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Last use for SL SD captured

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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by Theemile   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 4:55 pm

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Lord Skimper wrote:Why not just use them as small Forts and park a dozen of them at each junction. Park a dozen Keyhole II's with them and a set of system pods. They don't have to go anywhere, they are strong enough to absorb fire from anything coming through the junctions, they can go through the junctions themselves if need be, Spare parts come from the damaged ships or Beowulf or other Solly systems. ERM missiles and Current CM's new software updates. Upgrade them with missile tube based sensor systems. Like HALO only better. Missile tube sensors suites can provide additional control links for linking to the Keyhole II's.


Once again, your concepts all involve rebuilding the ships involved, and culumatively take more time than required to build a new ship, and still get a 2nd rate ship when finished. Currently, there isn't spare shipyard capacity to do said concepts, and even if there were, the RMN is not modifying their own tube wallers to these standards, because it is too hard, expensive, and result in a medicore product, for the same cost and effort as a SD(p), so why would they do it to these pieces of junk.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by Castenea   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 5:42 pm

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Since Manticore will be building better ships once they have facilities build them in, and difficult to sell due to the legal questions of are they legitimate prizes of war, Manticore will have very limited use for them. Anyone trying to buy these white elephants has just bought themselves a war with the SL.

Manticore will strip the ships of all consumables, small arms and small craft. This will be used or sold as appropriate. A max of a dozen and more likely 3-5 will be used for a combination of destructive testing, and as training site for Marine Boarding parties and SAR teams.

The rest of the white elephants will be treated as a source of refined metal and scrapped at leisure.
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by JohnRoth   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 6:45 pm

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Lord Skimper wrote:Why not just use them as small Forts and park a dozen of them at each junction. Park a dozen Keyhole II's with them and a set of system pods. They don't have to go anywhere, they are strong enough to absorb fire from anything coming through the junctions, they can go through the junctions themselves if need be, Spare parts come from the damaged ships or Beowulf or other Solly systems. ERM missiles and Current CM's new software updates. Upgrade them with missile tube based sensor systems. Like HALO only better. Missile tube sensors suites can provide additional control links for linking to the Keyhole II's.


You've actually got an interesting question once you get past the non-starter with trying to find a use for the SL junk other than using it to probe a star's innards. Science can always find a use for military surplus.

How do you defend a wormhole terminus? The classic answer has been with forts - big, slow monsters that can take a lot of punishment while bringing the big guns up and converting the attackers into navigation hazards.

I wonder if that's the best approach in a universe with Moiarty and Mycroft system defenses?
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Apr 16, 2017 7:37 pm

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JohnRoth wrote:
You've actually got an interesting question once you get past the non-starter with trying to find a use for the SL junk other than using it to probe a star's innards. Science can always find a use for military surplus.

How do you defend a wormhole terminus? The classic answer has been with forts - big, slow monsters that can take a lot of punishment while bringing the big guns up and converting the attackers into navigation hazards.

I wonder if that's the best approach in a universe with Moiarty and Mycroft system defenses?
A wormhole terminus/junction has two threat vectors to worry about.
1) Through the wormhole. This hasn't been a real problem since the invention of effective laserheads. The standoff range of a laserhead missile lets it detonate from outside the grav turbulent entry lane (where a physical missile would be instantly destroyed) but still strike ships caught within that lane under sails.
With contact nukes you couldn't use missiles against transiting ships until they cleared the lane (and could bring up their wedges and sidewalls) so you had to have forts parked within energy range to contest the entry. Now those forts still had a massive defensive advantage because they had sidewalls and the attackers didn't - but it did force them to be in pretty predictable locations.

2) Through hyper. Wormhole termini are invariably located beyond a star's hyper limit and their own hyper limit is very small. So there's a risk that an enemy will successfully pull off what the Peep's did during the Basilisk raid and drop out of hyper on a rapidly closing vector - allowing them to quickly force defenders into an energy duel. That, I think, is probably the primary reason that you still have big nasty forts (albeit now ones for Manticoran systems with LAC bays, Keyhole II, and Apollo missile pods to deploy)

I doubt even in time of war that Manticore would be willing to turn a terminus defense entirely over to automated computer control -- especially with no humans close enough to attempt to override. So even with FTL comms you couldn't control Junction defenses from Manticore; the 7+ minute FTL comm lag is too long to be acceptable even if all you're sending is an "auto-fire approved" message. Ideally you want to be able to lay fire on a hostile emerging in your wormhole's entry lane in under 60 seconds - so you've got enough time to destroy a potential mass hostile transit while they're all still stuck under sails. And that may be as short as a couple minutes.

So even if you have zero comm lag you need your laserheads parked within 1.5 million km just due to time of flight. In that scenario you don't even need MDMs because you barely use up the first drive at full power. And for snap shots against an enemy who successfully pounces from hyper at near-minimum range you also don't need long range missiles - but you'd still want them in case (as at Basilisk) the enemy failed to jump accurately enough.

So I think, even with FTL, you'd want manned forts fairly near the terminus, say within 10 light minutes, to control the launch. But that's still further away than un-relayed Apollo, can control a missile. Hopefully dispersion, randomized patrol patterns, and stealth would keep an enemy from knowing where to try to ambush the control forts and they could use Mycroft with minimal control lag to order pods near the exit lanes to engage anyone idiotic enough to try a hostile transit but dispersed Apollo pods to engage attackers smashing through hyper.


Still, not having big armored targets to focus the enemy's attacks at the wormhole might mean that whatever civilian stations there are to handle servicing, warehousing, docking, bars, etc. might take the brunt of any pounce from hyper attack - not sure if mitigating that's a good enough reason to keep fairly close in manned defensive forts though.
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by robert132   » Mon Apr 17, 2017 11:31 am

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saber964 wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:
Sorry I thought that USS Triton was preserved. When only her sail was.




USS Albacore (AGSS-569) might be worth thinking about, she's on display in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

She's unusual in a number of ways, a diesel electric built at a time when the Navy otherwise was going fully nuclear. Her first of it's kind "tear-drop" gave her amazing maneuverability.

Combine that hull with nuclear power and you get a "Skipjack" SSN hull. Since then the USN has gone back (more or less) to the "sewer pipe" design sub hulls, i.e. the Los Angeles, Sea Wolf and Virginia classes.
****

Just my opinion of course and probably not worth the paper it's not written on.
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by Lord Skimper   » Tue Apr 18, 2017 12:52 am

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Theemile wrote:
Lord Skimper wrote:Why not just use them as small Forts and park a dozen of them at each junction. Park a dozen Keyhole II's with them and a set of system pods. They don't have to go anywhere, they are strong enough to absorb fire from anything coming through the junctions, they can go through the junctions themselves if need be, Spare parts come from the damaged ships or Beowulf or other Solly systems. ERM missiles and Current CM's new software updates. Upgrade them with missile tube based sensor systems. Like HALO only better. Missile tube sensors suites can provide additional control links for linking to the Keyhole II's.


Once again, your concepts all involve rebuilding the ships involved, and culumatively take more time than required to build a new ship, and still get a 2nd rate ship when finished. Currently, there isn't spare shipyard capacity to do said concepts, and even if there were, the RMN is not modifying their own tube wallers to these standards, because it is too hard, expensive, and result in a medicore product, for the same cost and effort as a SD(p), so why would they do it to these pieces of junk.



No rebuilding necessary, the sensor suite in the tube we know works because it has been done without rebuilding anything. The Keyhole II has the FTL The software is easy to reprogram at Beowulf. System pods or Mk16 pods towed and add a BC(P) into the SD mix at the Lacoon II taken junctions which don't have Fortes because you can't build any Fortes.

This frees up all your ships currently guarding the junctions. The BC(P) which isn't liked gets used cycling the pods.

The SD offer the junctions needed energy fire power for anything that emerges in the junction in the form of heavy laser and graser fire power and pods for attacks any other way. Crews come from Silesian safe worlds, Talbott and Beowulf. All the junctions are secured and all the first line Manty ships are available for whatever comes next.
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Apr 18, 2017 2:16 am

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Lord Skimper wrote:No rebuilding necessary, the sensor suite in the tube we know works because it has been done without rebuilding anything. The Keyhole II has the FTL The software is easy to reprogram at Beowulf. System pods or Mk16 pods towed and add a BC(P) into the SD mix at the Lacoon II taken junctions which don't have Fortes because you can't build any Fortes.
Apparently you missed reading the part of the books where it took months in a shipyard to just upgrade an SD(P) from Keyhole to Keyhole II. And the added shipboard systems to support that were so extensive they ended up being shoehorned into an armored plug at the forward end of the pod bay. They reduced the number of pods the ship could carry just to fit the necessary hardware. Trying you fit the same into a heavily comparmentalized classic SD would be a vastly slower project...

So no, you can't just float Keyhole II near some on SDs and get Apollo FTL on the quick and easy. If you read the books more carefully your schemes might have fewer fatal flaws. Just a suggestion.
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by kenl511   » Tue Apr 18, 2017 2:18 am

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My own suggestion for use of captured SLN SDs: locate the next person to resurrect this subject and drop them on him. Kinetic Energy Weapons.
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by Lord Skimper   » Tue Apr 18, 2017 10:23 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:
Lord Skimper wrote:No rebuilding necessary, the sensor suite in the tube we know works because it has been done without rebuilding anything. The Keyhole II has the FTL The software is easy to reprogram at Beowulf. System pods or Mk16 pods towed and add a BC(P) into the SD mix at the Lacoon II taken junctions which don't have Fortes because you can't build any Fortes.
Apparently you missed reading the part of the books where it took months in a shipyard to just upgrade an SD(P) from Keyhole to Keyhole II. And the added shipboard systems to support that were so extensive they ended up being shoehorned into an armored plug at the forward end of the pod bay. They reduced the number of pods the ship could carry just to fit the necessary hardware. Trying you fit the same into a heavily comparmentalized classic SD would be a vastly slower project...

So no, you can't just float Keyhole II near some on SDs and get Apollo FTL on the quick and easy. If you read the books more carefully your schemes might have fewer fatal flaws. Just a suggestion.



There is always something. Fine do it without keyhole II. Use keyhole I instead. Use Mk16 pods or non Apollo mk 23 pods. Use missile tubes with control links if need be. The SD still make great mini Fortes.
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Re: Last use for SL SD captured
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Apr 18, 2017 11:07 am

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Lord Skimper wrote:There is always something. Fine do it without keyhole II. Use keyhole I instead. Use Mk16 pods or non Apollo mk 23 pods. Use missile tubes with control links if need be. The SD still make great mini Fortes.

Keyhole I is still a fire control relay it doesn't multiply the ship's ability the control missiles; the ship's tactical section computers still need to be able to control that many separate items.

That's less shipboard support than Keyhole II takes, but SLN SDs don't even appear to carry as much redundant fire control as the pre-war RMN DNs. While they SLN units most likely do have a beams power emitters on the broadside that can power the Keyhole it's unclear if they have the data links to talk to one properly; and if they did it would only allow them to control maybe twice the pitiful number of missiles they could without it. (I'm assuming not even the SLN would put in a tactical section that couldn't control both broadsides simultaneously - so relays would at least let you utilize that against a single target.)


Though I'm still at a loss for why you'd use SLN units rather than the better quality mothballed RMN SDs and DNs. I could potentially see handing over an ex-SLN unit to somebody you don't trust with RMN tech; but that doesn't apply if you're handing over keyhole and microfusion powered missiles. So again this is a (possibly) solution in search of a problem.
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