The Two General's Problem

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:Within normal space or a hyperspace band, the compensator isolates the crew from all outside acceleration (whether due to velocity or direction changes). However if the hull is hit by something (including an energy beam), then there is some inside acceleration, which could be felt.

penny wrote:I question why you'd be able to feel anything else beyond what is already felt. To expect the crew to feel laser hits is to expect the compensator to fail momentarily. A momentary failure should turn crew to paste.

I seems to me that somewhere you mentioned that there are examples of ships receiving internal damage from being hit. So I do not understand the distinction that you are trying to make in this sentence: "I question why you'd be able to feel anything else beyond what is already felt". What is the "else" that is beyond what it already felt? I was trying to say that the hit will have effects that cannot be dampened by the compensator: that the compensator only nullifies external accelerations and not those within the hull.

If you read the following quote, I hope you can see that the crew are definitely going to feel the effects of something like the following hit. From Honor Among Enemies:

Chapter 21 wrote:Webster's ship shuddered as that solitary hit ripped into her unarmored hull, and damage alarms wailed. Missile Three vanished, and the same hit smashed clear to Boat Bay One and tore two cutters and a pinnace—none, fortunately, manned—to splinters. Seventeen men and women were killed, and eleven more wounded, but for all that, Scheherazade got off incredibly lightly.

Even if the compensator prevented the crew from feeling any acceleration the hit imparted on ship as a whole, explosively blowing through big chunks of the ship it going to transmit shock through the ship's structure and that kind of whiplash of the decks and bulkheads is going to shake the crew around; compensator or no.

(IIRC it was one of the Essex-class carriers in WWII had casualties among the pilots in their ready rooms on the gallery deck from a bomb going off below them in the hanger. The fragments didn't get them, but the shockwave flexed the floor of the gallery deck hard and fast enough, in areas away from the bulkheads, to injure, cripple, or kill the occupants. An Honorverse warship's internal structures seem sturdier than that; but on the other hand a laser or graser is imparting way more energy that a WWII naval aircraft's bomb.)

tlb wrote:If you read the following quote, I hope you can see that the crew are definitely going to feel the effects of something like the following hit. From Honor Among Enemies:

Chapter 21 wrote:Webster's ship shuddered as that solitary hit ripped into her unarmored hull, and damage alarms wailed. Missile Three vanished, and the same hit smashed clear to Boat Bay One and tore two cutters and a pinnace—none, fortunately, manned—to splinters. Seventeen men and women were killed, and eleven more wounded, but for all that, Scheherazade got off incredibly lightly.

Jonathan_S wrote:Even if the compensator prevented the crew from feeling any acceleration the hit imparted on ship as a whole, explosively blowing through big chunks of the ship it going to transmit shock through the ship's structure and that kind of whiplash of the decks and bulkheads is going to shake the crew around; compensator or no.

Exactly what I meant.

munroburton wrote:It certainly was the greatest risk for the MAN during their Oyster Bay attack. Not only did they have simultaneous attacks planned in two star systems, one of them was further split into three sub-targets.

The streak drive is almost irrelevant; an Allied dispatch boat near the hyper limit alerted by FTL can be into hyperspace long before a second spider ship has received a lightspeed message from the first. The real problem for the MAN is they cannot use FTL comms while their enemies can.

One of their ships was almost discovered before the agreed time. If it had been, then their entire operation starts falling apart. The discovered task force is forced to attack early or abort. Depending on the timing, it will not be able to inform the other forces what has happened; they'd probably figure it out when their targets leaped to Zulu alert.

It makes one wonder exactly how the MAN coordinated those attacks. It had to have been the Streak Drive. Or did they simply agree upon a prearranged time? Which I find difficult to believe.

On another front, I never thought about the peripheral danger of your messenger being caught. That would alert the enemy of an impending attack! And of course, enemy forces wouldn’t want their presence to be known. But since attacking forces hang out in hyper, the danger of that is low for any navy. Non-existent for the MAN.

The GA’ s FTL reminds me of criminals trying to outrun police radio.

P.S. This thread is averaging nearly 12,000 views a day since it was created! Unbelievable! I just noticed that two days ago! Seems impossible.

munroburton wrote:It certainly was the greatest risk for the MAN during their Oyster Bay attack. Not only did they have simultaneous attacks planned in two star systems, one of them was further split into three sub-targets.

penny wrote:It makes one wonder exactly how the MAN coordinated those attacks. It had to have been the Streak Drive. Or did they simply agree upon a prearranged time? Which I find difficult to believe.

The streak drive just made the planning easier, but everything still depended on the prearranged time. Why is that difficult to believe? That is basically how Admiral White Haven captured Trevor's Star; he attacked and then another Manticoran fleet came through the junction to join the fight. There is not way to coordinate that except by adhering to a strict timetable.

Oyster Bay actually had it easier because that actual attack was by machines and not people. After deciding when that attack needed to take place, the planners just had to work backward to see when each key event needed to occur.

tlb wrote:The streak drive just made the planning easier, but everything still depended on the prearranged time. Why is that difficult to believe? That is basically how Admiral White Haven captured Trevor's Star; he attacked and then another Manticoran fleet came through the junction to join the fight. There is not way to coordinate that except by adhering to a strict timetable.

Oyster Bay actually had it easier because that actual attack was by machines and not people. After deciding when that attack needed to take place, the planners just had to work backward to see when each key event needed to occur.

Pre-arranged time was even easier to pull in in this case because only the 3 elements of the attack on the MBS had to be tightly sequenced. The attacks had to hit Manticore and Sphynx within a minute or two to avoid one alerting the other -- but since the two attack forces entered the system together and then split up to deploy their ballistic attack packages there wasn't a huge chance for the timing to go wrong. The attack on Gryphon only had to be synchronized within about half an hour or so -- as that's the quickest even a ship with a hyper drive could get a message between Manticore A and Manticore B. And that attack force also went most of the way to the MBS with the two that hit Manticore A.

The timing for the Grayson attack needed even less precise synchronization, as minimum message time between there and the MBS is about 4 days.

Hit within those timing windows and it's impossible for one segment of the attack to alert the targets of any other segment.


Now for a streak drive ship the transit times between Manticore A and B, or between the MBS and Grayson could be about 30% less (if you don't mind your hyper emergence getting seen by emerging in close to the hyper limit) -- but that's still too long to let the other groups know if another had hit a delay. And streak drive won't help at all coordinating between the strikes on Manticore and Sphynx as that's delay was based on in-system FTL com times and human reaction delays -- faster hyper drive doesn't help a bit there.

Jonathan_S wrote:Pre-arranged time was even easier to pull in in this case because only the 3 elements of the attack on the MBS had to be tightly sequenced. The attacks had to hit Manticore and Sphynx within a minute or two to avoid one alerting the other -- but since the two attack forces entered the system together and then split up to deploy their ballistic attack packages there wasn't a huge chance for the timing to go wrong. The attack on Gryphon only had to be synchronized within about half an hour or so -- as that's the quickest even a ship with a hyper drive could get a message between Manticore A and Manticore B. And that attack force also went most of the way to the MBS with the two that hit Manticore A.

Maybe the MAlign wasn't aware, but the sequencing actually had to be within 13 minutes, because that's the one-way message time via Hermes buoy-relay system between the A and B components of the MBS (13 light-hours divided by 62, roughly 13 minutes). We don't know the exact position of Manticore and Sphinx during the attack, but they are never farther than 18 light-minutes apart, so 18 seconds of warning time via FTL, and this the MAlign definitely knew about. Though at this low end, the issue is that there isn't much a defender can do in 18 seconds; raising bubblewalls is going to take a minute, assuming the nodes were already at stand-by.

Which they'd definitely have been at Sphinx, because that is only 2 light-minutes from the hyperlimit, which missiles could cover in a mere 400 seconds.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Pre-arranged time was even easier to pull in in this case because only the 3 elements of the attack on the MBS had to be tightly sequenced. The attacks had to hit Manticore and Sphynx within a minute or two to avoid one alerting the other -- but since the two attack forces entered the system together and then split up to deploy their ballistic attack packages there wasn't a huge chance for the timing to go wrong. The attack on Gryphon only had to be synchronized within about half an hour or so -- as that's the quickest even a ship with a hyper drive could get a message between Manticore A and Manticore B. And that attack force also went most of the way to the MBS with the two that hit Manticore A.

Maybe the MAlign wasn't aware, but the sequencing actually had to be within 13 minutes, because that's the one-way message time via Hermes buoy-relay system between the A and B components of the MBS (13 light-hours divided by 62, roughly 13 minutes). We don't know the exact position of Manticore and Sphinx during the attack, but they are never farther than 18 light-minutes apart, so 18 seconds of warning time via FTL, and this the MAlign definitely knew about. Though at this low end, the issue is that there isn't much a defender can do in 18 seconds; raising bubblewalls is going to take a minute, assuming the nodes were already at stand-by.

Which they'd definitely have been at Sphinx, because that is only 2 light-minutes from the hyperlimit, which missiles could cover in a mere 400 seconds.

Thanks for the correction on Manticore A - B signal time. I did the math on that correctly and then mentally screwed up my units (thinking the ~13 minutes was ~13 hours) -- and having made that simple and dumb mistake figured that a dispatch boat parked on the limit could beat that and guessed at half an hour. Oops.
So yes, you're absolutely right that the timing would have to be about half as tight as I'd said. Still, +/- 13 minutes seems a reasonable amount of leeway for a force which only separated from the rest of the MBS slightly before reentering normal space and had months to fine tune their approach and deploy their ballistic attack packages to arrive at the predetermined moment.


As for Manticore and Sphynx their maximum separation would be if their orbits put them on opposite sides of the star. At that point they'd be 11.5 LM + 21.2 LM = 32.6 LM apart (nearly twice the 18 LM you stated). And 32.6 LM would give them about 52 seconds FTL signal delay (and in reality probably a bit more as the Hermes buoys probably have to stay clear enough from their sun that the message would need to detour around it rather than straight-line through it). I'm not aware of them having any orbital resonance which would prevent them from ever ended up in opposition; and thus limit their maximum separation to 18 LM. On the other hand they'd usually be much closer and I didn't look to see if the books told us how far they actually were during OB.

Therefore I'd largely based my "within a minute or two" not on pure signal time, but more on some fudge factor to account for human response after a complete surprise plus the time it'd take defenses to come on-line.

Jonathan_S wrote:As for Manticore and Sphynx their maximum separation would be if their orbits put them on opposite sides of the star. At that point they'd be 11.5 LM + 21.2 LM = 32.6 LM apart (nearly twice the 18 LM you stated). And 32.6 LM would give them about 52 seconds FTL signal delay (and in reality probably a bit more as the Hermes buoys probably have to stay clear enough from their sun that the message would need to detour around it rather than straight-line through it). I'm not aware of them having any orbital resonance which would prevent them from ever ended up in opposition; and thus limit their maximum separation to 18 LM. On the other hand they'd usually be much closer and I didn't look to see if the books told us how far they actually were during OB.

Therefore I'd largely based my "within a minute or two" not on pure signal time, but more on some fudge factor to account for human response after a complete surprise plus the time it'd take defenses to come on-line.

That was just my mis-remembering their orbital radii.

Oyster Bay may have been originally designed to target the two components when they were in opposition, but we know it was not launched when designed and we know they were delayed too. So the positions of the two planets were probably as much random as anything else.

As for the Hermes buoys, I'm not sure they are required within the Manticore-A hyperlimit. The range of FTL comms is sufficient for that. Boost and multiplexing definitely come in handy, but for a Case Zulu emergency broadcast, those aren't necessary. The FTL comms can go through the star for all we know too.

In fact, the Case Zulu warning wouldn't even be necessary: the Cataphracts lighting up their impellers for final attack runs would be visible across the system at FTL speeds too. That's the warning. I also assume this is not hand-in-the-loop: as soon as the computers identify a threat like a lot of new impeller sources, the defences go up immediately. It will still take some time to bring the walls up, so if this is a false alarm, a human could abort the procedure (probably crashing the impellers, making them unable to go up again for an hour).

The only thing that could obscure that signal would be the mass of other impellers in the region, so the MAN probably opted for the attack on Hephaestus to go slightly ahead if anything, because of the larger traffic around Manticore. Still, those two prongs needed to be within one minute of each other.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The only thing that could obscure that signal would be the mass of other impellers in the region, so the MAN probably opted for the attack on Hephaestus to go slightly ahead if anything, because of the larger traffic around Manticore. Still, those two prongs needed to be within one minute of each other.

Absolutely one minute? Or the time it takes for the orbitals' sidewalls to come up from their normal status? The shipyard facilities attacked by the Cataphracts are unlikely to have any defensive fields.

tlb wrote:Absolutely one minute? Or the time it takes for the orbitals' sidewalls to come up from their normal status? The shipyard facilities attacked by the Cataphracts are unlikely to have any defensive fields.

The orbital stations' sidewalls going up is what I was thinking about when I said "one minute". In fact, even a half-formed wedge is sufficient to make precise targetting troublesome and may stop or divert a graser beam sufficiently.