April's thought experiment

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The fail-safe may have failed. S**t happens. We know Haven did get them somehow, in spite of the same type of fail-safes existing. Though they did capture bases and other installations, where such things in un-fired and un-armed form may have been found.

Though as the post from Jonathan_S shows, the timeline doesn't work for Haven. The MDMs, LACs and pod-layers were held back until Operation Buttercup, at which point Haven effectively lost the war. They had no opportunity to acquire samples because from this point onwards, the Manticore Alliance won every engagement until hostilities paused.

And yet Haven had MDMs by the launch of Operation Thunderbolt. So Foraker operated some miracles of engineering and reverse engineering just by knowing something was possible.

Edit: I see while I was digging around verifying my recollection ThinksMarkedly already posted the issues with the timeline. Still, since I went to the trouble of digging up specific references I'll go ahead and post this.

tlb wrote:However, weren't there cases of Haven jumping on RMN ships with cold nodes during Ashes of Victory, where the multidrive missiles were first used? If so, that would allow reverse-engineering. We did hear later where Theisman acknowledged how they were hindered by the anti-tampering features in the various captured equipment.

The ones I remembers were earlier.
Frances Yeargin in In Enemy Hands got her 6 CAs blown away when Tourville snuck well into missile range, towing pods, before being detected -- and launched before the cruisers could respond. Only one RMN ship got a CM salvo off. (And setting up the capture of Prince Adrian and Honor)
Though that wasn't explicitly described as having cold nodes -- but given that it takes about 15 minutes to bring them online even from hot standby (and her force died in only a handful of minutes) the state of its nodes wouldn't have made a difference.

And then there was the attack on Seaford Station in Echoes of Honor -- where Rear Admiral Santino sacked Andrea Jaruwalski before sailing his forces into the teeth of the far larger Peep one. None of his ships were equipped with MDMs; nor should Seaford Station be equipped with stockpiles of them.
(And frankly, given how much he panicked, if he'd had any MDMs he'd almost certainly have exposed the secret of them during his idiotic 'honor of the flag' attack -- to stay out of the Peep's missile range entirely)
That also wasn't explicitly described as having cold nodes -- but there was so much detection time in this case that it didn't matter; regardless of the state of their nodes they had plenty of time to prepare and charge the much heavier Peep fleet.

Ashes of Victory does use the phrase "cold nodes" once. But that was describing the state of the Peep defenders at McGregor; when Hydra's LAC strike caught them unawares.

The only Peep attack I remember in AoV was the one on Zelda, where GNS Isaiah MacKenzie and her companions made a fighting withdrawal (an not exposing their MDM or podlaying capabilities) as part of the pre-Buttercup moves to keep the Peeps in the dark. (And the only MDMs in that system would have been in the SD(P)s pod bays)
But once 8th fleet launched Buttercup and revealed the existence of SD(P)s and MDMs I don't believe there were any Peep counter attacks -- just a series of hopeless defensive stands.

The next time they had a chance to potentially capture a ship or facility that might be storing MDMs would after the ceasefire; during Thunderbolt. And by that point they already had their own.

If they got their hands on one to reverse engineer they must have:
*miraculously found an expended one after the fight for Zelda -- yet not been able to alert the PSN that such a weapon existed.
*recovered an expended one after one of the losing battles of Buttercup
*somehow stole one during the ceasefire
*somehow paid off someone on the alliance side to steal one for them

And it seems more likely that they'd be able to steal or illicitly purchase technical data than an entire missile.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The fail-safe may have failed. S**t happens. We know Haven did get them somehow, in spite of the same type of fail-safes existing. Though they did capture bases and other installations, where such things in un-fired and un-armed form may have been found.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Though as the post from Jonathan_S shows, the timeline doesn't work for Haven. The MDMs, LACs and pod-layers were held back until Operation Buttercup, at which point Haven effectively lost the war. They had no opportunity to acquire samples because from this point onwards, the Manticore Alliance won every engagement until hostilities paused.

And yet Haven had MDMs by the launch of Operation Thunderbolt. So Foraker operated some miracles of engineering and reverse engineering just by knowing something was possible.

The things had been distributed and even used before Buttercup (against the Peep attack at Elric in Ashes of Victory), just not at their full abilities. Then five years later (in War of Honor) Haven also had multidrive missiles.

So either something was captured before the start of Buttercup or during the ceasefire the Navy, under Janacek, had a intelligence failure.

Jonathan_S wrote:If they got their hands on one to reverse engineer they must have:
*miraculously found an expended one after the fight for Zelda -- yet not been able to alert the PSN that such a weapon existed.
*recovered an expended one after one of the losing battles of Buttercup
*somehow stole one during the ceasefire
*somehow paid off someone on the alliance side to steal one for them

And it seems more likely that they'd be able to steal or illicitly purchase technical data than an entire missile.

It's also possible they had acquired samples or technical information before the launch of Buttercup through espionage, but either not known what it was or the information never made it to the military analysts in time to make a difference. It wouldn't be until after the coup and Theisman put Foraker in charge of analysis that she'd realise what information was already available.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:If they got their hands on one to reverse engineer they must have:
*miraculously found an expended one after the fight for Zelda -- yet not been able to alert the PSN that such a weapon existed.
*recovered an expended one after one of the losing battles of Buttercup
*somehow stole one during the ceasefire
*somehow paid off someone on the alliance side to steal one for them

And it seems more likely that they'd be able to steal or illicitly purchase technical data than an entire missile.

It's also possible they had acquired samples or technical information before the launch of Buttercup through espionage, but either not known what it was or the information never made it to the military analysts in time to make a difference. It wouldn't be until after the coup and Theisman put Foraker in charge of analysis that she'd realise what information was already available.

Besides, at the end of the day, it's just physics - there are ultimately no secrets in Science. Haven has scientists, despite their education issues. But geniuses are geniuses, and if you had handed Newton a cell phone, by tomorrow he'd be showing you features you didn't know were on the phone. It quite possible that some nerd no one paid attention to, wrote a paper 30 years ago in some obscure journal focused on an unrelated field which cracked the science behind the Baffle.

And given Adcock's group's trolling the known universe for little known tech, it's possible that the RMN's baffle was actually based on the same little known Havenite paper, or a similiar one written by Walle Wallace on Walla-Walla world on the far side of the SLN.

Theemile wrote:Besides, at the end of the day, it's just physics - there are ultimately no secrets in Science. Haven has scientists, despite their education issues. But geniuses are geniuses, and if you had handed Newton a cell phone, by tomorrow he'd be showing you features you didn't know were on the phone. It quite possible that some nerd no one paid attention to, wrote a paper 30 years ago in some obscure journal focused on an unrelated field which cracked the science behind the Baffle.

But Clarke's Third Law still applies: sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Newton would be able to explore a mobile phone and find features in it like most newcomers to phones would, and would probably be above average because of his intelligence, but he'd be lacking context. Giving him a mobile phone might just as well put him in an Outside Context Problem.

He definitely wouldn't be able to figure out how it worked. The foundation of radio transmissions wouldn't be settled until a few centuries later with Maxwell and Curie. Semi-conductors would be a long way off. He wouldn't know "electricity" from its original Greek word meaning "amber."

And given Adcock's group's trolling the known universe for little known tech, it's possible that the RMN's baffle was actually based on the same little known Havenite paper, or a similiar one written by Walle Wallace on Walla-Walla world on the far side of the SLN.

Now that is entirely possible. Yes, there would be papers on quantum baffles and other quantum properties of some materials and meta-materials. Knowing something was possible, Foraker & team would have gone back and looked for the basis of how it was done, then repeated it themselves.

However, given the time between "knowing it was possible" and "high-volume manufacturing," I think it's unlikely they recreated completely from theory. They must have had a leg up, or several legs up.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote: .
However, don't you think that the latest generation missiles will self-destruct when their power gets to the minimum needed to fire the warhead? Why would Manticore allow their spent missiles to be recovered by the enemy? Where in the war against the SLN, did the SLN hold the field after the battle (except when Byng totally destroyed the defenseless destroyers)?
/i].

i'm not sure about that. Besides, what you say it will be a good way to avoid any unintentional erandani incidents. However i would think manticore would really pefer to recover them. missiles are really, really expensive. there were a few instances in the books, where an officer had to beg for permisson to live fire just a few. and we're talking two or four here. and those were more plain jane ones. so an order of more magnitude expesnive. for that matter while manticore never seem to run low on missles until oyster bay, there's also the time cost. Plus i'm sure a captain out in the wild would pefer to have his missle back to shoot a something else, instead of drifting as space dust, until he can get back home to get some more.