Honorverse ramblings and musings

Gladiator class DN aslo had grav lance.

and it was removed in follow on desings for the same reason it was pulled from the Homer BC.

it is too short ranged.

even back in 1901 effective energy range against a target with a sidewall active was 4 times the grav lances range.

effectibe engery fire against an open wedge nearly 8 times the grav lances range.

now IF you could run it on a LAC (you can't i know), or a drone (again you can't) that could maybe have gotten to that range and dropped side wall so a fellow LAC/drone sitting back at 700K km could fire then MAYBE it could have been useful but given that getting to that range was almost impossible (against competent foes, no trouble doing it to sollies) then the tonnage was better used on effective systems like grasers or missile tubes

cthia wrote:
It's just that, considering how much combat power Fearless lost when they raped her, I always wondered why Hemphill didn't move up to the next largest platform that operated as a singleton. To offset some of the firepower lost.

Wouldn't a BC have been a better test bed for her little project? At least in Hemphill's mind. Although it may be argued that a smaller platform could remain stealthed long enough to pull off that one-trick pony. But that wouldn't have figured in Hemphill's original conception -- she seemed to be completely oblivious to it being a one-trick pony.

As Theemile already said BCs (at least some of them) already mounted grav lances; as did wallers. Hemhill was interested in whether it would make sense to push it down into something a little more attritional like a new CL or CA.

Specifically House of Steel said the Anduril-class SDs and Gladiator-class DNs, and Homer-class BCs all mounted grav-lances and energy torpedoes. It did not say the same for the King William-class SDs; though Jayne's claimed they also mounted both.

Somewhat oddly the Reliant-class BC (flight I and/or II) mounted a pair of energy torps in each broadside, but no grav-lance.


But basically the same problem exists, you need to survive closing across 80+% of missile range, to less than half of energy weapons range, in order to use the grav-lance. If you do, and it works, the energy torpedoes can devastate even a large well armored ship. But the chances of even a BC surviving that death ride against something it couldn't more easily kill from longer range (especially after the introduction of towed missile pods) is low (to say the least).

How would Malign ships be targeted, even if they are stumbled upon by say, a LAC? They can't be locked onto if they can't be seen? Would GA ships presently have to engage at point blank range, thus nullifying the standoff range of Apollo and MDMs?

Surely the MAlign aren't twiddling its thumbs while the GA dons its inventers cap. If the MAlign develops technology that can jam Apollo then the entire GA may be headed for the breakers.

cthia wrote:How would Malign ships be targeted, even if they are stumbled upon by say, a LAC? They can't be locked onto if they can't be seen? Would GA ships presently have to engage at point blank range, thus nullifying the standoff range of Apollo and MDMs?

Radar is still a thing that exists. Hemphill seems reasonably confident that they can detect the spider drive in operation (IIRC, there's textev that they detected the torpedoes when they came in, they just disregarded those sensor readings).

Surely the MAlign aren't twiddling its thumbs while the GA dons its inventers cap. If the MAlign develops technology that can jam Apollo then the entire GA may be headed for the breakers.

Haven has tried for years to find options against grav pulse comms. They've failed. For all we know, it may be impossible to jam the main part of the Apollo system.

Fearless was a test bed. Almost certainly, a test bed for the heavy component of the 'Sonya Swarm' for which she was also pushing updated LACs. If I had to guess, I'd say that the basic tactical concept was to mix Fearless-style platforms in with the LACs to knock down sidewalls, which lets the LACs hit hard enough to destroy the opposition. It's not mentioned explicitly, but I would lay odds that Fearless also had top of the line EW after that refit. Making her even harder for Sirius to kill than a series Courageous would have been, as it happens, but not nearly hard enough to find and destroy to make the Swarm work.

Sonya has seen a lot more elephants now than she had in 1900, and it shows: everything she's come up with in the last 3 years has made sense.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:
It's just that, considering how much combat power Fearless lost when they raped her, I always wondered why Hemphill didn't move up to the next largest platform that operated as a singleton. To offset some of the firepower lost.

Wouldn't a BC have been a better test bed for her little project? At least in Hemphill's mind. Although it may be argued that a smaller platform could remain stealthed long enough to pull off that one-trick pony. But that wouldn't have figured in Hemphill's original conception -- she seemed to be completely oblivious to it being a one-trick pony.

As Theemile already said BCs (at least some of them) already mounted grav lances; as did wallers. Hemhill was interested in whether it would make sense to push it down into something a little more attritional like a new CL or CA.

Specifically House of Steel said the Anduril-class SDs and Gladiator-class DNs, and Homer-class BCs all mounted grav-lances and energy torpedoes. It did not say the same for the King William-class SDs; though Jayne's claimed they also mounted both.

Somewhat oddly the Reliant-class BC (flight I and/or II) mounted a pair of energy torps in each broadside, but no grav-lance.


But basically the same problem exists, you need to survive closing across 80+% of missile range, to less than half of energy weapons range, in order to use the grav-lance. If you do, and it works, the energy torpedoes can devastate even a large well armored ship. But the chances of even a BC surviving that death ride against something it couldn't more easily kill from longer range (especially after the introduction of towed missile pods) is low (to say the least).

The E wrote:

cthia wrote:How would Malign ships be targeted, even if they are stumbled upon by say, a LAC? They can't be locked onto if they can't be seen? Would GA ships presently have to engage at point blank range, thus nullifying the standoff range of Apollo and MDMs?

Radar is still a thing that exists. Hemphill seems reasonably confident that they can detect the spider drive in operation (IIRC, there's textev that they detected the torpedoes when they came in, they just disregarded those sensor readings).

Surely the MAlign aren't twiddling its thumbs while the GA dons its inventers cap. If the MAlign develops technology that can jam Apollo then the entire GA may be headed for the breakers.

Haven has tried for years to find options against grav pulse comms. They've failed. For all we know, it may be impossible to jam the main part of the Apollo system.

I remember that in textev as well, E. Sensors detected the torps. But IIRC, only somewhat because they appeared as little more than ghost images - which is why they were ignored in the first place.

Just as Apollo produces the very faintest of ghost images, it has proven to be difficult for the RHN and Shannon to isolate, even knowing what they were looking for, having seen it so many times. How will the GA have any better luck with mere ghost images themselves?

cthia wrote:Surely the MAlign aren't twiddling its thumbs while the GA dons its inventers cap. If the MAlign develops technology that can jam Apollo then the entire GA may be headed for the breakers.

Anything that can jam Apollo is going to be very noisy; gravametrically. And it's probably going to have to be pretty decent sized; since it's most likely going to have to be producing high bandwidth semi-random 'ripples' along the alpha wall.

And since missiles have sensors capable of seeing powerful artificial grav fields it shouldn't be hard to fire missiles in a "home on jam" mode to kill individual jammers.
You might need a lot of jammers to keep FTL fire control shut down in the face of HARM-style fire.

That said, you can't target them until they go active, and the first time someone lit them up it'd totally screw up the in-flight Apollo salvos.


But even worst case you just force the follow-up waves to fall back on lightspeed control - where they're still the most capable and dangerous missiles known. Because the most effective are Mk23s + Mk23Es in Apollo FTL control, the 2nd most effective are those same missiles in light-speed control mode (the Mk23E'a "AI", sensor fusion, and local inter-missile synchronization still boosting the effectiveness more than enough to offset the 2 fewer missiles per pod). Being forced to go from the most effective to 2nd most effective missile fire control known is a long way from "headed for the breakers".

The E wrote:Radar is still a thing that exists. Hemphill seems reasonably confident that they can detect the spider drive in operation (IIRC, there's textev that they detected the torpedoes when they came in, they just disregarded those sensor readings).

Cite?

I recall a picket intercepting the tight-beam targeting info, but I don't recall anyone picking up either the torpedoes or missile pods prior to the attack.

The E wrote:Radar is still a thing that exists. Hemphill seems reasonably confident that they can detect the spider drive in operation (IIRC, there's textev that they detected the torpedoes when they came in, they just disregarded those sensor readings).

Radar has a 4th power problem.

If something is close enough and you are transmitting enough power you can detect it. However at twice the range you need 16 times the power. At 10 times range you need 10,000 times as much power, etc.

And note that detectability of radar drops at the 2nd power, so high power emitters can be seen from almost infinitely long range.

The standard system sensor nets appear to be primarily designed to detect ships comming out of hyper and to pick up impeller drives. They then get down to various types of communication, other energy discharges and probably some manner of optical tracking (for all that stuff that occurs naturally in systems like comets, asteroids and misc. "natural" stuff that you really don't want hitting your planets or orbital installations.

If I understand it corretly, the RMN FTL communication is based on gravity pulses.

Could it be possible to do a variation of radar/echo location based on gravity pulses? The trick would be finding a way to make it work. Generation of the pulses might not be that hard, the difficult part would be finding some "frequency" that wouldreflect off a ship, even one as heavily stealthed as the Ghosts, Sharks and presumably the Lenny Detts. and give you an indication that at least something was there and moving (things sitting still are also suspect since dam near everything in a star system is moving in relation to something else).

There is also the fact that ships have mass and so have at least some minor gravitational effect. Nothing like a planet or a moon but some. Making something sensitive enough to detect such a point source of gravity and let a ship(or ships) go looking for it would help. Again, the trick is figuring out how to identify a mass by it's gravity/the effect of that mass on the surrounding space. This one is unlikely but a line of thought.