Uncompromising Honor, Snippet #3

ldwechsler wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:You grossly underestimate how hard this is. Compute the angular size of a 12,000 km wide target from 6 light hours out. Iirc, that’s about 6 billion km. At 10 percent of light it’s 600 hours.which if I’m not mistaken means that if you have a vector error of 3 mm per second you miss.

SNIP.

Can't claim the credit for this - I think kzt wrote that?

cthia wrote:Disproves everything I thought I knew about the Deneb Accords and the Eridani Edict. I don't understand how even a sleazy lawyer can mitigate himself out of that hot seat. A scorching-hot seat.

And the inference that such a strike is not outside the thinking of the obviously barbarous, murderous, idiotic SLN is EXHIBIT C.

Moment of silence for Beowulf?

The short answer is that the Eridani Edict drafters don't seem to have envisioned systems that had both no habitable planets and large system populations.

(If the wiki's timeline can be trusted the Edict was passed before the first wormhole was ever discovered - and without wormholes, or especially junctions, it's hard to conceive of any reason to bother trying to support truly large populations without habitable planets).


So the language was designed to protect planetary populations from indiscriminate bombardment. Industrial orbital facilities, even civilian ones, aren't on the prohibited list. And, in what now looks like a major oversight, it seems neither are orbital habitats no mater how large. (Which is why the strikes on Manticore's vast orbital stations weren't an Edict Violation despite all the civilians massacred there without warning)


As such a slimy lawyer could argue that the letter of the Edict wasn't violated because it doesn't say you can't bombard orbital platforms and obviously no prohibited strikes on planetary populations occurred (since there was no planet). The spirit of it would be violated has hell - and trying to rules lawyer that would be a bad idea even in normal times because ultimately it was only the SLN's opinion that counted and if they felt it was a violation your system was invaded and your government was dead.

But I don't know if the Deneb Accord (which we've heard of only in relation to POW treatment) has anything applicable to this situation.

Vince wrote:There are no Technodyne manufacturing facilities on Mesa. Just a corporate headquarters. At least according to previously published text. However, RFC has recently said in these forums that Technodyne has (or at least did have prior to the arrival of Henke and Tourville at Mesa) a manufacturing facility on Mesa, so a retcon may be forthcoming (assuming the fact what he said in the forums is in the next Honorverse book and it doesn't get edited out).

There are no manufacturing facilities on Mesa that Filareta knew about. He certainly doesn't know the whole story, though, so that's not evidence there isn't something covert there.

kzt wrote:You grossly underestimat how hard this is. Compute the angular size of a 12,000 km wide target from 6 light hours out. Iirc, that’s about 6 billion km. At 10 percent of light it’s 600 hours.which if I’m not mistaken means that if you have a vector error of 3 mm per second you miss.

You're assuming no midcourse correction.

Consider a bombardment missile: It's a lot larger than a conventional missile but mounts only reaction thrusters, no wedge. It's employed only in c-frac attacks. It attempts to function as a contact nuke but has a laser head in case it misses.

Against a ship it would be useless. Against a base not at red alert it probably would get through. It's got a map of it's target system and keeps adjusting it's course, you don't need a bazillion zeroes of accuracy at launch.

cthia wrote:But to be fair, kzt has a point as well. In the Honorverse, as written by RFC, projectiles do have a limitation on accuracy imposed on them from great distances. Well, non Manty missiles that is. The RMN's Apollo seems to be capable of performing a few pirouettes right before crawling up the backside of someone's orifice.

No--the reason everyone else's missiles perform so poorly at long range is the lightspeed lag. The instructions they are receiving are old and their internal seekers aren't good enough. Apollo greatly cuts the feedback loop. (Consider a modern torpedo--much more deadly if the control wires are intact and it can use the sub's sensors and operator intelligence rather than it's internal seeker. That's also why it's a common practice to fire a torpedo up the bearing of the inbound. The ship isn't expecting to hit anything with the torpedo, the purpose is to make the ship that fired it run away--and thus lose the control wires.)

Note that it's not just the computing power, the torpedo's sensor are myopic because they're torpedo-sized.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

cthia wrote:But to be fair, kzt has a point as well. In the Honorverse, as written by RFC, projectiles do have a limitation on accuracy imposed on them from great distances. Well, non Manty missiles that is. The RMN's Apollo seems to be capable of performing a few pirouettes right before crawling up the backside of someone's orifice.

No--the reason everyone else's missiles perform so poorly at long range is the lightspeed lag. The instructions they are receiving are old and their internal seekers aren't good enough. Apollo greatly cuts the feedback loop. (Consider a modern torpedo--much more deadly if the control wires are intact and it can use the sub's sensors and operator intelligence rather than it's internal seeker. That's also why it's a common practice to fire a torpedo up the bearing of the inbound. The ship isn't expecting to hit anything with the torpedo, the purpose is to make the ship that fired it run away--and thus lose the control wires.)

Note that it's not just the computing power, the torpedo's sensor are myopic because they're torpedo-sized.

There's actually a lot more than just that to it, including the fact that every individual missile is essentially a dispersed sensor array reporting back to the tac offices and computers in charge of modeling the entire combat environment [i]before[/i[ generating those corrections. I think that's a critical point people tend to miss . . . and also the reason Ghost Rider gives such a significant advantage even in the absence of Apollo.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

kzt wrote:You grossly underestimat how hard this is. Compute the angular size of a 12,000 km wide target from 6 light hours out. Iirc, that’s about 6 billion km. At 10 percent of light it’s 600 hours.which if I’m not mistaken means that if you have a vector error of 3 mm per second you miss.

You're assuming no midcourse correction.

Consider a bombardment missile: It's a lot larger than a conventional missile but mounts only reaction thrusters, no wedge. It's employed only in c-frac attacks. It attempts to function as a contact nuke but has a laser head in case it misses.

Against a ship it would be useless. Against a base not at red alert it probably would get through. It's got a map of it's target system and keeps adjusting it's course, you don't need a bazillion zeroes of accuracy at launch.

The midcourse burn capability of the average rock is 0mm/sec. And I was replying to a discussion of rocks.

runsforcelery wrote:
There's actually a lot more than just that to it, including the fact that every individual missile is essentially a dispersed sensor array reporting back to the tac offices and computers in charge of modeling the entire combat environment [i]before[/i[ generating those corrections. I think that's a critical point people tend to miss . . . and also the reason Ghost Rider gives such a significant advantage even in the absence of Apollo.

It’s a fairly trivial trick to build a interferometer out of a bunch of missiles and have that feedback into the missiles guidance. Each salvo will form a 2d array with the pointy end toward the enemy with at least 15km between them, so they can all not collide, see the enemy, and talk to the controlling ship. So an array of transceivers on the flanks would work fine. Even with the missiles rotating you’ll get enough traffic through at the hundreds of km range to be able to very effectively communicate. The fact that nobody did it speaks more the the lack of motivation by the SLN to improve weapons rather then the inherent difficulties.

[quote ]If the SLN is attacking NAWs, and they don't have conventional forces, their only option is non-conventional warfare or complete surrender.[/quote]

IF they have no conventional forces,all the talk of loading a Q-ship with missiles is as ridikkulus as loading a freighter with rocks. They have no conventional force-NO missiles,No mid course correction, No launch or targeting capability. More chance of just dumping rocks with a good push than ACTUALLY load a ship with imaginary missiles shot by Imaginary TOs and course corrected by imaginary retro rockets.

[Makes palm plant]

Define conventional forces please. Not everybody is talking about the same thing.

Don

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