The enemy in "extended space": SLN or MAlign

kzt wrote:David has posted all that here.

Can you post that location again please?

StealthSeeker wrote:

kzt wrote:David has posted all that here.

Can you post that location again please?

I believe I pointed you to this thread before, perhaps in a different thread, and suggested that you read all 19 pages of the discussion, because numerous propositions for forcing your way through a wormhole were suggested by posters and shot down by RFC. He went into great detail about the difficulty of such an action, in at least four different posts in the thread. His post on this particular page gives the details about how long it takes after transiting before you can bring up your wedge and sidewalls: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3107&p=69199&hilit=wormhole#p69199 (the answer is minutes, during which you cannot fire your own missiles and do not have the protection of sidewalls).

But you really should read the entire thread, because pretty much every possibility is covered there.

StealthSeeker wrote:Another post, regarding the “twins” location, stated that more than likely the MA has now built forts at the twins to take care of any further incursions through the Torch wormhole.

No one suggested that the MA would have built forts at the Twins. I was the poster you are talking about, and what I said was that it was almost certain that the Alignment had by now installed more permanent defenses on their side of the wormhole than the cobbled-together pair of battlecruisers. More permanent defenses does not have to mean forts--it is more likely to mean mines and missile pods, and perhaps a few permanently stationed ships which won't be missed after a while, unlike the MSDF ships that took out the Harvest Joy.

Just to have all the information together with this thread, here is a summary of the problems faced by an attacker trying to get through a wormhole defended on the other side.

1) After the attacking ships transit the wormhole, they must keep their Warshawski sails up until the travel some distance away from the terminus down a narrow path, or "lane", which takes from 2 to 5 minutes depending on the wormhole.
2) The attacking ships cannot use an impeller wedge, or sidewalls, or fire missiles that use impeller wedges, until the ships get through that passage.
3) Since the attacker used the hyper generator to transit the wormhole, he has to wait for the generator to completely cycle before charging the generator to jump into hyperspace. He cannot even begin cycling the generator until he is completely out of the lane.
4) The attacking ships do not know where the defenders will be, and cannot target them until they get through the terminus and manage to sense them (which takes a bit of time after transit).
5) The defending ships, on the other hand, know exactly where the attacking ship will appear, and where the lane is. They don't know when or if the attackers will appear, but they can have their weapons already aimed while they wait, and can fire immediately on detection of an attacker.
6) While the attacker cannot use missiles until he is out of the lane, the defender can fire missiles at the attacker; the laserheads will go off before the missile itself enters the lane, hitting the attacker with lasers which cannot be blocked by sidewalls. Mines can also sit outside the lane and fire grasers into the attackers in the lane.
7) The attacker cannot even use counter-missiles to defend against incoming missiles, and must rely solely on PDLCs.

In short, the attacker is a sitting duck for several minutes after transiting a wormhole, during which the defender can sit back outside of graser range and hit the attacker with missiles and mines with impunity and without worrying about shots being blocked by impeller wedges or sidewalls or counter-missiles. It's a shooting gallery.

This is all taken from the thread cited above.

SWM wrote:

StealthSeeker wrote:Can you post that location again please?

I believe I pointed you to this thread before, perhaps in a different thread, and suggested that you read all 19 pages of the discussion, because numerous propositions for forcing your way through a wormhole were suggested by posters and shot down by RFC. He went into great detail about the difficulty of such an action, in at least four different posts in the thread. His post on this particular page gives the details about how long it takes after transiting before you can bring up your wedge and sidewalls: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3107&p=69199&hilit=wormhole#p69199 (the answer is minutes, during which you cannot fire your own missiles and do not have the protection of sidewalls).

But you really should read the entire thread, because pretty much every possibility is covered there.

There's also some of it in the marginally newer thread More From David on Wormhole Assaults

In that one he somewhat clarifies that the length you're stuck vulnerable in the "lane" depends on both the wormhole strength and your compensator (how fast you can use your sails to accelerate out the end of the "lane")


I'm not sure why the good bits of those threads don't seem to have made it into the infodumps site. (I had to find them from my personal cheat-sheet doc of RFC's posts)

SWM wrote:Just to have all the information together with this thread, here is a summary of the problems faced by an attacker trying to get through a wormhole defended on the other side.

[snip]

In short, the attacker is a sitting duck for several minutes after transiting a wormhole, during which the defender can sit back outside of graser range and hit the attacker with missiles and mines with impunity and without worrying about shots being blocked by impeller wedges or sidewalls or counter-missiles. It's a shooting gallery.

This is all taken from the thread cited above.

From another 'verse:

The first method of choice for attacking a wormhole was by subterfuge, subornment, and infiltration, i.e., to cheat. The second, also preferring subterfuge in its execution, was by an end-run, sending forces around by another route (if there was one) into the contested local space. The third was to open the attack with a sacrifice ship laying down a "sun wall," a massive blanket of nuclear missilettes deployed as a unit, creating a planar wave that cleared near-space of everything including, frequently, the attack ship; but sun walls were costly, rapidly dissipated, and only locally effective. The Cetagandans had attempted to combine all three methods, as the Rangers' disarray and the filthy radioactive fog still outgassing from the vicinity of their first conquest testified.

The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded wormhole was to shoot the officer who suggested it. Miles trusted the Cetagandans would work around to that one too, by the time he was done.

Which underlines the importance of the Manties following up Henke's assault on Mesa, by seizing the Visigoth junction shortly after her ETA at Mesa.

fallsfromtrees wrote:"n7axw"]Hi fallsfromtrees,

Now there is an interesting thought. One would wonder if such individual would actually have a chance of saving himself by turning himself over to the sicbay of a Manty warship.
Talk about a security measure backfiring!

Don

And given thespeed at which it all had to be set up, it is a distinct possibility that one of the lower class minions didn't get his upgrade, and is therefore running around, with the controllers of Houdini thinking that everything had been covered.[/quote]

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Due to the Onion's compartmentalization, I suspect there will have to be several "someones" taking medical refuge in order to collect any usable information; otherwise you are getting half-a-dozen tiles from a 10,000 tile mosaic.

-- Stewart

Jonathan_S wrote:
I'm not sure why the good bits of those threads don't seem to have made it into the infodumps site. (I had to find them from my personal cheat-sheet doc of RFC's posts)

As far as I can tell, nothing from this site makes it into the infodumps site. That seems to be exclusively posts from Baen's Bar. Why that is, I don't know.

JohnRoth wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:
I'm not sure why the good bits of those threads don't seem to have made it into the infodumps site. (I had to find them from my personal cheat-sheet doc of RFC's posts)

As far as I can tell, nothing from this site makes it into the infodumps site. That seems to be exclusively posts from Baen's Bar. Why that is, I don't know.

I'd guess probably because the maintainer of the Pearls doesn't frequent this site, even though most of the Honorverse chat from the Bar migrated over here during the frequent outages a few years ago and never went back.

SWM wrote:

StealthSeeker wrote:Another post, regarding the “twins” location, stated that more than likely the MA has now built forts at the twins to take care of any further incursions through the Torch wormhole.

No one suggested that the MA would have built forts at the Twins. I was the poster you are talking about, and what I said was that it was almost certain that the Alignment had by now installed more permanent defenses on their side of the wormhole than the cobbled-together pair of battlecruisers. More permanent defenses does not have to mean forts--it is more likely to mean mines and missile pods, and perhaps a few permanently stationed ships which won't be missed after a while, unlike the MSDF ships that took out the Harvest Joy.

I haven't found it again, but IIRC has RFC posted here on the forums that what he hasn't said yet is that neither side of the Torch wormhole is "doing nothing" in terms of military preparations. Whatever plans each side might have had would presumably be growing more difficult "offstage" and we'll know more about that when the action resumes.

In addition, in CoG Erewhon has asked the team of Justice and Radamacher to effectively initial an even stronger "last ditch intervention" agreement with Haven, and Justice's domain includes Torch, at least until Cachat gets back. Seems like the usefulness of the planned invasion route from the MAlign into the Haven Quadrant is getting mighty slim.