I salvaged this from an old database. Thought some might like to see it again.

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On 1/22/98 3:05:55 AM, MARK HUME wrote: Simply as a What If. you did not have the capability to place ground troops, could not lift sufficient troops to match what was on the surface, or did not have time to conduct a protracted engagement on the surface. As in time for a hit and run only, doing the most damage possible in the shortest amount of time. Also would be a requirement that you did not care what happened to the planet, population, etc.

Would this be a form of scorched earth defensive policy, Scorched Planet?

Mark

Two Problems, guys:

(1) The "rules of war" of HH's universe require a planet to surrender when you control the high orbitals. If it doesn't, you're justified in doing all sorts of nasty things to said planet. But—

(2) If you carry out a mass planetary bombardment, you are in violation of the Solarian League's Eridani Edict, and the League will come and spank you with an axe. This is not an optional decision on the Sollies' part; the Eridani Edict is written into their constitution. This means that doing ANYTHING which could look like an indscriminate area attack on an inhabited planet is very much contraindicated unless you really like having the most powerful political unit in the known galaxy come annihilate you.

Sorry.

David

On 2/14/98 11:42:34 AM, Scott Washburn wrote: William: Good questions. 1. In HAE they tried to recover the pods because they were operating beyond normal logistic support, but considering the cost (and the possible production shortfalls I mentioned earlier)it would make sense to try and recover them.

2. Purpose built munition ships make sense 3. The problem of escort for the fleet train definitely benefits the defender. O,K, let me throw out a new thought: What sort of conventions exist regarding a planet whose star system is occupied by an enemy fleet?

Supply—and especially missile resupply—IS a major problem for the navies of HH's universe. The RMN does build specialized ammunition ships, and has been building more of them, hence the specialized fast merchantmen Honor is escorting in IEH when she is captured. The question of what happens when an enemy fleet controls the high orbitals has been discussed at some length on alt.books.david-weber. I do not normally do much web surfing because of how it cuts into writing time, but when someone raised the point there a friend of mine e-mailed the question to me. The point is covered (briefly) in ECHOES OF HONOR, where the Eridani Edict is referred to.

I can give a little more explanation without, I think, providing spoiler info on the new book, however. In essence, a planet is supposed to surrender when an enemy fleet controls the high orbitals. This is analagous to the 18th century military tradition which required a fortress to surrender when the attacker's siege guns had blown "a practicable breach" in its walls. If it surrendered at that point, the fortress garrison was assured of decent treatment. If it persisted when, under the "rules of war," its position had become hopeless, the attackers had the "right" to sack the city and execute the garrison. This was because the defenders had been so pigheaded as to continue inflicting casualties when they knew they couldn't win. (It was also a reaction to the incredible bloodshed of the previous century's religious wars.)

In HH's time, this means that since once a planet is exposed to orbital bombardment, its position is hopeless, it is OBLIGED to surrender. If it does not, the attacker may carry out orbital bombardment, though he is supposed to start with military targets and work his way down the list towards civilian targets. There is, however, a catch—the aforesaid Eridani Edict, which the Solarian League enacted after several billion of its citizens were killed in orbital bombardments in the Epsilon Eridani System. The Edict is embodied in the League Constitution and REQUIRES the League Navy to go after ANYONE who carries out an indiscriminate planetary bombardment.

What this means is that if either side in the Havenite Wars were to attack the other side's planetary civilian populations from space, the League would AUTOMATICALLY come in on the other side. Which means, I suspect, that no one will try it.

Of course, I could be wrong. I'm only the writer, and some of these people are STUBBORN :-) . David

On 2/17/98 8:04:47 AM, Scott Washburn wrote: Ronald: You are certainly correct about the increased Alliance production capability. My point, however, was if it is impossible to stop a fractional cee attack against orbital installations, why isn't it happening? The Peeps have shown that they have the ability to make deep penetration operations (Silesia and Fourth Yeltsin) and also sneaky ones like the Argus operation before the war. A Peep attack force could come out of hyper a few light months out of Manticore, accelerate up to .8 cee, launch the missiles and then get out. The Manties would never know they had even been there until the missiles hit two months later. According to Weber there is no defense against this so why aren't the Peeps (and the RMN) doing this?

Excuse me. I never meant to say that ALL fixed defenses were sitting ducks for cee-fractional attacks, and I think there has been some misreading here.

I said that in the case of GRAYSON's original forts, which had been refitted with spherical sidewalls BUT NOT DRIVES, there was no defense against a cee-fractional attack. Newer forts, like those the RMN has deployed to cover wormhole termini and planets, HAVE the ability to move (albeit at low accel rates) and so are not required to hold absolutely predictable positions. This means that long-range cee-fractional strikes become much less effective against them. And, of course, even if the warheads reach attack range of a modern fort, they still have to burn through sidewalls much more powerful than those which could be squeezed into the (small) forts Grayson had refitted.

The orbital defenses of Hades are vulnerable for an additional reason: they not only cannot maneuver, but they also have no sidewalls and can be killed by proximity attacks.

As for the tactic of dropping out of hyper so far out as to be undetected, launching the missiles, accelerating them to .99 cee, and letting them run in to attack range, you hit several problems:

(1) The central systems of the Alliance (and especially the Manticoran Binary System) are equipped with enormous, extremely sensitive gravitic arrays which can detect hyper footprints and impeller wedges at EXTREME ranges.

(2) At any range at which those very large gravitic arrays (like a couple of thousand of kilometers on a side) can't detect YOU upon your emergence from hyper, YOUR targeting systems certainly cannot detect your intended victims. This means you will have to launch blind and hope your targeting data from your system ephemeris is accurate enough to fire "off the map" and hit a target which, however large in absolute terms, is a flea-speck on any sort of solar system scale.

(3) Even assuming that you can make your launch from far enough out, your birds' sensor arrays will be exposed to fairly massive particle erosion once their drives go down. This will even further degrade their ability even to see their targets, should they happen to enter attack range.

(4) Even if your missiles' sensors arrays work properly, and even if a target comes within their cone of vision, it may well not be the RIGHT target. This is not a problem as long as it is an enemy warship, but suppose the wrong target is a neutral freighter? Or a passenger liner? Something like that could be Hard To Explain to the neutral news services.

All in all, this is a tactic which looks good on paper but doesn't work well in real life.

David

On 2/18/98 3:54:14 PM, Scott Washburn wrote:

One problem with speculating on the design of LAC carriers is that we do not know how big one of the new LAC's is. If the size relation ship between a LAC and an SD was the same as that between an F-14 and a Nimitz class carrier, then a Lac would mass 2500-3000 tons. I have gotten the impression, however, that a LAC is actually somewhere in the 10,000 - 20,000 ton range. Anyone have any ideas?

Try 20,000 tons. The new SHRIKE-class LAC is described (and maybe, oh, used just a LITTLE) in Echoes of Honor. David

On 2/21/98 10:22:32 PM, Douglas Jones wrote:

Getting away from LAC's for a minute. any thoughts on Wall of Battle - dedicated pod launching ships, larger then SD? Start with a large design. No, I mean a LARGE design. forget about 8M such as Wayfarer. Lets try 20 or 30M. Full range of armor, design from the core out as a ship of battle. The newest designs from RMN and Grayson for compensators, PD, etc. Is there an upper limit on energy weapons other then the size of the ship you are trying to fit them into? What would happen if you took a SD size graser and doubled the size and capability? Would that provide a sufficient increase in power output and range to justify the increased space requirement? What would the range be then? What about if the new class could launch 18 pods every 6 seconds. 18 pods x 10 launches x 10 missiles per pod would = 1800 missiles per minute from just one ship. (yes, this was mentioned elsewhere). Would this be sufficient firepower to justify building a division or 2 of these ships? Would the shielding, armor, etc that you could put on a ship this size reduce it's vulnerability due to it's being a larger (the biggest in sight) target? Doug

Using current technology, even with Grayson-derived inertial compensators, a ship of the mass you are describing would have a pitifully low acceleration rate. Remember that even the RMN's 16,000,000-ton Junction forts have an itty-bitty acceleration compared to any warship out there. Go back and look at the technical appendices in MTH, although there is a typo in the section describing the drop off in max accel above 8.5 Mtons. The actual drop is 1 G per 21,929 tons of mass above that. Thus a 30 MT ship, which is 21.5 Mtons bigger would have an acceleration 980 gees lower than an SD. Which, of course, would be a negative number—theoretically speaking. In fact, of course, it would simply be immobile.

David

On 3/13/98 7:50:44 AM, Scott Washburn wrote:

Andrew, On the targeting issue, I think you are overlooking how big space is and how much acceleration these ships have to work with. In a ten second time span a ship could be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away from where its "predicted course" would have put it if it had not changed course. No "canister blast" of energy shots over a wide area is going to have much luck hitting anything. As for the wall of battle - true its maneuverability is somewhat restricted but even a very tight wall is still mostly empty space.

FTL energy weapons, hey? I don't think so . . . unless somebody can figure out how to create a hyper space fold to zap the weapon through, sort of like DAHAK's fold-space coms. Of course, the Imperium had tech just a LITTLE more advanced than HH's.

On the long-range energy weapon targeting question, I really hate to point this out, but they don't even have to change course randomly to screw you up at really extended ranges. All they have to do is roll ship at unpredictable intervals, since no energy weapon can penetrate an impeller wedge. And a wall of battle can do that without undue difficulty if they are well trained and drilled. For that matter, individual ships within the wall could roll ship AS individuals rather than attempting to roll the entire wall at once, which would REALLY confuse your sensors at that sort of extended range. Since SOMEONE would be shooting at you the entire time, it would be extremely difficult (aka, impossible) to tell which ship was in what attitude at any given moment.

But it would be a nice thing to have if it were possible to make it work. David

I thought about it for a while and finally decided to go ahead and post the basic stats for the new SHRIKE-class LACs of the RMN. These are discussed in ECHOES OF HONOR, where (hint, hint) you will also get to see them in action for the first time. I don't plan to discuss their tactical doctrine or combat debut with any specificity, because I don't want to inadvertently give up any spoilers for what happens in the book, but I'm sure you uninhibited bunch of speculators can have fun playing with the new class all on your own.

The SHRIKE-class masses 20,000 metric tons, is 115 meters in length, with a maximum beam of 19.2 meters, and does NOT have the conventional warship hammerheads. It carries a crew of only 10: CO, XO, astrogator, tac officer, engineer, assistant engineer, helmsman, sensor officer, com officer, & electronic warfare specialist. It has NO broadside armament OR point defense.

The SHRIKE's main armament is a spinal graser mount (equivalent to a main battery weapon from one of the HOMER-class BCs), 4 "revolver" launchers for shipkiller missiles, and 4 counter-missile tubes, supported by 6 point defense laser clusters mounted around the graser emitter. The missile tubes are in blisters mounted aft of the forward impeller ring, aligned to fire between the nodes, which is the reason the normal hammerhead was Omitted: to clear the tubes' field of fire. Because of advances in mass drivers, missile on-board electronics, and shipboard fire control, coupled with the tubes' placement aft of the forward ring, a SHRIKE can fire attack missiles OR point defense missiles at angles of up to 120 degrees "off bore". The SHRIKE's shipkillers are equivalent to those carried by CLs or DDs, and each revolver magazine carries 5 missiles (total of 20 anti-shipping missiles carried internally), while the counter-missile magazine contains 52 missiles. With their new compensators, the SHRIKES can attain accelerations of 636 G at max military power, or 508.8 G at the normal "80% of military power" maximum rating of the RMN.

The SHRIKEs are also the first class to be fitted with the new "beta-squared" impeller nodes. These are MUCH more powerful than older beta nodes, reducing the required number of nodes from 16 per impeller ring to only 8. (They are more massive than the old beta nodes, but only by 15%-20%, and the mass saved is one reason the new ships are able to fit in internal magazines.) The mass savings also permit much more powerful sidewall generators, and the efficiency of the SHRIKEs' sidewalls is roughly equivalent to that of many older CAs, though not to that of the most recent ships of that type.

In addition, one of the LACs biggest problems has always been limited endurance; they simply do not have the bunker space for fusion reactor hydrogen for more than a few weeks' cruising. The SHRIKEs, however, borrowing another element from the Grayson tech bag, are built around high efficiency, very lightweight FISSION reactors, which means their endurance is now limited only by their environmental support.

On the electronics front, the new LACs have EW (and especially ECM) capabilities superior to most light cruisers. Coupled with their much smaller impeller signatures, which are already much less readily detectable than a DD's, that makes them far more stealthy than any other warship yet built. A SHRIKE mounts 3 tractors, which means it can tow up to 3 missile pods, but only with severe degradation of its acceleration curve. A SHRIKE with a single pod suffers a 20% reduction in accel; one with 2 pods suffers a 50% reduction; and one with 3 pods suffers an 80% reduction (max military power accel of only 127.2 gees). In addition, even a single pod on tow requires drive power levels which make stealth very difficult even with all the EW built into the new class.

The SHRIKE also mounts the new Phase Four FTL com. The P4 Com pulse repetition rate per beta node increase from one roughly every 93 seconds to one about every 9.5 seconds AND the new com is able to use separate beta nodes to generate separate pulses—that is, it has a total of 16 pulse generators, which means it can translate one pulse roughly every .594 seconds, with obvious advantages in increased data transmission rates. (Like by a factor of about 15657% over the Phase One com.)

Finally, the SHRIKE can do something no other warship can: it generates a BOW sidewall (already dubbed the "bow wall"). This is not as foolish as it sounds, despite the fact that it is well known that the forward and after aspects of an impeller wedge cannot be closed if the drive is to function. The trick is that one CAN close the bow aspect of a wedge so long as one is willing to accept that the wedge cannot then be used to accelerate or maneuver the vessel. That is, once the bow wall goes up, the LAC is limited to vector changes attainable with pure reaction thrusters until the bow wall comes down again. The bow wall contains only a single firing port—for the graser—which means that no missiles, offensive or defensive, may be fired while the bow wall is up. However, it is an IMMENSELY powerful bow wall—much more powerful than the sidewalls—and offers hostile units a very, very small, VERY "hardened" target.

The SHRIKE's biggest weakness, aside from its fragility, is that its sensor suite and on-board computer support, while probably at least as good as anything the Peeps currently possess, are simply too cramped for space to be up to the standards of heavier Manty units. A SHRIKE's sensors and fire control can be considered roughly equivalent to those of an RMN DD/CL, but are considerably inferior to those of any heavier units.

I won't go into any detail about squadron organization, wing size, the design of prototype carriers, etc., although these have been worked out for the novel. I figure this ought to be enough for you people to play with for the moment.

But I WILL tell you the name of the officer selected to run Project Anzio and test the feasibility of the LAC-carrier concept. You've met her before: Captain (SG) Alice Truman.

Enjoy

— David

On 3/16/98 2:09:55 PM, Paul Schmidt wrote: David, thanks for the info. I agree that you don't have to plug your books,

Maybe I don't have to, but there's a boisterous (not to say snerky) little boy side of me that ENJOYS plugging them. And this one is going to run to 250,000-plus words, so I feel even more pluggish than usual.

I thought Alice Truman was senior to Alistar McKeon? If so how come she has not promoted to Commodore?

Because McKeon got promoted out of the zone. It happens, even in the RMN, and especially in wartime.

Also, as a nuclear engineer I find it difficult to imagine a fission reactor that would have a higher energy Density than a fusion reactor. Kg for Kg the energy available by fusing 1 Kg of hydrogen is far more than that available by fissioning 1 Kg of Uranium

I never said the fission plants had a higher energy density than a fusion plant. What I said was that they were high efficiency fission plants—ie., much more efficient than anything the 20th century CE can boast. Their output is actually considerably lower than contemporary fusion plants (oh nit-picky Nuc!), but, then again, a LAC, even with a great, huge, humongous graser strapped on doesn't NEED the power output of a BC-sized fusion plant. What it does need that it hasn't had before is ENDURANCE, and that's where the fission plant comes in. You could look at it rather like the USN looked at reciprocating steam plants-versus-turbines in the first decade or so of this century. The turbine could drive a battleship at a higher rate of speed, but it was inefficient in terms of cruising radius (endurance) compared to "last generation" reciprocating plants with forced lubrication. Accordingly, the USN opted to stick with the older-style plants much longer than anyone else did, because the USN was the only navy then designing its battle fleet for strategic endurance. Similar considerations (plus superior damage-resistance ability) also helped drive the USN's later interest in turbo-electric machinery.

Oops. Digression. At any rate, the point for the SHRIKE is that the RMN has opted to trade off reduced power output for enhanced endurance in a unit whose power requirements are lower than those of larger units.

BTW, this is possible only because the Graysons, redeveloping their tech in isolation and living in a neighborhood lousy with heavy metals and fissionables, resurrectedd a power plant the rest of humanity had long ago abandoned. Their designs were much more efficient than the mainstream galactic tech base had contemplated, and the SKM, with other high tech goodies to play with, had tweaked it still further.

David