keep station. Finally and crucially, if the ship can't get onto a specific vector, it's not transiting in the first place anyway. The ships transiting the Manticoran Junction probably line up to go through all the way out of the minefield (in the "economy lane" at least).

I eventually caught up in the tread and saw your post - and I totally agree with it and this one.
And even in the tightly constrained space around the Junction the minefields were a wartime-only measure.

On Basilisk Station: Ch. wrote:In time of war, the forts would be augmented by thickly seeded remote laser platforms—old-fashioned, bomb-pumped laser satellites—much closer in and programmed to automatically engage anything not positively identified as friendly, but such measures were never used in peacetime.

Even with Haven's history of surprise attacks without declaration of war, even with the risk the war might start with a pounce on the Junction, Manticore didn't feel it could justify the risks of deploying mines there in peacetime - at least not before the confrontations at Basilisk and Yeltsin. We don't know whether or not they waited until the first shots had been fired to supplement the defenses there with mines. (Actually that might be why there was no mention of mines at the Basilisk terminus when Thunderbolt struck; Janacek may have treated the ceasefire like full peacetime and had all the RMN's defensive minefields removed)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Spider-driven ships on picket duty are completely useless. They are slow as molasses and can't catch any manoeuvring scout, unless the scout is unwittingly coming straight at the picket ship. We've discussed this before and unless the scout has a specific destination that the picket ship knows it will get to, the picket cannot get to missile range. Spider-driven graser torpedoes are no better, since they are still limited to a few thousand G acceleration -- more than the scout, but too little to close the range before the clock runs out and the scout translates out.

Actually you're dramtically overstating the acceleration of the graser torp. Here's what I believe is the first mention of it, back in MoH.

Mission of Honor: Ch. 28 wrote:The first wave of each attack consisted of a weapon which was as much a fundamental breakthrough, in its own way, as the Manticoran introduction of the multidrive missile: a graser torpedo which used its own variant of the spider drive. It was a large and cumbersome weapon, with the same trilateral symmetry as the Shark-class ships which had launched it, and for the same reasons.
The torpedo’s size made fitting it into magazines and actually firing it awkward, to say the least [...]
For all its size, it was also a slow weapon. It was simply impossible to fit a spider drive capable of more than a few hundred gravities’ acceleration into something small enough to make a practical weapon. As compensation, however, its drive had almost as much endurance as most of the galaxy’s recon drones, which gave it an impressive absolute range.

A few hundred gravities makes only around 2-3 times as quick as a manned spider ship, and slower than any conventional warship. It if wasn't undetectable it'd have no hope of hitting any ship underway, other than an unescorted freighter.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:From the tracks of the missiles, they could get a fairly good guess of direction they came from. Once they correlate that with investigations of sensor "ghosts", they should identify which one was the actual attack run. With the timing, they can deduce the acceleration that the attack ships could achieve. Thus, they will know that what ever drive was used had an acceleration that as a fraction of what an impeller-driven ship could achieve.

As tlb wrote above, unfortunately that doesn't give us much information. The torpedoes began accelerating much earlier than they needed to hit the targets, ostensibly because they needed to manoeuvre into targets with limited acceleration. So they weren't accelerating for the part of the attack run where they were under sensor observation.

Missiles, not the torpedoes. The missiles were regular impeller-driven (Cataphact type, but that is not important). Thus, tracking their attack runs (highly visible on gravity sensors) will give both their accelerations and more important their initial velocity (speed and direction). You tie that to a supposedly sensor ghost and find the acceleration provile to fit the time and velocity. Remember distance based on time squared while velocity is based on time. Since the acceleration profile has to match both velocity and distance, there isn't much flex in the range of possible solutions.

I'm still choking on the pill that is the excuse for Honor getting all of her deposit back. But then, that simply has to be a very big pill. I do accept that all of you can swallow that Honor didn't even get her paint scratched. Heck, I wouldn't even be surprised if she didn't bother with a shock frame, and had a mug of hot cocoa sitting in her armrest.

But alas, this discussion and my qualms with the climactic battle did remind me of a question or two I've had percolating for quite some time...

How big are mines? And how big are mine-layers? Even if mines are as large as missiles, mine-layers should be able to at least match the equivalent of a warship's load-out of missiles. Since mine layers shouldn't see battle, they should be hollow like podlayers, therefore matching a podlayers load out. There shouldn't be a need for a large crew or space consuming environmental systems or yatta yatta yatta. They should be carrying and able to lay down an extensive network of mines at specific coordinates at a moment's notice.

I also wondered way back when why huge multistage missiles weren't already in use for system defense. And, the concept of handing over control of these missiles to the appropriate Forts. Forts which I maintain should have been stacked on top of each other in the Sol system. If the SLN hadn't been dragging it's ass in system defense, they might have been first in certain technologies like control channels, another big pill. Or multistage system defense missiles. A bigger pill.

I also wonder why there doesn't seem to be any strategies and doctrines predicated on an enemy's likely vectors of attack. Also, in many other pieces of Sci-Fi, Sol's fixed defenses began way out beyond Mars. In Star Trek, the Borg Cube had to break through unmanned defenses between Mars and Jupiter. At least several of Honor's ships should have been losing atmosphere and leaking oil long before they could communicate with the Sol system. To be commensurate with the series long buildup of the great hairy ape.

The 800 pound gorilla didn't even have any hair on his chest. But he sure did stink.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:From the tracks of the missiles, they could get a fairly good guess of direction they came from. Once they correlate that with investigations of sensor "ghosts", they should identify which one was the actual attack run. With the timing, they can deduce the acceleration that the attack ships could achieve. Thus, they will know that what ever drive was used had an acceleration that as a fraction of what an impeller-driven ship could achieve.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:As tlb wrote above, unfortunately that doesn't give us much information. The torpedoes began accelerating much earlier than they needed to hit the targets, ostensibly because they needed to manoeuvre into targets with limited acceleration. So they weren't accelerating for the part of the attack run where they were under sensor observation.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Missiles, not the torpedoes. The missiles were regular impeller-driven (Cataphact type, but that is not important). Thus, tracking their attack runs (highly visible on gravity sensors) will give both their accelerations and more important their initial velocity (speed and direction). You tie that to a supposedly sensor ghost and find the acceleration provile to fit the time and velocity. Remember distance based on time squared while velocity is based on time. Since the acceleration profile has to match both velocity and distance, there isn't much flex in the range of possible solutions.

Since we thought that you were talking about getting an idea of the acceleration possible with a spider drive; the text from Mission of Honor made it clear that both the graser torpedoes and the missile pods flew into the system in a ballistic phase. So the calculations that you propose will only yield an average velocity and will say nothing about the possible acceleration rate. Once you add the possibility of a ballistic phase, then your highlighted statement becomes invalid; since you can only guess how long that phase lasted.

tlb wrote:Since we thought that you were talking about getting an idea of the acceleration possible with a spider drive; the text from Mission of Honor made it clear that both the graser torpedoes and the missile pods flew into the system in a ballistic phase. So the calculations that you propose will only yield an average velocity and will say nothing about the possible acceleration rate. Once you add the possibility of a ballistic phase, then your highlighted statement becomes invalid; since you can only guess how long that phase lasted.

Right. At best, assuming you got a sensor ghost on a Shark (not on a Ghost) that deployed the missile pods, with two points of data you can only calculate the average velocity vector and this is even assuming you can calculate how long that ballistic phase was. With the data captured from Ganymede, it's possible they can put an upper limit on how long the Cataphract pods can last, this putting an upper limit on the ballistic phase. But then again, the highest duration implies he smallest delta-vee.

Plus, that calculates the vector change of the ship, not of the missiles. We know ships are filled with squishy things called humans and thus are limited by how much acceleration can be compensated by some means or another. Absent a wedge to use as a gravity sump for the conventional compensators, the GA has to guess how the MAN is compensating. But compensating they are, whereas missiles and torpedoes need much less thereof.

BTW, someone can be come really rich selling the improved gravity plating in the open market to the freight business.

cthia wrote:I'm still choking on the pill that is the excuse for Honor getting all of her deposit back. But then, that simply has to be a very big pill. I do accept that all of you can swallow that Honor didn't even get her paint scratched. Heck, I wouldn't even be surprised if she didn't bother with a shock frame, and had a mug of hot cocoa sitting in her armrest.

At the Battle of Saltash, Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya of the SLN was astonished to realise the RMN crew aboard the destroyers weren't even on shipsuits.

How big are mines? And how big are mine-layers? Even if mines are as large as missiles, mine-layers should be able to at least match the equivalent of a warship's load-out of missiles. Since mine layers shouldn't see battle, they should be hollow like podlayers, therefore matching a podlayers load out. There shouldn't be a need for a large crew or space consuming environmental systems or yatta yatta yatta. They should be carrying and able to lay down an extensive network of mines at specific coordinates at a moment's notice.

Without an impeller ring, mines are probably much smaller than missiles. If they are ye olde nukes (boom mode) pre-laser heads, they can be very small indeed. The advantage in that being that they might be nigh-undetectable until too late, which is the whole point of a minefield.

I also wondered way back when why huge multistage missiles weren't already in use for system defense. And, the concept of handing over control of these missiles to the appropriate Forts. Forts which I maintain should have been stacked on top of each other in the Sol system. If the SLN hadn't been dragging it's ass in system defense, they might have been first in certain technologies like control channels, another big pill. Or multistage system defense missiles. A bigger pill.

They had been envisioned at least as far back as Travis' time. And he gave us the answer: the impellers on all the rings need to be tuned to one another and the clock starts on all of them at the moment any of them activate, unless they are very far from one another. In that case, then you'd need a pole connecting the multiple stages and there was no material known to science that could make such a pole thin enough to be worth the cost. With known materials science, the pole would be so big that this missile would be, as Travis put it, "as big as a frigate, as expensive as a destroyer."

With that, you can see why any navy would invest in frigates and destroyers instead..

The other aspect is, of course, that there was no need for much longer-ranged missiles if it couldn't kill any attackers further than was necessary. An ERM or a missile with higher acceleration would be more than enough to launch from just outside the attacker's range. Plus, the weight of fire should be enough to shatter the attack. If the defenders are firing 10 to 100x more missiles than the attackers and more than the attackers can counter, they're quite safe. Quantity has, after all, a value of its own.

I also wonder why there doesn't seem to be any strategies and doctrines predicated on an enemy's likely vectors of attack. Also, in many other pieces of Sci-Fi, Sol's fixed defenses began way out beyond Mars. In Star Trek, the Borg Cube had to break through unmanned defenses between Mars and Jupiter. At least several of Honor's ships should have been losing atmosphere and leaking oil long before they could communicate with the Sol system. To be commensurate with the series long buildup of the great hairy ape.

The 800 pound gorilla didn't even have any hair on his chest. But he sure did stink.

The answer to that is that RFC thinks about these things more than the script writers do in Star Trek. Most script writers also suffer from Khan's Failing: they think in 2D. More than that, they seem to think that planets are always in conjunction!

There's such thing as a least-time course which is quite predictable. You know where your defended positions are in your system, so you know what the closest hyper emergence point to that is. In some universes, fuel consumption may also matter, so in addition to the least-time course you have the most-fuel-efficient course. Either way, you could emplace your defenders there, at least for the coming battle. The problem is that the attacker knows the same thing, so the attacker has no incentive to arrive at that point. Rule #1 of Space Warfare: don't make it easy for the enemy to kill you.

That's of course different in universes where the only FTL travel is via wormholes or warp points. In those cases, there's a bottle neck and your enemy must go through that. Christopher Nuttal explores how tactics suddenly changed in one of his universes where that was the rule and then the Continuous Displacement Drive was invented, in "Barbarians at the Gates (The Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire Book 1)". Unfortunately, this happened prior to current events, so it's only recounted.

Anyway, the point is that in the HV, the rules mean that there was just no way to emplace defences in such a way that they are thick enough to give the invaders pause and also be unavoidable. With MDMs and 4DMs, that's different now.

cthia wrote:How big are mines? And how big are mine-layers? Even if mines are as large as missiles, mine-layers should be able to at least match the equivalent of a warship's load-out of missiles. Since mine layers shouldn't see battle, they should be hollow like podlayers, therefore matching a podlayers load out. There shouldn't be a need for a large crew or space consuming environmental systems or yatta yatta yatta. They should be carrying and able to lay down an extensive network of mines at specific coordinates at a moment's notice.

I don't believe we have hard data on the size of mines. I would guess that they're actually somewhat larger volume than capital ship missiles, but probably less elongated; more spherical. The actual mines (as opposed to the larger reusable remote energy platforms) as described as

Short Victorious War: Ch. 17 wrote:mines were simply old-fashioned bomb-pumped lasers. They were cheap but good for only a single shot each, and their accuracy was less than outstanding, which made them most effective when employed en masse against ships moving at low velocities. That meant they were usually emplaced for area coverage of relatively immobile targets like wormhole junctions, planets, or orbital bases . . . where, as Banton had just pointed out, the Peeps would expect to see them.

The bomb pumped laser that part is probably very similar to a capital missile's warhead - though scaled up since "Thousands of laser beams, each more powerful than any missile laser head could generate, stabbed and tore at their prey". Maybe a few more lasing rods, probably a somewhat bigger nuke, maybe larger but more effective grav lensing, but essentially the same. And looking at the cutaway diagrams of impeller missiles the warhead section already take up around 1/3 to 1/4 of the missile. Mines don't need the impeller nodes of the missile, however they need much more endurance; as well as station keeping capability (probably thrusters) so they'll presumably devote more room to power and fuel. And probably larger/better sensor arrays, pointed in all directions. (since unlike a missile they can't guarantee which side an enemy will approach from). And we know they carry passive stealth coatings/design; which missiles largely didn't bother with since their drives are so easy to see. All that likely adds up to more volume than you save by deleting the drive ring.


The one minelayer we've seen any mention of was the Erebus-class minelayers Sarnow used in his trap at Hancock Station at the start of the war. (Good thing they'd be ordered to wait there instead of proceeding through to their original destination when the war warning went out). Their size isn't explicitly stated, but they're nearly as fast as BC and the initial version of the plan Honor proposed would have had them pretending to be BCs; the 5 minelayers tied into the BC squadrons. Those both imply that they are little, if any, larger than the pre-war BCs.
I didn't find a mention of the number of mines they laid, but the quote above mentions that the field produce "thousands" of lasers. From that I'll attempt a SWAG.
Assume that "thousands" that means no more than 10,000 lasers (otherwise RFC would have phrased it differently) and assume 5 lasing rods per mine. That'd imply a maximum of 2000 mines; or 400 laid by each roughly BC-sized minelayer.



Also note that the minefield was no more effective than the far fewer number of towed pods the RMN BCs opened the fight with. The mines only killed one DN and significantly damaged another - though their poor target discrimination meant they did do a number on the lighter ships, BCs and DDs. (And if the Havenite ships had had any reasons to suspect a minefield out there they could have probed ahead with RDs and likely gotten more warning. They had more than enough firepower to blast giant holes in the field with missiles in "boom" mode it'd only have forced them to divert a few salvos away from the fleeing BCs)

tlb wrote:

Theemile wrote:The 450 SDs we are discussing were active ships in the Sol system and surrendered to be destroyed - we are not counting the 1000+ ships that were in the Reserve at Hyperion 1 (and destroyed).

And I correct myself - 450 ships actually represents fewer than 1 in 3 wallers of what the SLN had available to deploy in the SL Core - out of nearly 2400 ships active and in maintenance, 500 ships had been destroyed and 600+ had been deployed to Tasmania for "Raging Justice 2", leaving fewer than 1300 ships in the core, some of which were still in repair yards.

Thank you for the numbers, I do not follow them as well as I do the political aspects of the stories. Does this include the consideration that only about one third of the ships sent to attack Beowulf returned?

The Beowulf attack was purputated by BCs, not wallers. I'm not certain how many BCs were in Sol.

(re: backtracking the missile pods to the sensor ghost position and time)

tlb wrote:Since we thought that you were talking about getting an idea of the acceleration possible with a spider drive; the text from Mission of Honor made it clear that both the graser torpedoes and the missile pods flew into the system in a ballistic phase. So the calculations that you propose will only yield an average velocity and will say nothing about the possible acceleration rate. Once you add the possibility of a ballistic phase, then your highlighted statement becomes invalid; since you can only guess how long that phase lasted.

We know 3 things: the velocity of the pods before missile launch (from the missile tracks); the distance to the sensor "ghost", and the TIME since the sensor ghost. That's 3 knowns. What are the unknowns? I see only 2: Acceleration of the starships that deployed the pods and how long they were under acceleration before releasing the pods. Unless you can think of two more, that acceleration can be determined.