nBSG meets Honorverse

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gigabytelord
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nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by gigabytelord »

Timeline placements:

nBSG: 1 year before the events of the miniseries

Honorverse: 1900 PD
Restrictions: None
Stellar Geography: The duel Binary System of nBSG is located about 50 light-years to the galactic north of the Basilisk System
Setup: Roughly one year before the events of the miniseries Caprican long range sensors pick up a large ship entering the system. This ship is an incoming colony ship decelerating in system. It is loaded with more than 50,000 colonists and originated from a system called Beowulf. It has clearly been travelling STL for at least several centuries.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Crazedwraith »

Well militarily, the Honorverse can wipe the floor with anything. Their missiles have stand off ranges longer than BSG weapon ranges and they have inertial compensators BSG seem to lack. ( Vipers pull 6G, An Honorverse ship in the hundreds)

If they can be convinced to help out, they can squash the Cylons with ease. (Barring computer fuckery)

I'm thinking they'd be a lot Grayson style backlash from the more religious colonies before they enter the galactic community and it's prolong and everything else.


eta: Okay, that was my thoughts on just a general contact scenario. This stl colony ship from Beowulf has me a bit perplexed. How much standard Honorverse knowledge are they supposed to have? Beowulfians will have a lot of medical tech and knowledge of genetics but that's going to have a limited effect on the 12 colonies before the events of the miniseries hit.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by gigabytelord »

Crazedwraith wrote:eta: Okay, that was my thoughts on just a general contact scenario. This stl colony ship from Beowulf has me a bit perplexed. How much standard Honorverse knowledge are they supposed to have? Beowulfians will have a lot of medical tech and knowledge of genetics but that's going to have a limited effect on the 12 colonies before the events of the miniseries hit.
The colony ship has basic star charts which include all the major systems in the league plus Manticore, Haven, and New Berlin (which implies that it was sent out well after the invention of Honorverse FTL) since they are heading for a system that is on the other side of the systems in question. I was thinking about including that the colony ship had used the Beowolf > Manticore wormhole to cut a significant amount of time off of the STL trip which would imply that the Basilisk wormhole hadn't yet been discovered or mapped yet as they would have used it to cut even more time off the trip but then I realized that my knowledge of the standard procedures for sending out colonies ships is rather short in supply and also I thought it might overly complicate the scenario.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Elheru Aran »

Colony ship... are those typically even armed in the Honorverse?
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by gigabytelord »

Elheru Aran wrote:Colony ship... are those typically even armed in the Honorverse?
I genuinely don't know but it would seem unlikely.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Batman »

Did the colonies suddenly poof into existence or what? Because with them being merely 50 ly from Basilisk and having an at least 20th century technology society I don't see the Honorverse (which has been FTL spacegoing for centuries at this point) NOT having run across them before.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by gigabytelord »

Batman wrote:Did the colonies suddenly poof into existence or what? Because with them being merely 50 ly from Basilisk and having an at least 20th century technology society I don't see the Honorverse (which has been FTL spacegoing for centuries at this point) NOT having run across them before.
I'll revise it to 500ly for some reason I was assuming that extent of human exploration was about 500 ly from earth in any direction. I'm not sure why because I did know better.

Act of Q? Unlike in the series all that stuff about Kobal and the thirteenth colony could be just religious interpretations of true but less mistical events but that would fuck with nbsg canon :P
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Simon_Jester »

Basilisk is right on the frontier of human colonization or close to it, as I recall; there was very little 'there' there prior to the discovery of the Basilisk terminus.

Five hundred light years beyond that is so far for Honorverse drives that they might not find it for centuries.

By contrast, I doubt it's very long for Colonial jump drives. The jump drive really is a magnificent potential innovation from the point of view of the Honorverse powers. The ability to just freaking teleport to a target location without passing through the intervening space is a tremendous strategic asset.

And this is without the somewhat random possibility that jump ranges might 'stack' and be increased when the jumps are made while already in Weber's version of hyperspace.
Elheru Aran wrote:Colony ship... are those typically even armed in the Honorverse?
Probably depends heavily on your colony expedition and how well-heeled its backers were. If you were operating on a financial shoestring when you founded the colony, you'd skip the weapons. If you had respectable money, or were connected to some corporate or government interest on your homeward that wants to protect its investment, you'd probably have some minimal level of armament, just to make sure you aren't robbed blind or massacred by the space going equivalent of random pirates in rowboats.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Eternal_Freedom »

While I know little about Honorverse, the potential for BSG jump drives to have a major impact is definitely there. Even if the effect doesn't "stack" with Weber's hyperpspace as Simon mentioned, their range was limited by how accurately you can plot a jump, and how quickly. So if the Honorverse have better computers (I'd say this was a given) and more accurate star charts (of their area of space at least) then jump ranges could be high enough to make wormholes obsolete curiosities.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Crazedwraith »

In which case Manticore would have to do everything they can to suppress the technology. Their wealth is entirely based on the fact they have a wormhole junction in the system.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Zwinmar »

Just let the colonies jump to Sol and watch the fireworks.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Elheru Aran »

So... the general situation here is that nBSG is lower tech than Honorverse, their only real advantage being instant jump travel. The Honorverse force (colony ship) on the other hand isn't going to be heavily armed. So militarily the Colonies *could* have the edge. It would be to the Honorverse colony ship's advantage to form an alliance, temporary or permanent, with the Colonies in order to gain their jump drive, and the Colonies in turn would protect the Honorverse colonizers in exchange for technological upgrades. Are the Honorverse people the type to do that?
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Simon_Jester »

With a relative handful of exceptions (colonies full of crazy religious fanatics, outright pirates), most Honorverse people are sort of "first world" in that they are open to commercial opportunities, unlikely to opportunistically attack others without provocation and/or premeditation, and so on. An alliance of convenience is likely.
Eternal_Freedom wrote:While I know little about Honorverse, the potential for BSG jump drives to have a major impact is definitely there. Even if the effect doesn't "stack" with Weber's hyperpspace as Simon mentioned, their range was limited by how accurately you can plot a jump, and how quickly. So if the Honorverse have better computers (I'd say this was a given)...
The Honorverse probably has better computers than anyone who isn't a Cylon. On the other hand, the Cylons are so good at hacking I'm not sure how much in the way of computers the Colonies had before they crossed swords with the Cylons. They would have had to remove or disable a lot of the computers just to stop the Cylons' taking them over...
...and more accurate star charts (of their area of space at least) then jump ranges could be high enough to make wormholes obsolete curiosities.
This would happen pretty much regardless. BSG ships may only be jumping a few light years at a time but they can make many jumps in fairly rapid succession.

Top top speeds for Honorverse ships are something like 3500c (about ten light-years per day) for high-end military drives taking considerable risks with their lives and safety. The top-secret Mesan streak drive can beat that, probably topping out at around 4500-5000c.

All your jump drive needs to do is jump three or four times a day, and it's moving drastically faster than any hyperdrive ship could possibly move, even if you can't jump while already in hyperspace.

If you can jump while in hyperspace, then the range of jumps is increased by a factor of hundreds and you can go from one side of known space to the other instantaneously.

And yes, this would economically neuter Manticore once the jump drive technology began to proliferate. They'd still have a major shipbuilding industry, but there would be no particular advantage to shipping your goods in a Manticoran hull.

If this happens in 1900 PD, it is likely that jump drives will first be publicized before the beginning of the Manticore-Haven War. If Haven gains access to large numbers of them Manticore is probably screwed militarily because it makes a massive, rapid, undetectable, unavoidable surprise massed attack possible. Your ships can literally teleport out of nowhere, well inside their (million kilometer) missile range of civilian infrastructure, without being traced or tracked on the way in.

Since Manticore's infrastructure is all concentrated in a few key locations, they don't have a counter to this. They can mass strength at those key locations, but not enough strength, not if Haven really concentrates its force.

Conversely, if Manticore has large forces fitted with jump drives before Haven does, Haven is screwed, because the Manticorans have effectively no logistics limitations stopping them from staging deep raids into Havenite space. Their ships can jump into Havenite territory, attack fleet bases or industrial centers, and jump back before Haven even realizes they're gone.

I'm not clear on whether the BSGverse has any working FTL comms (at least, the Colonials don't; the Cylons clearly do or their resurrection infrastructure wouldn't work). The Honorverse doesn't, or rather, doesn't have interstellar communications which move faster than the speed of a spacecraft. This is a considerable handicap to the powers involved in the recent wars in the Honorverse, and would be an utterly crippling handicap in the face of a jump-capable opponent.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Eternal_Freedom »

I'm always skeptical of the Cylons "uber hacking" skills. Sure they planted that backdoor program to shut down the Colonial Fleet but that was via infiltration and sabotage, not really "hacking" in a battlefield/tactical sense.

The only instance I can think of is "Scattered" where they hack into the network Galactica set up to speed up the jump calculations (how they got access tot he network is a total mystery) which was set up by Gaeta who, good as he is, is an ops officer, not a computer wizard, and Baltar wasn't available).

Consider that in "Razor" after Shaw resets the programs to remove the backdoor, the ship can run with it's networks operating until Gina sabotages them (again).

Honestly,, Cylons are not some super-hackers, they had a spy nick the passwords, which is a whole different thing since they can't do that to the Honorverse people (not quickly anyway) and are unfamiliar with the computer system design.

Yes, they may well be able to hack a Manticorean/Havenite/whoever ship, but I will bet that that will take longer than it takes for said ship to blast the Basestar to scrap metal from a million km away.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Kingmaker »

Top top speeds for Honorverse ships are something like 3500c (about ten light-years per day) for high-end military drives taking considerable risks with their lives and safety. The top-secret Mesan streak drive can beat that, probably topping out at around 4500-5000c.
As a helpful point of comparison, the Colonial Fleet was able to jump every 33 minutes (under extreme circumstances, admittedly, but it gives you a reasonable comparison to Honorverse warships redlining the hyperdrive), with a typical jump being ~5-10 ly. So a conservative estimate (i.e. asspul; say 10 jumps a day at 5 ly/jump) gives you five times the speed, and the Colonial FTL drives don't need to worry about the system hyper limit like Honorverse hyperdrives do.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by gigabytelord »

For the purposes of making things a bit more interesting lets say that the colony ship has basic but hopelessly out of date point defense and offensive armament. Not warship level but maybe the kind weapons you might find on a Hauptmann(sp?) owned passenger liner. Even if it's, say, pre-17th or 16th century, depending on when the colony ship set out it would have been able to defend its self from any pirates of that period. Basically the owner was Hauptmann level rich.

In the event of a technological trade, or theft, how quickly could the industrial base of the 12 colonies start working on appropriate upgrades, if at all:- and also from what we've seen in the series how would the economy and industrial base of the 12 colonies compare to any of the other major nations in the already known honorverse?
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Elheru Aran »

If they were jumping every 33 minutes on the dot, they could jump around 43 times per 24-hour period. Times 5 LY/jump, that's 215 LY in 24 hours. Honorverse simply cannot match this if these numbers are right.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

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Eternal_Freedom wrote:I'm always skeptical of the Cylons "uber hacking" skills. Sure they planted that backdoor program to shut down the Colonial Fleet but that was via infiltration and sabotage, not really "hacking" in a battlefield/tactical sense.
That's a fair point, I'd forgotten how much of their hacking was done by psychosocial engineering.
Kingmaker wrote:As a helpful point of comparison, the Colonial Fleet was able to jump every 33 minutes (under extreme circumstances, admittedly, but it gives you a reasonable comparison to Honorverse warships redlining the hyperdrive), with a typical jump being ~5-10 ly. So a conservative estimate (i.e. asspul; say 10 jumps a day at 5 ly/jump) gives you five times the speed, and the Colonial FTL drives don't need to worry about the system hyper limit like Honorverse hyperdrives do.
Five times the speed of a secret super-fast courier ship using an otherwise exotic unknown drive developed by a secret devil society, that is. More like eight times the speed of anyone else's warships and ten times the speed of a fast merchant vessel.

The abolition of "hyper limits" is even more critically important. Basically, BSG ships lack the durability to survive being fired on by Honorverse weaponry, but Honorverse-technology ships modified to make use of BSG jump drives would have a massive, decisive military advantage over anyone who lacked such jump drives, regardless of any other factors in play (e.g. superior missile firepower and so on).
gigabytelord wrote:For the purposes of making things a bit more interesting lets say that the colony ship has basic but hopelessly out of date point defense and offensive armament. Not warship level but maybe the kind weapons you might find on a Hauptmann(sp?) owned passenger liner. Even if it's, say, pre-17th or 16th century, depending on when the colony ship set out it would have been able to defend its self from any pirates of that period. Basically the owner was Hauptmann level rich.
If the ship is a colony slowboat, it's been in transit for several hundred years- it would have no weapons of consequence, and would be sharply inferior in armament to any Honorverse warship we've seen portrayed (including the 16th century ones in the new Timothy Zahn novels).

If such a ship were in fact significantly armed, it would probably have some kind of quick-firing defensive railguns and at most a very small number of offensive beam weapons. Should have sidewalls, would certainly have a wedge I'd expect. It might actually be interesting taking such a ship up against a BSG ship, actually.
In the event of a technological trade, or theft, how quickly could the industrial base of the 12 colonies start working on appropriate upgrades, if at all...
Decades. Modern Honorverse technology (that is, stuff invented in the last century) is based on layer after layer of 'tools to make the tools to make the tools.'

Unless some foreign party simply supplies the necessary advanced industrial equipment to manufacture modern technology (e.g. nanotech alloys and molecular circuitry and the insanely powerful Honorverse gravitic equipment), bootstrapping would take decades or centuries even if one already knew exactly how to do it and what needed doing. Witness how much trouble the Graysons had- and, conversely, how quickly they brought their industrial base up to modern standards once they got Manticoran aid.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Batman »

Well Beowulf were the guys who invented impeller drive, so unless this ship has been underway for a really long time (impeller drive goes back to 1289 IIRC) that should give the colonials at least a working 'sublight' gravity drive, presumably sidewalls, and very likely acelleration compensation, something nBSG seems to lack. Assuming they manage to figure out any of this in a timeframe to matter (dubious but then, the Graysons did something similar, it just took them a couple centuries ).
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by Crazedwraith »

Did Beowulf invent the impeller? I thought it was just the sails they came up with,
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

Post by LastShadow »

For arguments sake, the amount of time it took to make another jump in nBSG was more attributed to the fact that it took them that long to make the jump calculations, transmit them to the fleet, recollect the vipers and then bounce out. That is why they networked the computers in that episode to try and get the hell out of dodge faster, it was a computational limitation mostly.

Aside from that there isnt anything else i can add due to a severe lack of knowledge about the honorverse.
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Re: nBSG meets Honorverse

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Batman wrote:Well Beowulf were the guys who invented impeller drive, so unless this ship has been underway for a really long time (impeller drive goes back to 1289 IIRC) that should give the colonials at least a working 'sublight' gravity drive, presumably sidewalls, and very likely acelleration compensation, something nBSG seems to lack. Assuming they manage to figure out any of this in a timeframe to matter (dubious but then, the Graysons did something similar, it just took them a couple centuries ).
The impellar drive was 1246 PD from Basilisk Station and the first Warshawski sail (FTL) was 1273 PD from Honor among Enemies
Crazedwraith wrote:Did Beowulf invent the impeller? I thought it was just the sails they came up with,
Beowolf Came up with the Impellar drive and the Warshawski sail was from Earth created by Dr. Adrienne Warshawski
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