What happens to all that debris?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I imagine especially after Operation Icarus. Haven had pods, MDMs and FTL comms during Thunderbolt, though not anywhere as sophisticated as Manty tech. Their recon drones had to transmit at light-speed to a nearby LAC, which had to stop accelerating in order to retransmit at FTL.

It was probably during Icarus that they got a lot of Manty HW to analyse. The rest is R&D. (Though note that during Icarus, there were no pod-layers or MDMs)

Which honestly is probably best. Most of Manticore's tech went though iterative deployments, and seeing some of the earlier, less sophisticated, more rushed versions would probably tell you more about the technology, than later, polished and refined versions. For example - If I'm making electronics at home (prototyping or very small batch production), I'm using purforated bread boards and large, solderable components with chip holders for large, standard DIMM chips. In small production, a company will use speciality boards and Surface Mount Chips (SMCs) with baked paste solder. Large scale production will use specially designed SoCs (System on a chip), with SMCs. The more advanced (in production version and in tech) the hardware gets, the more specialized the electronics.

tlb wrote:Please provide some information as to location in Cauldron of Ghosts (such as chapter of page number out of total pages), so I can see how big a piece of the ship we are talking about. If it is most of a ship that has some holes in it; then I would not that the result of vacuuming a debris field.

Sorry, wrong on two counts...
1st. I'm already up to Shadows of Victory. Chapter Eight, right at the beginning of the chapter.
2nd It was the shattered portions of Eroica Station.

tlb wrote:Please provide some information as to location in Cauldron of Ghosts (such as chapter of page number out of total pages), so I can see how big a piece of the ship we are talking about. If it is most of a ship that has some holes in it; then I would not that the result of vacuuming a debris field.

ZVar wrote:Sorry, wrong on two counts...
1st. I'm already up to Shadows of Victory. Chapter Eight, right at the beginning of the chapter.
2nd It was the shattered portions of Eroica Station.

It is actually while "exploring the innards of the consoles on the command deck of MSN Remorseless (until recently BC-1003 Incomparable, late of the Solarian League Navy)". Yes, they did find "a great many intact computer cores from the shattered military component of Eroica Station".

The thing is, this is not the result of vacuuming a debris field; these are captured structures big enough to walk around in. CPO Magdalena Grigoriv was not even in a skinsuit.

I can see the irony of using a Vaccum Cleaner in a vaccum.

More likely some sort of cosmic dust mop (exterior other than where the wedge is) covered with tractor beams and lidar. Or a spacegoing mechanical Whale Shark or Manta Ray operating as a filter-feeder analog and sweeping up bits of ships into it's mouth and hang onto the non-organic bits.

Picking up bits of former SLN battlecruisers at Eroica Station makes more sense. They were not under power at the time but docked for conversion/rearming at the military side of the station and unless they were hit with an old style nuke-rather than a beam from a laserhead- they probably would have started "more or less" with the station. The old type "contact" nuke would have obliterated much of even a battlecruser and remaing pieces would probably be torn off the mooring gear of the station with quite a lot of force.

If you are going to go looking for usable tec in ravaged starships, you have to send somebody to both track them down and identify what may or may not be things you want to look at in the time you have. Recall that after Fillerta's fleet was mangled and surrendered at Manticore, shuttles/LACs/etc had to be sent to run down driveless SLN ships to at least take surrender and then get the surviving crew off. We know that at least the surviving ships of the SLN at Manticore ended up in what was effectively a giant salvage yard parking area but it wasn't spelled out that large or even any portions of ships were towed there vs those that surrendered and capable of movement under their own power. Ultimately there would have been some net positive worth to stopping and then guiding back to the Binary System parts of wreckes of some particular size, certainly ships that were more or less intact other than whithout any power or manuvering capasity.
It's all scrap. Manticore needs that material if for nothing more than to reclaim the metals etc for use in it's own rebuilding or ship to Beowulf to offset or lower the cost of what Beowulf is building for them.
The intelligence recover operations made a lot of sence but there would have been other ONI and BuShips/BuWeps teams combing through all those ships looking for information and details and working examples of Solly and Technodyne equipment plus records and data. Remember that when Henke destroyed Bing's ship and too the rest as surrendered, they found all sorts of intersting stuff including all that FF/OFS planning (and much of that formal SOP outlines) for fermenting unrest, manuvering systems into being protectorates and other things. And records, lots and lots and lots of recordsd of FF (at least) logs and reports. You know- the things not mentioned in the book like at the wormhole transit information from the navigation and tactical sections for using any wormhole the ship had gone through and old deployment plans and operational reports and everthing else a naval warship might have in files. Enough to keep analysts, resarchers and God knows what other specialties busy for decades.

I was almost certain that rummaging thru debris for secrets was mentioned a few times in storyline. Perhaps I read it somewhere on the forum.

I was wondering why the RMN never sifted through debris, but now that I think about it, Haven never had anything worth looking for.

I don't understand how Haven got anything worthwhile as far as FTL. There's not going to be anything worthwhile left over from the missiles. What else could have given them a break as far as Manty FTL?

cthia wrote:I don't understand how Haven got anything worthwhile as far as FTL. There's not going to be anything worthwhile left over from the missiles. What else could have given them a break as far as Manty FTL?

Did they though? I have the remembrance of them basically doing FTL from scratch. At first low pulse rate and staying a generation or three behind the Manties. Did Haven even have FTL coms? I don't remember. I though all they had was enough bandwidth for tach data. Basically text streams and didn't even have the bandwidth for voice, much less the full up video Mantie had.

Of course wouldn't be the first time I've misremembered.

cthia wrote:I was almost certain that rummaging thru debris for secrets was mentioned a few times in storyline. Perhaps I read it somewhere on the forum.

I was wondering why the RMN never sifted through debris, but now that I think about it, Haven never had anything worth looking for.

Just because we weren't told doesn't mean it didn't happen. RFC talks repeatedly how Honor can't be everywhere in the Honorverse, so we do miss a lot of information. Like the whole battle that retook Trevor's Star.

But I suspect that captured debris in the mid- to late-war period was inconsequential. Everything they needed to know, they got from the disastrous opening phases. They got so many intact/repairable SDs that White Haven gave 11 to Grayson. They probably captured some trafficked Solarian tech after this, but by and large Peep technology didn't change from 1904 to 1915.

I don't understand how Haven got anything worthwhile as far as FTL. There's not going to be anything worthwhile left over from the missiles. What else could have given them a break as far as Manty FTL?

FTL is not difficult, once you get the idea. In the short story "With One Stone," Honor uses HMS Fearless' impellers to make an FTL signal to IANS Neue Bayern, something Sonja was very interested in. Gravitic sensors are FTL and you can detect an impeller that way, at least whether it's there or not, but often you can gauge wedge strength too; as far back as Travis' time we saw that happen, actually.

FTL comms is likely a "Black Swan" technology: it's not obvious before it happens, but once it does everyone realises the natural progression. So once the Havenites realised it was possible, they just had to apply R&D to it.

Ditto for pods and pod-layers.

But as I said, MDMs are a whole other matter. Unless you do it like the Cataphract, which is Travis style "as big as a frigate, as expensive as a destroyer," developing the baffle requires samples.

ZVar wrote:Of course wouldn't be the first time I've misremembered.

I have the same trouble, which I try to limit by providing text where I can. However there have been times when I have been too quick to post.

ZVar wrote:

cthia wrote:I don't understand how Haven got anything worthwhile as far as FTL. There's not going to be anything worthwhile left over from the missiles. What else could have given them a break as far as Manty FTL?

Did they though? I have the remembrance of them basically doing FTL from scratch. At first low pulse rate and staying a generation or three behind the Manties. Did Haven even have FTL coms? I don't remember. I though all they had was enough bandwidth for tach data. Basically text streams and didn't even have the bandwidth for voice, much less the full up video Mantie had.

Of course wouldn't be the first time I've misremembered.

Well, I was counting on your memory cells that Haven panned for gold in debris, but didn't know what windfalls they could have been looking for or have gotten other than FTL?

I just had a foreboding premonition that the MA could have gotten a lot of debris if they wanted to.

I was watching an episode of Jag and they buried crewmen out to sea. That's something missing in the Honorverse. The reason we buried men at sea was lack of space to keep them, inability to preserve bodies that would rot before getting them home in time, a need to maintain operational security, time and other necessities of war. Yet, I would imagine some of the same restraints apply in the Honorverse, especially during war when you have to travel the long way around and you have hundreds, or more, of dead bodies. Shot into space in escape pods would be the equivalent, I suppose. But Navies need the pods.

An aside: In another TV show there was a firing squad. I was shocked to learn a firing squad was used as recently as 2010. Shocked I tell you. I thought we had abandoned firing squads long before then. I wouldn't be surprised if they still existed in the HV.