Why would the RMN bother with any new ship designs...

n7axw wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:
But I don't think Herlander worked on the spider drive, so he may well not have any knowledge to add to the effort.

You might well be right on this one. His specialty was the streak. But it is possible that he knows enough about the general concept to give Sonja and Shannon a clue as to where to start dabbling with the idea.

And, it should be remembered, it's an old truism that knowing that something can be done is half the battle of doing it. So who knows how it will turn out?

Don

You know... If we don't know any differently and all else being equal, it's more likely that two breakthroughs represent two different applications of one fundamental breakthrough than two totally independent one. Both the spider drive and the streak drive represent unusual interactions with hyperspace walls: tractoring the alpha wall in the one case, safely penetrating the iota and kappa walls in the other. If the root of both is one advance in hyperspace physics, Herlander Simoes, as a mathematician doing work in the field, actually may be able to offer some slight information about the spider drive - or perhaps something that someone else may connect to the spider drive (cue Team Foraker-Hemphill), even without knowing the connection himself or having the background or cast of mind to make it.

kzt wrote:

Vince wrote:What the streak drive does is allow a ship to safely access the two hyper bands beyond the theta band (cracking the iota and kappa walls), with their more compressed normal space point to hyperspace point references.

It's been clearly stated that the reason you can't access the iota band without being destroyed is grav shear and that in fact a normal hyperdrive does in fact allow you to break the iota wall. You simply get destroyed when you do.

Grav shear is countering in the honorverse with sails, not the hyper generator. So I'm still unclear how changing the hyperdrive allows this. Does it also mean the MA can navigate grav waves without sails?

I'm not sure about the reason you can't access the iota band without being destroyed is grav shear. What I understand from all the books is that a ship with a standard military hyper generator can go as high as the iota wall, but not cross it (and return down to the theta band).

IIRC, no ship (until the Mesan Alignment) that attempted to access the iota band ever returned, so no one knows 1) why they were unsuccessful in cracking the iota wall, assuming they didn't make it across, and/or 2) what destroyed them in the iota band, assuming that they did succeed in cracking the iota wall.

The only Pearl I was able to find that addresses the topic, Hyper-band access by ship type was over a decade old, and RFC responded to the specific question about the higher hyper bands:

(c) is R&D to crack the barrier to the bands which are currently completely unreachable underway, and are there any hints you'd like to drop as to how said R&D might be progressing.

With this standard RFC, no disclosure answer:

(C) Tum-te-tum-te-tum.

Vince wrote:I'm not sure about the reason you can't access the iota band without being destroyed is grav shear. What I understand from all the books is that a ship with a standard military hyper generator can go as high as the iota wall, but not cross it (and return down to the theta band).

IIRC, no ship (until the Mesan Alignment) that attempted to access the iota band ever returned, so no one knows 1) why they were unsuccessful in cracking the iota wall, assuming they didn't make it across, and/or 2) what destroyed them in the iota band, assuming that they did succeed in cracking the iota wall.

I went back and looked it up and grav shear was part of the issues, but not the pertinent one for this. The hyper generator seems to need to deal with "dimensional shear".

The Universe of Honor Harrington
"The second problem was that the interfaces between any two hyper bands are regions of highly unstable and powerful energy flows, creating the "dimensional shear" which had destroyed so many early hyperships, and dimensional shear becomes more violent as band levels increase. Moreover, even the relatively "safe" lower bands which could be reliably reached were characterized by powerful energy surges and flows—currents, almost—of highly-charged particles and warped gravity waves. Adequate shielding could hold the radiation effects in check, but a grav shear within any band could rip the strongest ship to pieces."

Zakharra wrote:

kzt wrote:The obvious tactic is to never go anywhere that you can't immediately escape to hyper. This means pushing forward advanced recon/guidance drones then using Apollo with long ballistic phases from the ships outside the hyperlimit.

That then means it will be a LOT harder to take a system that has a decent system defense force because even if the attackers can hyper out, they also lose control of every missile they launched. To fight, both sides are going to have to find a way to stand and take what they can dish out otherwise attackers can be driven off fairly easily with little to show for it (wasted missiles). It becomes a kind of hit and run siege warfare that could drag out attacks on a system for months if not years.

Unless David reverses his decision to avoid autonimous drone warfare in the Honorverse you still need manned ships providing the ultimate fire-control, no matter how many drone they might relay it through.

So if you're planning to have your main fleet potentially escape into hyper to avoid a counter-blow you'll still need something (manned and with a lot of fire-control to take over control.

One option would be to split your fleet in half, have the first half jump in, push recon drones and fire, then just before they'd have to jump out jump I thr other half of your fleet far enought away that the counter-blow can't be redirected at them; hand over control of your inbound attack salvo and then the targets half of your fleet could jump clear.

Alterbatively you found adopt a page from the MAligns playbook and sneak in fire control ships ahead of time. That could let them sneak inside the limit (and aviod the need for so many FTL relays to retain missile control) and since they aren't firing their own missiles they'd be pretty hard to timely locate even once thy started making directional grav pulses to control the missiles your main fleet launched.

That said I hope the bright people at Bolthole figure out a more usable defense than simply having to hyper away from a missile swarm

SharkHunter wrote:...

Logically, why introduce a new ship type (primarily the CL) at all? As fun as it is to think about, wouldn't the RMN just crank out as many Sag-C's as possible for the foreseeable future, augmenting with the Roland DD's, then start rebuilding at the SD(p) level, and thence down to Nike(s)?

Keep in mind, it's not only shipyard space that the RMN lost, it's all those workers. Wouldn't there be a whole lot of space for mischief in the new ranks (read MAlign troublemakers...) if you don't go with a thoroughly vetted, mostly cast-in-stone ship design that can't get fudged up during construction?

Ship design is a series of trade-offs, especially below the wall where whatever is built in a time period is a choice to emphasize some things at the expense of others. If the design team, fleet drivers and the doctrine writers all do their jobs right and also talk to each other, it is clear what the positive and negative choices are, and those positive and negative choices fit within a coherent system of use for those ships. The design choice for the post-Buttercup Mk-16 builds were to build ships that could beat the ever living snot out of Legacy designs while being overgunned and underprotected against their near peers which no one else could build.

Given the strategic environment the Sag-Cs etc were launched into, this makes sense.

The vessels that can be build to fight the Mesan Alignment Navy as well as the Solarian Succession and Seccession War are being built in a vastly different strategic environment. There still might be a need for a legacy design beat down artist. I don't know if that need is great enough to justify new construction instead of just more missiles. But the trade-offs that led to Aggs, Sag-Cs, and Rolands were from a different strategic assumption. A new strategic situation could lead to new designs to accomodate a different set of trade-offs.

Jonathan_S wrote:
So if you're planning to have your main fleet potentially escape into hyper to avoid a counter-blow you'll still need something (manned and with a lot of fire-control to take over control.

A single kh2 can run an entire BatRon's missiles. So each ship can run 2 squadrons worth of missiles.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:
So if you're planning to have your main fleet potentially escape into hyper to avoid a counter-blow you'll still need something (manned and with a lot of fire-control to take over control.

A single kh2 can run an entire BatRon's missiles. So each ship can run 2 squadrons worth of missiles.

Yes. But an SD(P) with Keyhole II has a lot of fire control. But you couldn't sneak in a couple destroyers to control those missiles. But yeah, sneak in ~1/6th of the SD(P) in your attack force and you can control all the missiles the rest launched from way out over the limit.

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:A single kh2 can run an entire BatRon's missiles. So each ship can run 2 squadrons worth of missiles.

Yes. But an SD(P) with Keyhole II has a lot of fire control. But you couldn't sneak in a couple destroyers to control those missiles. But yeah, sneak in ~1/6th of the SD(P) in your attack force and you can control all the missiles the rest launched from way out over the limit.

Not to be nit pickey, but David's example of Apollo control went to "ship H"or #8 in the squadron, meaning that each apollo keyhole can control at least 8 ships worth of missiles.

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Not to be nit pickey, but David's example of Apollo control went to "ship H"or #8 in the squadron, meaning that each apollo keyhole can control at least 8 ships worth of missiles.

That's still a squadron's worth, or more if you work with post-Janacek squadron sizes. White Haven hasn't reconstituted 8-ship squadrons, so KZT's 1/6 figure is accurate -- it's one ship whether you figure it is 1/6 or 1/8 of a squadron.

I'm not sure I'd plan my tactics by relying on 100% readiness of Keyhole II platforms though; I'd only figure on dealing with one squadron's worth of Apollo ACMs at a time.