HMLAC 113

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Maybe Honor caught a belligerent SL SD in-system with its pants down, threatening to blow it out of space.

In addition to RMN LACs not getting deployed out of their home system, the SLN hasn't sent an SD outside its territory in centuries. (Not that anybody sends a single SD somewhere)

There's just no way Honor's HMLAC 113 and an SL SD were ever within 50 LY of each other; much less in the same system.

Besides any such activity by the RMN - conducted either properly within the due course of the laws of war, or improperly, would have caused the entire SLN to fall on Manticore - for the SLN could not be seen as being weak or inferior to any other power/polity - which is why they got themselves in the mess in the pd 1920s. And the RMN - Prior to 1900 PD, did not stand a snowball's chance in hades against the sheer weight that the SLN
could bring down on them.

So no - never happened or could have happened.

Emergency!!!



The Galaxy is so large that it is chock-full of reasons, even without that demon Murphy.

The SD could have ended up in the system because of an emergency, then overstayed its welcome by straying too close to restricted space. Secrets are kept safe on a need to know basis, and a curious SL CO getting lucky and witnessing something being tested out of Project Gram does not need to know... or stay in the system.

But are you telling me that a LAC firing a missile right up the tailpipe won't destroy even an SD? Or even energy weapons fired right up the keester?

HMLAC 113 could have been the origin of the SL's term of endearment. Neobarbs. Because one lowly LAC CO dared to challenge a SL Captain of an SD.

Wedge down


Does a ship have enough power for defensive systems if the wedge is down? In all cases? Even though we know a tremendous amount of energy is needed to start the wedge? God forbid if the start is unsuccessful. After all, this is an emergency visit.

I don't suppose it is too far-fetched that the electronics and hardware wasn't always as reliable as those systems are now. Especially in the Sol System.

.

munroburton wrote:

cthia wrote:Could HMLAC 113 have taken out an SD with wedges down?

Sure. Any ship with its wedge down should be completely vulnerable to being rammed by something else's wedge.

In hindsight, I'm puzzled why we've never actually seen it happen. The MacGregor raid, for example, could have seen the entire Peep force minus their ready screen destroyed by the LACs simply driving through them, preserving all their weapons for use against that screen. Same again at Grendelsbane. Higgins nuked the unfinished ships there instead of mowing impeller wedges through everything.

Indeed. Honor used her wedge against the DB in the Basilisk System. Its own wedge hadn't fully come up.

Jonathan_S wrote:(Not that anybody sends a single SD somewhere)

*coughHMSHerculescough*

There's been forum apocrypha about there being 20 or so unnamed naval powers with a squadron of waller and - my memory may be failing me here - another ~20 with just one or two. One of those could hypothetically fall into the hands of a mad fool who thought they could accomplish something in Manticore.

cthia wrote:Indeed. Honor used her wedge against the DB in the Basilisk System. Its own wedge hadn't fully come up.

Not quite like that. She passed so closely that Fearless' impeller wedge disrupted the dispatch boat's charging impeller nodes with slightly explosive results, but did not actually touch that boat with Fearless' wedge. I'm actually rereading OBS and currently paused on that very scene by a great coincidence. Fearless' wedge "missed" by about 2km.

I'm thinking more like what HMS Quay did during the Yawata Strike; she used her wedge to physically shred pieces of debris far larger than a mere SD. The entire Solarian Reserve could be destroyed by one industrious recon drone's impeller wedge if there were no active ships to shoot at it.

cthia wrote:Wedge down


Does a ship have enough power for defensive systems if the wedge is down? In all cases? Even though we know a tremendous amount of energy is needed to start the wedge? God forbid if the start is unsuccessful. After all, this is an emergency visit.

I don't suppose it is too far-fetched that the electronics and hardware wasn't always as reliable as those systems are now. Especially in the Sol System.

.

Yes, absolutely.
The wedge does provide a fair bit of its own power -- but unlike a Warshaski sail in a grav wave it does NOT produce surplus power that could be fed back into the ship's power systems.

Whether the wedge is up or down the ship can still have full power available to its defensive systems.


Sure, without the wedge it won't have sidewalls. But its radars, ECM, jammers, CMs, and PDLC is just as operable without the wedge as with it.

And even a SLN's SD's CMs and PDLC would swat away 24 LAC missiles (which, remember, have lower terminal velocity and less room for ECM and penetration aids than even a destroyer's missile)

And the SD's passive armor would negate most of the effects of a LAC missile's puny warhead anyway.


About the best you could do, if it didn't even bother to defend itself, would be to hit it with a full load of contact nukes. Those would likely be able to mission kill it by destroying its surface mounted sensors and probably knocking out a bunch of its weapons hatches and emitters. But the hull armor would keep the interior safe. (And even if you hit the far less armored dorsal or ventral surfaces an SD has a full wrap around armor cylinder around its core vitals; so the nukes still wouldn't kill those).

If you use laser heads some might breach the outer armor, or manage to hit an unarmored area, but they're not going to punch through the intervening compartments and then the inner armor to reach anything critical. And many of them may end up just cratering the meters thick armor that's specifically designed to defeat energy fire and nukes.



Basically the only way I can see for a single LAC to outright kill an SD is for the SD to belly up to it, just a thousand km or so away and then drop its wedge to expose its ventral surface. At that range the LAC might be able to pull of a wedge strike before the SD could obliterate it -- and the LAC's wedge would be enough to kill the SD. (Though the stress of doing so might well blow out the LAC's impeller rooms)

[quote="munroburton"There's been forum apocrypha about there being 20 or so unnamed naval powers with a squadron of waller and - my memory may be failing me here - another ~20 with just one or two. One of those could hypothetically fall into the hands of a mad fool who thought they could accomplish something in Manticore.[/quote]

Up until the 1850s, Manticore was one of such powers. They had 3 SDs.

But those were not the only capital ships they had. They were just the three biggest. They also had 11 Ad Astra-class DNs and 16 Thorson-class battleships (if they still used the same divisions that they did 300 years earlier, then each ship would be assigned to each of Green One, Green Two, and Red forces). I think the accounting that you're talking about wasn't really about SDs, but about capital ships and that includes DNs and BBs. If so, then Manticore wouldn't qualify and wouldn't have qualified since 1600 PD.

A reasonable polity that owned a single or a pair of SDs probably owns other ships to go along. So even if those are the only capital ships, one would expect that they also have a full squadron of battlecruisers and several of cruisers to provide escort.

What might happens is that such a rational polity realises that the SDs are just a waste of money and decides to sell them, investing instead in battlecruisers (like Indefatigables becoming available). Only that their SDs are so old that they can't get a reasonable price for them... so they sell to that hypothetical madman that has no escort ships to screen their brand new toy with.

Jonathan_S wrote:And even a SLN's SD's CMs and PDLC would swat away 24 LAC missiles (which, remember, have lower terminal velocity and less room for ECM and penetration aids than even a destroyer's missile)

That REALLY depends on the SLN SD though. Remember that even the Mandarin's were aware that the majority of the Reserve Solly SD's were still equipped with autocannon point-defense and not lasers. And for that matter it's quite possible some of the active-duty SDs were also using autocannons instead of PDLC's with how low a priority refits were... for every SD you have in a dock being refit is one less brand-new SD you could be building to skim money off didn't you know?


If they were still using autocannons instead of lasers for point-defense, they're unquestionably going to be light on CM tubes even by ~1800PD standards. And those CMs would be really blind even for an SD, because the Sollies were slow to adopt any new changes. So what few tubes those old(er) SD's had would be pretty ineffective, and their autocannons would be hard-pressed to stop a laserhead from detonating.


So even an old-style Manty LAC might have had a viable missile chance against a solo Solarian SD if it's older than the Scientists. And it could have upto 50/50 odds against even a Scientist since they thought just modernizing them under the "Fleet 2000" program was sufficient. "Fleet 2000" was basically just redoing the guts to make them look like starships from the universe equivalent of movies rather than functional craft, so it's quite possible that some of the Scientists were still using autocannons while on active duty as well.

Basically the only Solly SD we know for fact were truly 'modern' designs, were the Vega-class. Those were really just a rerun Scientists plus a few extra missile tubes to reflect the higher missile environment of ohh.... say 1850-1890 or so? Sollies finally noticed that more and more neo-barbs were fielding the laserhead missile so their 'newest' SD would be designed to counter that threat.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote: There's been forum apocrypha about there being 20 or so unnamed naval powers with a squadron of waller and - my memory may be failing me here - another ~20 with just one or two. One of those could hypothetically fall into the hands of a mad fool who thought they could accomplish something in Manticore.

Up until the 1850s, Manticore was one of such powers. They had 3 SDs.

But those were not the only capital ships they had. They were just the three biggest. They also had 11 Ad Astra-class DNs and 16 Thorson-class battleships (if they still used the same divisions that they did 300 years earlier, then each ship would be assigned to each of Green One, Green Two, and Red forces). I think the accounting that you're talking about wasn't really about SDs, but about capital ships and that includes DNs and BBs. If so, then Manticore wouldn't qualify and wouldn't have qualified since 1600 PD.

A reasonable polity that owned a single or a pair of SDs probably owns other ships to go along. So even if those are the only capital ships, one would expect that they also have a full squadron of battlecruisers and several of cruisers to provide escort.

What might happens is that such a rational polity realises that the SDs are just a waste of money and decides to sell them, investing instead in battlecruisers (like Indefatigables becoming available). Only that their SDs are so old that they can't get a reasonable price for them... so they sell to that hypothetical madman that has no escort ships to screen their brand new toy with.

David's classification was "Wallers", and the addage was that only 1% (or roughly 2 dozen) of the galaxy's navies (in 1900) could field 1 or more squadrons of wallers, and another 1% (or roughly 2 dozen) fielded any wallers in their navy. So Grayson, the Malign, and probably Talbot would not be on this list (yet).

So Manticore would have classified as a 1st rate Galactic power, even with most of the Thorstons and Manticores moldering in reserve, and it's existing ships being 200 years old.

In an age without pressures, it was ok to keep said ships and gently upgrade them over centuries - So any other lower Galactic powers probably have fleets similiar to the 1850 PD RMN fleet. a couple newer units, and a dozen or 2 units built over the last 300 years. Remember, we never got specs on the Beowulf units - we only know Beowulf didn't update them with the manty updates - so chances are (like everyone else) their fleet consists of ships built over that last 2-300 years or so.

The above also gives us the # of navies (and SDFs) out there - roughly 2400 polities have naval forces. Knowing that the majority of the members of the League and it's protectorates do not have SDFs, and polities like Haven, the Andermani, and Silesia did not have historical SDFs, we can assume that the actual habitated systems in the Honorverse is probably double that number - or somewhere in the 5000 range.

Somtaaw wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And even a SLN's SD's CMs and PDLC would swat away 24 LAC missiles (which, remember, have lower terminal velocity and less room for ECM and penetration aids than even a destroyer's missile)

That REALLY depends on the SLN SD though. Remember that even the Mandarin's were aware that the majority of the Reserve Solly SD's were still equipped with autocannon point-defense and not lasers. And for that matter it's quite possible some of the active-duty SDs were also using autocannons instead of PDLC's with how low a priority refits were... for every SD you have in a dock being refit is one less brand-new SD you could be building to skim money off didn't you know?


If they were still using autocannons instead of lasers for point-defense, they're unquestionably going to be light on CM tubes even by ~1800PD standards. And those CMs would be really blind even for an SD, because the Sollies were slow to adopt any new changes. So what few tubes those old(er) SD's had would be pretty ineffective, and their autocannons would be hard-pressed to stop a laserhead from detonating.


So even an old-style Manty LAC might have had a viable missile chance against a solo Solarian SD if it's older than the Scientists. And it could have upto 50/50 odds against even a Scientist since they thought just modernizing them under the "Fleet 2000" program was sufficient. "Fleet 2000" was basically just redoing the guts to make them look like starships from the universe equivalent of movies rather than functional craft, so it's quite possible that some of the Scientists were still using autocannons while on active duty as well.

Basically the only Solly SD we know for fact were truly 'modern' designs, were the Vega-class. Those were really just a rerun Scientists plus a few extra missile tubes to reflect the higher missile environment of ohh.... say 1850-1890 or so? Sollies finally noticed that more and more neo-barbs were fielding the laserhead missile so their 'newest' SD would be designed to counter that threat.

Let's not also forget when Honor was commanding LAC113 - which looks like somewhere in 1885 or so - The laser head was new, and had JUST been modified for CA/BC scale missiles a couple years previously. Chances are, these old LAC missiles are just boom/burn missiles - so gun based PD systems still had a snowball's chance in hades against such systems. Fleet 2000 was still some years off.

But on top of these old missiles, a LAC can't fire them as one salvo - each broadside has 2 6 missiles boxes on it. So no fancy launches, 2 separate 12 missile salvos of missiles with weak starting velocities (because no grav launchers.) So those missiles have a lower velocity, and have to get further in the defensive basket (in relatively small #s), so they have a much higher intercept ratio - even with the SD's older systems. This is actually the scenario the SD was designed for.