Some people on the Bar have been questioning why the Junction fortresses were even manned if the minefields were so effective at defending the MWJ (see the Torch wormhole discussion from a few weeks back). David sent along this response, which is intended for the Bar and crossposted here.
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Duckk --
I don't have time to read the entire discussion from the Bar, thanks to how far behind I am after just over three weeks in Europe, but I imagine I can guess what the screams are about.
"But David said the Royal Manticoran Navy needed forts to cover the termini, and now he's saying that all the ships have to come in in a 'tube' only 9,000 kilometers across and they're dead meat for mines and laser heads!" And, probably, some people are saying "But David said the RMN's prewar simulations showed that the Peeps could have nibbled away at the forts covering the junction by sending through battleships, and now he's saying even SD(P)s would be dead meat coming through a terminus." And I imagine a few people are bitching and moaning about White Haven's technique for finally taking Trevor's Star and saying "But if the ships coming through the terminus are going to be dead meat because of mines, why was Manticore stupid enough to feed better than three battle squadrons of SDs through the terminus?"
I think there's some straining at gnats and arguing over the number of angelic dance shoes on the tip of the pin going on here, frankly. And I also wish people would go ahead and take your word for it when you comment on points like this. You may not always get it exactly right, but you know a heck of a lot more about how my head is working and what the underlying realities are that virtually any of the people speculating about it online. Not only that, I'm pretty sure you'll ask me about anything you're not certain about.
In regard to this particular disputatious discussion:
The mechanics of exactly how wormhole transits work and the way in which ships make transit through them has been perfectly consistent from the beginning of the books to right now. Moreover, there hasn't been -- and isn't going to be -- an actual unassisted assault through a heavily defended terminus (see my comments on Trevor's Star below). And because I didn't fight the Battle of the Trevor's Star Terminus on stage, all of this debate really constitutes what happens when I share details with the readers and they aren't what the readers thought they were because the aforesaid readers had made certain assumptions. It's enough to make me sometimes reconsider whether I want to tell people anything that isn't already in the books because every time I do someone squawks that I'm "changing everything" when, in fact, what's really happening is that they're getting a look deeper into what was going on all along and it just happens not to be what they thought was going on. I really do wish that people would bear in mind that even well-informed characters in the books are not omniscient and that from the very beginning I have allowed even the Manties to have mistaken doctrine, less-than-perfect tactics, and strategic misconceptions that have had to be worked through. The strategy behind Operation Buttercup didn't simply leap full-grown from Hamish Alexander's brow; it was the product of things which had been working their way out in the books and even from a period before the first book was ever written.
Okay, having said that (and despite what some people may think), I am not retconning anything. Let's look at time frames, available technology, naval doctrine, and institutional reaction time.
As of 1900 PD, which is when On Basilisk Station takes place, no one has used laser heads extensively in combat. Mines are still "contact nukes" or kinetic kill vehicles, and the warheads mounted on them are "boom or burn" nuclear warheads. (Please note that five years later, at Hancock Station, the mines do have laser heads.) Late 19th-century PD nuclear warheads were intended to burn sidewalls from an extended range (over 9,000 kilometers by that time) but needed to get much closer than that to kill ships. They would damage ships at greater ranges, but the damage would have been relatively minor. So, at the time the Junction forts were first emplaced (decades before On Basilisk Station), the mines and missile warheads available did not have the standoff range to rapidly overwhelm and kill warships in the middle of a transit lane. Ship-mounted (or fortress-mounted) energy weapons did have the range to engage into and out of a transit lane with rapid and decisive effect, so fortresses were the best way to stop ships from attacking through a terminus and shipboard energy weapons were the best way to kill a fortresses trying to stop invaders from coming through a terminus.
The simulation/scenario Honor referenced in her thoughts in On Basilisk Station was already out of date by 1900, but tactical doctrine and strategic awareness had not yet caught up with the new tactical reality imposed by the laser head. Moreover, military planners are more or less obligated not to make overly optimistic assumptions where the security and survival of their star nations are concerned, so the planners who had to decide whether or not those forts should still be there in 1900 erred on the side of pessimism.
By the same token, no one had ever attempted an opposed assault through a wormhole terminus, at the Manticoran Wormhole Junction or anywhere else. A handful of termini had been seized by transiting warships, but those termini had always been taken by surprise and were only lightly defended, assuming they were defended at all. As a consequence, no one knew for certain what would happen if someone made the attempt. Thus the Manticoran nervousness about the possibility of the Peeps taking control of Basilisk when they already had control of Trevor's Star and the perceived Manticoran need to maintain a defensive posture to prevent an attack from coming through from one or both of those termini. The Manties always assumed that any serious attack through the Junction would be turned into mincemeat, no matter how many termini were used; the concern was how much damage the attackers would do before they all died. (That's obvious even from Honor's reflections on the simulation in On Basilisk Station, I think.) Dead men are dead men, whether they died victoriously or in defeat, and Manticore didn't want any more dead men (or women) than it could help. Moreover, it couldn't be certain the Peeps' assessment of such an attack's probable outcomes would match their own, which meant that even if it would be suicidal, and even if it would be stupid (given the Manticoran assessment), that didn't mean the Peeps wouldn't do it, and the possibility had to be guarded against.
Although the possibility of an attack from Trevor's Star remained a Manticoran concern throughout the early period of the First Havenite War, the main reason they wanted Trevor's Star (by the time White Haven finally took it) was far less to remove the threat to the Junction than it was to acquire an advanced, secure logistics point deep inside Peep territory. That was also the reason the Peeps wanted to prevent them from taking the Trevor's Star Terminus.
For that matter, despite Manticoran fears (pre-laser head) about the possibility of a two-pronged attack through the Junction if Haven secured control of Basilisk, Haven primarily wanted Basilisk at the time of On Basilisk Station because it was in the way of their line of advance towards Silesia, which they knew would be much easier pickings than Manticore or the Manticoran Alliance. It was, if you will, the Philippines in the way of the Japanese move into Indochina and Java. Remember that no one was thinking in terms of deep strike operations at this time, but rather of incremental advances protecting your supply lines as you went (and that the Peeps' ships were shorter-legged than Manticoran ships, and hence needed a greater number of advanced bases close to the theater of operations). Haven would have been perfectly happy to threaten Manticore with the possibility of an attack through the Junction, especially if it forced the RMN to divert defensive resources, but its main concern was to clear its flank of a potential advanced Manticoran naval base as it extended its conquests into Silesia, bypassing the Manticoran Alliance to get at easier pickings. The People's Republic's failure to acquire Basilisk in 1900 was, in fact, the final, decisive factor in convincing the Peeps that they would, indeed, eventually have to go to war with Manticore whether they wanted to or not. They'd not only failed to acquire the terminus, but the Manticoran response clearly indicated that Manticore -- and Elizabeth III -- truly were prepared for a standup fight if/when the Star Kingdom's vital interests were threatened.
Even after laser head mines and missiles became available, the Junction forts continued to serve a function which was important in wartime and absolutely vital in peacetime. Given that Manticore couldn't know what was coming through from the other side in the case of a "sneak attack," the RMN couldn't afford to leave its minefields on "automatic" in time of peace. Fortresses had human crews who could decide in a shoot/don't shoot situation and who were capable of discriminating between targets. Theoretically, mines could have been fitted with the same capability, but there was always the possibility of malfunction or even that the Peeps -- who had established quite a reputation for manufacturing "incidents" to justify the conquest of smaller star nations -- would induce a "malfunction." With the fortresses in the "kill chain" and holding primary responsibility -- in peacetime -- for engaging intruders, no one could accuse the Star Kingdom of having run avoidable risks which might result in the destruction of the odd passenger liner or two. In fact, Manticore was prepared to take losses among the forts closest to the transit lanes (in the event of such an attack) not simply to avoid a genuine accident but also to demonstrate to the galaxy at large that the Star Kingdom had gone the extra mile to avoid such an accident, thus clearly establishing Haven as the aggressor. (Mind you, it probably wouldn't have done Manticore a lot of good in the Solarian press, but it was worth trying for.)
The forts also provided command and control platforms. While the minefields, especially post-laser head, could have handled the job without human supervision, Manticore preferred to have a human element in the command loop at all times. The command platform mission, however, was decidedly secondary to the forts' most important wartime function: to protect the Junction against a pounce through hyper-space. The minefields were distributed to cover the transit lanes; they were subject to attack themselves from outside the transit lanes. Their only protection against destruction was dispersal, and in order to get the kind of density needed to kill incoming warships, they couldn't be dispersed as widely as a defensive planner might have wished. The forts were there to protect the Junction and its infrastructure from an attacker coming through hyper-space rather than through the terminus. In essence, they were a defensive fleet, parked on the Junction, that couldn't go anywhere else and consisted of immensely powerful units.
As the laser head proved itself, the forts became less and less important from the perspective of defending against an attack through the Junction. Indeed, by the time of On Basilisk Station, they were almost totally redundant in that role, although the Navy's doctrine hadn't caught up fully with that particular implication of the laser head in 1900. They retained their importance as the "fixed defenses" in normal-space against an attack through hyper-space, however, until the missile pod and the MDM came along. At that point, it was possible to shut down the vast majority of the forts, retaining only enough of them on active duty as control platforms for the system defense missile pods deployed to cover the Junction. The missile pods, unlike minefields (which were short ranged, if you'll recall from The Short Victorious War), were capable of engaging attackers in normal-space at a considerably greater range than the total volume of the Junction, and could also be massed to engage anyone trying to come through one of the transit lanes. Thus, with the capture of Trevor's Star (which permanently removed any possibility of a surprise attack through the Junction) and the introduction of the missile pod (even before they were fitted with MDMs) in 1910 (ten years, please note, after Honor's thoughts about the already-ancient-history simulation), it was possible for Cortez to begin talking about shutting down the Junction forts, which had been manpower sinks from the beginning and which had become self-evidently irrelevant to the defense of the Junction in 1910. Moreover, by that time Home Fleet was big enough, powerful enough, and had a large enough edge in weapons technology that the probability of a successful attack through hyper-space was low enough (by a huge margin) to justify shutting down obsolete forts which had mostly been designed in pre-laser head days, anyway. The forts which eventually replaced them, and which are in place to cover the Lynx Terminus, are designed with laser heads and MDMs in mind, and are still serving exactly the same function -- protecting the Junction's termini against attack from hyper-space, not through the termini in question.
In the case of White Haven's attack on Trevor's Star, there were no Havenite fortresses covering the Trevor's Star Terminus. The Peeps had never built any because if anyone was going to do any attacking through the terminus, it was going to be them (even though they never actually intended to do anything of the sort), and partly because they didn't care if they blew away the occasional merchant ship by relying on minefields and/or laser heads. So White Haven's problem was to deal with a mobile force as well as the Junction itself. Note that no one at any time on Manticore's side even thought about proposing an unassisted assault through the terminus. In addition, the transit lane for Trevor's Star is way shorter than the transit lane for the Junction; it's a single terminus, without the "focusing" effect of the Junction. An attacker coming through from the Manticore side finds himself in a transit lane which is about 12,000 kilometers across (not 9,000) and which extends only about 10,000 kilometers from the terminus itself. This means that a Manticoran superdreadnought with a 1910 compensator would spend only about 90 seconds trapped in the transit lane inbound to Trevor's Star, as opposed to the 4.5 minutes of an assault into the Junction.
Now, 90 seconds is more than enough time for a thicket of laser heads to take out a superdreadnought, but what White Haven did was to attack with a sufficiently powerful force to draw the defending wall of battle into engaging him out of its own range of the terminus utself. San Martin and its orbital infrastructure were also highly important to the People's Republic of Haven (that's where the actual Trecor's star fleet base was located), and he was in a position to choose an attack vector which threatened both the terminus and San Martin at a time when the Peeps, due to losses (in those preliminary approach operations of his) and lack of maintenance, could not afford to put two powerful fleets in place to defend each objective separately.
Once he had the defensive fleet units drawn out of effective range of the terminus in order to engage him, he sent a waiting destroyer into hyper to the force of battlecruisers he'd tucked away there. Those battlecruisers then dropped out of hyper almost on top of the terminus, headed directly away from the defending fleet units accelerating towards White Haven. Their function was to "sweep" the mines covering the transit lane. White Haven knew they wouldn't get all of them, but he anticipated that they would be able to inflict sufficient damage on them to make it possible for the single scout ship being sent through from Manticore to survive, return home, and bring back reinforcements. In the event, they didn't send the courier through at all; one of the battlecruisers came through the Junction from the Trevor's Star side, and the additional fleet units immediately made transit. The purpose of the transit was not to suddenly bring a massive weight of fire to bear on the defenders' rear and flanks; it was to hugely reinforce White Haven's fleet (already almost strong enough to take Trevor's Star on its own) directly from Home Fleet. If it was possible for the reinforcements to catch the defenders between themselves and White Haven's wall of battle, that would be wonderful. In the far more likely case that it wouldn't be possible for them to do that, however, they would still constitute such a powerful increase in combat power that the defenders would have no choice but to abandon both San Martin and the Trevor's Star Terminus.
I apologize for not having fought the battle out in all its gory details, but I was sort of concentrating on HMS Wayfarer and Silesia at the time the attack actually went in. I will also concede that not having actually fought the battle out in the books -- simply knowing how it was fought, if you take my meaning -- means that I hadn't refined all of the details as thoroughly as I would have if I'd actually shown you the tactics. It didn't occur to me that there was any need to do so, since it was all going to happen "offstage," and so there are a few touches and tweaks I would have added/made to White Haven's battle plan -- and the way he described it to Caparelli in Honor Among Enemies -- which don't appear in the books and probably contribute to this entire furor. (For example, I would probably have gone ahead and omitted the whole "send a courier through" portion of his initial battle plan because I would have realized how much more sense it would make to send the BC through from the Trevor's Star end. There critics of the battleplan as described to Caparelli probably have a valid criticism.) The fact that I didn't show you the battle step-by-step and blow-by-blow doesn't mean that the battle plan didn't conform to the way junction transits actually occur, however.
I suppose another part of the problem is that I've always operated on the theory that the Honorverse's combat environment is constantly changing without necessarily trying to hit the reader over the head with that minor fact any harder than I have to. In this instance, the fact that the readers are starting with 1900-1905 Manticoran technology as their base platform of capabilities probably tends to blind them to the fact that those capabilities were rapidly evolving even before hostilities began. In other words, the procurement and deployment policies leading up to the point at which the books begin reflected technologies which were already in the process of becoming obsolescent or outright obsolete but at least some of the readers didn't realize that because the universe "began" for them with laser heads already in service and the technological paradigm which had led to prewar defensive decisions already becoming obsolescent. If I'd started the books 10 years earlier, for example, before it was possible to fit effective laser heads to mines, you would have seen a totally different defensive problem where junctions and termini were concerned. As it is, quite a few readers apparently failed to realize the way in which weapons were transforming tactical realities even then and allow for the lag in the replacement of physical plant and tactical and strategic doctrine in the face of that transformation.
I'm sure that at least some people are going to continue to argue that I am changing the ground rules. They're wrong, but if they aren't prepared to take my word for it, there's not a lot we can do about it. [G] I suppose some of those critics are probably going to think I'm being petulant and arbitrary when I say "because I said that's how it works" about mechanics, tactics, and strategic perceptions in my own universe, but if that's the way they feel about it, I suppose I could do a real retcon and decreed that henceforth all Honorverse superdreadnoughts will be towed into action by swans. [G]
On a more serious note, I do wish that people would remember that even the best informed characters can be (and often are) mistaken or not fully informed. The fact that a character -- like a relatively junior starship commander named Honor Harrington in 1900 -- happens to firmly believe that something is true doesn't necessarily mean it is. Remember Honor's perceptions of Sonja Hemphill in 1900, and remember how readers of the first two books probably didn't have a clue how badly she'd actually been damaged psychologically by the Academy episode with Pavel Young. For that matter, remember Hamish Alexander's resistance to the weapon systems which completely transforms naval tactics in Manticore's favor. I don't always go out of my way to tell you "Oh, by the way, this is a point about which this intelligent, competent character was misinformed." I do that sometimes; other times I don't, either because I think it ought to be evident to the readers that that was the case or else because it simply doesn't occur to me that I need to disabuse readers of the notion that I know -- and the characters know -- is now out of date and no longer applicable.
and, Mangy Fur the Smart Alick Spacecat.