Shutting down the MWJ

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:OOPS!

I should have made it clearer. I am talking about shutting it down, "permanently," whereby it cannot be undone by simply giving orders to reopen it. Like sending the maximum amount of tonnage through to shut it down for the maximum amount of time. Where time is the only entity that can reopen it. I don't mean shutting it down by simply giving orders to Junction Control.

BTW, what is the maximum amount of time it would be shut down if the maximum amount of tonnage is sent through? Sorry, but I do not remember that detail.

If they'd lost control of it and one other terminus, which an enemy might be using to bring more fleet units from, then you could shut down their movements by sending some 250 million tonnes through.

The problem is that this scenario is too unlikely. This requires that some enemy have taken over one of the terminus and the junction itself. That means they've defeated all the defences in the Junction side, or at the very least neutralised them somehow. That traditionally means they've enough firepower on the MBS side, so transiting more from others isn't usually going to be a priority of theirs, nor is shutting it down going to be a priority of the defenders. They may gain 17 hours or however long it takes for the junction to re-establish itself.

The other thing is that those 30 SDs or 40 superfreighters are in a suicide mission.

Oh, one more detail: is the shutdown per terminus or for the whole junction? If it's per terminus, then there's no way the defenders could shut it down in the first place, because the only scenario that would even call for it implies that they've lost control of the Junction and that terminus. That implies they can't send a quarter billion tonnes of ship through.

Ah! I understand what you mean now! Send ships through anyway even if it is lost. Seems wasteful, but if time is of the essence, it would work. I suppose if Manticore needed the 17-hrs to get Apollo distributed. Cool.

****** *


I just learned something I wasn't even aware that I didn't know. What is worse is that I never even considered it.

When locking down the junction, the lockdown, let's say 17-hrs, affects both directions. Duh. I guess that is what it means when it is stated, "can't use the terminus for 17-hrs." I always thought that it was simply that particular terminus in that particular direction.

For instance, if Beowulf transited the maximum amount of tonnage through to Manticore, I simply thought Beowulf could no longer use the terminus, but Manticore can still send ships through to Beowulf. It seems I was in error. Dunce Cap.

At any rate, that sucks rotten eggs. An ally could cause problems for Manticore intentionally, just to irk them.* Like, say, if a new Manticoran government stepped on some Beowulfan toes like High Ridge did to Grayson.

I don't think you can simply fire on a mass transit of ships before determining whether they are hostile. IOW, civilian ships could make the trip. In that case, it should not be a suicide mission.

I would be surprised if even an enemy's mass transit of civilian ships would be fired upon.

*Reminds me of once upon a long time ago when "party lines" existed. That is telephone lines, to the uninitiated. It is an era when another party who shared a telephone line with you would intentionally leave their phone off the hook so you couldn't use the phone.

penny wrote:For instance, if Beowulf transited the maximum amount of tonnage through to Manticore, I simply thought Beowulf could no longer use the terminus, but Manticore can still send ships through to Beowulf. It seems I was in error. Dunce Cap.

At any rate, that sucks rotten eggs. An ally could cause problems for Manticore intentionally, just to irk them.* Like, say, if a new Manticoran government stepped on some Beowulfan toes like High Ridge did to Grayson.

I don't think you can simply fire on a mass transit of ships before determining whether they are hostile. IOW, civilian ships could make the trip. In that case, it should not be a suicide mission.

I would be surprised if even an enemy's mass transit of civilian ships would be fired upon.

*Reminds me of once upon a long time ago when "party lines" existed. That is telephone lines, to the uninitiated. It is an era when another party who shared a telephone line with you would intentionally leave their phone off the hook so you couldn't use the phone.

Seems unlikely that any ally, no matter how provoked, would do that. There are Astro-Control Stations at both ends that have give permission to enter the queue for transit (unless an enemy controls one end) and they would get pissed. On the other hand we have the case were Grayson exercised their treaty rights to send a task force through to Trevor's Star in chapter 53 of War of Honor. This certainly did disrupt civilian traffic; but not being a mass transit, did not shut the junction down for hours.

Doing a mass transit with civilian ships, would probably be illegal resulting in the ships being impounded.

Anyway there is enough time after transit where the forts can identify the arriving ships as friend of foe before the ships can take offensive action. But still the books mention the war game that imagined the Peep's would sent a mass transit of battleships and the results were bad for both sides; but then Manticore would have 17 hours to redirect forces.

Jonathan_S wrote:IIRC the formula is a constant * the square of the mass = lockdown time.
I worked it out well enough; but I’m away from the computer with that spreadsheet on it - if I remember later I’ll dig it up.

Okay, found the spreadsheet. And it was more ballpark, less accurate, than I'd remembered. The relationship between the square of the tonnage and the seconds of lockdown appeared close to, but not actually linear.

For the > 2.5 mton range I was working from just 4 data point.

1) “A single four-million-ton freighter's transit window was a bare twenty-five seconds" [OBS]
2) "his dreadnoughts would close the route for almost seventy seconds" [EoH]
3) "each superdreadnought would shut it down for a hundred and thirteen.” [EoH]
4) "a two-hundred-million-ton assault wave would shut down its route for over seventeen hours” [OBS]

I converted those to:
4,000,000 ton: 25 s
6,985,250 ton: 69 s
8,339,000 ton: 113 s
200,000,000 ton: 612000 s (17 hours)

Using the tonnage of a Bellerophon-class for the DN and a Gryphon-class for the SD.

Those masses and times aren't going to be exactly correct; but should be close enough for a reasonable formula.


From those, for tonnages between 2.5 mtons and the MWJ's limit of ~200 mtons you can get a reasonable seeming, but not actually correct, delay estimate by taking:
seconds = 1.6 * mtons^2

However the values it gives are:
2,500,000 ton: 10 s (matches the lockdown time from that tonnage or less)
4,000,000 ton: 25.6 s [+0.6 s]
6,985,250 ton: 78.1 s [+9.1 s]
8,339,000 ton: 111.3 s [-1.7 s]
200,000,000 ton: 64000 s (17.8 hours) [+2800 s]

(Of of course, you can invert the formula to work out the tonnage needed to produce a given lockdown: mtons = sqrt(seconds)/1.6)

Playing with the constant might make the fit a little better - as might guessing different tonnages for the DN and SD being referred to. But the 2.5 mton = 10 s might have been an assumption that drove the rest of this. It was a long time ago I worked on this.

penny wrote:I just learned something I wasn't even aware that I didn't know. What is worse is that I never even considered it.

When locking down the junction, the lockdown, let's say 17-hrs, affects both directions. Duh. I guess that is what it means when it is stated, "can't use the terminus for 17-hrs." I always thought that it was simply that particular terminus in that particular direction.

For instance, if Beowulf transited the maximum amount of tonnage through to Manticore, I simply thought Beowulf could no longer use the terminus, but Manticore can still send ships through to Beowulf. It seems I was in error. Dunce Cap.

At any rate, that sucks rotten eggs. An ally could cause problems for Manticore intentionally, just to irk them.* Like, say, if a new Manticoran government stepped on some Beowulfan toes like High Ridge did to Grayson.

I don't think you can simply fire on a mass transit of ships before determining whether they are hostile. IOW, civilian ships could make the trip. In that case, it should not be a suicide mission.

I would be surprised if even an enemy's mass transit of civilian ships would be fired upon.

I'd point out that it takes a fair bit of time to set up a mass transit - a terminus has a relatively small area you need to be within for your hyper generator to actually send you through the wormhole. All the ships involved in a mass transit needs to be carefully positioned and maintain station quite precisely so that all of them fit into that area at once. And then their hyper generator cycles needs to be very tightly synchronized -- because if one ship goes a little early then it locks the wormhole down for at least 10 seconds and disrupts the mass transit attempt. Oops.

Since Manticore controls, and has astro control and some forces, at all of its termini if some ally wanted to risk their ships (as the transit attempt itself is riskier than solo transits) to inconvenience Manticore, I'm pretty sure that it'd be very clear to the defenders of the remote terminus what kind of nonsense was being attempted -- and they'd be ordered off, and possible even escalating to warning shots or beyond should they persist in their stupidity. A mass transit might be a surprise to the receiving terminus (though you'd actually want to send through a single ship first to warn them - giving them time to move traffic to make room for the mass arrival) but the sending terminus would have probably at least 15 minutes between when it becomes obvious what was being attempted and when all the ships are in position to attempt the transit. So lots of time to make it very clear when such a thing is not being permitted

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I just learned something I wasn't even aware that I didn't know. What is worse is that I never even considered it.

When locking down the junction, the lockdown, let's say 17-hrs, affects both directions. Duh. I guess that is what it means when it is stated, "can't use the terminus for 17-hrs." I always thought that it was simply that particular terminus in that particular direction.

For instance, if Beowulf transited the maximum amount of tonnage through to Manticore, I simply thought Beowulf could no longer use the terminus, but Manticore can still send ships through to Beowulf. It seems I was in error. Dunce Cap.

At any rate, that sucks rotten eggs. An ally could cause problems for Manticore intentionally, just to irk them.* Like, say, if a new Manticoran government stepped on some Beowulfan toes like High Ridge did to Grayson.

I don't think you can simply fire on a mass transit of ships before determining whether they are hostile. IOW, civilian ships could make the trip. In that case, it should not be a suicide mission.

I would be surprised if even an enemy's mass transit of civilian ships would be fired upon.

I'd point out that it takes a fair bit of time to set up a mass transit - a terminus has a relatively small area you need to be within for your hyper generator to actually send you through the wormhole. All the ships involved in a mass transit needs to be carefully positioned and maintain station quite precisely so that all of them fit into that area at once. And then their hyper generator cycles needs to be very tightly synchronized -- because if one ship goes a little early then it locks the wormhole down for at least 10 seconds and disrupts the mass transit attempt. Oops.

Interesting post. We pretty much discussed this ad nauseum in the Wormhole Assault: MA Style thread. Currently on page 4 of the forum.

Jonathan_S wrote:Since Manticore controls, and has astro control and some forces, at all of its termini if some ally wanted to risk their ships (as the transit attempt itself is riskier than solo transits) to inconvenience Manticore, I'm pretty sure that it'd be very clear to the defenders of the remote terminus what kind of nonsense was being attempted -- and they'd be ordered off, and possible even escalating to warning shots or beyond should they persist in their stupidity. A mass transit might be a surprise to the receiving terminus (though you'd actually want to send through a single ship first to warn them - giving them time to move traffic to make room for the mass arrival) but the sending terminus would have probably at least 15 minutes between when it becomes obvious what was being attempted and when all the ships are in position to attempt the transit. So lots of time to make it very clear when such a thing is not being permitted

And I agree with everything you said, for the most part, certainly as it applies to most allies. But Beowulf is probably Manticore's "best girl" now, as she was once the SL's best girl. (See the "Beowulf the Karma Suitsya" thread).

At any rate, per storyline, in the second BoM, I got the impression that it is Beowulf's people who are manning Junction Control in Beowulf space. I certainly think they could pull it off. Probably not easily and certainly with some repercussions, but it could be done.

If only for the very reason that I think Junction Control, it would seem, should need to practice the "maneuver" from time to time. As you said, it is a complicated maneuver. That one ship can be sent ahead to warn of the "unscheduled" maneuver. They can argue about it later, but presently, a High Ridge like government is alienating Beowulf. Hey, it happens between allies on the best of days.

The US has committed alienating practices against its allies in the best of times as well. Depending on who is elected in the 2024 election, it will undoubtedly happen a lot.

tlb wrote:Seems unlikely that any ally, no matter how provoked, would do that. There are Astro-Control Stations at both ends that have give permission to enter the queue for transit (unless an enemy controls one end) and they would get pissed. On the other hand we have the case were Grayson exercised their treaty rights to send a task force through to Trevor's Star in chapter 53 of War of Honor. This certainly did disrupt civilian traffic; but not being a mass transit, did not shut the junction down for hours.

Doing a mass transit with civilian ships, would probably be illegal resulting in the ships being impounded.

Anyway there is enough time after transit where the forts can identify the arriving ships as friend of foe before the ships can take offensive action. But still the books mention the war game that imagined the Peep's would sent a mass transit of battleships and the results were bad for both sides; but then Manticore would have 17 hours to redirect forces.

RFC has done a slight ret-con on that wormhole defense study - it now was made earlier than we thought, (either pre- or early laserhead) and did not include the effects of modern laserheads or pods. in short, missiles at the time of the study could not do damage to any ships in an emergence lane (because they could not enter the Grav flux of the lane because the flux would destroy their drive nodes), so they were not included in the calculation while the opponents were in the emergence lane, only direct energy weapons from the defensive formations were counted. And the Standard Rules of Directed Weapons apply - if you can hit them- they most likely can hit you.

Now defenders can sit further back and control the shoals of missile pods, while being completely safe from return fire. Laser heads have standoff ranges of 50,000 Kilometers or more, and they can easily saturate the emergence lane with fire without entering the grav flux of the lane and blowing out their nodes. Even the missile pods can sit far enough back that they are outside effective direct weapons range, and respond with enough firepower to saturate any conceivable target for the 5+ minutes they are stuck in the emergence lane without wedges and sidewalls.

Theemile wrote:RFC has done a slight ret-con on that wormhole defense study - it now was made earlier than we thought, (either pre- or early laserhead) and did not include the effects of modern laserheads or pods. in short, missiles at the time of the study could not do damage to any ships in an emergence lane (because they could not enter the Grav flux of the lane because the flux would destroy their drive nodes), so they were not included in the calculation while the opponents were in the emergence lane, only direct energy weapons from the defensive formations were counted. And the Standard Rules of Directed Weapons apply - if you can hit them- they most likely can hit you.

Now defenders can sit further back and control the shoals of missile pods, while being completely safe from return fire. Laser heads have standoff ranges of 50,000 Kilometers or more, and they can easily saturate the emergence lane with fire without entering the grav flux of the lane and blowing out their nodes. Even the missile pods can sit far enough back that they are outside effective direct weapons range, and respond with enough firepower to saturate any conceivable target for the 5+ minutes they are stuck in the emergence lane without wedges and sidewalls.

Of course your second paragraph gives away why even the retcon was flawed. The defensive forts are going to have their bubble sidewalls up - yet, as you note, the transiting attack fleet can't use wedges or sidewalls for a few minutes until they clear the grav effects of the arrival lane.
Which means you can hit them but they actually can't hit you (or at least the hits are utterly ineffective).


Sidewalls roughly halve the range at which energy weapons are effective. Beyond half a million km a sidewall is said to basically nullify any laser or graser - yet against a target without sidewalls those same weapons are effective up to about a million km. So unless you're an idiot you'd position your forts so they're never closer than 500,000 km of the arrival lane. (But in that sub-million km effective range)

And now the attackers are back to needing to run through that withering fire in the hopes of surviving the long minutes until they can switch to wedge and sidewall and finally begin hitting back against the forts (which still are significantly more powerful on a 1 for 1 basis).

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:RFC has done a slight ret-con on that wormhole defense study - it now was made earlier than we thought, (either pre- or early laserhead) and did not include the effects of modern laserheads or pods. in short, missiles at the time of the study could not do damage to any ships in an emergence lane (because they could not enter the Grav flux of the lane because the flux would destroy their drive nodes), so they were not included in the calculation while the opponents were in the emergence lane, only direct energy weapons from the defensive formations were counted. And the Standard Rules of Directed Weapons apply - if you can hit them- they most likely can hit you.

Now defenders can sit further back and control the shoals of missile pods, while being completely safe from return fire. Laser heads have standoff ranges of 50,000 Kilometers or more, and they can easily saturate the emergence lane with fire without entering the grav flux of the lane and blowing out their nodes. Even the missile pods can sit far enough back that they are outside effective direct weapons range, and respond with enough firepower to saturate any conceivable target for the 5+ minutes they are stuck in the emergence lane without wedges and sidewalls.

Of course your second paragraph gives away why even the retcon was flawed. The defensive forts are going to have their bubble sidewalls up - yet, as you note, the transiting attack fleet can't use wedges or sidewalls for a few minutes until they clear the grav effects of the arrival lane.
Which means you can hit them but they actually can't hit you (or at least the hits are utterly ineffective).


Sidewalls roughly halve the range at which energy weapons are effective. Beyond half a million km a sidewall is said to basically nullify any laser or graser - yet against a target without sidewalls those same weapons are effective up to about a million km. So unless you're an idiot you'd position your forts so they're never closer than 500,000 km of the arrival lane. (But in that sub-million km effective range)

And now the attackers are back to needing to run through that withering fire in the hopes of surviving the long minutes until they can switch to wedge and sidewall and finally begin hitting back against the forts (which still are significantly more powerful on a 1 for 1 basis).

Very true, but the damages observed in the original study did take that into consideration, and despite that, they still determined that the defensive forts would take non-negligable damage in the dual max-mass assault scenario, rendering them considerably less effective against follow up assault waves.

But the subsequent changes in laserhead and pod technology now makes the defenses virtually invulnerable as they don't need to enter direct fire range at all, and Apollo allows them to sit even further back - the only limiting factor is the number of pods available to replace the defenses after each assault wave.

Jonathan_S wrote:Sidewalls roughly halve the range at which energy weapons are effective. Beyond half a million km a sidewall is said to basically nullify any laser or graser - yet against a target without sidewalls those same weapons are effective up to about a million km. So unless you're an idiot you'd position your forts so they're never closer than 500,000 km of the arrival lane. (But in that sub-million km effective range)

There's another variable to take into that calculation: the hyperlimit of the junction itself. It's only 300,000 km in radius (maybe diameter), so if you placed your forts half a million km from the emergence lanes, they'd be out of the hyperlimit in the first place. They would then be vulnerable to surprise attacks from hyperspace, which they can't see coming. Against an unprotected target, the missile doesn't need to actually fire; it can just use its own wedge as a vacuum cleaner. So the attackers could use CMs instead of proper warheads.

So you have to place the forts somewhere inside the hyperlimit for a modicum of protection. If you place them 100,000 km into the hyperlimit, a missile in sprint mode of 130,000G will take 12.5 seconds to slam into the target, 11.2 to be within 20,000 km and 8.85 to be within 50,000 km.

The ready forts would have their bubble walls up, but the standby ones wouldn't. A surprise attack could cost you all of the standby ones, which could be half or even more of all your forts. The attacking force would then subsequently die from retaliation by the remaining forts and defending mobile forces, but that's little consolation when you've lost a couple trillion of Manticore dollars of investment and years of construction.

The Alphanes are the exception that messes with the precept that there are no aliens with vastly superior tech....if they left "ruins" or artifacts or such on multiple planets in many star systems then they either went somewhere else or they rejected technology or whatever let the, travel between the stars and intentionally devolved their civilization. Except that in the short story in which they are introduced, one of the "sort of sentient" beings on the planet managed to adjust the Mantacoreian equipment "playing" the recording so that it worked at the correct speed to show the recordings at proper speed etc- like watching 1920's movie film at the correct frame rate and with whatever was recorded along with the video. But we digress.

We saw the LACs deployed from a Charlie Wilson class transport effectively murder every ship the SLN sent through a wormhole bridge (till they decided to just destroy the propulsion of each ship) by using LAC grazers to ravage them just as they materialized into the inbound lane. You don't have to depend on missiles or mines, you put LACs covering the appropriate lane and just killed them. All you need is enough LACs (the GA types) and a little warning and ...Presto...you have closed a wormhole.....or one lane of a terminus.

It would have changed the plot but, yes, Sigma Draconus Astro Control could have sent a Beowulf Dispatch Boar though to the Junction to say when the SLN task force was nearing the terminus and just BROADCAST to everybody around the terminus that the approach of a hostile force had been transmitted to the Junction Control and that any ship attempting to transit from that terminus after X time (about 2 minutes before the announcement was made) would be destroyed on appearance at the other end when it appeared.
You want to take a series of SDs though and be at the bottom of a very narrow well and completely defenseless against SD sized graders when your shielding isn't yet working and you are still blind and have essential neither speed, nor sensor information for targeting? Naked and blind is the concept.

Will the shutting down of a terminus that way hurt the side doing the defending?

Sure, no transit though that lane till by the aggressor (or anybody else) till a properly coded message is past by transit of a ship though at least hyperspace that the problem is now ended at the other end and the 1st acceptable ship with transit at Thus & So Time on a particular date of local time......Untill the difficulty is resolved, there will be a lot of scrap metal coming out of that lane which will be searched for usable stuff and then towed to the reclamation center.

Would that have hurt Beowulf? Sure, The SLN had already been told they would not be allowed to transit....per the wishes of Manticore. Just the initial "interference" conversation by the BSDF commander would have been an affront to the SLN but unless they were somehow able to interdict all transit into the wormhole to keep either SD Astro Control sending a message by Dispatch Boat or by one of the many freighters in the queue, it wouldn't matter. SLN and the League was going to be angry with Beowulf in any case unless they actively assisted in letting them through. Raging Justice was already a blown operation. Even without seeding the single pair of lains between Beowulf and Manticore. there was already a massive amount of defensive weaponry positioned around ALL of the transit lanes of the Junction and even if the SLN task force had tried to push though several SDs at a time to start with, they would be coming- naked and blind- into a heavily defended tight tunnel of gravitational forces and once the shooting starts (at the Manticore end) everything trying to come though would have been dealing with masses of debris blocking their way (really slow speed on appearance on the Manticore end) and a massive amount of energy weapons fire along with lazerhead fire being thrown into a tight kill zone.
And, given the way the SLN had set it up- with a DB operating as a false flag ship- they would be already in a State of War before the DB went though to Beowulf. And they had been TOLD by Beowulf that the plan was not secret any longer. Was thigh whole "reenforce through the Beowulf terminus" thing added as a way to cause even more deaths to the SLN and cull more SLN people and ships? Because it sure looks that way. Against the most heavily defended (and very few- we are lead to believe- wormholes had much in the way of active defense but Manticore has been at war with Haven for ? how many years? and this is the most heavily defended and organized wormhole military operation in the Known Human Occupied Space. Did the SLN have no actual information of what was sitting in both active and passive defensive ships and weapons on the transit lanes at the Junction end of the Manticore Junction? Or did they think they could just sail though and reform to parade in-system to help Filerta "mop up"?

Alignment looking to let somebody else kill off another few hundred thousand people and a large fleet to make their ultimate take over easier.