Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Jonathan_S wrote:Sure if it was cheap and quick to convert them then it might make sense as an interim measure until you could build proper MDM warships. But since needing about a 50% larger launcher and feed system involves cutting through many armored bulkheads and the ship's main armor belt and its internal core armor, plus moving systems that the larger feed tubes wouldn't fit past it's a long slow (and thus expensive) process to give you a ship with no more than 50% the combat potential of a first-gen SD(P).

They've far fewer broadside tubes than the missiles from a 6-pod salvo; they've got about half as many CMs and less than 60% the PDLCs -- so far less survivable against pods than the SD(P).

You probably spend more than 50% the time and cost of building a proper SD(P) in refitting the legacy SD which has no more than 50% the combat effectiveness. You would end up with more MDM capable hulls, but less combat power, for the investment.

(And if you'd done it when the Medusas first rolled out you'd have converted the SDs for Mk41 capacitor powered MDMs and it'd be another massive job to refit them again to carry Mk23 micro-fusion powered MDMs; so you likely wouldn't. But if carrying only Mk41s their missiles would be less capable than what the SD(P)s would soon be firing, due to a lower power budget for ECM/jamming. And when Apollo came along they be equally unable to fire that. So in addition to being more combat effective the SD(P) is more flexibly because it can fire anything that fits into the standard dimensions of a pod)

True, but this is why I think converting Nevadas would work decently. The cost for them will likely be lower, due to the built-in modularity, and you can get them for dirt-cheap (Or even free, if they defect/your system already has a couple), and converting them gives you a stopgap that can semi-kinda-maybe-sorta fight modern units.

I think you really understate how expensive new SDs are, though, especially with new designs. Manticore had a truly bonkers economy - something most systems dont have - and even they were feeling the financial strain from it. Developing a new design, and then building that design, is more expensive and - most importantly - takes far longer then just refitting them.

Say if I am a rather small system, that may not have any ships of the wall but have a decent (3-4 squadrons) fleet of battlecruisers. Buying new battlecruisers, or really making them on my own is extremely expensive or infeasible, but if I refit them then I get decently viable combat power at a lower cost. Not massively lower, probably about 50-60% of the cost of buying new battlecruisers, but that still matters.

Zendikarofthewest wrote:<snip>

I think you really understate how expensive new SDs are, though, especially with new designs. Manticore had a truly bonkers economy - something most systems dont have - and even they were feeling the financial strain from it. Developing a new design, and then building that design, is more expensive and - most importantly - takes far longer then just refitting them.

Say if I am a rather small system, that may not have any ships of the wall but have a decent (3-4 squadrons) fleet of battlecruisers. Buying new battlecruisers, or really making them on my own is extremely expensive or infeasible, but if I refit them then I get decently viable combat power at a lower cost. Not massively lower, probably about 50-60% of the cost of buying new battlecruisers, but that still matters.

You're missing what we are saying. We've sat through dozens of back and forth conversations with the Author on this topic. People have thrown dozens of arguments against him and He is adamant - the economics are on the side of new builds over refits at this scale. The volume of work necessary and the difficulty of working with the external and internal armor is just so difficult.

The armor, internal and external, is literally formed in place and designed to resist processes intended to tear it apart. In SITS, one of the early SD classes is discussed, the Andruils. It was so well armored, the internal cofferdaming is so difficult to work with and through, some original components had to be left in place when the ships were later upgraded. They were too large to remove through the spaces, and to difficult to cut up and remove in pieces. Later ships had lessor internal armor schemes due to this issue - but the difficulty is still there.

We've had variants of this discussion so many times, I changed my signature to include the line from David about upgrading to the modern system, so it would not be forgotten and could be referenced at any time, by anyone.

Now, Modularity is a fine thing, until you upgrade past the capability of the original modular scheme. I'm been building my own PCs since the 80s, using modular parts - one of my first chassis was one of the first run of of IBM PCS from 1982. Over the years I had upgraded that PC so it was barely identifiable, and ran circles around the original's 4.77 mhz processor with 64K of ram on the motherboard. However, once the ATX standard came out, I had to switch chassis - the motherboard screw down points changed, the power supply design shape changed, the backplane card slots didn't line up and a new, replaceable backplane port cover was introduced. Oh and the "new" 16 bit and 32 bit VESA cards were never compatible with the 8 bit card slots in the "modular" motherboard from 1982.

The ATX chassis standard has subsequently been updated to the 2.0 and 3.0 standards, and a mini-ATX standard added, as well as the smaller ITX. Even inside those standards, the processor pinout has changed 3 or 4 dozen times, the memory mounts changes almost as many times, there have been about a dozen card slot adaptors, another dozen + hard drive interfaces, over 3 dozen different display interfaces, and dozens of sub-standards for each port or mount, limiting any port's upgradeability below it's "final" capability as technology shifted and advanced past what the initial designer of the component ever anticipated.

At some point, modularity just runs out - and when you are trying to shove 20 pounds of potatoes into a 5 pound bag, it's time to upgrade the container, no matter how well it's made.

And I guess for a hypothetical small system.

a) Who is going to give them the technology for, or sell them, Cataphracts or true DDM/MDM? If they can't get the tech for the missiles and the supporting launchers, etc. they can't upgrade at all.

b) Did they just buy their BCs 'off-the-shelf' from a foreign yard or do they actually have domestic naval yards capable of doing that work? (Most won't; and you can't do a major refit if you don't have the yards and the skilled workers to perform it)

c) Assuming the have the capability who are they trying to design this upgraded navy against? Naval strategy is build strategy. More capable ships are nice, but you need to make sure they meet your actual naval and national needs; which depends on your strategic plans, which depend on the threats you're worried about.

I'm not convinced that anybody without the ability to design and build new DDM BCs is going to have the technology, infrastructure, and skills to massively refit old BCs. And if you've the ability to build new BCs then you're better off doing that. (Not only will they be more capable, and maybe actually able to survive in an DDM missile environment, but you won't be creating a multi-year capability gap by sending your existing BCs into the yards. If you build new you can keep your existing navy until the new ships commission, if you refit the ship(s) undergoing that great rebuilt have to be out of service (weakening your navy) for the duration.

Jonathan_S wrote:But mostly what a smaller pod-layer would cost you is hull area to mount missile defense. (Cube-square law means you lose surface area quicker than volume, so your defenses go down faster than the number of pods you can carry). That's going to make a DN(P) even more fragile than the tonnage ratio between DN(P) and SD(P) would imply. If it's 15% lighter it's probably at least 20% less survivable.

Nitpick: the other way around: volume shrinks faster. If you shrink the linear dimension by 10%, the surface area shrinks by 19% and the volume by 27.1%. This gets a little worse if you consider DNs are wallers and must have the armour to withstand being in a wall, so they must dedicate proportionately more volume to armour than an SD does. That means it has even less internal volume available to store missile pods in, though this is not new to DN(P) - DNs had the same problem compared to SDs.

A BC(P) has a very different role: it was meant to lead detached squadrons and maybe thicken a screen. A DN(P) is not a cheap SD(P). It would probably need to be nearly as big as an SLN Vega- or Scientist-class SD, pushing 6 million tonnes.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Nitpick: the other way around: volume shrinks faster. If you shrink the linear dimension by 10%, the surface area shrinks by 19% and the volume by 27.1%. This gets a little worse if you consider DNs are wallers and must have the armour to withstand being in a wall, so they must dedicate proportionately more volume to armour than an SD does. That means it has even less internal volume available to store missile pods in, though this is not new to DN(P) - DNs had the same problem compared to SDs.

A BC(P) has a very different role: it was meant to lead detached squadrons and maybe thicken a screen. A DN(P) is not a cheap SD(P). It would probably need to be nearly as big as an SLN Vega- or Scientist-class SD, pushing 6 million tonnes.

In the Day, David said a DN(p) was going to cost 90-95% of an SD(p) (same control system, same Keyholes, etc, etc) and only give you 80% (or less) capability. Even if you did engineer in the same salvo capability, it would be much more fragile, and have far less active defenses, for incrementally less cost.

Ironically, one of the (many) reasons the RMN continued to build DNs as long as they did was that they had some ancient DN slips which couldn't handle SDs. It was never written, but we've discussed that the reason why the Minotaur (and subsequent CLACs) were the size they were might have been to take advantage of underutilized slips after the DN builds stopped, and thus as an experimental design, not disrupt SD production.

Theemile wrote:
In the Day, David said a DN(p) was going to cost 90-95% of an SD(p) (same control system, same Keyholes, etc, etc) and only give you 80% (or less) capability. Even if you did engineer in the same salvo capability, it would be much more fragile, and have far less active defenses, for incrementally less cost.

Ironically, one of the (many) reasons the RMN continued to build DNs as long as they did was that they had some ancient DN slips which couldn't handle SDs. It was never written, but we've discussed that the reason why the Minotaur (and subsequent CLACs) were the size they were was to take advantage of underutilized slips after the DN builds stopped.

The UK had some of similar issues - though more maintenance slips than build slips. The size of some of their designs got limited by the availibity of suitably sized drydocks around the Empire.

They didn't think it much use to build a ship that couldn't be deployed to their forward fleet stations. But they wouldn't a ship somewhere it couldn't be maintained (and if necessarily) repaired.

France on the other hand did have major issues with the size of her building slips; requiring some interesting contortions in the building of her final battleships.

Getting the necessary peacetime funding to expand facilities was difficult (and come wartime when the funding might have been made available there wasn't time)

I'm sure Manticore suffered the same issues with getting infrastructure funding.


Of course Manticore also suffered a bit of the other UK ship problem; a need/desire to prioritize hull numbers over the absolute most powerful ships. That's what led to the UK to tend towards smaller cruiser and destroyers than some other powers. Even when there wasn't a treaty tonnage cap to worry about there were still financial tradeoffs. And if you've identified a need for, say, 100 cruisers it may not matter if you're paying 70% the cost to get 60% the capability per ship if the only way to get the numbers is to do that. If you got the more capable ships you'd end up 30 hulls short and not able to cover all your commitments.

Theemile wrote:As for the Drunk Wiki... it's a great way to get burned in an argument. It's very accurate, unless you are comparing it to what is written in the books. What is there is heavily edited, and abridged. Some is blatantly wrong, much has been edited out, and doesn't contain pertinent details. I always use it as a starting point in research (because there is a lot that is correct), not the definitive or comprehensive answer.

Zendikarofthewest wrote:Drunk wiki? I know of two honorverse wikis, one of which is shit, and one of which is... slightly less shit.

I only know of the Honorverse Fandom Wiki, what is the other one? Anyone know why one is called the Drunk Wiki? I have seen the mentions over the years, but never was interested enough to ask before.

tlb wrote:I only know of the Honorverse Fandom Wiki, what is the other one? Anyone know why one is called the Drunk Wiki? I have seen the mentions over the years, but never was interested enough to ask before.

Cthia/penny was the first poster I can recall calling it that.

My guess would be that the nickname got coined after getting tripped up by its errors & assumptions one too many times.

And "drunk wiki" does kind of serve as a useful shorthand for 'take this with a grain of salt; this information hasn't been personally verified against the books'

tlb wrote:I only know of the Honorverse Fandom Wiki, what is the other one? Anyone know why one is called the Drunk Wiki? I have seen the mentions over the years, but never was interested enough to ask before.

Jonathan_S wrote:Cthia/penny was the first poster I can recall calling it that.

My guess would be that the nickname got coined after getting tripped up by its errors & assumptions one too many times.

And "drunk wiki" does kind of serve as a useful shorthand for 'take this with a grain of salt; this information hasn't been personally verified against the books'

Thank you, yes this seems like one of the few times that someone else used it. The earliest mention that I could find was in 2017 by Cthia, where he says "drunken wiki informant" (later shortened to "drunken wiki"). I was hoping there might have been something from before 2014, which has since been aged off the forum.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:I only know of the Honorverse Fandom Wiki, what is the other one? Anyone know why one is called the Drunk Wiki? I have seen the mentions over the years, but never was interested enough to ask before.

Jonathan_S wrote:Cthia/penny was the first poster I can recall calling it that.

My guess would be that the nickname got coined after getting tripped up by its errors & assumptions one too many times.

And "drunk wiki" does kind of serve as a useful shorthand for 'take this with a grain of salt; this information hasn't been personally verified against the books'

Thank you, yes this seems like one of the few times that someone else used it. The earliest mention that I could find was in 2017 by Cthia, where he says "drunken wiki informant" (later shortened to "drunken wiki"). I was hoping there might have been something from before 2014, which has since been aged off the forum.

Sorry, I was leaning a little too far into hyperbole, and stole from Cthia (Thanks for leaving your literary shed open Cthia, I'll put the monikers back when I'm done).

The Honorverse Wiki is better now than it was years back (When it started with the Notorious List as a base), but even when it is accurate, the information is not usually complete enough to be useful or trustworthy, nor (as mentioned) can you trust that someone hasn't overwritten hard researched, accurate facts with their fan fiction over the weekend.

Just like your drunk friend's ramblings on the drive home from the bar, verify in the light of the morning if the cr@p he was spewing was the truth.