What happens to all that debris?

tlb wrote:As for explosive warheads; every laser head missile has an explosive warhead and can be used as such. For that matter, if the mothballed fleet has no wedge or sidewall then the wedge of the missile (or using a CM instead) would most likely destroy a ship.

What explosives? Honorverse fusion warheads are set off by gravity generators. You can't set off lithium deutride with chemical explosives anyway.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:If I had to stay in the Jupiter system, I'd probably park the ships on a moon. A smaller, outer one so its gravity won't crush the ship and not to close to Jupiter to endanger the ship with Jupiter's radiation belts. Leda and Lysithea look like good candidates.

Nope. They would run out of parking space and there probably isn't any decent parking space there, anyway--too small, it's going to be a total mess, not anything remotely flat.

tlb wrote:As for explosive warheads; every laser head missile has an explosive warhead and can be used as such. For that matter, if the mothballed fleet has no wedge or sidewall then the wedge of the missile (or using a CM instead) would most likely destroy a ship.

Loren Pechtel wrote:What explosives? Honorverse fusion warheads are set off by gravity generators. You can't set off lithium deutride with chemical explosives anyway.

Are you trying to tell me that a "fusion warhead" has no explosive effect?! There is an atomic explosion and the warhead has been used in that mode purely for that explosive effect.

I have already explained this earlier in the thread and I do not understand how people get fixated on the idea that only chemicals can produce an explosion. From chapter 30 of Storm from the Shadows:

But now, thanks primarily to fallout from the Star Kingdom's ongoing emphasis on improving its grav-pulse FTL communications capability, BuWeaps had completed field testing and begun production of a new generation of substantially more powerful gravity generators for the cruiser-weight Mark 16. In fact, they'd almost doubled the grav lens amplification factor, and while they were at it, they'd increased the yield of the missile warhead, as well, which had actually required at least as much ingenuity as the new amplification generators, given the way warheads scaled. They'd had to shift quite a few of the original Mark 16's components around to find a way to shoehorn all of that in, which had included shifting several weapons bus components aft, but Helen didn't expect anyone to complain about the final result. With its fifteen megaton warhead, the Mark 16 had been capable of dealing with heavy cruiser or battlecruiser armor, although punching through to the interior of a battlecruiser had pushed it almost to the limit. Now, with the new Mod G's forty megaton warhead and improved grav lensing, the Mark 16 had very nearly as much punch as an all-up capital missile from as recently as five or six T-years ago.

It seems the me that 15 megaton and 40 megaton are both impressive explosions.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Nope. They would run out of parking space and there probably isn't any decent parking space there, anyway--too small, it's going to be a total mess, not anything remotely flat.

Who needs flat? Install some cradles so the ship's bottom isn't lying on the surface and it'll hold up (literally).

Leda has a diameter of 21.5 km and Lysithea's is 42.2 km. They're highly irregular, not spherical, but if I approximate them to a sphere of half that radius, Leda would have a surface area of 1250 km² and Lysithea of 5000 km². For 5000 ships, that's 0.25 to 1 km². We don't have the dimensions of SL ships, but I'll approximate using the dimensions of an Anduril-class SD from HoS: 1304 x 189 x 176 m. So giving each ship a berth of 1.5 km long by 0.25 km wide on the surface gives a footprint of 0.375 km². They'd be packed like sardines on Leda, but Lysithea would be far roomier.

The cradle can also hold the ship down in case of some major atmospheric leak. Not to make sure it won't fly away from the moon -- even the 7.2 mm/s² mean surface gravity and 12 m/s escape velocity are too high for a mere leak, the ship would need to basically blow its entire mass in atmosphere at 1 km/s to achieve that delta-v (if I used the Tsiolkovsky calculators correctly). Achieving escape velocity is not the problem. Lifting up and colliding with the next ship over would be.

cthia wrote:Thanks for the link. But I don't think the SLN was aware of most of that. They weren't aware of their obsolescence, and didn't seem to be aware of what reactivating any of them would mean. So, in their head, the reserve should have been worth quite a bit. So why didn't they protect them with major platforms. A lot of resources were lost over the centuries tending to that junkyard. If you're not going to protect them, why maintain them.

Why does the answer to everything Solly have to be the same, "WE ARE THE INVINCIBLE SL."

Along the lines of what just happened with Naval "Station" Ganymede, I think it's easy to get lost in regarding the "Reserve" as if it was actually a functional reserve. It ceased to be that as soon as the SLN ran out of reserve personnel to man it(or built more ships than they had crews for).

They do have something of a disposal operation, as their battleships don't exist anymore and only a few dreadnoughts, if any, remained in the oldest corner of that reserve. That suggests to me the whole thing is more of a badly backlogged scrapyard queue. They probably started off calling it a Reserve so nobody asked why the scrapyards were so poorly run and then the bureaucracy forgot they did that and simply let it accumulate.

munroburton wrote:Along the lines of what just happened with Naval "Station" Ganymede, I think it's easy to get lost in regarding the "Reserve" as if it was actually a functional reserve. It ceased to be that as soon as the SLN ran out of reserve personnel to man it(or built more ships than they had crews for).

No Navy keeps enough personnel to man its mothballed ships on active duty. They may have them on half-pay or reserve status, at best. On active duty, they have for the ships they actually have active, plus the support personnel. You may be able to reassign from the latter to reactivated ships, but not entirely because it stands to reason that support is needed.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Quick note: there were at 8,000 SDs in the entire SLN reserve. I've argued before that not all of them were at Naval Station Ganymede, that some would be in other systems. And I've argued "Reserve One" isn't the entirety of the NSG reserve either.

Those ships need protection, but what was the danger to them? It s not like someone could steal them away from the SLN without someone noticing. The ships were cold (cold reactor, cold impeller nodes, probably no propellent or reaction mass, as discussed before). Even if someone snuck in undetected, fuelled it undetected, the wedge startup time would be a dead giveaway and allow the NSG patrol ships to intervene.

They wouldn't be attacked -- or so the SLN thought. Who in their right mind would strike at the Solarian League or the Sol system for that matter? And if they did, they wouldn't attack cold ships... those weren't an immediate threat. Any military planner rightfully would conclude that enemies would deal with the active ships and NSG defences first (remember there were 400 active SDs in the Sol system). If such an enemy got past all of those, any defences around the reserve wouldn't deter them anyway.

The way I see it, the biggest problem for the SLN would be theft from those ships. There were probably enough parts of military interest to 99% of the Verge and Shell that could be smuggled out.

And Ganymede had sufficient protections and anti-ship missiles capable of stopping most entire Honorverse navies cold. (Though at least some of the point defenses were recently increased in response to the conflict with Manticore -- just not increased anywhere near enough)

The problem is that conception of those defenses clearly pre-dates multidrive/stage missiles - relying to some extent on the breathing room that Jupiter's hyper limit provides - attackers having to cross that to get close enough to send anything but burned out missiles on balistic. The longer ranged missiles allows the attack to be launched, and be effective from out beyond Jupiter's hyper limit (allowing the attackers to hyper out to avoid counterbattery fire). Plus of course the defenses weren't designed to face the weight of fire modern podlayers, when massed in significant numbers, can put down -- nor against missiles as effective as Apollo.

But 10 years ago? Against RMN pre-pod SDs with only the handful of (SDM) pods they could tow? If 3rd fleet had been thrown against those defenses around Ganymede and Reserve One, instead of at Trevor's Star, the fleet would likely have taken painful losses. (And the Peep would pay an even higher cost should they throw one of their fleets at it back then).

Though even by that point in the 1st was with Haven the fixed defense and handful of on-station active ships probably weren't strong enough to actually stop such an assault cold. But going up against them would probably hurt in a way that taking that same fleet up against its equivalent tonnage of SLN SDs wouldn't have.


So I'd say it wasn't so much that the defenses were inadequate as designed and build; they'd simply been overtaken by newer technology. (Technology the SLN was slow to acknowledge and respond to)

Jonathan_S wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Quick note: there were at 8,000 SDs in the entire SLN reserve. I've argued before that not all of them were at Naval Station Ganymede, that some would be in other systems. And I've argued "Reserve One" isn't the entirety of the NSG reserve either.

Those ships need protection, but what was the danger to them? It s not like someone could steal them away from the SLN without someone noticing. The ships were cold (cold reactor, cold impeller nodes, probably no propellent or reaction mass, as discussed before). Even if someone snuck in undetected, fuelled it undetected, the wedge startup time would be a dead giveaway and allow the NSG patrol ships to intervene.

They wouldn't be attacked -- or so the SLN thought. Who in their right mind would strike at the Solarian League or the Sol system for that matter? And if they did, they wouldn't attack cold ships... those weren't an immediate threat. Any military planner rightfully would conclude that enemies would deal with the active ships and NSG defences first (remember there were 400 active SDs in the Sol system). If such an enemy got past all of those, any defences around the reserve wouldn't deter them anyway.

The way I see it, the biggest problem for the SLN would be theft from those ships. There were probably enough parts of military interest to 99% of the Verge and Shell that could be smuggled out.

And Ganymede had sufficient protections and anti-ship missiles capable of stopping most entire Honorverse navies cold. (Though at least some of the point defenses were recently increased in response to the conflict with Manticore -- just not increased anywhere near enough)

The problem is that conception of those defenses clearly pre-dates multidrive/stage missiles - relying to some extent on the breathing room that Jupiter's hyper limit provides - attackers having to cross that to get close enough to send anything but burned out missiles on balistic. The longer ranged missiles allows the attack to be launched, and be effective from out beyond Jupiter's hyper limit (allowing the attackers to hyper out to avoid counterbattery fire). Plus of course the defenses weren't designed to face the weight of fire modern podlayers, when massed in significant numbers, can put down -- nor against missiles as effective as Apollo.

But 10 years ago? Against RMN pre-pod SDs with only the handful of (SDM) pods they could tow? If 3rd fleet had been thrown against those defenses around Ganymede and Reserve One, instead of at Trevor's Star, the fleet would likely have taken painful losses. (And the Peep would pay an even higher cost should they throw one of their fleets at it back then).

Though even by that point in the 1st was with Haven the fixed defense and handful of on-station active ships probably weren't strong enough to actually stop such an assault cold. But going up against them would probably hurt in a way that taking that same fleet up against its equivalent tonnage of SLN SDs wouldn't have.


So I'd say it wasn't so much that the defenses were inadequate as designed and build; they'd simply been overtaken by newer technology. (Technology the SLN was slow to acknowledge and respond to)

How'd you do that? You anticipated and answered all of my billion dollar questions and then some. Cool. Copyediting should be a breeze now, as the only thing left is the million dollar question ...

10 years ago, could the RMN still have launched on the reserve and avoided Ganymede's defenses, like now?

cthia wrote:10 years ago, could the RMN still have launched on the reserve and avoided Ganymede's defenses, like now?

Yes, but they wouldn't do it.

Technically, the Mk14 ERMs and even the Mk13 could have likely avoided the defences of Ganymede and inflicted serious damage to what the RMN commander would have wanted to hit. Nowhere as good as Mk23 of course, even the pre-Apollo ones, but those missiles had already been ahead of the SLN Javelins before successive iterations against the war with Haven made them even beter.

SDMs have a regular range of about 7.5 million km, which is under half a light-minute. ERMs extend that to 17 million km, which is close to a full light-minute. Jupiter's hyperlimit has a radius of 3 light-minutes. So with SDMs, even the extended range ones, the attacking force would need to travel at least 2 light-minutes into the limit, which takes an hour. That's an awfully long time, but avoiding hitting Jupiter is pretty easy, so the fleet doesn't need to decelerate after launching and can just cut a chord and exit on any vector after about another hour and still be at only 0.1 c so it can transit out of the system.

They'd also need to have brought a lot of ships to tow enough pods. It's totally feasible for them to have rolled pods from the colliers before making their alpha translation into the Jovian system, so they could have brought sufficient missiles. But firing even a quarter as many as Honor did would have strained their capabilities.

So it could be done.

But it wouldn't be done. Because as I said, that would have strained their capabilities for too little gain. With at least 250 SLN SDs in the system defending it, it would be tactically irresponsible to attack the reserve and leave an active threat at their backs.

And it would also be strategically irresponsible for the RMN to do that. At this stage, the RMN does not have enough of a technological superiority (though it's coming, Buttercup era is only 1-1½ year away) to warrant such a provocation for little gain. It does not have the numbers either. The RMN was smaller at this time and had no pod-layers. Grayson at this point had just commissioned GSNS Honor Harrigton, hull number SD-31: so they have less than three dozen SDs. Even assuming somehow magically Thomas Theisman had been in charge of the RoH military and allied with Honor, and the Andermani were around, they wouldn't have added to much: their technology was much behind that of the MA and had not yet begun researching pod-layers.

A GA at 1911 could have won against the SLN, but it would have had to fight a very different war. They'd have to actually win much narrower military victories, destroying or crippling as many SDs as it could before the SLN got its act together. They'd have had to actually seek to destroy the SLN's active force and its production centres.

So a Grand Fleet in 1911 would have fought the SLN Sol Fleet first and, after winning, it would have looted the reserve, before scuttling it. The SDs are still death traps, but bringing home those overpowered grasers and all the NSG R&D records would be quite welcome.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote:Along the lines of what just happened with Naval "Station" Ganymede, I think it's easy to get lost in regarding the "Reserve" as if it was actually a functional reserve. It ceased to be that as soon as the SLN ran out of reserve personnel to man it(or built more ships than they had crews for).

No Navy keeps enough personnel to man its mothballed ships on active duty. They may have them on half-pay or reserve status, at best. On active duty, they have for the ships they actually have active, plus the support personnel. You may be able to reassign from the latter to reactivated ships, but not entirely because it stands to reason that support is needed.

I didn't say they lacked active-duty personnel. I said they lacked reserve personnel, as in the non-active personnel they don't retain in active service for whatever reasons. They had barely enough for a few hundred SDs - less than a tenth of the entire Reserve could be reactivated and manned by these reserve crews.

That is what made the bulk of the Reserve useless, a queue for the scapyard, even before any tech obsolescence kicked in. The SLN in 1750 or 1850 could also "only" operate one to two thousand wallers and man an additional two or three hundred - anything else they had waiting for the scrapyard couldn't be activated without about a decade of warning and preparation.

And if they got that decade, they would have ample opportunity to build a brand-new, redesigned battle wall for all those new crews as well. The only thing this "Reserve" really provided were sinecure positions for Battle Fleet's retired admirals.