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Honorverse ramblings and musings

Join us in talking discussing all things Honor, including (but not limited to) tactics, favorite characters, and book discussions.
Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by cthia   » Sun Mar 15, 2015 7:52 pm

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Question. When an adversary is following you in hyper, their long range sensors are degraded. They are probably mirroring your course. Just as James Bond releases a slick patch of oil or steel tacs to disable the vehicle in pursuit, can a pursued ship in the Honorverse release mines?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Mar 15, 2015 8:48 pm

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cthia wrote:Question. When an adversary is following you in hyper, their long range sensors are degraded. They are probably mirroring your course. Just as James Bond releases a slick patch of oil or steel tacs to disable the vehicle in pursuit, can a pursued ship in the Honorverse release mines?

Potentially. But there'd be no point in doing so in a grav wave. The wave would shred them as long before the enemy would enter their range.
But if you were in a rift you would try. But odds are the enemy is far enough offset from your exact tract to be outside the 30-50k standoff range of laserhead mines. And of course the mines sensors are also degraded; but that may not be too big a deal - deceased sensors are more a factor in not seeing the mines get rolled than they'd be in keeping the mine from seeing 200k km or so for final lock on to orient and watch for the target to come into range.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by Vince   » Sun Mar 15, 2015 8:51 pm

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cthia wrote:Question. When an adversary is following you in hyper, their long range sensors are degraded. They are probably mirroring your course. Just as James Bond releases a slick patch of oil or steel tacs to disable the vehicle in pursuit, can a pursued ship in the Honorverse release mines?

Yes, but it isn't worth it. Since mines don't have the capability of missiles for powered flight (the only drives they might have are of the station-keeping variety), your adversary would have to come into attack range of any mines released (a sphere approximately 50,000km in diameter, derived from the effective range of a laser-head against a sidewall--25,000km) and achieve a line of sight to the hull of the adversary not blocked by a wedge.


And space is big.


Really, really, big.

The odds are that the adversary is not directly astern of the ship that would release the mines, or even that it would pass through the attack range of a released mine.

Detection ranges in hyperspace (or the range at which an adversary can follow you):
More Than Honor, The Universe of Honor Harrington, (1) Background (General) wrote:Navigation, communication, and observation all are rendered difficult by the nature of hyper-space. Formed by gravitational distortion, hyper-space itself acts as a focusing glass, producing a cascade effect of ever more tightly warped space. The laws of relativistic physics apply at any given point in that space, but as a hypothetical observer looks "outward" in hyper-space, his instruments show a rapidly increasing distortion. At ranges above about 20 LM (359,751,000 km.) that distortion becomes so pronounced that accurate observations are impossible. One says "about 20 LM" because, depending on local conditions, that range may vary up or down by as much as 12%—that is, from 17.6 LM (316,580,880 km.) to 22.4 LM (or 402,921,120 km.). A hypership thus travels at the center of a bubble of observation from 633,161,760 to 805,842,240 km. in diameter. Even within that sphere, observations and measurements can be highly suspect; in effect, the "bubble" may be thought of as the region in which an observer can tell something is out there and very roughly where. Exact, precise observations and measurements are all but impossible above ranges of 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 km., which would make navigational fixes impossible even if there were anything to take fixes on.
Boldface is my emphasis.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by Kizarvexis   » Sun Mar 15, 2015 8:57 pm

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cthia wrote:Question. When an adversary is following you in hyper, their long range sensors are degraded. They are probably mirroring your course. Just as James Bond releases a slick patch of oil or steel tacs to disable the vehicle in pursuit, can a pursued ship in the Honorverse release mines?


Depends on if you are in hyperspace between grav waves or not. In between grav waves a warship can just shoot missiles at the bad guy. In a grav wave, it depends on where the other unit is when they detect you. In the case of the Cpt Helen Zilwicki, the Peeps were overtaking the convoy from astern. As long as the overtake was from directly behind the ship or close enough a course change would generate that, then sure. You would have to use mines that could not bring up the wedges for a final sprint, so only the mines close enough to the ship would be able to attack and that would probably not be many. If the attack was more like the sim that Lt Hearns was in where the SLN ships attacked from either beam, then that would not work. Of course, Lt Hearns was in between grav waves which is why she MDM'd the attackers.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by SWM   » Mon Mar 16, 2015 1:31 pm

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cthia wrote:Question. When an adversary is following you in hyper, their long range sensors are degraded. They are probably mirroring your course. Just as James Bond releases a slick patch of oil or steel tacs to disable the vehicle in pursuit, can a pursued ship in the Honorverse release mines?

Certainly they could. After all, Honor managed to do that during the Battle of Hancock, and they didn't even have the advantage of sensors degraded by hyperspace.

But it requires a very specific geometry. Basically, the escaping ship would have to slowly maneuver itself until it was traveling directly in line with the chasing ship. As others have mentioned, space is big, and normally you would not expect the chasing ship to be directly in line with the escaping ship. But it could be done if the escaping ship carefully maneuvers to set it up without the chasing ship suspecting.

But it won't happen very often, because ships almost never chase each other in hyperspace. We've only seen a handful of such incidents. And none of those ships had mines. The only ships that carry mines are mine layers.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by Bill Woods   » Tue Mar 17, 2015 3:24 am

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Vince wrote:Detection ranges in hyperspace (or the range at which an adversary can follow you):
More Than Honor, The Universe of Honor Harrington, (1) Background (General) wrote: ... At ranges above about 20 LM (359,751,000 km.) that distortion becomes so pronounced that accurate observations are impossible. One says "about 20 LM" because, depending on local conditions, that range may vary up or down by as much as 12%—that is, from 17.6 LM (316,580,880 km.) to 22.4 LM (or 402,921,120 km.). A hypership thus travels at the center of a bubble of observation from 633,161,760 to 805,842,240 km. in diameter. ... Exact, precise observations and measurements are all but impossible above ranges of 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 km., which would make navigational fixes impossible even if there were anything to take fixes on.
Boldface is my emphasis.
Grrr. Spurious precision from units conversion. There's no justification for giving those numbers to more than a couple of significant figures. E.g. '... about 20 LM (350,000,000 km)'. Or 350 million km, or 350 gigameters, or 350 Gm.

(And 'km' isn't an abbreviation that needs a period, it's a symbol.)

[/pedant]
----
Imagined conversation:
Admiral [noting yet another Manty tech surprise]:
XO, what's the budget for the ONI?
Vice Admiral: I don't recall exactly, sir. Several billion quatloos.
Admiral: ... What do you suppose they did with all that money?
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by JeffEngel   » Tue Mar 17, 2015 8:27 am

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Bill Woods wrote:Grrr. Spurious precision from units conversion. There's no justification for giving those numbers to more than a couple of significant figures. E.g. '... about 20 LM (350,000,000 km)'. Or 350 million km, or 350 gigameters, or 350 Gm.

(And 'km' isn't an abbreviation that needs a period, it's a symbol.)

[/pedant]

'About' is a wonderful, wonderful word. So is 'approximately', if you just need the syllables to satisfy some peculiar internal drive or your 'x' key is feeling lonely. Give 'around' and even 'in the neighborhood of' a spin for variety! And if you want to abbreviate, '~' (shift top left!) is even lonelier on English-speaking keyboards.

And yeah - precision beyond the reach of accuracy is some sort of sin.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by SWM   » Tue Mar 17, 2015 2:13 pm

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JeffEngel wrote:
Bill Woods wrote:Grrr. Spurious precision from units conversion. There's no justification for giving those numbers to more than a couple of significant figures. E.g. '... about 20 LM (350,000,000 km)'. Or 350 million km, or 350 gigameters, or 350 Gm.

(And 'km' isn't an abbreviation that needs a period, it's a symbol.)

[/pedant]

'About' is a wonderful, wonderful word. So is 'approximately', if you just need the syllables to satisfy some peculiar internal drive or your 'x' key is feeling lonely. Give 'around' and even 'in the neighborhood of' a spin for variety! And if you want to abbreviate, '~' (shift top left!) is even lonelier on English-speaking keyboards.

And yeah - precision beyond the reach of accuracy is some sort of sin.

It is quite possible that the parenthetical value was added in editing, rather than by Weber's hand.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by cthia   » Tue Mar 17, 2015 7:19 pm

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A Rising Thunder
Once we get all of our shipping out of Solly space, they’re really going to be hurting, and we’ll have done it by simply calling our own freighters home, without using a single commerce-raider or privateer. But when Lacoön Two activates and we start closing down as much as we can of the entire network, it’s going to get even worse. They don’t begin to have the hulls to take up the slack even if all the termini stayed open; with the termini closed, with every ton of cargo having to spend four or five times as long in transit, to boot…

Can't SDs be utilized for merchant duty? Reconfigured of course. Instead of sending them to the breakers. Since they are desperate and present Solarian warships useless.

Textev states wormhole savings of as much as seven to nine months travel time. If the wormholes suddenly become unstable, what would that do to the survivability of certain systems? Frightening.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by cthia   » Tue Mar 17, 2015 7:36 pm

cthia
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A Rising Thunder
Readiness State Two, also known as “General Quarters,” was one step short of Battle Stations. Engineering and life-support systems would be fully manned, as would CIC, although Auxiliary Control would be reduced to a skeleton watch. The ship would maintain a full passive sensor watch, augmented by the remote FTL platforms they’d deployed as soon as they arrived, and the tactical department would be fully manned. Passive defenses would be active and enabled under computer control; electronic warfare systems and active sensors would be manned and available, although not emitting; and Onyx’s offensive weapons would be partially manned by their on-mount crews.

Bold mine.

Forgive my denseness. I simply love missile ECM. The dazzlers and Dragon's teeth turn me on. :oops:

I always wondered why the ship itself didn't employ some form of the same tech to protect itself. I thought the only protection the ships enjoy are the counter-missiles and point defense. But this passage suggests exactly some form of ship ECM?

Is the ship's electronic warfare just a detection of launched missiles in order to engage with CMs? And isn't that just an extension of CIC?

What am I confusing?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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