2nd Battle of Manticore questions

JeffEngel wrote:

cthia wrote:Remember, even with the Havenites, Honor and other officers would hazard a guess as to the location of an SLN flagship because they knew that there MO was to place its flag on an SD "in the middle" of the formation. It always reminded me of playing Stratego and growing accustomed to where one likes to place their flag. Honor, as far as I know, was the only officer who tended to like to wrap her bacon in a less than optimum package. Which none of her officers liked.

Putting a flagship in the very middle of the wall minimizes communication speed lag to the edges of it. It also, alas, puts the flagship in a predictable position. Varying the position by a bit still leaves you with most of the command loop benefit without being quite in the middle of a bulls-eye.

Commanding from one of a force's less powerful units is fairly common in the books, though still a divergence from standard practice in the universe. Lester Tourville stuck to BC flagships in the late Peep era, to avoid being in a unit likely to get targeted in the crush of walls. Any flag officer commanding from a CLAC gets that, such as Honor for the Silesian/Marsh operations in War of Honor or Alice Truman at First Manticore. In those cases, if I recall correctly, Honor wanted mostly to retain Rafe Cardones as he flag captain and didn't want to disrupt things so much as to take him off to another ship to do so, and Truman inherited command at First Manticore due to so many seniors getting killed. Staying with a preferred/familiar flag captain and flagship kept Mike Henke on a less-than-the-largest ship in 10th Fleet after it got reinforced.

In any case, with formations opening up only a little and FTL communications opening comms up vastly, the rationale for being in the middle of the wall is gone. There may be a morale point in sharing the danger with the ships drawing fire, but there's a lot of practicality in putting your flag on a ship the enemy has no or little reason to try to target except to kill the fleet's commanding officer. For my part, I'd rather my CO is able to maintain effective, well-informed command throughout battle than that their butt is just as vulnerable as mine or more so.

SWM wrote:

cthia wrote:Wasn't aware that the flagship had been identified. I suppose triangulation of the signal via the Hermes buoys would have yielded fruit, if both legs of the signal could have been passed through Hermes.

But anyways, what could Filareta possibly know? Except for more Manty bashing.

Filareta's flagship was definitely identified, because Honor sent her communication specifically to his ship by laser. No one else heard the message.

cthia wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:Putting a flagship in the very middle of the wall minimizes communication speed lag to the edges of it. It also, alas, puts the flagship in a predictable position. Varying the position by a bit still leaves you with most of the command loop benefit without being quite in the middle of a bulls-eye.

Do forgive my unauthorized emblazoning of your prose.

Ships are also placed in the middle of the formation to enjoy optimum CM support, I thought.

cthia wrote:
VAST SNIPPAGE


I woke up this morning with a slight admonition from my sister's 13-yr-old Alberta Einstein, in the form of an email.

email from niece wrote:Hi Uncle,
Guess what?! You guessed! We are going back to Stonehenge for pi day!!! Mother is learning to bribe me. I had to give up this summer's trip to Geneva. But she doesn't know that I've been invited to tag along with Aunt Beatrice. Ha! But she's getting better, so I'm going to have to alter my tactics. Mums the word.(literally)

Hey, you didn't respond to your mobile last night. So you were either asleep or in your lab. I checked on the forum and you hadn't posted since earlier in the night so I surmised you were asleep. I saw an interesting post and I'm surprised at you. You must be getting old Uncle. Of course Honor would have identified Filareta's ship through simple interferometry. An entire essay on it can be found in Volume IV of my journal during the time I got my first radio telescope to build. Remember that kit we shipped from Germany?

Here is a summary. Ship probes will represent Earth bound telescopes. I'm sure you will want to post it, so I'll try and accommodate forum format, since physics symbols still fail to display properly.

Interferometry

R = lambda/D

Where the Resolution is equal to the source we are trying to observe(lambda) over the diameter of the telescope(D)

It is used to determine the diameter of the telescope we need to build to achieve a particular resolution. However, building larger and larger diameter telescopes is rather expensive. Fortunately, that problem can be circumvented by using several antennas strategically placed. Strategically, meaning their distance from each other is not haphazard, because the equation R = lambda/D modifies into lambda/B. Where B represents the largest separation between any two telescopes. The separation acts as the effective diameter of the array.

Let's say that we have two antennas(probes) i and j separated by a distance B. Pointing the probes at the source(ships) whose distance we already know we will receive the signal at different times, directly related to the distance from each ship. The probe closest to the source will receive the signal first. The difference in the time of the signal received by the probe farther away is called the geometric delay.(tau) We know that the velocity of our waves is the speed of light.

In interferometry, we need to determine the distance to the source from each telescope. Whereas that is accomplished by tau = b dot s/c.

b dot s is simply the unit vector. However, this stage can be skipped because in the Honorverse we already know the distance to each ship.

[huge snip]

This is all very simple Uncle. It can be found in Volume IV of my journal, when I received my first telescope.

I so enjoyed riding Glue Factory Uncle. I think he missed me terribly. There were tears in his eyes. I loathe certain aspects of the winter.

See ya,
Tierney

Oh the time that the youth has on their hands. And their memory. I should have remembered that from school if not from her journal. Although, her journal is so chock-full of stuff that a certain dosage of aspirin is advised before perusing. Aspirin, peace and quiet, serenity, a super-computer and a few technical assistants.

I'll pay for that.

cthia wrote:Wasn't aware that the flagship had been identified. I suppose triangulation of the signal via the Hermes buoys would have yielded fruit, if both legs of the signal could have been passed through Hermes.

But anyways, what could Filareta possibly know? Except for more Manty bashing.

SWM wrote:Filareta's flagship was definitely identified, because Honor sent her communication specifically to his ship by laser. No one else heard the message.

Bill Woods wrote:Mmm, maybe. The first message was specifically addressed to 'Admiral Filareta, CO 11th Fleet', but I doubt it was on a tight beam. The first couple of of rounds, Honor was transmitting from her flagship a light-minute away. It might be possible to hit a single moving ship at that range, but why bother? At that stage, she was showing off her knowledge of his plans, but not her tech. Though her recon platforms surely identified his flagship when he responded.

The final rounds, she was flaunting her FTL comm buoys, but the text doesn't say it was a tight beam. If I were in her place, I'd want all the squadron and ship commanders to be clear on the facts that (A) they were hopelessly outgunned, but (B) they were being offered a chance to surrender.

cthia wrote:
I woke up this morning with a slight admonition from my sister's 13-yr-old Alberta Einstein, in the form of an email.

cthia wrote:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary

StealthSeeker wrote:

cthia wrote:http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary

An impressive library! It now needs to move in to the future a little bit where it "checks out" copies of books by putting a time limited access copy of the book directly onto your own book reader. And if you really need a hard copy of the book it can get you one, even if the book is out of print and not on the shelf, by printing a single copy, binding it, making a royalty payment (if still required) and delivering it to you with in 15 minutes.

And regardless of the library, you still have to make a child believe that going to one is a worth while thing to do. Other than say... setting a new high score in their favorite RPG game.

Kudos to your sister!

StealthSeeker wrote:

cthia wrote:http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary

An impressive library! It now needs to move in to the future a little bit where it "checks out" copies of books by putting a time limited access copy of the book directly onto your own book reader. And if you really need a hard copy of the book it can get you one, even if the book is out of print and not on the shelf, by printing a single copy, binding it, making a royalty payment (if still required) and delivering it to you with in 15 minutes.

And regardless of the library, you still have to make a child believe that going to one is a worth while thing to do. Other than say... setting a new high score in their favorite RPG game.

Kudos to your sister!

SWM wrote:If NCSU is like most academic libraries, you don't need to check out e-books. At my university, and at most others, we have agreements that allow our students, staff, and faculty to just access the e-books we subscribe to, directly, at any time and without a limit on how long you can access it. You don't even need an e-book reader, though you could access it through most current e-book readers. You can just pull it up on your computer, laptop, tablet, or even your smart phone through a link in the library catalog.

As for your idea of print-on-demand, that really isn't something a library could just set up for themselves. But the problem is the publishers, not the libraries. Publishers are not going to give permission to libraries to do that. So it is not the library that needs to move into the future--it is the academic publishing industry.