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

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.

He sat once more upon MANS Mako's flag bridge. Beyond the flagship's hull, fourteen more ships of Task Group 1.1, kept perfect formation upon her, and the brilliant beacon of Manticore-A blazed before them. They were only one light-week from that star, now, and they'd decelerated to only twenty percent of light-speed. This was the point for which they'd been headed ever since leaving Mesa four T-months before. Now it was time to do what they'd come here to do.
"Begin deployment," he said, and the enormous hatches opened and the pods began to spill free.
The six units of Task Group 1.2 were elsewhere, under Rear Admiral Lydia Papnikitas, closing on Manticore-B. They wouldn't be deploying their pods just yet, not until they'd reached their own preselected launch point. Topolev wished he'd had more ships to commit to that prong of the attack, but the decision to move up Oyster Bay had dictated the available resources, and this prong had to be decisive. Besides, there were fewer targets in the Manticore-B subsystem, anyway, and the planners had had to come up with the eight additional Shark-class ships for Admiral Colenso's Task Group 2.1's Grayson operation from somewhere.

Brigade XO wrote:Sol is the administrative and legislative (in a mockery sense of legislative) hub of the SL and the primary fleet base area for the SLN. There was much more than the equevelent of the SEM Home Fleet in system all the tims plus there was the Reserve Fleet location.

Even with the fighting that had already been going on, SLN couldn't truly concive of anybody attacking the Sol system and nobody had as much in the way of active SD and other capital ships as they did.

Who was going to attack the SLN at Sol? Ok, retorical question. But there was apparently no need for forts at Sol with the number of SLN orbital locations and number of active warships squadrons in system all the time.

Darius......going in half cocked? (in this sence that would be round chamberd and safety on). At the moment (just post UH) if the GA were able to show up at Darius tomorrow they would be going in with missles armed in the tubes. Make your best guess at what you would face and bring twice what you think you need...and come in hot. PRESUME that you are going to be facing an unknown number of those invisable ships and do something truly odd. Flooding the system with Ghost Ryder RDs followd by the equivalent of firing buckshot through at least 50% of the system to see if anything stops a pellet. Yah, totaly unrealistic.

What's your desired result if you show up at Darius? Do you want to talk? Do you really feel confident is is more than possible that you would come to talk and that would continue right up to the point where they put enough undetectable warships right on top of your fleets and just destroy all your ships out of hand.......yeah, quite likely with this bunch.

So, very ruthless--after haveing some idea of the geography of the system --you bring gobs of ships out of hyper and pour as much firepower into the system at as many targets as possible and know you are not going to get everything they have, mostly because some of their ships will already be undetectable and others will turn on those odd drives and vanish (and change vectors/speeds).
How very uncivilized. Or mostly desperate since we- the readers- already know exactly how far the Alignment is willing to go (kill them all by the millions and don't bother sorting them out) and the goal is total domination and enslavement.
Sigh....war porn.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

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.

tlb wrote:According to Storm from the Shadows, chapter 51, the Sharks made the translation from hyper while tractored together in two clumps one light month out from Manticore, accelerated to 80 percent of light speed and traveled for 3 weeks to their destination where (from MOH) they slowed to 20 percent of light speed to release the pods.

PS. I do accept that if the Sharks had translated with zero velocity, accelerated at a constant rate and then released the pods when the measured velocity was achieved; then you are correct that we would have all the information needed to calculate that acceleration. But I never liked that scenario, because it did not allow any wiggle room to achieve that precise timing that the planners wanted.

cthia wrote:Your explanation is well explained TM. Thanks!

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Huh... 1 light-week at 0.2c means the pods would take 5 weeks to reach the target. That's an awfully long time for almost anything. First, it's way too long for capacitors to maintain charge. Second, targetting solutions are really poor at 181 billion km / 1200 AU out. Third and most importantly, that seems to be total overkill. I'd expect that the pods be launched a day or two out -- and that's time, not light-day. I suppose the ships would make final gross manoeuvring that far out, before final fine-tuning which they might with jets -- but we know they needed to bring their spiders online to move onto escape exfiltration trajectories.

Anyway, the point was that the pods were deployed from far out, whether it's half a light day or a full light-week it doesn't matter. That means the ships can manoeuvre a lot and not always on the same direction and not all the time. That throws off any prediction.

Daniel Detweiler's researchers hadn't yet figured out how to fit multiple full-size, sustainable drives into a single missile of manageable dimensions. They had, however, realized what the RMN must have done, and they were working industriously to duplicate the Manticoran advantage. In the meantime, they'd come up with Cataphract, a variant of their own based on taking the standard missile bodies for the SLN's new-generation anti-ship missiles and adding what amounted to a separate final stage carrying a standard laser head and a counter-missile 's drive system. For Oyster Bay, they'd brought out the longest-ranged, heaviest version of their new weapon, fitted the birds into out-sized pods, then launched them behind other, specialized pods which carried nothing but low-powered particle screens and the power supplies to maintain them for the ballistic run in-system to their targets. The missile-laden pods had followed in the zone swept by the shield-equipped platforms; now they completed their own system checks and began to launch.

tlb wrote:PS. I do accept that if the Sharks had translated with zero velocity, accelerated at a constant rate and then released the pods when the measured velocity was achieved; then you are correct that we would have all the information needed to calculate that acceleration. But I never liked that scenario, because it did not allow any wiggle room to achieve that precise timing that the planners wanted.

tlb wrote:

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

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.

Mission of Honor, chapter 12:

He sat once more upon MANS Mako's flag bridge. Beyond the flagship's hull, fourteen more ships of Task Group 1.1, kept perfect formation upon her, and the brilliant beacon of Manticore-A blazed before them. They were only one light-week from that star, now, and they'd decelerated to only twenty percent of light-speed. This was the point for which they'd been headed ever since leaving Mesa four T-months before. Now it was time to do what they'd come here to do.
"Begin deployment," he said, and the enormous hatches opened and the pods began to spill free.
The six units of Task Group 1.2 were elsewhere, under Rear Admiral Lydia Papnikitas, closing on Manticore-B. They wouldn't be deploying their pods just yet, not until they'd reached their own preselected launch point. Topolev wished he'd had more ships to commit to that prong of the attack, but the decision to move up Oyster Bay had dictated the available resources, and this prong had to be decisive. Besides, there were fewer targets in the Manticore-B subsystem, anyway, and the planners had had to come up with the eight additional Shark-class ships for Admiral Colenso's Task Group 2.1's Grayson operation from somewhere.

Does it affect your calculation if they have been decelerating prior to pod release?

According to Storm from the Shadows, chapter 51, the Sharks made the translation from hyper while tractored together in two clumps one light month out from Manticore, accelerated to 80 percent of light speed and traveled for 3 weeks to their destination where (from MOH) they slowed to 20 percent of light speed to release the pods.

PS. I do accept that if the Sharks had translated with zero velocity, accelerated at a constant rate and then released the pods when the measured velocity was achieved; then you are correct that we would have all the information needed to calculate that acceleration. But I never liked that scenario, because it did not allow any wiggle room to achieve that precise timing that the planners wanted.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:The deceleration phase does complicate the calculation as does the weeks they spent at the high rate. I will admit that the top velocity and the time coasting at that velocity are unknowns. But, 80% speed of light is a typical max velocity in normal space, so I suspect that would be the first used (slower maximums will also be plugged into the equations, just to see what it does to the acceleration result). I will put together a spreadsheet tomorrow (though not with actual numbers) as a demonstration of concept.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:You're welcome!

Another thought I had was that Sol was defended to the best of what the SLN knew and had continually been so. I mentioned above I expected mines to be small, boom-mode nukes, but someone has posted textev showing they were big, laserheads more powerful than missiles. The laserhead was first invented in the Solarian League, it's likely the first system to be defended by laserhead mines would be Sol -- probably around Ganymede, for example.

The first system to be defended by superdreadnoughts must have been Sol. The first system to receive the newest class of SLN construction would be it too. The first one to receive the Fleet 2000 upgrades, and so forth.

The problem wasn't the intention to defend. The inexcusable mistake was to ignore the war between Manticore and Haven, though it wasn't entirely their fault they did (MAlign agents were already at work). In original plans in which Honor had died, RFC said that the SL and SLN would have had time to realise they were obsolete before the actual confrontation.