Defending a wormhole junction/terminus.

Belial666 wrote:Secure areas are provided by the hyper limit. Most inhabited planets are 10 or more light-minutes inside the limit so even MDM attacks cannot reach with any accuracy. And by the time they've done their 10-minute run to reach, the LACs will have been launched, providing at least 2000 countermissile tubes and 3000 PDLCs per enemy superdreadnought. No missile attack is getting through that.

Besides, having ships and some FTL drones stationed at each hyper-band near the system guarantees you early warning against enemy ships in hyper. In fact, a megaton's worth of courier boats and drones would make an early-warning system that could detect impeller-drive ships as far as one light-hour away... in all hyperspace bands up to the theta bands.

I say again.
1. f3 e5 2. g4 Qh4#

You have a solution searching for a problem.

Duckk wrote:

Belial666 wrote:Not really. They also need to mount armor to all aspects because they don't rely on wedge coverage. So whatever mass is gained from not having hyper generators, compensators and powerful impellers is lost on having to armor 30%-40% more of their surface.

So? They have the mass to spare. A fort doesn't care about mass, it only cares about weapons. It'll have more weapons available than a SD.

A 12M ton fortress, the size built to cover the talbot terminus, is 40% larger in tonnage, that means that it has only 20%-25% more surface area, (cube square law, plus geometry) so that means that on a ton for ton basis, the fort needs no more armor than a SD.

As far as your assertion that the fort can't bring all it's tubes to bear in a missile dual, Have you forgotten about bubble sidewalls and the buckkler sidewall? It is entirely possible for the fort to fire broadside missiles while bow or stern on, thus being able to fire all missile tubes aginst an oponent, than rolling to present a broadside for an energy weapons engagement.

I don't recall any detailed textove on how a manticoran fort is constructed other than size (16M tons for early junction forts, 12M tons for talbot terminus fors) and the fact that they have both a wedge and a bubble sidewall. So here goes my stab at designing a talbot terminus fort.

I am presuming that the fort has 70% of its tonnage for offensive weapons vs 45% for a prepod SD or 50% for a SDP. Use beta squared nodes for the impeller. The Nike BCP impleller should work nicely to propel the fort at 75G's, with few modifications.

As the Shrike missile tubes can fire missiles past the impeller ring, there should be no impediment to fireing missile pods past the forts impeller rings as well. Mount 8 pod rails each bow and stern, (16 total) each with 200 pods, for a total of 3,200 pods.

In each hammerhead, mount as many energy weapons as I can cram into it, along with PDLC's. No tubes in the hammerhead. (CM or attack)

The top, bottom, port, and stern will each have the same number of energy mounts as a SD, but each mount will be heavier, giving it 50% more energy armement than a SD per broadside.

The bubble sidewalls would be normally on, but to enable the fort to fight with wedge up, only on port and starbord would have missile tubes. I would have 80 missile tubes in each of 2 broadsides to supplement the pod rails (double the Medusa B) and 12,000 missiles in storage (equal to the Medusa B)

Finaly, as benifit of automation and crew reduction, I would give it a crew double what it would need to fight effectively. This would allow it to remain at general quarters 1/2 the time indefinatly rather than 1/4 the time that an old style fort or a hyper capable warship could do.

Belial666 wrote:

Honor Among Enemies wrote:"In addition to that, we have our own manpower needs. We've got roughly three hundred of the wall in commission, with an average crew of fifty-two hundred. That uses up another million and a half men and women. After that, we've got a hundred and twenty-four forts covering the Junction, with another million plus people aboard them...

That's pre-automation.

As you point out, that's pre-automation but it's also pre-alliance. The forts you're complaining about were designed during a totally different tech and threat environment.

Those forts used SDMs (not even pods of them; all internal), counter missiles that were short ranged any myopic by modern standards, purely light-speed fire control (no FTL comm at all), no offbore missile launches, and no keyhole arrays. And they had to be able to decisively defeat a maximum wormhole transit of Legislaturalist SDs.


When they were built LACs had virtually no useful energy weapons, much lighter less effective missiles, and be toast in the face of SDs. (Or even DDs. Old style LACs are barely capable of chasing off garden variety pirates). Building thousands and thousands of them just makes for a target rich environment.


If you magically give pre-war Manticore all the tech goodies from decades of fighting of course they'd design their defenses differently.

For that matter I'm sure the new MDM capable forts they built to replace the decommissioned ones are far fewer in number and vastly more lethal than the legacy fortresses you're so unhappy with. (Although those were designed pre-Apollo; but presumably are getting/were retrofitted for it)


But ignoring the fact that you're implicitly comparing two quite different technological eras is like complaining that loading WW-II battleships down with 5", 40mm, and 20mm anti-aircraft guns was a waste of resources. "They should have mounted evolved sea-sparrow missiles instead. Much less mass/volume per kill and vastly better hit probability."

Hi Michael Everett,

Very well put.

Our new friend isn't just mixing times and technologies but effectively generations of technologies.

The new ~14 Lynx fortresses can apparently handle somewhere between 1000 to 4000 RMN SDP's now that they've been upgraded to Apollo, which is orders of magnitude greater than what the capability of the first war era fortresses, most of which were built decades before that war, and while they could stop a maximum invasion of around 30 SD's, the exchange rate was roughly 1-1, but actually in the peep's favor; 29-31.

Going from there to 1000 to 4000 RMN SDP's destroyed to zip is almost infinitely superior (though how they will handle spider ships and the MAlg is quite a different question), and makes your suggested improvement quite unnecessary in the honorverse.

First of all, why build one of anything to defend a wormhole termini?

It violates the principle of flexibility which is almost second nature to intelligent or organized warfare.

Such an attitude might be found in the overly bureaucratic SLN perhaps, but I can imagine all kinds of opposition from any rational Haven sector navy

Aside from the threat not being just from the other side of the termini, the vulnerability of anything advertised as indestructible has already been demonstrated, NTM the emperor's new clothes; if you're a sucker for the sales pitch, why should they bother telling the truth about its liabilities.

BTW, the largest old fortresses were twice the 16 MT you mentioned, so the 124 cited might total almost 3 billion tons not 2.

Current SDP's crews total around 1175, IIRC; not 6600+, that's what SLN BF SD's have.

There are so many technical reasons and common sense practical military ones why such a construct wouldn't work in the honorverse that listing them isn't worth the time.

Feel free to write your own story involving this thing but definitely not in the honorverse; but I personally doubt you'll find a publisher for a variety of reasons.

L

Michael Everett wrote:

Belial666 wrote:Secure areas are provided by the hyper limit. Most inhabited planets are 10 or more light-minutes inside the limit so even MDM attacks cannot reach with any accuracy. And by the time they've done their 10-minute run to reach, the LACs will have been launched, providing at least 2000 countermissile tubes and 3000 PDLCs per enemy superdreadnought. No missile attack is getting through that.

Besides, having ships and some FTL drones stationed at each hyper-band near the system guarantees you early warning against enemy ships in hyper. In fact, a megaton's worth of courier boats and drones would make an early-warning system that could detect impeller-drive ships as far as one light-hour away... in all hyperspace bands up to the theta bands.

I say again.
1. f3 e5 2. g4 Qh4#

You have a solution searching for a problem.

One reason you defend a wormhole terminus is because it is a vastly efficient way of inserting an attacking force into a system with almost no warning or for the local SFD being able to react as fast or as well if the same attack comes in over the alpha wall just outside the hyperlimit.

Another is to control the transit of ships through the wormhole and collect the fees and dutys on products.

We have seen that the various wormholes that are being picketed for the safe return of SEM merchant ships under Lacoon I or taken over under Lacoon II are not being defended by fortresses but by LACs and light warships. They are not so much defending as mounting guard for the toll and transit fees and providing local law enforcement.

It's apparently been a long time since anybody did a wormhole assault. Most planets/systems don't have wormholes so the concentration on system defences is warships to repel attacks comming in from hyperspace. The LACs, pinnicles and cutters are mostly for in-system enforcement and customs, not attacking incomming warships.

While the SL has (mostly) kept it's members from attacking each other militarily, it's primarily the Verge that is having one system attacking others. The obvious example is Haven who was taking system after system thorugh a variety of tactics.


Manticore had had a long experience with with defending it's merchant marine and had seen the danger of someone having control of one of the other ends of a junction of their terminus and use it as a launching point for an attack. So they began to fortify the junction in addition to the customs and law/traffic enforcement forces.
It's not difficult to justify putting lightly mobile fortresses in position to interdict the wormhole exit because it means that a focused defence on a weak point. Effectivly (at least by the time the war with Haven gets to the shooting part) Manticore is set up to rotate the fortresses on station at the junction such that they could overwhelm any force comming though a wormhole at them. The thing that makes this practical is that essentialy the attacker has to come through in succession, not arrayed in battle fleet formation. They don't know where the defending forts area accutaly located relative to the place they will pop out of wormhole and it will take time to find targets for their weapons. The fortresses have a fixe (if somewhat large) target area and arrayed in a hemisphear around it. They are shooting into a basket, a killing ground, and only have to engage one target at a time. They don't have to vaporize each attacker, but they are going to smash them.

The fortresses solution is a limited one. It gives up mobility (in terms of using hypercapable warships, even large ones) for the ability to mount more and larger weapons plus armor in a point defence of a speciffic area. The juntion. They surround the junction entry and exit lanes (because an attacker can use both- the lanes are an arbitrary artifact of traffic control).
Note that the Alignment is using a squadron of BCs to cover the wormhole that has one end by Torch. They are rotating the guard duties between the ships in pairs but all in a formation around the wormhole. Why don't they use fortresses? Probably because 1) they haven't had a need for them (yet) since they don't have any publicly known wormholes and 2) if they did build them they would have to move them in pieces to site---nobody has mentioned if there is a habitable planet or orbital industries at the Alignment end of the wormhole so there is difficultes there. If there isn't another wormhole in the system- leading directly to an industrialized Alignment world- they would have to tow or ship the components to the Alighment end of the wormhole and that is way more expensive, complicated and open to somebody seeing something than sending warships from a pupet state.

Of course Manticore also have to have the Home Fleet to defend against the more ususal assault from hyperspace.

lyonheart wrote:Hi Michael Everett,

Very well put.

Our new friend isn't just mixing times and technologies but effectively generations of technologies.

The new ~14 Lynx fortresses can apparently handle somewhere between 1000 to 4000 RMN SDP's now that they've been upgraded to Apollo, which is orders of magnitude greater than what the capability of the first war era fortresses, most of which were built decades before that war, and while they could stop a maximum invasion of around 30 SD's, the exchange rate was roughly 1-1, but actually in the peep's favor; 29-31.

Going from there to 1000 to 4000 RMN SDP's destroyed to zip is almost infinitely superior (though how they will handle spider ships and the MAlg is quite a different question), and makes your suggested improvement quite unnecessary in the honorverse.

Minor clarification.

Mission of Honor wrote:“Hamish is right about that, Your Majesty,” he said. “We’ve got all but one of the forts fully online now. And we’ve got Apollo system-defense birds deployed in depth to cover them. In fact, we were planning on recalling Jessup Blaine from Lynx to refit his pod-layers with Keyhole-Two and Apollo.”
“So you and Hamish are both confident the Lynx Terminus could hold off seventy-one superdreadnoughts if it had to?”

“Your Majesty, at the risk of sounding immodest, the only real question would be how long it took us to blow all seventy-one of them out of space. Those forts were designed to hold that terminus without any outside support against the attack of two hundred and fifty of our own pre-Apollo podnoughts. Now that they have Apollo, their defensive capability’s been multiplied many times. We still aren’t sure by exactly how much, but it’s got to be at least a factor of four.”

Without Apollo, the talbot forts could handle 250 pre apollo RMN SDP's.

With Apollo, The talbot forts could handle 1,000+ Pre-apollo RMN SDP's. This dosen't say how many Apollo SDP's the forts could handle, however.

Since one pre apollo SDP could handle more than 2 SD's with SDM's, (depending on range), it is aparent that the talbot forts by themselves could hand the entire SLN active wall of battle. Nothing else needs to be said.

Attacking a wormhole junction / terminus is difficult at best. At worst it is a quick way to commit suicide.

Defending a wormhole junction / terminus can be broken down as defending against two different threat axises. The first threat axis is a force transiting the wormhole itself. The second threat axis is a force transiting from hyper space to normal space near the vicinity of the junction / terminus.

If you set up your defenses against the second threat axis as being the primary threat, it takes only slight modifications of your defenses to cover the first threat axis in addition to the second.

The first threat axis, in an era where the defender has missile pods (even limiting the pods to single drive missiles) and the offensive force doesn't, has become no more than a quick way for the offensive force to commit suicide. The defender can put out massive overkill missile salvos against any offensive force, as the offensive force is limited in size by the wormhole's upper mass limit that can transit, as well as the time it takes for the wormhole to stabilize after a mass transit. Adding MDM pods, Apollo, Keyhole and Ghost Rider recon drones to the defensive force and the life expectancy of the attacking forces after transit can be measured in the flight time of the defending forces missile salvos.

The second threat axis does not limit the size of the offensive forces. However, if the offensive forces doesn't have missile pods, or are out-ranged by the defenders (defenders having MDMs), the chances of the offensive force surviving to inflict any damage to the defenders is miniscule, if the defensive forces are of any reasonable size.

Best advice for attacking a wormhole junction / terminus: Don't even consider it if your forces are inferior (in numbers, mass, and in the current Honorverse era, especially in technological capabilities) to the defending forces.

Brigade XO wrote:One reason you defend a wormhole terminus is because it is a vastly efficient way of inserting an attacking force into a system with almost no warning or for the local SFD being able to react as fast or as well if the same attack comes in over the alpha wall just outside the hyperlimit.

Another is to control the transit of ships through the wormhole and collect the fees and dutys on products.

We have seen that the various wormholes that are being picketed for the safe return of SEM merchant ships under Lacoon I or taken over under Lacoon II are not being defended by fortresses but by LACs and light warships. They are not so much defending as mounting guard for the toll and transit fees and providing local law enforcement.

It's apparently been a long time since anybody did a wormhole assault. Most planets/systems don't have wormholes so the concentration on system defences is warships to repel attacks comming in from hyperspace. The LACs, pinnicles and cutters are mostly for in-system enforcement and customs, not attacking incomming warships.

Remember that Manticore was almost singularly vulnerable to a wormhole assult. They both had a known unfriendly power owning one of their termini and the Manticore junction, was unusually strong as well. That translated into a quite high max transit ceiling.

So not only was Manticore in the position where they'd always be tactically surprised if a force transited (because they can't secure all remote termini; the preferred way to defend a wormhole) but the attacking force could be larger than almost any other wormhole owner had to worry about.

Correct
Haven had one terminus. At the time of OBS, there wasn't anything in the way of a significant force as Basilisk. Once Young left- taking his heavy crusier with him- there was only the Fearless. No forts, just traffice control and Customs. That has since changed. Once it became clear that Haven was going for open warfare, at least Basilisk terminus was fortified. The terminus by Beowulf had it's own security with Beowulf SDF. I presume that the other termini were given suitable protection by SEM though I don't recall exact data in the books.

It is possible for a force comming in from hyperspace to simply stand-off and launch single drive missiles at terminus forts and feed updated targeting data to the missiles to correct for manuvering by the forts. On the other hand, that would give the forts a lot of time to plot the incomming weapons for counter-battery fire by cm (or today by LACs forward deployed as a cm screen which could engage the missils well beyond their powerd flight range. Using the LACs that way would in conjunction with ECM drones etc Should let the LACs hide in the electronic smoke and take skeet type passing shots at the incomming rounds. Sure, you can fire down the throat of the incomming rounds but that puts you directly in their line of fire, better to stand off to the side and "lead" the birds- if the incomming rounds go to powered flight to avoid that layer of defence, they will have that much harder time getting at the actual target which would be the forts.

Your terminus forts would also have the advantage of a fast resupply and support responce from home. Along with shipments of ammunition you can get hypercapable warships (including SD) through to both thicken your launch capasity and that can close on the attacker, probably on a flank. This is what happens when Haven tries to take Basalisk with striking at both the orbital /fleet forces and the terminus forts (and not hitting the mark on the jump in from hyperspace against the forts.

The description of what would have happend to the SL SD force that was not allowed to pass through from Beowulf to Manticore is exacty why the forts are there. Every incomming ship has to run the gauntlet of massed fire and defence in depth from very heavy mobile fortifications. Once an assault is identifed, (by drones etc right on the terminus cusp) it becomes almost totally a weapons free- fire when you see it situation. Any fort taking damage can be cycled out of the mele.
Think of charging down a 20 foot wide culvert pipe that opens in at the center of the 50 yardline in the middle of the stadium and 75 rows off the ground in a 150 row high stadium. Then that there are 1000 people with machineguns (up to .50cal) plus 20 & 30 mm automatic weapons plus 100 Abrams tanks and a who bunch of sholderfired anti-armor weapons all in renforced bunkers. Those bunkers are not symetricaly arranged in at least the hemisphear facing the pipe AND there are three times that number of weapons (and people) waiting to move up and take the place of any system that is damaged or destroyed
Now imagine that the rules of engagement are that IF the incomming target is not identified as friendly in the first 60 seconds, 15 bunkers are going to open fire AND the safety's are all OFF on all the weapons.
Manticore has been in a hot war for most of 20 years. They are EXPECTING a problem.
Did the Sollie Admiral think they were just going to drop in and surprise someone?

Now think about what happened to the Harvest Joy.
Right
Jump in and try madly to lock up hostile targets AND engage them before you become so much expanding gas....and PERHAPS the 100th ship in the transit que will just be a shattered hulk instead of a gas cloud when the forts shif to the next target since even a junior tactical officer on any of the forts would have shortly learned how many missiles is needed to effectivly destroy a Sollie SD.