Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington II

[PKRudeBoy]

Honestly, I think that if you put live blades in the hands of an Olympic level fencer and a Krav Maga or Systema master (which seem to me the closest equivalents to coup de vitesse) who has cross trained in fencing, and is both stronger and faster, the latter will win most of the time. I've fenced foil and épée, and the latter in particular I feel might even be counterproductive in an actual fight. Training to lightly flick any exposed body part to score a touch will not help you if your trying to run someone through or take their head, and your muscle memory will be screaming at you to fight how you were taught.

[Simon_Jester]

On the other hand, Burdette is trained in something more like kendo and less like foil or epee, so he's actually accustomed to a sport where the standard attack IS pretty much "slash this guy in the head/torso with your sword." His reflexes aren't going to be acting against him to the same extent.

[Ahriman238]

The two-toned priority buzz of Honor's bedside com yanked her awake with all the gentleness of a garrote. She hissed in pain as broken ribs and bruised muscles protested their abuse, but the spinal-reflex reactions of thirty years of naval service were ruthless, and she shoved the pain aside and swung her feet to the deck even as she rubbed at sleep-gummy eyes. She didn't need the querulous sound Nimitz made from his nest in the blankets to tell her they'd gotten barely an hour's sack time. Her thoughts felt slow and logy, floating on a drift of fatigue, and she made herself take another few seconds to fight herself awake before she pressed the audio-only acceptance key.

Nevermind, I guess her rib is still broken. Oh, and she's now upgraded to four hours of sleep in the last two days.

Honor tried to keep her face from reacting, but her mind raced, despite the streamers of fatigue which clogged it. Although the sensor platform's grav-pulse transmitters were FTL capable, each pulse took time to generate, which meant their data transmission rate was slow. At the moment, all Mercedes' information was based on the intruders' hyper footprint and impeller signatures, both of which were also FTL and could be directly observed from Grayson, but which told very little—other than raw numbers—about the ships who'd made them. It would be several minutes yet before the closest sensor platforms could send Central anything definite on the Peeps' light-speed emissions, but if it was a standard Peep formation, that high a unit count argued for at least twenty-five ships of the wall . . . and she had six.

Grayson can detect hyper-footprints and wedges 27 light-minutes out independent of the FTL spy-net. Also, remember when they couldn't stream video through FTL comm? Ah well, it'll be a while before those days are gone for us. 61 contacts, if a standard Peep formation, 25 (almost half) would be wallers. Small screens, except we later get a count far higher, so perhaps they only detected the BBs and BCs, and one random contact.

"Yes, Sir. I'm just making a little bet with myself on how soon we see the opposition." The commissioner looked puzzled, and Thurston waved at the plot. "They've known we're here for over thirty minutes, but all we've seen are a few destroyers and a dozen or so cruisers and battlecruisers, and half of them have been positively IDed as Manties. Intelligence says the Graysons alone have more light and medium combatants than that, and I'm fairly confident they left most of them behind to watch their home world when they pulled out their SDs. The question becomes where they are and when we'll see them."

-snip-

"All right. Now, if our strength estimates are correct, they don't have anything heavier than a battlecruiser, and a battlecruiser can pull five hundred to five-twenty gees. A DuQuesne-class SD, on the other hand, can pull a maximum accel of only about four hundred and twenty-five. Intelligence estimates the Manties' new inertial compensators increase their efficiency by two to three percent, which would up that to four thirty-three to four thirty-eight, assuming they've had time to refit with it. Intelligence calls that unlikely, but even if they have, those figures are for maximum military power with no safety margin, and the Manties don't like to do that any more than we do. So figure eighty percent as their normal full power setting, and you get roughly three forty-six to three fifty gees for an SD even with the new compensator. If we see anything in that envelope, it may mean Stalking Horse didn't actually get all their SDs out of the system, and that means we'll have to rethink our entire plan."

Preznikov nodded yet again, and Thurston shrugged.

"On the other hand, how soon they head out to meet us will also give me a better read on their commander. It's hard to watch this much firepower coming at you and not start doing something, Sir, but a good CO will do just that. The critical factor is for his movements to unite his entire force before we make contact, but the longer he waits, the further committed we become. Given the disparity in force levels we anticipate, that shouldn't make any difference, but it's a matter of professionalism. A good CO will try to make us fully commit whether he figures he can stop us or not, almost by reflex action. And it's axiomatic, especially when you have an emplaced sensor net and the enemy doesn't, that you deny him any chance to gauge your strength—which means waiting to light off the drives we can detect—for as long as possible.

"But an inexperienced commander will want to get his entire force in motion as soon as possible. He'll feel the strain of waiting more, and if he's unsure of himself, he may be looking to react to an enemy's actions rather than initiate his own. In that case, it makes sense to show himself early so he can see what the enemy does and try to take advantage of it . . . but that also lets the enemy dictate the conditions of engagement—which, by the way, is a mistake our own Navy's still making against the Manties. So," Thurston turned away from the plot and started back towards his command chair, "a good CO will probably wait until the last moment, then bring his ships out of Grayson orbit under high accel, and a nervous, or tentative CO will probably bring them out sooner, at a lower accel. And knowing which sort of commander you're up against, Citizen Commissioner, is half the trick of winning."

They know the main force of the GSN is in Grayson orbit and will have to leave if they want to meet the various ships scattered around the system and heading for a common intercept point. An experienced commander will wait for the last minute then punch out at max velocity to give the enemy minimal time to scrutinize his forces and disposition. Unless, of course, this commander is feeling sneaky.

Oh, and Haven intelligence estimates that Grayson compensators allow a 2-3% increase in accel. They're wrong by the way, very wrong.

The good news—such as it was—was that the Peeps had nothing bigger than a battleship. At four and a half million tons, a Triumphant-class BB—the standard Peep design for the type—was fifty-six percent as massive as her own SDs, but it had no more than forty-five percent of the firepower, and its defenses were little more than a third as effective as her own ships' had been even before refit.

The bad news was that they had thirty-six of them, supported by twenty-four battlecruisers, twenty-four heavy cruisers, thirty-eight light cruisers, and forty-two destroyers. She had six superdreadnoughts, nineteen battlecruisers (including all those racing in from various other locations to rendezvous with her main force), ten heavy cruisers, forty light cruisers, and nineteen destroyers. There were, in fact, eight more BCs—Mark Brentworth's First Battlecruiser Squadron—and four more CAs in Yeltsin, but none of them could reach her before the Peeps reached Grayson, and she'd used her grav-pulse transmitters to order them to go silent and hold their positions rather than reveal their locations. Mark's battlecruisers had done so even before she ordered it, and she was glad they had, for they'd been at rest relative to Yeltsin and less than eight million klicks from the Peeps when they made transit. The Peeps' higher base velocity would have made it easy to run Mark down if he'd tried to break in-system to join her.

Order of battle.

Haven: 0 SD, 0 DN, 36 BB, 24 BC, 24 CA, 38 CL, 42 DD.

Grayson: 6 SD, 0 DN, 0 BB, 19 BC, 10 CA, 40 CL, 19 DD.

Of course, the Haven force was always going to split in two if it seemed the whole force wasn't needed to take Grayson. I'd note two things. First that Admiral Thurston's forces compromise roughly 10-15% of each classification available to the entire People's Navy, according to SVW and discounting destroyers. In fact, this is over a quarter of their pre-War battlecruisers here. Even without wallers this is a significant fraction of the PN with according resources. Second, the Grayson has another 8 BCs and 4 CA hiding in the system periphery who can't make the intercept coordinates. Even discounting the SDs (and repairing and refitting them was a major project) Grayson has rebuilt their navy in just three years from nothing into a force with over three times the BCs Sarnow had at Hancock and an equal or greater screen for them. GLORIOUS KERBAL GRAYSONS!!!!! Your Protector salutes you!

Oh, and a brief discussion of battleships. They're just over half the size of Honor's Haven-built SDs (which are pretty shrimpy compared to Manticoran SDs) but have less than half the firepower, and comparatively shitty missile defense for their size. It seems their hardware just doesn't scale well right there in the middle, and though they were once THE capital ship, now they're too weak and fragile to play with the big boys, and too slow for most other things a Navy would need. Hence why Haven's aging BB fleet is used mostly for convoy escort and rear-area security, and they were so excited to have found a use for some.

The problem was that her total available force fell well short of the firepower headed for her. She enjoyed the Alliance's usual tech advantage, but that was most effective in a long-range missile duel, and, in this case, the nature of the opposing forces went far towards offsetting it. The armament of Peep battleships was heavily biased in favor of missile tubes—they had little more than fifteen percent of an SD's energy armament but thirty percent of its missile power—precisely because they were supposed to stay out of energy range of true ships of the wall. Sluggish as they might be compared to battlecruisers or lighter units, BBs could pull much higher accelerations than dreadnoughts or superdreadnoughts. These people would be able to avoid Honor's SDs with relative ease, and although battleships were more fragile, the sheer numbers of tubes on the other side would give the Peeps something like an advantage of two to one in missile throw weight in a sustained engagement. She could offset some of that with missile pods, but only in the initial—and longest-ranged—salvos, given the pods' susceptibility to proximity soft kills.

Haven BBs (and other ships) are weighted more towards missile combat. Again, despite being 56% the mass of an SD, they have 33% the missile tubes and 15% the energy mounts. The downside here is that many BBs can and will beat down Honor in a missile-spam contest, even with her better ECM.

If she stayed where she was, with Grayson's orbital forts in support, the Peep commander would be foolhardy to risk a close action. But though they hadn't launched any yet, the Peeps were bound to probe the space about Grayson with recon drones before they closed. That meant they'd spot the squadron before they entered attack range, and they had the acceleration to crab aside and break past Grayson without ever coming into the forts' range.

Which, unfortunately, would not save Grayson, for neither the planet, its shipyards, its orbital farms, nor its forts could dodge, and immobility was the Achilles' heel of any fixed defenses. The Peeps could break off into the outer system and come back in at as much as eighty percent light-speed, and missiles launched from that velocity against nonevading targets would be deadly. Once their drives burned out, the incoming missiles would be impossible to track on gravitics, and even Manticoran radar had a maximum detection range of little more than a million kilometers against such small targets. Oh, they might get a sniff at as much as two million, given the Peeps' less effective penetration ECM, but they could never localize at more than a million—and if the Peeps launched at .8 c, their birds' drives would boost them to .99 c before burnout. That would give the point defense systems three seconds to lock on, engage, and stop them, which brought the old cliché about the snowflake in Hell forcibly to mind.

Almost as bad, the Peeps would be free to do whatever they wanted in the outer system if she held her position in near-Grayson space, and they would undoubtedly demolish Yeltsin's asteroid extraction infrastructure. That, alone, would devastate the system's industrial base, and they'd still be able to turn around and attack Grayson itself whenever they chose. Or, for that matter, they could detach a large enough force to pin her in Yeltsin and send a half dozen battleships to Endicott. The heaviest RMN or GSN ship covering Masada was a battlecruiser, and there were only eighteen of them. They could never stand off an attack with battleship support, yet if they failed to do so—

Limits of Manticoran radar, 1 million km detection rate against ECM-using ballistic missiles at 0.99 c, or 3 seconds before impact. Well, double that for detection, but 1 million to narrow it down enough to have a shot at shooting them down. According to Honor, not a chance, which is funny because when the dreaded 'c-fractional' strike came up before she wasn't worried that she wouldn't be able to stop some or most of the missiles, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to stop all of them.

Oh, and honor hits on the plan to destabilize Masada all over again. It would be petty of me to point out that the relatively unimportant Endicott picket has over twice the firepower Yancey Parks left to defend his main base and the ONLY repair station within a couple of weeks flight, but I can be a very petty person sometimes.

"They hit Candor and Minette to draw our SDs out of Yeltsin, Fred," Honor said, "and they think they've succeeded. That's the only reason for them to head in for a normal engagement with the forts. They think they can take them out, and those 'freighters' are probably transports with an occupation force to take over the shipyards after they knock out the defenses. They can't hope to hold onto them, but they can certainly destroy them, and if they've brought along the right tech teams, they could learn an awful lot about our latest systems for their own use."

The probable point of the attack, or at least why they aren't accelerating to do a c-fractional drive-by shooting.

He shook his head and gazed thoughtfully into the plot. Almost exactly seventy minutes had passed since the task force's arrival, and its units were up to 20,403 KPS. So far they'd covered over forty-six and a half million kilometers, and for a while he'd thought the Graysons were going to fight smart. Destroyers and dispatch boats had shot out in all directions, no doubt carrying word of his attack to nearby systems and screaming for help, but whatever they'd had in Grayson orbit had sat tight. The fact that one of those courier vessels had headed out on a least-time course to Endicott was irritating, since it meant the forces covering that system would be alerted to make whatever preparations they could before he detached Theisman and Chernov, but he'd known from the outset that that was likely to happen. He couldn't divide his own forces until he'd confirmed that there were no ships of the wall in Yeltsin, and every minute the Grayson commander had sat tight, denying him that confirmation, was one more minute he'd had to hold onto Theisman and TG 14.2's battleships and battlecruisers.

But now the enemy had come out of hiding, and his timing was execrable. The largest units Thurston's sensors could see were battlecruisers, but the Allied force's acceleration was 458 g, which was stupid. It was higher than a Manty BC's "normal maximum" of four hundred gravities at eighty percent power, so they'd obviously redlined their drives. Yet that was still over forty gravities lower than the maximum they could have pulled, which indicated that they had some of their damnable missile pods on tow. The extra launchers those things provided in the opening salvos had worried Thurston when he first conceived Dagger, but the battlecruisers coming at him couldn't be towing more than one or at most two pods each, or their accel would have been still lower.

That was what made their movements so stupid. If Grayson's defenders were going to come out at less than max accel they should have started even sooner, with an even lower acceleration, which would have let them tow more pods. The small number their BCs could have available at this accel would make no difference against battleship point defense, so all they'd accomplished by bringing them along was to cost themselves about a half KPS2 and give Thurston an earlier look at their numbers and formation than they had to.

If, he thought, you could call that a formation. The untidy gaggle of starships moved towards him in awkward clumps and knots, and he shook his head again. There were Manty ships in that mess, but its CO had to be a Grayson, because no Manty admiral would let himself fuck up this way. Thurston recognized the courage his enemy was displaying, but Lord was he dumb!

All according to plan. Battlecruisers (presumably Haven) as a baseline can pull 400 Gs of accel if they stick to the normal 80% power for non-emergencies, and 498 Gs going all out. The loss of 40 Gs makes Thurston assume each BC must be towing exactly 2 pods. Which interests me, does he expect a ship to lose 20 Gs for each pod, or does it not scale linearly?

"Plotting makes it twenty-five battlecruisers, ten heavy cruisers, forty-odd light cruisers, and sixteen to twenty destroyers, Citizen Admiral," his ops officer responded. "We're not positive about the count on the light units because of their formation. They're not only getting in each other's way, but some of them are grouped so tight it's all but impossible to get a close look at their wedges."

"RDs?"

"Not much point at this range, Citizen Admiral," his senior tracking officer replied. "We can't send drones in ballistic the way their formation's all tangled up—we'd need to bring them in under power and steer them into location. If we do that, their point defense will have so much tracking and solution time they'll pick them off in droves. Given our vectors, the missile envelope should be about thirteen million klicks, though. We could probably bury the drones in our missile fire then and sneak 'em past, but—"

"But by that time, we'll have plenty of direct observation without them," Thurston agreed.

They're right on the ship-count (besides one glaring error Honor is leading them into) and to Thurston's credit he does consider using recon drones to confirm what his sensors are telling him.

There were limits to even a Grayson-refitted SD's EW capabilities. Terrible could do a lot to make her impeller wedge look weaker, yet it was so powerful that the deception was unlikely to hold if someone got a good, hard look at it. Which was why she'd "disarranged" her formation and put at least three other ships in front of each SD. With their wedges directly between the superdreadnoughts and the Peeps' sensors, interference should mask the greater power of the SDs' drives. Coupled with the heavier ships' EW activity, that should keep the Peeps from realizing what they were truly up against . . . unless they got a recon drone close enough for a good look.

The trick, of course, was to dissuade them from trying to do just that. The chance of getting a big, relatively slow RD past her point defense was low, but it was possible, especially if the Peep commander should feel uneasy enough to expend the huge numbers of RDs needed to swamp her defenses.

So what she needed to do was to make the Peeps so confident of what they saw that they felt no need to confirm it, and she'd taken a risky step to do just that. She was running her superdreadnoughts flat out at full military power and zero safety margin, which gave the squadron about a three percent chance of someone suffering a compensator failure—with fatal consequences for whoever it happened to. But it also let them pull an acceleration of over 4.5 KPS2, far higher than any "normal" SD could manage, and she hoped Peep intelligence hadn't yet figured out that the new compensators had increased Alliance acceleration rates by over six percent virtually across the board. If they hadn't, her accel should look too high to be an SD's.

She did this at Blackbird too, used the light Grayson units to block view of her Manticoran ships and play a bit of a shellgame.

Unless I fail statistics forever (actually I barely scraped a pass, but that was some years ago) there is a 3% chance one of Honor's 6 ships that are running full-max zero safety (as opposed to her BCs which are going fairly leisurely as emergency military power goes) will have a compensator failure, this translates into a 0.166% overall likelihood of compensator failure while performing this stunt.

Finally, even Haven Intelligence's most pessimistic guess about the accel/deccel advantages of Grayson-style compensators is only half the reality.

"I see it, Fred," she said quietly, and her aching eyes narrowed in disbelief as the Peep formation changed. A full third of their battleships—and two-thirds of their battlecruisers!—had just begun decelerating at 470 g. That must be running the BBs' compensators close to redline, although they didn't have missile pods to complicate their lives, of course, and she frowned. The larger group continued onward at a steady 450 g, still heading for its eventual turnover, which meant the gap between it and the smaller force was growing at over nine KPS2.

She reached out to punch numbers into her plot, but she'd never been a confident mathematician, and fatigue seemed to have put extra joints in the middles of her fingers. She fumbled at the keypad, then grimaced in frustration with her own clumsiness and looked at Bagwell.

"Have CIC designate the lead formation as Force Alpha and the trailer as Force Zulu, Fred."

"Aye, aye, My Lady."

"Allen," she turned to her astrogator, "assume all accelerations remain constant to Force Alpha's projected turnover and that Alpha decelerates at four-point-four KPS squared thereafter. What will the range to Zulu be when we're nine million klicks from Alpha?"

"Nine million?" Commander Sewell repeated, and bent over his own console at her nod. His fingers moved with the brisk assurance which had evaded her own, and he looked back up in mere seconds. "Under the assumptions you specified, My Lady, the range to Force Zulu at that point will be approximately six-seven-point-six-eight-eight million kilometers."

First time I remember Honor on-screen turning to her dedicated math officer and saying "do my maths." This token flaw brought up once again, on the same page that she farms it out to the man whose full-time job it is to do this for her. Oh yes, and Thurston is convinced enough that there's no threat to send Theisman and TF 14.2 on their way.

"Skip, if I didn't know better—and I don't know better—I'd say six of those battlecruisers just slid into a modified vertical wall of battle."

"That's crazy, Shannon," Caslet's astrogator said. "Battlecruisers don't form wall against battleships! That'd be suicide!"

"Yep," Foraker agreed. "That's exactly what it would be—for battlecruisers."

Shannon Foraker, ladies and gentlemen.

The enemy formation had begun to put out decoys and brought its jammers on-line, which was making it even harder to keep track of anything in that mishmash formation. His own ships were doing the same things, of course, but the Manties had obviously provided their Grayson allies with first-line EW equipment. First-line Manty EW equipment, he amended sourly. The range had fallen to just under thirteen million kilometers, well within theoretical missile range, but those decoys and jammers cut the effective range to seventy percent of theoretical, max. He had perhaps four-and-a-half minutes before both sides began to fire, and he didn't have time for last-minute nonsense.

-snip-

Thurston swung back to his own display and opened his mouth impatiently, then paused. Six Alliance battlecruisers were now highlighted in a darker red, and they formed—indisputably, they formed—what might just possibly be a formal wall of battle. It was an unorthodox one, like a huge "V" laid on its side in space, but the intervals were unmistakable. The confusion of the rest of their formation had hidden it from him, but now that those individual units had been highlighted, the spacing virtually leapt out of the display at him. Yet there was something wrong with it. . . .

Citizen Vice Admiral Alexander Thurston punched a query into his console, and his face went pale as dispassionate computers answered it. No, that interval was all wrong for a wall of battlecruisers—but it was just right for one of superdreadnoughts. . . .

The penny drops. One effect of Manticoran ECM is to lower the opposing forces' effective missile range by 30%, until they figure out a workaround.

Honor's battlecruisers had only two missile pods apiece. That was all they could tow without massive degradation of their acceleration rates. But superdreadnoughts were big enough they could actually tractor the pods inside their wedges, where they had no effect at all on acceleration, and now each of her ships of the wall deployed a lumpy, ungainly tail of no less than ten pods. They were ugly, clumsy, and fragile, those pods—but each of them also mounted ten box launchers loaded with missiles even larger and more powerful than a superdreadnought's missile tubes could fire.

The last Grayson destroyer skittered out of the way as the range fell to nine million kilometers, and then Battle Squadron One, Grayson Space Navy, fired its first broadside in anger.

Interesting, the pods' drag doesn't seem to scale linearly, as two is their max before their accel is really cut down.

Oh, and each of Honor's superdreadnoughts can tow pods inside the wedge, though they still have to kick them out to fire, and they can each manage ten. That's an extra 200 missiles per ship to the opening broadside, a serious boost considering this class of SD has 36 launchers to a side.

One instant, the situation had been well in hand; five minutes later, fourteen hundred missiles erupted from the Allied "battlecruisers." Havenite missiles answered almost instantly, but all twenty-four battleships between them could produce only seven hundred missiles in reply, and, unlike the Allies, they'd spread their first, preprogrammed broadside's fire over all twenty-five of the "battlecruisers" in the opposing task force. The Allies hadn't done that. They'd concentrated twice as much fire on just twelve battleships—less than half as many targets—and taken the Peep point defense crews totally by surprise, to boot.

The perils of spreading your fire too much, though that would have done it if they'd all really been BCs. Even with all the pods, they just manage to double the Peeps' broadsides.

The two formations slid broadside towards one another at just under forty thousand kilometers per second while the missiles went out with an acceleration of eighty-five thousand gravities. At their closure rate, the two formations had only two hundred and twenty-six seconds before they interpenetrated. Not passed one another, but interpenetrated, for Honor had deliberately turned directly across TG 14.1's base course to give her energy weapons the best possible field of fire for the bare twelve seconds it would take the Peeps to shoot clear across their effective range envelope. So great was their closing speed that flight time was barely over a minute and a half, despite the range, and both sides had seeded their broadsides with EW missiles packed with penetration aids to make their birds still harder to track.

85,000 G accel is the max of missiles from all the way back in Basilisk Station. But there it was said that the drives would burn out after a minute, here they have a minute and a half. It makes sense to use the max accel if you're in close and don't have to worry about drive endurance, but shouldn't the first broadside or two have had lower accel?

My sad mathematical skills are totally inadequate to comparing the flight characteristics (burnout time, speed at burnout) of missiles accelerating at 850 KPS2 for 1 minute and ones pulling 425 KPS2 for 3 minutes, as seems to be the preference for max-range missile duels. Though I probably should have tried a while ago, this is not new data.

Oh, and Haven is using EW warheads too now.

Standard PN doctrine put the task force commander at the center of his wall of battle, where light-speed communication lags were minimized and the wall's interlocking point defense was maximized. But in this sort of minimum-range shootout, point defense was largely irrelevant, and the Manties were going for Task Force Fourteen's brain. Alexander Thurston's brain.

And Manticoran/Grayson doctrine is to waste the obvious flagship if one presents itself. Okay, the positioning does make sense, but there is an obvious drawback and I'm reasonably certain it's one that Manticorans don't use. And Haven won't use it much in the future either.

BatRon One and its screen went to maximum rate fire with their very first broadsides. The superdreadnoughts retained their original Havenite launchers, with a cycle time of approximately twenty seconds; the lighter Grayson units carried the Mod 7b Manticoran launcher, and the GSN's battlecruisers mounted the Mod 19, both with a cycle time of only seventeen seconds.

But two hundred and twenty-six seconds would allow BatRon One's SDs only eleven broadsides and the lighter ships only thirteen, and there was no time to observe the results of one broadside before the next was fired. The initial fire plans had been locked into the computers, and human reflexes were hopelessly inadequate to modify them in the time they had.

Computers finally used intelligently to execute preplanned firing routines faster than humans could.

Hmm...

A few books ago when Honor was also fighting for the fate of Grayson her Fearless had the latest Mod 7b and could fire a broadside every 11 seconds. Meanwhile, Saladin/Thunder of God could get off one every 15 seconds. Here we have Grayson cruisers with the same missile launcher Honor had but inferior performance to both ships 17 seconds for Grayson cruiser and BC alike. 20 seconds for a Haven built SD I'll buy.

BatRon One's first broadside went in with horrific effect. It was the heaviest and most concentrated one the engagement would see, and Honor's fire control officers had calculated its targeting setup with exquisite care, then run constant updates the whole time the two fleets advanced to meet one another. Despite the short flight time, the Peeps' point defense crews managed to knock down almost thirty percent of the incoming fire. Decoys and jammers threw another ten percent off track, and desperate captains—abandoning formation discipline in last-ditch efforts to save their ships—sprawled out of their wall of battle, frantically rolling in attempts to interpose the impenetrable roofs or floors of their impeller wedges against the incoming fire. Their reckless maneuvers brought PNS Theban Warrior and PNS Saracen too near one another—their wedges physically collided, and the collision blew alpha and beta nodes in a frenzy of wild energy that half-vaporized both battleships—but their sister ships managed to take yet another twenty-two percent of BatRon One's missiles against their wedges.

Yet for all their frantic maneuvers, thirty-eight percent of Honor's birds got through . . . spread between a mere twelve targets. Five hundred and thirty-two laser warheads—warheads of a size and power only ships of the wall, or RMN missile pods, could throw—detonated almost as one. Bomb-pumped lasers gouged and tore at the sidewalls covering the open flanks of their targets' wedges, and some of them—perhaps as many as twenty percent—detonated directly ahead or astern of their targets, where there were no sidewalls.

Despite being taken by surprise by the huge vast missile swarm, Haven point defense and evasive maneuvers still negate 62% of the incoming. It's not nearly enough to save them, but shows why it still takes an awful lot of missiles to saturate a task force. Yes my friends, one day soon we shall look back fondly on the times when 1400 missiles was an awful lot.

Oh, and wedge-on-wedge continues to be bad mojo. Countermissiles overpower missile wedges and cause them to implode in an orgy of mutual destruction. When Honor rammed a courier boat in the first book while it's wedge was still forming, the courier's impeller nodes blew out but there was no irreparable damage or loss of life. Here two ships under power collide, and they blow out their impeller nodes with enough force to kill or cripple both ships, or so I read "half-vaporized." We even see a little wedge-on-matter, a SAM was used in SVW to assassinate the head of InSec but whatever effect it had on her air-limo was lost "in the explosion of it's hydrogen fuel tanks." In this book we properly saw a impeller SAM hit it's target and it sliced the nose off like the gravity plane was an incredibly sharp blade, and dumped a metric fuckton of kinetic energy into the rest of the craft, enough to shatter the front third and bring the crash-landing aircraft to a full and immediate stop.

Oh and confirmation again that all the pods are stuffed with capital ship missiles.

The Peeps' opening salvo was almost uniformly distributed among all twenty-five of the "battlecruisers" they'd been tracking. Had those targets, in fact, all been battlecruisers, it would have been an effective fire plan, for it also spread the Allies' defenses thin. Some, at least, of those missiles would have gotten through against every target, and successive broadsides would have finished the cripples. But Honor's orders for her screen to scatter freed her real battlecruisers to maneuver independently against the fire directed at them, and the "confusion" the Peeps had seen in her formation had been nothing of the sort. She'd deliberately broken the screening units down into their own point defense nets, independent of her SDs and freed of any responsibility for covering her wall. Combined with their more effective decoys and jammers, that tremendously degraded the accuracy of the fire directed upon them.

The screening units form their own point-defense networks, allowing the SDs to focus on stopping the birds flying for the SDs and letting the screening units look after themselves. I'm not sure why this is more effective in this case, and how you'd know when to play it this way.

In direct contravention of most battles, the first broadsides were the most effective ones for both sides. Normally, fire got more effective, not less, as tactical officers adjusted for their enemies' ECM and concentrated succeeding broadsides on more vulnerable targets. This time, there was simply too little time between salvos to adjust fire; half of each side's follow-up broadsides were already in space before the first ones even struck home. Over a third of the birds in BatRon One's second and third salvos wasted themselves on targets which were already destroyed, but the ones that didn't tore in on the surviving Peep BBs, and the Peeps had wasted thirty-one seconds retargeting their fire.

Normally following broadsides get more effective as targeting data and counter-ECM is refined. Here they have the computer firing as fast as it can, even into holes in space that would hold ships now dead.

Honor clung to her command chair, eyes on her display, watching the computers execute the plan she'd locked into them, and the holocaust of those three-point-seven minutes was simply beyond comprehension. Formalism had become the rule for fleet engagements over the centuries, and ships of the wall had not engaged in such point-blank mutual slaughter in over seventy T-years. The losing side in a battle knew when to cut and run, when to break off, and admirals never closed on a course which wouldn't let them break off at need. But Alexander Thurston had believed there were no ships of the wall to face him, and Honor had had no choice but to come to meet him. And now, as the last missile salvos roared out, her five surviving SDs completed their final turn and brought their energy batteries to bear.

Only seven Peep battleships remained, all but one of them damaged, and their crews knew as well as Honor that they could never survive an energy-range engagement with superdreadnoughts. Yet there was no way they could avoid it, either. Their own wall had completely disintegrated as the units which composed it died, and they maneuvered independently, twisting in desperate, despairing efforts to interpose their wedges. But this was the moment for which Honor had stacked her line vertically rather than horizontally. The sharp angle in its middle meant at least one of her SDs would have a shot at each battleship's sidewalls, however it might twist or turn. There was no time for a neat, formal distribution of fire from the flagship, but Honor had known there wouldn't be. Each superdreadnought's computers had been assigned targeting criteria, and it was all up to them to find and kill their targets in the instant the Peeps' velocity carried them helplessly through Honor's wall.

Five superdreadnoughts of the Grayson Navy fired almost as one, their massive energy batteries blazing away like God's own fury at ranges as low as three thousand kilometers, and five more Peep battleships and two battlecruisers blew apart under their pounding. A sixth battleship coasted out of the carnage, her drives dead, half her hull blown to wreckage while small craft and life pods spilled from her splintered flanks and desperate parties of courageous men and women fought to pull trapped and wounded comrades out of her broken compartments while there was still time.

PNS Vindicator, the seventh—and last—battleship of TG 14.1, actually broke past BatRon One completely undamaged and streaked away at forty thousand KPS. A few missiles raced after her, but now she was running away from them rather than into them, and BatRon One had not emerged unscathed from that crushing, short-range slaughter. Glorious had already died, now Manticore's Gift fell out of formation with her entire forward impeller ring—and both sidewalls forward of frame eight-fifty—shot away.

One SD destroyed and one crippled. In exchange Honor kills 23 Peep BBs and an unknown number of screening units (at least some escaped, Warner Caslet was in a cruiser there, and it's like the screen would have been a targeting priority.)

[Ahriman238]

One of her superdreadnoughts and six battlecruisers—over thirteen million tons of shipping—had been totally destroyed. Manticore's Gift was a wreck, and Walter Brentworth's flagship, Magnificent, was little better, though at least she still had most of her drive. Admiral Trailman had been killed by a direct hit on Manticore's Gift's flag bridge, Brentworth's communications were practically nonexistent after the pounding Magnificent had taken, and Furious had lost over half her weapons. Of Battle Squadron One's original six ships, only Judah Yanakov's Courageous and her own Terrible remained truly combat effective, and even they would require months of yard time to make good their damages.

Yet five of her six ships had survived—a testimonial, she thought with infinite bitterness, to the engineers who'd designed and built them, not to the fool who'd led them to the slaughter. But they'd done the job, she told herself. She'd lost thirteen million tons of shipping and twenty thousand people; the Peeps had lost over a hundred million tons, and their butcher's bill didn't even bear thinking on. She'd just destroyed an entire peacetime navy in less than five minutes of actual combat.

Amended, Honor lost an SD, three more were pounded into barely-functional wrecks, and she lost 6 BCs besides. On the other hand, she got better than a 5:1 exchange ratio in tonnage.

"My own thought, exactly." He turned back to LePic. "Citizen Commissioner, we don't dare execute our part of Dagger with combat effective ships of the wall behind us. If we pull out for Endicott and they follow us, they can trap us between themselves and whatever ships are already picketing the system. But if they've taken as much damage as I suspect they have—if, in fact, they aren't combat effective anymore—we can engage and destroy them. And if we do that, then we can still achieve all of Dagger's objectives, because there won't be anything heavy enough to stop us."

"And just how do you propose to find out if they're combat effective, Citizen Admiral?"

"There's only one way to do that, Sir," Thomas Theisman said quietly.

Theisman decides to engage Honor, reasoning her SDs must be mostly wrecks by now and his squadron of battleships can take her. Probably. Better to find out now either way, taking out her is the only way he can manage his mission with some form of security, and there's a political officer on the bridge to remind him that pulling out before even trying his mission is cowardice and cowardice=treason=death.

"I'm afraid that won't work, Fred," she said, and the ops officer stared at her. "If we break off, we lose the Gift and, probably, Magnificent. That's bad enough. But if we fall back, then whoever's in command out there will know—not just suspect, but know—we can't fight her. If she wants to, she can carry out a long-range cee-fractional bombardment of Grayson, and we can't stop her. I don't think she'd be crazy enough to go for the planet itself, but she could take out the forts, the shipyards . . . the farms."

She saw the stark understanding on the faces of her Grayson staff of what losing two-thirds of their world's food sources would mean, and nodded.

Apparently a majority of Grayson's food is grown in orbit.

Honor decides not to retreat behind the shelter of the orbital forts for the reason given, hoping to try and bluff the enemy into leaving or, just like last time in this system, kill or cripple enough ships with her death to keep them from achieving their mission.

"Warm up the pulse transmitter for an FTL Flash Priority transmission to Courvosier."

"Courvosier, Milady?" Mercedes Brigham looked up with a frown. Mark Brentworth's Raoul Courvosier was way the hell and gone out-system—almost on the hyper limit, over a hundred million klicks behind Force Zulu. The enemy had accelerated right past her and the rest of her squadron on his way in while they hid under a total emissions shut down, but even if the eight of them had been powerful enough to threaten the Peeps, they were hopelessly out of range.

"Courvosier," Honor repeated. "I've got a little job for Captain Brentworth," she said, and Mercedes blinked at the sudden, almost mischievous twinkle in her tired eyes.

-snip-

"It would appear to be a squadron of Manty superdreadnoughts, Citizen Commissioner," Theisman heard himself say calmly.

"Superdreadnoughts?" LePic stared at him in horror. "What— Where— How can they be here?"

"Manty stealth systems are better than ours, Sir," Theisman replied in that same calm, dispassionate tone while his own eyes dropped to the steadily narrowing green cone in Conquérant's master plot. "It's possible they've been there all along. If they were too far out-system to rendezvous with Harrington before she came out to ambush Citizen Admiral Thurston—and, given their current positions, that would have to have been the case—they could have been coming in under stealth to catch us if we'd run straight back to the hyper limit on a reciprocal of our original entry vector."

"But—" LePic clamped his jaws together and scrubbed sweat from his forehead, blinking furiously, and Theisman watched him dispassionately. "This changes the situation, doesn't it, Citizen Admiral?" the commissioner said after a moment in the tone of a man fighting desperately for calm. "I mean, even if you completely destroy this force—" he pointed to the light codes of Harrington's oncoming ships "—this one—" he pointed at the newcomers "—will still prevent us from carrying out the rest of Operation Dagger, won't they?"

"Eight Gryphon-class superdreadnoughts?" Theisman snorted. "They certainly would, Citizen Commissioner!"

"But you still think you can destroy Harrington?"

"I'm certain of it," Theisman said firmly.

"But you couldn't carry out Dagger afterwards?" LePic pressed.

"Not against a full squadron of Manty SDs," Theisman admitted.

"I see." LePic inhaled deeply, and then, suddenly, he seemed to calm. "Well, Citizen Admiral, I can only say that I'm impressed by your determination and courage, especially after what's already happened here, but your ships are too valuable to throw away in a hopeless cause. If we can't carry through with Operation Dagger even if you defeat Harrington, then I see no way to justify the losses we'd take from her in reply. Speaking for the Committee of Public Safety, I instruct you to break off."

Theisman glanced back into the plot. There were still a couple of minutes to go before the green cone disappeared, he noted, and let an edge of mulish obstinacy into his expression.

"Citizen Commissioner, even if we lose every battleship in the task group, the loss of four superdreadnoughts to the Alliance would—"

"I admire your determination," LePic said even more firmly, "but it's not just the battleships. There are also the transports and the freighters, not to mention the units of your screen." The commissioner shook his head. "No, Citizen Admiral. We've lost today—through no fault of yours, but we've lost—so let's not throw good money after bad. Break off, Citizen Admiral. That's an order."

"As you wish, Citizen Commissioner." Theisman sighed with manifest unwillingness, and looked at his ops officer. "You heard the citizen commissioner, Megan. Bring us hard to port and go to maximum acceleration."

I admit I love this bit. After a while of Honor's closing, Theisman is a bit less sure of his assertions that he can take her, or that she won't be able to cripple his force first. So when Honor has the BCs on the system periphery light up their drives and escort 8 EW drones impersonating SDs, Theisman figures it out inside three seconds but doesn't let on. Instead of backing down and being accused of cowardice or insufficient loyalty, he manipulates his political officer into talking him down.

This was the moment that cemented Thomas Theisman as Honor's worthy adversary, and it remains a great disappointment to me that they never directly clash again.

Damn the woman! Burdette must have been right about her after all, the idiot. Only Satan himself could have arranged this! They'd had her, he thought almost despairingly. They'd had her, actually managed to turn the people of Grayson against her—and now this! Damn it to Hell, she must be the very spawn of Satan! How else could she have survived the dome collapse, being shot out of the sky, a second assassination attempt at point-blank range, a duel with one of Grayson's fifty best fencers, and then defeated yet another invasion of Yeltsin? She wasn't human!

Hey! Keep your slurs about the genetically-manipulated out of this!

Establishes some of what Master Second means, Burdette wasn't the best fencer on Grayson nor the runner-up (because the runner-up is Honor's teacher) but he was definitely in the top 50.

A hint of true satisfaction crept into his assumed smile of pleasure at that thought. His "insurance policy" had already accounted for twenty-six of its thirty targets, including both Marchant and Harding, the only ones he was certain could have testified against him. It was fortunate Mayhew had delayed any move against them until after Harrington had been given her chance to confront Burdette—not that he'd had much choice. Planetary Security had to notify any steadholder before they made arrests in his steading, and Mayhew could scarcely have notified Burdette of his plans to arrest Marchant and his cousin without warning the Steadholder. But unlike Mayhew's men, Mueller's had already been in Burdette, and they'd acted with skill and dispatch. Indeed, Mueller thought with a grim chuckle, they'd made Marchant's death look like the vengeance of outraged private citizens, while Harding had "thrown himself to his death" from a tenth story window.

Mueller is kind of a weasel, and arranged for everyone who could possibly connect him to Burdette to die.

Interesting that Planetary Security (which serves like a federal law enforcement) need to inform a steadholder before arresting any of their citizens.

"My Lords, our world and people have been the victims of a disgusting and cowardly plot against a person our Protector so rightly called a good and a godly woman. To my own shame, I, too, believed the initial reports. I actually held Grayson Sky Domes—and Lady Harrington—responsible for the deaths of my steaders, and in my anger, I did and said things which I now deeply regret."

He spoke quietly, sincerely, bending his head to acknowledge his fault, and the other Keys gazed at him in silent understanding and compassion.

"My Lords," he resumed after a moment, "I, as many of us, have done grievous damage to Sky Domes by canceling contracts and initiating litigation against them. For my own part, and on behalf of the Steading of Mueller, I now publicly renounce that litigation. I invite Sky Domes to resume construction of the Mueller Middle School Dome, and I pledge the privy purse of Mueller to cover any reasonable expense in clearing the site so that work may begin anew."

Mueller arranges to renew his contract with Sky Domes, to pay to clear the debris himself, and that Grayson as a whole recoup lost profits over the whole collapsing domes scare. In this way he positions himself to survive the aftermath of his plots and live to menace Honor another day. Still waiting on that other day, but like I said, Mueller is kind of a weasel and he's seen what happens to people who mess with Honor.

"My Lords," Mackenzie said quietly, "I find this motion a wise and a proper one. It is always fitting that we honor those who have met the Test of Life, and surely no one in our history has ever met—and surpassed—her Test more fully than Lady Harrington. My Lords of Grayson, I second Lord Mueller's motions in full, and ask the Conclave to adopt them by acclamation."

There was another moment of intense silence. Only one other individual had ever received the Crossed Swords to indicate a second award of Grayson's highest decoration for valor . . . and that man had been Isaiah Mackenzie, Benjamin the Great's captain general in the Civil War. For six hundred years, the tradition had been that no one else would ever receive the Swords to the Star, but Isaiah Mackenzie had been John Mackenzie's ancestor, in direct line, and if John Mackenzie felt—

Honor has the crossed swords added to her Star, making her one of the two most decorated officers in Grayson history and upsetting a six hundred year tradition that no one is as heroic or honored as Isaiah Mackenzie. The motion is proposed by Mueller, seconded by Steadholder Mackenzie (who will be taking Burdette's post as the most reactionary bigot in the room) and made unanimous by everyone else.

fade to black.

Oh, there is an afterword that when Weber wrote the dome collapse he tried to make it as horrifying an act of cynical violence as he could (this being 94) but between his writing and the book's publishing the Oklahoma City bombing proved he'd imagined small, and that such men and such deeds must be ever opposed.



I can't believe I'm done with Flag. How time flies.

[Simon_Jester]

Nevermind, I guess her rib is still broken. Oh, and she's now upgraded to four hours of sleep in the last two days.

Well, how broken the rib is, we don't know- it's a matter of degree. Is it being held together by some sort of glue? Tape over the torso? something that's stimulated healing so that it's about as healed up as it would be after a week of normal recovery time? Two weeks? Dunno.

Oh, and Haven intelligence estimates that Grayson compensators allow a 2-3% increase in accel. They're wrong by the way, very wrong.

I bet I know why. The RMN almost has to be deliberately running ships slower than it could, when it knows Havenites can see, to avoid tipping off just how much faster their ships really are. Also, a lot of the updated-compensator ships are in squadrons along with ones that have not received the updates at this point, so the faster ships are stuck poking along at low accelerations so their sisters can keep up.

If this kind of deception is in place, then at most Haven would tend to see formations with one or two slowpoke ships running at 85% max or whatever, to keep up with a majority of ships that are faster and COULD theoretically move much more quickly, at the cost of forcing their older sisters to redline their engines.

This misestimate in acceleration really screws over Thurston, by the way, denying him the opportunity to figure out exactly what's coming at him.

Of course, the Haven force was always going to split in two if it seemed the whole force wasn't needed to take Grayson. I'd note two things. First that Admiral Thurston's forces compromise roughly 10-15% of each classification available to the entire People's Navy, according to SVW and discounting destroyers. In fact, this is over a quarter of their pre-War battlecruisers here. Even without wallers this is a significant fraction of the PN with according resources.

The PN seems to be very short on screening ships overall, actually. Some reasons screening ships may be overrepresented here:

1) Thurston knows that he's going to be fighting a lot of cruisers and battlecruisers, both Grayson and RMN, and wants ships fast enough to catch them or at least not get left in the dust by them.
2) Thurston is planning to use his control of Grayson to launch cruiser/battlecruiser raids against other systems in the vicinity, which means he needs to have cruisers and battlecruisers handy, in large numbers.

Oh, and a brief discussion of battleships. They're just over half the size of Honor's Haven-built SDs (which are pretty shrimpy compared to Manticoran SDs) but have less than half the firepower, and comparatively shitty missile defense for their size...

The numbers don't really add up, though- the 4.5 megaton Triumphants being 56% the mass of Honor's ships puts them at eight million tons on the nose, which isn't at all shrimpy for a superdreadnought.

House of Steel, 15-20 years later, puts the DuQuesne-class Honor is using at around 7.2 million tons.

As to the 'scaling badly' observation, hm..... sounds credible. At a guess, there are several factors in play here.

1) The Havenite battleships were designed to beat up on the navies and defenses of relatively weak powers, and are old ships; they would not have strong missile defense relative to a modern ship of either Haven or Manticore.

2) As noted, it may simply not be possible to build large enough sidewall generators or heavy enough armor plating on the hulls of these smaller ships to make them properly resistant to capital-class beams and missile warheads.

3) The battleships may suffer from the "Imperial Star Destroyer syndrome" of being designed not just as pure naval combatants, but as flying troop transports and system control platforms. Thus, they might be heavy on shuttle bays, Marine contingents, and other things very useful to 1850 PD Haven but largely useless to Alexander Thurston when he's fighting a squadron of Honor's superdreadnoughts.

The problem was that her total available force fell well short of the firepower headed for her. She enjoyed the Alliance's usual tech advantage, but that was most effective in a long-range missile duel, and, in this case, the nature of the opposing forces went far towards offsetting it. The armament of Peep battleships was heavily biased in favor of missile tubes—they had little more than fifteen percent of an SD's energy armament but thirty percent of its missile power—precisely because they were supposed to stay out of energy range of true ships of the wall...

Sluggish as they might be compared to battlecruisers or lighter units, BBs could pull much higher accelerations than dreadnoughts or superdreadnoughts. These people would be able to avoid Honor's SDs with relative ease, and although battleships were more fragile, the sheer numbers of tubes on the other side would give the Peeps something like an advantage of two to one in missile throw weight in a sustained engagement. She could offset some of that with missile pods, but only in the initial—and longest-ranged—salvos, given the pods' susceptibility to proximity soft kills.

Haven BBs (and other ships) are weighted more towards missile combat. Again, despite being 56% the mass of an SD, they have 33% the missile tubes and 15% the energy mounts. The downside here is that many BBs can and will beat down Honor in a missile-spam contest, even with her better ECM.

The battleships might also have deeper magazines and faster rates of fire for the tubes they DO have, but that's a shot in the dark. Another point is that if we can apply the 2012-vintage contents of House of Steel to this 1995-vintage novel, we know that seemingly ALL Havenite capital ships appear to be biased in favor of missile combat rather than beams, so it's no surprise that these clunky old battlewagons are too.

Limits of Manticoran radar, 1 million km detection rate against ECM-using ballistic missiles at 0.99 c, or 3 seconds before impact. Well, double that for detection, but 1 million to narrow it down enough to have a shot at shooting them down. According to Honor, not a chance, which is funny because when the dreaded 'c-fractional' strike came up before she wasn't worried that she wouldn't be able to stop some or most of the missiles, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to stop all of them.

Those earlier "c-fractional" attacks, as I recall, were thought of as ballistic shots from long range, on missiles whose drives are already burned out. These... aren't.

Another point is that there's an obvious way to block c-fractional missile attacks up to a point: interpose an impeller wedge. That works relatively well for protecting a space station that's only a few kilometers across and can hide behind a ship's skirts like that, at least against purely ballistic threats. It will NOT work against missiles that still have burn time on their drives when they enter your defense envelope at 0.9c and rising.

If, he thought, you could call that a formation. The untidy gaggle of starships moved towards him in awkward clumps and knots, and he shook his head again. There were Manty ships in that mess, but its CO had to be a Grayson, because no Manty admiral would let himself fuck up this way. Thurston recognized the courage his enemy was displaying, but Lord was he dumb!

All according to plan. Battlecruisers (presumably Haven) as a baseline can pull 400 Gs of accel if they stick to the normal 80% power for non-emergencies, and 498 Gs going all out. The loss of 40 Gs makes Thurston assume each BC must be towing exactly 2 pods. Which interests me, does he expect a ship to lose 20 Gs for each pod, or does it not scale linearly?

As far as I can tell it doesn't scale linearly.

The real catch here is that Thurston is simply making far too many calculations about what his enemy's drives do and don't allow them to do. He's assuming that just from knowing their accelerations he can deduce what class of ship he's fighting AND how many of a largely unknown weapon they're carrying. This turns out to be fatal when he doesn't make allowances for "but what if the enemy's compensators are drastically better than we thought?"

Sure, StateSec and its naval intelligence arm should have alerted him to that possibility- but Theisman or someone like him would probably have thought to make allowances the chance of them being wrong.

Unless I fail statistics forever (actually I barely scraped a pass, but that was some years ago) there is a 3% chance one of Honor's 6 ships that are running full-max zero safety (as opposed to her BCs which are going fairly leisurely as emergency military power goes) will have a compensator failure, this translates into a 0.166% overall likelihood of compensator failure while performing this stunt.

Uh... I think that's a statistics fail.

Put like this. Suppose an event has probability P of happening. Therefore it has a probability (1-P) of NOT happening: in this case, the probability of one of Honor's SDs NOT blowing up. If each ship had a 2% chance of blowing up, it would have a 98% chance of not blowing up, for instance.

With several ships involved, you multiply the probabilities: for six ships and a 98% chance of survival per ship, the odds of ALL the ships surviving would be (.98)^6 = 88.6%.

Doing a bit of algebra, if the overall chance of all ships surviving is 97%, then the odds of any single ship blowing up are (.97)^(1/6)... just about 0.5%, almost exactly.

To check that, for small probabilities and small numbers of trials, this is normal- because you could also add the probabilities and reason that if 1 in 200 SDs would blow up on this operation, and there are six SDs being sent out, there is a 6 in 200 or 3% chance that one of them will explode. That method works well as long as there are few individual units; if there are a great many units it starts to break down.


Aaaanyway.

Also note that this is for about one hour's flight time, or at least not several hours as far as I can tell. If a starship has a 0.5% chance of being destroyed just from a few hours at maximum military power, it serves to explain very neatly why they don't do this often, even in combat. It gives a ship an average life expectancy of about 100 hours before the compensator gives out and the ship is lost with all hands.

Shannon Foraker, ladies and gentlemen.

She just spotted Honor's secret plan.

Oops.

Interesting, the pods' drag doesn't seem to scale linearly, as two is their max before their accel is really cut down.

Oh, and each of Honor's superdreadnoughts can tow pods inside the wedge, though they still have to kick them out to fire, and they can each manage ten. That's an extra 200 missiles per ship to the opening broadside, a serious boost considering this class of SD has 36 launchers to a side.

...ten pods per superdreadnought, times ten missiles per pod, is not 200 missiles per SD. The total weight of the pod salvo is 100 per SD, plus 20 per battlecruiser, totalling just under a thousand missiles from pod launchers, plus about 200-odd from the SD's internal launchers. Battlecruiser-weight and smaller missiles are launched by the hundreds or thousands of course; they are individually lighter and I have no patience to work out exactly how many there are.

85,000 G accel is the max of missiles from all the way back in Basilisk Station. But there it was said that the drives would burn out after a minute, here they have a minute and a half. It makes sense to use the max accel if you're in close and don't have to worry about drive endurance, but shouldn't the first broadside or two have had lower accel?

My sad mathematical skills are totally inadequate to comparing the flight characteristics (burnout time, speed at burnout) of missiles accelerating at 850 KPS2 for 1 minute and ones pulling 425 KPS2 for 3 minutes, as seems to be the preference for max-range missile duels. Though I probably should have tried a while ago, this is not new data.

Fired from rest, the low-acceleration missiles will be going 50% faster at burnout and travel 4.5 times farther. Anything more will cost you extra, but I'll refer you to the correct equation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equations_ ... _equations

First and second from the top give final speed and final distance from the launcher, respectively. Note that 's' is being used for final position, and 'u' is being used for initial speed.

Oh, and Haven is using EW warheads too now.

I suspect they always were in fleet battles; the idea is too obvious NOT to use.

And Manticoran/Grayson doctrine is to waste the obvious flagship if one presents itself. Okay, the positioning does make sense, but there is an obvious drawback and I'm reasonably certain it's one that Manticorans don't use. And Haven won't use it much in the future either.

Like the Sollies, the Havenites are used to fighting weaker opponents- even if they know where your flagship is, they may not be able to take it out.

A few books ago when Honor was also fighting for the fate of Grayson her Fearless had the latest Mod 7b and could fire a broadside every 11 seconds. Meanwhile, Saladin/Thunder of God could get off one every 15 seconds. Here we have Grayson cruisers with the same missile launcher Honor had but inferior performance to both ships 17 seconds for Grayson cruiser and BC alike. 20 seconds for a Haven built SD I'll buy.

Whooopsie. !

The screening units form their own point-defense networks, allowing the SDs to focus on stopping the birds flying for the SDs and letting the screening units look after themselves. I'm not sure why this is more effective in this case, and how you'd know when to play it this way.

It's more effective because each ship has a roughly equal number of missiles being lobbed at it, and Honor took pains to ensure that this would be so, by tricking the enemy into thinking she had 25 identical ships instead of 19 little ones and 6 big ones.

Honor would reason that the superdreadnoughts should be able to pretty easily shoot down or tank the 20-30 missiles apiece being directed against them, assuming an evenly distributed salvo. The battlecruisers, targeted by 20-30 missiles each, are having a Very Bad Day... but they're operating in tight, mutually covering groups. They have the full support of the smaller destroyers and cruisers, and any individual ship that doesn't think it can handle the enemy salvo is free to maneuver to protect itself as best as possible. Best she can do.

Normally, Thurston would have fired all his missiles at the superdreadnoughts (which is indeed his last order), in which case Honor would need all those screening ships trying to plink the incoming missiles BEFORE they reach the superdreadnoughts. The screening ships would, as a cost of that, have to largely ignore any missiles aimed at them... but then again, not many missiles would be aimed at them, because who bothers shooting at a light cruiser when there are capital ships to fight?

One SD destroyed and one crippled. In exchange Honor kills 23 Peep BBs and an unknown number of screening units (at least some escaped, Warner Caslet was in a cruiser there, and it's like the screen would have been a targeting priority.)

"It's like?" Did you mean "it's not like?"

---

I admit I love this bit. After a while of Honor's closing, Theisman is a bit less sure of his assertions that he can take her, or that she won't be able to cripple his force first. So when Honor has the BCs on the system periphery light up their drives and escort 8 EW drones impersonating SDs, Theisman figures it out inside three seconds but doesn't let on. Instead of backing down and being accused of cowardice or insufficient loyalty, he manipulates his political officer into talking him down.

This was the moment that cemented Thomas Theisman as Honor's worthy adversary, and it remains a great disappointment to me that they never directly clash again.

Yes.

IF there is to be a retreat, Theisman presents himself as blatantly willing to do something suicidal that would get his entire command wiped out to wear down the Grayson fleet by attrition. As a result of that, the political officer, LePic, is placed in the position of being the voice of reason. He's the one having to tell Theisman "Wow, you are frighteningly hardcore, but seriously we just lost 2/3 of our entire combat force in a massive ambush, it's time to pack it in and head home before she pulls something else out of her hat. Let's go home."

Which, if LePic is a reasonable man at heart, and Theisman may have reason to think he is... Well, in that case, that's the best possible way to get away with a retreat in the Pierre-era People's Navy.

[Terralthra]

Honor tried to keep her face from reacting, but her mind raced, despite the streamers of fatigue which clogged it. Although the sensor platform's grav-pulse transmitters were FTL capable, each pulse took time to generate, which meant their data transmission rate was slow. At the moment, all Mercedes' information was based on the intruders' hyper footprint and impeller signatures, both of which were also FTL and could be directly observed from Grayson, but which told very little—other than raw numbers—about the ships who'd made them. It would be several minutes yet before the closest sensor platforms could send Central anything definite on the Peeps' light-speed emissions, but if it was a standard Peep formation, that high a unit count argued for at least twenty-five ships of the wall . . . and she had six.

Grayson can detect hyper-footprints and wedges 27 light-minutes out independent of the FTL spy-net. Also, remember when they couldn't stream video through FTL comm? Ah well, it'll be a while before those days are gone for us. 61 contacts, if a standard Peep formation, 25 (almost half) would be wallers. Small screens, except we later get a count far higher, so perhaps they only detected the BBs and BCs, and one random contact.

That's an odd discrepancy. Weber is fairly consistent on this: the hyper footprint from a downward translation is very detectable, even from something as small as a courier ship or destroyer. That they get such an inaccurate count of the units...At first, this passage is a "PN formations have small screens" support, but the later exact count of the whole formation is "PN formations have large screens", in accordance with the capture of Chin's DN force in SVW.

Oh, and a brief discussion of battleships. They're just over half the size of Honor's Haven-built SDs (which are pretty shrimpy compared to Manticoran SDs) but have less than half the firepower, and comparatively shitty missile defense for their size. It seems their hardware just doesn't scale well right there in the middle, and though they were once THE capital ship, now they're too weak and fragile to play with the big boys, and too slow for most other things a Navy would need. Hence why Haven's aging BB fleet is used mostly for convoy escort and rear-area security, and they were so excited to have found a use for some.

What's the source on the DuQuesne-class being shrimpy compared to RMN SDs? They seem roughly equivalent. 8 megatons is more or less the ceiling for the average SD. The Junction forts support this, as "the smallest of them are twice as big as an SD, at 16 million tons."

Limits of Manticoran radar, 1 million km detection rate against ECM-using ballistic missiles at 0.99 c, or 3 seconds before impact. Well, double that for detection, but 1 million to narrow it down enough to have a shot at shooting them down. According to Honor, not a chance, which is funny because when the dreaded 'c-fractional' strike came up before she wasn't worried that she wouldn't be able to stop some or most of the missiles, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to stop all of them.

Stopping 1 BC's worth of c-fractional missiles is a much easier task than stopping the missile load of a task force headed by 24 BBs.

If, he thought, you could call that a formation. The untidy gaggle of starships moved towards him in awkward clumps and knots, and he shook his head again. There were Manty ships in that mess, but its CO had to be a Grayson, because no Manty admiral would let himself fuck up this way. Thurston recognized the courage his enemy was displaying, but Lord was he dumb!

The aforementioned "Thurston sees something he thinks is stupid, doesn't stop to wonder why."

All according to plan. Battlecruisers (presumably Haven) as a baseline can pull 400 Gs of accel if they stick to the normal 80% power for non-emergencies, and 498 Gs going all out. The loss of 40 Gs makes Thurston assume each BC must be towing exactly 2 pods. Which interests me, does he expect a ship to lose 20 Gs for each pod, or does it not scale linearly?

He does think "1, or 2 at most."

Unless I fail statistics forever (actually I barely scraped a pass, but that was some years ago) there is a 3% chance one of Honor's 6 ships that are running full-max zero safety (as opposed to her BCs which are going fairly leisurely as emergency military power goes) will have a compensator failure, this translates into a 0.166% overall likelihood of compensator failure while performing this stunt.

Not quite. Her SDs as a group have a 3% chance of suffering a failure. For each individual ship, then, the chance of suffering a failure x satisfies the the following equation: (1-0.03) = (1-x)^6. Rearrange to get x alone, and it's 6th_root(0.97) = 1 - x == 1 - 6th_root(0.97) = x. x (failure rate per SD) = roughly 0.005%.

The two formations slid broadside towards one another at just under forty thousand kilometers per second while the missiles went out with an acceleration of eighty-five thousand gravities. At their closure rate, the two formations had only two hundred and twenty-six seconds before they interpenetrated. Not passed one another, but interpenetrated, for Honor had deliberately turned directly across TG 14.1's base course to give her energy weapons the best possible field of fire for the bare twelve seconds it would take the Peeps to shoot clear across their effective range envelope. So great was their closing speed that flight time was barely over a minute and a half, despite the range, and both sides had seeded their broadsides with EW missiles packed with penetration aids to make their birds still harder to track.

I have nothing to say here, except that this quote leads directly back to an old argument.

BatRon One and its screen went to maximum rate fire with their very first broadsides. The superdreadnoughts retained their original Havenite launchers, with a cycle time of approximately twenty seconds; the lighter Grayson units carried the Mod 7b Manticoran launcher, and the GSN's battlecruisers mounted the Mod 19, both with a cycle time of only seventeen seconds.

But two hundred and twenty-six seconds would allow BatRon One's SDs only eleven broadsides and the lighter ships only thirteen, and there was no time to observe the results of one broadside before the next was fired. The initial fire plans had been locked into the computers, and human reflexes were hopelessly inadequate to modify them in the time they had.

Also relevant.

The Peeps' opening salvo was almost uniformly distributed among all twenty-five of the "battlecruisers" they'd been tracking. Had those targets, in fact, all been battlecruisers, it would have been an effective fire plan, for it also spread the Allies' defenses thin. Some, at least, of those missiles would have gotten through against every target, and successive broadsides would have finished the cripples. But Honor's orders for her screen to scatter freed her real battlecruisers to maneuver independently against the fire directed at them, and the "confusion" the Peeps had seen in her formation had been nothing of the sort. She'd deliberately broken the screening units down into their own point defense nets, independent of her SDs and freed of any responsibility for covering her wall. Combined with their more effective decoys and jammers, that tremendously degraded the accuracy of the fire directed upon them.

The screening units form their own point-defense networks, allowing the SDs to focus on stopping the birds flying for the SDs and letting the screening units look after themselves. I'm not sure why this is more effective in this case, and how you'd know when to play it this way.

It lets the BCs not devote any of their missiles or laser clusters to shooting down missiles targeted at SDs. It's not "more effective", it's "don't worry about us man, we'll be fine." In effect, she's gambling on her SDs' toughness to survive forgoing the counter-missile capability of the screen, hoping that will let more of her screen survive.

Honor clung to her command chair, eyes on her display, watching the computers execute the plan she'd locked into them, and the holocaust of those three-point-seven minutes was simply beyond comprehension. Formalism had become the rule for fleet engagements over the centuries, and ships of the wall had not engaged in such point-blank mutual slaughter in over seventy T-years. The losing side in a battle knew when to cut and run, when to break off, and admirals never closed on a course which wouldn't let them break off at need. But Alexander Thurston had believed there were no ships of the wall to face him, and Honor had had no choice but to come to meet him. And now, as the last missile salvos roared out, her five surviving SDs completed their final turn and brought their energy batteries to bear.

And this is the last relevant portion to that old argument. 6 GNS SDs are in formation going directly towards the enemy formation. Directly. This is made very very very very clear. They aren't just going towards them, they aren't just going to pass them, the two formations have reciprocal base courses and are going to interpenetrate. When they drop the EW and start firing broadsides, they are broadside on (again, made very very clear), and are 226 seconds from range 0. The narration says 226 seconds at 20 seconds per broadside is 11 broadsides for the SDs. That's 220 seconds. After 220 seconds, "the last missile salvos" (broadsides) roar out, and then - and only then - do the SDs make turns to bring their energy broadsides to bear on the BBs as the formations interpenetrate, allowing broadside energy fire to gut the surviving BBs. That is a full 90 degree turn (broadside-on to broadside-to-the-side) in 6 seconds. Minutes to make a 90 degree turn does not match the text.

One of her superdreadnoughts and six battlecruisers—over thirteen million tons of shipping—had been totally destroyed. Manticore's Gift was a wreck, and Walter Brentworth's flagship, Magnificent, was little better, though at least she still had most of her drive. Admiral Trailman had been killed by a direct hit on Manticore's Gift's flag bridge, Brentworth's communications were practically nonexistent after the pounding Magnificent had taken, and Furious had lost over half her weapons. Of Battle Squadron One's original six ships, only Judah Yanakov's Courageous and her own Terrible remained truly combat effective, and even they would require months of yard time to make good their damages.

Yet five of her six ships had survived—a testimonial, she thought with infinite bitterness, to the engineers who'd designed and built them, not to the fool who'd led them to the slaughter. But they'd done the job, she told herself. She'd lost thirteen million tons of shipping and twenty thousand people; the Peeps had lost over a hundred million tons, and their butcher's bill didn't even bear thinking on. She'd just destroyed an entire peacetime navy in less than five minutes of actual combat.

Amended, Honor lost an SD, three more were pounded into barely-functional wrecks, and she lost 6 BCs besides. On the other hand, she got better than a 5:1 exchange ratio in tonnage.

I also like the callback to Honor's overall state of mind about losing people in battle in both OBS, tHotQ, and SVW. Taking command means anyone she loses, she feels like it was literally her fault, even if she did the best anyone could, pulling victory out of her hat.

"I'm afraid that won't work, Fred," she said, and the ops officer stared at her. "If we break off, we lose the Gift and, probably, Magnificent. That's bad enough. But if we fall back, then whoever's in command out there will know—not just suspect, but know—we can't fight her. If she wants to, she can carry out a long-range cee-fractional bombardment of Grayson, and we can't stop her. I don't think she'd be crazy enough to go for the planet itself, but she could take out the forts, the shipyards . . . the farms."

She saw the stark understanding on the faces of her Grayson staff of what losing two-thirds of their world's food sources would mean, and nodded.

Apparently a majority of Grayson's food is grown in orbit.

What I don't understand about this is how this can really be a concern against a single squadron of BBs that she can detect out far beyond their range to detect her. SDs have (as said many times) wedges that are tens, if not hundreds, of kilometers in size. Park an SD in front of a bunch of forts, making sure one keeps the wedge between the enemy BB formation and the farms and forts. Send a BC to Candor/Minette with a request for a squadron of SDs to come back and wipe the floor with the BBs still in system. Laugh uproariously. I mean, this is simple geometry; if you know the incoming vector (you do), you can park your SD a few hundred thousand kilometers away from the planet and cover the vast majority of the orbital sphere with the wedge.

I admit I love this bit. After a while of Honor's closing, Theisman is a bit less sure of his assertions that he can take her, or that she won't be able to cripple his force first. So when Honor has the BCs on the system periphery light up their drives and escort 8 EW drones impersonating SDs, Theisman figures it out inside three seconds but doesn't let on. Instead of backing down and being accused of cowardice or insufficient loyalty, he manipulates his political officer into talking him down.

This was the moment that cemented Thomas Theisman as Honor's worthy adversary, and it remains a great disappointment to me that they never directly clash again.

I love this bit as well, especially the ratcheting tension as Weber goes back and forth between the bridges. War is fought by human beings, indeed.

Mueller arranges to renew his contract with Sky Domes, to pay to clear the debris himself, and that Grayson as a whole recoup lost profits over the whole collapsing domes scare. In this way he positions himself to survive the aftermath of his plots and live to menace Honor another day. Still waiting on that other day, but like I said, Mueller is kind of a weasel and he's seen what happens to people who mess with Honor.

Uh...? Have you not read Ashes of Victory?

As to the 'scaling badly' observation, hm..... sounds credible. At a guess, there are several factors in play here.

1) The Havenite battleships were designed to beat up on the navies and defenses of relatively weak powers, and are old ships; they would not have strong missile defense relative to a modern ship of either Haven or Manticore.

2) As noted, it may simply not be possible to build large enough sidewall generators or heavy enough armor plating on the hulls of these smaller ships to make them properly resistant to capital-class beams and missile warheads.

3) The battleships may suffer from the "Imperial Star Destroyer syndrome" of being designed not just as pure naval combatants, but as flying troop transports and system control platforms. Thus, they might be heavy on shuttle bays, Marine contingents, and other things very useful to 1850 PD Haven but largely useless to Alexander Thurston when he's fighting a squadron of Honor's superdreadnoughts.

My thought is more that it's the precise opposite of your number 2. BBs were, in this case, built as "ship of the wall lite." That means they have at least some measure of the internal bulkhead and cofferdamming that goes into making a ship of the wall such a resilient bastard, but, as Weber says in other places, there's a certain minimum hull that will support such massively redundancy built into it. In other words, the hull and internal bulkheads that make a ship tough enough to be a ship of the wall take up a certain minimum volume. BBs are small enough that that minimum volume eats directly into the space that would be taken up by, say, missile launchers and beam weapons, but aren't big enough that that minimum volume makes them as truly survivable. One might call it the BC(P) problem, as well.

Unless I fail statistics forever (actually I barely scraped a pass, but that was some years ago) there is a 3% chance one of Honor's 6 ships that are running full-max zero safety (as opposed to her BCs which are going fairly leisurely as emergency military power goes) will have a compensator failure, this translates into a 0.166% overall likelihood of compensator failure while performing this stunt.

Uh... I think that's a statistics fail.

Put like this. Suppose an event has probability P of happening. Therefore it has a probability (1-P) of NOT happening: in this case, the probability of one of Honor's SDs NOT blowing up. If each ship had a 2% chance of blowing up, it would have a 98% chance of not blowing up, for instance.

With several ships involved, you multiply the probabilities: for six ships and a 98% chance of survival per ship, the odds of ALL the ships surviving would be (.98)^6 = 88.6%.

Doing a bit of algebra, if the overall chance of all ships surviving is 97%, then the odds of any single ship blowing up are (.97)^(1/6)... just about 0.5%, almost exactly.

Glad to have support on my maths.

[Simon_Jester]

That's an odd discrepancy. Weber is fairly consistent on this: the hyper footprint from a downward translation is very detectable, even from something as small as a courier ship or destroyer. That they get such an inaccurate count of the units...At first, this passage is a "PN formations have small screens" support, but the later exact count of the whole formation is "PN formations have large screens", in accordance with the capture of Chin's DN force in SVW.

I'm not surprised that a large formation transitioning all at once, with two dozen 4.5 million ton battleships making their splashes, would tend to drown out the individual signatures of a lot of the little ~100 thousand ton ships that arrived along with them.

If, he thought, you could call that a formation. The untidy gaggle of starships moved towards him in awkward clumps and knots, and he shook his head again. There were Manty ships in that mess, but its CO had to be a Grayson, because no Manty admiral would let himself fuck up this way. Thurston recognized the courage his enemy was displaying, but Lord was he dumb!

The aforementioned "Thurston sees something he thinks is stupid, doesn't stop to wonder why."

Ah, yes. I think it's because under the circumstances, Thurston thinks the Grayson commander screwing up and launching a disorganized counterattack is perfectly plausible- it's exactly the sort of thing he'd expect to see, given that the GSN has no experienced flag officers, and of whatever they DO have, the best two or three are presumably off at Casca or Minette dealing with the diversion.

Not quite. Her SDs as a group have a 3% chance of suffering a failure. For each individual ship, then, the chance of suffering a failure x satisfies the the following equation: (1-0.03) = (1-x)^6. Rearrange to get x alone, and it's 6th_root(0.97) = 1 - x == 1 - 6th_root(0.97) = x. x (failure rate per SD) = roughly 0.005%.

No, that is 0.005 absolute, on a probability scale from 0 to 1, not 0.005%.

A probability of 0.005 gives a 0.5% chance of the event happening; you did the same calculation I did.

The screening units form their own point-defense networks, allowing the SDs to focus on stopping the birds flying for the SDs and letting the screening units look after themselves. I'm not sure why this is more effective in this case, and how you'd know when to play it this way.

It lets the BCs not devote any of their missiles or laser clusters to shooting down missiles targeted at SDs. It's not "more effective", it's "don't worry about us man, we'll be fine." In effect, she's gambling on her SDs' toughness to survive forgoing the counter-missile capability of the screen, hoping that will let more of her screen survive.[/quote]Especially since her own battleplan specifically seeks to make sure that each battlecruiser eats more or less the full missile broadside of one Havenite battleship, spread evenly across the formation. That's good for her superdreadnoughts because they are quite capable of handling that, so the SDs survive intact and can continue firing upon the enemy. But it's bad for her battlecruisers, they're in serious danger, so to preserve them she has to give different orders than usual to give them the maximum freedom to protect themselves.

As noted, in a more conventional fleet arrangement, the battlecruisers and lighter ships would be screening the SDs and shooting down missiles bound for the SDs... but they'd need to be doing that, because each SD would be the target of four times as many missiles.

And this is the last relevant portion to that old argument. 6 GNS SDs are in formation going directly towards the enemy formation. Directly. This is made very very very very clear. They aren't just going towards them, they aren't just going to pass them, the two formations have reciprocal base courses and are going to interpenetrate. When they drop the EW and start firing broadsides, they are broadside on (again, made very very clear), and are 226 seconds from range 0. The narration says 226 seconds at 20 seconds per broadside is 11 broadsides for the SDs. That's 220 seconds. After 220 seconds, "the last missile salvos" (broadsides) roar out, and then - and only then - do the SDs make turns to bring their energy broadsides to bear on the BBs as the formations interpenetrate, allowing broadside energy fire to gut the surviving BBs. That is a full 90 degree turn (broadside-on to broadside-to-the-side) in 6 seconds. Minutes to make a 90 degree turn does not match the text.

OK.

Question, do we actually know the SDs are making 90 degree turns to fire at targets ahead of them? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to adjust course slightly, then pour energy weapon fire into a target as it passes you and you fly right through their formation? Given that there's time for only one short, sharp exchange of beams, I would expect that- there's no point in turning a full 90 degrees, even if you could, because the enemy ships won't be in your line of fire for very long anyway.

But that brings us back down to relatively small turns.

What I don't understand about this is how this can really be a concern against a single squadron of BBs that she can detect out far beyond their range to detect her. SDs have (as said many times) wedges that are tens, if not hundreds, of kilometers in size. Park an SD in front of a bunch of forts, making sure one keeps the wedge between the enemy BB formation and the farms and forts.

That would work if she were covering a single point target; she's not. Grayson and its orbital zone are... something like 15-20 thousand kilometers across, and you can't protect a 20000-km target with a 200-km umbrella of impenetrable force field.

Send a BC to Candor/Minette with a request for a squadron of SDs to come back and wipe the floor with the BBs still in system. Laugh uproariously. I mean, this is simple geometry; if you know the incoming vector (you do), you can park your SD a few hundred thousand kilometers away from the planet and cover the vast majority of the orbital sphere with the wedge.

Uh... geometry says no.

Let there be a point source that missiles come from. You have a superdreadnought wedge, several hundred kilometers across, to block missiles from. How do you cover a target tens of thousands of kilometers across?

The only place you can do this from is from basically right next to the point source- the equivalent of stopping bullets by walking up to the barrel and holding a little square of steel over the muzzle. In which case you're back to having to fight it out with Theisman's battleships.

See, you could intercept missiles coming from a known direction to any single target in this way, but you couldn't intercept missiles coming from that direction to all the targets, any more than you can use a cocktail umbrella to keep from getting wet in a rainstorm. It doesn't matter how cleverly you position it, it's not big enough.

To make matters worse, Theisman's command isn't a point source; he can divide his ships up into several groups, in which case you are trying to cover all the targets in a volume 15-20 thousand kilometers in diameter, from all possible angles, using a few dozen ships (I'm including the battlecruisers), no one of which can generate a protective barrier more than a few hundred kilometers across.

This isn't going to work. I don't know what visualization of the geometry makes you think it does, but it won't.

As to the 'scaling badly' observation, hm..... sounds credible. At a guess, there are several factors in play here.

1) The Havenite battleships were designed to beat up on the navies and defenses of relatively weak powers, and are old ships; they would not have strong missile defense relative to a modern ship of either Haven or Manticore.

2) As noted, it may simply not be possible to build large enough sidewall generators or heavy enough armor plating on the hulls of these smaller ships to make them properly resistant to capital-class beams and missile warheads.

3) The battleships may suffer from the "Imperial Star Destroyer syndrome" of being designed not just as pure naval combatants, but as flying troop transports and system control platforms. Thus, they might be heavy on shuttle bays, Marine contingents, and other things very useful to 1850 PD Haven but largely useless to Alexander Thurston when he's fighting a squadron of Honor's superdreadnoughts.

My thought is more that it's the precise opposite of your number 2. BBs were, in this case, built as "ship of the wall lite." That means they have at least some measure of the internal bulkhead and cofferdamming that goes into making a ship of the wall such a resilient bastard, but, as Weber says in other places, there's a certain minimum hull that will support such massively redundancy built into it. In other words, the hull and internal bulkheads that make a ship tough enough to be a ship of the wall take up a certain minimum volume. BBs are small enough that that minimum volume eats directly into the space that would be taken up by, say, missile launchers and beam weapons, but aren't big enough that that minimum volume makes them as truly survivable. One might call it the BC(P) problem, as well.

Ah. Actually, that makes a lot of sense. It also helps to explain why 2-4.5 million ton ships were THE last word in survivable capital ships back when that was as big as could be easily constructed; a ship that big would have been damnably hard to kill with the cruder weapons of the pre-1800 PD era, being built with defenses 'to capital scale.'

And the tendency to build the ships tough for their tonnage, with limited room for weapons, would help explain why battles of the wall were indecisive, whereas in the setting's present it is obvious that ANY energy-range combat between walls would be decisive very quickly, if only because no one on either side is left standing after a minute or two of pounding.

[Terralthra]

That's an odd discrepancy. Weber is fairly consistent on this: the hyper footprint from a downward translation is very detectable, even from something as small as a courier ship or destroyer. That they get such an inaccurate count of the units...At first, this passage is a "PN formations have small screens" support, but the later exact count of the whole formation is "PN formations have large screens", in accordance with the capture of Chin's DN force in SVW.

I'm not surprised that a large formation transitioning all at once, with two dozen 4.5 million ton battleships making their splashes, would tend to drown out the individual signatures of a lot of the little ~100 thousand ton ships that arrived along with them.

Fair enough. Small fry can get drowned out, that is also consistent with canon.

The aforementioned "Thurston sees something he thinks is stupid, doesn't stop to wonder why."

Ah, yes. I think it's because under the circumstances, Thurston thinks the Grayson commander screwing up and launching a disorganized counterattack is perfectly plausible- it's exactly the sort of thing he'd expect to see, given that the GSN has no experienced flag officers, and of whatever they DO have, the best two or three are presumably off at Casca or Minette dealing with the diversion.

It doesn't set off my SOD, but only because Thurston is remarked on, both in this book and later books, as not too bright an admiral who fell in love with his own battle plan. He sold the plan to the CPS as low-risk, and when executing it, saw what he wanted to see.

Not quite. Her SDs as a group have a 3% chance of suffering a failure. For each individual ship, then, the chance of suffering a failure x satisfies the the following equation: (1-0.03) = (1-x)^6. Rearrange to get x alone, and it's 6th_root(0.97) = 1 - x == 1 - 6th_root(0.97) = x. x (failure rate per SD) = roughly 0.005%.

No, that is 0.005 absolute, on a probability scale from 0 to 1, not 0.005%.

A probability of 0.005 gives a 0.5% chance of the event happening; you did the same calculation I did.

Whoops. Typo. I knew it was 0.5%, but hit % on the absolute number by accident. Mea culpa.

And this is the last relevant portion to that old argument. 6 GNS SDs are in formation going directly towards the enemy formation. Directly. This is made very very very very clear. They aren't just going towards them, they aren't just going to pass them, the two formations have reciprocal base courses and are going to interpenetrate. When they drop the EW and start firing broadsides, they are broadside on (again, made very very clear), and are 226 seconds from range 0. The narration says 226 seconds at 20 seconds per broadside is 11 broadsides for the SDs. That's 220 seconds. After 220 seconds, "the last missile salvos" (broadsides) roar out, and then - and only then - do the SDs make turns to bring their energy broadsides to bear on the BBs as the formations interpenetrate, allowing broadside energy fire to gut the surviving BBs. That is a full 90 degree turn (broadside-on to broadside-to-the-side) in 6 seconds. Minutes to make a 90 degree turn does not match the text.

OK.

Question, do we actually know the SDs are making 90 degree turns to fire at targets ahead of them? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to adjust course slightly, then pour energy weapon fire into a target as it passes you and you fly right through their formation? Given that there's time for only one short, sharp exchange of beams, I would expect that- there's no point in turning a full 90 degrees, even if you could, because the enemy ships won't be in your line of fire for very long anyway.

But that brings us back down to relatively small turns.

They're not firing at targets ahead of them with energy weapons. They're turning from firing missile broadsides ahead of them to fire their energy weapons at targets to the side, which we know because it says they are. The formations interpenetrate, and it makes sense to turn because they can hopefully bring both broadsides to bear on the Peeps as they are inside the formation.

What I don't understand about this is how this can really be a concern against a single squadron of BBs that she can detect out far beyond their range to detect her. SDs have (as said many times) wedges that are tens, if not hundreds, of kilometers in size. Park an SD in front of a bunch of forts, making sure one keeps the wedge between the enemy BB formation and the farms and forts.

That would work if she were covering a single point target; she's not. Grayson and its orbital zone are... something like 15-20 thousand kilometers across, and you can't protect a 20000-km target with a 200-km umbrella of impenetrable force field.

Send a BC to Candor/Minette with a request for a squadron of SDs to come back and wipe the floor with the BBs still in system. Laugh uproariously. I mean, this is simple geometry; if you know the incoming vector (you do), you can park your SD a few hundred thousand kilometers away from the planet and cover the vast majority of the orbital sphere with the wedge.

Uh... geometry says no.

Let there be a point source that missiles come from. You have a superdreadnought wedge, several hundred kilometers across, to block missiles from. How do you cover a target tens of thousands of kilometers across?

The only place you can do this from is from basically right next to the point source- the equivalent of stopping bullets by walking up to the barrel and holding a little square of steel over the muzzle. In which case you're back to having to fight it out with Theisman's battleships.

See, you could intercept missiles coming from a known direction to any single target in this way, but you couldn't intercept missiles coming from that direction to all the targets, any more than you can use a cocktail umbrella to keep from getting wet in a rainstorm. It doesn't matter how cleverly you position it, it's not big enough.

This isn't going to work. I don't know what visualization of the geometry makes you think it does, but it won't.

To make matters worse, Theisman's command isn't a point source; he can divide his ships up into several groups, in which case you are trying to cover all the targets in a volume 15-20 thousand kilometers in diameter, from all possible angles, using a few dozen ships (I'm including the battlecruisers), no one of which can generate a protective barrier more than a few hundred kilometers across.

He can, but that leaves him vulnerable to a defeat in detail. If he separates into any smaller than he is now, a full squadron of BCs pounces on that part of his task force. He's only got 12 BBs and 12 BCs. Split any more than into at most halves, and he's at risk of having a portion pounced on.

My geometry says: consider a triangle with a base of, let's say, 20 Mm (megameters) across, and a height of (bare minimum) >183,472 Mm. Why 183 megameters? Because that's the hyper limit, minus Grayson's orbital diameter. In order to do a cee-fractional strike, Theisman would almost have to pull back past the hyper limit to do it. If he tried inside the hyper limit, he'd commit himself to a) a span of tens of hours getting the range to accelerate up to c-fractional launch speeds and b) commit his launching forces into another tens of hours fixed course* getting up the base velocity to launch, and another tens of hours slowing back down to get out-system. A wily commander would take advantage of this to force him to engage. So he has to get out into hyper to get far enough away, then drop down to real-space and re-accelerate up to c-fractional speed (he has to reaccelerate because dropping out of alpha hyper into real-space robs him of 90% of his speed).

Even then, 183,472 Mm is a vast underestimate, because he can't launch at the hyper-limit either, he has to launch significantly before the hyper limit so he has time to slow back down to (at most) .3 c before he hits the hyper limit, so he can go back into the alpha bands. If he goes across the hyper limit in his attack run, yes, he gets a launch off, but again, he's commited to taking a huge base velocity into the system, eating yet more tens of hours slowing back down to zero and accelerating back out of system (meanwhile allowing someone to force him to engage). Realistically, he'd have to start way outside the hyper limit, accelerate inward, launch well outside the hyper wall, slow to .3 c, pop into hyper to kill his velocity, accelerate back out, and repeat the cycle. How far outside, I don't really want to dig up the numbers to calculate, but a hyper-wall launch is an absolute floor.

Also, the orbital mechanics narrow his launch locations, too. Since he has to be outside the hyper limit, his actual launch range is a minimum of 10.2 LM (closest point at the hyper wall on the ecliptic) to 37.2 LM (farthest point at the ecliptic)[if he goes off the ecliptic, the range is even longer, since it's established that the hyper wall at the ecliptic is closer and softer]. The aforementioned buffer distance between his launch point and the hyper wall applies to all those numbers as well. Longer range at launch means the GSN force can be correspondingly (comparatively) closer to the orbital zone, because the resultant triangle is even thinner at the peak angle.

Anyway, given an isoceles triangle with a base of 20 Mm and a height of 183,472 Mm, trigonometry tells us that the two equal ϴ angles at the base are 89.9968 degrees. That means the triangle's peak angle is 0.0064 degrees. So, given an isosceles triangle with a peak angle of 0.0064 degrees and a base of .2 Mm (a minimum estimate for an SD's wedge), reversing the previous equation gives us a height of 1,594.54 Mm...which is well inside missile range (1,594 Mm = 1,591,549 km, powered missile range from rest is a little over 6 million km), but the Grayson force would be perfectly capable of forcing engagement on favorable conditions, at that point, since Theisman would be steaming in and unable to avoid engagement, but also unable to hyper out and unable to avoid energy engagement, at which point he's fucked. Also, powering in on that sort of vector leaves him crossing his own T for 5+ million km and able to fire with chasers only.

I'm not sure why you figure this "won't work." Is it as great as forcing a retreat? Nope. But it takes away Theisman's main advantage in the prospective engagement before Honor spooks him: his ability to pound her damaged fleet in missile range from untouched, more maneuverable targets with a missile-heavy weapons mix. That's the main problem with Honor v. Theisman right now: they have roughly equivalent forces, but Honor's force is damaged, making it somewhat less combat-effective than Theisman's untouched force, and Theisman can control the terms of the engagement, due to superior maneuverability and attacker's initiative. His need to keep enough of his command intact enough to fulfill the primary mission (savage the orbital infrastructure of two planets) and his time window (before any reinforcements sent to Candor/Minette return to Grayson and make it a moot point) are his downsides. He makes it clear that a squadron of SDs scrubs the mission entirely (he's lying about these particular SDs, because he knows they're not real, but the lie is plausible to LePic and his bridge crew, so we can assume a squadron of SDs will in fact scrub his mission), so he has to get this done now, because the SDs will come back from wherever they went at some point. The Alliance won't leave Grayson undefended.

*It doesn't have to be a fixed course, it can be a big spiral with one portion of the vector always pointed towards his eventual target vector, but that makes this take even longer (and he's up against a time deadline; reinforcements will come sooner or later, and every part of a c-fractional attack takes dozens of hours).

[StarSword]

And this is the last relevant portion to that old argument. 6 GNS SDs are in formation going directly towards the enemy formation. Directly. This is made very very very very clear. They aren't just going towards them, they aren't just going to pass them, the two formations have reciprocal base courses and are going to interpenetrate. When they drop the EW and start firing broadsides, they are broadside on (again, made very very clear), and are 226 seconds from range 0. The narration says 226 seconds at 20 seconds per broadside is 11 broadsides for the SDs. That's 220 seconds. After 220 seconds, "the last missile salvos" (broadsides) roar out, and then - and only then - do the SDs make turns to bring their energy broadsides to bear on the BBs as the formations interpenetrate, allowing broadside energy fire to gut the surviving BBs. That is a full 90 degree turn (broadside-on to broadside-to-the-side) in 6 seconds. Minutes to make a 90 degree turn does not match the text.

OK.

Question, do we actually know the SDs are making 90 degree turns to fire at targets ahead of them? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to adjust course slightly, then pour energy weapon fire into a target as it passes you and you fly right through their formation? Given that there's time for only one short, sharp exchange of beams, I would expect that- there's no point in turning a full 90 degrees, even if you could, because the enemy ships won't be in your line of fire for very long anyway.

But that brings us back down to relatively small turns.

Something that might settle it is if we could find some numbers for how far off-axis the graser batteries on Honor's SD's can actually fire.

[Simon_Jester]

Fair enough. Small fry can get drowned out, that is also consistent with canon.

This would tend to be especially true when the small ships' arrival is accompanied by numerous large ships arriving over a brief time at long range. Also, they may be looking at a huge number of transitions and trying to disentangle them, thinking something like "there are at least 61 separate transition events in here, maybe more." It's actually more like 160, but as we discussed, the 100 or so smaller ship transitions may have gotten mostly drowned out.

It doesn't set off my SOD, but only because Thurston is remarked on, both in this book and later books, as not too bright an admiral who fell in love with his own battle plan. He sold the plan to the CPS as low-risk, and when executing it, saw what he wanted to see.

Also, he's the quintessential "staff puke:" an officer with a background in military planning but relatively little combat experience, and probably one who was promoted rapidly by the new regime. If Theisman is any indication, Thurston may have been a captain before the war, in which case he's got the same inexperience problem Honor does, maybe more so.

OK.

Question, do we actually know the SDs are making 90 degree turns to fire at targets ahead of them? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to adjust course slightly, then pour energy weapon fire into a target as it passes you and you fly right through their formation? Given that there's time for only one short, sharp exchange of beams, I would expect that- there's no point in turning a full 90 degrees, even if you could, because the enemy ships won't be in your line of fire for very long anyway.

But that brings us back down to relatively small turns.

They're not firing at targets ahead of them with energy weapons. They're turning from firing missile broadsides ahetad of them to fire their energy weapons at targets to the side, which we know because it says they are. The formations interpenetrate, and it makes sense to turn because they can hopefully bring both broadsides to bear on the Peeps as they are inside the formation.

Ah, I see. So your argument is that the RMN ships must have started out with their ships perpendicular to the two fleets' line of flight (to fire and shoot down missiles), but then turned to point parallel to the line of flight (to fire their beam broadsides into enemy ships as they pass).

Why not just remain pointed perpendicular, with (say) the starboard broadside pointing at the approaching enemy, fire that broadside, then fire the port broadside at the enemy's retreating back after they pass your ship? That requires much smaller turns and maneuvers, but makes just as much sense and allows you to deliver roughly the same amount of fire on the enemy.

What I don't understand about this is how this can really be a concern against a single squadron of BBs that she can detect out far beyond their range to detect her. SDs have (as said many times) wedges that are tens, if not hundreds, of kilometers in size. Park an SD in front of a bunch of forts, making sure one keeps the wedge between the enemy BB formation and the farms and forts.

That would work if she were covering a single point target; she's not. Grayson and its orbital zone are... something like 15-20 thousand kilometers across, and you can't protect a 20000-km target with a 200-km umbrella of impenetrable force field.

Send a BC to Candor/Minette with a request for a squadron of SDs to come back and wipe the floor with the BBs still in system. Laugh uproariously. I mean, this is simple geometry; if you know the incoming vector (you do), you can park your SD a few hundred thousand kilometers away from the planet and cover the vast majority of the orbital sphere with the wedge.

Uh... geometry says no.

Let there be a point source that missiles come from. You have a superdreadnought wedge, several hundred kilometers across, to block missiles from. How do you cover a target tens of thousands of kilometers across?

The only place you can do this from is from basically right next to the point source- the equivalent of stopping bullets by walking up to the barrel and holding a little square of steel over the muzzle. In which case you're back to having to fight it out with Theisman's battleships.

See, you could intercept missiles coming from a known direction to any single target in this way, but you couldn't intercept missiles coming from that direction to all the targets, any more than you can use a cocktail umbrella to keep from getting wet in a rainstorm. It doesn't matter how cleverly you position it, it's not big enough.

This isn't going to work. I don't know what visualization of the geometry makes you think it does, but it won't.

To make matters worse, Theisman's command isn't a point source; he can divide his ships up into several groups, in which case you are trying to cover all the targets in a volume 15-20 thousand kilometers in diameter, from all possible angles, using a few dozen ships (I'm including the battlecruisers), no one of which can generate a protective barrier more than a few hundred kilometers across.

He can, but that leaves him vulnerable to a defeat in detail. If he separates into any smaller than he is now, a full squadron of BCs pounces on that part of his task force. He's only got 12 BBs and 12 BCs. Split any more than into at most halves, and he's at risk of having a portion pounced on.

True, in that there are enough Grayson screening elements that they could probably jump a force of, say, four battleships and destroy it, though they'd take heavy losses in the process. On the other hand, having those screen elements NOT present to protect Grayson from the missile barrage would make it even harder to shield the planet and its orbital space.

My geometry says: consider a triangle with a base of, let's say, 20 Mm (megameters) across, and a height of (bare minimum) >183,472 Mm. Why 183 megameters?

Er... are you using a comma as a decimal point, or to denote a distance of 183 million kilometers? I'm not going to dispute the calculation you just made either way, even if you made a mistake in this part it wouldn't matter, but I'd like to know which you're doing.

From an astronomical point of view, the missiles are being fired "from infinity;" the launch point is far enough away that it really doesn't matter how far away they started out, they're coming in on parallel trajectories, separated by a distance small relative to the distance to the launch point. Treat them like an oncoming meteor shower or something and you're fine.

Anyway, given an isoceles triangle with a base of 20 Mm and a height of 183,472 Mm, trigonometry tells us that the two equal ϴ angles at the base are 89.9968 degrees. That means the triangle's peak angle is 0.0064 degrees. So, given an isosceles triangle with a peak angle of 0.0064 degrees and a base of .2 Mm (a minimum estimate for an SD's wedge), reversing the previous equation gives us a height of 1,594.54 Mm...which is well inside missile range (1,594 Mm = 1,591,549 km, powered missile range from rest is a little over 6 million km),

Ah-HA.

I see the problem.

[geometry teacher hat... ON!]

Let A be the location of Theisman's fleet. Let BC be the line segment that represents the 'base' of the triangle- the width of the target he's firing at, about 20000 km wide. Now, let DE be the line segment that represents the wedge of Honor's ship(s)- 200 km wide.

For Honor's ship to 'blot out' or totally obscure Grayson from Theisman's point of view, triangles ADE and ABC must have similar angular width (.00064 degrees, you estimate, and I don't dispute that). The problem is that to do this, Honor needs to be within ~1.6 million kilometers OF THEISMAN, not within 1.6 million kilometers of Grayson. You have to measure the height of the smaller triangle from point A, not from baseline DE.

This supports our intuitive understanding of what it means to protect a target from a bunch of things coming in on almost-parallel courses from a great distance- such as rays of light emerging from a point source. For example, take the beam of a lighthouse, shining on a distant cliff. The cliff is hundreds of feet wide, the lighthouse's lamp is only a few feet wide. If you wanted to stop the beam from hitting the cliff, you would NOT stand close to the cliff, you'd have to literally walk up to the lamp and cover it with your body.

So Honor CAN use the wedges of her ships to block Theisman's line of sight to Grayson entirely, and prevent Theisman from being able to fire missiles at Grayson... but to do that, she needs to be well within Theisman's missile range, and to maintain a precise position between Grayson and Theisman, MUCH closer to Theisman than to Grayson. In which case she's back to the problem of how to fight a battle with Theisman and win, because as long as she's in missile range of Theisman she might as well shoot at him to pass the time.

I'm not sure why you figure this "won't work."

See above; similar triangles don't work the way you have them working. Missiles are being fired from (roughly) 160 million kilometers out, at a 20000 kilometer target. To stop them with her 200 kilometer shield, Honor would need to be 1.6 million kilometers from the launch point, not from the target. Getting that close to the launch point means fighting a battle with Theisman, which is exactly what Honor is worried about doing in the first place.

This pretty much collapses your entire plan, which is based on the idea that Honor can sit very close to Grayson and cover the whole planet, plus its orbital zone, with the wedges of her ships.

[Terralthra]

Ah, I see. So your argument is that the RMN ships must have started out with their ships perpendicular to the two fleets' line of flight (to fire and shoot down missiles), but then turned to point parallel to the line of flight (to fire their beam broadsides into enemy ships as they pass).

Why not just remain pointed perpendicular, with (say) the starboard broadside pointing at the approaching enemy, fire that broadside, then fire the port broadside at the enemy's retreating back after they pass your ship? That requires much smaller turns and maneuvers, but makes just as much sense and allows you to deliver roughly the same amount of fire on the enemy.

Well, I agree that that is possible, but it doesn't match with the firing angles of the modified wall described by both Honor and Shannon Foraker: "like a V, laid on its side" in order to make sure no matter how a BB spins, it will have a throat, kilt, or sidewall pointed at an SD. This works if the SDs are facing fore/aft parallel with their vector (broadsides to the side), but does not work if they are broadsides fore-n-aft and firing before and after they penetrate.

Er... are you using a comma as a decimal point, or to denote a distance of 183 million kilometers? I'm not going to dispute the calculation you just made either way, even if you made a mistake in this part it wouldn't matter, but I'd like to know which you're doing.

183 million kilometers (183 thousand megameters, take your pick).

Anyway, given an isoceles triangle with a base of 20 Mm and a height of 183,472 Mm, trigonometry tells us that the two equal ϴ angles at the base are 89.9968 degrees. That means the triangle's peak angle is 0.0064 degrees. So, given an isosceles triangle with a peak angle of 0.0064 degrees and a base of .2 Mm (a minimum estimate for an SD's wedge), reversing the previous equation gives us a height of 1,594.54 Mm...which is well inside missile range (1,594 Mm = 1,591,549 km, powered missile range from rest is a little over 6 million km),

Ah-HA.

I see the problem.

[geometry teacher hat... ON!]

Let A be the location of Theisman's fleet. Let BC be the line segment that represents the 'base' of the triangle- the width of the target he's firing at, about 20000 km wide. Now, let DE be the line segment that represents the wedge of Honor's ship(s)- 200 km wide.

For Honor's ship to 'blot out' or totally obscure Grayson from Theisman's point of view, triangles ADE and ABC must have similar angular width (.00064 degrees, you estimate, and I don't dispute that). The problem is that to do this, Honor needs to be within ~1.6 million kilometers OF THEISMAN, not within 1.6 million kilometers of Grayson. You have to measure the height of the smaller triangle from point A, not from baseline DE.

This supports our intuitive understanding of what it means to protect a target from a bunch of things coming in on almost-parallel courses from a great distance- such as rays of light emerging from a point source. For example, take the beam of a lighthouse, shining on a distant cliff. The cliff is hundreds of feet wide, the lighthouse's lamp is only a few feet wide. If you wanted to stop the beam from hitting the cliff, you would NOT stand close to the cliff, you'd have to literally walk up to the lamp and cover it with your body.

So Honor CAN use the wedges of her ships to block Theisman's line of sight to Grayson entirely, and prevent Theisman from being able to fire missiles at Grayson... but to do that, she needs to be well within Theisman's missile range, and to maintain a precise position between Grayson and Theisman, MUCH closer to Theisman than to Grayson. In which case she's back to the problem of how to fight a battle with Theisman and win, because as long as she's in missile range of Theisman she might as well shoot at him to pass the time.

You're not giving me new information. I made my understanding of this quite clear in the part of my post you didn't quote. In fact, you cut off my quote right after I point out that she'd be in missile range of Theisman...but before I talk about why the situation in which they're in range of each other is different.

I'm not sure why you figure this "won't work."

See above; similar triangles don't work the way you have them working. Missiles are being fired from (roughly) 160 million kilometers out, at a 20000 kilometer target. To stop them with her 200 kilometer shield, Honor would need to be 1.6 million kilometers from the launch point, not from the target. Getting that close to the launch point means fighting a battle with Theisman, which is exactly what Honor is worried about doing in the first place.

This pretty much collapses your entire plan, which is based on the idea that Honor can sit very close to Grayson and cover the whole planet, plus its orbital zone, with the wedges of her ships.

No, I'm quite aware that the 1.5 million kilometers is in range of Theisman, but the situation differs substantially, and she's not worried about fighting a battle with Theisman, she's worried about fighting this particular battle with Theisman: due to size and lack of damage, he has the choice to engage, at whatever range he'd like, and his missile-heavy armament guarantees he can pound her wounded command to scrap without ever getting into energy range that would let her obliterate his force like she did Thurston's.

A battle in which Theisman is by definition approaching to within 1.5 million kilometers while crossing his own T, and on a vector which guarantees he passes through the SDs' energy range, is a battle I'm sure Honor would be much happier about. As you point out, as long as she's in range of him, she might as well shoot him to pass the time...but he is required to be bow-on to her, engaging only with chasers while she shoves missiles down his throat for the last 5-odd million kilometers from her broadsides.

In fact, given that energy range against an unshielded target is ~1 million km, at his launch point, she can unleash her energy weapons against him and blow him out of space, considering that he'd be going near 0.5 c at that point, and would cross to within 1 million km by the time her beam weapons travel the intervening distance.

[Esquire]

Unless the Havenites were to change formation once an SD squadron came out to meet them. It wouldn't be super hard or anything; warships have 20% acceleration to play with over their usual maximum so the leading BB could decelerate a little, the next accelerate a little, and continuing down the line until you have a regular wall of battle and we're right back to the problem of how to win a battle with an undamage force of roughly-equal tonnage, and now if anything substantial survives it'll be at significiant speed and headed straight for Grayson.

Consider - the fight with Thurston's command killed four of Honor's superdreadnoughts in exchange for 23 battleships. By massive oversimplification, it becomes apparent that one SD equals just under four BBs. Honor has two damaged but still functional capital ships left against 12 fresh battleships; this will not end well for her. In fact, the N-square law means that she will kill less than the eight enemy units she's entitled to, and will have thrown away the last of her ships for nothing particularly useful, since even one surviving Havenite BB can finish off the Grayson orbital infrastructure without any problems.

[Terralthra]

Unless the Havenites were to change formation once an SD squadron came out to meet them. It wouldn't be super hard or anything; warships have 20% acceleration to play with over their usual maximum so the leading BB could decelerate a little, the next accelerate a little, and continuing down the line until you have a regular wall of battle and we're right back to the problem of how to win a battle with an undamage force of roughly-equal tonnage, and now if anything substantial survives it'll be at significiant speed and headed straight for Grayson.

Consider - the fight with Thurston's command killed four of Honor's superdreadnoughts in exchange for 23 battleships. By massive oversimplification, it becomes apparent that one SD equals just under four BBs. Honor has two damaged but still functional capital ships left against 12 fresh battleships; this will not end well for her. In fact, the N-square law means that she will kill less than the eight enemy units she's entitled to, and will have thrown away the last of her ships for nothing particularly useful, since even one surviving Havenite BB can finish off the Grayson orbital infrastructure without any problems.

No, the fight with Thurston's command killed one of Honor's SDs, and heavily damaged a second so it was no longer really combat-effective. She lost 1.5 SDs for 23 BBs. So, 1 SD is worth ~16 or so BBs, by your "logic". Really, it's not a scalable problem, because she can't get that situation against Theisman in the situation she's in now. She arranged things so Thurston let his BBs get into unavoidable energy range against ships of the wall. Theisman won't do that, he'll keep the range open and pound her with missiles from extreme range. But in the proposed battle plan, that's exactly what Theisman would be doing to himself: spending hours building a vector which guarantees he will go directly into energy range with Honor's 4 SDs, at vectors which mean no matter what he does, she's going to get to drill him with capital ship grasers at point-blank range (either on approach or as he flies by).

Also, remember that Theisman is not Masadan. He's not a fanatic, and he - and his citizen commissioner - will not sacrifice their command for a salvo at Grayson or its infrastructure. If Honor sets up a situation where she offers him a shot at Grayson, but at the expense of his command, he won't take it. We know this because she does, and he doesn't. If a portion of his force survives making a direct head-on charge at 4 SDs and blows past them and heads for Grayson, they're exactly where they don't want to be: trapped between a mobile force and Grayson's orbital forts, on a heading which commits them to getting hit from both sides, and unable to hyper out.

[StarSword]

Changing the subject a little bit, (I may be misremembering here but) did anyone else notice Honor pulled basically the same trick to get Theisman to pull out that she'd pulled to hide her SDs, except in reverse? She had a BC squadron light up like SDs. And Foraker and Theisman didn't catch it this time.

[Terralthra]

Changing the subject a little bit, (I may be misremembering here but) did anyone else notice Honor pulled basically the same trick to get Theisman to pull out that she'd pulled to hide her SDs, except in reverse? She had a BC squadron light up like SDs. And Foraker and Theisman didn't catch it this time.

Theisman absolutely did catch it. He knew the SDs weren't real. He pretended they were real to LePic so LePic would let him pull out without fighting Harrington (and risking himself in a fight he didn't think was worth dying over).

[Esquire]

One of her superdreadnoughts and six battlecruisers—over thirteen million tons of shipping—had been totally destroyed. Manticore's Gift was a wreck, and Walter Brentworth's flagship, Magnificent, was little better, though at least she still had most of her drive. Admiral Trailman had been killed by a direct hit on Manticore's Gift's flag bridge, Brentworth's communications were practically nonexistent after the pounding Magnificent had taken, and Furious had lost over half her weapons. Of Battle Squadron One's original six ships, only Judah Yanakov's Courageous and her own Terrible remained truly combat effective, and even they would require months of yard time to make good their damages.

Yet five of her six ships had survived—a testimonial, she thought with infinite bitterness, to the engineers who'd designed and built them, not to the fool who'd led them to the slaughter. But they'd done the job, she told herself. She'd lost thirteen million tons of shipping and twenty thousand people; the Peeps had lost over a hundred million tons, and their butcher's bill didn't even bear thinking on. She'd just destroyed an entire peacetime navy in less than five minutes of actual combat.

Amended, Honor lost an SD, three more were pounded into barely-functional wrecks, and she lost 6 BCs besides. On the other hand, she got better than a 5:1 exchange ratio in tonnage.

Did I misread something? Ahriman's quote seems accurate to me; 1 SD outright destroyed and three more damaged beyond combat effectiveness.

Why does Theisman have to build a massive closing vector? If the only reason is to build up for a c-fractional missile strike against Grayson's orbital industry in order to not have to fight Honor's remaining ships, presumably he would stop once it became apparent that his plan would lead to fighting those ships anyway.

[PKRudeBoy]

I think it's the difference between killed and mission killed, and the fact that the destroyed ship, the Glorious, isn't mentioned that's causing confusion. Manticore's Gift and Magnificent were not combat capable, Furious was at half effectiveness at most, and Terrible and Courageous were damaged but still combat capable. So while only Glorious was destroyed outright, Manticore's Gift and Magnifincent were out of the fight for the near future.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah, I see. So your argument is that the RMN ships must have started out with their ships perpendicular to the two fleets' line of flight (to fire and shoot down missiles), but then turned to point parallel to the line of flight (to fire their beam broadsides into enemy ships as they pass).

Why not just remain pointed perpendicular, with (say) the starboard broadside pointing at the approaching enemy, fire that broadside, then fire the port broadside at the enemy's retreating back after they pass your ship? That requires much smaller turns and maneuvers, but makes just as much sense and allows you to deliver roughly the same amount of fire on the enemy.

Well, I agree that that is possible, but it doesn't match with the firing angles of the modified wall described by both Honor and Shannon Foraker: "like a V, laid on its side" in order to make sure no matter how a BB spins, it will have a throat, kilt, or sidewall pointed at an SD. This works if the SDs are facing fore/aft parallel with their vector (broadsides to the side), but does not work if they are broadsides fore-n-aft and firing before and after they penetrate.

...I fail to see how the orientation of the superdreadnoughts matters. What matters is their relative position- so that no matter which way you point your ship, if you look out into the sky, you will see at least one SD that has line of sight to the not-invincible parts of your wedge.

....

Er... are you using a comma as a decimal point, or to denote a distance of 183 million kilometers? I'm not going to dispute the calculation you just made either way, even if you made a mistake in this part it wouldn't matter, but I'd like to know which you're doing.

183 million kilometers (183 thousand megameters, take your pick).

This sort of thing is why I nearly always report answers to two or three decimal places on this site and say stuff like 1.64 million instead of 1,640,000. Also, when you have limited significant figures, the "1.64 million" option is less misleading, sort of a poor man's scientific notation.

[geometry teacher hat... ON!]

Let A be the location of Theisman's fleet. Let BC be the line segment that represents the 'base' of the triangle- the width of the target he's firing at, about 20000 km wide. Now, let DE be the line segment that represents the wedge of Honor's ship(s)- 200 km wide.

For Honor's ship to 'blot out' or totally obscure Grayson from Theisman's point of view, triangles ADE and ABC must have similar angular width (.00064 degrees, you estimate, and I don't dispute that). The problem is that to do this, Honor needs to be within ~1.6 million kilometers OF THEISMAN, not within 1.6 million kilometers of Grayson. You have to measure the height of the smaller triangle from point A, not from baseline DE.

...

So Honor CAN use the wedges of her ships to block Theisman's line of sight to Grayson entirely, and prevent Theisman from being able to fire missiles at Grayson... but to do that, she needs to be well within Theisman's missile range, and to maintain a precise position between Grayson and Theisman, MUCH closer to Theisman than to Grayson. In which case she's back to the problem of how to fight a battle with Theisman and win, because as long as she's in missile range of Theisman she might as well shoot at him to pass the time.

You're not giving me new information. I made my understanding of this quite clear in the part of my post you didn't quote. In fact, you cut off my quote right after I point out that she'd be in missile range of Theisman...but before I talk about why the situation in which they're in range of each other is different.

Actually, I'm still not clear on why the situation is different. Theisman can still fire missiles at Honor if he knows she's coming, and will still be able to avoid action if he sees Honor coming from far enough out. Which he can take certain steps to ensure he does, like using a few picketing destroyers under emissions control to keep an eye out for Honor's impeller wedge signatures.

No, I'm quite aware that the 1.5 million kilometers is in range of Theisman, but the situation differs substantially, and she's not worried about fighting a battle with Theisman, she's worried about fighting this particular battle with Theisman: due to size and lack of damage, he has the choice to engage, at whatever range he'd like, and his missile-heavy armament guarantees he can pound her wounded command to scrap without ever getting into energy range that would let her obliterate his force like she did Thurston's.

As far as I can tell, this plan relies on Theisman blindly charging into Honor's teeth. Basically, you're saying that Theisman starts his high-speed attack run from outside the hyper limit, and Honor comes rushing out to meet him, placing her ships on a direct line between Theisman's ships and Grayson to make it impossible for Theisman to launch high-speed missile attacks.

The problem is, this makes very specific assumptions about how Theisman's going to react to all this- among other things, that he doesn't maneuver to avoid Honor, and doesn't simply fire missiles past her to devastate Grayson's orbitals during the attack run. All in all, I don't see how Honor could possibly ensure that Theisman gets drawn into energy weapon range the way Thurston did, and if he doesn't, she's meat on the table in a battle.

No, the fight with Thurston's command killed one of Honor's SDs, and heavily damaged a second so it was no longer really combat-effective. She lost 1.5 SDs for 23 BBs. So, 1 SD is worth ~16 or so BBs, by your "logic". Really, it's not a scalable problem, because she can't get that situation against Theisman in the situation she's in now.

She has one SD completely annihilated.

She has one that is in what a wet-navy man would call "a sinking condition:" the ship is so battered that further combat would finish her off almost instantly, and cannot be considered effective.

She has one that is "little better" but at least still has some kind of propulsion, but essentially no communications systems.

And she has one that has "lost more than half [its] weapons."

NONE of those ships are properly combat-effective. The three cripples may still be usable in combat, but at least one would be too vulnerable to fight effectively, and the latter two are badly lacking in very important areas. Lack of communications means Magnificent cannot participate in a missile defense network, for example; lack of weapons means Furious has very little offensive punch, and the loss of weapons strongly suggests other damage to other systems.

So she is down to one completely crippled ship, two partial cripples that would probably be hard-pressed to defeat ONE intact, well-handled battleship in single combat, and two semi-effective ships that are damaged but can still fight in more or less their original weight class.

You cannot sanely pretend that this is equivalent to "oh, 4 SDs against 12 battleships is a perfectly reasonable odds to fight at."

She arranged things so Thurston let his BBs get into unavoidable energy range against ships of the wall. Theisman won't do that, he'll keep the range open and pound her with missiles from extreme range. But in the proposed battle plan, that's exactly what Theisman would be doing to himself: spending hours building a vector which guarantees he will go directly into energy range with Honor's 4 SDs, at vectors which mean no matter what he does, she's going to get to drill him with capital ship grasers at point-blank range (either on approach or as he flies by).

...No? I mean, I don't understand why you assume that Theisman will be unable to avoid a beam-range engagement with Honor's ships, just because she happens to be trying to intercept him in the middle of a relativistic missile attack. I can think of a number of ways for him to see Honor coming and dodge by a large enough margin to avoid energy attack.

Changing the subject a little bit, (I may be misremembering here but) did anyone else notice Honor pulled basically the same trick to get Theisman to pull out that she'd pulled to hide her SDs, except in reverse? She had a BC squadron light up like SDs. And Foraker and Theisman didn't catch it this time.

We don't know if Foraker caught it. Theisman DID, or at least deduced that it was a trick- but it suited his purposes to pretend to be fooled.

[Ahriman238]

Of course, the Haven force was always going to split in two if it seemed the whole force wasn't needed to take Grayson. I'd note two things. First that Admiral Thurston's forces compromise roughly 10-15% of each classification available to the entire People's Navy, according to SVW and discounting destroyers. In fact, this is over a quarter of their pre-War battlecruisers here. Even without wallers this is a significant fraction of the PN with according resources.

The PN seems to be very short on screening ships overall, actually. Some reasons screening ships may be overrepresented here:

1) Thurston knows that he's going to be fighting a lot of cruisers and battlecruisers, both Grayson and RMN, and wants ships fast enough to catch them or at least not get left in the dust by them.
2) Thurston is planning to use his control of Grayson to launch cruiser/battlecruiser raids against other systems in the vicinity, which means he needs to have cruisers and battlecruisers handy, in large numbers.

Makes sense. I just meant that this force strikes a nice balance between being a significant investment of resources for Haven, while at the same time Honor's victory here is not exactly going to end the war.

As to the 'scaling badly' observation, hm..... sounds credible. At a guess, there are several factors in play here.

1) The Havenite battleships were designed to beat up on the navies and defenses of relatively weak powers, and are old ships; they would not have strong missile defense relative to a modern ship of either Haven or Manticore.

2) As noted, it may simply not be possible to build large enough sidewall generators or heavy enough armor plating on the hulls of these smaller ships to make them properly resistant to capital-class beams and missile warheads.

3) The battleships may suffer from the "Imperial Star Destroyer syndrome" of being designed not just as pure naval combatants, but as flying troop transports and system control platforms. Thus, they might be heavy on shuttle bays, Marine contingents, and other things very useful to 1850 PD Haven but largely useless to Alexander Thurston when he's fighting a squadron of Honor's superdreadnoughts.

Haven't found a source for it, and I could be dead wrong, but the impression I always got was that 70-150 years ago battleships were the original wallers, tough enough to smack down everything and a squadron of foreign BBs in your system was bad news. Then they started building dreadnoughts, then superdreadnoughts, and the BB found itself in that awkward position of not being tough enough to do the one thing it was designed for. I always saw Haven as either a holdout still building and crewing BBs when the rest of the galaxy had given up on the concept, or as making the most of their BBs because their industrial base is crap and they've never had enough new construction for all their crews trying to get out of the slums and off the BLS.

Unless I fail statistics forever (actually I barely scraped a pass, but that was some years ago) there is a 3% chance one of Honor's 6 ships that are running full-max zero safety (as opposed to her BCs which are going fairly leisurely as emergency military power goes) will have a compensator failure, this translates into a 0.166% overall likelihood of compensator failure while performing this stunt.

Uh... I think that's a statistics fail.

Put like this. Suppose an event has probability P of happening. Therefore it has a probability (1-P) of NOT happening: in this case, the probability of one of Honor's SDs NOT blowing up. If each ship had a 2% chance of blowing up, it would have a 98% chance of not blowing up, for instance.

With several ships involved, you multiply the probabilities: for six ships and a 98% chance of survival per ship, the odds of ALL the ships surviving would be (.98)^6 = 88.6%.

Doing a bit of algebra, if the overall chance of all ships surviving is 97%, then the odds of any single ship blowing up are (.97)^(1/6)... just about 0.5%, almost exactly.

To check that, for small probabilities and small numbers of trials, this is normal- because you could also add the probabilities and reason that if 1 in 200 SDs would blow up on this operation, and there are six SDs being sent out, there is a 6 in 200 or 3% chance that one of them will explode. That method works well as long as there are few individual units; if there are a great many units it starts to break down.

Alright. Thank you, I just went divide 3% by six.

Shannon Foraker, ladies and gentlemen.

She just spotted Honor's secret plan.

Oops.

She's very good at her job. Not that a warning five minutes before missile range could have saved Thurston.

Interesting, the pods' drag doesn't seem to scale linearly, as two is their max before their accel is really cut down.

Oh, and each of Honor's superdreadnoughts can tow pods inside the wedge, though they still have to kick them out to fire, and they can each manage ten. That's an extra 200 missiles per ship to the opening broadside, a serious boost considering this class of SD has 36 launchers to a side.

...ten pods per superdreadnought, times ten missiles per pod, is not 200 missiles per SD. The total weight of the pod salvo is 100 per SD, plus 20 per battlecruiser, totalling just under a thousand missiles from pod launchers, plus about 200-odd from the SD's internal launchers. Battlecruiser-weight and smaller missiles are launched by the hundreds or thousands of course; they are individually lighter and I have no patience to work out exactly how many there are.

Yeah, don't know what I was thinking. Ten missiles to a pod, 14 for Haven when they finally get into the game. Still, adding the pods almost quadruples that first broadside.

85,000 G accel is the max of missiles from all the way back in Basilisk Station. But there it was said that the drives would burn out after a minute, here they have a minute and a half. It makes sense to use the max accel if you're in close and don't have to worry about drive endurance, but shouldn't the first broadside or two have had lower accel?

My sad mathematical skills are totally inadequate to comparing the flight characteristics (burnout time, speed at burnout) of missiles accelerating at 850 KPS2 for 1 minute and ones pulling 425 KPS2 for 3 minutes, as seems to be the preference for max-range missile duels. Though I probably should have tried a while ago, this is not new data.

Fired from rest, the low-acceleration missiles will be going 50% faster at burnout and travel 4.5 times farther. Anything more will cost you extra, but I'll refer you to the correct equation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equations_ ... _equations

First and second from the top give final speed and final distance from the launcher, respectively. Note that 's' is being used for final position, and 'u' is being used for initial speed.

Thank you Simon!

The screening units form their own point-defense networks, allowing the SDs to focus on stopping the birds flying for the SDs and letting the screening units look after themselves. I'm not sure why this is more effective in this case, and how you'd know when to play it this way.

It's more effective because each ship has a roughly equal number of missiles being lobbed at it, and Honor took pains to ensure that this would be so, by tricking the enemy into thinking she had 25 identical ships instead of 19 little ones and 6 big ones.

Honor would reason that the superdreadnoughts should be able to pretty easily shoot down or tank the 20-30 missiles apiece being directed against them, assuming an evenly distributed salvo. The battlecruisers, targeted by 20-30 missiles each, are having a Very Bad Day... but they're operating in tight, mutually covering groups. They have the full support of the smaller destroyers and cruisers, and any individual ship that doesn't think it can handle the enemy salvo is free to maneuver to protect itself as best as possible. Best she can do.

Normally, Thurston would have fired all his missiles at the superdreadnoughts (which is indeed his last order), in which case Honor would need all those screening ships trying to plink the incoming missiles BEFORE they reach the superdreadnoughts. The screening ships would, as a cost of that, have to largely ignore any missiles aimed at them... but then again, not many missiles would be aimed at them, because who bothers shooting at a light cruiser when there are capital ships to fight?

That makes sense.

One SD destroyed and one crippled. In exchange Honor kills 23 Peep BBs and an unknown number of screening units (at least some escaped, Warner Caslet was in a cruiser there, and it's like the screen would have been a targeting priority.)

"It's like?" Did you mean "it's not like?"

Yes. Nobody is going to be trying to kill all the cruisers while there are still battleships.

I admit I love this bit. After a while of Honor's closing, Theisman is a bit less sure of his assertions that he can take her, or that she won't be able to cripple his force first. So when Honor has the BCs on the system periphery light up their drives and escort 8 EW drones impersonating SDs, Theisman figures it out inside three seconds but doesn't let on. Instead of backing down and being accused of cowardice or insufficient loyalty, he manipulates his political officer into talking him down.

This was the moment that cemented Thomas Theisman as Honor's worthy adversary, and it remains a great disappointment to me that they never directly clash again.

Yes.

IF there is to be a retreat, Theisman presents himself as blatantly willing to do something suicidal that would get his entire command wiped out to wear down the Grayson fleet by attrition. As a result of that, the political officer, LePic, is placed in the position of being the voice of reason. He's the one having to tell Theisman "Wow, you are frighteningly hardcore, but seriously we just lost 2/3 of our entire combat force in a massive ambush, it's time to pack it in and head home before she pulls something else out of her hat. Let's go home."

Which, if LePic is a reasonable man at heart, and Theisman may have reason to think he is... Well, in that case, that's the best possible way to get away with a retreat in the Pierre-era People's Navy.

Theisman talked his political officer, the man responsible for shooting him if he shows insufficient zeal, into ordering him to withdraw, without this assurer of loyalty's even suspecting the manipulation. That's pretty badass. Good thing LePic is such a reasonable guy and wants to live too, trying to set up some of the other People's Commisioners we see to pull you back from the brink would have ended... poorly.

[Batman]

Something I never thought about before-Honorverse ships are usually portrayed as accelerating/decelerating all the time, yet they seem to be broadside ahead once they get into missile range without reducing acceleration. I was rather under the impression that the 80%/max acceleration figures were for the ship going nose/tail first which would only allow them to bring their chasers to bear, yet I don't recall any mention of them turning to unmask their broadsides cutting into their accel. Does impeller drive merely not give a damn where your ship's bow is pointed? Because that's sure as hell not how it was presented in the early novels, where deviating from your base course to bring your broadside armament to bear would cut into your acceleration relative to your target.

[Simon_Jester]

Makes sense. I just meant that this force strikes a nice balance between being a significant investment of resources for Haven, while at the same time Honor's victory here is not exactly going to end the war.

True.

Haven't found a source for it, and I could be dead wrong, but the impression I always got was that 70-150 years ago battleships were the original wallers, tough enough to smack down everything and a squadron of foreign BBs in your system was bad news. Then they started building dreadnoughts, then superdreadnoughts, and the BB found itself in that awkward position of not being tough enough to do the one thing it was designed for. I always saw Haven as either a holdout still building and crewing BBs when the rest of the galaxy had given up on the concept, or as making the most of their BBs because their industrial base is crap and they've never had enough new construction for all their crews trying to get out of the slums and off the BLS.

Ships of dreadnought and superdreadnought weight have existed for centuries according to the sources we have. And the Solarian League has reserve ships of superdreadnought weight which are centuries old.

However, 'battleships' may well have been the norm for powers that were not exceptionally rich- say, the biggest and baddest ships that a relatively 'normal' single-system polity like the San Martinos could afford. And big enough to fill out the numbers on the fleets of relatively modest interstellar polities like, say, the Andermani Empire.

Alright. Thank you, I just went divide 3% by six.

Which should STILL have given you 0.5%.

Theisman talked his political officer, the man responsible for shooting him if he shows insufficient zeal, into ordering him to withdraw, without this assurer of loyalty's even suspecting the manipulation. That's pretty badass. Good thing LePic is such a reasonable guy and wants to live too, trying to set up some of the other People's Commisioners we see to pull you back from the brink would have ended... poorly.

Yes. Then again, I suspect Theisman had a pretty good idea that he could get away with this. One of the first priorities of any Havenite officer would be to get a sense for the political officer's character, and get to know them as well as possible...

[thinks of Giscard and Pritchart, snickers]

Something I never thought about before-Honorverse ships are usually portrayed as accelerating/decelerating all the time, yet they seem to be broadside ahead once they get into missile range without reducing acceleration. I was rather under the impression that the 80%/max acceleration figures were for the ship going nose/tail first which would only allow them to bring their chasers to bear, yet I don't recall any mention of them turning to unmask their broadsides cutting into their accel. Does impeller drive merely not give a damn where your ship's bow is pointed? Because that's sure as hell not how it was presented in the early novels, where deviating from your base course to bring your broadside armament to bear would cut into your acceleration relative to your target.

Are the ships still presented as accelerating in this battle after bringing their broadsides to bear?

[Batman]

I can't recall a single mention of them having to deal with reduced acceleration when they do that, and prior to the podnought era, they turn to bring their broadsides to bear pretty much the moment they hit max feasible missile range, nor is it ever mentioned that they are reduced to chasers when they decide 'Yeah, this isn't going to work, let's mosey out of here', they keep firing broadsides while running away at what is their best acceleration at that point in the series.

Now I really stink at geometry leave alone orbital mechanics but if memory serves a lot of pre-podnought fleet engagements consisted of the fleets essentially heading straight for each other, which would pretty much require them to turn broadside ahead. Also, Honor's modified vertical wall of battle would pretty much require her SDs to be broadside-on to the incoming Havenites and I don't recall any mention of that affecting her acceleration.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm honestly not clear on whether the ships are even accelerating toward the enemy- they build up a base vector while not in missile range, but that doesn't mean they're still speeding up to close in on the enemy after reaching missile range.

[Darth Nostril]

Question, do we actually know the SDs are making 90 degree turns to fire at targets ahead of them? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to adjust course slightly, then pour energy weapon fire into a target as it passes you and you fly right through their formation? Given that there's time for only one short, sharp exchange of beams, I would expect that- there's no point in turning a full 90 degrees, even if you could, because the enemy ships won't be in your line of fire for very long anyway.

But that brings us back down to relatively small turns.

The forces are approaching each other side on to present their broadsides, turning 90 degrees gives you a greater chance of crossing the enemies 'T' and scoring direct down the throat/up the kilt hits as you interpenetrate their formation.
Off the bore firing which I'm pretty certain they're capable of (re-reading the entire series, only up to Flag in Exile at the moment, so may take a while to find some examples) lets them keep on pouring fire into the enemy formation as they approach and after they pass through.

[Simon_Jester]

Off-boresight missile fire is something they're explicitly stated to be capable of in the late series but NOT the early ones- this actually represents a significant advance in how they control their missiles.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/150/0

Now, there seems little doubt that in the early series missiles had SOME angle off-boresight at which they could still engage effectively; otherwise they'd be useless. But from the sound of it, that angle was more like 30, 45, or maybe 60 degrees; it was not practical to launch missiles to the left and hit an opponent on the right with them.
____________________________

This still leaves us with the basic constraint of pre-1912 PD ship design: ships have to point their sidewalls at a target to launch effective missile attacks at it.

I presume that a ship cannot accelerate in the direction its sidewalls, roof, or belly bands point... but I really couldn't say.