- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yes. To be clear, I knew how the missiles worked.
My point is that the entire category "very stealthy low-acceleration/low-velocity missile" is normally useless in the Honorverse as a weapon of war, for pretty much the reason the SLN rejected them. Either the missiles are invisible and highly unlikely to hit an uncooperative target, or they are visible (thanks to terminal guidance sensors) and highly likely to get shot down by an uncooperative target.
And because this category of weapon is not very useful against an uncooperative target, the RMN never tried to build it, and frontline RMN and Grayson personnel don't even seem to have seriously considered the possibility as of 1914 PD or so. So it's not really the case that we can work backwards from "the stealth capabilities of this weird weapon surprised Manticorans" to "the Manticorans lack the technology to duplicate this weird weapon and it's far beyond them."
Which is the thesis you were originally trying to use the missile to prove.
Ahem.
Okay, I'm going to be candid, since my paper copy of War of Honor is in a cardboard box somewhere and my efforts to online-search online copies went badly, I can't find the exact quotes in question. From the wiki, Foraker did develop observation platforms and use them in the runup to Thunderbolt.
However, I can't find any support for the proposition that the Argus network was running continuously or entirely undetected from 1905 to 1917. That doesn't mean no textual support exists for this, just that I have so far failed to find it despite a noticeable amount of effort. I may have used the wrong keywords or my browser may not have searched certain texts properly.
I can believe the actual physical platforms were not discovered, for reasons I discuss below, but this is particularly unimpressive if the Argus observation platforms were not in active use... and as far as I know, they weren't.
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As with the stealth missiles but for a different reason, I think you've been overly impressed by the capabilities Argus implies. Successfully deploying something like Argus clearly represents respectable operational capabilities, and there's a "floor" of technological competence below which someone couldn't do it, but beyond that, the nature of the setting means that anyone who has a large, well-organized fleet and industrial base could probably set up something like Argus if they put their mind to it, and countering such technology will necessarily be difficult for the defenders.
The reason for this comes down to the fact that Honorverse sensors have a practical maximum range, especially in systems that don't have very large fixed arrays as part of an expensive defensive investment.
To provide some context...
By far the easiest thing to detect from a distance is enemy ships with full-up, highly active impeller wedges, or alternatively enemy ships coming out of hyperspace. If individual ships slip into normal space slowly and carefully, starting from far enough "out," they are much harder to spot, regardless of technology. Likewise if they maneuver slowly and carefully under low levels of impeller power. This greatly reduces the effective range of detection- and if the impeller wedge is turned off, or if the target doesn't have a wedge at all, then detection at ranges of light-minutes or longer becomes virtually impossible for small targets in the setting. You don't need to have better tech than your opponent to take advantage of this, any more than you have to be some kind of super-secret stealth ninja expert to hide in a clump of bushes a hundred yards away from someone. Sure, they might spot you at long range, but it's inherently a hard task.
The Argus platforms avoid detection in large part by being outside normal sensor range. Since they are purely passive observers, they emit few or no signals an enemy could conceivably detect. Certainly they don't have the kind of gravitic emissions profile Honorverse technology usually uses for long range detection. As for detection via the more ordinary EM spectrum, the platforms are puny compared to, say, a random Kuiper Belt object. And they will be made of low-observability materials by default. So they are inherently very hard to see if you don't have a good idea of where to look.
The most important thing that better technology lets you do to make an Argus platform harder for the enemy to spot is that it gives you better sensors, so you can park the platform farther away from the enemy in the inner system and still observe them, thus gaining even more security-through-obscurity.
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Note that this also ties into why I'm not impressed that the Manties haven't spotted the platforms if the Havenites stopped actively using them after 1905 PD, which seems likely. Without Havenite picket ships going in and making hyper translations to get the datadumps from the platforms, they're just random bits of space debris way farther out from the inner system than is relevant. They would indeed be hard to find, even as products of inferior technology.
Because the real test of "is your stealth good" in the Honorverse is whether you can maneuver actively and get close to the enemy unseen. Not whether you can be 'invisible' when emitting nothing and parked billions of kilometers away.
[As to why I don't think the Havenites were actively using the Argus platforms from 1905 to 1917 PD or so... Well, think about it. For almost all that time they were being pushed back away from the systems where they'd originally seeded the platforms. Argus-like systems only really work when you know exactly which systems the enemy will occupy for months into the future and don't mind planning ahead by putting observation platforms out there to watch them. During the First Manticore-Haven War, the front lines were just fluid enough to disrupt that kind of plan.]
Hm.
To explain myself better, I'm going to have to digress a bit about how shipbuilding and ship design work in real life. So... well, maybe you'll think I'm backpedaling, or maybe not, and maybe I've communicated poorly. Don't know. Don't care. Here's what I really think about League military shipbuilding.
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Okay, the first rule to remember is the SLN is a bureaucracy, trying to survive and persist in a somewhat hostile environment. The environment is hostile because the League is so hilariously secure at the strategic level that it's hard to justify an actual military beyond small naval forces in the hands of regional garrison authorities. One of the most critical things a bureaucracy in this kind of position has to focus on is retaining capacity, because if it loses capacities on a permanent basis it becomes vulnerable to "shrink it till it can drown in the bathtub" tactics.
In particular, the SLN needs to retain, on centuries-long timescales, certain critical features:
1) A sizeable reserve fleet (which justifies an oversized "tail" of support infrastructure as being held in readiness for mobilization of the reserve).
2) The means to rapidly retrofit and reactivate the reserve fleet, justified by and in turn justifying (1), and allowing for infrastructure expansion.
3) A naval design and engineering establishment capable of updating and designing ships, and understanding the designs of existing ships, which is a precondition for (2).
4) Ongoing shipbuilding and design activity, necessary to sustain (3).
5) An active-duty fleet, created by (4) and providing justification for further infrastructure, while also lending credibility to the ongoing existence of (1).
If it starts losing any of these, it's going to run into problems. Lose (1) and you lose the justification for keeping a large chunk of the SLN employed maintaining those ships and the capacity to support them all if they are needed- something that probably serves as a sinecure for a lot of SLN officers. Lose (2) and the reserve fleet cannot be reactivated in a timely manner, making it pointless, and you lose (1). Lose (3) and you don't have (2). Lose (4) and you don't have anything, soon enough; you'll have neither an active duty fleet nor the capacity to sustain or upgrade the reserve fleet.
In particular, let's focus on (4).
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Warship designs don't pop out of thin air. Large teams of engineers, preferably experienced engineers, have to pore over every detail of the design, or on the other end of the process you don't have a functional warship. This is very much true in real life and has been throughout the twentieth century; I see no reason it would become less true in the Honorverse where ships are larger and more technologically complex.
Likewise, warship production is a specialized industry. Warships in the Honorverse tend to use materials and equipment nothing else uses. As we've discussed in various contexts, it takes a large collection of specialists to build the ships properly.
As such, the SLN cannot afford to ever truly cease production of warships, nor can it afford to simply not do any design work for thirty years and then reconvene an engineering team to do the work on the next cruiser class or whatever. In either case, the skilled workforce they need would scatter and when they finally wanted to restart the machinery, it wouldn't work. Quality would suffer and the SLN would likely become more dependent on outsourcing, contracting, and all the things that gradually cause bureaucracies to shrivel up and die.
They don't want that.
So there is a political and logistical imperative for the SLN to always be manufacturing ships somewhere, and to always have warship designers (re)designing a ship somewhere.
Put together, these imperatives give rise to a surprisingly realistic solution:
Flights.
For an example of this in practice, see the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Design on the Arleigh Burkes started in 1980 and construction has been ongoing almost continuously since the late 1980s, with no end in sight.
However, importantly, the ships of this class laid down today are not identical to the first ones. Instead, successive modifications have been made to the design, improving on problems found in the earliest models and integrating new systems when and as they arise, without radically changing the design itself.
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I don't know how long the Solarian League kept churning out, for example, Scientist-class capital ships. But I am reasonably confident that for the political and logistical reasons described:
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1) The ships were not all built at once, but rather a few dozen at a time in specific yard facilities that work continuously. This keeps the workforce from leaving for other jobs (or, pre-prolong, just dying of old age) in between bursts of construction. It is also far more sustainable in terms of political capital costs. Instead of having to beg desperately for money to crash-build hundreds or thousands of ships a couple of times a century, you just chug along in the background with a construction budget so small they could probably run it as a GoFundMe without the central government even becoming involved, every year.
"If everyone reading this message donated five Space Dollars, the League Navy could afford to build 100 of the most powerful capital ships in the known universe this year."
[You laugh, but quite a few pre-WWI governments paid to build at least some of their warships by public subscription, which was basically "the government runs a GoFundMe drive among the population, only without the Internet."]
[To be clear, I'm not asserting as a factual proposition that the League does this, only that they are far more likely in general to be able to sustain the production they desire as a low-rate continuous operation than as periodic "spikes" whenever they commission a new class a couple of times a century]
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2) Along with the ships not all being built at once, design teams kept tinkering with the ships throughout the production run, if only to keep the designers busy and gainfully employed working for the SLN. Now, they're not visiting the fundamental design philosophy questions the way Manticorans (who are desperate to find a way to make one ship do the work of two) or Havenites (who have a wealth of combat experience informing their ideas, while trying to keep costs down despite knowing their navy will be used).
But they'll be trying to solve problems like "aha, this storage layout is suboptimally efficient" or "hmm, the end-users are complaining that whenever the ship accelerates at above 60% of maximum military power, there's a resonance vibration set up by the after impeller nodes and every toilet in the back half of the ship spontaneously unflushes" or "oh dear, there was an equipment failure aboard the SLNS Joe Buckley and the new missile tube accidentally shredded a thirty-ton missile and railgunned the fragments backwards into the ship's hull at hypersonic speeds, we'd better do some redesign of the ship electrical grid so that can't happen again."
Or speculative stuff like "hmm, if we reduce the comfort of the crew quarters by 25%, how much extra space does that free up for fuel tankage to increase the ship's operational range, is it worth designing that into the next fifty capital ships we build?"
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3) As a consequence of (1) and (2), I would expect a longstanding class like the Scientists and the Indefatigables to exist in several recognizable "flights" or "blocks" in a quasi-realistic setting. This affects how often ship designs are "updated," but also means that even within the active-duty fleet not all SLN ships will be fully modernized. And of course ships in the reserve fleet will very rarely receive modernization...
Though one of the kinds of busy work likely to keep the design teams preoccupied is the very challenging project of "so, this is a Flight I Coelecanth-class dreadnought built literally 300 years ago... uh, how exactly would we refit it into something capable of participating on a modern battlefield without being a complete deathtrap, exactly?"
