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Yep, Janacek was First Lord of the Admiralty during "On Basilisk Station."

Don

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Eyal wrote:On another note, one thing that's bothered me is the whole premise behind Fearless' modifications in the first book. There weren't any engineering problems with the refitted design, nor were any of the weapons new - the thing that was changed and was being tested was the concept. So how did BuShips approve the (presumably expensive) modifications without anyone proving it could work in simulations? Which would have rapidly shown the inherent problems in the idea (i.e. that it was largely useless unless it was a total surprise).

Fearless was never intended to be deployed on active duty in that configuration. Unfortunately, Captain Harrington embarrassed first the 'old guard' and then Hemphill and Janacek. None of them responded to it well, so the troublesome ship and officer were exiled to someplace they couldn't cause any trouble.

We all saw how well that worked out.
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Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send 'em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.

Got to respect a busy author who takes the time to considerately and comprehensively answer a bunch of imprudent questions. Many thanks.

Eagleeye wrote:Two reasons come to my mind. 1st) Janacek was First Lord of Admiralty at that time - and Hemphill was related to him. There's textev somewhere, that Janacek was some kind of "family man" - that he cared for his relatives in the RMN; so he pushed some buttons to made it happen.
2nd) Remember - was it Admiral Adcock? - at the time the CLAC concept came into existence, who said, that the best scale to test a new weapon is 10 mm to 1 cm? The same thing could've happened here. Why not doing the livetest, if the only vessel you have to cripple for it is an old CL (which possibly was already earmarked for the crapper as soon as the next damage needs to be repaired)?

ldwechsler wrote:I don't think Janacek was in at that time but it doesn't make a difference. Navies are always experimenting on ships. Quite often a ship of the same class launched ten years ago is different from one done now. There's constant tiny changes going on, sometimes because tech has progressed and sometimes because of suggestions from those on the earlier ships.

And some of the mods just do not work. That may be all this is.

Imaginos1892 wrote:Fearless was never intended to be deployed on active duty in that configuration. Unfortunately, Captain Harrington embarrassed first the 'old guard' and then Hemphill and Janacek. None of them responded to it well, so the troublesome ship and officer were exiled to someplace they couldn't cause any trouble.

1) While Janacek was indeed a "Family man", he went to great (excessive) lengths to cut costs when he became First Lord again.
2) "the best scale to test a new weapon is 10 mm to 1 cm" is true when it's the final test. But AFAIK no-one does it as an initial step because then you find out you've wasted millions on a change that, in retrospect, it was obvious wouldn't work (for various reasons) from the beginning - and if Adcock did think that should be done he deserved to lose his position.
Which is my point here. Even if Fearless was heading to the breakers, the modifications would have been quite expensive, both in terms of the work itself, as well as tying up the slip and taking the ship and much of its crew out of commission as far as other duties were concerned. It doesn't matter whether or not they intended to actively deploy Fearless without changing it back or alternatively to send it straight to decommissioning after the tests were over. While modifications often don't work out, that typically happens due to engineering issues - e.g. the idea is fine but the hardware just doesn't cooperate.
But this isn't the case here. The engineering aspects of Fearless' modifications went off fine (despite some initial problems mentioned in the first chapter or two); the problem was the basic concept, and that should have been weeded out in the brainstorming phase, certainly before any hardware was being touched.
Look, I work on design of complex systems, albeit not for weapons. If I want to make a modification - much less a new design - I need to be able to show it works either mathematically or by simulation*; while passing these steps doesn't guarantee it'll work, if it doesn't work (or just proves to be not worth it) in those laboratory conditions there's no point in spending the time and money to proceed. And the problem with Fearless' concept (heavy short-range weapon on a light platform intended for use as a capital ship killer) was pretty obvious (there might be theoretical solutions to that, but it doesn't look like anyone even thought about it).

*assuming it's possible to do so, it isn't in all cases

We all saw how well that worked out.

Actually, given the circumstances, Janacek's decision to assign Fearless to Basilisk was IMO justifiable (albeit those were apparently not his actual reasons).
At this point, the modifications were sunk costs. Reversing them would have been very expensive, and probably seen as not worth it on a ship which, as you say, would likely have been decommissioned soon.
On the other hand, Basilisk had never come under attack and there was no reason to think it would. Furthermore, the picket there couldn't have stood up to a serious attack even if Fearless hadn't been modified; it's purpose was to police the station (which Fearless could do even modified) and run for help if anything more serious happened. Lastly, Fearless was supposed to be the lighter component of the picket, with a heavy cruiser in tow.
Where Janacek did drop the ball was not assigning a replacement for Warlock, especially when the refit started to drag on (and remember that it was deliberately delayed by members of the Admiralty who wanted to keep Young out of Honor's hair).

Eyal wrote:

Eagleeye wrote:Two reasons come to my mind. 1st) Janacek was First Lord of Admiralty at that time - and Hemphill was related to him. There's textev somewhere, that Janacek was some kind of "family man" - that he cared for his relatives in the RMN; so he pushed some buttons to made it happen.
2nd) Remember - was it Admiral Adcock? - at the time the CLAC concept came into existence, who said, that the best scale to test a new weapon is 10 mm to 1 cm? The same thing could've happened here. Why not doing the livetest, if the only vessel you have to cripple for it is an old CL (which possibly was already earmarked for the crapper as soon as the next damage needs to be repaired)?

1) While Janacek was indeed a "Family man", he went to great (excessive) lengths to cut costs when he became First Lord again.
2) "the best scale to test a new weapon is 10 mm to 1 cm" is true when it's the final test. But AFAIK no-one does it as an initial step because then you find out you've wasted millions on a change that, in retrospect, it was obvious wouldn't work (for various reasons) from the beginning - and if Adcock did think that should be done he deserved to lose his position.
Which is my point here. Even if Fearless was heading to the breakers, the modifications would have been quite expensive, both in terms of the work itself, as well as tying up the slip and taking the ship and much of its crew out of commission as far as other duties were concerned. It doesn't matter whether or not they intended to actively deploy Fearless without changing it back or alternatively to send it straight to decommissioning after the tests were over. While modifications often don't work out, that typically happens due to engineering issues - e.g. the idea is fine but the hardware just doesn't cooperate.
But this isn't the case here. The engineering aspects of Fearless' modifications went off fine (despite some initial problems mentioned in the first chapter or two); the problem was the basic concept, and that should have been weeded out in the brainstorming phase, certainly before any hardware was being touched.
Look, I work on design of complex systems, albeit not for weapons. If I want to make a modification - much less a new design - I need to be able to show it works either mathematically or by simulation*; while passing these steps doesn't guarantee it'll work, if it doesn't work (or just proves to be not worth it) in those laboratory conditions there's no point in spending the time and money to proceed. And the problem with Fearless' concept (heavy short-range weapon on a light platform intended for use as a capital ship killer) was pretty obvious (there might be theoretical solutions to that, but it doesn't look like anyone even thought about it).

*assuming it's possible to do so, it isn't in all cases


Actually, given the circumstances, Janacek's decision to assign Fearless to Basilisk was IMO justifiable (albeit those were apparently not his actual reasons).
At this point, the modifications were sunk costs. Reversing them would have been very expensive, and probably seen as not worth it on a ship which, as you say, would likely have been decommissioned soon.
On the other hand, Basilisk had never come under attack and there was no reason to think it would. Furthermore, the picket there couldn't have stood up to a serious attack even if Fearless hadn't been modified; it's purpose was to police the station (which Fearless could do even modified) and run for help if anything more serious happened. Lastly, Fearless was supposed to be the lighter component of the picket, with a heavy cruiser in tow.
Where Janacek did drop the ball was not assigning a replacement for Warlock, especially when the refit started to drag on (and remember that it was deliberately delayed by members of the Admiralty who wanted to keep Young out of Honor's hair).

All good points, but a couple of counterpoints/expansions come to mind.

(1) Janacek wasn’t cutting costs because he believed in protecting the public’s money or because he was the sort to spend only cautiously on proven concepts. He was cutting costs as part of the High Ridge Government’s effort to direct funding away from the military to “more important” vote-buying expenditures. In short, he was willing to run the Navy down to what were (in fact) dangerously weak levels out of a combination of arrogance which denigrated the Republic’s chances of finding a tech equalizer (“We have got the Maxim gun and they do not!”) and cynical political maneuvering for partisan ends. Neither of those qualities would have precluded him from wasting the public’s money on pet projects of a relative whose success he thought would make him look good, and the truth is that he always knew Sonja really was the smartest person in the room . . . usually.

(2) As Sonja later told Honor (once they’d mended their various fences and Honor realized she wasn’t really so “Horrible” after all), she had never intended to suggest Fearless’s mods as more than a test bed. She did get pissed when D’Orville swatted her toy over and over again, but the truth is (and I never did find a way to make this completely clear to the reader) a lot of what Honor saw as anger at her was actually anger Sonja was directing at herself as the concept proved a flop. I wrote a passage in which she tells Honor that, too, but it didn’t seem to me to read right where I’d put it. It was pretty obvious that I’d put it there only so she could explain that, and that seemed like an unnecessary bump in the flow of the story when I actually looked at it. It’s important to remember, though, that even today, Honor can misread someone’s emotions unless she’s close enough to sample them directly. She could certainly do it then! And don’t forget how she misread White Haven’s attitude when he was trying to save her from herself before the duel with Young . . . which was after she and Nimitz made their breakthrough.

(3) Cost and resource allocation wasn’t really a factor here. The cost was relatively low, actually; more a matter of installing known components aboard a ship chosen more because it was an available hull no one would miss than any other reason. The concept had been tried out in simulations with . . . ambiguous results. (Some unkind souls in the RMN have argued that the people running the sims were under discreet pressure from unnamed high-ranking civilian Navy officials to make sure they worked out properly. Sort of like the IJN carrier that was magically un-sunk during one of the war games leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.) More importantly, they wanted a platform they could run around in space, tweak here and there as possible improvements were suggested, and evaluate the system(s) in actual deployment. Getting that data was assessed as more valuable than the piddling (and by RMN standards at this time, they were piddling) costs of modifying one obsolete cruiser destined for the breakers at the end of her next commission, no matter what.

(4) You have a very good point about BS being seen (by pretty much everyone) as a station which scarcely required first-line units. There was a reason they’d stuck Pavel Young there, where he “couldn’t do any harm.” It is true that Janacek sent Fearless there to get what he saw as an embarrassment for one of his family members out-of-sight, out-of-mind, but it’s also true that it was easy for him to justify that based on the station’s existing priority. It was also an easy choice for him because he was one of the people who’d always thought that annexing the system was a mistake in the first place, so he’d never assigned any priority to protecting it properly. Again, though, the critical thing here isn’t why he did it; it’s why Honor and her crew thought he’d done it. Everything that happens after they get to Basilisk happens in the shadow of their repeated failure in the maneuvers, their (mistaken) belief that all of Hemphill’s anger/frustration was directed at them for “making” her brilliant concept fail, and their knowledge that Basilisk was where the Navy sent the real screw-ups (actually, being military, they would have used a stronger term) so they couldn’t do any damage to the Navy’s real missions. It doesn’t really matter if they were sent there to remove an embarrassment to one of Janacek’s relatives, as punishment for pissing off Sonja, because they were seen as too incompetent to be trusted with a real mission, or because it made more sense to use a platform with minimum combat value on what amounted to customs patrol duties rather than sending her to Silesia to chase pirates. What matters is what they thought had happened and how they — and Honor — responded to it.

runsforcelery wrote:<snip>

(3) Cost and resource allocation wasn’t really a factor here. The cost was relatively low, actually; more a matter of installing known components aboard a ship chosen more because it was an available hull no one would miss than any other reason. The concept had been tried out in simulations with . . . ambiguous results. (Some unkind souls in the RMN have argued that the people running the sims were under discreet pressure from unnamed high-ranking civilian Navy officials to make sure they worked out properly. Sort of like the IJN carrier that was magically un-sunk during one of the war games leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.) More importantly, they wanted a platform they could run around in space, tweak here and there as possible improvements were suggested, and evaluate the system(s) in actual deployment. Getting that data was assessed as more valuable than the piddling (and by RMN standards at this time, they were piddling) costs of modifying one obsolete cruiser destined for the breakers at the end of her next commission, no matter what.
.

You've mentioned several times that the only reason the Fearless was used was it's availability, but didn't you mention in the past, that if the concept were successful, the final fleet component would have been a CA sized vessel with a more balanced weapons fit? Even if the Fearless worked, there never was a inkling of fielding something so gelded in that role?

runsforcelery wrote:
(1) Janacek wasn’t cutting costs because he believed in protecting the public’s money or because he was the sort to spend only cautiously on proven concepts. He was cutting costs as part of the High Ridge Government’s effort to direct funding away from the military to “more important” vote-buying expenditures. In short, he was willing to run the Navy down to what were (in fact) dangerously weak levels out of a combination of arrogance which denigrated the Republic’s chances of finding a tech equalizer (“We have got the Maxim gun and they do not!”) and cynical political maneuvering for partisan ends. Neither of those qualities would have precluded him from wasting the public’s money on pet projects of a relative whose success he thought would make him look good, and the truth is that he always knew Sonja really was the smartest person in the room . . . usually.

Wait, I'm confused. The Highridge government happened long after On Basilisk Station. Why would their cost cutting vote buying boondoggle be relevant in this instance?

Theemile wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:<snip>

(3) Cost and resource allocation wasn’t really a factor here. The cost was relatively low, actually; more a matter of installing known components aboard a ship chosen more because it was an available hull no one would miss than any other reason. The concept had been tried out in simulations with . . . ambiguous results. (Some unkind souls in the RMN have argued that the people running the sims were under discreet pressure from unnamed high-ranking civilian Navy officials to make sure they worked out properly. Sort of like the IJN carrier that was magically un-sunk during one of the war games leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.) More importantly, they wanted a platform they could run around in space, tweak here and there as possible improvements were suggested, and evaluate the system(s) in actual deployment. Getting that data was assessed as more valuable than the piddling (and by RMN standards at this time, they were piddling) costs of modifying one obsolete cruiser destined for the breakers at the end of her next commission, no matter what.
.

You've mentioned several times that the only reason the Fearless was used was it's availability, but didn't you mention in the past, that if the concept were successful, the final fleet component would have been a CA sized vessel with a more balanced weapons fit? Even if the Fearless worked, there never was a inkling of fielding something so gelded in that role?

The original "concept" vessel was a CA-sized ship on the theory that a better suite of offensive and defensive weapons could have been fitted into, say, a Star Knight's hull after allowing for the volume of the engineering changes. It was never anything more than a concept vessel, however, and they didn't have a handy CA hull as remotely disposable as an old light cruiser smaller than some modern destroyers. And what the Fearless trials demonstrated pretty clearly was that any grav lance-armed ship was going to be solely an "ambush" vessel (Honor's first, successful use of it actually validated that truth) and that it couldn't be used successfully that way if the other side knew it existed (which all of Honor's subsequent efforts to use it validated). So there was never any real possibility of proceeding beyond the trial stage.

In fact, Honor was totally successful in her assigned mission: to demonstrate the possibilities --- and limitations --- of the concept. Sonja was royally pissed by how poorly it worked out in the end, but however pissed she might be, she also knew that Honor was one of the best tactical officers in the Fleet . . . and that she'd demonstrated that she couldn't make it work, once the mere existence of lance-armed ships was known. That's the very definition of a successful trial . . . of a system that doesn't work, because proving that a weapon absitively, posoloutely doesn't work is just as valuable as proving that it does.

::clears throat::

Are there people over here impugning the honor of my baby girl Sonja Hemphill?

RFC, please... er. Correct their misconceptions.

blackjack217 wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:
(1) Janacek wasn’t cutting costs because he believed in protecting the public’s money or because he was the sort to spend only cautiously on proven concepts. He was cutting costs as part of the High Ridge Government’s effort to direct funding away from the military to “more important” vote-buying expenditures. In short, he was willing to run the Navy down to what were (in fact) dangerously weak levels out of a combination of arrogance which denigrated the Republic’s chances of finding a tech equalizer (“We have got the Maxim gun and they do not!”) and cynical political maneuvering for partisan ends. Neither of those qualities would have precluded him from wasting the public’s money on pet projects of a relative whose success he thought would make him look good, and the truth is that he always knew Sonja really was the smartest person in the room . . . usually.

Wait, I'm confused. The Highridge government happened long after On Basilisk Station. Why would their cost cutting vote buying boondoggle be relevant in this instance?

Yeah, the High Ridge gov't was long after OBS, but at the time of the series' start, Janacek was First Lord of the Admiralty for... er, Reasons. I don't really remember what the Reasons were, but there were Reasons. I don't think he left the post until after the whole Pavel Young shitstorm.