Dilandu wrote:n7axw wrote:
It needs to be said that it has been observed, I think in HFQ, that the armor on the Harahlds was not designed to withstand plunging fire from rockets.
The rockets involved were not individually accurate, but were used in an area denial role which was what caught Eraystor who happened into that zone covered by the rockets.
Don
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If their armor was not designed to withstand plunging fire from rockets, it basically means that it was not designed to withstand any plunging fire at all, and so the ships are essentially one floating mistake. With all respect, but I really doubt that Merlin & Co could do SUCH fatal mistake.
And again, the problem is:
* It's practically impossible to build XIX-century level rocket, capable of carrying any meaningful AP warhead. It's absolutely impossible on Church tech level, which is not actually XIX-century in many aspects (like precise machining, for example).
* The probability of XIX century rocket to hit armored deck at such angle that warhead would be able to penetrate - even if we assume, that said warhead could be carried by XIX century rocket at all! - is very low. Rocket flight is much more complex than of artillery shells, and it would be practically impossible to predict at which angle said rocket would hit.
* Combined with rockets low accuracy, their low penetration probability is basically making them really useless as anti-ironclad weapon. To put it simply; firstly we need the rocket to actually hit target (probability are low), and then we need the rocket that hit to hit at right angle (probability is even lower). If, say, 5% of rockets would hit Charisian battleship, and out of those rockets that hit only 5% would hit at right angle... then the probability of actually scoring the penetration hit is less than 0.25%. I.e. out of THOUSAND rockets, two may score such a hit.
In short: completely implausible. Frankly, I think this whole episode need a rewriting, with rockets replaced by mortars:
They actually WERE a credible threat to armored ships. Not very big - since it was pretty hard to hit moving target with mortar at all - but IF they scored a hit, then their massive shells, falling at predictable angle (ballistic!) have a good chance to actually penetrate. And, mortars are much more plausible for XIX-century tech of Church, than rockets, comparable with 1950s tech level!
I understand that I am simply the author here, however Dilandu is making some assumptions about the Church's sophistication which are inaccurate. You may or may not find their capabilities plausible, but they are the ones the Church has been building with and towards almost from the beginning and I walked the reader through both the acquisition of the technology and the first test use of the system. And based on the actual capabilities of the Church:
(1) The rockets in question are spin stabilized in flight with machined nozzles. Yes, they are black powder and yes they will not be precision weapons. They will, however, be one hell of a lot more accurate than 19th century black powder rockets
without spin stabilization.
(2) The rockets in question were fired en masse at a volume of watter which had been preranged and pretargeted. They were not aimed "at" the
ships at all, and the vast, bast majority of them missed.
(3) If anyone was paying attention, the devastation was primarily the result of fires, set in the super structures. There
were some deck penetrations, and the deck armor
was thin. No one on the other side had the sort of heavy mortars which have been mentioned in this post, so most fire would be coming in on a fairly flat trajectory. (Had such heavy mortars been under construction, Merln would have known about it, and the deck armor --- which was much better on the
Gwyllym Manthyr than on the ironclads which were never supposed to engage such heavy foritications and guns --- would have been considerably thicker.) The
rockets became available to the Church only after the ships in question had been launched, and therefore represented a threat the designers had rated as low when they built the ships, Given the need for the thickest belt and casemate armor they could carry, they "skimped" on deck armor . . . just like a lot of RL late 19th-early 20th century naval architects,
(4) The rickets in this casecame in on a steeper trajectory than cannon fire would have at that range, and it was specifically stated in the book that these were extraordinarily
large rockets which had been specifically designed to carry heavy warheads designed to attack protected targets, which is one reason their range was so extraordinarily short and their trajectories were so steep. They were very short ranged weapons whose extremely nose-heavy design pulled them down at a very sharp angle.
The only really valid criticism of this passage (in my admittedly biased opinion) is the fact that the SNARC remotes should reasonably have been parked in the rocket barges waiting to detonate the instant they were needed if Sarmouth had already known the rockets were there. I will concede that there is a plothole there because I failed to think the scene completely through. It happens sometimes, no matter how hard a writer tries to avoid it, especially on a canvas the size of Safehold or the Honorverse. And in this case, the book was late, I was proofreading 2 different books simultaneously, and I was extremely ill, so while I regret it, I'm not really surprised that my brain was not at its sharpest during the final edit when I would probably otherwise have spotted that minor problem. I'd still have used the rockets, but I would have structured the entire sequence with Sarmouth and the SNARCs differently. Nonetheless, the hole is wider than usual and I accept full responsibility for it. I ought to have recognized the logic fail when I first wrote it, and I didn't. And I trust it goes without saying that I will continue to seek to
avoid plotholes in future. Overall, I think my record is actually pretty good, but it can always be better,
For the rest of it, given the features I designed into the hardware on both sides ---
and explicated in the book on my way through --- the action works just fine the way it's written.
You may or may not agree with my reasoning or the technology I made available to the two sides. That's your prerogative.
