Spoilers - Toll of Honor

penny wrote:Denver Summervale was beaten to a bloody pulp. And that was before Colonel Ramirez made the statement, paraphrasing "I said I wouldn't kill you Summervale, but I didn't say I wouldn't hurt you."

So, whatever recording existed, I am sure if it is authentic, its sounds clearly shows Summervale under duress, stressed, bleeding at the mouth, scared shitless, and babbling like a cornered criminal, if the recording is undoctored. If it has been doctored then it is useless.

We can agree on all of that (except as noted below); but if the recording given to Honor starts AFTER the statement by Colonel Ramirez, then there is no evidence when Denver was beaten nor by whom. Considering what he is admitting and that he is already dead based on those statements, it is unlikely that any charges would be brought or that any jury would convict.

Note: Denver is not the person to be frightened by a beating; as a professional duelist he must have a very high tolerance for pain and an almost non-existent amount of fear. What he is, is so enraged at the beating that he has forgotten caution. He simply wants the beating to stop so he can go on about his business. He fully intends to kill each and everyone there in duels after he kills Honor, because no one will be able to say he is challenging them for money. He is confident that anyone, who would do this on Honor's behalf, will not try to refuse a duel to avenge her death.

Toll of Honor

Captain Cristina Zaragoza, HMS Cestus’ CO, winced visibly, and Brandy didn’t blame her. Nor did she like to think about what a four-band crash translation would do to Prince Adrian’s hyper generator. It wouldn’t present any safety threats to a well-found ship whose generator was in good repair, which Prince Adrian’s was. It would, however, burn somewhere around two T-months of the generator’s normal overhaul cycle in less than fifteen minutes.

This is also something that is quite interesting, but it is also something else that surpried me. This particular crash translation subtracted a full two T-months off the generator's life cycle? I knew that crash translations resulted in wear and tear, but that amount seems to be far too excessive for a much smaller navy to sustain; a smaller navy who has a much smaller order of battle overall. Intuitively, a far bigger navy can wage a different kind of war of attrition by forcing the enemy's need for repairs to exceed the life of their components, and their ability to keep up with repairs. I realize that that happens anyway as a byproduct of battle, but I am suggesting that the tactic can be used intentionally. Not only are ones enemy's people worn down by the tactic of constantly hypering in and out, but an enemy's ships can be worn down by forcing them to maintain hot nodes.

At any rate, it would appear that crash translations are imperative if a fleet is to be successful attacking the enemy's rear areas. But eating away at that much of your component's life cycle during every attack on an enemy's rear areas seems very costly. (OTOH, it might explain why the humongous League had so many maintenance issues because of their larger bailiwick). And if the enemy has hot nodes, a smaller navy probably cannot sustain the resulting attrition rate. And if the crash translation is off and there is some middle ground in the enemy's ready status, it could all be a waste of component wear.

What does Jayne's say about the MTBF of the hyper generator and the compensator?



Choosing the correct operational tempo seems to be far more critical than I once thought. Honor and Eighth Fleet readily comes to mind.

That didn’t even consider what that sort of sustained plunge through hyper space would do to the crews’ stomachs. They’d hit each band’s boundary at a maximum gradient, and a lot of people would be puking their guts out by the time they finished. From Captain Zaragoza’s expression, she expected to be one of them.

I am assuming that maximum gradient refers to the shortest distance between two bands—the infamous smallest distance between two points. Something our very own space shuttle wouldn't want to try at home during reentry.

Brandy’s stomach was less sensitive than many, but she still made a mental note to go easy on the pre-battle solid meal the Navy traditionally fed its people.

“Once we’ve made translation into n-space,” Chen continued, “a lot will depend on how good our astrogation was. Either way, though, we’ll be accelerating in-system at the wallers’ maximum safe pod-towing compensator settings. The screen—that’s us and Admiral Moreno’s battlecruisers—will be well out in front of the wall-of-battle. We’ll be Admiral White Haven’s primary surveillance screen, and we’ll deploy recon drones to supplement our shipboard sensors for relay to the wall. In addition, CruRon Thirty-Three and BatCruRon Five will have primary responsibility for the outer missile defense zone. Because of that—” laying out the operation’s parameters clearly and concisely, and Brandy sipped coffee as she listened.

Whatever “the wallers’ maximum pod-towing compensator settings” actually mean. I thought the compensator settings didn't matter as long as the pods were inside the wedge. Did I miss something?

Unlike quite a few of Sixth Fleet’s personnel, she’d seen combat. She knew how ugly it could be. But this time, the Navy would be attacking the Peeps, not the other way around, and she smiled vengefully as she contemplated that minor difference.

That is the difference I preached on and on about if the MA attacks first. It seems kind of hard for me to imagine a more exciting war if the MA happens to attack the galaxy first.

Guess who has come to dinner.

penny wrote:This is also something that is quite interesting, but it is also something else that surpried me. This particular crash translation subtracted a full two T-months off the generator's life cycle? I knew that crash translations resulted in wear and tear, but that amount seems to be far too excessive for a much smaller navy to sustain; a smaller navy who has a much smaller order of battle overall. Intuitively, a far bigger navy can wage a different kind of war of attrition by forcing the enemy's need for repairs to exceed the life of their components, and their ability to keep up with repairs. I realize that that happens anyway as a byproduct of battle, but I am suggesting that the tactic can be used intentionally. Not only are ones enemy's people worn down by the tactic of constantly hypering in and out, but an enemy's ships can be worn down by forcing them to maintain hot nodes.

At any rate, it would appear that crash translations are imperative if a fleet is to be successful attacking the enemy's rear areas. But eating away at that much of your component's life cycle during every attack on an enemy's rear areas seems very costly. (OTOH, it might explain why the humongous League had so many maintenance issues because of their larger bailiwick). And if the enemy has hot nodes, a smaller navy probably cannot sustain the resulting attrition rate. And if the crash translation is off and there is some middle ground in the enemy's ready status, it could all be a waste of component wear.

What does Jayne's say about the MTBF of the hyper generator and the compensator?

Choosing the correct operational tempo seems to be far more critical than I once thought. Honor and Eighth Fleet readily comes to mind.

That didn’t even consider what that sort of sustained plunge through hyper space would do to the crews’ stomachs. They’d hit each band’s boundary at a maximum gradient, and a lot of people would be puking their guts out by the time they finished. From Captain Zaragoza’s expression, she expected to be one of them.

I am assuming that maximum gradient refers to the shortest distance between two bands—the infamous smallest distance between two points. Something our very own space shuttle wouldn't want to try at home during reentry.

Brandy’s stomach was less sensitive than many, but she still made a mental note to go easy on the pre-battle solid meal the Navy traditionally fed its people.

“Once we’ve made translation into n-space,” Chen continued, “a lot will depend on how good our astrogation was. Either way, though, we’ll be accelerating in-system at the wallers’ maximum safe pod-towing compensator settings. The screen—that’s us and Admiral Moreno’s battlecruisers—will be well out in front of the wall-of-battle. We’ll be Admiral White Haven’s primary surveillance screen, and we’ll deploy recon drones to supplement our shipboard sensors for relay to the wall. In addition, CruRon Thirty-Three and BatCruRon Five will have primary responsibility for the outer missile defense zone. Because of that—” laying out the operation’s parameters clearly and concisely, and Brandy sipped coffee as she listened.

Whatever “the wallers’ maximum pod-towing compensator settings” actually mean. I thought the compensator settings didn't matter as long as the pods were inside the wedge. Did I miss something?

Unlike quite a few of Sixth Fleet’s personnel, she’d seen combat. She knew how ugly it could be. But this time, the Navy would be attacking the Peeps, not the other way around, and she smiled vengefully as she contemplated that minor difference.

That is the difference I preached on and on about if the MA attacks first. It seems kind of hard for me to imagine a more exciting war if the MA happens to attack the galaxy first.

Guess who has come to dinner.

[/quote]Jayne's doesn't say anything about the maintenance cycles of a hyper generator. (And neither does SITS or House of Steel)

So I don't think we have any way to know what the normal overhaul cycle period is (how much, if any, more than 15 months) on a hyper generator; so we don't know how large a percentage of that time the 2-months reduction amounted to.

However I disagree that crash translations are imperative when raiding an enemy rear. They were done in this case because for some reason White Haven specifically wanted that translation. But a crash translation produces a much larger alpha flare -- making your force's arrival far more visible -- while simultaneously leaving you with far less base velocity than if you'd made a gradual translation down to the Alpha bands, spent a little while rebuilding your velocity, and then made a gentler (shallower gradient, longer duration) translation down into normal space. I don't know why White Haven wanted a noisy entry with a low base velocity; but his plans went out of their way to achieve that effect.
Most raiders probably don't want either of those things (or if they do was a low base velocity to better let them break back over the limit there are other ways to achieve that without the wear and tear and stronger hyper emergence flare of a crash translation)

So I don't think we can rely on small navies running themselves to maintenance exhaustion by repeatedly making crash translations.

I suspect that any hyper translation is going to cause more wear than keeping the hyper generator on standby -- though from the other text in Toll of Honor it's clear that keeping them on standby does wear them down -- but it seems to imply that crash translations (from higher velocities with more abrupt translations), especially over more bands, causes much more wear. But the normal overhaul cycle time is going to be predicated on an expected average usage mix of the generator; so it's only forcing more frequent or harder use than assumed that will shorten the cycle time.


As for the waller's compensation settings -- this attack happens before we'd seen anybody start using the trick of tucking pods inside the wedge. Plus, a waller can tow fewer pods that way; so if White Haven is going in heavy then he'd be dragging along too many pods to hide them within the wedge even if that tactic had already been dreamed up.

Jonathan_S wrote:
As for the waller's compensation settings -- this attack happens before we'd seen anybody start using the trick of tucking pods inside the wedge. Plus, a waller can tow fewer pods that way; so if White Haven is going in heavy then he'd be dragging along too many pods to hide them within the wedge even if that tactic had already been dreamed up.

Also, the early pods were BIG. The 7mx19mx19m "Flatpack" pods we see in 1919PD are the result of 15+ years of draconian development. We were never told their size, but carrying a couple behind a BC was a radical idea in 1904/5 when Honor did it at Hancock (BC's didn't even have the software loaded to control them yet.) So were probably too large to fit many inside the SD's comp field, let alone a BC's (or smaller). And even on tow, an SD was limited to 10-20 pods, not the 500+ we see limpeted to the same ship's hulls in 1921pd. (Yes, the self tractoring ability allows that massive #, but the number of pods any ship can carry has been steadily increasing the series.)

Jonathan_S wrote:So I don't think we can rely on small navies running themselves to maintenance exhaustion by repeatedly making crash translations.

Also, why would small navies be doing raiding? The scenario of w war with the MAlign, the MAlign would be doing the raiding, not the other way around.

In any case, what I took important from the passage is that you can do a 4-band crash translation in 15 minutes, so you can do two bands in 5. That's important for the calculation of how long the ready-desron takes to respond to a hyper footprint way out from the hyperlimit.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
In any case, what I took important from the passage is that you can do a 4-band crash translation in 15 minutes, so you can do two bands in 5. That's important for the calculation of how long the ready-desron takes to respond to a hyper footprint way out from the hyperlimit.

If you can do 4 bands in 15 minutes then why would you expect 2 bands to take only 5?
I didn't see any such statement in the book. I could see arguments for 7.5 minutes, and wouldn't be surprised to find it takes closer to 10 (which would imply some level of fixed overhead for any change plus some level of additional time for adding extra bands). I suppose it's possible that higher bands simply take more time; meaning dropping from lower bands is disproportionately faster, but offhand can't think of anything that actually says that.


Also, to really nail down that minimum response time we'd also need to know how quickly you can climb the hyper bands. That would let us plot out which band is most optimal for reacting to an event a given range.

By the time you've climbed even a couple of band residual base velocity is almost irrelevant, even if the response ships were already moving fast; and higher bands allow greater multiples of c so you'd think the higher the better. However, over short enough distances, the time you save from the higher velocity multiplier in the higher band could more than be offset by any extra time it takes to climb up to and then descent from that higher band. (It's just without the timing into and out of each band we can't compare that extra time against the velocity multiplier based time savings)

Jonathan_S wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
In any case, what I took important from the passage is that you can do a 4-band crash translation in 15 minutes, so you can do two bands in 5. That's important for the calculation of how long the ready-desron takes to respond to a hyper footprint way out from the hyperlimit.

If you can do 4 bands in 15 minutes then why would you expect 2 bands to take only 5?
I didn't see any such statement in the book. I could see arguments for 7.5 minutes, and wouldn't be surprised to find it takes closer to 10 (which would imply some level of fixed overhead for any change plus some level of additional time for adding extra bands). I suppose it's possible that higher bands simply take more time; meaning dropping from lower bands is disproportionately faster, but offhand can't think of anything that actually says that.


Also, to really nail down that minimum response time we'd also need to know how quickly you can climb the hyper bands. That would let us plot out which band is most optimal for reacting to an event a given range.

By the time you've climbed even a couple of band residual base velocity is almost irrelevant, even if the response ships were already moving fast; and higher bands allow greater multiples of c so you'd think the higher the better. However, over short enough distances, the time you save from the higher velocity multiplier in the higher band could more than be offset by any extra time it takes to climb up to and then descent from that higher band. (It's just without the timing into and out of each band we can't compare that extra time against the velocity multiplier based time savings)

Thinkmarkedly might be correct. If a downward crash translation through each band bleeds velocity. Then the maximum possible gradient through the next band increases and thus reduces the distance between the two points, or bands. IOW, does a lower velocity increase the maximum gradient in which a ship can traverse the next band? Significantly?

At any rate, my apology about the pods. I keep forgetting the timeline of this book.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:So I don't think we can rely on small navies running themselves to maintenance exhaustion by repeatedly making crash translations.

Also, why would small navies be doing raiding? The scenario of w war with the MAlign, the MAlign would be doing the raiding, not the other way around.

In any case, what I took important from the passage is that you can do a 4-band crash translation in 15 minutes, so you can do two bands in 5. That's important for the calculation of how long the ready-desron takes to respond to a hyper footprint way out from the hyperlimit.

I was specifically referring to the RMN. The RMN is traditionally a much smaller navy than the RHN, and certainly smaller than the SLN. And the RMN has been attacking the Peep's rear areas since the beginning. Sometimes that is all a mosquito can do until its Project Gram gives it a significant bite. Especially when the much bigger navy is forcing you into war. Besides, "island hopping" is a thing.

penny wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Also, why would small navies be doing raiding? The scenario of w war with the MAlign, the MAlign would be doing the raiding, not the other way around.

In any case, what I took important from the passage is that you can do a 4-band crash translation in 15 minutes, so you can do two bands in 5. That's important for the calculation of how long the ready-desron takes to respond to a hyper footprint way out from the hyperlimit.

I was specifically referring to the RMN. The RMN is traditionally a much smaller navy than the RHN, and certainly smaller than the SLN. And the RMN has been attacking the Peep's rear areas since the beginning. Sometimes that is all a mosquito can do until its Project Gram gives it a significant bite. Especially when the much bigger navy is forcing you into war. Besides, "island hopping" is a thing.

I wouldn't have guessed that was who you were talking about.

While it is true that the RMN, as the third largest navy, as of OBS, is smaller than the 1st largest (SLN) or 2nd largest (RHN) it is not what most people would call small. (Over 300 wallers, 2/3rds as many as Haven is still quite a large navy)

Jonathan_S wrote:I wouldn't have guessed that was who you were talking about.

While it is true that the RMN, as the third largest navy, as of OBS, is smaller than the 1st largest (SLN) or 2nd largest (RHN) it is not what most people would call small. (Over 300 wallers, 2/3rds as many as Haven is still quite a large navy)

The sizes of the Havenite Sector combatants makes the later SLN behavior of ignoring anything that happened during the war and any warfighting developments as completely criminal in retrospect. Especially when such levels of combat had never been seen before.

It's kinda like the whole Houthi situation now, The Houthis are throwing relative junk at shipping, but they are throwing a lot of it, and it's the first time naval air defense systems are being stressed to this degree since WWII. Lessons are being learned by everybody involved - disregarding what is happening due to the low tech nature of the projectiles being fired and their owners (As the SLN probably would), would be ignorant.