Honorverse series, the future..?

n7axw wrote:I suspect that Sollies are about to send some of their antiquated drath traps to Beowulf. ART implies that much. But I bet they have orders to beat a hasty retreat if actively opposed. I would also guess they don't risk a force as large as Filaretta's. They are slow learners. But eventually enough Solly admirals will be purged from the gene pool for the others to catch on.

Don

Wow, you're even more optimistic than Hutch...

Bad policy at the political level.

HB of CJ wrote:Give the Sollie big battle fleet ONE CHANCE to surrender? If I were that Grand Alliance Admiral...AND if I had beyond the reasonable doubt that enough time had elapsed to insure that the Sollie Admiral should have known better....NO!!

No single chance to surrender. I would just mouse trap them if possible or if not, then exploit my missile advantage and I would just blow them all away. All of them. No survivors. NEVER EVER NEVER GIVE the bad guys a chance to hurt you.

The E wrote:

Norm.bone wrote:Let's assume that secession vote passes, and that the Mandrins' plans to slip a fleet into Beowulf's orbitals and replace the government (ie " One OFS # 6 special, with fries") with one that will repudiate the alliance were to succeed. The Terminus fleet isn't in time, Moriarty isn't enough.

Your whole thought experiment falls apart at this stage though. There is no way that an SLN force can get into Beowulf orbit unopposed.

The SLN Fleet appear in the upper orbits and demands a surrender. Soon thereafter, the RMN and RHN appear and suggest politely that the SLN OFS government should surrender.

phillies wrote:
The SLN Fleet appear in the upper orbits and demands a surrender. Soon thereafter, the RMN and RHN appear and suggest politely that the SLN OFS government should surrender.

I seem to remember a suggestion by the SL that bad things will happen then.

Hi Jonathan_S,

The problem with Apollo missiles is if Mycroft isn't up yet, the Apollo's apparently can't be used by the BSDF, except in a very reduced capacity as Mike did at Spindle.

I don't expect RFC to repeat Spindle even if 3-6 times larger.

Mistletoe's are something than can work without Mycroft, while being explained, if they ever have to be, as something the BSDF came up with after the Grayson assassination attempt on its own, or Theisman's mine equipped drones that were wrecked at the beginning of Buttercup.

I don't expect the BSDF to bother responding to any demands for explanations though, since system security is each system's private prerogative.

RFC has made it plain that Beowulf is a science and tech leader not just in biology, so a Mistletoe type weapon is quite possible to claim as indigenous.

When I tried to estimate daily missile production costs for 5-10,000 MDM's at M$5-8M each, given the Fearless's SDM's in OBS were in the M$1-2M range, RFC explained that mass production vastly reduced the unit cost so MDM's didn't cost much more than the SDM's had, and the war production had even reduced that slightly before High Ridge took over, with RD (including Mistletoe) production also being relatively huge though again with low unit costs.

L

Jonathan_S wrote:**quote="Weird Harold"**[quote="lyonheart"]First of all, there are orders of magnitude difference between that assassination weapon (which apparently had no active stealth etc) and RMN RD's that can accelerate up to 5000 G's before being detected by RMN sensors.**/quote**

You do realize that RMN missiles accelerate at 85,000 to 90,000 Gs? Mistletoe style armed RDs are slow enough even the SLN can interdict them once they know they exist.

That makes them only good the first time they're used. Mistletoe armed RDs would probably be slightly more effective than the assassin missiles, but Appollo can do the same thing with eight Laser heads at 17-18 times the acceleration.

They can only interdict them if they can find them. Right now their sensors aren't good enough to do so.

That said, I don't see a reason to use a slower, more expensive weapon against SL units; especially when you can only carry a limited number of them. MDMs are already very effective, are carried in vast numbers, and don't take as long to reach firing position.


Mistletoe's can be used at even longer range (if you've got time for them to get there) because they've got vastly better onboard sensors (being recon drones). And that makes them useful for sniffing out and gutting fixed defenses. And a fixed defense that at least matches your effective range is sufficient threat to justify using expensive large weapons to neutralize - but current and likely near future SLN ships just don't (IMHO)[/quote]

lyonheart wrote:They can only interdict them if they can find them. Right now their sensors aren't good enough to do so.

The mistletoe platforms have to loiter over a hundred thousand Km -- against Havenite sensors. Against SLN sensors, probably no more than half that, BUT...

The have to go active and accelerate from near stationary and they cease to be stealthy at that point. Even the SLN should be able to get a shot or two at them, or roll wedge against them. The mistletoe platforms are designed for use against non-maneuvering targets.

At All Costs
Adm Thomas Theisman
wrote:"We should have realized that sooner or later they were going to strap weapons onto their recon drones. They've demonstrated they can operate them deep inside our defended areas with virtual impunity, and they probably took a certain pleasure from applying a variant of the same technique Saint-Just used to destroy Elizabeth's yacht in Yeltsin. The bad news is how close they can get them; the good news—such as it is—is that, even so, they can't get them all the way into attack range in stealth. They still have to get into range to execute their attacks, and not even Manty stealth systems can hide them during the last hundred thousand kilometers or so of their runs. They don't have the sort of acceleration rates missiles do, either, and to be used properly, they have to attack virtually from rest, or else they can't loiter until the proper moment. So they have relatively low closing velocities when they come in, and they can be engaged by counter-missiles and standard point defense, now that we know they're out there. Our intercept probabilities won't be good, especially given how little warning we'll have between the moment their drives peak and the moment they reach attack range, but we can probably cope with the threat."

On the sensor front. RHN sensors got 20 times better between the cease fire, probably comparable to current SLN sensors--maybe?, and Operation Thunderbolt.

Bold is my emphasis.

SoS Chapter 22 wrote:“That would depend on how good their sensor suites are, and how good the people using them are,” Bagwell replied. “BuWeaps’ R and D people evaluated and tested as much of their hardware as we could recover from the ships Duchess Harrington knocked out at Sidemore Station. On the basis of their tests, and assuming these people have well-trained, alert sensor crews,” he was punching information into his console as he spoke, cross-indexing against the recorded test data, “I’d have to say they’d have somewhere around a . . . one-in-ten chance. That might be a little pessimistic, but I’d rather err on the side of overestimating their chances, rather than underestimating.”

“Understood.” Terekhov pursed his lips for a few moments, then looked back at his EWO. “On the other hand, you’re evaluating their chances on the basis of current first-line equipment, correct?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Assume instead that they have what was first-line equipment as of Operation Buttercup.” Despite himself, Bagwell’s eyebrows rose, and Terekhov smiled thinly. “It’s not as loony as it sounds, Commander. We know these people have Goshawk-Three fusion plants, and those should have been replaced even before the High Ridge cease-fire. They weren’t. I’d say there’s at least a fair chance that if they didn’t replace something as dangerous as that, they also didn’t waste any effort on upgrading Bogey One sensors. Mind you,” his smile got a little broader, “I can’t imagine why they didn’t upgrade both, if they were going to keep the ship in inventory at all. But since we know they didn’t change out the fusion plants—” He shrugged.

“Yes, Sir.” Bagwell input additional data, then looked back up at his captain. “Assuming the parameters you’ve specified, Sir, even a well-trained and alert sensor watch would probably have no more than one chance in about two hundred.”

So it would seem a a valid tactic whether it is a economy of force is about the only question. Even if it takes only 10 instead of a 100 to destroy a SLN SD it probably won't be.

Of course all the above except the quote is speculation especially for the SLN application.

Have a good day,
T2M

Hi Weird Harold

Any relation to Bill Cosby's 'Weird Harold'?
For years our family had all his records, NTM us kids memorizing his routines.

We have the textev from ART and SoF that demonstrates RD's can easily get within 10,000 km of FF warships all while under power, whose sensors are probably far better than those decades old BF SD design's, whose refit rate can't keep up with what would be required to keep the active BF up to date.

L

Weird Harold wrote:

lyonheart wrote:They can only interdict them if they can find them. Right now their sensors aren't good enough to do so.

The mistletoe platforms have to loiter over a hundred thousand Km -- against Havenite sensors. Against SLN sensors, probably no more than half that, BUT...

The have to go active and accelerate from near stationary and they cease to be stealthy at that point. Even the SLN should be able to get a shot or two at them, or roll wedge against them. The mistletoe platforms are designed for use against non-maneuvering targets.

At All Costs
Adm Thomas Theisman
wrote:"We should have realized that sooner or later they were going to strap weapons onto their recon drones. They've demonstrated they can operate them deep inside our defended areas with virtual impunity, and they probably took a certain pleasure from applying a variant of the same technique Saint-Just used to destroy Elizabeth's yacht in Yeltsin. The bad news is how close they can get them; the good news—such as it is—is that, even so, they can't get them all the way into attack range in stealth. They still have to get into range to execute their attacks, and not even Manty stealth systems can hide them during the last hundred thousand kilometers or so of their runs. They don't have the sort of acceleration rates missiles do, either, and to be used properly, they have to attack virtually from rest, or else they can't loiter until the proper moment. So they have relatively low closing velocities when they come in, and they can be engaged by counter-missiles and standard point defense, now that we know they're out there. Our intercept probabilities won't be good, especially given how little warning we'll have between the moment their drives peak and the moment they reach attack range, but we can probably cope with the threat."

lyonheart wrote:Any relation to Bill Cosby's 'Weird Harold'?

I don't fit Bill's description: I'm too short, too fat and too white. But the nick-name does date from the same era (late 1960s) as Bill's stories about his childhood.

lyonheart wrote:We have the textev from ART and SoF that demonstrates RD's can easily get within 10,000 km of FF warships all while under power, whose sensors are probably far better than those decades old BF SD design's, whose refit rate can't keep up with what would be required to keep the active BF up to date.

The first time (or few times) a mistletoe is used against the SLN, it would be as effective as it was against Moriarty. In the meantime, SLN sensor techs are going to learn what to look for and actually start doing their jobs.

Yes, initially GA forces put RDs practically inside their targets sidewalls, but that is as much due to sensor tech training and threat assessment programming as it is sensor quality -- The PNE was unimpressed with Solarian technology, but openly contemptuous of Solarian software.

Still, the bottom line argument against the idea is cost; it is economical to use mistletoe against fixed high value, or high danger, targets like system defense fire-control centers or system defense pods. It does not make economic sense to build and deply them as a general offensive weapon. Especially since an Apollo pod can do most of what a mistletoe can do, and do it faster.

Actually against the Havenite tech that showed up at Thunderbolt, the SLN is toast. Both sides could range on the opposition at about 60 million klicks. At those ranges without Apollo, accuracy suffered. But they could engage their targets. Against what Honor encountered at Solon, the SLN does not survive.

So unless it can be demonsrated that using Misseltoe is a more economical way to engage, it is not needed.

Don