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

n7axw wrote:I believe our good friend Herlander is probably at Bolthole helping the GA puzzle through the secret of the streak. Therefore we will probably see GA streaks. In what role they will serve or how important they will be remains a matter of conjecture.

Don

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I suspect we shall soon see Streak-Drive on at least CA classes; Node size requirements will determine if they show up on DD's (or Roland II DDL's ).

The more significant production from Herr Semoles might be a Spider-Drive sensor / detector.

(side humor)
"Those are BIG Nodes"
"She can touch your Nodes, but not your Latinum"
(variation on Ferrengi Rule of Acquisition)

-- Stewart

stewart wrote:

n7axw wrote:I believe our good friend Herlander is probably at Bolthole helping the GA puzzle through the secret of the streak. Therefore we will probably see GA streaks. In what role they will serve or how important they will be remains a matter of conjecture.

Don

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I suspect we shall soon see Streak-Drive on at least CA classes; Node size requirements will determine if they show up on DD's (or Roland II DDL's ).

The more significant production from Herr Semoles might be a Spider-Drive sensor / detector.

(side humor)
"Those are BIG Nodes"
"She can touch your Nodes, but not your Latinum"
(variation on Ferrengi Rule of Acquisition)

-- Stewart

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

The MA has spent a lot of time and effort sabotaging the SLN in multiple ways. It's been clearly stated that they are responsible for the SLN discounting the reports of actual observers of the Haven sector battles. It's likely that this not the only way they do this.

And when I suggested recon and guidance I meant both recon and guidance. So yeah the ship 73 light minutes away hypers out, but the big ass drone that is actually guiding the missiles is still there and still feeding them updates. Not to mention that there is no reason why they leave Nd don't come back. You can have multiple divisions bouncing in and out of hyper and transferring control as needed.

Zakharra wrote:One of the things any new ships will be looked at to do is to be able to withstand a RMN Apollo guided missile storm. Given what the RMN and RHN has done with their military tech, it's clear that -everyone- will be looking to match or exceed the missile storms that are now common place in naval warfare. That is now the standard to beat and sooner than later other stellar nations will be capable of fielding ships and missiles capable of matching (within a Haven standard of matching) the RMN's known capabilities. So any new developments in ship development and tactics are going to be steered to being able to survive that kind of missile heavy battlefield.

If you are willing to devote enough small drones to it, you can make any ship almost immune to missiles with laser or nuclear heads. Wedges of any size are completely impervious to directed weapons fire, with the sole exception of the weapon that must not be named.

The tactical use of unmanned drones to create layers of defenses has not been approached by any Navy in the Honorverse - that we are aware of...

I've commented on this in other threads, so I won't go into great detail here, other than to say that the SL, if it were to take it's ancient and decrepit SD fleet out of mothballs and crank up drone production and use it as I mentioned above, could give the Haven sector a real fight.

munroburton wrote:The scariest bit of what you quoted, I have bolded below.

R&D was beginning to experiment with the same FTL technology back home, and unlike many of his fellows, Byng had made it a point to follow at least the unclassified aspects of their efforts. According to them, just the power storage any grav-pulse installation would have required would have been impossible to fit into any drone-sized platform. And that completely ignored the fact that actually generating the pulse in the first place took the equivalent of an all-up impeller node, many times the size of any recon drone ever built!

So even Byng may not be the worst the SLN has to offer. Of course, we've already met Sandra Crandall...

Crandall suffered more from anger management issues than lack of brains. For that matter, Byng suffered from similar pride management issues. And I don't think there's much to be said wrong about Filareta's skill or brains, given what he knew - if you want to beat on him, you go for his personal habits and boy howdy can you have a field day there.

I have the impression - it'd be interesting to do a careful analysis, if someone really cared - that all their reputations were a lot better before they got killed with a lot of fellow SLN officers than afterward. Understandably, mind you - that kind of thing does make for reasonable evidence! - but it may well mean that the notion that the SLN has not been sending their first team to the fight is based on skewed perceptions. They haven't been picked on the basis of skill as such, good or bad; they've been picked on the basis of having useful hooks to get or force actions appropriate to Alignment goals out of them.

stewart wrote:

n7axw wrote:I believe our good friend Herlander is probably at Bolthole helping the GA puzzle through the secret of the streak. Therefore we will probably see GA streaks. In what role they will serve or how important they will be remains a matter of conjecture.

Don

--------------------

I suspect we shall soon see Streak-Drive on at least CA classes; Node size requirements will determine if they show up on DD's (or Roland II DDL's ).

The more significant production from Herr Semoles might be a Spider-Drive sensor / detector.

(side humor)
"Those are BIG Nodes"
"She can touch your Nodes, but not your Latinum"
(variation on Ferrengi Rule of Acquisition)

-- Stewart

The streak drive (hyper drive) has nothing to do with the impeller nodes, either alpha, beta or both (unlike the inertial compensator). The streak drive is simply a super hyper generator that is "twice the size" (whether that is mass, volume or all 3 dimensions of height, width, length is not given in text) of existing hyper generators. And the use of hyper generators to get into hyperspace preceded the invention of the impeller drive and Warshawski sails (people were using it, with reaction drives (rocket motors) providing propulsion.

A lot of people on this forum get confused because David has the Mesan Alignment calling their new, improved, super-duper hyper generator a drive, just having it alone lets you go faster. This is just plain wrong.

More Than Honor, The Universe of Honor Harrington, makes it clear that the hyper generator alone does not provide propulsion or acceleration. In fact what it actually does is cause the ship mounting it to radically decelerate every time upon using it to enter hyperspace, exit hyperspace, move up a hyper band, and move down a hyper band.

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.

Maybe we should start calling it the Streak Brake (since it allows 2 additional braking maneuvers-up/down for each of the two additional hyper bands (iota and kappa) it allows access to for a total of 4 additional brakes) to avoid confusion.

--snipping--

JeffEngel wrote:I have the impression - it'd be interesting to do a careful analysis, if someone really cared - that all their reputations were a lot better before they got killed with a lot of fellow SLN officers than afterward. Understandably, mind you - that kind of thing does make for reasonable evidence! - but it may well mean that the notion that the SLN has not been sending their first team to the fight is based on skewed perceptions. They haven't been picked on the basis of skill as such, good or bad; they've been picked on the basis of having useful hooks to get or force actions appropriate to Alignment goals out of them.

--end snipping--

One of the thing RFC hasn't shown us is "who the SLN first team is", though it's likely that Filerata was a lot closer to that level than Crandall, because the SLN officers who had met Crandall didn't think very highly of her as a command officer. She had a good tactical team, based on what the SLN knew at the time, aka no idea of the actual Mark-23 range and Apollo missile's ability to control them FTL.

What we do know is that in the SLN halls of power, "reporting accurately" on Haven Sector tech was a good way to get shipped off to outer darkness, career wise. Only one little unofficial think tank has been looking at the data with open eyes, until after Filareta's fleet is decimated with virtually no losses to the RMN. So even the majority of the first line officers are still stuck with very bad intel from which to develop a new fighting doctrine, PLUS the institutional arrogance about their need to.

Think of it this way. Let's say (ignoring the US Air Force for now) you're the mighty USN, which as of 2015 has impunity in the oceans, and someone comes to you, senior admiral, and says "the Philippines* don't like you anymore, and they've developed weapons platforms you can't get to, and even a small squadron of their cruisers can take out your all feared carrier task group. You laugh and go back to drinking your coffee, right?

Add interstellar distances, 300 plus years of naval contract graft and corruption, and really bad intel as to how the Philippines could possibly have done that, and see if your "all powerful navy" officers are ready to listen.... until a big fleet commanded by one of your 1st team gets smoked.

*I chose the Philippines for an example by virtue of their cartographic positioning between the Indian and Pacific Oceans; Indonesia and Malaysia would have also worked but less well.

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.

Maybe we should start calling it the Streak Brake (since it allows 2 additional braking maneuvers-up/down for each of the two additional hyper bands (iota and kappa) it allows access to for a total of 4 additional brakes) to avoid confusion.

"Hyperspace Fast Lane Access Pass"

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?

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