Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

penny wrote:Thanks for the post. Makes lots of sense. It appears that a slight adjustment of tactics might solve some of the biggest hurdles. In major hubs where the the density of dispatch boats is greater, I would simply jump ahead in the iota band immediately, then drop back down ASAP. That might ensure sighting at least one dispatch boat upon "immediately" leaving the system. Similar to shooting a shotgun into a flock of geese. You are sure to hit something.

I don't think it's that simple.

Let's assume the attacker is keeping tabs on the DB that is about to leave and they have a good idea of how long it'll take that DB from now to translate to alpha. So let's say this attacker is keeping one band ahead, which would also keep it concealed from the DB. They will translate to beta before the DB gets to alpha, then gamma before the DB gets to beta, etc. So the attacker will get to iota when the DB arrives on theta.

The problem is then that the attacker needs to go back down to theta to engage, which means a 92% velocity loss and a momentary loss of cognitive abilities (let's say the MAN personnel suffers less, but I say they still suffer some). So going to iota is actually counter-productive: it takes longer to get to and from there to theta, plus a bigger loss of speed. That makes interception difficult.

The best tactic might be to not go higher than the DB: just stay in theta. By accelerating away before the DB, but doing so more intensively, the DB will begin to overtake the attacker, bringing itself into conflict. Alternatively, the attacker may actually only go to eta and accelerate away: the ratio between those two bands is sufficiently small that the attacker can actually make a significant headway before the DB begins accelerating, and then translate up before they hit the 0.3c speed limit.

Either way, the streak drive doesn't help. That means this tactic would have been available for nearly a millennium to any belligerents.

Edited: fixed the Greek letters.

@ ThinksMarkedly. As to '"a momentary loss of cognitive abilities (let's say the MAN personnel suffers less, but I say they still suffer some"".
More likely that having higher cognitive abilities would make them more vulnerable, rather than less.

Daryl wrote:@ ThinksMarkedly. As to '"a momentary loss of cognitive abilities (let's say the MAN personnel suffers less, but I say they still suffer some"".
More likely that having higher cognitive abilities would make them more vulnerable, rather than less.

I think Thinksmarkedly is allowing for the possibility that the MA may have had some some sort of genetic modification that prevents the loss of cognitive abilities. Those kinds of mods aligns perfectly with what they do.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Thanks for the post. Makes lots of sense. It appears that a slight adjustment of tactics might solve some of the biggest hurdles. In major hubs where the the density of dispatch boats is greater, I would simply jump ahead in the iota band immediately, then drop back down ASAP. That might ensure sighting at least one dispatch boat upon "immediately" leaving the system. Similar to shooting a shotgun into a flock of geese. You are sure to hit something.

I don't think it's that simple.

Let's assume the attacker is keeping tabs on the DB that is about to leave and they have a good idea of how long it'll take that DB from now to translate to alpha. So let's say this attacker is keeping one band ahead, which would also keep it concealed from the DB. They will translate to beta before the DB gets to alpha, then gamma before the DB gets to beta, etc. So the attacker will get to iota when the DB arrives on theta.

The problem is then that the attacker needs to go back down to theta to engage, which means a 92% velocity loss and a momentary loss of cognitive abilities (let's say the MAN personnel suffers less, but I say they still suffer some). So going to iota is actually counter-productive: it takes longer to get to and from there to theta, plus a bigger loss of speed. That makes interception difficult.

The best tactic might be to not go higher than the DB: just stay in theta. By accelerating away before the DB, but doing so more intensively, the DB will begin to overtake the attacker, bringing itself into conflict. Alternatively, the attacker may actually only go to eta and accelerate away: the ratio between those two bands is sufficiently small that the attacker can actually make a significant headway before the DB begins accelerating, and then translate up before they hit the 0.3c speed limit.

Either way, the streak drive doesn't help. That means this tactic would have been available for nearly a millennium to any belligerents.

Edited: fixed the Greek letters.

I see your points. Let me just say that I don't think any variation on the theme will be simple, although I like your tactic.

But! Has it really been available? As in feasible all around?

Here's the thing. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I don't know if there is some galactic treaty or law preventing attacks on DBs even if feasible, but if there is, I would imagine that all players are quick to adopt it. Every major or even somewhat major system's economy may depend heavily on DBs. So, one wouldn't want to start something that can come home to roost. The MA, being hidden, don't have to worry about that. Their location is unknown, and their actual DBs are unknown. Surely their DBs do not fly under the flag of Darius. So, that fact rules out tit-for-tat.

But I cannot think of a more effective commerce raiding strategy than destroying the prelude to the commerce carriers. Before the freighters run, the DBs may run with the orders. Pirates wouldn't want to destroy the DBs which may prevent the freighters from running. But a navy may want to, if it can get away with it without any sort of reprisals.

When a DB comes out of hyper, it is vulnerable, right? Remember the trick the Masadans(?) used to almost destroy several heads of state by smuggling a homing beacon onboard?

The MA's DB can target an enemy DB with a stealthed drone that attaches itself to the hull and sends out a signal in hyper. That signal would be limited, yes, unless the MA finds a way to increase its range and shrink the size of the drone significantly.

However, if the MA's DB can attach something to the DB, that "something" can simply explode at a later time.

penny wrote:I see your points. Let me just say that I don't think any variation on the theme will be simple, although I like your tactic.

But! Has it really been available? As in feasible all around?

Here's the thing. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I don't know if there is some galactic treaty or law preventing attacks on DBs even if feasible, but if there is, I would imagine that all players are quick to adopt it. Every major or even somewhat major system's economy may depend heavily on DBs.

There are at least 5 known users of dispatch/courier boats and AFAIK only one is protected by any kind of interstellar law.
1. Diplomatic couriers (protected)
2. Newsies dispatch boats
3. Commercial dispatch boats / private courier
4. Governmental couriers
5. Naval dispatch boats
[The commercial one is only mentioned in WoH as something that Ambassador Jackson in Horus might have used to send messages to Tourville's fleet in Silesia instead of using one of the detached Peep DDs.]

Now the news boats might be registered and home based in some other nation- collecting news and returning it to, say, the League; so only attack them if you're willing to be in a war with their nation too. But I doubt they have any actual treaty protection.


However I think you're overestimating how many DB there are flying around and how important they are for commerce. The Honorverse (to the extent RFC has thought about its interstellar economy) seems to be far less connected that we're used to -- after all he modeled it on age of sail where economies, even trading ones, didn't rely on rapid flow of financial data; and most mail and dispatches simply road along with whatever boat was headed in the right direction.
The vast, vast, majority of the ones few hundred mentions in the text are naval or governmental boats; carrying orders around within a nation or its fleet deployments. Then diplomatic ones making a very distant third. Ones that might be involved in financial or shipping updates just don't seem to be mentioned (though I guess I could have missed a mention or two).



Oh, and while looking for references in the text I did find a couple little gems about their speed, or lack there-of:
"Today it might take dispatch boats weeks or even months to complete their voyages, but, unfortunately, they always did seem to get there in the end." [IEH]
And that without access to the Junction "Haven was a six-month round trip away [from the Sol System] even for a dispatch boat" [AoV]
"Of course, that information is bound to be out of date, since the dispatch boat took the better part of two weeks to get here [to Haven] from Trevor's Star." [WoH]

They may be the quickest way to get information around the Honorverse; but they're not actually a particularly fast one.

Dispatch boats- at least the military ones- seem to have a habit of notifying the relevant authority of their Star Nation with burst transmissions about critical data aboard when they drop out of hyper.
What we saw with the Peeps at on the courier route including Cerberus was that they couldn't access the files from the DB but they had routing lists. But that might not always be the case. If you start loosing boats when they drop in at their destination, you might want to put a duplicate into a RD and drop it right as you come out of hyper at a given destination. Don't have to activate the drive, but the RD would be a difficult target to lock up given the proximity to a DB running it's wedge to make best time in-system. The RD can bring up actives sensors later and go where it is intended but even passive sensors would provide enough info to let it know where it was in relation to it's destination and just follow it's programming.
On the other hand, you might also want to vary widely what vector you were going to have your DBs both leave and enter systems on a case-by-case basis. Even pirates seem to have staked out what would be the most practical (least expensive) vector to make a delivery to System X when coming from the most normal departure system of regular freighter runs.

The Alignment is still not going to want anybody identifying them as the reason for missing shipping. That means that they have to ambush and destroy their targets and not get either sighted or recognized. Ideally they would do the destroying somewhere like the transition points between gravity waves were there are no routine sensor monitoring. That also lets the debris move away from the site at whatever speeds the larger pieces had when the ship broke up or was blown up. Not really much chance of tracking debris a day or two later if you don't have a beacon or some unusual power source showing on your sensors when they shouldn't be there. And you would have to be looking for debris. Very few merchant ships are going to have sensors powerful enough to be looking for random debris- particularly since any of that would be moving away -unpowered- from the merchant who is setting up to enter a gravity wave.

Another question is if the Alignment would try to concentrate this kind of destruction on the ships of or delivering too a particular star system or if they would be better off scattering it around to many systems and just start overall attrition of shipping capacity. Being specific on your targeting is going to be noticed as will a number of ships going missing on one run or which were heading to a particular system.

Dispatch boats- at least the military ones- seem to have a habit of notifying the relevant authority of their Star Nation with burst transmissions about critical data aboard when they drop out of hyper.
What we saw with the Peeps at on the courier route including Cerberus was that they couldn't access the files from the DB but they had routing lists. But that might not always be the case. If you start loosing boats when they drop in at their destination, you might want to put a duplicate into a RD and drop it right as you come out of hyper at a given destination. Don't have to activate the drive, but the RD would be a difficult target to lock up given the proximity to a DB running it's wedge to make best time in-system. The RD can bring up actives sensors later and go where it is intended but even passive sensors would provide enough info to let it know where it was in relation to it's destination and just follow it's programming.
On the other hand, you might also want to vary widely what vector you were going to have your DBs both leave and enter systems on a case-by-case basis. Even pirates seem to have staked out what would be the most practical (least expensive) vector to make a delivery to System X when coming from the most normal departure system of regular freighter runs.

The Alignment is still not going to want anybody identifying them as the reason for missing shipping. That means that they have to ambush and destroy their targets and not get either sighted or recognized. Ideally they would do the destroying somewhere like the transition points between gravity waves were there are no routine sensor monitoring. That also lets the debris move away from the site at whatever speeds the larger pieces had when the ship broke up or was blown up. Not really much chance of tracking debris a day or two later if you don't have a beacon or some unusual power source showing on your sensors when they shouldn't be there. And you would have to be looking for debris. Very few merchant ships are going to have sensors powerful enough to be looking for random debris- particularly since any of that would be moving away -unpowered- from the merchant who is setting up to enter a gravity wave.

Another question is if the Alignment would try to concentrate this kind of destruction on the ships of or delivering too a particular star system or if they would be better off scattering it around to many systems and just start overall attrition of shipping capacity. Being specific on your targeting is going to be noticed as will a number of ships going missing on one run or which were heading to a particular system.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I see your points. Let me just say that I don't think any variation on the theme will be simple, although I like your tactic.

But! Has it really been available? As in feasible all around?

Here's the thing. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I don't know if there is some galactic treaty or law preventing attacks on DBs even if feasible, but if there is, I would imagine that all players are quick to adopt it. Every major or even somewhat major system's economy may depend heavily on DBs.

There are at least 5 known users of dispatch/courier boats and AFAIK only one is protected by any kind of interstellar law.
1. Diplomatic couriers (protected)
2. Newsies dispatch boats
3. Commercial dispatch boats / private courier
4. Governmental couriers
5. Naval dispatch boats
[The commercial one is only mentioned in WoH as something that Ambassador Jackson in Horus might have used to send messages to Tourville's fleet in Silesia instead of using one of the detached Peep DDs.]

Now the news boats might be registered and home based in some other nation- collecting news and returning it to, say, the League; so only attack them if you're willing to be in a war with their nation too. But I doubt they have any actual treaty protection.


However I think you're overestimating how many DB there are flying around and how important they are for commerce. The Honorverse (to the extent RFC has thought about its interstellar economy) seems to be far less connected that we're used to -- after all he modeled it on age of sail where economies, even trading ones, didn't rely on rapid flow of financial data; and most mail and dispatches simply road along with whatever boat was headed in the right direction.
The vast, vast, majority of the ones few hundred mentions in the text are naval or governmental boats; carrying orders around within a nation or its fleet deployments. Then diplomatic ones making a very distant third. Ones that might be involved in financial or shipping updates just don't seem to be mentioned (though I guess I could have missed a mention or two).



Oh, and while looking for references in the text I did find a couple little gems about their speed, or lack there-of:
"Today it might take dispatch boats weeks or even months to complete their voyages, but, unfortunately, they always did seem to get there in the end." [IEH]
And that without access to the Junction "Haven was a six-month round trip away [from the Sol System] even for a dispatch boat" [AoV]
"Of course, that information is bound to be out of date, since the dispatch boat took the better part of two weeks to get here [to Haven] from Trevor's Star." [WoH]

They may be the quickest way to get information around the Honorverse; but they're not actually a particularly fast one.

I just cannot imagine that DBs are not really really important for commerce. The author could certainly offer a class or two on HV economics. But if there are so few of them, then it should be a given that their routes may consist of weeks to months. Especially considering the many systems in the HV.

I also think I am correct about the major hubs being highly dependent on time sensitive data. The SL and Haven should be highly dependent upon the data. I have to admit that I would not have thought that the most powerful economic powerhouses receive data so slowly. That just does not compute. Most economic hubs have access to a junction anyway, right? Junctions, like water sources in the Wild West, are what is responsible for economic powerhouses in the HV, I thought.

I would have thought a DB would sprint directly to main hubs. And each polity has a DB representing it in the MBS awaiting for the latest stock reports to post. Then the info travels from there, would be my guess. I cannot imagine a lack of systems that do a lot of business which depend on certain data originating from the MBS and other such hubs like it. Again, lacking a formal class on HV economics from the author. At any rate and again, I simply cannot wrap my head around certain systems not needing data asap.

I had a thought. The MA, at the beginning of war, can target the whole flock of DBs out near the limit which should be sitting ducks against g-torps. But I would imagine an entity who would adopt such a slant on commerce raiding would want the destruction of a DB to remain unknown. One would not want the enemy to know the DB needs to be replaced. I would think.

Jonathan_S wrote:However I think you're overestimating how many DB there are flying around and how important they are for commerce. The Honorverse (to the extent RFC has thought about its interstellar economy) seems to be far less connected that we're used to -- after all he modeled it on age of sail where economies, even trading ones, didn't rely on rapid flow of financial data; and most mail and dispatches simply road along with whatever boat was headed in the right direction.

I agree with the conclusion, but not the premise. I actually think it's the other way around: there are A LOT of DBs flying around. A moderately wealthy system with have a couple hundred of them. Manticore will have thousands. If the MMM had a couple thousand multi-million-tonne freighter hulls, they can definitely have ten thousand 30k-tonne DB.

But the transit times and the number of routes is equally large. That's why the connectedness and information latency of the HV is similar to that of the Age of Sail.

But if there are thousands of DBs in a given route, one every couple of hours, intercepting one of them is useless. Even intercepting a dozen of them is hardly a drop in the bucket. But doing so will bring out the defenders on you and if you have a hundred attackers out there trying to disrupt commerce, one of them is going to get caught, with sufficiently intact stealth systems (I assume those won't be spider-drive ships).

The MAN can definitely build that many DB-interceptors, in the 40k-tonne range. It's just another DB with a box launcher for missile, after all. But there's a cost of opportunity for them: the rest of the Galaxy has a huge lead time advance in building those, so building sufficiently in the Darius system will require so many resources that it could put in jeopardy building the other ships they do need. They only have so many resources to go around.