?

tlb wrote:However the GA would not learn anything new from an examination of what is basically a Solarian missile. The dropped first stage will be going fast enough to destroy itself on impact with anything in system (hopefully nothing inhabited, although the Malign does not really care) or else leave the system entirely.

I have no idea of the effect of the final stage size.

Well they wouldn't learn anything from the Flight I or Flight II Cataphracts. Those Solarian missile drives are able to handle a bit more acceleration that what Manticore has been fielding. But Manticore has already captured hundreds of those SLN missile drives in the magazines of Byng, Crandall, and Fileretta's surviving units.

However the performance of the latest Flight of Cataphract booster stages made a dramatic 80% improvement in acceleration over those SLN missiles! Their half power, 3 minute runtime, setting is now ~ 85,900g! while Manticore's is still only 46,000g (hell, Manticore's full power, 60 second runtime, accel is only 92,000g).

I think Grand Alliance would find the drive of a current Cataphract booster extremely interesting to examine.

cthia wrote:I'm predicting that an LD will have at least fifty of the most powerful grasers with which mankind has yet had the pleasure to make toast. I'll go out on a limb and say five will mission kill a target. That is ten ships targeted every five seconds. Fifty ships destroyed in twenty-five seconds. It will take thirty seconds for the targeted ships to react.

cthia wrote:Indeed, but that is tangential to my point. CIC will definitely be able to figure out what happened after they analyze the data. But that takes time. Time they don't have. The victims won't automatically assume the destruction is related to energy fire. And even if they are quicker off the mark than Chin was, what do they do? What orders are given? What maneuvers can be made, not knowing the location of the enemy? Less than thirty seconds and a fleet is gone.

CIC will be able to make that determination much faster than that, within a handful of seconds. There's a huge power spike of the graser activating and there's enough divergence of the beam to the sides that the beam can be picked up by anyone within 10° and a couple million km of the emitter. And this is of course much worse for a ship firing 50 grasers.

So not only will the targeted ships react much quicker than 30 seconds, they will know the general direction of where the graser fire came from, sufficiently so that they could rotate and interpose wedges (two problems with that: rotation takes time and that can also be a trap, exposing another aspect to a different attacker). After the first encounter with LD-mounted grasers, the targeted ships can also analyse the Doppler shift of the incoming wave packet and determine the velocity vector of the firing ship at the moment of firing.

Even if all that isn't true, as soon as ships start exploding for no reasons, all other ships will bring up sidewalls automatically, without human interaction, if they weren't up. So the LDs must take out ALL their targets with their first shot, because they're hardly going to get a second.

Finally, I might agree 5 graser beams from a MAlign mount are able to mission-kill an SD, especially if they last long like the Oyster Bay torpedoes did, if they land. That conditional is the problem: as we discussed a couple of pages ago, firing from a million km away means you need to predict a ship's position 6.6 seconds in advance, while it might be 128 km away from that point, in any direction. If the ships weren't executing randomised motion along a baseline before, they will kick into evasive as soon as ships start showing signs of being hit by grasers. So, again, only the first shot will land this perfectly. After the first, in order to get 5 beams to land, you need to fire all 50 broadside mounts on each target.

So it's not going to be 50 ships every twenty five seconds. The absolute worst case scenario is 10 ships in the first volley and that's it, and this is assuming the targets are going on a straight line with sidewalls down, which I've argued again and again is not going to happen in any system, even the Home System, for the foreseeable future. Random jinking is so easy and can be done completely under the control of the computers, so there's no possibility of even crews slacking.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:the targets are going on a straight line with sidewalls down, which I've argued again and again is not going to happen in any system, even the Home System, for the foreseeable future. Random jinking is so easy and can be done completely under the control of the computers, so there's no possibility of even crews slacking.

Sorry to burst your bubble but some guy wrote a book in which the entire RMN fleet hanging out at the Beowulf terminus was sitting there with cold nodes. It’s like how the RMN hasn’t made a single change in technique or operations to reflect that they have no logistics.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm predicting that an LD will have at least fifty of the most powerful grasers with which mankind has yet had the pleasure to make toast. I'll go out on a limb and say five will mission kill a target. That is ten ships targeted every five seconds. Fifty ships destroyed in twenty-five seconds. It will take thirty seconds for the targeted ships to react.

cthia wrote:Indeed, but that is tangential to my point. CIC will definitely be able to figure out what happened after they analyze the data. But that takes time. Time they don't have. The victims won't automatically assume the destruction is related to energy fire. And even if they are quicker off the mark than Chin was, what do they do? What orders are given? What maneuvers can be made, not knowing the location of the enemy? Less than thirty seconds and a fleet is gone.

CIC will be able to make that determination much faster than that, within a handful of seconds. There's a huge power spike of the graser activating and there's enough divergence of the beam to the sides that the beam can be picked up by anyone within 10° and a couple million km of the emitter. And this is of course much worse for a ship firing 50 grasers.

So not only will the targeted ships react much quicker than 30 seconds, they will know the general direction of where the graser fire came from, sufficiently so that they could rotate and interpose wedges (two problems with that: rotation takes time and that can also be a trap, exposing another aspect to a different attacker). After the first encounter with LD-mounted grasers, the targeted ships can also analyse the Doppler shift of the incoming wave packet and determine the velocity vector of the firing ship at the moment of firing.

Even if all that isn't true, as soon as ships start exploding for no reasons, all other ships will bring up sidewalls automatically, without human interaction, if they weren't up. So the LDs must take out ALL their targets with their first shot, because they're hardly going to get a second.

Finally, I might agree 5 graser beams from a MAlign mount are able to mission-kill an SD, especially if they last long like the Oyster Bay torpedoes did, if they land. That conditional is the problem: as we discussed a couple of pages ago, firing from a million km away means you need to predict a ship's position 6.6 seconds in advance, while it might be 128 km away from that point, in any direction. If the ships weren't executing randomised motion along a baseline before, they will kick into evasive as soon as ships start showing signs of being hit by grasers. So, again, only the first shot will land this perfectly. After the first, in order to get 5 beams to land, you need to fire all 50 broadside mounts on each target.

So it's not going to be 50 ships every twenty five seconds. The absolute worst case scenario is 10 ships in the first volley and that's it, and this is assuming the targets are going on a straight line with sidewalls down, which I've argued again and again is not going to happen in any system, even the Home System, for the foreseeable future. Random jinking is so easy and can be done completely under the control of the computers, so there's no possibility of even crews slacking.

The reason the graser torp was able to fire for so long was it was self destructing, destroying itself and the rest of the torpedo in the process. The MAlign might get a little more duration out of it's shipborn grasers but, no where near what the torpedo does, especially if they plan on taking a second shot.

As far as the last flight -we know about, we don't know what the Aligment has reserved for itself- of Cataphracts, you have to presume that the ships that delivered the missle pods with the new Cataphracts to Fillerta also brought along compleat specs and manuals since somebody was going to have to end up working with if not actualy on the pod launched missiles before the attack. Since we know that a great many of the surviving SLN ships did NOT dump their computers both Haven and Manticore have a least the informaton Fillerta's ships were given--remember that the UH talked about the lower "accommodations" that the commanders of ships which did dump their computers were given as POWs.

I don't remember any discussion about Fillerta's fleet train and if it or any of it was captured post battle. There probably would be physical examples of the newer Cataphracts (and or in pods) with the train unless the ammuntion ships sent with the new pods only had just enough or even a few too little pods to give to the attack fleet.

I seem to remember that the RMN MDM's had multiple impeller rings and when the 1st burned out the 2nd would be activated -per instructions- and the 1st used ring just stayed on the missile. The dropped 1st stage of the SLN DD missiles may or may not have fried themselves when they burned out. In any case, a couple of hours after the start of an engagement with them the 1st stages are long gone out of the system and are really tiny targets as far as somebody looking for them and they would be heading in all sorts of directions with the last vectors of the original missle plus whatever direction they may have been nudges in at seperation.

Brigade XO wrote:As far as the last flight -we know about, we don't know what the Aligment has reserved for itself- of Cataphracts, you have to presume that the ships that delivered the missle pods with the new Cataphracts to Fillerta also brought along compleat specs and manuals since somebody was going to have to end up working with if not actualy on the pod launched missiles before the attack. Since we know that a great many of the surviving SLN ships did NOT dump their computers both Haven and Manticore have a least the informaton Fillerta's ships were given--remember that the UH talked about the lower "accommodations" that the commanders of ships which did dump their computers were given as POWs.

I don't remember any discussion about Fillerta's fleet train and if it or any of it was captured post battle. There probably would be physical examples of the newer Cataphracts (and or in pods) with the train unless the ammuntion ships sent with the new pods only had just enough or even a few too little pods to give to the attack fleet.

I seem to remember that the RMN MDM's had multiple impeller rings and when the 1st burned out the 2nd would be activated -per instructions- and the 1st used ring just stayed on the missile. The dropped 1st stage of the SLN DD missiles may or may not have fried themselves when they burned out. In any case, a couple of hours after the start of an engagement with them the 1st stages are long gone out of the system and are really tiny targets as far as somebody looking for them and they would be heading in all sorts of directions with the last vectors of the original missle plus whatever direction they may have been nudges in at seperation.

Uncompromising Honor specifically notes that the Cataphract's with the accel I noted were significantly improved over what Fillerta was provided. He seems to have had slightly improved versions over what was used at Congo and Oyster Bay (which were specifically noted by the Manties to have had identical performance).

I do assume that missiles in the magazines of many of his ships were captured, and examples probably got shipped off to Bolthole for GA R&D to study and reverse engineer. But while the drives seem more capable that the base RMN or RHN missile drive it's still far inferior to the latest the MAlign has shown.

But I agree it'd be damned hard to find the spend 1st stage booster of a Cataphract. And it's even possible that the 2nd stage drive ignition would shred the only just separated booster - rendering recovery pointless/impossible.


OTOH it's possible that some of those newer Cataphracts were captured, or their specs found, in the surrendered ships and research stations at Sol at the end of the book - since IIRC they had been provided to the SLN through "Technodyne". So it's possible that the GA will already have some of the later Flights to play with.

kzt wrote:Sorry to burst your bubble but some guy wrote a book in which the entire RMN fleet hanging out at the Beowulf terminus was sitting there with cold nodes. It’s like how the RMN hasn’t made a single change in technique or operations to reflect that they have no logistics.

What occurrence are you referring to? Is that after Oyster Bay and not done so they could have stealth?

The only time I can remember now of an RMN task force at the Beowulf terminus was Alice Truman during Operation Raging Justice and she did not have cold nodes; she was under stealth.

That might be a good point: stealth for anything except Ghost Riders implies the wedge is down, even if the nodes are hot[*]. That also means no sidewall. So a ship operating under stealth is under serious danger if it is detected. Of course, the whole point of being stealthed is that it can't be easily detected. I don't see much of a reason to be in stealth in a friendly system, unless one is expecting an attack in the first place, in which case they are following a predetermined action plan. And if it is not a friendly system, then the LD can't tell where the GA is going to arrive and what vector it will use ahead of time. If the MAlign can tell where a stealth ship is going to be, they've compromised OpSec, in which case all bets are indeed lost.

The Silver Bullet found the Mycroft stealth stations in Beowulf, but it spent a lot of time looking for it. It wasn't an arrive-and-fire. An LD would have to lurk in the inner system for days on end to find a stealth ship, which unlike a station is highly mobile. I don't see this happening. In fact, an RMN or RHN ship with no wedge and under stealth is probably less detectable from a distance than the spider drive. An LD looking for such a ship is running the risk of being detected first.

Not to mention that such a ship would be no bigger than a BC squadron, like Henke was doing tailing Crandall at Spindle. Would the MAN risk an LD for a BC squadron? Is it worth the trade-off?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That might be a good point: stealth for anything except Ghost Riders implies the wedge is down, even if the nodes are hot[*]. That also means no sidewall.

[*] Wait, does it? In Hypatia, TG 110.2 was definitely accelerating with full wedges, and yet the SLN couldn't detect them from less than 30 million km away (less than 2 light-minutes). Sure, SLN sensors are myopic and TF 1030 wasn't looking. Does this count as stealth?

And we do know a Ghost Rider can pull 3500 gravities and no one else in the system can see it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That might be a good point: stealth for anything except Ghost Riders implies the wedge is down, even if the nodes are hot[*]. That also means no sidewall.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:[*] Wait, does it? In Hypatia, TG 110.2 was definitely accelerating with full wedges, and yet the SLN couldn't detect them from less than 30 million km away (less than 2 light-minutes). Sure, SLN sensors are myopic and TF 1030 wasn't looking. Does this count as stealth?

And we do know a Ghost Rider can pull 3500 gravities and no one else in the system can see it.

It has never been the case in the Honorverse, that being in stealth imples that sidewalls and wedges are down.

Consider the stealthy drones, not just Ghost Rider, that travel through systems with passive surveillance (such as at Monica). There are other examples with warships. This quote is from the dinner conversation in chapter 23 of Ashes of Victory:

"I understand that, Ma'am," Gillingham said. "But at Third Yeltsin, Earl White Haven used his stealth systems and low-powered wedges to keep the Peeps from seeing his additional units at all. They were a surprise because no one on the other side had detected a trace of them until it was too late."

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm predicting that an LD will have at least fifty of the most powerful grasers with which mankind has yet had the pleasure to make toast. I'll go out on a limb and say five will mission kill a target. That is ten ships targeted every five seconds. Fifty ships destroyed in twenty-five seconds. It will take thirty seconds for the targeted ships to react.

cthia wrote:Indeed, but that is tangential to my point. CIC will definitely be able to figure out what happened after they analyze the data. But that takes time. Time they don't have. The victims won't automatically assume the destruction is related to energy fire. And even if they are quicker off the mark than Chin was, what do they do? What orders are given? What maneuvers can be made, not knowing the location of the enemy? Less than thirty seconds and a fleet is gone.

CIC will be able to make that determination much faster than that, within a handful of seconds. There's a huge power spike of the graser activating and there's enough divergence of the beam to the sides that the beam can be picked up by anyone within 10° and a couple million km of the emitter. And this is of course much worse for a ship firing 50 grasers.

So not only will the targeted ships react much quicker than 30 seconds, they will know the general direction of where the graser fire came from, sufficiently so that they could rotate and interpose wedges (two problems with that: rotation takes time and that can also be a trap, exposing another aspect to a different attacker). After the first encounter with LD-mounted grasers, the targeted ships can also analyse the Doppler shift of the incoming wave packet and determine the velocity vector of the firing ship at the moment of firing.

Even if all that isn't true, as soon as ships start exploding for no reasons, all other ships will bring up sidewalls automatically, without human interaction, if they weren't up. So the LDs must take out ALL their targets with their first shot, because they're hardly going to get a second.

Finally, I might agree 5 graser beams from a MAlign mount are able to mission-kill an SD, especially if they last long like the Oyster Bay torpedoes did, if they land. That conditional is the problem: as we discussed a couple of pages ago, firing from a million km away means you need to predict a ship's position 6.6 seconds in advance, while it might be 128 km away from that point, in any direction. If the ships weren't executing randomised motion along a baseline before, they will kick into evasive as soon as ships start showing signs of being hit by grasers. So, again, only the first shot will land this perfectly. After the first, in order to get 5 beams to land, you need to fire all 50 broadside mounts on each target.

So it's not going to be 50 ships every twenty five seconds. The absolute worst case scenario is 10 ships in the first volley and that's it, and this is assuming the targets are going on a straight line with sidewalls down, which I've argued again and again is not going to happen in any system, even the Home System, for the foreseeable future. Random jinking is so easy and can be done completely under the control of the computers, so there's no possibility of even crews slacking.

TheEmile wrote:The reason the graser torp was able to fire for so long was it was self destructing, destroying itself and the rest of the torpedo in the process. The MAlign might get a little more duration out of it's shipborn grasers but, no where near what the torpedo does, especially if they plan on taking a second shot.

As far as the shipborn grasers, you may be betting against the horse before it is even mount(ed).

On that note, are we sure the graser torp didn't self-detruct because that is an intended design element? Wouldn't want that to fall into enemy hands. I think I remember textev saying it is a byproduct, but that doesn't mean the MA didn't accept it as providence. It's secrets are secure, perhaps, because the MA may have accepted its imminent destruction as a fortunate byproduct. After all, no self-destruct mechanism is needed.