Honorverse ramblings and musings

cthia wrote: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.

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?

This is not the first time passive defenses are mentioned in the text. It appears to be somewhat effective, though Apollo makes it a lot less effective. The text has never been very explicit about all the methods used, but there is definitely some passive defense available. You can't use the equivalent of a dazzler without blinding your own sensors. But there are other methods.

One form of passive defense which is mentioned is drones which send out signals like ships, drawing some of the missiles away from real targets. You probably recall the text talking about X number of missiles aiming for the drones while Y missiles go for the real ship. One of Manticore's advantages early in the war was it's ability to mislead Haven's missiles this way. It's the same concept as the Dragon's Teeth. Another form of passive defense in the text is the sidewalls. Presumably the sidewall is modulated in such a way as to make it harder to pin down the location of the ship behind it.

Keyhole is also used as a passive defense. David says that the Keyhole pair will alternate sending out ship signals, first one then the other, in a random pattern. The effect is to displace the apparent position of the ship back and forth erratically.

The buckler sidewall is a passive defense. It can be moved around some, enabling the ship to block the zone it expects missiles to attack from.

Stealthing is another form of passive defense. It isn't very useful for large ships in the midst of combat, but LACs benefit from it quite a bit. A ship which is not engaged can also benefit from reducing signal strength and trying to be stealthy. In combat, ships probably try to predict which signals the enemy is tracing; the ship can reduce or change signals in an attempt to throw the enemy tracking off.

I can't recall any other examples of passive defense in the text. But there are probably a few more.

cthia wrote: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.

They're beastly inefficient for it as-is, and beastly hard to refit into something that isn't. Freighters are basically empty space, with engines and crew accommodation for a tiny amount of people. SD's are basically armor, weapons, engines etc., and lots of crew for redundancy. Not much space in there. To refit space in, you have to rip through vast amounts of armor. SD's are the largest really mobile artifacts in human history, and the only things tougher are the fortresses that are only nominally mobile. That's due to that armor and internal compartmentalization, which you have to rip through for major refits.

Building freighters from the keel up is a lot easier.

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.

Few or no systems are incapable of supporting their own basic needs. It's luxuries or cheaper-from-elsewhere stuff that's shipped star to star. That's a lot of wealth, by all means, and tapping it is one of two major sources of League income, but systems going without wormhole traffic will make it out tolerably well.

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

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?

I think ships do have ECM to attempt to screw up missile targeting and they also have decoys to attempt to lure missiles away. (Jammers would probably be less useful because by the time the attacking missile is close enough to jam it's so far away from the launch platform that lightspeed lag means it's already dropped the control link and gone into autonomous final attack mode)
But those capabilities are just not normally spelled out in detail; they gets lumped in with missiles decoyed away or losing lock.


But remember back in Honor of the Queen when the shipboard ECM of Thunder of God, even on 'canned' routines was pretty effective. Until Rafael Cardones realized that and programmed the contact nukes to know the pattern and therefore use the target's ECM emitters to home in on.

Jonathan_S wrote:

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

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?

I think ships do have ECM to attempt to screw up missile targeting and they also have decoys to attempt to lure missiles away. (Jammers would probably be less useful because by the time the attacking missile is close enough to jam it's so far away from the launch platform that lightspeed lag means it's already dropped the control link and gone into autonomous final attack mode)
But those capabilities are just not normally spelled out in detail; they gets lumped in with missiles decoyed away or losing lock.


But remember back in Honor of the Queen when the shipboard ECM of Thunder of God, even on 'canned' routines was pretty effective. Until Rafael Cardones realized that and programmed the contact nukes to know the pattern and therefore use the target's ECM emitters to home in on.

Thanks everyone for my only marginally better understanding of it all.

I was thinking long ago that some form of ECM could be employed to prevent an enemy ship from achieving a good lock on you. Something that distance naturally achieves.

I think many forget the sidewall exists. Canon states: sidewall completely distorts signals emminating from the ship behind it.

Likewise the ship can maneuver in roughly a 10km "box" between the wedges.

So, if Sidewall distorts signals, the the ship in question can aim false images of "itself" onto the sidewall where the ship obviously is not. The missile has to figure out what is what.

GSN units used to have more mass dedicated than any other ship class out there. IIRC newer classes have gone away from this ECM. I honestly do not know why this would not still work even with FTL RD's present and Apollo ACM's manipulating the attack missiles. It is not as if the RD's are INISDE the sidewall to take accurate measurements of where the ship is. The massive sidewall distortion still exists and is the ships best defense.

Relax wrote:I think many forget the sidewall exists. Canon states: sidewall completely distorts signals emminating from the ship behind it.

Likewise the ship can maneuver in roughly a 10km "box" between the wedges.

So, if Sidewall distorts signals, the the ship in question can aim false images of "itself" onto the sidewall where the ship obviously is not. The missile has to figure out what is what.

GSN units used to have more mass dedicated than any other ship class out there. IIRC newer classes have gone away from this ECM. I honestly do not know why this would not still work even with FTL RD's present and Apollo ACM's manipulating the attack missiles. It is not as if the RD's are INISDE the sidewall to take accurate measurements of where the ship is. The massive sidewall distortion still exists and is the ships best defense.

In several cases, we've seen that a swarm of RDs is positioned in a globe all around the target force. That means that however they turn at least one RD is getting a clear view down the bow end of the wedge.

Bill Woods wrote:

Relax wrote:I think many forget the sidewall exists. Canon states: sidewall completely distorts signals emminating from the ship behind it.

Likewise the ship can maneuver in roughly a 10km "box" between the wedges.

So, if Sidewall distorts signals, the the ship in question can aim false images of "itself" onto the sidewall where the ship obviously is not. The missile has to figure out what is what.

GSN units used to have more mass dedicated than any other ship class out there. IIRC newer classes have gone away from this ECM. I honestly do not know why this would not still work even with FTL RD's present and Apollo ACM's manipulating the attack missiles. It is not as if the RD's are INISDE the sidewall to take accurate measurements of where the ship is. The massive sidewall distortion still exists and is the ships best defense.

In several cases, we've seen that a swarm of RDs is positioned in a globe all around the target force. That means that however they turn at least one RD is getting a clear view down the bow end of the wedge.

Not exactly true. The view down the throat or kilt of the wedge is extremely narrow. You would need thousands of drones that you have an unobstructed view of the enemy ship.

Are we to assume that Lacoon II is now in full swing?

And if so, doesn't that mean that Manticore will shut down the League's Yildun and Visigoth junctions? And the League isn't going to attempt to fight for control of their own junctions?

And how can Manticore prevent junction battles from turning into beam to beam conflicts?

Relax wrote:I think many forget the sidewall exists. Canon states: sidewall completely distorts signals emminating from the ship behind it.

Likewise the ship can maneuver in roughly a 10km "box" between the wedges.

So, if Sidewall distorts signals, the the ship in question can aim false images of "itself" onto the sidewall where the ship obviously is not. The missile has to figure out what is what.

GSN units used to have more mass dedicated than any other ship class out there. IIRC newer classes have gone away from this ECM. I honestly do not know why this would not still work even with FTL RD's present and Apollo ACM's manipulating the attack missiles. It is not as if the RD's are INISDE the sidewall to take accurate measurements of where the ship is. The massive sidewall distortion still exists and is the ships best defense.

I don't think newer classes have gone away from this ECM. Actually, I don't think it is a matter of projecting a false location onto the sidewall--I think it is a matter of the sidewall distorting the position. That is an intrinsic feature of the sidewall. The ECM part of it is to modulate the sidewall so that the distortion is constantly changing. I believe the newer classes still do this; in fact, it is a critical part of the defenses because otherwise, the incoming missiles would know exactly how to penetrate the sidewall, with either laserheads or even a contact nuke.

cthia wrote:Are we to assume that Lacoon II is now in full swing?

And if so, doesn't that mean that Manticore will shut down the League's Yildun and Visigoth junctions? And the League isn't going to attempt to fight for control of their own junctions?

And how can Manticore prevent junction battles from turning into beam to beam conflicts?

Yes, Yes, No, and Can't.

In slightly longer form:
Presumably Lacoon II is in full swing.
Presumably Manticore will target the Visigoth and Yildun junctions.
The League probably will attempt to fight for control of their own junctions, if they happen to have a fighting force at the right place and the right time.
Manticore cannot prevent junction battle from turning into beam-to-beam conflicts; they can only reduce the risk and be ready to temporarily lose control of a terminus if necessary until sufficient forces are gathered to retake it.