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RHN hardware vs SLN

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Re: RHN hardware vs SLN
Post by Jonathan_S   » Mon Oct 10, 2022 8:04 am

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cthia wrote:If there isn't something equal to BuWeaps and someone equal to a Shannon or Sonja, how could the SLN ever have hoped to dissect and digest the information coming in about super missiles? No wonder they couldn't grasp the new threat environment.

I didn't think Project Gram was located on Weyland or either of the space stations. So, I wouldn't expect BuWeaps to be located on Ganymede. Although I could be wrong about Gram's physical location.

At any rate, I don't recall a BuWeaps in Grayson or RHN space either.

But out of the long history of the SL, Technodyne would not have been their major supplier of R&D or hardware. That's impossible and ludicrous in the face of classified information. So, where does the brunt of SL R&D occur? And who heads it up? The possibility of Manty superweapons was never passed by a SL version of Sonja.

FWIW the US dissolved its version of BuWeaps, the US Navy's Bureau of Ordnance, in 1959. That didn't stop it Navy from running various weapon development trials, nor from it acquiring a whole host of new weapon systems over the last 60-odd years. And, just as one example, didn't cause them to close the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS), now known as Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake where a number of weapons have been developed over the years (probably best known the Sidewinder family of heat seeking air-to-air missiles and Shrike anti-radiation [aka radar-killing] missile)

It just means that organizationally the navy no longer concentrated all weapons/ordinance development into a single Bureau. Instead, after some separation and merging, responsibility is a bit more dispersed and often time the navy now doesn't develop the weapons themselves -- instead they tell industry what kind of capabilities they'd like and lets the design teams of the various competing companies figure out different ways to meet, or exceed, the navy's demands.
(And even during WWII, when BuOrd was definitely a thing, some of the best weapons designs and improvements came from outside it and were sometimes adopted over their objections)

From a narrative point of view it's compelling to have a singular genius with her fingers in all weapons development; or at least a singular organization doing all the development work. But in reality it probably makes more sense to run the more distributed approach where you can better leverage the knowledge and skills of folks in industry and academia who aren't part of the navy's bureaucracy)
And on something the scale of the League there are simply too many places from which new research or weapons design could come from (now that they're sufficiently motivated, and the navy is looking for that) to run through just one person.
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Re: RHN hardware vs SLN
Post by kzt   » Mon Oct 10, 2022 11:59 am

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Software is how you implement concepts and theories. People discover or develop approaches to compromise sensors or other enemy systems. They then engineer systems to perform that attack, develop tactics to use it, and then write software to control that.

So if someone has developed approaches you have never through of and you gain access to their combat system software, analysis will tell you things that you might be able to utilize on completely different hardware, though it might also require that you develop and deploy new hardware.

It doesn’t mean you can effectively use it, as it might be exploiting a feature of your systems and not be generally applicable. But you’d still probably want to know that they figured out how to force your main anti-missile systems to drop all their tracks and reboot.
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Re: RHN hardware vs SLN
Post by cthia   » Sun Oct 16, 2022 11:43 am

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kzt wrote:Software is how you implement concepts and theories. People discover or develop approaches to compromise sensors or other enemy systems. They then engineer systems to perform that attack, develop tactics to use it, and then write software to control that.

So if someone has developed approaches you have never through of and you gain access to their combat system software, analysis will tell you things that you might be able to utilize on completely different hardware, though it might also require that you develop and deploy new hardware.

It doesn’t mean you can effectively use it, as it might be exploiting a feature of your systems and not be generally applicable. But you’d still probably want to know that they figured out how to force your main anti-missile systems to drop all their tracks and reboot.



Ditto.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: RHN hardware vs SLN
Post by Shannon_Foraker   » Sun Oct 30, 2022 9:36 pm

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cthia wrote:
Robert_A_Woodward wrote:
A "System Development Command" is mentioned in _Uncompromising Honor_ (also referred to in _A Rising Thunder_). It appears to be the equivalent of BuWeaps, but it didn't produce anything until after Kingsford purged the command staff.

If there isn't something equal to BuWeaps and someone equal to a Shannon or Sonja, how could the SLN ever have hoped to dissect and digest the information coming in about super missiles? No wonder they couldn't grasp the new threat environment.

I didn't think Project Gram was located on Weyland or either of the space stations. So, I wouldn't expect BuWeaps to be located on Ganymede. Although I could be wrong about Gram's physical location.

At any rate, I don't recall a BuWeaps in Grayson or RHN space either.

But out of the long history of the SL, Technodyne would not have been their major supplier of R&D or hardware. That's impossible and ludicrous in the face of classified information. So, where does the brunt of SL R&D occur? And who heads it up? The possibility of Manty superweapons was never passed by a SL version of Sonja.


Not trying to start a war, but wouldn't Bolthole be a sort of BuWeaps?
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Re: RHN hardware vs SLN
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Oct 30, 2022 10:05 pm

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Shannon_Foraker wrote:Not trying to start a war, but wouldn't Bolthole be a sort of BuWeaps?

I'd say rather than whatever organization in Haven mirrors BuWeaps responsibilities would partially overlap in a Venn diagram with Bolthole.

BuWeaps is the entire Bureau of (Naval) Weapons, which is more than just the R&D labs, or the weapons factories. Certainly some of Haven's best and most secure weapons development labs seem to be out at Bolthole, as would be weapons factories like the ones the first produced their MDMs -- but not all weapons R&D would have been moved be there; and whatever organization is responsible for all weapons R&D would have control over all the non-Bolthole labs as well.

But Manticore's BuWeaps is presumably also responsible for collecting information of how weapons have worked in the field to feed back into their R&D, some level of input or control of weapons maintenance and upgrades, etc. And they have oversight on some non-weapons things, like apparently the recon drone improvements that led to the current Ghost Rider were a BuWeaps project.

So the RHN's BuWeaps (or the organization(s) that serve that purpose for them) is larger than just Bolthole.
But conversely Bolthole is larger than just the weapons work there - it has an entire shipyard (presumably under Haven's equivalent of BuShips -- responsible for building, refit, and maintenance of vessels); and it has training facilities to train spacers for their new vessels and new technologies (which in Manticore would fall under BuTrain), and personnel departments to manage all the people (Manticore's BuPer), and would have hospitals and medical facilities (Manticore's BuMed), and WoH mentioned that the RHN has a Bureau of Logistics which presumably also has a presence in Bolthole.


But organizationally we don't know if Haven organizes things the same way Manticore did. It's quite possible that, just as a example, they might have put all manufacturing under a Bureau of Building or Bureau of Production, and all R&D under a Bureau of Research; While (as noted above) Manticore has weapons (and drone?) research, development, and production under BuWeap and ship design, production, refit, upgrade, and maintenance under BuShip -- but that isn't the only way to organize things. So we don't know if Haven has a direct analog to BuWeaps or if those function is split across multiple, differently organized, Bureaus.
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Re: RHN hardware vs SLN
Post by Somtaaw   » Sat Nov 05, 2022 4:27 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:So the RHN's BuWeaps (or the organization(s) that serve that purpose for them) is larger than just Bolthole.
But conversely Bolthole is larger than just the weapons work there - it has an entire shipyard (presumably under Haven's equivalent of BuShips -- responsible for building, refit, and maintenance of vessels); and it has training facilities to train spacers for their new vessels and new technologies (which in Manticore would fall under BuTrain), and personnel departments to manage all the people (Manticore's BuPer), and would have hospitals and medical facilities (Manticore's BuMed), and WoH mentioned that the RHN has a Bureau of Logistics which presumably also has a presence in Bolthole.


Not so sure on this one, Bolthole really isn't that much larger than Weyland was in scope. Both were combined R&D with dedicated shipyards and limited training capacity to train people on experimental hardware, and honestly Naval Station Ganymede served the same role for the Sollies.

We know that BuShips and BuWeaps seemed to generally share command of Weyland, but BuPers, BuTrain and BuPlan all had their spoons in that pot as part of a collective effort to mask things. The original Project Anzio for example, look how much they had to have been collaborating between at least the Space Lords of multiple bureaus. BuWeaps having conceived the LAC Carrier, BuShips ensuring the "personnel shuttles" were windowless & getting the Carrier testbed built at all, BuTrain making sure the high turnover fast repair training ship Candice was in the area, BuPers with the artfully useless assignment orders, and so on. Only BuMed wasn't openly involved, but a few of the officers iirc were recently recovered from injuries, so BuMed may have been overrided to get some of those officers back in space.


The only differences between Weyland, Bolthole and NSG was the total size, and that seemed relative to the overall size of the star nation in question, so on a sheer tonnage scale Ganymede was larger than Bolthole which was larger than Weyland. But thanks to sheer Manticoran efficiency, and lack thereof for Solarian efforts they were all seemed reasonably close to similar absolute outputs.


With how far back Weyland had originally been set up, we can make a fairly good inference that just about everybody (else) operates pretty much on the same Solly model. You might spread out your theoretical R&D a bunch because it's mostly theory and advanced math which can be done almost literally anywhere, even on the surface of say Basilisk, watching Stilties for entertainment. But for any projects that can actually be applied and requires even limited experimental hardware built, it all seems to be done at one centralized location (ex Ganymede, Bolthole, Weyland or Darius)
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