Honorverse ramblings and musings

Weird Harold wrote:FTL Comms pass ripples along the Alpha Wall (or next higher hyper-wall). They logically must be able to filter out gross gravitic effects from drives in order to detect the smaller signals from FTL comms.

Let me repeat: There is nothing in the text to suggest that anything (except maybe an active wedge between the transmitter and receiver) can interfere with grav pulses. There's no need to filter, because signals are either clear, or not present at all.

In addition, we already know that there's no special grav pulse receiver: Standard gravitics sensors are perfectly sufficient for the task.

Spider Drives operate by grabbing the Alpha Wall and dragging the ships along. That should produce a different "signature" than Impeller Drives that don't interact directly with the Alpha Wall.

Yes, they do. And we already know that it's an exceptionally weak signal, weaker than even stealthed low-power wedges. We already know how hard to detect those are. I am pretty sure that detecting spiders beyond energy range is not yet on the horizon, even for the RMN.

Yes, I know all about the inventiveness of the various tech geniuses. But I also know that most of the rapid advancement we've seen in the books is all payoff from a couple of very long term research projects (as anyone who's read House of Steel has to realize). The kind of leap in sensor acuity that spider detection implies doesn't come out of nowhere; RFC usually drops hints towards those things several books out.

Since Spider Drives and FTL comms interact directly with the Alpha Wall, there should logically be some detectable interaction between the two at a level far below the gross effects of Drives and such that only affect the Alpha Wall indirectly.

I should think that the kind of violent hole-ripping into the alpha wall that wedges do classifies as direct interaction

The E wrote:Let me repeat: There is nothing in the text to suggest that anything (except maybe an active wedge between the transmitter and receiver) can interfere with grav pulses. There's no need to filter, because signals are either clear, or not present at all.

In addition, we already know that there's no special grav pulse receiver: Standard gravitics sensors are perfectly sufficient for the task.

Spider Drives operate by grabbing the Alpha Wall and dragging the ships along. That should produce a different "signature" than Impeller Drives that don't interact directly with the Alpha Wall.

Yes, they do. And we already know that it's an exceptionally weak signal, weaker than even stealthed low-power wedges. We already know how hard to detect those are. I am pretty sure that detecting spiders beyond energy range is not yet on the horizon, even for the RMN.

Yes, I know all about the inventiveness of the various tech geniuses. But I also know that most of the rapid advancement we've seen in the books is all payoff from a couple of very long term research projects (as anyone who's read House of Steel has to realize). The kind of leap in sensor acuity that spider detection implies doesn't come out of nowhere; RFC usually drops hints towards those things several books out.

Since Spider Drives and FTL comms interact directly with the Alpha Wall, there should logically be some detectable interaction between the two at a level far below the gross effects of Drives and such that only affect the Alpha Wall indirectly.

I should think that the kind of violent hole-ripping into the alpha wall that wedges do classifies as direct interaction

Spider drives are IIRC described as punching through to lock onto and pull against a fixed point in the hyper wall. I know wedges siphon power through the wall but I don't recall them being described as tearing holes in that wall.

I do agree that the spider drives are far stealthier than wedges; as you say that's their whole point. But I have wondered if grabbing hard enough to create a fixed point to pull on might cause a very localized area when the hyper wall is temporarily unable to flex. An localized inability to flex logically should cause ripples attempting to pass through that tiny spot to either be absorbed or scattered back. But that's assumption piled on assumption. But if the spider tractored point distorts grav ripples then possibly a short sharp pulse could act similar to radar or to active sonar.

Or maybe not. That might be trying to take the spider ships are submarine analogs and overreaching looking far a sonar analog to detect the "subs".

The E wrote:I should think that the kind of violent hole-ripping into the alpha wall that wedges do classifies as direct interaction

Hyperdrives do that, not impeller drives.

The main point is that FTL comm gear is looking for weak, momentary, signals at the same point Spider Drives grab for traction. Signals more conventional detectors ignore as too weak. IOW, only FTL comms are looking in the right place with the right sensitivity to detect Spider Drives in use -- they may use the same "antenna" as other systems, but they are processing the signal differently.

Jonathan_S wrote:I do agree that the spider drives are far stealthier than wedges; as you say that's their whole point. But I have wondered if grabbing hard enough to create a fixed point to pull on might cause a very localized area when the hyper wall is temporarily unable to flex. An localized inability to flex logically should cause ripples attempting to pass through that tiny spot to either be absorbed or scattered back. But that's assumption piled on assumption. But if the spider tractored point distorts grav ripples then possibly a short sharp pulse could act similar to radar or to active sonar.

Problem is that both radar and sonar rely on the pulse being reflected back at the emitter. As far as we are aware, this doesn't happen with grav pulses; even if spider drives have a sort of dampening effect, the only way to detect it would be for the spider ship to pass between a pulse emitter and a receiver. And while we have seen something like this happen, I would still rate the chances of building a useful detector based on this as astronomically low.

Weird Harold wrote:Hyperdrives do that, not impeller drives.

Not entirely correct. According to RFC, Wedges are something like a very weak version of the Dahak core tap tech; since they are drawing energy from across the wall, describing them as ripping holes into the wall seems accurate to me.

The main point is that FTL comm gear is looking for weak, momentary, signals at the same point Spider Drives grab for traction. Signals more conventional detectors ignore as too weak. IOW, only FTL comms are looking in the right place with the right sensitivity to detect Spider Drives in use -- they may use the same "antenna" as other systems, but they are processing the signal differently.

But, as said before, there is no dedicated grav pulse receiver. It's all done with the gravitic arrays. We also know that grav pulses are readily detectable without any sort of special processing, implying that the signal strength used is orders of magnitude greater than spider signatures.

It all comes down to the fact that, in order to detect an active spider drive, the acuity of traditional gravitic arrays would have to be increased by several orders of magnitude, and that we haven't seen any hints towards this in the books yet.

The E wrote:But, as said before, there is no dedicated grav pulse receiver. It's all done with the gravitic arrays. We also know that grav pulses are readily detectable without any sort of special processing, implying that the signal strength used is orders of magnitude greater than spider signatures.

So the Comm section has to look over the gravitics tech's shoulder to read FTL Comm signals?

The arrays are the same -- and probably shared -- but the signals processors have to be separate.

We know that FTL comm signals are weaker, because they have less range than detecting an active impeller wedge. (especially Apollo Control Missiles.) FTL signals processors must therefore be more sensitive than Normal Gravitic Sensors.

Weird Harold wrote:So the Comm section has to look over the gravitics tech's shoulder to read FTL Comm signals?

Okay, I think there's a misunderstanding here. I read your argument about special signal processing for FTL comms as an assertion that there's an entire detector array dedicated to it, with a ton of extra software on top to filter out grav pulses, which is simply not the case as far as the text goes.

The thing is, AFAIK, an FTL com receiver is nothing more than a piece of software running on the existing gravitics sensor output, and not even a particularly sophisticated one.

Again, we know from textev that it doesn't take a lot to read FTL comms. Havenite equipment as far back as HotQ could do it without issue, and while there was a switch from omnidirectional broadcasts in HotQ to directed emmissions some time later, the basic detectability of pulses hasn't changed much. They're still standing out clearly over the gravitic background noise (if such a thing exists), so I think that your assumption that grav comm equipment has to be more sensitive than normal gravitics is false.

The arrays are the same -- and probably shared -- but the signals processors have to be separate.

We know that FTL comm signals are weaker, because they have less range than detecting an active impeller wedge. (especially Apollo Control Missiles.) FTL signals processors must therefore be more sensitive than Normal Gravitic Sensors.

Com signals are certainly weaker than most active wedges, no doubt about it, but again: picking them up seems to be very easy. Interpreting them, now that's a different kettle of fish, but if spider drives had signatures close to what we can see from FTL com, they wouldn't be very stealthy.

The E wrote:Com signals are certainly weaker than most active wedges, no doubt about it, but again: picking them up seems to be very easy. Interpreting them, now that's a different kettle of fish, but if spider drives had signatures close to what we can see from FTL com, they wouldn't be very stealthy.

The whole point is that FTL Comm looks at the Alpha Wall differently than Gravitic Sensors. It's looking at small, short, changes in the ripples along the Wall. The MAlign doesn't have FTL Comm, so they have no idea if FTL Comms can pick up whatever small, short, disturbances the Spider Drive might be generating.

FTL Comms are the only technology that looks at the right place in a way that might detect a Spider Drive in action. The MAlign has tested every method they have available and FTL Comms are a technology they do NOT have available. Without some Deus Ex Machina, out of the blue, handwavium tech, there is nothing else in the Honorverse that might be adaptable to detecting Spider Drives.

Weird Harold wrote:The whole point is that FTL Comm looks at the Alpha Wall differently than Gravitic Sensors. It's looking at small, short, changes in the ripples along the Wall. The MAlign doesn't have FTL Comm, so they have no idea if FTL Comms can pick up whatever small, short, disturbances the Spider Drive might be generating.

FTL Comms are the only technology that looks at the right place in a way that might detect a Spider Drive in action. The MAlign has tested every method they have available and FTL Comms are a technology they do NOT have available.

Okay, no. Not buying it. For the third and last time: Detecting ftl comm pulses is not hard. You do not need special hardware to do it, you don't even really need special software to do it (although you do need software to decode it for you with an acceptable bandwidth for remote EW purposes).

Your assertion that the FTL comm is somehow able to detect something the main gravitics sensors can't doesn't hold up, because the main gravitics arrays are used to pick up FTL comm pulses. There's nothing special about it; in fact, there isn't even a substantial difference between an FTL comm transmitter and an impeller wedge with a rapid cycle rate (AIUI, the FTL transmitter is effecticely a modification of normal impeller nodes).

Furthermore, while the MAlign may not have FTL transmitters available to them, they at the very least have a bunch of intelligence on it. Unlike the SLN, they have watched the Haven sector quite intensely, and I would imagine acquiring sensor data, if not actual working hardware, was a top priority for them.
And the critical thing here is that, while the Manticorans were the first to develop these things into deployable hardware, the theory behind it is very simple. The Havenites figured out what was happening very quickly, and only the fact that their research establishment was nowhere near as capable as Manticore's stopped them from actually deploying a version of the system of their own during the first havenite war. Remember that the Andermani developed their own version in the same time frame.
Getting a working FTL comm, in other words, isn't hard; the challenges involved are understood by everyone involved. If you recall, the same was true of multi-drive missiles: In House of Steel, we've learned that the problems in getting them to work were very well defined long before Fearless set out for Basilisk.

The E wrote:Okay, no. Not buying it. For the third and last time: Detecting ftl comm pulses is not hard.

I never said it was hard, just that you have to look at gravitic information differently.

Consider this...

If Honor had lost both of her eyes, then RFC could have chosen to increase the imagery pathways between treecat and human effectively allowing Honor to see the world thru Nimitz' and other Cats' eyes.

It is not too late. RFC could choose to temporarily cost Honor her remaining eye and allow the appropriate channel between 'Cat and human to be greatly increased allowing vivid imagery at a dramatic point in storyline. Honor learning to read Braille in record time, drawing out the suspense of questioning her continued command ability.

As a byproduct, Nimitz and by implication the treecats learn Braille.

Making for great press within the Navy and in the unwritten Memoirs of Honor Harrington hypering through the grapevine.

Eh?