Questions on Terran Federation Tech

Aside from computing systems which is the most dramatic difference, there's also the matter of small arms.

Honorverse small arms are slug throwers. True, they're very high tech slug throwers that use grav tech to accelerate small darts to VERY high speed. A 30 round magazine could easily fit inside Honor's fake arm for example. But they're still slug (dart?) throwers.

Safehold Federation small arms though are ENERGY weapons. I'm reminded of that one scene where an angel shoots a slash lizard attacking with something I think was about the size of a modern carbine. He makes the slash lizard EXPLODE.

An Honorverse pulser carbine might be able to kill the slash lizard too, but I don't think the actual killing mechanism would be quite so dramatic. I don't think the Honorverse has anything short of a plasma rifle that could do the same thing that Federation weapon could do, and IIRC, you can't use a plasma rifle without full body protection because you'd get burns just from the flash of it firing.

Of course, small arms aren't going to determine who wins in an interstellar war fought by starships.

evilauthor wrote:Aside from computing systems which is the most dramatic difference, there's also the matter of small arms.

Honorverse small arms are slug throwers. True, they're very high tech slug throwers that use grav tech to accelerate small darts to VERY high speed. A 30 round magazine could easily fit inside Honor's fake arm for example. But they're still slug (dart?) throwers.

Safehold Federation small arms though are ENERGY weapons. I'm reminded of that one scene where an angel shoots a slash lizard attacking with something I think was about the size of a modern carbine. He makes the slash lizard EXPLODE.


An Honorverse pulser carbine might be able to kill the slash lizard too, but I don't think the actual killing mechanism would be quite so dramatic. I don't think the Honorverse has anything short of a plasma rifle that could do the same thing that Federation weapon could do, and IIRC, you can't use a plasma rifle without full body protection because you'd get burns just from the flash of it firing.

Of course, small arms aren't going to determine who wins in an interstellar war fought by starships.

Trust me, a one-second burst from an Honorverse light tribarrel (they come in multiple varieties, you know), would make a slash lizard explode quite nicely. It wouldn't be a single explosion, but the exploding darts would detonate so close together no observer could really tell the difference.

And Honorverse projectiles are so high velocity that they might as well be light-speed weapons.

Not that it really matters. Attentive readers may recall from HotQ that a certain David Prescott Tremaine is qualified High Expert with a plasma carbine. So yes indeed people outside full body armor can use them. For that matter, plasma rifles are one of the two weapons used by the heavy fire elements of Marine platoons in the Honorverse, with or without armor. The main reason you don't see such weapons used very often in the Honorverse is that you're usually looking at fairly close quarters combat where the "back splash" from a plasma bolt would get . . . messy. Recall the hard time Honor gave Scotty about his weapon of choice on Black Bird. Essentially, by choosing that weapon, he was telling her that he didn't care how many Masadans got blown away as collateral damage if that was what it took to watch her back.

There are advantages to using powered armor, including additional power supply, and the the weapons used by armored troops are, indeed, heavier than those used by unarmored troops. But there are "man portable" versions of most Honoverse weapons. You can think of the armored-versus-unarmored versions as someone who can tote around a Ma Deuce .50 caliber as opposed to someone who can handle a BAR or an M249 SAW.

runsforcelery wrote:You can think of the armored-versus-unarmored versions as someone who can tote around a Ma Deuce .50 caliber as opposed to someone who can handle a BAR or an M249 SAW.

There's "man portable" and then there "light enough to be used for standard issue self defense". An Honorverse plasma rifle or light tribarrel is the equivalent of a Ma Deuce or SAW, true, but the angel I was talking about was on a routine village visit, and was surprised by the slash lizard. As such, he wouldn't be carrying anything other than a personal self defense weapon, the equivalent of a pistol or at most a submachine gun.

Now, if the Honorverse could build pistols and SMGs with that kind of firepower, I haven't seen it in anything I've read.

runsforcelery wrote:However, her 850-pound shells couldn't penetrate Iowa's belt beyond about 3,500 yards and probably couldn't penetrate both armored decks at all (they'd be landing at far too oblique an angle for such light shells to penetrate). She'd do better using HE and trying to tear up Iowas upper works, smash her optical rangefinders and directors, and inflict the sort of mission kill Dilandu is suggesting.

A mission kill is enough to bring safety, you don't need to send it to the bottom. In time it would likely lead to sinking it anyway--tear up enough and you're going to have a big fire problem.

evilauthor wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:You can think of the armored-versus-unarmored versions as someone who can tote around a Ma Deuce .50 caliber as opposed to someone who can handle a BAR or an M249 SAW.

There's "man portable" and then there "light enough to be used for standard issue self defense". An Honorverse plasma rifle or light tribarrel is the equivalent of a Ma Deuce or SAW, true, but the angel I was talking about was on a routine village visit, and was surprised by the slash lizard. As such, he wouldn't be carrying anything other than a personal self defense weapon, the equivalent of a pistol or at most a submachine gun.

Now, if the Honorverse could build pistols and SMGs with that kind of firepower, I haven't seen it in anything I've read.

That would be the plasma carbine I referenced in regard to one Scotty Tremaine. A max power shot from it would turn a slash lizard inside out and splatter it all over the landscape. And what makes you think that Angels and Archangels, who had to be ready to display God's Wrath, only carried the equivalent of pocket pistols around with them? First, even an Angel could be eaten by a slash lizard (which would be very bad PR for the Writ) so sme heavy duty self-defense weaponry as clearly in order. Second, the Angels were both the benevolent shepherds of God's flock and also its disciplinarians, and the ability to demonstrate the Wrath was one way to avoid being forced to apply the Wrath.

Just because you've only seen a single historical instance of Angelic firepower, as it were, should not be construed to mean there were no more of them. And I reiterate, Honorverse small arms and crew-served weapons are very comparable to the Federations. In fact, some of them are damned near identical.

Please recall that in Nimue's cave, along with the APCs and assault shuttle, there are 200 assault rifles and 2,000,000 rounds of ammunition. That sound familiar to Honor & Co.?

Loren Pechtel wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:However, her 850-pound shells couldn't penetrate Iowa's belt beyond about 3,500 yards and probably couldn't penetrate both armored decks at all (they'd be landing at far too oblique an angle for such light shells to penetrate). She'd do better using HE and trying to tear up Iowas upper works, smash her optical rangefinders and directors, and inflict the sort of mission kill Dilandu is suggesting.

A mission kill is enough to bring safety, you don't need to send it to the bottom. In time it would likely lead to sinking it anyway--tear up enough and you're going to have a big fire problem.

So paint shells, as long as you get the hits, is almost good enough?

As a perhaps incorrect thought, if the other guy is playing very bright light on you to dazzle any observers, break out the welder's goggles or the smoked glass so that everything is very dark, except for the now only modestly bright point of light that is the enemy dazzle ray in use. Terget that.

An active source is a target.

Life may be more complex if the dazzle is pulsed.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:However, her 850-pound shells couldn't penetrate Iowa's belt beyond about 3,500 yards and probably couldn't penetrate both armored decks at all (they'd be landing at far too oblique an angle for such light shells to penetrate). She'd do better using HE and trying to tear up Iowas upper works, smash her optical rangefinders and directors, and inflict the sort of mission kill Dilandu is suggesting.

A mission kill is enough to bring safety, you don't need to send it to the bottom. In time it would likely lead to sinking it anyway--tear up enough and you're going to have a big fire problem.

Fire is, indeed, the main killer of ships that don't sink outright. However, have you really looked at late-WW II USN firefighting equipment and training? The survival of the Franklin and the Bunker Hill wasn't exactly purely fortuitous.

Yes, you could probably cause enough fires to gut an Iowa's superstructure (unlikely, but certainly conceivable), but without penetrating hits that start the fire below decks, you are not going to knock out her engineering plant or her plotting rooms, and her plot is direct-connected to the rangefinders and sights in her turrets. For that matter, her Number 2 16" turret is designated as her emergency fire control station, responsible for coordinating her armament if the plot is destroyed. (Mind you, it'd do a pretty poor job compared to her regular systems, but it's in the chain precisely to allow for the pretty much unimaginable case of her plot being taken out while she's still afloat.)

So (1) you aren't going to sink her, no matter what, before her 30-knot speed runs out of your 15-knot range, if running is what she decides to do; (2) your chances of killing her with a fire set by 850-pound shells is pretty poor; and (3) you'd better hope to hell that she doesn't get to knife range inside the smoke screen. If she gets just one or two of her shells into you, it's lights out.

runsforcelery wrote:

Fire is, indeed, the main killer of ships that don't sink outright. However, have you really looked at late-WW II USN firefighting equipment and training? The survival of the Franklin and the Bunker Hill wasn't exactly purely fortuitous.

That's the factor often missed in discussions about the Pacific War - the fact that USN ships have literally the best damage control parties in the world, and were build from STS steel (basically homogenous armor) instead of usual construction steel. No other navy of WW2 era could afford to use such expensive materials. So, basically, the average USN warship could survive twice as much damage as average IJN warship of similar class (Japanese were notoriously bad in damage control... and their ships were structurally weak, overweight with weapon)

Dilandu wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:

Fire is, indeed, the main killer of ships that don't sink outright. However, have you really looked at late-WW II USN firefighting equipment and training? The survival of the Franklin and the Bunker Hill wasn't exactly purely fortuitous.

That's the factor often missed in discussions about the Pacific War - the fact that USN ships have literally the best damage control parties in the world, and were build from STS steel (basically homogenous armor) instead of usual construction steel. No other navy of WW2 era could afford to use such expensive materials. So, basically, the average USN warship could survive twice as much damage as average IJN warship of similar class (Japanese were notoriously bad in damage control... and their ships were structurally weak, overweight with weapon)

These readers will doubtless recall that when the Hiei engaged US destroyers and was set on fire, it had serious problems, though there is some dispute as to exactly how it was sent to the bottom, and exactly where. The sunken hull of the Kirishima, on the other hand, has apparently been found.

Readers may also recall the Japanese BB that was given depth charge racks, just in case, or the CL that was given so much extra weaponry that it capsized.