Honorverse ramblings and musings

Why would armor cause a fusion plant to fail? They're entirely separate subsystems. That's like saying my car door's body panel is responsible for my engine leaking oil.

Duckk wrote:Why would armor cause a fusion plant to fail? They're entirely separate subsystems. That's like saying my car door's body panel is responsible for my engine leaking oil.

Your car door could be responsible for your engine leaking oil.

One particular model of the Ford Taurus had an electrical problem that went on for years that could never be solved. Years later, it was determined to be caused from engine vibrations from the body - brought about by the early symptoms of weight shaving.

Happened again with the turbo blades of several high-performance jets. Vibrations from the structure that resonated within the engine.

Sonic vibrations can be a real problem. Directed frequencies can move heavy objects.

The concept gave the Hulk a hard time.

My Bose 901 Series VI can be used as a formidable proof of concept.

Higher-tech designs only introduce lower-tech failures from higher-tech concepts.

My job is in the automotive suspensions area, so I'm quite aware of the need to dampen body vibrations. What you're describing is a system level effect - engine placement and frequency set against the chassis' particular attributes, of which the door is just one part of.

The point of my question is you seem to be drawing a correlation between two unrelated systems simply because they were mentioned in text. There's nothing in text which says they are related in any way, any more than, say, Nike's swimming pool is.

cthia wrote:

Duckk wrote:Why would armor cause a fusion plant to fail? They're entirely separate subsystems. That's like saying my car door's body panel is responsible for my engine leaking oil.

Your car door could be responsible for your engine leaking oil.

One particular model of the Ford Taurus had an electrical problem that went on for years that could never be solved. Years later, it was determined to be caused from engine vibrations from the body - brought about by the early symptoms of weight shaving.

Happened again with the turbo blades of several high-performance jets. Vibrations from the structure that resonated within the engine.

Sonic vibrations can be a real problem. Directed frequencies can move heavy objects.

The concept gave the Hulk a hard time.

My Bose 901 Series VI can be used as a formidable proof of concept.

Higher-tech designs only introduce lower-tech failures from higher-tech concepts.

The problem with the armor was Hancock wasn't outfitted to effectively cut through it, due to its new nature, and would have required inordinate time to cut through it , replace the reactor, then regrow the armor. Older armor could have been cut through , moved aside as a patch, then welded back into place when the repair was complete, but the new armor needed to be regrown by nanites. So it was easier to go the “long” way, through the unarmored top IIRC, than to touch the armor.

The Reactor was also made of another new material which complicated the repair. This was unrelated to the armor, but made it initially uncertain if the reactor could be repaired- so it was decided to replace it, and if the old reactor could be successfully repaired, it would be placed in the Hancock stores, backfilling Nike’s new reactor.

cthia wrote:But I was more wishing she rode a BC as a singleton, on her own, as was with Fearless. BCs operate as singletons don't they? They're the ships that straddle the line between smaller combatants and screens for larger ones. They'll do perfectly fine in some polity's back yard raiding or she'd fit in perfectly, off as a singleton facing the odds that normally befell the Salamander.

In theory, yes, and going by what we know of RMN doctrine for Battlecruisers, it's likely that they've sent single BC's out for antipiracy patrols in the past. But in the context of the Havenite war, with the RMN moving from a shipping protection mission to a warfighting one, it doesn't really work. Look at it this way: Honor has already proven her ability to handle independent command. That's good, that sort of initiative is something BuPers looks for in frontline commanders. Sending her on another independent cruise, even in a larger vessel, wouldn't further her career. She certainly wouldn't learn anything from it, and so it was ordered that she take command of a Battlecruiser slated to be a BatCruRon flagship. BuPers wanted to fast-track her to squadron command, and the best way to learn how to do that task is by making her the right hand of a squadron commander.

But Nike was assigned to someone else's order of battle and Honor took a back seat until fate played a part. Then everything was dumped into her lap along with the biggest wholeass of the galaxy.

Sure would've been nice if she could have commanded Nike longer. Plus, they gave her a brand new ship that was broken and one about to become obsolete. Darn, can anything ever go right for Honor?

If it did, she wouldn't be interesting. You get interesting stories by throwing rocks at your characters and writing down how they react, not by handing them cake.

cthia wrote:
AND, was this new armor ever used again?

As far as we know this 'grown' armor is the new standard and was used on every RMN (and presumably GSN) warship designed and laid down after about 1904. So yes, it appears to have been used very extensively afterwards.

IIRC it was implicitly contrasted in the Shadows books (or maybe it was in ART) when it there was a mention that the SLN Battle Fleet SDs had old-style 'bolt on' armor.

The whole RMN single battle cruiser raid strategy that they had been focusing on for decades had this minor issue that the war with Peeps exposed, which is it didn't work. Those obsolete BBs the Peeps had running rear area security apparently were perfectly adequate to tear a modern RMN BC into little tiny pieces. And after a few tries the RMN found things to do with the BC that were not suicide missions.

The E wrote:

cthia wrote:But I was more wishing she rode a BC as a singleton, on her own, as was with Fearless. BCs operate as singletons don't they? They're the ships that straddle the line between smaller combatants and screens for larger ones. They'll do perfectly fine in some polity's back yard raiding or she'd fit in perfectly, off as a singleton facing the odds that normally befell the Salamander.

In theory, yes, and going by what we know of RMN doctrine for Battlecruisers, it's likely that they've sent single BC's out for antipiracy patrols in the past. But in the context of the Havenite war, with the RMN moving from a shipping protection mission to a warfighting one, it doesn't really work. Look at it this way: Honor has already proven her ability to handle independent command. That's good, that sort of initiative is something BuPers looks for in frontline commanders. Sending her on another independent cruise, even in a larger vessel, wouldn't further her career. She certainly wouldn't learn anything from it, and so it was ordered that she take command of a Battlecruiser slated to be a BatCruRon flagship. BuPers wanted to fast-track her to squadron command, and the best way to learn how to do that task is by making her the right hand of a squadron commander.

But Nike was assigned to someone else's order of battle and Honor took a back seat until fate played a part. Then everything was dumped into her lap along with the biggest wholeass of the galaxy.

Sure would've been nice if she could have commanded Nike longer. Plus, they gave her a brand new ship that was broken and one about to become obsolete. Darn, can anything ever go right for Honor?

If it did, she wouldn't be interesting. You get interesting stories by throwing rocks at your characters and writing down how they react, not by handing them cake.

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.

Late Edit:
Cake? She always got the cake assignments -- if you were an officer and equated cake with non-boring fun. She just never got any icing on it. In fact, they intentionally removed a lot of the icing when they raped Fearless.

You're attributing far too much ignorance and/or malice to Hemphill. She was fully aware of Fearless' shortcomings.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/37/1

As far as Fearless' function in her scheme of things, she regarded the ship purely as a technological and tactical testbed. Honor's initial success against Sebastian D'Orville's flagship delighted Hemphill, because it appeared to be a vindication -- finally! -- of her determination to find technological ways account of long-standing tactical impasses. When it turned out that her brainchild didn't work if the other side knew it was coming, she got angry, and her anger showed in her communications with Honor. Her anger was even more intense because of the fact that things had looked so good in Honor's first ambush scenario. It was possibly unprofessional of her to allow that anger to show, and especially to make Honor feel that it was directed at her, but Hemphill did not ask to have Honor sent to Basilisk. In fact, she wasn't consulted at all. And if she had been consulted, she would have pointed out that the Fearless conversion had been carried out as part of a test program and that the test had not been a success. She would not have advocated [assigning] Fearless to a duty station where there was the least possibility of the ship being called to action. Now, she didn't protest the ship's deployment to Basilisk or argue that the ship must immediately be withdrawn from active duty and either restored to its original configuration (not going to happen; Fearless was chosen in the first place because her small size, age, and limited utility had her earmarked for disposal but she was large enough to serve as a testbed for the notion of a cruiser-mounted gravity lance) or immediately scrapped. Arguably, she should have. And practical reality, however, the decision was properly up to the people who had authorized the test exercise in the first place, which happened to be Edward Janacek's Admiralty. In fact, the officer who should have insisted that Fearless be withdrawn from service with her proper armament was undoubtedly First Space Lord Webster… who didn't. He horse-traded with Janacek, instead. Why? Because he didn't actually expect anything untoward to happen on Basilisk station, either. And he had other priorities rather than worrying about one, obsolete light cruiser which would certainly be scrapped at the end of its present commission, anyway. Indeed, he might actually have thought that allowing Honor to retain her command, even in Basilisk, would have been kinder than informing her that her ship was to be immediately scrapped. In short, Sonja Hemphill is not the appropriate person to blame for the fact that Fearless was committed to a combat situation with the armament she carried at the time. She is the appropriate person to blame -- or credit -- for the fact that Fearless had that armament, but, again, she never contemplated the ship's being used as anything but a testbed, unless, of course, the weapons combination have proved a brilliant success. Which she was quite well aware by the end of the fleet exercise it had not.

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.

Hemphill's project was centered around finding ways to make the Grav Lance a useful addition to the tactical arsenal of the RMN. The only way to do it, barring breakthroughs in the tech the Lance is based on that would increase its range drastically, is by mounting it on a heavily stealthed platform that can be inserted into an enemy formation for some initial disruption.
And don't forget one thing: Even if Fearless didn't work, the overall operational concepts are good. A few years after OBS, when Ghost Rider was in full swing, the concept of an armed, heavily stealthed and ultimately disposable assassin unit actually works (see: Mistletoe, LAC strikes).