Belial666 wrote:It costs too much. Take, for example, the Manticore wormhole junction. It had well over a hundred forts defending it at one time, massing two billion tons and having over a million crew.
Even with automation reducing crew requirements by 60% and even by downsizing to only three dozen forts, you still have over a half billion tons of construction and two hundred thousand crew tied there.
Can't the junction be defended in another way?
With LACs:
Suppose you build 10.000 LACs and station them at 700.000 kilometers from the junction. That's 200 million tons of construction and 100 thousand crew. Only about 2500 will be on duty at a time, with sidewalls raised and lots of stealth. Suppose 50 enemy ships get through in a mass transit. They will be in grazer range of the LACs because they will not have sidewalls raised - they'll need to reconfigure from warsawskis to wedges and then raise sidewalls - for a considerable interval. The LACs won't be in energy range because they will have sidewalls. Even taken totally by surprise as the Dreadnought Bellerophon was by battlecruisers, they can't be immediately destroyed.
Now, a mass transit is definitely not civilian transition no matter what happens. And an unannounced mass transit should always be enemy forces. Even allowing 10-15 seconds to confirm hostility, 2500 LACs will then blast each unsidewalled ship with 50 battlecruiser-sized energy mounts. That should be enough to cripple even a superdreadnought.
Even if those 50 enemy ships fire missiles (assuming Nike-class battlecruisers) they could not get more than 5000 missiles in space. The missiles will have a flight time of (at best) 30 seconds and will have a speed of 30.000 kps in final approach. The LACs have 15.000 total PDLCs of 8 emmitters each, allowing for 24 shots per enemy missile. They also have 10.000 total PDLCs and have time to fire 3 times, each missile eating 6 countermissiles.
With superdreadnoughts:
24 superdreadnoughts of a same mass as the LACs with 70.000 crew. Same conditions as the LACs, more or less. Each superdreadnought is to have the broadside towards the junction in full readiness, with the other broadside's crews resting and additional crew for an extra broadside onboard, also resting. This means 15 superdreadnought-sized energy mounts are covering each of those 50 hypothetical enemy ships and what that kind of energy firepower is going to do against unsidewalled ships is scary.
The SDs actually have only 1/5 as much point-defense as the LACs in this case. However, it still is only 200 missiles per SD and those are going to be very, very slow, unguided missiles (because their motherships will be toast)
With one big fortress:
OK, time to have fun designing crazy stuff.
A "ship" with twice the dimensions of a superdreadnought is 3,2 kilometers long with ~400 meters max beam. Its broadside space usable for weapons would be 1500 meters x 150 meters.
Armament:
# Take a Shrike-B. Remove compensator, impeller drive, power plant, shipkiller armament, rear countermissile launchers and a few other useless things. Replace its total of 12 PDLCs with only 3 bigger ones with 25 emmiters each (instead of 8) you put up front. That that leaves you is a defense station with 1 battlecruiser grazer, 3 really big PDLCs, 4 CM tubes with 25 missiles each and four sidewall generators. The station is 10 meters wide, 10 meters thick, 100 meters long and weighs around 10 kilotons, so we should be able to fit... 2250 in our big ship's broadside. For the interest of saving space, let's only put 2000.
# In 160 more ten by ten positions we didn't fill, we fit the forty biggest, more powerful grazer mounts we can fit. Each one is twice as wide/long and eight times as massive (and powerful) as a superdreadnought grazer. Those mounts are meant for obliterating little things like superdreadnoughts that make mass transits and do manage to raise sidewalls (somehow) before the fortress reacts.
# In the last 90 ten by ten positions we didn't fill in the weapons deck, we put 22 lauch tubes / modified pod rails. Those should be big enough to fire entire pods of missiles. Those are meant only for long-range combat just in case. In the big ship's inner core, there are 4400 missile pods meant for a 25-minute engagement time in max rate of fire.
Propulsion:
Standard wedge, hyperspace generator, thrusters with hour-long fuel supply at max accel. The fortress is too big for a compensator but can make 120-150 gravities or so using gravity plates without strain (depending on available tech). The impeller nodes are designed to be retractable so they can hide behind armor when the ship is fighting on thrusters+bubble sidewall so as to avoid damage in, say, a confrontation in hyper or energy range duel.
Sidewalls:
We know that big ships have multiple sidewall generators to generate their sidewall for various reasons. Going just with the generators the LACs came with, the fortress has 8000 generators per broadside, plus a couple more to cover the larger weapons mounts. That is both for redundancy and for making a strong sidewall but also to avoid weakening the sidewall's strength from the number of weapons we put. Each generator not only corresponds to a single gunport, the same way LACs get so strong bow walls, but also has to cover a much smaller area, resulting in even stronger sidewalls.
Also, the ship has a big bubble sidewall generator for use in hyperspace or when it's fighting under thrusters.
Armor:
So far, the ship should weigh around 100 megatons or so, already being denser than the same volume of SDs. This is roughly 50 megatons from all the systems and weapons the same volume of SDs would have (except for armor) plus another 50 megatons for the broadside defense stations, extra fuel and assorted odds and ends. Since we want it capable of passing through the junction, we can't make it heavier than 170 megatons, which leaves "only" 70 megatons for armor. The same volume of SDs would only have about 16 megatons... but would have to armor twice the surface. Let's go distribute that armor.
# First of all, the ex-LAC defense stations need to be armored. Their outer surface should have armor as thick as an SDs (several meters thick), only interrupted by the grazer mount. In addition, each station should have at least some armor in its inner surfaces to contain damage from expanding sideways or inwards so that each hit could take out only one station at a time, unless the hit is extremely powerful. In fact, each station should be made as removable so if it is damaged/destroyed, it could be plugged out and replaced by a new station very quickly. That ought to take up about 16 megatons of our armor allotment despite the very small outer surface.
# The main armor of the fortress should weigh around 32 megatons. That's twice the armor mass for less than half the surface in comparison to 8 superdreadnoughts, so we got 4-5 times as tough armor. This armor is built similar to the layers of armor in an SD, only individual layers are thicker, and curves to include the large energy mounts. The only thing that can't be thus armored is the long pod-launching tubes/rails.
# 16 more megatons of armor go to armoring the back and belly of the fortress. Unlike an SD, there could conceivably be times the fortress takes hits there and thus armor is needed. This area is again about half as large as the armored surfaces of an SD so given the armor allotment, it should have armor 2x as tough as an SDs stronger points.
# The last thing to be armored is the ship's inner core. The core has about the surface of an entire superdreadnought and we got 6 megatons of mass to spare, leading to armor 2x as tough as an SDs, minimum.
Use:
This is basically a fortress, but also a ship as slow as a merchanter. Its very powerful energy batteries allow it to obliterate any enemy force forced into an energy engagement -such as someone doing mass transit on the junction it's defending- and its very heavy armor, compartmentalization and very powerful sidewalls virtually guarantee the enemy won't be able to deal much damage in the few seconds they got left.
Its 40 giant grazers are meant to destroy even enemy SDs after they've raised sidewalls at the kind of ranges they'll be at after they exit the junction.
Its 2000 battlecruiser-sized grazers are meant to engage multiple targets in case of a mass transit of smaller ships and engage faster targets at close ranges in normal engagements (i.e. swarming LACs). In the case of missiles fired from enemy forces in a mass translation they should also be usable; those missiles will start at practically 0 speed from within the energy envelope and need 30 seconds to accelerate at their final speed of only 0,1 c.
Its 6000 PDLCs (150.000 emitters total) have their usual purpose, augmented by 8000 CM launch tubes - those can't fire all at once if they want to avoid wedge fratricide but are meant to fire at one second intervals, all of them firing within 8 seconds. The Keyhole II platforms are responsible for countermissile control.
Its long-range missile capacity is roughly comparable to that of 8 normal podnoughts, except that it has a pod supply only for a quick engagement. It is generally not meant for extended missile engagements, at least not in the rapid-fire mode.
I haven't followed this thread in detail, and I have no intention of doing so, but there's a reason — in fact, several of them — that this insanity hasn't been tried by Honorverse navies. I'm not even going to go into the problem with making blue-sky, unsupported assumptions about required tonnages, manning requirements, interchangeability of point defense clusters emitters, etc., etc. I don't have time to spend whacking those moles one at a time. Instead, I'm going to concentrate on some rather more general — but crucial — considerations.
First, only junctions — and critically important ones, at that — are normally protected by fortresses. There are some exceptions to this, such as the Lynx Terminus, but they are special cases.
Second, one major reason for using fortresses is that they can't go anywhere else. In discussing the reason that ground forces were so fond of the A-10 Thunderbolt, one armored division commander pointed out that the ground pounders could be certain that the Warthogs wouldn't be off chasing MIGs at the moment they were needed by the folks on the ground. That is, the very fact that it was . . . suboptimal, shall we say, for air-to-air combat meant that it wouldn't be diverted from its primary duty at a critical moment because it could also fulfill a secondary duty, however important that secondary deity might seem under certain circumstances.
Third, for their function, and for the firepower they pack, fortresses are more economical than hyper-capable starships and one hell of a lot tougher than LACs.
Fourth, a point which seems to have missed certain persons' attention in the course of this debate, wormholes are normally a minimum of five light-hours from the stars with which they are associated. That's 5,396,265,000 kilometers, which is, as we say in South Carolina, "a fair piece."
Fifth, wormhole junctions are normally (although not always) associated with inner-system infrastructure and populations which also require protection.
Sixth, wormholes and wormhole junctions can be attacked from multiple directions.
Let's look at each of these points.
(1) There aren't so very many locations even for someone like the Star Empire of Manticore where fortresses are going to be required. Where they are required, the targets being defended are of supremely critical strategic and operational importance, justifying major, dedicated defensive outlays. Moreover, for the degree of defensive firepower provided, fortresses designed with current technology are almost always more economical in terms of manpower and long-term capital expenses than mobile units would be. It is far wiser strategically to invest in the heaviest, most effective defenses for a limited number of absolutely essential points like junctions and critical wormholes, than it is to be penny wise and pound foolish, and that's been the traditional Manticoran viewpoint since the day the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was first discovered. It isn't going to change anytime soon.
(2) These critical defensive needs require that the forces protecting these specific points be dedicated solely to their defense, without being diverted elsewhere. Without, indeed, even the possibility of being diverted elsewhere. By and large, the Star Empire prefers to rely on mobile forces for area defense for most objectives for several reasons, both tactical and strategic, including the ability to switch between defense and offense and to readily and rapidly redeploy combat power. Wormhole junctions and critical wormholes are not among the places where the Star Empire prefers to rely on mobile forces, because it needs to know those forces will be there in the event that they are needed.
In many ways, you could think of these fortresses as being a separate, strategic command within the RMN, much as coastal artillery was a separate artillery specialization in the United States Army's artillery branch from 1794 and became the independent Coastal Artillery Corps, split off from the Field Artillery completely, between 1907 and 1950. The purpose of coastal artillery was to make certain no fleet in its right mind would challenge a point target protected by the artillerists, and by and large it succeeded in that goal. There were specific points in time, when the weaponry mix was in a state of flux, at which the coastal gunners found themselves disadvantaged vis-à-vis the shipboard gunners, but the balance invariably swung back in the coastal gunners' favor eventually.
In the Honorverse, the introduction of the MDM and the general Manticoran-spawned revolution in war-fighting technologies made pre-Havenite Wars fortress design obsolete, which has required some rethinking about fortress design. (The Solarian League hasn't gotten around to that yet, for some strange reason.) Also, in the course of the Havenite Wars, Manticore was sufficiently strapped for manpower and warships that it chose to stand down the majority of the Junction forts once Trevor's Star had been taken away from the Peeps. That represented four special considerations on the Admiralty's part. First, the crucial need for trained manpower and additional warships to maintain the offensive against such a numerically far larger foe. Second, that the immediate, critical threat of some sort of suicidal thrust through the Junction had been taken off the table by Trevor's star's conquest. Third, that the existing fortress designs had become obsolescent if not outright obsolete in the face of the new weapons systems about to be deployed. And, fourth (and in some ways the most critical consideration), that no one besides the People's Republic posed a significant threat to the Junction or the Home System at that time. In other words, the decision was made as part of a threat assessment of a very specific set of circumstances.
(3) Fortresses in the Honorverse have always been more manpower-efficient for their firepower than mobile units. That disparity has always existed; following Manticore's enthusiastic adoption of manpower-reducing technologies, it's become far, far more pronounced, however. The crew of one of the "new-model" fortresses which have been built to cover the Junction and the Lynx Terminus is about the same size as that of a Nike-class battle cruiser, exclusive of any LAC personnel assigned to them. That's not a very big manpower investment in a 15-16 megaton platform, I think, especially when the platform in question is so much bigger, tougher, and generally kick-the-hell-out-of-you nastier than any superdreadnought ever built. And especially when you consider that crew increases do not scale linearly if fortress size is increased above 16 megatons (see below).
(4 & 5) It's true that wormholes — and especially junctions — are normally associated with inhabited star systems which have additional targets that have to be protected. It would be nice if it was possible to protect both the inner-system and the wormhole/junction with the same warships or fortresses; unfortunately, it isn't. Go back and look at Sebastian D'Orville's defensive obligations before the Battle of Manticore. A given warship or fortress can be in only one place at a time, and it's a hell of a long ways from any wormhole — remember that 5.4 billion kilometers? — to the inner system of any star. The notion that a more "mobile" defensive force would be available in a timely fashion to protect the aforesaid inner system is . . . flawed. For one thing, the response time even for ships with hyper capability is going to be awkward. If anyone were foolish enough to try to use a huge force of LACs to protect a wormhole, then without a huge, instantly ready, supporting force of CLACs, you would never get them into range to engage someone who translated out of hyper on the far side of the star system from the wormhole to attack the inner system until it was all over.
Even if you use a fleet of superdreadnoughts to defend the Manticoran Wormhole Junction (which, by the way, is over 7.5 billion kilometers from Manticore-A), it cannot simultaneously defend Manticore and/or Sphinx or the inner-system infrastructure and population associated with them. If a threat to the inner system causes you to hold those superdreadnoughts in-system to defend the planets and the population, then you uncover the Junction for a secondary pounce summoned by the stealthed dispatch boat the attacking fleet left behind to nip back into hyper and inform the attackers' second task force that its true objective has just been stripped of its defenses. By using fortresses, the officer responsible for system defense is left unable to pull his Junction defenders in-system, and taking that option off the table was a deliberate part of the Star Empire's decision to build the fortresses in the first place. Those dedicated, anchored defenses will always be there, and the building policies for the rest of the Navy are simply forced to take that into consideration.
(6) In association with the idea of "drawing off" a defending fleet in order to pounce on a wormhole or a junction, please do bear in mind that an attacker doesn't have to come through the wormhole or the junction in question. This isn't the StarFire universe, and it's entirely possible to attack a wormhole or a junction in overwhelming force through a normal hyper-space attack. Thus while it's important for the defenders to be able to massacre anyone stupid enough to come through the wormhole right into the teeth of their fire, it's equally important for them to have "all-around" defensive capability. Manticoran fortresses are designed to shoot the hell out of "normal" attackers, not just deal with incursions through the wormholes they're defending. During the early period of the Havenite Wars, the Peeps' possession of Trevor's Star made the possibility of an assault through the Junction particularly critical, but that was never the sole consideration of the Star Kingdom's defensive planners, and it is at best a secondary (or even tertiary) consideration of the Star Empire's defensive strategists. Designing fortresses — especially current-technology fortresses — with an eye towards primarily defeating relatively close-range attacks or somehow getting into energy range — or even, God help us, LAC-range — of the attackers would be extraordinarily foolish.
It should be remembered both that fortresses are not truly immobile and that their hull forms are significantly different from those of hyper-capable warships. Because they aren't hyper-capable, they don't require Warshawski sails, which means they don't require the "double-ended spindle" design of a superdreadnought. If they choose to drop the impeller wedges which give them mobility, they have an enormously greater field of fire than any superdreadnought, protected by sidewall bubble generators (and a few additional neat tricks the Manties have developed in the last few years), even though those wedges remain available if needed for protection as well as movement. Among other things, this gives them vastly more effective direct-fire anti-missile capability. They have much more volume (and usable surface area) for defensive systems, and they can be — and are — built with multiple MDM missile cores and very heavily armored deployment hatches. They carry more than twice as much ammunition, have a heavier volume of fire, are better protected, have four or five times as many counter missile launchers and point defense clusters, and require much smaller crews than superdreadnoughts half their size. In addition, fortresses, because they are fixed defenses that don't have to transport all of their war fighting capabilities with them, can be readily built (or reconfigured) to support multiple Keyhole platforms, including Keyhole-Two platforms, further augmenting their defensive firepower and providing enormously capable Apollo offensive fire control for all of those oodles and oodles of internal missiles they carry around with them . . . not to mention the system defense pods normally deployed in company with them.
Traditionally, fortresses have been designed and built with an eye towards refits and upgrades to a much greater extent than would be possible with a conventional warship. The pre-Havenite Wars Manticoran fortresses were built to then-current technological standards, however. In an era of MDMs — and especially Apollo — it was literally impossible to refit them radically enough to retain them as survivable and effective platforms, which is why the RMN completely redesigned them and started building from scratch. The new fortresses are built in modular sections which are transported to the point at which they will be needed and assembled in place (and which can be disassembled and moved somewhere else if that seems appropriate). They've also incorporated all of the new armor technologies, and their energy batteries have been arranged with an eye towards completely removing any of the (multiple) weapon decks (and the armor protecting them) in order to plug in new, upgraded weapons (or to change them out for additional CM launchers and point defense clusters, if that seems appropriate). They have enormous stowage capacity for missile pods and counter missiles, and their modular construction was deliberately designed to allow additional modules to be assembled into single platforms of up to 30 megatons. For that matter, they could be built even bigger than that, except that the Navy hasn't yet gotten around to designing a spinal structure to go to tonnages above that level. And they are fitted with armored LAC bays to provide them with large numbers of LACs for employment in local security functions and use in the new Manticoran anti-missile doctrines being developed.
Defending critical wormholes and junctions is indeed expensive, and the capital investment in effective fortresses is high, but it is worth the expense and protects the operational and strategic availability of a navy's mobile striking forces at what is actually a very economic cost in manpower and long-term physical plant. It needs to see something far more compelling than the arguments I've seen advanced so far in skimming this thread to even consider altering that long-established, newly-upgraded paradigm.