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Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies

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Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by Fireflair   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 11:30 pm

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So, like Rose, I do periodic rereads of the series. I'm sure many of the MWW's fans do. We find stuff we'd missed before, or jog our memories about things we find later in the stories.

Over and over again we hear about how it's suicidal to come through a wormhole that's hostile to you. Mines will be deployed during wartime, forts are there, etc. We don't get a clear accounting of the battle for Trevor's Star, but we know that White Haven accomplishes it by pulling the admiral in charge of Trevor's star out of position then launches a simultaneous assault through the junction and at from a fleet that hypers into Trevor's star.

We are also given plenty of textev that Trevor's star is heavily re-enforced and that it's considered crucial to both sides. So why wouldn't the RHN have deployed mines around the worm hole junction, have forts in place, etc, to stop an attack through the junction? Basically, why did White Haven's plan succeed when we've been told so often how it's a bad plan.

As a side note, what sort of traffic is coming through this junction at this time? I doubt that Haven is allowing Manticore's shipping through, and certainly not their war ships. Maybe just neutral party shipping? Andies and Sol stuff that transships in the Manti side of the WHJ?
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Re: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by ThisName1   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:34 am

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Fireflair wrote:As a side note, what sort of traffic is coming through this junction at this time? I doubt that Haven is allowing Manticore's shipping through, and certainly not their war ships. Maybe just neutral party shipping? Andies and Sol stuff that transships in the Manti side of the WHJ?


By at this time I'm assuming you mean at the time of White Haven's attack. I don't think there would have been anything going through the junction at the time of the attack. With manticore already at war I can't see any reason they would allow any shipping through.

Before that though it probably did see a lot of traffic going through from the solarian league into the PRH.
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Re: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by Theemile   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 4:02 am

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Fireflair wrote:So, like Rose, I do periodic rereads of the series. I'm sure many of the MWW's fans do. We find stuff we'd missed before, or jog our memories about things we find later in the stories.

Over and over again we hear about how it's suicidal to come through a wormhole that's hostile to you. Mines will be deployed during wartime, forts are there, etc. We don't get a clear accounting of the battle for Trevor's Star, but we know that White Haven accomplishes it by pulling the admiral in charge of Trevor's star out of position then launches a simultaneous assault through the junction and at from a fleet that hypers into Trevor's star.

We are also given plenty of textev that Trevor's star is heavily re-enforced and that it's considered crucial to both sides. So why wouldn't the RHN have deployed mines around the worm hole junction, have forts in place, etc, to stop an attack through the junction? Basically, why did White Haven's plan succeed when we've been told so often how it's a bad plan.

As a side note, what sort of traffic is coming through this junction at this time? I doubt that Haven is allowing Manticore's shipping through, and certainly not their war ships. Maybe just neutral party shipping? Andies and Sol stuff that transships in the Manti side of the WHJ?


Nothing should have been going through the Trevor's Star Terminus, all trading to Haven was being embargoed during the war. Even DBs should have been blocked.

About the Havenite side of the wormhole, you are correct; if Forts were not in place, and all traffic could be considered hostile, the terminus should be smothered in ACTIVE mines during the war. Any transit, or ship nearing the terminus without the correct IFF should be instantly engaged by the mines. Mines are cheap, easily replaced force multipliers, that are the defined weapons solution for this problem- there is no reason they shouldn't have been used in massive quantities.

I would assume that the minefield (like missile pods) is vulnerable to large proximity nuke strikes. Since a ship approaching in n- space knows the location of the terminus, it could saturate the region with nukes as it approaches, theoretically destroying the minefield and allowing it to jump home to Manticore and summoning the other fleet.

We were never told this happened, but it is the only explanation that fits what we know: White Haven attacked San Martin, pulling the mobile force off the wormhole in response, then a portion of Home Fleet jumped in and captured the wormhole. Since you cannot time 2 attacks accurately when the fleets are 300 light years apart, White Haven would need to send a messenger through to signal Home Fleet. That messenger would need to cope with the fixed defenses before it jumped. I would assume the messenger was part of a Cruiser level force sent to clear the minefields and summoning Home Fleet.
******
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: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by Fireflair   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 5:32 am

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In the opening chapters of HoE there is a scene which is White Haven discussing with the head of the RMN about his plan for taking Trevor's Star. The plan, as outlined, was for him to work around the edge of Trevor's Star, pulling the Peeps out of position and 'distracting' the wormhole forces so that Home Fleet could attack through the junction. Before Home Fleet would make the jump they intended to have one ship cross over, verify conditions then jump back. White Haven even reflects that the Peeps probably have a contingency plan for just this sort of attack but believes that they won't expect it from him, given his motis operandus in the past.

My read on the wormhole was that it would not have been in use, as everyone's pointed out the Peeps and the Manti's are at war with each other, except for maybe allowing neutral shipping through. Even that would have been doubtful which is why I solicited opinions.

So there should have been a whole load of active mines ready to blow up any single ship that came through. A ship doesn't come through with sidewalls up or impeller's to protect itself. As we saw with the Harvest Joy, it's a sitting duck and highly vulnerable following a worm hole transit.

More than the mines, no matter how much White Haven has pulled the Peeps out of position wouldn't they still have left a few ships to cover the worm hole locale? I mean a couple of tin cans, maybe some light cruisers, can take out almost anything that comes through without sidewalls and impellers. Well not anything, literally, but they could certainly handle a lot with the help of mines, and maybe some sort of wormhole forts.

It's talked about elsewhere about forcing a transit being possible if you're willing to take the losses but I can't see White Haven giving up a sizable percentage of Home Fleet to force the passage. Even if they took Trevor's Star in the process.
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Re: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by munroburton   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 6:21 am

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http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/si ... gton/280/1

Neutral traffic was allowed passage, even after the war officially started.

Fireflair wrote:More than the mines, no matter how much White Haven has pulled the Peeps out of position wouldn't they still have left a few ships to cover the worm hole locale? I mean a couple of tin cans, maybe some light cruisers, can take out almost anything that comes through without sidewalls and impellers. Well not anything, literally, but they could certainly handle a lot with the help of mines, and maybe some sort of wormhole forts.


They didn't. Remember, Peep Admirals are still under strict oversight by People's Commissioners and StateSec at this point.

IIRC, the plan was for Home Fleet to send a single scout. When it returned with the all-clear, the battle squadrons then transited.

It is kind of surprising there was a paucity of fixed defenses. However, this could be explained by the PRH's tight fiscal straits(eg, building defenses in Trevor's Star would have negated the income from controlling the terminus there) and possibly a historical look at how Quentin Saint-James won the brief San Martin war with Manticore a century earlier(he bypassed the terminus and went for the planet).

Or a different explanation is that White Haven had detached a squadron of battlecruisers to attack the terminus directly from a different direction in hyperspace, after he managed to draw the main Peep force away. They cleared the mines and any light pickets, then sent a messenger through to Home Fleet. I like to imagine HMS Nike and her squadron had this job.

As for losses, whilst those weren't directly mentioned, the Manticoran Alliance did revert to an almost wholly defensive posture for four or five years, until the Battle of Barnett. The effort required to take Trevor's Star obviously tore a hole in their readiness status. McQueen's Operation Icarus didn't help, but that didn't come until two years after Trevor's Star.
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Re: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:24 pm

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They don't seem to have made it into the Pearls but David posted a few times about White Haven's attack on Trevor's Star. What follows is basically a cut & paste of a post I made on this same thing back in 2014.

Here's a quote from him in the "Possible Spoilers:- Wormhole Assult SD(P)s" thread of a several years ago.
runsforcelery wrote:In the case of Trevor's Star, the Peeps hadn't put any forts on the terminus. They hadn't needed to. If anyone started any wars between them and the SKM, they intended for it to be them, which meant that --- unlike the SKM --- they didn't have to worry about a sneak attack in peacetime. Therefore, it made more sense to use the immensely less expensive option of mining the single transit lane to a fare-thee-well. That strategy came back to bite them when White Haven managed to convince the Admiralty to let him go after the terminus from both directions at once, but please do note how long it took him to convince Admiralty House to let him try that even with the enormous strategic edge Trevor's Star's was going to give the RMN. Had the PR been able to find the resources to put forts on the terminus to protect it against an attack through hyper-space, White Haven's plans probably wouldn't have worked because there would have been something in place to back up the mines, but the PN didn't have all those big nasty forts and was under the impression that a sufficient number of SDs ought to do the trick

And another from about a month later in the "More from David on Wormhole Assults" thread
runsforcelery wrote:Moreover, there hasn't been -- and isn't going to be -- an actual unassisted assault through a heavily defended terminus (see my comments on Trevor's Star below). And because I didn't fight the Battle of the Trevor's Star Terminus on stage, all of this debate really constitutes what happens when I share details with the readers and they aren't what the readers thought they were because the aforesaid readers had made certain assumptions. It's enough to make me sometimes reconsider whether I want to tell people anything that isn't already in the books because every time I do someone squawks that I'm "changing everything" when, in fact, what's really happening is that they're getting a look deeper into what was going on all along and it just happens not to be what they thought was going on.

[major snip about wormhole assults in general; and the impact of the transit physics]

In the case of White Haven's attack on Trevor's Star, there were no Havenite fortresses covering the Trevor's Star Terminus. The Peeps had never built any because if anyone was going to do any attacking through the terminus, it was going to be them (even though they never actually intended to do anything of the sort), and partly because they didn't care if they blew away the occasional merchant ship by relying on minefields and/or laser heads. So White Haven's problem was to deal with a mobile force as well as the Junction itself. Note that no one at any time on Manticore's side even thought about proposing an unassisted assault through the terminus. In addition, the transit lane for Trevor's Star is way shorter than the transit lane for the Junction; it's a single terminus, without the "focusing" effect of the Junction. An attacker coming through from the Manticore side finds himself in a transit lane which is about 12,000 kilometers across (not 9,000) and which extends only about 10,000 kilometers from the terminus itself. This means that a Manticoran superdreadnought with a 1910 compensator would spend only about 90 seconds trapped in the transit lane inbound to Trevor's Star, as opposed to the 4.5 minutes of an assault into the Junction.

Now, 90 seconds is more than enough time for a thicket of laser heads to take out a superdreadnought, but what White Haven did was to attack with a sufficiently powerful force to draw the defending wall of battle into engaging him out of its own range of the terminus utself. San Martin and its orbital infrastructure were also highly important to the People's Republic of Haven (that's where the actual Trecor's star fleet base was located), and he was in a position to choose an attack vector which threatened both the terminus and San Martin at a time when the Peeps, due to losses (in those preliminary approach operations of his) and lack of maintenance, could not afford to put two powerful fleets in place to defend each objective separately.

Once he had the defensive fleet units drawn out of effective range of the terminus in order to engage him, he sent a waiting destroyer into hyper to the force of battlecruisers he'd tucked away there. Those battlecruisers then dropped out of hyper almost on top of the terminus, headed directly away from the defending fleet units accelerating towards White Haven. Their function was to "sweep" the mines covering the transit lane. White Haven knew they wouldn't get all of them, but he anticipated that they would be able to inflict sufficient damage on them to make it possible for the single scout ship being sent through from Manticore to survive, return home, and bring back reinforcements. In the event, they didn't send the courier through at all; one of the battlecruisers came through the Junction from the Trevor's Star side, and the additional fleet units immediately made transit. The purpose of the transit was not to suddenly bring a massive weight of fire to bear on the defenders' rear and flanks; it was to hugely reinforce White Haven's fleet (already almost strong enough to take Trevor's Star on its own) directly from Home Fleet. If it was possible for the reinforcements to catch the defenders between themselves and White Haven's wall of battle, that would be wonderful. In the far more likely case that it wouldn't be possible for them to do that, however, they would still constitute such a powerful increase in combat power that the defenders would have no choice but to abandon both San Martin and the Trevor's Star Terminus.

I apologize for not having fought the battle out in all its gory details, but I was sort of concentrating on HMS Wayfarer and Silesia at the time the attack actually went in. I will also concede that not having actually fought the battle out in the books -- simply knowing how it was fought, if you take my meaning -- means that I hadn't refined all of the details as thoroughly as I would have if I'd actually shown you the tactics. It didn't occur to me that there was any need to do so, since it was all going to happen "offstage," and so there are a few touches and tweaks I would have added/made to White Haven's battle plan -- and the way he described it to Caparelli in Honor Among Enemies -- which don't appear in the books and probably contribute to this entire furor. (For example, I would probably have gone ahead and omitted the whole "send a courier through" portion of his initial battle plan because I would have realized how much more sense it would make to send the BC through from the Trevor's Star end. There critics of the battleplan as described to Caparelli probably have a valid criticism.) The fact that I didn't show you the battle step-by-step and blow-by-blow doesn't mean that the battle plan didn't conform to the way junction transits actually occur, however.


Hope that satisfied your curiosity. (Glad I'd copied those into my personal doc of significant RFC posts - I'm having trouble finding them on the forum anymore)
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Re: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by munroburton   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:49 pm

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Nice one, Jonathan. I knew I'd seen a reference to a battlecruiser squadron somewhere! :)

The key to remember is that scene with Caparelli in HAE was the "first draft" discussion of WH's plan for assaulting Trevor's Star.
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Re: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by drothgery   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 10:17 pm

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Fireflair wrote:So why wouldn't the RHN have deployed mines around the worm hole junction, have forts in place, etc, to stop an attack through the junction?
Well, the RHN wouldn't have because if Tom Theisman had a TARDIS, he'd have much higher priorities than that for what to do with it. Others have already given RFC's take on why the People's Navy didn't.
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Re: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by Fireflair   » Wed Jul 26, 2017 11:26 pm

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Thanks for the post and the notes from RFC. The plan makes more reasonable sense with his background notes to fill in. The idea of co-ordinating attacks from Trevor's Star and from Manticore's WHJ simultaneously had me a bit puzzled too. Was the 'courtier' going to randomly cross back and forth to just check on things hoping that the battle had begun? Timing on something like that would be almost impossibly critical because any glitch on White Haven's side would have royally screwed the vessel come from the Manticore side.

So, what I get from the pearl and from the quoted text is that RHN did mine it, they were allowing neutral traffic back and forth and they did have units defending. White Haven's improved plan dealt with these things and provided a new way to co-ordinate the force attacking through the wormhole. A much better one than a potentially suicidal ship coming through on it's own.

I'd considered that they hadn't built forts for financial reasons, but the notion of not mining for financial reasons I dismissed as mines are reportedly very cheap to make and are standard defensive weapons that are frequently employed. The idea that they didn't build forts because they knew the RHN wouldn't attack and start the war doesn't hold much water at the time of HAE, after all they're at war already.

I accepted that White Haven took Trevor's Star off screen and it didn't bother me the first time around. But like a lot of the people on the forums when I do my rereads, given what I know now, some things stand out to me or make me curious. This topic was one of them.

Speaking of off screen stuff I would have liked to have seen, Trevor's Star actually takes a second place to what happens when Sarnow goes out to Silesia to take over the splitting up of the confederacy between the Andermani and the Manties. That is something I was sad to see happen off screen!
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Re: Reading Reading... Honor Amoung Enemies
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Jul 27, 2017 12:04 am

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Fireflair wrote:I'd considered that they hadn't built forts for financial reasons, but the notion of not mining for financial reasons I dismissed as mines are reportedly very cheap to make and are standard defensive weapons that are frequently employed. The idea that they didn't build forts because they knew the RHN wouldn't attack and start the war doesn't hold much water at the time of HAE, after all they're at war already.
Once the war started I'm sure Haven had higher priorities than beefing up the terminus security at Trevor's Star.

After all from their point of view resources sunk into forts there couldn't be spent on critically needed replacement wallers, or missile pods, of the things that would definitely be used to fight Manticore. Holding that terminus just wasn't that critical to them, and forts were likely to be a wasted resources.

They'd have altered While Haven's plans, and possible slightly delayed the attack (or else he'd have convinced the Admiralty that releasing the Home Fleet units directly for this one battle after which, win or lose, they'd return wouldn't open an exploitable window of vulnerability. Unless Haven was willing to abandon defense of San Martin they can't force White Haven to fight them where terminus forts could support their mobile fleet...


And most often forts are infrastructure resources that are built in peacetime - during war building focues on mobile units. (The upgraded Basilisk terminus forts being an obvious exception to that general rule)
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