Where Next for the GSN?

tlb wrote:external threat

tlb wrote:external threat

Relax wrote:Did you manage to read the word fort in my original statement, reply to you, and second reply to you, by any chance?
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Grayson has no external threat worth mentioning that is not addressed by forts. Same is true for Manticore. Eventually you have to go on the offensive, but if you have 4 stage FTL missiles able to reach the hyper limit, then who needs tons of SDP?
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Only true external threat is lack of an equivalent defensive capability to match that of their offensive one. Of course this could easily be addressed by system defense CM pods, but DW said "NO!" to that... So, go figure.

Relax wrote:If all of your manpower is tied up trying to survive your environment where you have to treat all of your water, land, soil, grow crops, and you still have massive health problems tying up the rest of your manpower taking care of the sick and destitute you have NO ONE left over to build a civilization as they are spending the rest of their time building EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE space habitats on the ground to keep out the poisonous atmosphere.....

The more MANPOWER you can free up by eliminating the need for massive filtration systems for water, food, creating superior health, decreasing numbers of people in the medical field, cheaper housing the more AFFLUENT your society becomes.

Grayson will by basic economic necessity put all of its resources towards freeing up its manpower by placing its entire civilization under giant domes as their external threat essentially is gone or taken care of at least for the foreseeable future.

But, talking basic economics is not a sexy topic worth pursuing for most.

FiE Ch. 10 wrote:"Is it really that bad?" Honor asked quietly.

"Worse," Mercedes said bleakly. "Remember when we first came out here? How hard we found it to understand how Grayson women could accept their status?" Honor nodded, and Mercedes shrugged. "Compared to Graysons, Masadan women are downright scary. They're not even people. They're property . . . and ninety percent of them seem to accept that that's the way it's supposed to be." She shook her head. "Of the few who don't, half aren't sure the occupation's going to last. They're too terrified to do anything about the way they've been treated, but the ones who aren't afraid are almost worse. The homicide rate on Masada doubled in the first six months of the occupation, and something like two-thirds of the extra bodies were 'husbands'—if you can call the pigs that—who'd been murdered by their 'wives.' Some of them were rather artistic, too, like Elder Simonds' wives. The cops never did find all of his body parts."

"Good Lord," Honor murmured, and Mercedes nodded.

"It hasn't just been limited to women getting even with 'husbands,' either. The overwhelming majority of Masadans still believe in their so-called religion, but a lot of those who don't have some pretty nasty personal scores to pay off. A quarter of the church elders were murdered by their parishioners before General Marcel put the others into protective custody . . . and that only started the survivors howling about the 'oppression of the Faith'! The whole place is still under martial law, General Marcel's had a hell of a time finding anything resembling a body of responsible moderates to act as the local government, and no one on the planet has any idea how to run a nontheocratic state. Under the circumstances, the mere thought of putting in Grayson occupation troops would touch off an explosion, and there's no way Marcel's MPs have managed to confiscate all the weapons on the planet."

Honor leaned further back and steepled her fingers under her chin as she frowned at her chief of staff. The Grayson 'faxes reported on Masada regularly, but they'd taken a distinctly hands-off approach. That had surprised her, given the centuries of hatred between the two planets, and her frown deepened as she wondered for the first time if perhaps the Council hadn't "convinced" the reporters to don kid gloves in hopes of sedating public opinion. Of course, the Star Kingdom, not Grayson, had officially claimed the Endicott System as a protectorate by right of conquest. That gave the Graysons a certain insulation from the Masadan occupation . . . and from what Mercedes was saying, that might be the smartest thing anyone had done yet. It was a pity anyone had to occupy the place, but the Alliance couldn't afford to leave a strategically located planet full of implacably hostile fanatics unoccupied.

"How would you rate the potential for real trouble?" she asked finally, and Mercedes shrugged.

"If you mean a general insurrection, not very great as long as we control the high orbitals. There are still lots of small arms floating around, but Marcel's managed to confiscate all their heavy weapons—we hope!—and they understand what a kinetic interdiction strike would do to anyone stupid enough to come out in the open. Couple that with ground-based Marine combat teams to support the MPs and rapid response forces deployed from orbit, all with modern weapons and battle armor, and any sort of mass resistance would be a quick form of suicide. But that hasn't prevented a lot of sabotage and more or less spontaneous acts of guerrilla warfare. Maybe worse, some of them have figured out we don't like killing people in job lots. We're seeing some really ugly 'peaceful demonstrations,' and their organizers keep pushing. I think they're trying to see how far they can go before someone on our side pulls the trigger and creates a brand new crop of martyrs."

"Wonderful." Honor pinched the bridge of her nose and grimaced. "If they do push that far, it'll give the Liberals and Progressives back home another reason to moan about our 'brutal, imperialist' policy in the system!"

"Just thank God the Masadans haven't figured that out, Milady," Mercedes said darkly. "Their traditions are so different from ours that they don't seem to realize our government actually has to listen to people who disagree with it. If they ever do realize, and start playing to the newsies . . ."

Relax wrote:TLB: Just what exactly do you think HOUSES Mycroft??? A freighter? Mycroft is offensive only. Need CM's as well as sidewalls, armor along with C&C. = FORTS. Or said platforms get kablooied by mistletoe or certain spoilers...

@ET al:
Forts are not immobile.
They run around at 75G.
Certain bad guys run around at 150G...
In the age of FTL 4 stage missiles with unlimited range, acceleration means nothing. This is like the problem today of wet navy ships plodding along at 30 knots who are going to "dodge" HAHAHA, ICBM's at 17,000 knots... or even fighters at 600knots. Not a chance in Hell of that happening.

Only true reason one has mobile units is to attack outside the hyper limit anymore. Because if one can defend to the hyper limit with FTL missiles(they can) then one can attack from beyond the hyper limit with FTL missiles as well. This means that current hyper capable ships are not adequate as they cannot accurately/quickly enough micro jump to attack/defend before a million missiles are headed to your orbital infrastructure. Needs to change in their design, but this would be predicated on the need for better astrogation technology allowing closer hyper jumps and being BASED outside the hyperlimit with 100% hot hyperdrives/impellers at ALL times.... OUCH! Maintenance expense Holy Cow! DOES NOT EXIST: So, need LOTS of anti missile defense in system. = Bubble sidewall FORTS + Keyhole.

Resource extraction: IS NOT critical infrastructure. This is why every nation, that is an industrialized one here on earth has strategic reserves.

FOOD:
Only reason Grayson did not go balls to the wall building Domes planetside is because of this little thing called a WAR. Otherwise, everything plowed into war would have been plowed into Sky Domes. Grayson was only using 30% free manpower to update itself to modern standards as it was taking 70% to ONLY feed itself before we address clothe/house itself(nice quote by the way. I had forgotten about it). That is horrifically pathetic compared to earth today. This would make Grayson destitute by today's standard equal to that of Chad, Somalia, Sudan, Mongolia, China(two China's today, the industrial coast and everyone else)

Oyster Bay, would only drive home the need to ditch the orbital food production ASAP. Starvation is not fun.

Incidentally, all this orbital reliance would also force them to build... FORTS.

runsforcelery wrote:Yes.

Something that's been part of the Honorverse from the get go was the problem of any individual missile visualizing the entire battlefield, especially with all the various decoys, jammers, deception mode EW, etc., cranked in. In addition, because of wedge interference, it was really difficult for missiles to communicate with other missiles, especially after evasive routing and maneuvers were cranked in. I'm not saying that any of those things were flat out impossible; I'm saying that the ability to do any of them was severely constrained by these factors. In addition, missile defense was good enough to nail almost any pre-laserhead missile well before it reached attack range. This results in a situation in which missile design philosophy was: these things are going to have minimal hit chances once they get beyond the envelope where their profiles can be updated by someone who can see the entire battlefield, so build them cheap enough (and small enough) we can use them en masse to have a chance of swamping the missile defense.

Recall, BTW, that we're talking about points on a spectrum here, a process in evolution. If you are reading the Travis Lee novels, for example, you will see a huge difference between Travis's missiles and those of Honor's time in terms of relative size, acceleration rates, and general capabilities. Remember, however, that the development of effective laserheads (and the stand off range they permitted) was a relatively recent development as of Basilisk Station.

By the time Roger launched his R&D programs, the missile paradigm had translated (wisely or not) into missiles which had minimal sensor capability as individuals. None of them tried to communicate with each other, except at extremely short range, but each of them carried telemetry links to the launching platforms which allowed those platforms to correlate the take from all the other missiles in the salvo (i.e., from dozens of sensor platforms in a dispersed array). That meant the ships which had launched them were able to do very sophisticated modeling of the tactical environment, then direct the missiles to attack most effectively so long as they were within close enough range that transmission lag was manageable. Beyond that range, hit probabilities dropped off dramatically, which is one reason no one had poured a lot of effort into developing the equivalent of the Saganami-B's extended range missiles. The extra expense and size wasn't worth worth it in weapons which would have very little chance of scoring a hit at their maximum powered range.

This was a well understood model at the beginning of the Havenite Wars. The impact of laserheads in combat was less well understood, because the combatants were sort of in the position of the Royal British Navy in 1914, hypothesizing about the effectiveness of torpedoes based on the experience of the Russo-Japanese war. There was a lot of theoretical analysis and not a lot of hands-on "Oh my God, they're shooting at us!" data to go around.

Project Gram unbalanced the prewar concept of missile doctrine in oh, so many ways. Range was vastly increased, but the MDM's much greater range made the existing "cheap-but-myopic" missile design increasingly less useful. The first step was to improve the individual missile's sensors and onboard computer capability, which allowed hit probabilities at extreme range (which was now much more extreme than it had ever been before) to remain within combat-effective levels, although they were considerably lower than they'd been when the combat ranges were such as to allow effective shipboard control. This is essentially where the RMN was at the time of Operation Buttercup and where the RHN was at the time of Operation Thunderbolt.

When the basic research for Ghost Rider was combined with the MDM, the telemetry range was enormously increased, as well, which restored that portion of the earlier missile paradigm, using the far more capable missiles which had been developed in the meantime. When you couple that with the more powerful laser heads being mounted aboard the missiles, missile combat at what was once extreme range (but would now be considered moderate range, at worst) became really, really deadly. At extended ranges, it was more lethal than it had ever been before, but the possibility of extended missile exchanges (assuming that one side didn't have a "kill-them-all-twice" superiority in pods at the beginning of the engagement) became feasible.

The real killer aspect of Apollo comes in three stages:

(1) The vast range and energetic terminal maneuvers possible for a three-stage MDM. (There is also a four-stage system defense missile, but it had not been put into volume production before Oyster Bay and the decision was made to focus Beowulf's missile production capability on the standard Apollo that could be carried aboard warships.) This particular part of what I think of as the "Apollo Triad" is shared with all other MDMs, of course, but the other two legs of the triad give it enormously more impact in Apollo's case.

(2) The FTL telemetry link, which continues to tie shipboard control (and the greater "reach" the controlling ship and all her consorts possess) into the targeting process when it comes to analyzing the battlefield and directing attack assets as effectively as possible "on-the-fly" at ranges which were previously unimaginable.

(3) The Mark 23-E. The Echo is the most important part of the entire Apollo system. Not only is it the FTL relay through which the firing ships communicate with the attack missiles, but because the Echo is following along behind the attack birds, it is screened and protected by their wedge interference, which means it doesn't have to maneuver erratically even as the salvo approaches its target. Its onboard AI is the best in the business, and while it has no sensors of its own, it gets superb input from the highly capable sensors now mounted in the individual Mark 23s. And all of the Mark 23-Es talk to each other, sharing the data from "their" attack missiles. They are, in effect, capable of performing the function of the controlling starships in the traditional, pre-MDM combat environment, even at maximum powered and ballistic range. One of the key points here is that they can perform that function for any starship that launches them. They are most effective when they can combine with all of the launch platforms' telemetry, as well, since in really big salvos — and I believe we can safely say that we have seen some REALLY Big Salvos in recent years — not even Mark 23-Es have the lateral "reach" to access and process the sensor take from every missile in the salvo.

What this means is that as long as a salvo of Mark 23s is in effective FTL telemetry range of the launching ships (that is, close enough range that the upgrade and performance outweighs the degradation of the transmission lag), an Apollo-armed ship equipped with Keyhole-Two is a sniper armed with a Barrett against anyone without comparable technology. The Mark 23-E, even without Keyhole-Two, is probably the equivalent of a sniper armed with a Springfield in the same range bracket. Beyond that range, when even FTL telemetry is taken out of the equation, the Mark 23-E turns a salvo of Mark 23s into infantry armed with rifles with iron sights up against matchlock-armed musketeers. Large salvo size is still required in order to penetrate capable defenses, but missiles which do penetrate score far, far higher percentages of hits.

This is why there are passages in the books which comment on the fact that extreme-range Apollo launches are much less accurate than closer-ranged launches . . . only enormously more accurate than anyone else's launches.

-- snip of spoiler-- As I believe I said before, Mycroft is effectively the cherry on top of a system defense capability — the MDM and Apollo — which would already be decisive against almost any attack. In a very real sense, Apollo has returned attacks launched from inside the hyper-limit of a heavily defended star system to the days when Horatio Nelson said "A ship's a fool to fight a fort."

Now, no one says the missile paradigm is going to stay where it is, of course!

cthia wrote:Hate to open this can of worms again, but no one seems to see it as I do. What's new? LOL

I still think Grayson needs to get a handle on the situation on Masada. I simply think Manticoran occupation of Masada can only be considered as a temporary solution that cannot last. What the hell is going to happen if another High Ridge government decides to pull out of Masada, forcing Grayson to do what they are not prepared to do? Grayson is ignoring a problem that can potentially bite her in the ass.

drothgery wrote:

cthia wrote:Hate to open this can of worms again, but no one seems to see it as I do. What's new? LOL

I still think Grayson needs to get a handle on the situation on Masada. I simply think Manticoran occupation of Masada can only be considered as a temporary solution that cannot last. What the hell is going to happen if another High Ridge government decides to pull out of Masada, forcing Grayson to do what they are not prepared to do? Grayson is ignoring a problem that can potentially bite her in the ass.

How? Without the Manticore-Haven conflict, there aren't any outsiders around with any interest in propping up the Faithful. And out of their own resources, Masada couldn't keep up with Grayson technologically before the alliance with Manticore. Now? Without something within shouting distance of first-line Grand Alliance warfighting tech (which, umm, no one outside the Grand Alliance has), Masada's no threat, and there's absolutely no way for them to get that.