Defending a wormhole junction/terminus.

darrell wrote:Oyster bay was primarily to destroy the manticoran space stations, but it would surprise me of they didn't have some weapons to take out any forts around sphinx, so by the time of filerta, there would be no forts left.

Forts typically run bubble sidewalls with point defense systems in autonomous mode. Their point defenses would have killed most of the attack missiles and a fort with a fort class bubble sidewall plus millions of tons of fortress armor armor is probably immune to a cruiser class graser.

solbergb wrote:In 1st Manticore there were a crapload of MDMs in orbit around Sphinx. They may or may not have been fortresses but there was certainly at least fire control.

There were some paragraphs spent debating whether or not to shoot Tourvelle with them, and the decision not to was based on protecting Sphinx from strays and hoping Kuziak could take care of business without risking that.

I'm aware of the crapload of MDM pods in orbit around Sphinx --- (side note, why in orbit and not a couple million kilometers closer to the RZ/normal space boundary and off to the side a little bit???)

But we know Gryphon is covered by forts, we know Medusa is covered by forts, we know Yeltsin was at one time covered by forts, we know forts are used for high value targets including but not exclusively Junction/Termini. Sphinx's near orbitals qualify as very high value targets, and building forts would have fit into the ideological/political profile of the Janacek Admiralty as they are not offensive weapons at all and all of the money stayed in-system.

Once the decision was made to keep Sphinx's fixed defenses in tight --- not firing on 2nd Fleet makes a lot of sense. My question is whether or not Sphinx had forts that could have been mobile before Home Fleet was destroyed.

fester wrote:
I'm aware of the crapload of MDM pods in orbit around Sphinx --- (side note, why in orbit and not a couple million kilometers closer to the RZ/normal space boundary and off to the side a little bit???)

Gravity. Anything close to a major body is going to be in orbit around it unless you've got some kind of active propulsion to keep it in a fixed relationship.

That's going to be expensive, and if you're talking things like shoals of pods having an active propulsion system is going to give away where they're located.

JohnRoth wrote:

fester wrote:
I'm aware of the crapload of MDM pods in orbit around Sphinx --- (side note, why in orbit and not a couple million kilometers closer to the RZ/normal space boundary and off to the side a little bit???)

Gravity. Anything close to a major body is going to be in orbit around it unless you've got some kind of active propulsion to keep it in a fixed relationship.

That's going to be expensive, and if you're talking things like shoals of pods having an active propulsion system is going to give away where they're located.

So get small station keeping drives on the pod arrays and get a few pod tenders built/retrofitted from old cruisers that otherwise would have been scrapped. Energy in the Honorverse is ridiculuously cheap, so use it

solbergb wrote:There may also be issues with balancing the sails...you may need 8 and exactly 8 nodes in each ring, perfectly placed, to grow a sail.

So more nodes maybe don't help, unless you can somehow replace a damaged node with a spare.

If you have the first set of 8 nodes in the normal position and the second set of 8 interpolated between them (offset 22.5 degrees from the first set) then you could lose nodes from either set and still have a full set arranged in the same relative positions.

Only if you lost nodes from both sets would you not have a set of 8 nodes at 45 degree spacing.

fester wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:

fester wrote:
I'm aware of the crapload of MDM pods in orbit around Sphinx --- (side note, why in orbit and not a couple million kilometers closer to the RZ/normal space boundary and off to the side a little bit???)

Gravity. Anything close to a major body is going to be in orbit around it unless you've got some kind of active propulsion to keep it in a fixed relationship.

That's going to be expensive, and if you're talking things like shoals of pods having an active propulsion system is going to give away where they're located.

So get small station keeping drives on the pod arrays and get a few pod tenders built/retrofitted from old cruisers that otherwise would have been scrapped. Energy in the Honorverse is ridiculuously cheap, so use it

You can use gravity to help you. There is a spot known as the L2 Larange point. (further away from the Sun.)

A spacecraft placed there is more distant from the Sun and therefore should orbit it more slowly than the Earth; but the extra pull of the Earth adds up to the Sun's pull, and this allows the spacecraft to move faster and keep up with Earth.

At a certain point, the spacecraft’s orbital period equals that of Earth’s. This is L2. It is located 1.5 million kilometres directly 'behind' the Earth as viewed from the Sun. It is about four times further away from the Earth than the Moon.

With the weaker pull of the maticore A star on sphinx, the star/sphinx L2 larange point would be between 2 and 3 Mkm tward the hyper limit from sphynx (7-10 light seconds) this would be ideal for a cluster of pods and or forts. You don't need thrusters to keep them in place

There is also an arc that runs from L2 to L5 behind sphinx orbit, not quite as stable as L2 that would also be suitable for placing pods or forts. these would require minimum orbital corrections.

fester wrote:But we know Gryphon is covered by forts, we know Medusa is covered by forts, we know Yeltsin was at one time covered by forts, we know forts are used for high value targets including but not exclusively Junction/Termini. Sphinx's near orbitals qualify as very high value targets, and building forts would have fit into the ideological/political profile of the Janacek Admiralty as they are not offensive weapons at all and all of the money stayed in-system.

Where does it state that Gryphon is covered by forts?

solbergb wrote:Sphinx's forts decided not to fire in 1st manticore because.

1. Didn't want to become a legit target and risk a near miss smashing the planet

2. 3rd fleet was on the way, and could get the job done anyway.

Had 8th fleet not destroyed Chin, the forts would have probably conserved their fire for Chin's undamaged ships, since not much was going to be left of Tourvelle's force after getting hammered by 3rd fleet and yet another Shrike wave while 3rd fleet was dying.

Actually, the forts (if any), and other defenses in Sphinx orbit were already legit targets (just because a defender isn't shooting doesn't make them a valid target). The feeling was that Tourville wouldn't engage them from extreme range, but might change his mind if they started shooting at him (so don't shoot until misses hitting the planet weren't such a risk).

kzt wrote:

fester wrote:But we know Gryphon is covered by forts, we know Medusa is covered by forts, we know Yeltsin was at one time covered by forts, we know forts are used for high value targets including but not exclusively Junction/Termini. Sphinx's near orbitals qualify as very high value targets, and building forts would have fit into the ideological/political profile of the Janacek Admiralty as they are not offensive weapons at all and all of the money stayed in-system.

Where does it state that Gryphon is covered by forts?

From AAC, e-ARC p. 537 of the .doc format:

In fact, Manticore-B's forts and space station were already refitting with Keyhole II and would begin deploying the first of the system-defense Apollo pods within the next three weeks, on the theory that it would need them worse since it couldn't call as readily on Home Fleet's protection.

I also wondered why the missiles weren't placed far enough from orbit that a near miss won't hit the planet but near enough to cover. With MDMs, there isn't any reason to be in orbit, your envelope is just so much larger. Put em in orbit around the sun, in a similar orbit to the planet you are trying to protect.

We saw Haven doing this sort of thing in the Cutworm raids. It might have just been institutional inertia that had the pods in orbit. In the single drive days, that worked fine, as long as the forts could move around slowly so C-fractional ballistic strikes couldn't take them out (this was the problem with the Greyson fortifications in 4th Yeltsin)

Seriously, a weapon platform that can't become a target because of proximity to valuable stuff (be it orbital farms on Greyson or Sphinx in 2nd Manticore) is pointless.