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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

Non-hyper-capable units

The idea of non-hyper-capable system-defense units has been brought up once again. The idea seems to be that they would be built in star systems which already possess the shipyard capacity to construct them, and that they would be more heavily armed for their displacement than hyper-capable units and on "permanent assignment" to the systems where they were built, since they couldn't be pulled out in the first place.

 

I believe I've expressed my views on this possibility in the past. To summarize, there already are non-hyper capable "warships" in the Honorverse; they're called fortresses. In certain very specific instances, it makes sense to have a defensive force which will be permanently assigned to cover especially valuable, fixed points within a star system or at a wormhole junction or terminus. For those points, Honorverse star nations build fortresses, which are actually (as I've said repeatedly) mobile units; they just aren't very mobile, and they don't have hyper-capability. Those units, however, are always regarded as highly specialized (which is why they are very carefully referred to as "fortresses" and not "ships"), and they are also almost always regarded as an unfortunate compromise between expense and what the admiralties in question would really prefer to have. No one is happy about tying up significant amounts of combat power in units which cannot possibly be deployed anywhere except in the star system in which they were built. The only case in which it might makes sense to build such units as a first choice would be in a single-star star nation, with only a single star system to defend. Even there, however, the tactical limitations imposed by an inability to enter hyper are severe. If the attacker knows you can't enter hyper, then he has the option of using feints with hyper-capable units to draw your sublight units into disadvantageous positions before he commits to the actual attack. For anyone with more than one star system to defend, or with the need to project military power across interstellar distances, however, a purely sublight unit is effectively a hole in space for him to dump money down. He wants units which he can deploy across interstellar distances in response to changing mission requirements and threats. He doesn't want units that he can't redeploy. That's one reason why LAC doctrine has developed the way it has. Essentially, those are sublight units which can be deployed across interstellar distances, but no one is going to build a larger non-hyper-capable warship if he has any other option at all.