Honorverse ramblings and musings

I think I've asked this before, but I have another angle. lol

I asked some time ago about the current status of Masada. I think it is occupied by Manticoran forces? How long will that last? Is Masada akin to Viet Nam inasmuch as Manticore can never withdraw? Why can't Grayson Marines occupy Masada? Are there Grayson Marines?

Wouldn't it be advantageous for Grayson to just annex Masada? I know there was an agreement between the two to let bygones be bygones and to live and let live. But Masada never lived up to that arrangement so why should Grayson?

If Grayson could properly assimilate Masada then they could become an even more powerful nation. Resources. Food. Clean environment. Grayson has means to force the issue now.

They are interesting questions, and we don't know the answers. Yes, Masada is currently occupied by Manticoran forces (Army, I believe, on the ground).

There were three reasons Grayson was not the occupier. First, it wasn't Grayson that conquered Masada--it was Manticore. Two, Grayson didn't have enough ground forces to control all of Masada. Masada has several times the population of Grayson, and has a normal 1:1 male-female ratio, unlike Grayson. Three, having Grayson occupy Masada would have guaranteed blood flowing every day. There is just no way that Masada would have stood for it. They would have rebelled, repeatedly. And Grayson would not have had enough men to control it.

Maybe in another fifty years, when all of Masada's hardliners are dead, Grayson could start to integrate Masada. But there is no indication whether Manticore even wants that to happen.

SWM wrote:They are interesting questions, and we don't know the answers. Yes, Masada is currently occupied by Manticoran forces (Army, I believe, on the ground).

There were three reasons Grayson was not the occupier. First, it wasn't Grayson that conquered Masada--it was Manticore. Two, Grayson didn't have enough ground forces to control all of Masada. Masada has several times the population of Grayson, and has a normal 1:1 male-female ratio, unlike Grayson. Three, having Grayson occupy Masada would have guaranteed blood flowing every day. There is just no way that Masada would have stood for it. They would have rebelled, repeatedly. And Grayson would not have had enough men to control it.

Maybe in another fifty years, when all of Masada's hardliners are dead, Grayson could start to integrate Masada. But there is no indication whether Manticore even wants that to happen.

I think Manticore wants an independent Masada, whenever the non-crazy Masadans can safely run the place without Manticore backing them up very closely and with overwhelming firepower. From what I recall, the non-crazy Masadans are a tiny portion still, and what Manticore has there is a shaky administration by the less-crazy (or more patient) Masadans able to cooperate with them at least nominally, over a seething mass of variously crazy sorts. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Anyway, SWM's saying pretty much what I would, but for one tangential point. I don't recall anything to indicate Masada has a 1:1 male:female ratio. The gene tweak that made for that on Grayson predated by a long, long time the departure of the Faithful after the Civil War, so the first Masadans had it.

They no longer needed it to fix heavy metals in their mucus on Masada, so there wouldn't be selective pressure to retain it, but that wasn't so many generations ago for that selection pressure to've accomplished much.

They could have fixed it, but Masada is unlikely to have had its own Allison Harrington to have caught that, and if they did, their fix would likely have been a source for Dr. Harrington (or an earlier Grayson doctor) for her fix. It wasn't, so there's indirect evidence that Masada never got the mod behind Grayson heavy metal resistance and incidental live birth sex skewing accomplished locally.

They could have lost it with interbreeding with a population that did not have that mod. Certainly the rival allele for that location would have tremendous success away from Grayson's heavy metals: the offspring with the rival wouldn't fail so often during gestation, and wouldn't suffer any ill effects afterward, so it could spread considerably even in the modest number of generations spent on Masada. But Masada's population had been pretty well isolated there, by being out of the way, obscure, and definitely not an inviting, attractive place for immigrants. So that's not a likely source of a fix either.

So, in the absence of positive indication that they do have a 1:1 sex ratio, it'd be reasonable to assume they do not. There remains a grim possibility that they have a 1:1 sex ratio among adults despite having a 1:3 male to female ratio among live births, just because they kill about two girls in three. That's consistent with their valuation of women, at least, but I imagine a Masadan patriarch wants to have (on average) three "wives" rather than one, leaving them inclined, presumably, to spare the girls death just so they can keep them as lifelong sex slaves in generous number but still individually disposable. (I do recall mention that the "wife" count varies a lot depending on social status on Masada, as opposed to the Grayson model of 2-3 wives per husband, so the lower status Masadan men will be able to have only 0-1 "wife" each. They could motivate a large number of vicious soldiers and spacers by offering "wife" #1 as a reward for service.)

And if any of that last makes your teeth grind and your stomach turn, well, that's a bit more evidence for why keeping a Manticoran boot firmly on the Masadan neck as long as it takes sounds good!

(One last bit: I suppose killing mothers who do not produce live sons, or at least no longer having children by them, would introduce a selection pressure in stronger favor of mutants without the modified gene, but it does assume that it's a result, wholly or partially, of the mother's contribution to the child's genetic makeup. If it's all on the father's side, that's pointless; if it's largely on the father's side, it's minimally pointed. I simply do not recall enough about the discussion in EoH to judge that. Maybe someone else has it handier, by search or by memory.)

JeffEngel wrote:I don't recall anything to indicate Masada has a 1:1 male:female ratio. The gene tweak that made for that on Grayson predated by a long, long time the departure of the Faithful after the Civil War, so the first Masadans had it.

They no longer needed it to fix heavy metals in their mucus on Masada, so there wouldn't be selective pressure to retain it, but that wasn't so many generations ago for that selection pressure to've accomplished much.

They could have fixed it, but Masada is unlikely to have had its own Allison Harrington to have caught that, and if they did, their fix would likely have been a source for Dr. Harrington (or an earlier Grayson doctor) for her fix. It wasn't, so there's indirect evidence that Masada never got the mod behind Grayson heavy metal resistance and incidental live birth sex skewing accomplished locally.

They could have lost it with interbreeding with a population that did not have that mod. Certainly the rival allele for that location would have tremendous success away from Grayson's heavy metals: the offspring with the rival wouldn't fail so often during gestation, and wouldn't suffer any ill effects afterward, so it could spread considerably even in the modest number of generations spent on Masada. But Masada's population had been pretty well isolated there, by being out of the way, obscure, and definitely not an inviting, attractive place for immigrants. So that's not a likely source of a fix either.

So, in the absence of positive indication that they do have a 1:1 sex ratio, it'd be reasonable to assume they do not. There remains a grim possibility that they have a 1:1 sex ratio among adults despite having a 1:3 male to female ratio among live births, just because they kill about two girls in three. That's consistent with their valuation of women, at least, but I imagine a Masadan patriarch wants to have (on average) three "wives" rather than one, leaving them inclined, presumably, to spare the girls death just so they can keep them as lifelong sex slaves in generous number but still individually disposable. (I do recall mention that the "wife" count varies a lot depending on social status on Masada, as opposed to the Grayson model of 2-3 wives per husband, so the lower status Masadan men will be able to have only 0-1 "wife" each. They could motivate a large number of vicious soldiers and spacers by offering "wife" #1 as a reward for service.)

And if any of that last makes your teeth grind and your stomach turn, well, that's a bit more evidence for why keeping a Manticoran boot firmly on the Masadan neck as long as it takes sounds good!

(One last bit: I suppose killing mothers who do not produce live sons, or at least no longer having children by them, would introduce a selection pressure in stronger favor of mutants without the modified gene, but it does assume that it's a result, wholly or partially, of the mother's contribution to the child's genetic makeup. If it's all on the father's side, that's pointless; if it's largely on the father's side, it's minimally pointed. I simply do not recall enough about the discussion in EoH to judge that. Maybe someone else has it handier, by search or by memory.)

My reading is that the heavy metal resistance, and the accidental 2nd mutation (which is what skewed the birthrate), are both mutations to the X chromosome. So since the father doesn't contribute an 'X' the mutation seems like has to be controlled by the mother's genes.

Here's what's probably the key quote from EoH

Echoes of Honor: Ch 6 wrote:But what resulted here was worse—much worse. It destroyed a portion of the chromosome necessary for early embryonic development."
"Which means, My Lady?" Sullivan asked intently.
"It means that it produced an embryonic lethal mutation in males, Your Grace," Allison said simply.
This time the Reverend came bolt upright in his chair, and she nodded to the display still glowing above the coffee table.
"Any male embryo with this mutation cannot be carried to term," she said. "Female embryos each have two X chromosomes, however, which gives them the chance for an extra copy of the destroyed gene. And the lyonization process, which inactivates one X chromosome in a female, almost always inactivates the structurally damaged one in cases like this, which means that, unlike males with the same problem, they survive."
"But in that case—" Sullivan stared into the holo for several seconds, then looked back at Allison. "If I understand you correctly, My Lady, you're saying that no male child with this mutation could live?" She nodded. "In that case, how could our ancestors possibly have survived? If everyone who received the benign mutation also received this one, then how were any living male children born at all?"
"The two mutations are linked in that they were both introduced by the same vector, Your Grace, but that's the only linkage between them. Everyone got the intended mutation—well, that's probably an overstatement. Let's say that everyone who survived got the intentional one, but the unintentional one, fortunately, had incomplete penetrance. That means that thirty percent or so of the males didn't express the mutation and so survived—but even those who survived could be carriers.

But based on the description it seems like its still a crapshoot whether the X genes in any given egg have the lethal 2nd mutation. So even a carrier can have sons, they just have to be much luckier to do so that one without. So while killing those with the 2nd mutation would provide the selective pressure you mentioned I think identifying them would be tricky since they might have at least one son (and conversely women might have all daughters for reasons totally unrelated to this 2nd mutation)

You're right, Jeff. I had in the back of my head that Masada had a 1:1 male-female ratio, but that can't be true.

Something I've always wondered. There were many occasions where Manticore used probes to simulate larger warships. Honor used the ploy ruthlessly. Incidentally, I don't recall any other navy employing the ploy. But is it possible to play with the wedge itself to make it appear to be a smaller ship in order to suck in prey or directly manipulate the wedge of a battlecruiser to make it appear to be a ship of the wall? I'm sure this question has probably already been asked - apology in advance.

I seem to remember that the practice has its limits regarding how much play an SD has in that respect, but I never understood it. It seems that an SD should be able to appear to be a battlecruiser at only the expense of acceleration. And it'd be interesting to know balance of acceleration vs. ruse.

In Flag in Exile

Something funny going on here, Skip."

" 'Funny'? What d'you mean 'funny'?" Citizen Commander Caslet demanded. TG 14.1 sped straight towards the enemy at a combined closing velocity of over forty-six thousand KPS, which meant maximum effective missile range would be just over thirteen million kilometers. They'd enter that range in less than five more minutes, and he was more anxious than he wanted to reveal. Vaubon was only a light cruiser, hardly a high-priority target with battleships to shoot at, but there were light units on the other side, as well, and they might well choose to engage Vaubon simply because she was small enough they might actually get through her defenses.

"It's just—" Citizen Lieutenant Foraker leaned back, rubbing the tip of her nose, then grimaced. "Let me show you, Skip," she said, and switched her own tactical readouts to Caslet's tertiary display. "Watch this motion," she said, and he gazed intently at the display as the raggedy-assed enemy formation bobbed and swirled. There'd been some movement in it all along, but it had become more pronounced as the range dropped—a fact he'd put down to nerves.

"I don't—" he began, but Foraker was tapping commands into her console, and Caslet's mouth closed with a snap as the same movement replayed itself. The only difference was that this time a half-dozen or so of the dots left little worms of light behind, charting their paths, and the "formation" they'd dropped into. . . .

"What is that?" he asked slowly, and this time there was more than a trace of worry in his techno-nerd tactical officer's reply.

"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."

Caslet stared at the glowing light worms and felt his stomach drop clear out of the universe. It wasn't possible. And even if it were possible, surely one of the battlecruisers or battleships with their better sensors and more powerful computers would have seen it before a light cruiser did!

But those battlecruisers and battleships didn't have his resident tac witch, a cold, clear voice said in his brain.

"Communications! Get me a priority link to the Flag—now!"

I always wondered why the wedge strength of the SD's weren't fiddled with - even at the expense of acceleration?

If it is possible, it seems a tactic that may work against the SLN. They've probably never even seen the slick-probe trick.

cthia wrote:Something I've always wondered. There were many occasions where Manticore used probes to simulate larger warships. Honor used the ploy ruthlessly. Incidentally, I don't recall any other navy employing the ploy. But is it possible to play with the wedge itself to make it appear to be a smaller ship in order to suck in prey or directly manipulate the wedge of a battlecruiser to make it appear to be a ship of the wall? I'm sure this question has probably already been asked - apology in advance.

I seem to remember that the practice has its limits regarding how much play an SD has in that respect, but I never understood it. It seems that an SD should be able to appear to be a battlecruiser at only the expense of acceleration. And it'd be interesting to know balance of acceleration vs. ruse.

[snip quote of Honor's SD formation at 4th Yeltsin]
I always wondered why the wedge strength of the SD's weren't fiddled with - even at the expense of acceleration?

If it is possible, it seems a tactic that may work against the SLN. They've probably never even seen the slick-probe trick.

I get the impression its far easier to amplify the apparent power used by a wedge than it is to mask how much power it's actually using.

Ship size is normally determined by comparing acceleration to wedge power level. You can drop wedge power by dropping acceleration, but that still doesn't cause an SD to need as little power as a CL for any given accel. You still need to "hide" the extra wedge strength to make it look like a CL. It's not impossible, at lower accel, with a good ECM/stealth system and while you're still pretty far out -- in fact a page or two before your quote it mentions that "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."
But making a wedge look weaker is not as easy as making the wedge of a CL (or a decoy) look like that of an SD.


But in the specific fight you quoted Honor had reasons to pick very high accel over other tricks. If she'd kept the accel down to where as SD could be quite likely to hide it's wedge strength from a good look that alone would make the Peeps suspicious that Grayson still has some SDs out there (and that all the ships were towing maximum pod loads). That would in turn make them cautious enough to avoid the head on collision that Honor needed to put her few SDs into energy range of their numerous BBs.
Remeber the tonnage factor was so far against her that her SDs would have been crushed in a straight missile duel with the horde of BBs. To avoid that she picked an accel that was around 50g higher than a pre-war SD could have pull at 100% power, running the risk of compensator failure, just to make the Peeps dead certain that no SDs could be in that swarm of ships headed their way.

Honor judged (presumably correctly) that they'd feel more confident faced with acccel in excess of what an SD could do (as far as they knew) and a swarm of impeller signatures they couldn't get a good look at than they would be getting a good look at all the impeller signatures at an accel low enough that SDs could be spoofing themselves as weaker units.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Something I've always wondered. There were many occasions where Manticore used probes to simulate larger warships. Honor used the ploy ruthlessly. Incidentally, I don't recall any other navy employing the ploy. But is it possible to play with the wedge itself to make it appear to be a smaller ship in order to suck in prey or directly manipulate the wedge of a battlecruiser to make it appear to be a ship of the wall? I'm sure this question has probably already been asked - apology in advance.

I seem to remember that the practice has its limits regarding how much play an SD has in that respect, but I never understood it. It seems that an SD should be able to appear to be a battlecruiser at only the expense of acceleration. And it'd be interesting to know balance of acceleration vs. ruse.

[snip quote of Honor's SD formation at 4th Yeltsin]
I always wondered why the wedge strength of the SD's weren't fiddled with - even at the expense of acceleration?

If it is possible, it seems a tactic that may work against the SLN. They've probably never even seen the slick-probe trick.

I get the impression its far easier to amplify the apparent power used by a wedge than it is to mask how much power it's actually using.

Ship size is normally determined by comparing acceleration to wedge power level. You can drop wedge power by dropping acceleration, but that still doesn't cause an SD to need as little power as a CL for any given accel. You still need to "hide" the extra wedge strength to make it look like a CL. It's not impossible, at lower accel, with a good ECM/stealth system and while you're still pretty far out -- in fact a page or two before your quote it mentions that "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."
But making a wedge look weaker is not as easy as making the wedge of a CL (or a decoy) look like that of an SD.


But in the specific fight you quoted Honor had reasons to pick very high accel over other tricks. If she'd kept the accel down to where as SD could be quite likely to hide it's wedge strength from a good look that alone would make the Peeps suspicious that Grayson still has some SDs out there (and that all the ships were towing maximum pod loads). That would in turn make them cautious enough to avoid the head on collision that Honor needed to put her few SDs into energy range of their numerous BBs.
Remeber the tonnage factor was so far against her that her SDs would have been crushed in a straight missile duel with the horde of BBs. To avoid that she picked an accel that was around 50g higher than a pre-war SD could have pull at 100% power, running the risk of compensator failure, just to make the Peeps dead certain that no SDs could be in that swarm of ships headed their way.

Honor judged (presumably correctly) that they'd feel more confident faced with acccel in excess of what an SD could do (as far as they knew) and a swarm of impeller signatures they couldn't get a good look at than they would be getting a good look at all the impeller signatures at an accel low enough that SDs could be spoofing themselves as weaker units.

She also had the advantage that the Graysons completely refitted the entire class's ECM. The new Manty made ECM equipment was so much smaller than the Havenite hardware deployed on the Desquenes, that they almost doubled the ECM capability on the SDs, allowing the wedge's power to be hidden further than anyone else would have been able to do.

One piece of tech surprisingly lacking in the Honorverse that is present in every other space opera is the dogfighter. Even before the LACs I felt that emptiness. When the LACs came along, I was like "finally, Johnny come lately."

But then, someone had to burst my bubble with "LACs aren't that maneuverable." Drats.

Dogfighters are part and parcel of Earth. Perhaps the League will introduce extremely small ships which amounts to very cramped extremely small insanely maneuverable engines straddled by a single pilot. A truly crotch-rocket specific space vehicle. CRSV. Now for weaponry fitted to the fleet footed little flea capable of maneuvering for an up to kilt or down the throat shot that can mission kill - mass produced in insurmountable numbers.

Perhaps they should be called wedge rockets. Talk about a piece of tech giving a new meaning to wedgie.

Of course, they'll be nicknamed the "flying wedgies." lol

Dogfighting exists on Earth because we can leverage a different propulsion system, in a different medium, which allows for far more maneuverability than naval vessels. The Honorverse has no such equivalence: everything is "water" and no known drive system can provide the accelerations needed for manned craft to dogfight in the traditional sense. One can get into the kinds of furballs that happened at the Battle of Blackbird, but even those tend to be relatively brief with little radical maneuvering.