Solarian Military Catchup Attempts

I think I found the text that you have been thinking of. In More Than Honor:

The impeller drive used a series of nodal generators to create a pair of stressed bands in normal-space, one "above" and one "below" the mounting ship. Inclined towards one another, these produced a sort of wedge-shaped quasi-hyper-space in those regions, having no direct effect upon the generating vessel but creating what might be called a "tame grav wave" which was capable of attaining near-light speeds very quickly. Because of the angle at which the bands were generated relative to one another, the vessel rode a small pocket of normal space (open ahead of the vessel and closing in astern) trapped between the grav waves, much as a surfboard rides the crest or curl of a wave, which was driven along between the stress bands.

That is probably what gave you your mental image. But note the sentences immediately following:

Since the stress bands were waves and not particles, the "impeller wedge" was able, theoretically, at least, to attain an instantaneous light-speed velocity. Unfortunately, the normal-space "pocket" had to deal with the conservation of inertia, which meant that the effective acceleration of a manned ship was limited to that which produced a g force the crew could survive.

The impeller wedge refers to the impeller bands themselves. The normal space pocket is the volume inside the wedge, which includes the entire ship.

It seems to be saying that the pocket of normal space, including the ship, gets driven forward by the accelerating grav wave around it (the wedge), but the pocket is still subject to inertial forces.

SWM wrote:I think I found the text that you have been thinking of. In More Than Honor:

...snip...

The impeller wedge refers to the impeller bands themselves. The normal space pocket is the volume inside the wedge, which includes the entire ship.

It seems to be saying that the pocket of normal space, including the ship, gets driven forward by the accelerating grav wave around it (the wedge), but the pocket is still subject to inertial forces.

So my mental picture of how it worked wasn't totally out whack then .

[quote="Valen123456"]IN several of the Pearls of Weber posts about various future weapon/tech advances(some dating back quite a way) our dear Author noted or hinted a few times that some solutions might be attempted by the Solarian League when they finally took notice of Manticores military prowess.

Now with a long chain on military screw-ups under their collective belts it is about time for some of those to start appearing as the SLN tries to close the technological gap.

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I suspect the Sollies will replicate the LAC's first following the Havenite pattern -- take a high accel pinnace, assault shuttle or dispatch boat and strip out all unnecessary items, then re-arm.

CLAC's are an obvious follow on once the need is seen.

The Maya sector's arsenal ships are a good example of local development, albeit they are keeping their development under wraps for obvious reasons.

Micro-fusion plants will take a while longer. The Sollies MAY figure out the fission plant option that Grayson took; development might take a bit, but war has a very strong Darwinian effect.

-- Stewart

You know. If the Solarian league can "get back on balance ", I think they might look into possible innovations discarded by the RMN. Certain technology/innovations may be inferior to RMN doctrine, but may be a boon to present lackluster SLN performance numbers. (Which is the premise of this thread)

*For instance, RFC said 'no' to what I thought was a good idea for the RMN, from another poster. Someone had suggested dedicated CM ships for the RMN. RFC said no and gave detailed reasons supporting it in the Pearls. But the SLN may go foraging in their discarded garbage. A lot, if not all, of the 'no go' RMN CM options may be quite welcome to the SLN.

*
I thought of CM ships myself. But decided to search the Pearls to see if it had already been discussed. It had. RFC says no. His reasons make sense, and are very detailed. But it takes RMN present doctrine into account. LACs, for instance. And achieving a more effective CM performance by "spreading" the pattern.

But SLN doctrine is different, and they may be able to use discarded RMN innovations.

Of course, they'd still have to build the darn things.

The Pearls.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/series/Harrington/

Edit:
Scroll down to Technology
-Missiles, Counter-missile Pods and Technology

--Counter-missile pods and two-stage counter-missiles.

.

cthia wrote:You know. If the Solarian league can "get back on balance ", I think they might look into possible innovations discarded by the RMN. Certain technology/innovations may be inferior to RMN doctrine, but may be a boon to present lackluster SLN performance numbers. (Which is the premise of this thread)

*For instance, RFC said 'no' to what I thought was a good idea for the RMN, from another poster. Someone had suggested dedicated CM ships for the RMN. RFC said no and gave detailed reasons supporting it in the Pearls. But the SLN may go foraging in their discarded garbage. A lot, if not all, of the 'no go' RMN CM options may be quite welcome to the SLN.

*
I thought of CM ships myself. But decided to search the Pearls to see if it had already been discussed. It had. RFC says no. His reasons make sense, and are very detailed. But it takes RMN present doctrine into account. LACs, for instance. And achieving a more effective CM performance by "spreading" the pattern.

But SLN doctrine is different, and they may be able to use discarded RMN innovations.

Of course, they'd still have to build the darn things.

The Pearls.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/series/Harrington/

SL, if it des ides to fight, has much more build capability than the GA. But it is not nearly so advanced for modern combat ships, so their force mix should look quite different.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:You know. If the Solarian league can "get back on balance ", I think they might look into possible innovations discarded by the RMN. Certain technology/innovations may be inferior to RMN doctrine, but may be a boon to present lackluster SLN performance numbers. (Which is the premise of this thread)

*For instance, RFC said 'no' to what I thought was a good idea for the RMN, from another poster. Someone had suggested dedicated CM ships for the RMN. RFC said no and gave detailed reasons supporting it in the Pearls. But the SLN may go foraging in their discarded garbage. A lot, if not all, of the 'no go' RMN CM options may be quite welcome to the SLN.

*
I thought of CM ships myself. But decided to search the Pearls to see if it had already been discussed. It had. RFC says no. His reasons make sense, and are very detailed. But it takes RMN present doctrine into account. LACs, for instance. And achieving a more effective CM performance by "spreading" the pattern.

But SLN doctrine is different, and they may be able to use discarded RMN innovations.

Of course, they'd still have to build the darn things.

The Pearls.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/series/Harrington/

SL, if it des ides to fight, has much more build capability than the GA. But it is not nearly so advanced for modern combat ships, so their force mix should look quite different.

I agree. Their force mix should look different. Even if given it, it'll take lots of time to reproduce Manty tech. Hence, a quick fix, juryrig approach — not unlike Foraker's donkey, triple-ripple, et cetera — may be just the thing to help get over the hump. And I believe CM ships, and even CM-P ships would go a long way to help the SLN. Perhaps they can even manage a few innovations on the CM ship theme, because of their different views, fueled by a completely different vantage point in doctrine.

The SLN needs to buy themselves time. If they can manage to turn present circumstance into a favorable attritional war, then they would find themselves parallel to the RHN-RMN attritional war, mirroring a strategy of attritional warfare while introducing, ASAP, catchup innovations. Same as Haven did back in the good old days.

cthia wrote:The SLN needs to buy themselves time. If they can manage to turn present circumstance into a favorable attritional war, then they would find themselves parallel to the RHN-RMN attritional war, mirroring a strategy of attritional warfare while introducing, ASAP, catchup innovations. Same as Haven did back in the good old days.

And given that Haven and the Manties both know that they are not going to be giving the SL the time. In the next novel I suspect that we will see multiple splintering forces working at the League, the Maya sector will declare independence, more Verge rebellions will spark up, the Madras sectors occupation will come to light, Beowulf will go its own way with others quickly following. The Sollies literally will not know which way to turn.

In a way you almost have to feel sorry for the Mandarins, we can see all of this trouble about to come sailing in and hit them in the face, and they cannot. They are not exactly evil people in the way Manpower/Mesan Alignment are, just the soul tarnishing rot of bureaucracy gone too far. They rose to these positions because they were good at playing the game, and now they are in a position were only real leaders will work, and they are going to get seriously scorched by the changes.

Hmm.
Take a mothballed SD, add extra CM control links and load nothing but CM cannisters in the main tubes.
Refocus the lasers/grasers for a slightly more dispersed beam (after all it should take less energy to destroy a missile than to damage an enemy SD given toughness and range etc) and basically field them as CM ships.
Quick, cheap, off the shelf, and from the Sollies perspective likely to help.
How many more control links they could squeeze in and what they'd have to gut to fit them could be tricky.

Annachie wrote:Hmm.
Take a mothballed SD, add extra CM control links and load nothing but CM cannisters in the main tubes.
Refocus the lasers/grasers for a slightly more dispersed beam (after all it should take less energy to destroy a missile than to damage an enemy SD given toughness and range etc) and basically field them as CM ships.
Quick, cheap, off the shelf, and from the Sollies perspective likely to help.
How many more control links they could squeeze in and what they'd have to gut to fit them could be tricky.

Aegis is somewhat similar, but they were giving up main missile tubes for control links (plus devoting others to launching CM canisters)

I assume that even with the SLNs relative lack of prior focus on missile combat that they wouldn't have given up tubes for CM fire-control if there'd been a less painful tradeoff. So it seems you wouldn't be able to use all the rest of your main tubes to launch CM canisters - some more would need to be sacrificed for fire control. But that may be just as well. I'm not sure if an SD could avoid CM wedge fratricide if even 60% of its tubes launched CM canisters near simultaneously.

Seriously though, this is a solution they could make pretty quickly. I'm just not sure if its enough of a help, not without faster cycling CM launchers, better CMs, major computer upgrades, etc, etc. Their missile defense sucks for many more reasons than low numbers of CM tubes. All that said, I can't think of any better short term solutions - sucks with all the solutions look insufficient.

As readers we can be pretty sure it wont work. But then the Sollies have never read the books. (So foolish ofvthem. . )