Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Mr Bean]

...

I don't remember them. At all. Beyond the odd mention of Beowulf, largely as the place with all the genetics knowledge where Honor's mom came from, that is. And, in later books, as pillars of bioethics and a tough place to imigrate to.

And you say they've been mentioned in every book following Flag in Exile?

They are listed under a weird name of the Biological Survey Group. Their actions are limited to Cold War daggers in dark ally work. They only explicitly act in book 14 I think. But prior to that you can trace a lot of the mentions of such and so slaver ship was spotted back to the BSG which is a Beowulf group.

It's something that is showing up more and more but the basic jist is that Torch would have never come to be without all the safehouses and pipelines the BSG set up and in turned help the former slaves set up there own.

[Simon_Jester]

t's worth noting that doing this would be a really GOOD way to create an even more blatant international incident than they already have- a Peep ship blowing a Manticoran cruiser out of the ether because its captain is doing her job in Manticoran space is much more of a provocation than "a Peep ship was physically present in our system."

Err-I'd like you to elaborate on that. The Manticorans at the time, while feeling it was inevitable, still very much wanted to avoid that war, and the Havenites were going out of their way (however incompetently) to pretend they weren't the ones who started it.

That's kind of my point. If Coglin tried to sucker a Manticoran cruiser into energy range and blow her up, then any recording or evidence of that action would prove that the Havenites have armed ships sneaking around in the system, and that they've killed hundreds of Manticoran citizens in space alone, regardless of what happens on the ground. That's what you call an international incident.

So he'd be averse to doing that if he can avoid it.

From his point of view, the ideal goal is for him to just run away from Medusa, then alert the Havenite fleet that the whole op is screwed up and that they shouldn't bother to come to Medusa at all. The Havenites can go blah blah plausible deniability "we were never here."

But then Honor has to be nice and ferocious and chase Coglin, threatening to fire into his ship if he doesn't agree to stop for inspection. In THAT case, Coglin will never get the chance to alert the Havenite fleet, in which case he winds up in a total clusterfuck of a situation, because (again) it is revealed that the Havenites had a Q-ship AND a fleet ready to intervene in Medusa. Worst of both worlds, plus Coglin personally has to deal with the humiliation of having surrendered his ship to the Manties without firing a shot.

So instead of doing that, he starts lobbing missiles at Honor, figuring that if he can deter her from chasing, or damage her ship and escape, then on the one hand, Haven gets a bloody nose for having a Q-ship in Medusa, but at least the fleet can be warned away, so Coglin accomplishes his core mission. Haven disavows Coglin's actions, Coglin himself is hopefully spirited away into the Havenite equivalent of a witness protection program rather than being turned over to the Manties, mission accomplished.

But until Honor started chasing Coglin on his way out of the system, Coglin had no reason to WANT a fight with a Manticoran cruiser.

But triumph at such cost. She bit her lip again, feeling the pain. One hundred and seven of her crew, more than a third of those aboard at the start of that terrible pursuit and slaughter, had died. Another fifty-eight were wounded, though the medics and base hospital teams would probably return most of them to duty in the next few months.

The cost in blood and pain had been terrible enough, but that had been fifty-nine percent of her total crew, even before detachments, including Dominica Santos and two of her three commissioned assistant engineers. She'd had barely a hundred and twenty uninjured people left for her repair parties, and Fearless had been a shambles. Her forward impeller nodes had failed completely within seconds of Sirius's destruction, and this time there had been no way to repair them. Worse, her after impeller ring had gone for over forty-five minutes, as well—three-quarters of an hour in which she had coasted another ninety-four million kilometers outward while damage reports flooded in to her airless bridge.

Ok, I'm glad they didn't just coast into deep space on their momentum and die, but how is a third the crew aboard, with several detached duty stations, the same as almost 60% of the crew before you started splitting them up?
Oh well, 107 died in the pursuit, from a 300+ man crew.

Suppose there were 300 people on the ship when the pursuit began. About 35% of the total crew died. Roughly 60% were casualties. "Casualties" includes people who were injured but not killed (like the noncom who gets her pelvis smashed up by a missile). So, when you have 60% of the people on the ship casualties, only 40%, roughly 120 out of 300, are left whole and hearty to help fix the ship.

As an exercise in algebra we could make this work, IMO.

Also, the grav lance did substantial damage to their own impeller, another good argument against it.

That's probably because the impeller was on its last legs anyway... it's not like the grav lance broke down Fearless during the training exercises.

Ok, so one more brief mention of Suchon. 4 hours to decelerate, suggesting the brakes are a lot slower than the gas for Honorverse ships, which the series seems to bear out. Then again, with this in isolation it'd make more sense to say that;s how badly they were damaged.

The latter. Although realistically, even if her impellers were undamaged, she would probably not have used maximum military power and risked a compensator failure on the way back, so her acceleration would still be lower.

The hit to the comm room took out all communications.

Ack! Single point of failure! Single point of failure is bad! BAAAAAD!

More seriously, Fearless is only so large, so I guess there can't be backups for everything.
Resolution to the invasion, 3 Peep battle squadrons to secure the Junction. I wonder if these are anything like the BC squadron Honor was part of in the 3rd book? Just in the sense of being 8 BCs and screening elements.

A "battle squadron" would typically be a squadron of capital ships.

In real life, "battlecruisers" were nearly as large as the "battleship/dreadnoughts" of their era; Weber creates an artificial and arbitrary distinction by making them something like 10-20% the size of a real capital ship.

Resolution for both Mckeon and the future of Basilisk Station. I'm much more interested in the the situation planetside with the Medusans however, which is never addressed. Come one, aliens gave the nomads firearms and raised an army against the other off-worlders. Even with the army slaughtered, and the Peeps arrested, you can't tell me there won't be lasting consequences.

It's a pity we never see anything of this. It does sound like a great opportunity for a spinoff, but it wasn't the kind of story Weber wanted to tell at that time, and at this stage in his career he's never going to revisit it.

Funnily enough, in later books and short stories, the Silesian anti-piracy patrol is looked at as a fine thing for a peacetime navy, letting the crews see a bit of action.

Escort duty would suck, because no sensible pirate would ever actually attack a freighter that was escorted by a Star Knight. They'd have to be out of their minds.

What would be really desirable for an RMN captain with Ambitions would be independent operations- the authority to go wandering around like a knight-errant, hunting after pirate bases and setting their own operational patterns, sort of like Honor gets to do with Wayfarer.

Honor doesn't get knighted or enobled, because otherwise what oculd she aim for in the sequel? And once again, Honor makes enemies wherever she goes.

Yes, that was one of the lovely things about early-series Harrington novels. It really is a pity that this process pretty much came to an end in Book Seven of what's shaping up to be a fifteen-book or longer series.

And end book 1.

Honor's report to the Weapons Development Board is something of a noodle incident, it's mentioned a couple times in the next few books, but never shown. When it is mentioned it's always in the context of "tactless Harrington sure made a lot of enemies that time at the Weapons Development Board." Or oblique references to publicly humiliating Admiral Hemphill. On the other hand, at least one person (Mark Sarnow, if you need a name) seems to think she was never less than polite and professional, and it's hardly her fault if her conclusions did not match some members of the board's.

It's very much possible to be extremely professional and polite while ripping someone to shreds:

"...At this point, standard tactics would have been to introduce a sixty-degree yaw on our base course and launch full broadsides at Sirius's stern. Based on chase missile performance during the action, I estimate that the mission could have been accomplished, with crippling impeller damage to Sirius, within approximately five to six broadsides. However, this was impossible, due to HMS Fearless's extremely weak missile armament, forcing upon us what might be called the tactics of desperation, and resulting in the deaths of at least [insert double digit number here] of the men and women under my command."

[looks very, very calmly at Adm. Hemphill]

It really doesn't, tons of people die that way. Doesn't help the ship's flying apart in killing splinters is another Napoleon Wars relic.

Well, it's a very plausible reaction of metals when struck by energetic shock waves from bits of the hull explosively vaporizing. Spallation is a very well documented problem in tank design, for example, and one that can leave a poorly designed tank sitting there, its armor unpenetrated... but with the crew reduced to piles of bloody hamburger.

You know, it's funny how much Honor and her clique hates on Hemphill's work when she is about 95% reason behind HH every success - just because Hemphill happens to be on wrong political side. Even in first book alone, had Harrington did not have broadside capable of destroying Q-Ship, she would be really dead before series even started

I'm pretty sure that Honor would have been able to accomplish her mission just by getting into missile range and tossing broadsides into Sirius's stern. She didn't need to destroy the Q-ship, just immobilize it by damaging one or more of its alpha nodes. Given how easily she was able to hit the Q-ship with two-missile salvoes, I'm quite sure that a few seven-missile launches of standard nukes would have been able to do the necessary damage to Sirius's stern section.

More generally, Honor actually ends up on Hemphill's side of the political feud by the time of Book Seven, and by Nine or so the success of Buttercup makes any question of whether Hemphill was right entirely irrelevant. But at this particular time, I think Harrington has good cause to resent Hemphill saddling her with a ship that has bizarre and suboptimal armament.

[Terralthra]

And yeah, those are the high notes. I didn't include Grayson or Erewhon yet, since they'll be Alliance soon and for most of the series and deserve more detail when I get to them.

Don't forget the Beowulf conspiracy, the Anti-Mesan folks who wish nothing but ill to genetic slavery. It's a quiet thing that's not played it's card yet. But every book past book six mentions them.

...

I don't remember them. At all. Beyond the odd mention of Beowulf, largely as the place with all the genetics knowledge where Honor's mom came from, that is. And, in later books, as pillars of bioethics and a tough place to imigrate to.

And you say they've been mentioned in every book following Flag in Exile?

Mr. Bean could be referring to the Audobon Ballroom, the Anti-Slavery League (known to be in contact through ex-Countess of Tor Catherine Montaigne), or the Kingdom of Torch. Anton Zilwicki is a member(?) of the ASL, possibly the Audobon Ballroom (certainly has contacts), and is mentioned or has scenes in most books following Flag in Exile.

[Mr Bean]

Mr. Bean could be referring to the Audobon Ballroom, the Anti-Slavery League (known to be in contact through ex-Countess of Tor Catherine Montaigne), or the Kingdom of Torch. Anton Zilwicki is a member(?) of the ASL, possibly the Audobon Ballroom (certainly has contacts), and is mentioned or has scenes in most books following Flag in Exile.

There is strong evidence that the Audobon Ballroom and the ASL are inventions of the Biological Survey Group aka the Beowulf planetary government wetwork division. That while the formers slaves are not ruled in secret by Beowulf, they are advised, funded and equipped by Beowulf planetary authorities and have been for decades. Beowulf hates Mensa, which hates Beowulf and the Ballroom was created and funded by the BSG as a means of harming Mensa. With the happy addition of giving them a network of friendly spies in every Mensa operation. And just being feel good work to boot.

[Batman]

Um-Bean explicitly mentioned the Biological Survey Group, not the Ballroom or the ASL or Torch, and while I don't remember when the BSG first showed up, I know the Ballroom, the ASL, and especially the Kingdom of Torch did NOT this early (the Kingdom of Torch in no small part by virtue of not yet existing at the time).

[Terralthra]

Mr. Bean could be referring to the Audobon Ballroom, the Anti-Slavery League (known to be in contact through ex-Countess of Tor Catherine Montaigne), or the Kingdom of Torch. Anton Zilwicki is a member(?) of the ASL, possibly the Audobon Ballroom (certainly has contacts), and is mentioned or has scenes in most books following Flag in Exile.

There is strong evidence that the Audobon Ballroom and the ASL are inventions of the Biological Survey Group aka the Beowulf planetary government wetwork division. That while the formers slaves are not ruled in secret by Beowulf, they are advised, funded and equipped by Beowulf planetary authorities and have been for decades. Beowulf hates Mensa, which hates Beowulf and the Ballroom was created and funded by the BSG as a means of harming Mensa. With the happy addition of giving them a network of friendly spies in every Mensa operation. And just being feel good work to boot.

I haven't seen the evidence of such laid out. It's not unbelievable, but there's also evidence that the ASL was funding the Audobon Ballroom. I know that Mesa and Beowulf hate each other (as Mesa is a splinter off of Beowulf in the first place), but the BSC funding and creating the Audobon Ballroom is new to me.

Um-Bean explicitly mentioned the Biological Survey Group, not the Ballroom or the ASL or Torch, and while I don't remember when the BSG first showed up, I know the Ballroom, the ASL, and especially the Kingdom of Torch did NOT this early (the Kingdom of Torch in no small part by virtue of not yet existing at the time).

I didn't read his post mentioning the BSC. All I saw (and quoted) was the reference to "Anti-Mesa conspiracy", which is...vague.

[Terralthra]

You know, it's funny how much Honor and her clique hates on Hemphill's work when she is about 95% reason behind HH every success - just because Hemphill happens to be on wrong political side. Even in first book alone, had Harrington did not have broadside capable of destroying Q-Ship, she would be really dead before series even started

I'm pretty sure that Honor would have been able to accomplish her mission just by getting into missile range and tossing broadsides into Sirius's stern. She didn't need to destroy the Q-ship, just immobilize it by damaging one or more of its alpha nodes. Given how easily she was able to hit the Q-ship with two-missile salvoes, I'm quite sure that a few seven-missile launches of standard nukes would have been able to do the necessary damage to Sirius's stern section.

More generally, Honor actually ends up on Hemphill's side of the political feud by the time of Book Seven, and by Nine or so the success of Buttercup makes any question of whether Hemphill was right entirely irrelevant. But at this particular time, I think Harrington has good cause to resent Hemphill saddling her with a ship that has bizarre and suboptimal armament.

Notably, even HMS Nike had plasma torpedo launchers (two in each broadside, if I recall correctly), on the rare circumstance that it gets into energy range with an enemy ship whose sidewall is down, or gets a throat/kilt shot. Likewise, the pod-launchers that BatCruRon 5 use to blow a hole in Rear Admiral Chin's DN squadron at First Hancock are only possible because of the missile launcher miniaturization project that Hemphill initiated. She was trying to get full-size missiles down to fit in her LAC swarm idea, but the fruits ended up in another area.

In general, Hemphill's ideas were always dartboard in nature. Some of them end up working, some end up stupidly never working, and some work despite her by being reapplied by other (saner) designers, or only end up working because of massive doctrinal changes learned the hard way by better tacticians. She's not a genius in the sense that everything she comes up with works great. She's an iconoclast with a bunch of ideas, and no real clue how any will work out in practice, or integrate into a larger tactical doctrine.

She comes up with a ton of ideas, and by Operation Buttercup, her better ideas merge together into a realistic tactical doctrine...in part based heavily on Honor's tactical experience with her misbegotten ideas. LAC carriers and SD(P)s both come straight out of the Wayfarer's battle history in Silesia, and that was all based on Honor's tactical ingenuity and inventiveness with a sandwich of ice cream and shit.

[StarSword]

[quote="Ahriman238]Honor's report to the Weapons Development Board is something of a noodle incident, it's mentioned a couple times in the next few books, but never shown. When it is mentioned it's always in the context of "tactless Harrington sure made a lot of enemies that time at the Weapons Development Board." Or oblique references to publicly humiliating Admiral Hemphill. On the other hand, at least one person (Mark Sarnow, if you need a name) seems to think she was never less than polite and professional, and it's hardly her fault if her conclusions did not match some members of the board's.

It's very much possible to be extremely professional and polite while ripping someone to shreds:

"...At this point, standard tactics would have been to introduce a sixty-degree yaw on our base course and launch full broadsides at Sirius's stern. Based on chase missile performance during the action, I estimate that the mission could have been accomplished, with crippling impeller damage to Sirius, within approximately five to six broadsides. However, this was impossible, due to HMS Fearless's extremely weak missile armament, forcing upon us what might be called the tactics of desperation, and resulting in the deaths of at least [insert double digit number here] of the men and women under my command."

[looks very, very calmly at Adm. Hemphill][/quote][/quote]
Yes, we know it's possible for most people to do that. But you have to factor in Honor's well-documented issues with temper control at this time, which leads you to wonder if she, specifically, can manage it. Then again, she would probably have rehearsed it beforehand.

[Ahriman238]

I am familiar with the Ballroom and Torch, and dimly recall mention that Cathy used to rub elbows with an ASL before getting booted from the House of Lords for knowing Jeremy X. Still don't remember a BSC, though a covert Beowulf group funding and aiding the Ballroom would not be out of place. Probably another element added after I stopped reading.


Incidentally, the excellent short story With One Stone by Timothy Zahn takes place between the first and second books. Fearless II is testing the new equipment and personnel hunting pirates in Silesia, generally having a grand old time when Rafe Cardones is called away for detached duty, very hush-hush secret mission. By Admiral Hemphill, no less.

It seems Haven has either invented, or more likely purchased a shiny new superweapon called the Crippler, believed to be some sort of super grav lance, which can conk out not just a sidewall, but an entire wedge from a million klicks out. The BC PNS Vanguard seems to be testing this system, having hit 8 Manty freighters in Silesian space. As an expert on grav lances, the only man to ever fire one in anger, Rafe gets seconded to Hemphill's Tech Team Four to investigate. The whole thing turns out to be a con from a fly-by-night Sollie salesman. Or rather, the capability is real, the Crippler creates some kind of resonance with the target wedge that overloads the impellers, what the salesman is desperately hiding is that the effect is completely useless against a warship because the twin bands support and stabilize each other. So it's good for stopping couriers, illegal under interstellar law, or freighters already inside missile range, who are plenty vulnerable and will pull over if they have any hope of seeing tomorrow. Probably why the League abandoned that line of research. Anyways, once Rafe and friends have seen it in action and figured out the trick, it takes them all of a few days to design a workaround that will restore impeller drive just five minutes after being knocked out that way.

Honor gets her own adventure playing diplomat to the Andermani, forming a temporary alliance to chase rumors of the Peep supership in the area, kicking pirate ass and, at one point having a somewhat civil conversation with a Silesian rebel insisting to board the ships she's escorting and search for "shredders." Apparently banned pulser dart variants meant for turning large crowds of unarmored protesters into large quantities of finely shredded meat. Which makes me wonder how much nastier can pulsers get?

Also, twice in this story warships convincingly imitate merchantmen by dailing down their wedges and keeping the acceleration to what a freighter can do, and both times it works to sucker the other side in.

Also, Honor is now known as the Butcher of Basilisk, a name given by Public Information.

In the climax all the threads come together as the Vanguard and a second ship (a captured Andermani cruiser, run by a prize crew) raid a convoy Fearless is covering, which includes the incognito Tech Team Four, testing their counter to the Crippler. It works, and the team leader wants to sit on it and let Haven spend as much time and money as they can on a weapon Manticore already has a counter to. But Rafe disobeys orders to bring the wedge back up and distract Vanguard, so Honor doesn't get into another hopeless fight with a ship that severely outclasses her.

Then they disable the safeties, kill the inertial compensator, abandon ship and program their freighter for a kamikaze run on Vanguard at 2000 Gs acceleration. The two whips die in wedge-on-wedge leading to total overload of ther fusion reactors. Here the wedges extend 500 km from the hulls. The light cruiser is captured and returned to the Andermani.

We end with Rafe taking his chewing out from Hemphill, who explains that nothing he, Honor, or any of the crew of Fearless ever do will ever pay the sort of dividend to the kingdom that he passed up by proving to the Peeps that the Crippler isn't a perfect superweapon. Oh, and Honor signals her Andermani allies in the end battle by flickering her wedge in a prearranged pattern, and the end strongly implies this is what gave Hemphill the idea for FTL comm.

[Xon]

There's about half a dozen sentient or near sentient alien species, none of them remotely close to spaceflight capability. One short story, however, mentions ruins of a distinct interstellar civilization, the Alphane, of great interest to achaeologists. At present, there are no known, active, interstellar aliens.

Point of order, Treecats are the only known-to-readers intersteller aliens. That they use the Manticore Navy are thier personal transport service, and so far only have one extra-Manticore colony is beside the point.

Nimitz before he hooked up with Honor was a drug-runner. The spice celery must flow.

[Irbis]

I think those were direct hits, while the hits on Thunder of God were proximity explosions (IIRC a "contact hit" in the Honerverse means the nuke contacted the sidewall, not the hull.

No. Two of her missiles do ram the sidewall and explode, but the rest used "sidewall penetrators" and exploded on hull:

Two of them vanished in sun-bright fireballs that shook Thunder to her keel as twin, 78-ton hammers struck her sidewall at .25 C. For all their fury, those two were harmless, but their sisters’ sidewall penetrators functioned as designed.

Thunder of God took four nukes to the side and it didn't even took all guns and shield projectors on that one.

On a side note, either Weber or Haven programmers have no idea what a randomizer is.

There's about half a dozen sentient or near sentient alien species, none of them remotely close to spaceflight capability. One short story, however, mentions ruins of a distinct interstellar civilization, the Alphane, of great interest to achaeologists. At present, there are no known, active, interstellar aliens.

Spoiler

Technically, one story features aliens with very advanced technology who are implied to still have some grasp of it but IIRC it's non-Weber one and thus possibly non-canon.

If I recall correctly, the fleet at Grendelsbane is unfinished. With no sidewalls, rad shielding, or even a completed armor matrix, the nukes could detonate exactly where they'd do the most damage, as opposed to where they had the luck to be able to strike.

Not really 'unfinished'. They were target of scramble finish project, at least half were described as being in fitting-out stations, thus finished, and upon second reading, Manty admiral also blows up several complete SDs, that were undergoing refit or repairs. That's why government had to resign, due to losses in virtually battle-worthy hulls.

The problem is, if Thunder of God can withstand 4 nukes, why SD(p) cannot one? The goal of that bombardment was to deny Haven not hulls, but technology - grav emitters, sensors, computers, ECM, the whole suite. With just nuking them, Haven should have been able to salvage virtually dozens of examples of everything, and that newest samples, given at least 100+ capital ships hulls/wrecks they captured. Yet, they didn't, and all ships are treated as vaporized.

Something that should have been colossal victory and led to Haven using Manticore technology in at least some fields in At All Costs gets wiped out of existence, like that idiotic retcon to end of Echoes of Honor when it turns out what we read in last book wasn't what actually happened

And I don't know where Irbis gets 'one nuke per ship' from. There's no mention of exactly how many warheads were used in those ships' destruction that I can recall.

Maybe I actually read the book?

"We don't have time to set demolition charges, Juliet. So I want you to lay in a fire plan. As we pull out, I want an old-fashioned nuke on top of every building slip, every immobile ship, every fabrication center. Everything. The only thing you don't hit are the personnel platforms. You understand me?"

Not only 'an' nuke, but the simple fact he had minutes to spare and the constructed fleet alone outweighed bombarding force 25-to-1, never mind all the infrastructure he also had to bombard, means there is no way in hell he could devote much more than one missile to each target.

Not to mention analysis beforehand in this thread has a point, if nukes are virtually obsolete for 6 books now, just where he got even one nuke per target (minimum 170+ ships, and at least twice that in shipyards), never mind more you imply?

[Black Admiral]

I think those were direct hits, while the hits on Thunder of God were proximity explosions (IIRC a "contact hit" in the Honerverse means the nuke contacted the sidewall, not the hull.

No. Two of her missiles do ram the sidewall and explode, but the rest used "sidewall penetrators" and exploded on hull:

Two of them vanished in sun-bright fireballs that shook Thunder to her keel as twin, 78-ton hammers struck her sidewall at .25 C. For all their fury, those two were harmless, but their sisters’ sidewall penetrators functioned as designed.

Thunder of God took four nukes to the side and it didn't even took all guns and shield projectors on that one.

No, Thunder of God took two indirect nuke hits (Honor's narration noting that "[Cardones] hadn't scored direct hits" (THOTQ, pg. 400) - six missiles, two shot down ("One of the six died, then another, but the final quartet came on", same source), two impacting on Thunder's sidewall, and the last two detonating successfully.

On a side note, either Weber or Haven programmers have no idea what a randomizer is.

More likely the Masadans simply have no clue how to work Thunder's EW suite the way it's supposed to be operated.

[Terralthra]

I think those were direct hits, while the hits on Thunder of God were proximity explosions (IIRC a "contact hit" in the Honerverse means the nuke contacted the sidewall, not the hull.

No. Two of her missiles do ram the sidewall and explode, but the rest used "sidewall penetrators" and exploded on hull:

Two of them vanished in sun-bright fireballs that shook Thunder to her keel as twin, 78-ton hammers struck her sidewall at .25 C. For all their fury, those two were harmless, but their sisters’ sidewall penetrators functioned as designed.

Thunder of God took four nukes to the side and it didn't even took all guns and shield projectors on that one.

On a side note, either Weber or Haven programmers have no idea what a randomizer is.

Or EW is way more complicated than that, and even the best pseudo-random number generator we have is predictable over a long enough time, with sufficient computation devoted to it.

Also, Thunder of God takes two missiles, not four, and the narration is clear that they penetrate the sidewall, but they do not detonate in hull contact.

If I recall correctly, the fleet at Grendelsbane is unfinished. With no sidewalls, rad shielding, or even a completed armor matrix, the nukes could detonate exactly where they'd do the most damage, as opposed to where they had the luck to be able to strike.

Not really 'unfinished'. They were target of scramble finish project, at least half were described as being in fitting-out stations, thus finished, and upon second reading, Manty admiral also blows up several complete SDs, that were undergoing refit or repairs. That's why government had to resign, due to losses in virtually battle-worthy hulls.

The problem is, if Thunder of God can withstand 4 nukes, why SD(p) cannot one? The goal of that bombardment was to deny Haven not hulls, but technology - grav emitters, sensors, computers, ECM, the whole suite. With just nuking them, Haven should have been able to salvage virtually dozens of examples of everything, and that newest samples, given at least 100+ capital ships hulls/wrecks they captured. Yet, they didn't, and all ships are treated as vaporized.

As I said earlier, a nuke through the sidewall and detonated isn't necessarily as powerful as "a nuke that we put exactly where we want it." Plus, the SD missiles, possibly Ghost Rider (can't remember for sure), are presumably much more powerful than single-stage cruiser missiles from 20 years prior, and have correspondingly more powerful warheads.

Something that should have been colossal victory and led to Haven using Manticore technology in at least some fields in At All Costs gets wiped out of existence, like that idiotic retcon to end of Echoes of Honor when it turns out what we read in last book wasn't what actually happened

Eh? What retcon is that?

And I don't know where Irbis gets 'one nuke per ship' from. There's no mention of exactly how many warheads were used in those ships' destruction that I can recall.

Maybe I actually read the book?

"We don't have time to set demolition charges, Juliet. So I want you to lay in a fire plan. As we pull out, I want an old-fashioned nuke on top of every building slip, every immobile ship, every fabrication center. Everything. The only thing you don't hit are the personnel platforms. You understand me?"

Not only 'an' nuke, but the simple fact he had minutes to spare and the constructed fleet alone outweighed bombarding force 25-to-1, never mind all the infrastructure he also had to bombard, means there is no way in hell he could devote much more than one missile to each target.

Not to mention analysis beforehand in this thread has a point, if nukes are virtually obsolete for 6 books now, just where he got even one nuke per target (minimum 170+ ships, and at least twice that in shipyards), never mind more you imply?

46+27 SD(P)s, 19 CLACs, and 53 lighter ships, is 145. Let's triple that to account for building slips, fabrication centers, etc. So, 435. Triple that for multiples targeting everything, let's say, so roughly 1300 nukes. Adm. Higgins had two squadrons of SDs, pre-pod. Just as a guess, let's say they're Gryphon class. Gryphons mount 174 missile tubes. 16 Gryphons can thus fire ~2784 missiles in a single alpha-strike.

1300 missiles required. 2784 per salvo. You don't think that between them, Higgins' ships had 1 nuke per 2 tubes?

The King William class had only 80 launchers per SD, and their magazines contained 9600 missiles. If all of his SDs had been King William class, he could still (barely) have saturated the shipyard with missiles in a broadside (1280 firing an all-ship alpha strike, just the SDs, not the BC screen), and to make every missile in that salvo a nuke would require devoting just 0.8% of the total magazine capacity to nukes. Less than one missile in a hundred.

I don't think you have actually done the math to support your assertion that there's no way they had enough missiles.

Aside: this is on top of the fact that the laser head missiles are still nukes. It'd be a simple fire control command to turn off the lasing rod system in favor of letting the nuke be a nuke.

[Irbis]

No, Thunder of God took two indirect nuke hits (Honor's narration noting that "[Cardones] hadn't scored direct hits" (THOTQ, pg. 400) - six missiles, two shot down ("One of the six died, then another, but the final quartet came on", same source), two impacting on Thunder's sidewall, and the last two detonating successfully.

Ok, two (I mistook them for the EW missiles at first) but ToG still took 2 nukes on unshielded area.

More likely the Masadans simply have no clue how to work Thunder's EW suite the way it's supposed to be operated.

Why, yes, but the very idea that computer defence put on full auto would repeat the exact same scheme every 6.6 minutes is preposterous. Had it been explained as humans subconsciously repeating that, sure, but somehow to Weber humans are capable of random patterns, computers are not.

By the way, Cardones picking up on 6.6 min long pattern is also implausible - humans are very likely to find non-existent pattern in something that long, while computers are good in finding real patterns. Again, to Weber, opposite seems to be true. His computers always seem to work better when "corrected" by humans which even today isn't true.

It's very much possible to be extremely professional and polite while ripping someone to shreds:

"...At this point, standard tactics would have been to introduce a sixty-degree yaw on our base course and launch full broadsides at Sirius's stern. Based on chase missile performance during the action, I estimate that the mission could have been accomplished, with crippling impeller damage to Sirius, within approximately five to six broadsides. However, this was impossible, due to HMS Fearless's extremely weak missile armament, forcing upon us what might be called the tactics of desperation, and resulting in the deaths of at least [insert double digit number here] of the men and women under my command."

[looks very, very calmly at Adm. Hemphill]

Example reply:

Hemphill: *folds hands* We ran bath of twelve million simulations concerning said course of action and estimated chance of stern hit to be mere 0.012%. In addition, had the HMS Fearless commander did not desperately cling to Saganami-era tactic despite her ship armament being completely unsuited for it, but went after Sirius first, instead of ramming courier boat she could have easily stopped with carried shuttles instead, the likelihood of crippling or forcing Sirius to surrender with zero-life loss would be 86%. Dismissed, ...captain.

That's my problem with Honor. She often engages in pointless fights that could have been avoided, getting a lot of her crew killed in process, and is never chewed for that in return. Not even by opposing side, which uses dumbest, weakest smear they can think of instead.

I'm pretty sure that Honor would have been able to accomplish her mission just by getting into missile range and tossing broadsides into Sirius's stern. She didn't need to destroy the Q-ship, just immobilize it by damaging one or more of its alpha nodes. Given how easily she was able to hit the Q-ship with two-missile salvoes, I'm quite sure that a few seven-missile launches of standard nukes would have been able to do the necessary damage to Sirius's stern section.

She hit the target the size of Superdreadnought. Trying to hit something less than 1/100 volume of that with just 7 more missiles would be "Hail Mary" tactic extremely unlikely to work. It was 80 year old ship, not Apollo platform, all it would do would be one light cruiser silhouette painted on Q-Ships bridge wall after the final salvo, IMHO.

In general, Hemphill's ideas were always dartboard in nature. Some of them end up working, some end up stupidly never working, and some work despite her by being reapplied by other (saner) designers, or only end up working because of massive doctrinal changes learned the hard way by better tacticians. She's not a genius in the sense that everything she comes up with works great. She's an iconoclast with a bunch of ideas, and no real clue how any will work out in practice, or integrate into a larger tactical doctrine.

By "some" you mean the fact that Hemphill pretty much wins the war for Manticore, twice, first by making Buttercup possible, then by pulling Apollo out of her behind when war isn't lost only due to Haven's tardiness?

And let me give you a quote produced by "better tactician" regarding her work:
Spoiler

"I realize that your stint on the Board was brief, Milady, but just look at some of its proposals." He ticked the points off on the fingers of his raised hand. "First, it wants us to radically redesign our ships of the wall to produce a totally untested class. Next, it wants us to accelerate the construction of light attack craft, when we've demonstrated just about conclusively that even modern LACs are no match, ton-for-ton, for properly designed starships, even in a defensive role. Then it wants us to divert something like ten percent of our building capacity from superdreadnoughts and dreadnoughts—and this, mind you, at a time when the Peeps' building rates in those same classes are going up—to build these so-called 'LAC-carriers' in order to transport light attack craft across interstellar distances as offensive units, not defensive ones. Not content with that, it wants to strip the missile tubes out of our existing ships of the wall and replace them with launchers which will use up twelve percent more weapons volume and fire missiles whose size effectively reduces magazine capacity by eighteen percent?" He shook his head.

That was White Haven commenting on SD(P), LAC/cLAC, and MDM. My goodness, why they didn't listen to him and put these useless, twelve percent larger missiles with eighteen percent less ammunition into action?

She comes up with a ton of ideas, and by Operation Buttercup, her better ideas merge together into a realistic tactical doctrine...in part based heavily on Honor's tactical experience with her misbegotten ideas. LAC carriers and SD(P)s both come straight out of the Wayfarer's battle history in Silesia, and that was all based on Honor's tactical ingenuity and inventiveness with a sandwich of ice cream and shit.

So, you say Honor after being given cLAC with MDM pod capability...

...formulated doctrine on using cLACs and MDM capability.

Somehow it looks like egg was before chicken here.

Though, granted, unlike White Haven she managed to look past the end of her nose. Great success!

[Jedipilot24]

Example reply:
Hemphill: *folds hands* We ran bath of twelve million simulations concerning said course of action and estimated chance of stern hit to be mere 0.012%. In addition, had the HMS Fearless commander did not desperately cling to Saganami-era tactic despite her ship armament being completely unsuited for it, but went after Sirius first, instead of ramming courier boat she could have easily stopped with carried shuttles instead, the likelihood of crippling or forcing Sirius to surrender with zero-life loss would be 86%. Dismissed, ...captain.

The courier boat had diplomatic immunity, which means that Honor couldn't just drop shuttles to board it; trying would have made an even bigger diplomatic stink that her actual actions did.
And I don't see how ignoring the courier bout would have bought Honor any significantly increased chances against Sirius, or what other tactics she could have used given her ships current armament mix. And you ignore the fact that Honor was already making those stern hits with only two missiles; seven would have significantly increased the odds.

That's my problem with Honor. She often engages in pointless fights that could have been avoided, getting a lot of her crew killed in process, and is never chewed for that in return. Not even by opposing side, which uses dumbest, weakest smear they can think of instead.

You haven't shown any better ideas.

She hit the target the size of Superdreadnought. Trying to hit something less than 1/100 volume of that with just 7 more missiles would be "Hail Mary" tactic extremely unlikely to work. It was 80 year old ship, not Apollo platform, all it would do would be one light cruiser silhouette painted on Q-Ships bridge wall after the final salvo, IMHO..

This is total nonsense; Honor was already very effective against Sirius with only two missile salvos and yet you claim that her being able to shoot more missiles would somehow lead her to being less effective? That makes no sense, particularly since Coglin himself was fearing just such a tactic because he had no way of knowing about Fearless' refit.

By "some" you mean the fact that Hemphill pretty much wins the war for Manticore, twice, first by making Buttercup possible, then by pulling Apollo out of her behind when war isn't lost only due to Haven's tardiness?

And let me give you a quote produced by "better tactician" regarding her work:
Spoiler

"I realize that your stint on the Board was brief, Milady, but just look at some of its proposals." He ticked the points off on the fingers of his raised hand. "First, it wants us to radically redesign our ships of the wall to produce a totally untested class. Next, it wants us to accelerate the construction of light attack craft, when we've demonstrated just about conclusively that even modern LACs are no match, ton-for-ton, for properly designed starships, even in a defensive role. Then it wants us to divert something like ten percent of our building capacity from superdreadnoughts and dreadnoughts—and this, mind you, at a time when the Peeps' building rates in those same classes are going up—to build these so-called 'LAC-carriers' in order to transport light attack craft across interstellar distances as offensive units, not defensive ones. Not content with that, it wants to strip the missile tubes out of our existing ships of the wall and replace them with launchers which will use up twelve percent more weapons volume and fire missiles whose size effectively reduces magazine capacity by eighteen percent?" He shook his head.

That was White Haven commenting on SD(P), LAC/cLAC, and MDM. My goodness, why they didn't listen to him and put these useless, twelve percent larger missiles with eighteen percent less ammunition into action? ..

Actually, if you read In Enemy Hands, Honor rips White Haven a new one and explains that what he's criticizing are her recommendations, not Hemphill's. Hemphill had a lot to do in making them possible, granted, but the whole point of Honor's stint on the WDB was to give the development programs the benefit Honor's combat experience. In fact, Hemphill was actually opposed to the new missile pods because they were an antiquated idea and Hemphill tends to equate 'old' with 'outdated'.

She comes up with a ton of ideas, and by Operation Buttercup, her better ideas merge together into a realistic tactical doctrine...in part based heavily on Honor's tactical experience with her misbegotten ideas. LAC carriers and SD(P)s both come straight out of the Wayfarer's battle history in Silesia, and that was all based on Honor's tactical ingenuity and inventiveness with a sandwich of ice cream and shit.

So, you say Honor after being given cLAC with MDM pod capability...

...formulated doctrine on using cLACs and MDM capability.

Somehow it looks like egg was before chicken here.

Though, granted, unlike White Haven she managed to look past the end of her nose. Great success!

.[/quote]

Actually it was Honor who came up with the idea for CLACs and SD(p)s based on her Silesia experience using a Q-ship that had possessed both such capabilities. All she would have had to say is "Well if we can do this with a Q-ship, why can't we do this with real warships?" Honor, at one point in Silesia, fires so many pod missiles that she actually manages to one-shot a BC; horrible overkill, but said BC was a Sultan and Honor knew too well how deadly those could be. She probably thought sometime afterward "Well if my Q-ship could do that, why not a real warship?" She explains all this to White Haven in 'In Enemy Hands'.
MDM's were from an entirely separate project.

[Irbis]

The courier boat had diplomatic immunity, which means that Honor couldn't just drop shuttles to board it; trying would have made an even bigger diplomatic stink that her actual actions did.

A) I am pretty sure whatever diplomatic immunity it had also extended to being rammed by military ships, B) Honor said she doesn't care for its immunity, C) Quite a lot of post-Basilisk mess was tied to fact Manticore had no proof of Haven wrongdoing. Had the boarding party entered the ship immediately, they could have found one and force Haven to much better concessions.

And I don't see how ignoring the courier bout would have bought Honor any significantly increased chances against Sirius, or what other tactics she could have used given her ships current armament mix. And you ignore the fact that Honor was already making those stern hits with only two missiles; seven would have significantly increased the odds.

Increased chanced by catching it earlier and enduring less fire? If she wanted to stop it from running, she picked her initial position terribly. As for 7 missiles, you forget that her own estimate said she could only fire broadsides by weaving, slowing down significantly and allowing Sirius to open distance. It's quite possibly doing that would just enable it to run and make incident worse for Manticore and Honor.

You haven't shown any better ideas.

Not engage in them?

Yes, she had solid reasons for some, but for most others, it's just her blind charge at whatever enemy presents itself for weakest reasons. Even that story with 'crippler' above lampshades it. Had she received critique for some, it would be understandable, but all she gets are lavish praises, medals, kicks up the charge rank, nobility titles, fortune in money, and other insignificant things like that.

To me, straw that broke camel's back was that she managed to convince religious fundamentalists into voluntarily changing religion for her sake without asking

This is total nonsense; Honor was already very effective against Sirius with only two missile salvos and yet you claim that her being able to shoot more missiles would somehow lead her to being less effective? That makes no sense, particularly since Coglin himself was fearing just such a tactic because he had no way of knowing about Fearless' refit.

Read again - I said about scoring drive hits. More hits on Sirius sides accomplish exactly nothing, it had toughness to withstand them. All that saved Honor was the fact her ship had capability to blow Sirius up, however remote, take it away and last scene in book is Sirius doing gunnery practice with energy weapons.

Actually, if you read In Enemy Hands, Honor rips White Haven a new one and explains that what he's criticizing are her recommendations, not Hemphill's. Hemphill had a lot to do in making them possible, granted, but the whole point of Honor's stint on the WDB was to give the development programs the benefit Honor's combat experience. In fact, Hemphill was actually opposed to the new missile pods because they were an antiquated idea and Hemphill tends to equate 'old' with 'outdated'.

Unlike you, I did read that, and that was opinion of someone hailed as Manticore's best commander who apparently was too dumb to comprehend meaning of extra zero on missile range. Honor shared the same opinion, until Hemphill beat just how effective her ideas were into Honor's thick skull by giving her opportinity to command a ship with them on board. Honor had zero to do with construction of first MDM pod/LAC carrier, she just managed to grasp what she saw after using it, and converted.

Actually it was Honor who came up with the idea for CLACs and SD(p)s based on her Silesia experience using a Q-ship that had possessed both such capabilities. All she would have had to say is "Well if we can do this with a Q-ship, why can't we do this with real warships?"

And who gave her opportunity to say that by forcing through the construction of said Q-ship, and all weapons that were on board?

In essence, Hemphill proposed turning some of the RMN's standard Caravan-class freighters into armed merchant cruisers. The Caravans were big ships, over seven million tons, but they were slow and unarmored, with civilian-grade drives. Under normal circumstances, they'd be helpless against any proper warship, but Hemphill wanted to outfit them with the heaviest possible firepower and seed them into the Fleet Train convoys laboring to keep Sixth Fleet supplied. The idea was for them to look just like any other freighter until some unwary raider got close, at which point they were supposed to blow him out of space.

Gee, Hemphill hated those MDM pods so much she shipped them all to Silesia

Oh, and White Haven in following paragraph says it has no chance in hell to work at all except on dumbest and weakest pirates, and even then only at first. Good thing Manticore had one intelligent admiral, even if she commanded nothing, otherwise these tactical 'geniuses' would have lost the war by tenth book.

Honor, at one point in Silesia, fires so many pod missiles that she actually manages to one-shot a BC; horrible overkill, but said BC was a Sultan and Honor knew too well how deadly those could be. She probably thought sometime afterward "Well if my Q-ship could do that, why not a real warship?" She explains all this to White Haven in 'In Enemy Hands'.

The very fact that White Haven was unable to comprehend what extra zero on missile range and two zeros on number of missiles meant and insisted on duking it out with Haven using old style, short range ships says volumes about "quality" of Hemphill's critics.

Or EW is way more complicated than that, and even the best pseudo-random number generator we have is predictable over a long enough time, with sufficient computation devoted to it.

Even if so, certainly not by humans. And I'd say even today we can do better than pseudo-random number generator capable of 400 second period.

As I said earlier, a nuke through the sidewall and detonated isn't necessarily as powerful as "a nuke that we put exactly where we want it." Plus, the SD missiles, possibly Ghost Rider (can't remember for sure), are presumably much more powerful than single-stage cruiser missiles from 20 years prior, and have correspondingly more powerful warheads.

Putting aside question why old pre-pod SDs (only ones bombarding force had) still bothered with nuke missiles despite limited magazines, the only real example of nuke hit on big ship we have was Thunder of God. Even if SD missile is more powerful than BC's, SD(P) is going to have far more powerful armour than old BC - and ToG survived with only surface damage. Ok, it was contact hit, but Weber also categorically stated SD is disproportionally better armoured than Battleship, something vastly better armoured than BC in turn (link). Another link, he says SDs carry heavy energy broadside because even SD missiles are relatively ineffective against them. Apparent vaporization just doesn't add up, sorry.

Eh? What retcon is that?

Diamato manages (in very touching scene - that's why the retcon was so bad) to take control over Kellet's battered Battleship force and pulls it out of the battle, very blooded but largely whole, with good recordings of new Manty LACs.

Very next book, we learn it was actually almost annihilated and recordings are worthless, thus McQueen is being laughed behind her back for actually believing what her officers say, we can't have even minor success or advance warning what is coming on Haven's side, no

Also, doing what LACs did (repeated charges into wall of battle) is very good idea to lose them all, while in this book they really are a superweapon.

46+27 SD(P)s, 19 CLACs, and 53 lighter ships, is 145. Let's triple that to account for building slips, fabrication centers, etc. So, 435. Triple that for multiples targeting everything, let's say, so roughly 1300 nukes. Adm. Higgins had two squadrons of SDs, pre-pod. Just as a guess, let's say they're Gryphon class. Gryphons mount 174 missile tubes. 16 Gryphons can thus fire ~2784 missiles in a single alpha-strike.

145 is only new, still constructed ships. The admiral in command says they also have to destroy all older, finished ships that are now undergoing repair or refit, adding a bit to it. He also mentions forts defending shipyard, useless against Haven's MDMs.

1300 missiles required. 2784 per salvo. You don't think that between them, Higgins' ships had 1 nuke per 2 tubes?

The King William class had only 80 launchers per SD, and their magazines contained 9600 missiles. If all of his SDs had been King William class, he could still (barely) have saturated the shipyard with missiles in a broadside (1280 firing an all-ship alpha strike, just the SDs, not the BC screen), and to make every missile in that salvo a nuke would require devoting just 0.8% of the total magazine capacity to nukes. Less than one missile in a hundred.

I don't think you have actually done the math to support your assertion that there's no way they had enough missiles.

IIRC, in another brilliant example of Weber's universe constructor's ingenuity only new Manticoran ships like Hexapuma have 'advanced' technology to actually fire from both sides, so just adding up all tubes is wildly optimistic, if only due to limited telemetry.

Upping your numbers above to account for repaired ships and forts (which were also destroyed as they were not MDM capable but had new tech on them) we have 2000+ missiles needed. seeing Higgins didn't send his SDs with SD(p)s to be destroyed, they had to be really old, obsolete ships (Grendelsbane was in deep rear, after all). Assuming King William class has 30 tubes per board, 16 ships of KW class would need 5+ salvos to cover that much. Adding reach chasers, we can cut it to 4+, but still, he has his whole fleet firing continuously as he flees, and he still managed to work only tiny redundancy in case something goes wrong to put a single missile per target. If anything, the numbers above confirm he really couldn't devote much more than a handful of missiles per target while escaping.

And I like how Gryphon can simply double King William's class launchers on platform of the same size. Assuming it's not a typo, again, consistency is really strong here

Aside: this is on top of the fact that the laser head missiles are still nukes. It'd be a simple fire control command to turn off the lasing rod system in favor of letting the nuke be a nuke.

Ok, that is actually very plausible, but still, laser warhead used lengthwise on an SD should produce larger damage than just nuke, especially if you can hit with all lasers on your leisure. And if you just nuke them, why not nuke + lase? No, I think that's not what Weber meant.

[Jedipilot24]

The courier boat had diplomatic immunity, which means that Honor couldn't just drop shuttles to board it; trying would have made an even bigger diplomatic stink that her actual actions did.

A) I am pretty sure whatever diplomatic immunity it had also extended to being rammed by military ships, B) Honor said she doesn't care for its immunity, C) Quite a lot of post-Basilisk mess was tied to fact Manticore had no proof of Haven wrongdoing. Had the boarding party entered the ship immediately, they could have found one and force Haven to much better concessions.

And I don't see how ignoring the courier bout would have bought Honor any significantly increased chances against Sirius, or what other tactics she could have used given her ships current armament mix. And you ignore the fact that Honor was already making those stern hits with only two missiles; seven would have significantly increased the odds.

Increased chanced by catching it earlier and enduring less fire? If she wanted to stop it from running, she picked her initial position terribly. As for 7 missiles, you forget that her own estimate said she could only fire broadsides by weaving, slowing down significantly and allowing Sirius to open distance. It's quite possibly doing that would just enable it to run and make incident worse for Manticore and Honor.

You haven't shown any better ideas.

Not engage in them?

Yes, she had solid reasons for some, but for most others, it's just her blind charge at whatever enemy presents itself for weakest reasons. Even that story with 'crippler' above lampshades it. Had she received critique for some, it would be understandable, but all she gets are lavish praises, medals, kicks up the charge rank, nobility titles, fortune in money, and other insignificant things like that.

To me, straw that broke camel's back was that she managed to convince religious fundamentalists into voluntarily changing religion for her sake without asking

This is total nonsense; Honor was already very effective against Sirius with only two missile salvos and yet you claim that her being able to shoot more missiles would somehow lead her to being less effective? That makes no sense, particularly since Coglin himself was fearing just such a tactic because he had no way of knowing about Fearless' refit.

Read again - I said about scoring drive hits. More hits on Sirius sides accomplish exactly nothing, it had toughness to withstand them. All that saved Honor was the fact her ship had capability to blow Sirius up, however remote, take it away and last scene in book is Sirius doing gunnery practice with energy weapons.

Actually, if you read In Enemy Hands, Honor rips White Haven a new one and explains that what he's criticizing are her recommendations, not Hemphill's. Hemphill had a lot to do in making them possible, granted, but the whole point of Honor's stint on the WDB was to give the development programs the benefit Honor's combat experience. In fact, Hemphill was actually opposed to the new missile pods because they were an antiquated idea and Hemphill tends to equate 'old' with 'outdated'.

Unlike you, I did read that, and that was opinion of someone hailed as Manticore's best commander who apparently was too dumb to comprehend meaning of extra zero on missile range. Honor shared the same opinion, until Hemphill beat just how effective her ideas were into Honor's thick skull by giving her opportinity to command a ship with them on board. Honor had zero to do with construction of first MDM pod/LAC carrier, she just managed to grasp what she saw after using it, and converted.

Actually it was Honor who came up with the idea for CLACs and SD(p)s based on her Silesia experience using a Q-ship that had possessed both such capabilities. All she would have had to say is "Well if we can do this with a Q-ship, why can't we do this with real warships?"

And who gave her opportunity to say that by forcing through the construction of said Q-ship, and all weapons that were on board?

In essence, Hemphill proposed turning some of the RMN's standard Caravan-class freighters into armed merchant cruisers. The Caravans were big ships, over seven million tons, but they were slow and unarmored, with civilian-grade drives. Under normal circumstances, they'd be helpless against any proper warship, but Hemphill wanted to outfit them with the heaviest possible firepower and seed them into the Fleet Train convoys laboring to keep Sixth Fleet supplied. The idea was for them to look just like any other freighter until some unwary raider got close, at which point they were supposed to blow him out of space.

Gee, Hemphill hated those MDM pods so much she shipped them all to Silesia

Oh, and White Haven in following paragraph says it has no chance in hell to work at all except on dumbest and weakest pirates, and even then only at first. Good thing Manticore had one intelligent admiral, even if she commanded nothing, otherwise these tactical 'geniuses' would have lost the war by tenth book.

Honor, at one point in Silesia, fires so many pod missiles that she actually manages to one-shot a BC; horrible overkill, but said BC was a Sultan and Honor knew too well how deadly those could be. She probably thought sometime afterward "Well if my Q-ship could do that, why not a real warship?" She explains all this to White Haven in 'In Enemy Hands'.

The very fact that White Haven was unable to comprehend what extra zero on missile range and two zeros on number of missiles meant and insisted on duking it out with Haven using old style, short range ships says volumes about "quality" of Hemphill's critics.

Once again you confuse the MDM missile with the missile pods and the pod-laying system. They all started out as different programs and Hemphill initially opposed the new missile pods because the launchers used in them were intended for LAC's; NOT the Shrikes but the predecessors to the LAC's that were used in Silesia; get your facts straight. Honor didn't use MDM's in Silesia because MDM's didn't even exist when Wayfarer was converted but she did use missile pods with normal missiles, which had been in use since the war began and whose utility even White Haven acknowledged. I'll reiterate, it's mentioned in 'Short Victorious War' that Hemphill had initially opposed the new missile pod.

Are you seriously trying to argue that Honor should have just ignored Sirius when it departed WITHOUT PERMISSION from the traffic control center? That's a pretty serious violation, especially since for all Honor knew Sirius was departing in order to BRING the Haven fleet in. Even if the Haven fleet didn't arrive, Honor would still have faced some pretty serious questions if she had ignored Sirius.
You keep saying that Honor should have tried to get into energy range to use her grav-lance/energy torpedoes sooner and conveniently overlook that even accelerating full out with no safety margins, she never got into energy range until Sirius TURNED AROUND to attack her ship after it had been all but crippled by missile fire. Saving a few seconds by ignoring the courier boat would not have changed that.

[Mr Bean]

Aside: this is on top of the fact that the laser head missiles are still nukes. It'd be a simple fire control command to turn off the lasing rod system in favor of letting the nuke be a nuke.

Ok, that is actually very plausible, but still, laser warhead used lengthwise on an SD should produce larger damage than just nuke, especially if you can hit with all lasers on your leisure. And if you just nuke them, why not nuke + lase? No, I think that's not what Weber meant.

Note contact nukes are something like eight times the size of laser nukes since the pop off head, the laser guidance systems and the cones to focus the explosion into lasers all take up space. The one shot hyperwave generator to reflect as much force back forward also takes up space. I believe the tonnages go from 8 megaton laser heads for cruisers and below with 15 megaton heads for ships of the line. Post Buttercup the missile warheads start increasing all the way up to 40 megatons for a laser head with 200 megaton contact nukes in use at this point.

My memory might be faulty but that's what I'm remembering.

[Ahriman238]

In fairness to Honor's actions in the short story, attacking the people who are attacking your convoy is sort of the point to convoy escort. I'm not sure whether or not you can realistically win really enters into it. It probably doesn't, given the RMN tradition of getting all self-sacrificial to protect your convoys.

[Simon_Jester]

[review of With One Stone]
We end with Rafe taking his chewing out from Hemphill, who explains that nothing he, Honor, or any of the crew of Fearless ever do will ever pay the sort of dividend to the kingdom that he passed up by proving to the Peeps that the Crippler isn't a perfect superweapon. Oh, and Honor signals her Andermani allies in the end battle by flickering her wedge in a prearranged pattern, and the end strongly implies this is what gave Hemphill the idea for FTL comm.

Realistically, the FTL comm had to have been in development longer than that, IMO; real weapon systems take more than one year to reach production viability.

Also, this is an example of how Hemphill views war in terms of weapons, not people: from her perspective, you win by teching up and piling up the best possible combination of weapons, while hopefully forcing your enemy to operate with inferior weapons. This helps to explain why she's in charge of the Bureau of Weapons, as opposed to a fleet command; it takes maximum advantage of her strengths, while restraining and limiting the effects of her weaknesses.

Yes, we know it's possible for most people to do that. But you have to factor in Honor's well-documented issues with temper control at this time, which leads you to wonder if she, specifically, can manage it. Then again, she would probably have rehearsed it beforehand.

At this stage in her career she's still trailing the Awkward in Public Speaking label, so she almost certainly would. In general, Honor is very professional except when her temper overrules her, at which point she goes apeshit. The only time this ever happened for a sustained period, though, was in Field of Dishonor, where she basically spends the second half of the book in a coldly violent state of berserkergang.

Notably, even HMS Nike had plasma energy torpedo launchers (two in each broadside, if I recall correctly), on the rare circumstance that it gets into energy range with an enemy ship whose sidewall is down, or gets a throat/kilt shot. Likewise, the pod-launchers that BatCruRon 5 use to blow a hole in Rear Admiral Chin's DN squadron at First Hancock are only possible because of the missile launcher miniaturization project that Hemphill initiated. She was trying to get full-size missiles down to fit in her LAC swarm idea, but the fruits ended up in another area.

In general, Hemphill's ideas were always dartboard in nature. Some of them end up working, some end up stupidly never working, and some work despite her by being reapplied by other (saner) designers, or only end up working because of massive doctrinal changes learned the hard way by better tacticians. She's not a genius in the sense that everything she comes up with works great. She's an iconoclast with a bunch of ideas, and no real clue how any will work out in practice, or integrate into a larger tactical doctrine.

Oh absolutely, this is all correct, though I suspect that the "Buttercup" innovations would still have come together in a reasonable amount of time even if Honor had never participated in the program. She's presented as Manticore's best tactician, but not its only good one.

On a side note, either Weber or Haven programmers have no idea what a randomizer is.

The computer defaults are an 'idiot mode;' even Havenite crews can and will perform vastly better under normal conditions. It seems quite plausible that the computer default setting is just five minutes of pre-recorded EW patterns, which are loaded into the system purely so that the ship's systems will be able to do something if for whatever reason direct control is lost for a few minutes (hit on the bridge, glitch in the control runs, EWO has a heart attack). In that case, it would never have been designed to run for more than a short period, and the Masadans are badly abusing it by making it run over and over in a repeating loop.

And yet that still works better than having the Masadans ignorantly crowding around the control station trying frantically to look up what to do in the online help manual while incoming missiles pound on them.

If I recall correctly, the fleet at Grendelsbane is unfinished. With no sidewalls, rad shielding, or even a completed armor matrix, the nukes could detonate exactly where they'd do the most damage, as opposed to where they had the luck to be able to strike.

Not really 'unfinished'. They were target of scramble finish project, at least half were described as being in fitting-out stations, thus finished, and upon second reading, Manty admiral also blows up several complete SDs, that were undergoing refit or repairs. That's why government had to resign, due to losses in virtually battle-worthy hulls.

The problem is, if Thunder of God can withstand 4 nukes, why SD(p) cannot one? The goal of that bombardment was to deny Haven not hulls, but technology - grav emitters, sensors, computers, ECM, the whole suite. With just nuking them, Haven should have been able to salvage virtually dozens of examples of everything, and that newest samples, given at least 100+ capital ships hulls/wrecks they captured. Yet, they didn't, and all ships are treated as vaporized.

And I don't know where Irbis gets 'one nuke per ship' from. There's no mention of exactly how many warheads were used in those ships' destruction that I can recall.

Maybe I actually read the book?

"We don't have time to set demolition charges, Juliet. So I want you to lay in a fire plan. As we pull out, I want an old-fashioned nuke on top of every building slip, every immobile ship, every fabrication center. Everything. The only thing you don't hit are the personnel platforms. You understand me?"

Not only 'an' nuke, but the simple fact he had minutes to spare and the constructed fleet alone outweighed bombarding force 25-to-1, never mind all the infrastructure he also had to bombard, means there is no way in hell he could devote much more than one missile to each target.

Are you kidding me?

Higgins is not an idiot, nor are his staffers, he knows how durable his own ships are, and any sane person would interpret his order to mean "lay sufficient firepower on those ships to destroy their salvage value and wreck their systems, so that the Havenites can't get much out of them that they couldn't figure out anyway by reverse-engineering all the other crap left over from the battles they've won against us."

It is only by being overliteral and interpreting the "an" in "I want an old-fashioned nuke on each of those platforms" that we get the result "the SD(P)s are only slightly damaged and Haven captures them." More sanely, each of those berthed SD(P)s and other ships gets one or more full missile broadsides from an old-style superdreadnought, which would deliver dozens of missiles. The other platforms, which unlike SD(P)s are not armored, would probably be targeted by less firepower since they are much easier to kill.

Higgins has more than enough time for each of his superdreadnoughts to fire several broadsides before bugging out of the system. That is where the firepower to scuttle several squadrons of SD(P)s comes from, Irbis.

Also, if you're wondering "where did they get those nukes." consider that a laser head is STILL functional as a purely conventional nuke- all you have to do is fly the missile close enough for the actual warhead going off to be effective, instead of detonating from thousands of miles away so that only the part of the energy channeled through the lasing rods actually hits the target.

Fuck, if he really wanted to be thorough he could use the missiles' impeller wedges to destroy the SD(P)s totally, but that might be a bad idea because of close proximity to habitats; impeller wedges as weapons of mass destruction have an even bigger 'blast radius' than nukes.

Something that should have been colossal victory and led to Haven using Manticore technology in at least some fields in At All Costs gets wiped out of existence, like that idiotic retcon to end of Echoes of Honor when it turns out what we read in last book wasn't what actually happened

Precisely what are you talking about now?

More likely the Masadans simply have no clue how to work Thunder's EW suite the way it's supposed to be operated.

Why, yes, but the very idea that computer defence put on full auto would repeat the exact same scheme every 6.6 minutes is preposterous. Had it been explained as humans subconsciously repeating that, sure, but somehow to Weber humans are capable of random patterns, computers are not.

As I suggested earlier, the automatic mode might never have been intended to be used for more than a few minutes at a time, without human inputs telling it things like "hey, the enemy seems to have figured out trick XYZ, let's use trick ABC instead, oh and I'm pretty sure that's a decoy over there because there's no way they would have dangled their destroyer out in front instead of putting it in back."

By the way, Cardones picking up on 6.6 min long pattern is also implausible - humans are very likely to find non-existent pattern in something that long, while computers are good in finding real patterns. Again, to Weber, opposite seems to be true. His computers always seem to work better when "corrected" by humans which even today isn't true.

He's explained this repeatedly; to summarize:

ALL Honorverse EW systems are heavily computerized. Analysis of the electronic warfare patterns ("hey, this thing resets to the same default state every 400 seconds") would be heavily computerized. Where humans come into the decision loop is that they look at various 'pictures' the computer can draw of what's really going on, use their judgment to determine whether a computer's analysis is likely to be correct, and discard obvious errors the computer made because it was fooled by the (equally capable) computers on the enemy's ship.

This is a pretty good representation of what software does for military systems in real life. The software handles inhumanly difficult tasks, things like tracking dozens of objects in real time. While the human being sits back and looks for anything the software didn't think of or didn't notice due to the numerous glitches and bugs that pop up when the enemy is actively jamming your sensors and fucking with you in a complicated combat environment.

On which note, as a rule Manticore has better software than Haven, so it's no surprise that the clever Cardones, using good software, can pick up vulnerabilities in Thunder of God's defenses that are caused by the idiot Masadans using bad software.

It's very much possible to be extremely professional and polite while ripping someone to shreds:

"...At this point, standard tactics would have been to introduce a sixty-degree yaw on our base course and launch full broadsides at Sirius's stern. Based on chase missile performance during the action, I estimate that the mission could have been accomplished, with crippling impeller damage to Sirius, within approximately five to six broadsides. However, this was impossible, due to HMS Fearless's extremely weak missile armament, forcing upon us what might be called the tactics of desperation, and resulting in the deaths of at least [insert double digit number here] of the men and women under my command."

[looks very, very calmly at Adm. Hemphill]

Example reply:

Hemphill: *folds hands* We ran bath of twelve million simulations concerning said course of action and estimated chance of stern hit to be mere 0.012%. In addition, had the HMS Fearless commander did not desperately cling to Saganami-era tactic despite her ship armament being completely unsuited for it, but went after Sirius first, instead of ramming courier boat she could have easily stopped with carried shuttles instead, the likelihood of crippling or forcing Sirius to surrender with zero-life loss would be 86%. Dismissed, ...captain.

Assuming in this case that Hemphill is right about the "chance of stern hit..." wait. Hm.

Actually, this 'reply' of yours sounds like you're just making shit up because you have an axe to grind, whereas I tried to hew pretty closely to the book. I noted that if Sirius's stern point defense couldn't stop pairs of missiles reliably, it would have been totally screwed trying to stop seven at a time, something that even Coglin noticed and wondered about during the battle.

I mean, I can get that Honor's actions are open to criticism, but you should not try to present these criticisms as "the objective facts make her WRONG WRONG WRONG" when you are not operating on complete information, are not in a position to do things like actually sit down and calculate whether alternative plans would have worked, and are in fact guessing and actively making up alternative plans without stopping to consider them seriously.

I have only so much interest in spending hours trying to refute a random selection of your fanfic theories about how you could have done it better than the book's protagonist.

That's my problem with Honor. She often engages in pointless fights that could have been avoided, getting a lot of her crew killed in process, and is never chewed for that in return. Not even by opposing side, which uses dumbest, weakest smear they can think of instead.

The one time she deserves a really royal chewing-out is for having left Grayson in Honor of the Queen, which is the worst professional mistake she's ever made IMO. Unfortunately, everyone senior enough to give her such a chewing is DEAD when she gets back to Grayson. Or is a Grayson officer not in her chain of command and too busy to deliver one because he's trying to deal with the horrible military position he's in. By the time anyone that senior shows up, Honor has 'vindicated' herself by good naval tactics now that she's back, so that nobody wants to deliver a chewing-out for her earlier mistake even though it was so costly.

Which is normal. In real life, generals who screw up, then recover and win the battle do NOT get chewed out endlessly and demoted by their own side, not usually. Because doing that results in a military where everyone is too terrified of making a mistake to actually accomplish anything.

She hit the target the size of Superdreadnought. Trying to hit something less than 1/100 volume of that with just 7 more missiles would be "Hail Mary" tactic extremely unlikely to work. It was 80 year old ship, not Apollo platform, all it would do would be one light cruiser silhouette painted on Q-Ships bridge wall after the final salvo, IMHO.

Uh no? The point is that Fearless's fire was mauling the hell out of Sirius's stern, including damage to Sirius's engines. Firing three times more missiles per salvo would make it much more likely that even more mauling would happen, and she'd have a very good chance of knocking out one or more of the freighter's alpha nodes by blind luck.

What would have happened, if instead of using an EW bird to get one contact nuke through Sirius's defenses in that one big hit, Cardones had been able to land two, three, or four such nukes?

In general, Hemphill's ideas were always dartboard in nature. Some of them end up working, some end up stupidly never working, and some work despite her by being reapplied by other (saner) designers, or only end up working because of massive doctrinal changes learned the hard way by better tacticians. She's not a genius in the sense that everything she comes up with works great. She's an iconoclast with a bunch of ideas, and no real clue how any will work out in practice, or integrate into a larger tactical doctrine.

By "some" you mean the fact that Hemphill pretty much wins the war for Manticore, twice, first by making Buttercup possible, then by pulling Apollo out of her behind when war isn't lost only due to Haven's tardiness?

Yes. SOME of her ideas work well, or even brilliantly. Others turn out to suck. This is realistic.

Hemphill is based on the real-life admiral Jackie Fisher of the British Navy, whose accomplishments include some royally stupid cruiser/battlecruiser designs, a factually incorrect fixation on "speed is armor!" and assuming that a ship sailing at 30 mph would be invulnerable to ships sailing at 25 mph. Oh, and inventing the modern battleship as we know it.

Gee, just like Hemphill, who designed some very poorly thought out cruisers, gave the navy some bad advice... and then pulls out some very innovative design concepts, rams them through opposition which has gotten tired of putting up with her bad ideas, and turns out to have struck gold.

And let me give you a quote produced by "better tactician" regarding her work:
Spoiler

"I realize that your stint on the Board was brief, Milady, but just look at some of its proposals." He ticked the points off on the fingers of his raised hand. "First, it wants us to radically redesign our ships of the wall to produce a totally untested class. Next, it wants us to accelerate the construction of light attack craft, when we've demonstrated just about conclusively that even modern LACs are no match, ton-for-ton, for properly designed starships, even in a defensive role. Then it wants us to divert something like ten percent of our building capacity from superdreadnoughts and dreadnoughts—and this, mind you, at a time when the Peeps' building rates in those same classes are going up—to build these so-called 'LAC-carriers' in order to transport light attack craft across interstellar distances as offensive units, not defensive ones. Not content with that, it wants to strip the missile tubes out of our existing ships of the wall and replace them with launchers which will use up twelve percent more weapons volume and fire missiles whose size effectively reduces magazine capacity by eighteen percent?" He shook his head.

That was White Haven commenting on SD(P), LAC/cLAC, and MDM. My goodness, why they didn't listen to him and put these useless, twelve percent larger missiles with eighteen percent less ammunition into action?

He actually has several points here. LACs had sucked for centuries prior to this writing, and sucked even more recently than they used to, so "let's build CLACS!" is something an admiral with any common sense would groan at if they were not already intimately familiar with the capabilities of the latest Shrike-class LACs.

For that matter, even the Shrike turns out to provide only a modest, temporary advantage; it's actually much less of a game-changer than the MDM and SD(P) turn out to be.

The SD(P) is a radical design concept to change over to in the middle of the war; as it happened it worked wonderfully but there are a lot of ways it could have NOT worked so wonderfully.

Ripping the missile tubes out of existing warships is actually a stupid idea, so it's no surprise White Haven pooh-poohs that. In real life you do NOT do that sort of thing during wartime, because it means having your ships in drydock for modifications for months at a time when you desperately need them shooting at the enemy. In the long run, it turns out that almost none of the old pre-SD(P) capital ships can be redesigned to fire the full-sized MDMs, and they wind up getting released to second-line duties for precisely this reason, sort of like predreadnought battleships in World War One.

Moreover...

White Haven initially opposed these developments, and was more cautious and conservative about their employment, precisely because he was painfully familiar with the various royal stinkers Hemphill had thrown out there pre-war. Like some of the posters here who saw the hamhanded employment of the grav lance cruiser in the 1900 PD exercises, and assumed Hemphill must be an overbred aristocratic moron for her incompetent tactics.

White Haven, himself a more imaginative tactician, and one with no patience for foolishness, would probably have had his perception of Hemphill's competence reduced permanently by that.

It's worth remembering that as a rule, all the people who start the series with the rank of admiral have known each other professionally and personally for decades before the war even starts. Their interpersonal relations, their private friendships and feuds, have been building for decades. Even very intelligent and competent people do have enemies, and do artificially discount and disrespect their enemies' accomplishments sometimes. If you don't believe me, go work with a group of scientists for a few years.

So when White Haven listens to Hemphill he hears:

"Blah blah, yes let's start building LAC carriers instead of dreadnoughts even though we all know LACs suck and have sucked for centuries, blah blah blah, let's rip the missile launchers out of all our ships in the middle of a war and refit for a new bigger nastier missile design."

Which sounds really stupid, especially if you've ever read Superiority, by Arthur C. Clarke.

This is because White Haven has known Hemphill for years and thinks she's an impractical jerk with no sense of tactical realities. Personal prejudice will do that to you, even if you are fairly intelligent, and it takes an outside perspective to get White Haven to pull his head out of his posterior.

It happens in real life, even if you choose not to believe that people don't sometimes look at a text with bias, spot 'obvious' flaws in the thinking in that text, and reject the whole work on the strength of the parts they took out of context.

[Which amuses me because that is exactly the attitude you seem to bring to interpreting Weber's writing]

[Ahriman238]

Realistically, the FTL comm had to have been in development longer than that, IMO; real weapon systems take more than one year to reach production viability.

Well, yes but there's more like 3 years separating the first and second books. Plus, in the story she was musing on the potential and thinking of all the miniaturzed parts, the compact fusion plant and new superconducters in particular, she'd been working on for the next-gen EW platforms and her new LACs.

[Simon_Jester]

A) I am pretty sure whatever diplomatic immunity it had also extended to being rammed by military ships, B) Honor said she doesn't care for its immunity, C) Quite a lot of post-Basilisk mess was tied to fact Manticore had no proof of Haven wrongdoing. Had the boarding party entered the ship immediately, they could have found one and force Haven to much better concessions.

Of course, Honor has also just dispatched all her remaining Marines and heavily armed shuttles to fight the native uprising, and has neither the troops nor the shuttles to force even a courier boat to surrender against its will.

But let's not let a detail like "she couldn't do that because the stuff she'd have needed didn't exist and/or was millions of miles away" get in the way of "I'm so much smarter than her, why didn't she do XYZ instead of ABC?"

Increased chanced by catching it earlier and enduring less fire? If she wanted to stop it from running, she picked her initial position terribly. As for 7 missiles, you forget that her own estimate said she could only fire broadsides by weaving, slowing down significantly and allowing Sirius to open distance. It's quite possibly doing that would just enable it to run and make incident worse for Manticore and Honor.

So why was Coglin so surprised that she didn't do exactly that, given that he obviously knew she was trying to stop his ship from escaping?

To me, straw that broke camel's back was that she managed to convince religious fundamentalists into voluntarily changing religion for her sake without asking

That's a separate criticism.

Saying "Honor gets into unnecessary fights and deserves an ass-kicking for it" is one thing.

Saying "Honor is a Mary Sue because in real life, no way would religious fundamentalists change their rules to award very high honors to a woman just because that woman had saved their planet from conquest by ancient enemies." is a separate thing.

You might be right about the second thing, though I'm not conceding it without debate. But it's totally different from the first thing.

Read again - I said about scoring drive hits. More hits on Sirius sides accomplish exactly nothing, it had toughness to withstand them. All that saved Honor was the fact her ship had capability to blow Sirius up, however remote...

Uh, no. Because if Honor had scored any hits on any of Sirius's alpha nodes, she would have achieved her objective of "stop that freighter from leaving the system."

More missiles hitting Sirius equals more chance of a hit on the alpha nodes. As it was, she almost managed it, but only got two of the beta nodes, which accomplishes nothing for her.

Sirius does not have this magic "immune to missiles" tag that makes it irrelevant how many times she shoots it with missiles.

...

The very fact that White Haven was unable to comprehend what extra zero on missile range and two zeros on number of missiles meant and insisted on duking it out with Haven using old style, short range ships says volumes about "quality" of Hemphill's critics.

Let me see if I can strip the arrogance out and translate your criticism.

"White Haven condemns the SD(P) design as too risky to use during wartime, the long range MDM as too bulky to be fired from existing ships, and the CLAC as fundamentally impractical in the long run. He must have been stupid to not see the implication of what would happen if someone built a fleet of SD(P)s firing MDMs and escorted by CLACs."

Three things pop into my head. One is that the CLAC concept actually is probably overrated in Hemphill's reports. This isn't the first time Hemphill has proposed making super-powerful LACs, and the idea has been a persistently bad idea for decades. In real life, the LAC concept turns out to be relatively easy to counter, and provides only a temporary advantage for the RMN. Most of the late-series naval battles would have played out more or less the same way if the LACs didn't exist on either side.

The other part is more serious. The combination of the SD(P) design's massive volume of fire, the MDM's extremely long range, AND the improvement of missile fire control coming out of Ghost Rider, combined, represent a revolution in the way ship battles are fought- with salvoes of tens of thousands of missiles fired from tens of millions of kilometers, instead of (at most) thousands fired at millions.

But for an opponent of Hemphill who is used to having to slap her on the wrist every time she thinks she's just invented a new unstoppable God weapon that turns out overrated...

Well, what's the surprise? The first thing such a person will do is break down the report into four separate ideas, rather than seeing it as an integrated whole. The four new ideas are: the CLAC, Ghost Rider, the MDM, and the SD(P).

The CLAC idea will appear to suck; it's terrible if you base your assumptions about what the LACs can do on, say, your fifty years of experience working with LACs. If you realize that LAC technology has improved by like a factor of five in a few years, you may be able to figure out that things are changing, but this is a major mental leap for anyone to make, including a "good tactician."

Ghost Rider will look like a good idea- you will note that White Haven does not object to the new EW platforms and technologies that are coming out of the Weapons Development Board.

The SD(P) and the MDM are the big ticket items, and a critical person looking at them will ask a lot of questions:

1)While the MDM is no doubt a big improvement, it cannot be fired from existing warships, which is NOT a good thing in the middle of a war; see Superiority by Clarke for reference. Entirely new classes of ships will have to be designed and built to fire MDMs, limiting its utility.

2)The MDM's range is not matched by improvements in fire control. White Haven might reasonably predict that an MDM barrage would be very ineffective because of this, with accuracy so poor that even launching ten thousand of the things at the enemy doesn't make much of a dent. This is a very real problem, which not even the SD(P)'s volume of fire really fixes. Ghost Rider begins to help, and White Haven may be making the mistake of evaluating the MDM's accuracy in terms of pre-Ghost Rider fire control systems.

Really, this problem wasn't fixed until Apollo. I would argue that Apollo isn't a separate development at all; it's simply an update to fire control required to make a complete weapon system out of the MDM, bringing its fire control decision loop back down into usable parameters. And as of the time of the conversation we're talking about, Apollo isn't even off the drawing boards yet.

3) The SD(P) is fragile because it has a big hollow core instead of a heavily armored and cross-braced core hull. This is a serious problem if the ship takes hits in combat. Which it will if the MDM doesn't pan out. With the MDM, there's at least a narrow window of time in which SD(P)s armed with the things can pot enemy ships from far outside their effective range, but that doesn't go away.

In the series, this would be more of an issue except for massive improvements in the active missile defense of capital ships on both sides... which probably aren't being directly factored into the analysis of the Weapons Development Board in saying 'we should build this.'

4) The SD(P)'s volume of fire is not that drastically better than what already exists. The ship can drop 60 missiles per 12 seconds, compared to, say, 40 missiles per 15 seconds. That's a big deal, but it doesn't totally revolutionize warfare by itself.

The real advantage of SD(P)s is their ability to "roll pods" and stack up massive salvoes consisting of, say, 20-30 pods per capital ship in a formation, and do so repeatedly. With each salvo having the potential to overwhelm an entire task force's point defense. Normal ships with internal launchers don't seem to be able to do that, although it's not clear to me why they can't. But when you're talking about firing several hundred missiles per ship per minute, you have to ask a new question:

How the hell are we going to control all those missiles?

If that question can't be answered it cripples the effectiveness of the SD(P), and as of the time of this conversation it hasn't been answered. Part of the answer is "existing ships can't actually do that, we'll need entirely new ships to control these massive salvoes."

Which brings us back to:

5) To make good use of the SD(P) and MDM, an entirely new generation of ships have to be designed. These ships will have to be designed on radical new principles in the middle of a war, and if the plan doesn't work for some reason, then the ships become nearly useless. If the MDM production line runs into unexpected hitches, the SD(P)s become fragile flying bombs because their ability to 'stack' salvoes cannot be used in a conventional missile duel with conventional ships. If the ship design of the SD(P) has teething problems because it's got huge fundamental structural differences from any ship that ever existed before, the effectiveness of the MDM as a weapon is largely neutered.

This is why adopting the SD(P)/MDM combo is quite a gamble. You need multiple layers of new technology to come into play, all at the same time, all reinforcing each other. As it happened, that worked out pretty much perfectly. But White Haven had many reasons to wonder about all the stuff that could go wrong. And Hemphill can't take all the credit for it going right because most of the work was done by her staff and by the people who worked out the doctrine for her.


Hemphill herself probably could not address these questions I have outlined, given the limitations we see in her throughout the series. Her idea of military strategy is pretty limited:

1. Design new weapon
2. Use new weapon (somehow)
3. ???
4. Profit!

This is NOT how real wars work.

Or EW is way more complicated than that, and even the best pseudo-random number generator we have is predictable over a long enough time, with sufficient computation devoted to it.

Even if so, certainly not by humans. And I'd say even today we can do better than pseudo-random number generator capable of 400 second period.

See previous. YOU are the one saying that Weber sucks because the systems on Thunder of God don't automatically reset the random seed used for their EW scheme without human input.

I can think of numerous reasons for that, the most obvious one being that the system is not designed to work without a trained crew who know what the hell they're doing. Therefore, the programmers who programmed the system did not give it features that would make it work without such a crew.

You can rant and rave about how no one would be stupid enough to NOT design those features into the system. However, in real life when people design complicated things, they do it like this:

1) Set the specifications.
2) Design a system that meets the specifications.

If the specification is "must be able to independently run the ship's EW systems for five minutes while we get the assistant EW officer out of the bathroom in case his boss has a heart attack," it is NOT guaranteed that the system will work perfectly if called upon to operate for ten minutes, or twenty, or a hundred. Sure, the designers might decide 'what the hey' and program that capability in, but they don't have to, it's extra work, and it MIGHT just needlessly complicate a system that is already going to involve thousands or millions of lines of code.

Under no reasonable conditions would one of the specs for the factory default settings on the ship's EW be "will work perfectly even when the ship is being operated by half-trained monkeys who have just mutinied and taken over from the crew who are actually trained to use this stuff."

Putting aside question why old pre-pod SDs (only ones bombarding force had) still bothered with nuke missiles despite limited magazines, the only real example of nuke hit on big ship we have was Thunder of God. Even if SD missile is more powerful than BC's, SD(P) is going to have far more powerful armour than old BC - and ToG survived with only surface damage. Ok, it was contact hit, but Weber also categorically stated SD is disproportionally better armoured than Battleship, something vastly better armoured than BC in turn (link). Another link, he says SDs carry heavy energy broadside because even SD missiles are relatively ineffective against them. Apparent vaporization just doesn't add up, sorry.

Missiles are relatively ineffective against other SDs because of the SD's active defenses: the wedge, the point defense, the jammers. All those combine to make it very hard to land killing hits on a ship. Switch off the active defenses and the ship becomes far more vulnerable... but that's a situation that would never occur in combat.

By analogy, it is relatively easy to swat a bug that is standing still. It can take a lot of effort and comical flailing and wasted energy to kill the same bug if it is flying around. The problem is not that your flyswatter is a weak weapon against bugs. The problem is that hitting the target is hard when the target is trying not to be killed.

Eh? What retcon is that?

Diamato manages (in very touching scene - that's why the retcon was so bad) to take control over Kellet's battered Battleship force and pulls it out of the battle, very blooded but largely whole, with good recordings of new Manty LACs.

Very next book, we learn it was actually almost annihilated and recordings are worthless, thus McQueen is being laughed behind her back for actually believing what her officers say, we can't have even minor success or advance warning what is coming on Haven's side, no

Also, doing what LACs did (repeated charges into wall of battle) is very good idea to lose them all, while in this book they really are a superweapon.

And in the book after THAT, the data collected by Diamato and others becomes the basis for the very successful Havenite LAC doctrine developed during the cease-fire period, and Diamato gets to take revenge on the Manties for all the crap they put him through.

Sometimes it takes more than one year for someone to be vindicated and recover from a disastrous defeat- who would have guessed?

IIRC, in another brilliant example of Weber's universe constructor's ingenuity only new Manticoran ships like Hexapuma have 'advanced' technology to actually fire from both sides, so just adding up all tubes is wildly optimistic, if only due to limited telemetry.

Since the enemy isn't jamming the missile launches, the missiles don't need telemetry; their instructions are simple: "fly to this point in space and blow up." Honorverse missiles can do that without their mothership to hold their hands, as long as enemy EW systems don't come into play and the enemy isn't trying to dodge.

The limited ability to fire missiles from both sides comes from the control issue- which is entirely irrelevant here.

Again, you seem to be raging and freaking out about how THEY SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO DO THAT RAAAH when your idea of what they can and can't do is based on faulty ideas.

And I like how Gryphon can simply double King William's class launchers on platform of the same size. Assuming it's not a typo, again, consistency is really strong here

The Gryphon-class is 15% bigger and heavier, and if I look this stuff up in a recently published book, House of Steel. And it does NOT mount that many more tubes.

The King Williams have 32 missiles per broadside, and 40 heavy beam weapon mounts. The Gryphons have 37 missiles per broadside and 41 heavy beam weapon mounts.

Aside: this is on top of the fact that the laser head missiles are still nukes. It'd be a simple fire control command to turn off the lasing rod system in favor of letting the nuke be a nuke.

Ok, that is actually very plausible, but still, laser warhead used lengthwise on an SD should produce larger damage than just nuke, especially if you can hit with all lasers on your leisure. And if you just nuke them, why not nuke + lase? No, I think that's not what Weber meant.

The lasing rods cannot deliver more energy than was already in the original nuclear explosion, and Weber has been very explicit that the combined output of ALL the lasing rods does not use all the energy released by the original explosion- quite a lot of it is wasted, but that is the price of ever actually having a chance of hitting the target at all.

[Ahriman238]

A further point, it's stressed several times that to save on mass the belly and roof of Honorverse ships are armored lightly, or not at all for the smaller ships, because those sides are normally protected by the impeller wedge. Which is another way potting docked ships is not remotely like engaging those same ships in actual battle, and likely accounts for the ease of destruciton.

[Simon_Jester]

Since I may be the only person in the thread dumb enough to buy a copy of House of Steel, let me jump ahead a bit in chronological order to quote some of what it says about the adoption of the SD(P) ship design.

The RMN began its operational experience with pod-laying designs with the Trojan-class armed merchant cruiser of Project Trojan Horse. While the initial designs were cumbersome, fragile, and inefficient, they still provided a huge force multiplier. They also proved the concept of the hollow-core pod-layer which certain officers in BuWeaps and BuShips had been proposing for some time. The Trojans' successful deployment finally routed most of the "traditionalist" opposition to the proposal, and BuShips was formally authorized to begin design studies on what became the SD(P).

Beginning with the Medusa-class, the RMN took the concept of a pod-laying warship and began an entirely new era of warfare. For the first time since its inception centuries before, the ponderous formality of the wall of battle had been broken, as engagements were often decided in the opening salvos of missiles.

The simultaneous implementation of a practical multi-drive missile gave the RMN a qualitative edge that was unparalleled, and drove the People's Navy to the brink of defeat in the few short months leading up to the ceasefire. Even though the MDM was inherently inaccurate at extended ranges, the pod-laying designs could fire salvoes of thousands, multiple times, so that even a low percentage rate of hits produced overwhelming numbers of them in absolute terms.

Almost unnoticed in the early stages of the developing doctrine was that the endurance of the missile pod allowed a single ship to stack multiple patterns of pods, allowing it to fire double or triple patterns (or more), up to the limits of its individual fire control. As a result, even an outnumbered force could put enough missiles into space to saturate a target's defenses in the opening salvo. The smaller force might still be wiped out in the end, but no longer would it go quietly.

With the introduction of the MDM and pod-layer on both sides of the conflict, the RMN has been forced to continually reevaluate its own doctrine for defending against the weigh of fire a pod-layer can lay down. This reassessment is reflected in countless places, from new antimissile weapons, improved EW, and experimental defensive doctrine to the makeup of task forces and the formations adopted in combat, reflecting a time of rapid change in all areas of warfare.

Medusa-class pod superdreadnought

The Medusa-class was in secret conceptual development for over a decade prior to Operation Trojan Horse in 1909 while the Weapons Development Board and Project Ghost Rider worked to develop the weapon systems the class would eventually carry. The success of the prototype pod system in the Trojans threw the project into high gear, however, imposing a great deal of strain on BuShips' design staff.

Even before the first units were laid down, the RMN had begun a carefully crafted disinformation campaign, including a leaked 'spring study' for the next generation (conventional) superdreadnought replacement for the Gryphon-class. Thus the RMN diverted attention from the decrease in new Gryphons and gave the Havenite intelligence agencies a plausible explanation for the secret programs being conducted at HMSS Weyland.

[snip paragraph about naming the ships, only relevant information is that Grayson managed to rush-build about three of the things into production a year ahead of the RMN, having full access to the blueprints in a joint design project. They did this by yanking components intended for other ships and in general throwing the rest of their construction program into chaos.]

As the first RMN warship designed from the keel out to deploy missile pods from an internal magazine, the Medusa faced some unique design challenges. The most obvious difference between it and any conventional ship of the wall is apparent from the broadside. All of the primary armament has been pushed into the forward half of the main hull to make room for the double rings of missile pod storage in the after section. The second most noticeable difference is the sheer number of surface arrays, which provide both fire control and telemetry uplinks for the hundreds of missiles these ships can launch in a single stacked salvo. Finally, the defensive armament, located at the upper and lower turn of the hull, extends along the entire length, and the number of point defense and countermissile installations have been greatly increased over any previous design.

While massively enhancing the ships' first-strike capabilities, the hollow core filling the after third of the hull reduced its survivability in comparison to pre-pod superdreadnoughts. In addition, the need to mount armored hatches through which to deploy the pods forced the designers to sacrifice some of the after chase weaponry.

Despite the huge increase in offensive firepower, the Medusas contain a significant degree of automation in their design and require a crew less than half that of an older conventional design.

[snip details about the pod rails; the Medusas carry roughly 500 10-missile pods as of Operation Buttercup, and now carry 800 thinner, more miniaturized ones]

Invictus-class pod superdreadnought

The Invictus-class was on the drawing board at the end of the First Havenite War as the improved successor of the Medusa-class, but construction of the first wave of ships had barely begun when the High Ridge Government agreed to a truce with the People's Republic. As per the drawdown of forces ordered by the new government, construction of the majority of units in the class was suspended and the unfinished ships were placed in storage in their building slips in the Manticore and Grendelsbane shipyards.

At the resumption of hostilities, only twelve Invictus-class ships were in commission, with a few more nearing completion in Manticore from previously suspended construction programs. Dozens were lost in the Grendelsbane attack, and over a hundred were laid down as part of the emergency war construction program for completion over the next couple of years.

In many ways the Invictus is simply an evolution of the Medusa design, with a pod core extending half again as deep into the hull. In a departure from both traditional Manticoran and contemporary Grayson practice, all broadside missile tubes were eliminated to allow for the maximum extension of the missile core, which is capable of holding upwards of a thousand of the new flat-pack missile pods. Internally, the differences are even greater, however, as one of the major weaknesses of the pod-layer concept has been partially offset by armoring the interior of the pod core almost as heavily as the outer hull armor. Almost all of the tonnage advantage over the Medusa went into this new armoring scheme, which has greatly increased survivability.

Nevertheless, the greatest weakness of the design remains in the pod rails, and even with the new armoring scheme, a single hit on the pod core can cause enough damage to jam up deployment of the pods 'upstream' of the hit. Cross connecting rails, the ability to quickly jettison debris and destroyed pods, and a tractor system that can help the system "leapfrog" over broken rails all help mitigate the effects of this damage, but the incidence of mission-kills in pod-layers with otherwise light damage remains potentially high.

By far the most significant improvement seen in the Invictus class, however, is the new Mk 20 Keyhole platform. At least two versions of this versatile tractor-tethered platform exist, but both of them share a number of the same features. Although Keyhole was envisioned primarily as a means to improve active antimissile capability, conceptual evolution produced a very different end product. At their heart, Keyholes are telemetry relays, multiplying the number of telemetry links the ship can maintain, which in turn allows for even deeper stacked salvoes, or a layered approach where conventional ships in the squadron can hand off their onboard and pod-launched missiles to an Invictus to centrally control.

In addition, the Keyhole platform extends the sensor reach of the host ship, both with dedicated offboard arrays as well as with the ability to deploy outside the wedge and relay information while the ship has rolled against the threat axis (that is, pointed its roof or belly bands at the enemy- SJ).

Finally, the platform not only replaces the traditional tethered decoy platform, mounting sophisticated jammers and ECM gear, but is very heavily equipped with point defense laser clusters of its own. Although no more than two can be carried by even the largest of ships, they are still cheaper to replace than an entire warship, and the heavy onboard array of point defense laser clusters not only allows them a degree of self-defense far in advance of any previous tethered EW platform in Manticoran service, but also contributes significantly to the defense of the deploying ship.

[blah blah compliments for the Invictus]

[Mr Bean]

I did not know that keyhole had it's own point defense lasers. Wonder if that's it's own development or copying the Peep tactics of using LAC's offensively and on the defense. Launching them early to add their own wedges and counter missiles to shield the bigger ships only to launch forward as the fleets cross.