Honorverse ramblings and musings

cthia wrote:One thing I'm unclear on. There's the GA now. Right!

Once production of Apollo gets ramped up, of course the RHN and GSN navies will be supplied across the board??? But there are ignoramuses in all navies. I can't see the RMN giving Pavel Young Apollo. He'd shoot his eye out!

Seriously though, ships with that technology cannot be allowed to be captured. The neutralization of Apollo would be its only Achilles heel at the moment. Superior weapons systems are only as superior as their inferior link - the human morons that wield them.

SWM wrote:Pavel Young was mysoginist, vain, cowardly, and many other unflattering adjectives. But he was not stupid. He did know how to run a ship, how to navigate, how to follow regulations, etc. He was not a moron.

But you are mistaken in thinking that they will be giving Apollo to everyone. They will be giving Apollo to people running podlayers. Not every captain is given a podlayer.

One final note: you may remember that Pavel Young is no longer in the Manticoran Navy (or even alive). In fact, he was removed after the very first battles of the war. At this point, Manticore and Haven have been at war for almost twenty years. I think you can be pretty confident that everyone who is not worthy of their ship commands has been eliminated from both navies--one way or another.

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Also keep in mind that even the AI in Apollo missiles isn't up to lightminute+ autonomous attacks. They still need guidance from ships or forts. And from AAC we know the Apollo control missile can only maintain that FTL link less than 8 lightminutes (Bom2) (though at least 3 lm (Lovat). (Well, unless you can seed the system with Mycroft style FTL fire control relays)

So an Apollo "minefield" would either need a controlling ship with Keyhole II somewhere "nearby", need a string of Mycroft style relays dropped, or need the enemy to wander past close enough (1/2 SDM range? Less?) that the onboard sensors could lock-on for a fully autonomous attack.


In addition to that, it's not clear whether there are angularity concerns with the FTL link. I tend to suspect (though I'm not aware of any text-ev either way) that it's mostly designed to work when pointing aft. That might be one more issue trying to really pincer a force with fire from two significantly different directions, both launched from the same spot. (Sweep out much ahead or behind the target and you might[/u] turn enough to lose line of sight on your FTL transceivers. Certainly if you loop really far it'll start cutting into your terminal velocity - since you spend some of your acceleration budget moving off the straight-line path; then overcoming that off-target vector)


Still, Apollo is a hell of a multiplier and there probably are better uses for it than boring straight in on a least time path.

I've always thought that Mycroft-like platforms should be standard seed in the Manty home system just as the Hermes buoys. You're just not supposed to be able to come into someone's home or home system with the intent of raising hell. If that system is a super power, or 'Pay the Grim Reaper at the tollbooth.'

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Jonathan_S wrote:Also keep in mind that even the AI in Apollo missiles isn't up to lightminute+ autonomous attacks. They still need guidance from ships or forts. And from AAC we know the Apollo control missile can only maintain that FTL link less than 8 lightminutes (Bom2) (though at least 3 lm (Lovat). (Well, unless you can seed the system with Mycroft style FTL fire control relays)

So an Apollo "minefield" would either need a controlling ship with Keyhole II somewhere "nearby", need a string of Mycroft style relays dropped, or need the enemy to wander past close enough (1/2 SDM range? Less?) that the onboard sensors could lock-on for a fully autonomous attack.


In addition to that, it's not clear whether there are angularity concerns with the FTL link. I tend to suspect (though I'm not aware of any text-ev either way) that it's mostly designed to work when pointing aft. That might be one more issue trying to really pincer a force with fire from two significantly different directions, both launched from the same spot. (Sweep out much ahead or behind the target and you might turn enough to lose line of sight on your FTL transceivers. Certainly if you loop really far it'll start cutting into your terminal velocity - since you spend some of your acceleration budget moving off the straight-line path; then overcoming that off-target vector)


Still, Apollo is a hell of a multiplier and there probably are better uses for it than boring straight in on a least time path.

Cthia wrote:I've always thought that Mycroft-like platforms should be standard seed in the Manty home system just as the Hermes buoys. You're just not supposed to be able to come into someone's home or home system with the intent of raising hell. If that system is a super power, or 'Pay the Grim Reaper at the tollbooth.'

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Johnathan_S wrote:Oh sure. Charge into a system defends with Mycroft pods and you're toast. And at minimum that home systems and major fleet cases should have priority on permanent Mycroft deployment. Those should relay FTL fire control all over at least the inside of the hyper limit. And iirc the FTL latency from a fort in planetary orbit to the far side of the system's hyper limit (behind the sun) is still about what lightspeed lag to a max range SDM was.

But the way you'd phrased your post I thought it was primarily addressing RMNfleets in hostile systems; where I seriously double they'd be routinely scattering Mycroft nodes. That's where your FTL range, and possibly viewing angles, start to limit the tricks you can play. (Plus of course the system defense Apollo variant has that 4th "sprint" drive to play with (that an offensive Apollo fleet wouldn't)

SWM wrote:

cthia wrote:I've always thought that Mycroft-like platforms should be standard seed in the Manty home system just as the Hermes buoys. You're just not supposed to be able to come into someone's home or home system with the intent of raising hell. If that system is a super power, or 'Pay the Grim Reaper at the tollbooth.'

Manticore did have Mycroft-like platforms in the home system--they were called Forts. Now they are called Forts with Keyhole II.

cthia wrote:

SWM wrote:Manticore did have Mycroft-like platforms in the home system--they were called Forts. Now they are called Forts with Keyhole II.

But the Forts aren't mobile. Isn't Mycroft?

Honorverse star nations build fortresses, which are actually (as I've said repeatedly) mobile units; they just aren't very mobile, and they don't have hyper-capability.

Hutch wrote:I have absolutely no idea how I managed to put this post in. Wasn't planned that way.

But, as long as I am here...

cthia, I think the point was that 'natural selection', i.e., the Santino option, would have removed the incompetents from command (see the disaster at Alder (Commodore Yeargin) before Honor arrived in IEH or consider Admiral Styles in Echos of Honor.

And the Peeps were even simpler--lose a battle, we shoot you.

Hard on their crews, but one way or another, incompetents were removed from command.

cthia wrote:

SWM wrote:Manticore did have Mycroft-like platforms in the home system--they were called Forts. Now they are called Forts with Keyhole II.

But the Forts aren't mobile. Isn't Mycroft?

Vince wrote:All modern forts are mobile.

Non-hyper-capable units

Honorverse star nations build fortresses, which are actually (as I've said repeatedly) mobile units; they just aren't very mobile, and they don't have hyper-capability.

cthia wrote:

SWM wrote:Manticore did have Mycroft-like platforms in the home system--they were called Forts. Now they are called Forts with Keyhole II.

But the Forts aren't mobile. Isn't Mycroft?

cthia wrote:

SWM wrote:Manticore did have Mycroft-like platforms in the home system--they were called Forts. Now they are called Forts with Keyhole II.

But the Forts aren't mobile. Isn't Mycroft?

Vince wrote:All modern forts are mobile.

Non-hyper-capable units

Honorverse star nations build fortresses, which are actually (as I've said repeatedly) mobile units; they just aren't very mobile, and they don't have hyper-capability.

cthia wrote:Not real-time in the heat of battle mobile.

Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 8 wrote:Although the Star Kingdom had opted not to reactivate the fortresses around the Junction's central terminus, there were at least a dozen of them under construction at the Lynx Terminus. They wouldn't be as big as the Junction forts, but they were being shipped in in prefabricated chunks, and unlike the Junction forts, they were being built with the latest in weapons, sensors, and EW systems. And they were also being built using the same manpower-reducing automation which was a feature of the most recent Manticoran and Grayson warship designs. When finished, each would mass about ten million tons, significantly larger than any superdreadnought, and with far less internal volume devoted to impeller rooms. Bristling with missile tubes and LAC service bays, they would constitute a most emphatic statement of the Star Kingdom's ownership of the wormhole terminus.

Mission of Honor, Chapter 18 wrote:“Hamish is right about that, Your Majesty,” he said. “We’ve got all but one of the forts fully online now. And we’ve got Apollo system-defense birds deployed in depth to cover them. In fact, we were planning on recalling Jessup Blaine from Lynx to refit his pod-layers with Keyhole-Two and Apollo.”
“So you and Hamish are both confident the Lynx Terminus could hold off seventy-one superdreadnoughts if it had to?”
“Your Majesty, at the risk of sounding immodest, the only real question would be how long it took us to blow all seventy-one of them out of space. Those forts were designed to hold that terminus without any outside support against the attack of two hundred and fifty of our own pre-Apollo podnoughts. Now that they have Apollo, their defensive capability’s been multiplied many times. We still aren’t sure by exactly how much, but it’s got to be at least a factor of four.”