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Yamato 2199 is a great show, even without Star Blazers nostalgia to go on. It's a classic story, well told, and with the best WW2 ships in space art done yet. As I recall, Crunchyroll has it in the US and it's absolutely worth a watch. Passage at Arms is loosely connected to the Shadowline/Starfishers trilogy. The war from PoA is backstory for the trilogy, but recent enough that a climber can be taken out of mothballs and crewed for an ultra top secret recon mission. PoA was actually written later, possibly to reinforce just how hosed things are that they might have to resort to using climbers again. U-Boat crews had a rough time of it, climber crews had it even worse. PoA is also a note-perfect retelling of Das Boot, and is the greatest space warfare as submarine warfare book yet written, and will probably remain so. I'd say read it, then grab Shadowline and keep going, that's a really interesting series with a lot of moving parts and intriguing worldbuilding. I hope Moishe finishes his novel sometime.
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May 4, 2020 07:56
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General Battuta posted:e: qne You've forgotten the most critical point though, which alphabet would you use for negative bands? Cyrillic has the problem of having several slightly different regional variants (plus "We've hit the ge wall" doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way as alpha wall or theta wall). Devanagari has very similar sounding letter names which would get confusing. Arabic probably works the best if you cut out some of the similar letter names but doesn't transliterate to Latin script super well. I'm not even going to touch Hangul. Actually, in doing some research, the Georgian alphabet looks kind of cool (ani/bani/gani/doni/eni/vini/zeni). I think next time you want to use the Greek alphabet for something you should use the Georgian instead to mix it up. On less important matters, I'm not sure what tactical use "submarine" style ships would be - obviously the traditional role of submarines as merchant ship hunters is pointless in the universe because every ship is effectively a submarine outside of planetary systems. Any attacks inside planetary systems would effectively be suicide attacks (I'm assuming here that you're significantly weaker than the defenders - otherwise you would just conventionally attack them) since you can't translate upwards inside the hyper limit and if you translate downwards the opponent will just overfly your position in real space and then translate down on top of you. I think you'd have to come up with some kind of weapon that could be launched from - let's call it "subspace" - across the boundary into real space, basically a torpedo analogue. Even then, it seems too easy to defend against since most targets worth attacking are in fixed locations and could have some sort of warning system in place. There's not really a doctrinal use for subspace because of how ships travel between systems - if anything a space submarine would be some kind of incredibly stealthy vessel that sits in the middle of grav waves waiting for convoys to come by. You would be hoping to set up a long range shot into their unprotected tops/bottoms (since they're in sail mode in grav waves) and then fly off the other direction. You'd have to be stealthy enough that they can't detect you until you're close enough to be able to effectively shoot them, but that's why this is a specialty class of ship - all the stealth equipment takes up so much space/mass that it's a terrible combat ship (it probably doesn't even carry any missiles since it expects to do all its fighting in grav waves). I think Weber actually dismissed the idea of a specialty grav wave combat ship in one of the books by claiming that almost no combat took place in grav waves vs. in systems, but I don't think he considered the possibilities for commerce raiding as opposed to straight up combat inherent in such a design. This actually sounds like something the Solarians could use in your story since they probably have a few grav wave-optimized designs kicking around as part of their "make a ton of weird ships and see if anything works well" ship design process. Throw a few of those into the grav waves that serve the major trade routes and they could probably have a pretty major impact on the merchant marine.
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May 4, 2020 08:16
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blackmongoose posted:This actually sounds like something the Solarians could use in your story since they probably have a few grav wave-optimized designs kicking around as part of their "make a ton of weird ships and see if anything works well" ship design process. Throw a few of those into the grav waves that serve the major trade routes and they could probably have a pretty major impact on the merchant marine. I don’t think that they would develop something like that. They’ve been characterized as barely considering infrastructure attacks as a way to wage war. Given that they have more ships than anyone else and are basically uninterested in inflicting attrition over the course of a long enemy advance the League probably wouldn’t build this sort of thing. On the other hand I could completely see Bolthole turning a few out because they know that they can’t win a conventional fight but might want a threat that would cause manticore to delay their military advance. On thing that I like about Uller in General Battuta’s rewrite is that it makes a lot of sense as an avenue the SLN would pursue and underscores their commitment to a decisive battle doctrine. IIRC missiles were kind of a joke for a long time in universe; only becoming decisive for sub-wall ships recently with the invention of bomb pumped warheads. And until manticore started to up their salvo density with pods, missiles still only caused gradual damage in a wall of battle. So for the SLN the actual part of a battleship that puts in work is the graser broadside, so they revolutionize that at the same time manticore is rethinking missile combat. I also like VEDA, they give a strong Lancer forecast/GALSIM by way of the Laundry Files vibe.
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May 4, 2020 09:34
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akulanization posted:I don’t think that they would develop something like that. They’ve been characterized as barely considering infrastructure attacks as a way to wage war. I don't think they would have put a great deal of effort into it, but Battuta has characterized their small ship design as including a bunch of random ideas that some guy in R&D came up with while stoned out of his mind/hung over/after watching 20 hours of Galactic Hero Solaria. Based on that paradigm they probably have a couple grav wave optimized ships lying around somewhere. Their doctrinal ideas may mean that no one actually realizes what they have, but if he wants to introduce space submarines it's not too far out there that some random analyst comes up with a new idea on how to use these weirdo ships he noticed in inventory.
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May 4, 2020 09:46
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All this talk of missiles in terms of mass and length is confusing to me. A missile weighs what and is 15m long? But how big is it really? And the pods? Please present all arguments in displacement tons from now on, where 1 dT is the volume of 1 metric ton of liquid hydrogen, approximately two 1.5m grid squares, 3m in height. Thank you.
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May 4, 2020 12:12
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Kchama posted:
I don't think that was the point of the line there. Raoul is an admiral by training and temperament - a naval battle is what he's trained for his entire life for, so it's an incredibly straightforward assignment. There's a strong element of "we should have an agreement in place by now - we both want what the other wants, and we could have it by now if they weren't being so chatty", but there's not even an undercurrent of "diplomacy sucks, just kill em all and let God sort em out". Looking through the series, I don't see a single case where honest diplomacy failed without sabotage. quote:Also this is an attack they've seen coming from a pretty decent distance away because basically they wanted to be seen and the target of the attack is basically screwed. Of course it is. If you have very few ships - this small detachment is bigger than the entire Grayson navy sans LACs, and the other guy's willing to strike at peripheral targets, an impossible intercept is the rule rather than a shock. Your ships and fortresses are positioned to cover the most important territory - the planet Grayson and the extensive network of orbital farms that feed it. The only way to do more is to have a huge navy in your system, and Grayson can't afford it. What we have here is essentially a coastal raid. To put it into recognizable terms, the Grayson fleet is in the English Channel, while the Masadans are dashing off to bombard Cornwall. Close enough that the fleet can intercept, but not close enough that they can intercept before the shells hit. 90s Cringe Rock posted:All this talk of missiles in terms of mass and length is confusing to me. A missile weighs what and is 15m long? But how big is it really? And the pods? Please present all arguments in displacement tons from now on, where 1 dT is the volume of 1 metric ton of liquid hydrogen, approximately two 1.5m grid squares, 3m in height. Thank you. You jest, but this is exactly where Weber's problems with numbers comes from. Through the entire series, he gives almost everything in mass. Physical dimensions are rarely given, except as a throwaway note when gushing over some New Fancy Ship or as a "the missile is three meters (or whatever) long, making it really awkward to move around" note. The few physical dimensions he gives are wrong - he forgot the square-cube law, so the ships should mass three times as much for the dimensions they have. He also assumed that, for example, a 3,000,000 ton ship could easily carry 30,000 tons of missile, and never worked out the cubage that that many missiles would require compared to the dimensions of the ship.
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May 4, 2020 22:06
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All this talk about missiles made me realize two things: 1. Goddamn, I never imagined Weber's ships to be so thin. A length to width ratio of 17:1 is more like needle then spindle, imho 2. For some reason I started liking missile-battles in the early books, but the ever growing missile-holocausts of the later books mentally exhausted me to the point where, when I now read about space battles in my favorite SF-series, I'm secretly glad if they just, like, move their KNK-cannons and shoot at something, instead of spewing trillions of death-kill missiles.
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May 4, 2020 22:42
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I really do think pods ruined everything in Honor Harrington. He wanted to do age of sail combat, so he had ships launching missiles from their broadsides like cannonballs. This is good because it implies that the missiles require a 'gun' to launch them (the fig leaf of the mass driver and reactor required to get the missiles powered and up to speed). And as long as the gun is more important than the missile, you need ships to carry the guns. But for the sake of one scene in the third book he made a horrible mistake—he allowed missiles to be launched from pods, basically 'boxes of guns' towed behind ships. Once you can do this, and missiles no longer have to come from the broadsides of warships, all bets are off. Everything is ruined. You've given cannonballs the ability to fire themselves, like they're some kind of Harry Potter bludgers. From there you inevitably escalate to the scene in book 11, where the Haven ships are towing pods, which are all towing pods, which are all towing pods, so they can shoot 500,000 missiles in one volley. And then the battles in later books where freighters just dump bazillions of pods and warships do nothing but manage and target them. I guess Weber probably grew up on Lensman so this level of escalation is probably nostalgic.
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May 4, 2020 22:53
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For Pre-pod ships in the Honorverse, missiles are primarily used for skirmishing and "crit-fishing" (hoping to score a lucky crippling or killing hit, such as drive nodes or the fusion plant) as you close to engage with the short-range energy batteries that are the real ship-killing weapon. Pod-laying ships turned the missile into a primary weapon by increasing the salvo size, and allowing easy use of much longer ranged and more accurate missiles. At the same time, new inertial compensator technology made the ships much faster, and the invention of the bow/stern wall allowed for hitherto-impossible levels of protection. For Pre-dreadnought battleships in the real-world, the big guns were primarily used for skirmishing and "crit-fishing" (hoping to score a lucky crippling or killing hit, such as drive machinery or the main magazine) as you close to engage with the short-range torpedoes that are the real ship-killing weapon and crippling fire from the rapid-fire secondary batteries. Dreadnoughts turned the big guns into the primary weapons by mounting more turrets, increasing the rate of fire, and developing fire control that could actually hope to hit at extended range. At the same time, new engine technology made the ships much faster, and the invention of the all-or-nothing armor scheme allowed for hitherto-impossible levels of protection. The parallel seems to not merely be obvious, but deliberately baked into the design of the older ships.
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May 4, 2020 23:06
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It's not really a parallel. Dreadnoughts were still big warships that hammered away at each other with big guns in dramatic duels where each hit and each decision could make a difference. Pods render individual warships and their traits pretty irrelevant.
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May 4, 2020 23:09
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General Battuta posted:It's not really a parallel. Dreadnoughts were still big warships that hammered away at each other with big guns in dramatic duels where each hit and each decision could make a difference. Pods render individual warships and their traits pretty irrelevant. And then Uller came and made BIG GUNS actually relevant again. I was talking with FBH about this: whichever power can manage to get a fleet that incorporates all the new lessons and technical advances into a fleet and can support that fleet becomes the new top dog. A fleet of Missile Pod layers for alpha strikes, Uller equipped fast SDNs, CLACS with manticoran style SuperLACs, MAN(D) Graser Torpedoes, and Spider Drive ships for scouting, all backed up and linked by FTL Comms and Targeting like Apollo would be a loving nightmare for anyone to face. Fivemarks fucked around with this message at 23:42 on May 4, 2020 |
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May 4, 2020 23:39
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Fivemarks posted:And then Uller came and made BIG GUNS actually relevant again. I was talking with FBH about this: whichever power can manage to get a fleet that incorporates all the new lessons and technical advances into a fleet and can support that fleet becomes the new top dog. All this poo poo makes me wish the people from the honor verse will at some point encounter aliens who went done a completely different route and developed grav lances with a range easily reaching ranges of the best Human missiles and with particle lances using similar principles to keep their beams stable up to similar ranges. Also of course with FTL-comms and targeting, so the Manticora, sorry I mean Human ships can't easily evade their shots. And so every battle starts and ends with them stripping all those missile-controlling enemy ships from all their protection, then gutting them with long-range particle beams. Followed by them then retreating/evading the suddenly dumb as bricks gazillion missiles left slowly creeping towards them.
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May 5, 2020 00:16
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Gnoman posted:I don't think that was the point of the line there. Raoul is an admiral by training and temperament - a naval battle is what he's trained for his entire life for, so it's an incredibly straightforward assignment. There's a strong element of "we should have an agreement in place by now - we both want what the other wants, and we could have it by now if they weren't being so chatty", but there's not even an undercurrent of "diplomacy sucks, just kill em all and let God sort em out". Looking through the series, I don't see a single case where honest diplomacy failed without sabotage. I was actually talking about the DIPLOMAT SPAT OUT AS A CURSE because it becomes very reflective of future goings. Like the entire Second Haven War happens because a dude in charge of the Haven diplomacy missives keeps editting them to cause a war. Sorry for being unclear about my joke. Also I'm pretty sure this 'small detachment' is also most of the Masadan navy outside of the two purchased Peep ships. But my point was that even with full knowledge of where they were going because Masada was not hiding it at all, the orbital facilities there were pretty much screwed because they didn't have any forces out there. And the thing is, does Manticore really have that many forces in, say, Manticore? Like, I'm pretty sure they keep most of their forces on 'the front lines' and would be pretty vulnerable to this kind of just brazen run up and smash and flee. Also the reason why Weber does everything in tonnage is pretty much because that was scifi tabletop standard when he developed Starfire... 3e was it? Weapons were just presumed to fit size-wise always as a matter of gameplay abstraction so they just used weight to limit how much you could have of anything. Which is fine as a gameplay mechanic but doesn't work if you're not abstracting things away, like in a novel. General Battuta posted:I really do think pods ruined everything in Honor Harrington. To be fair I think missiles actually ruined Honorverse. Like, it's originally portrayed that missiles aren't really weapons that will do serious damage, and it's the close-in weapons that do all the real work while missiles basically soften up targets. And that largely holds in the first book. Mostly. But here we are in the second book and the first actual fight is completely done with missiles and the other weapons on board are already falling to the wayside.
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May 5, 2020 00:18
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General Battuta posted:I guess Weber probably grew up on Lensman so this level of escalation is probably nostalgic. The big tech escalation in the Lensman books isn't antimatter planets moving at 15c (or two of them on opposing inertial vectors), it's the Primary beam. They were invented as a desperation weapon by a Boskonian force that figured out a way to take a lot of Patrolmen with them to Klono's Frozen Hell. They had 'normal' beam weapons, that took considerable time to overload the target's shields - and a ship losing an engagement can always go free and let the incoming beam fire push them safely into interstellar space. In fact, for a proper beam engagement you both had to be inert and ideally tractor-locked together. The dastardly Boskonians being described by your humble scribe had a simple idea: explosively dump the entire capacitor bank for a projector into the weapon. This produces an energy beam of starkly irresistible force, cable of puncturing the shields of even a free ship. The Boskonians traded "a beam projector and its crew for one of our cruisers and its crew." Patrol engineers would soon develop a technique for safely supercharging a beam using disposable capacitors, much like a pre-space naval rifle and its shells. This was a secret weapon for a considerable period of the late War, used only where there is no chance of survivors or even a message about the new weapon being sent. Since Weber put both a Primary beam, a Needle beam, and an energy projector that gradually overfills the targets capacitors, it is a certainty second only to an Arisian's visualization of the Cosmic All that Weber was strongly influenced by the Lensman series. But I don't see anyone mounting Alpha nodes on a spare planet, so he's a piker in comparison.
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May 5, 2020 00:43
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Kchama posted:I was actually talking about the DIPLOMAT SPAT OUT AS A CURSE because it becomes very reflective of future goings. Like the entire Second Haven War happens because a dude in charge of the Haven diplomacy missives keeps editting them to cause a war. Sorry for being unclear about my joke. That was sabotaged on both sides, and creating a war was an accident - the guy screwing it up from Haven's end was trying to develop a crisis so he could leap in and solve it, and forgot that the new leader of the country was a highly effective terrorist before restoring the old Constitution. Still, that's why I clarified that I don't remember any cases of non-sabotaged diplomacy failing. quote:Also I'm pretty sure this 'small detachment' is also most of the Masadan navy outside of the two purchased Peep ships. But my point was that even with full knowledge of where they were going because Masada was not hiding it at all, the orbital facilities there were pretty much screwed because they didn't have any forces out there. And the thing is, does Manticore really have that many forces in, say, Manticore? Like, I'm pretty sure they keep most of their forces on 'the front lines' and would be pretty vulnerable to this kind of just brazen run up and smash and flee. Kchama posted:
The fact that Manticore maintains a powerful Home Fleet (and the Havenites maintain Capital Fleet) is commonly cited as a major drag on their offensive operations. When the war breaks out, the RMN decides to dispatch 64 capital ships from Home Fleet, which is explicitly 26% of Home Fleet's SDs. Meaning that they'd normally have ~256 (or more) out of their 309 capital ships there. This tracks with the way two or three dozen capital ships is a major combat force in the early stages of the war. Reducing either is frequently mentioned as a Move Of Last Resort. There's even several scenes where Sebastian D'Orville is having a low-key panic attack because he has to leave Sphinx exposed to attack to avoid uncovering Manticore and Gryphon. quote:Also the reason why Weber does everything in tonnage is pretty much because that was scifi tabletop standard when he developed Starfire... 3e was it? Weapons were just presumed to fit size-wise always as a matter of gameplay abstraction so they just used weight to limit how much you could have of anything. Which is fine as a gameplay mechanic but doesn't work if you're not abstracting things away, like in a novel. To be fair I think missiles actually ruined Honorverse. Like, it's originally portrayed that missiles aren't really weapons that will do serious damage, and it's the close-in weapons that do all the real work while missiles basically soften up targets. And that largely holds in the first book. Mostly. But here we are in the second book and the first actual fight is completely done with missiles and the other weapons on board are already falling to the wayside. [/quote] The first book states pretty clearly that missiles are a real weapon for smaller ships, and become skirmishing weapons at fleet scale. The reason for this is because modern point defense is devastatingly effective, so you can't get contact nukes (like the one that takes out the Abraham here) through at all, and laser heads don't do enough per-hit damage to be crippling without getting a lot of them through. They're so effective here because the Graysons and Masadans don't have that kind of point defense, so the balance is heavily skewed.
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May 5, 2020 00:46
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mllaneza posted:The big tech escalation in the Lensman books isn't antimatter planets moving at 15c (or two of them on opposing inertial vectors), it's the Primary beam. They were invented as a desperation weapon by a Boskonian force that figured out a way to take a lot of Patrolmen with them to Klono's Frozen Hell. They had 'normal' beam weapons, that took considerable time to overload the target's shields - and a ship losing an engagement can always go free and let the incoming beam fire push them safely into interstellar space. In fact, for a proper beam engagement you both had to be inert and ideally tractor-locked together. I've always wondered where the "primary beams" in the Star Fire books came from, that's neat. But I have a question: What exactly is a primary beam made of? The Star Fire books just say they're made of "force" or something, as far as I can remember. Which is not really an explanation. What is meant by "force" in this case? I can safely assume it's not the same force Jedi Knights are using, but beyond that? Is it something like a Meson particle beam, exotic hyperspace energy, what is it?!
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May 5, 2020 00:56
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Gnoman posted:That was sabotaged on both sides, and creating a war was an accident - the guy screwing it up from Haven's end was trying to develop a crisis so he could leap in and solve it, and forgot that the new leader of the country was a highly effective terrorist before restoring the old Constitution. Still, that's why I clarified that I don't remember any cases of non-sabotaged diplomacy failing. The entirety of Rising Thunder is basically it too. There's a scene where the Manticorean diplomat visits the basically president of the Solarian League due to his power who actually wants to work things out but basically gets told that 'diplomacy has failed' despite it not happening in the first place and now Manticore is going to destroy them. Also, unrelated, but I really just want to talk about how loving boring the Honorverse ships really are, for a series supposedly about space battles. Mobile Suit Gundam, a show about giant robots fighting, has more care about its spaceships and THEIR spaceship battles than Honorverse does for its ships. Honorverse ships are extremely homogenized. They have all identical shapes because everyone uses the same technology that forces them to use a specific shape. Everyone uses the exact same class names in the exact same meaning (and whose roles largely are just a function of size as they all have the same general armaments). It's only in the later books that new ship types even show up, and Podlayers are just "this but with pods". CLACs are the only really new thing and even they are just "regular ships but with different weapons" in the end. If I said the name of any ship, you could instantly picture them, yes, but not because they are memorable or altogether interesting... most ships don't get much more than a name and class, to be honest. But it's entirely because if you've seen one Honorverse ship, you've seen them all.
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May 5, 2020 01:36
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Libluini posted:I've always wondered where the "primary beams" in the Star Fire books came from, that's neat. They're weaponized tractor beams. Think Star Wars or Star Trek, but designed to grab a chunk of enemy ship and rip it away (Force Beams) or poke holes in enemy ships (Primary Beams). It's related to whatever they use for artificial gravity. If you want to know more than that, then I'm sorry, you're officially giving the matter more thought than any of the writers did. 
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May 5, 2020 02:06
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Kchama posted:
The same could be said for David Drake's RCN or the Schlock Mercenary universe. Unless you get into really soft sci-fi like Star Trek or science fantasy like Star Wars or Warhammer, I don't really see that much of a way to avoid this problem. I suppose that if you were to introduce some other side using wholly different weapons -like the Mesan not-submarines, you could get some differentiation, but this isn't a static universe. Anything really useful is going to get copied as much as possible.
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May 5, 2020 02:36
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Gnoman posted:The same could be said for David Drake's RCN or the Schlock Mercenary universe. Unless you get into really soft sci-fi like Star Trek or science fantasy like Star Wars or Warhammer, I don't really see that much of a way to avoid this problem. I suppose that if you were to introduce some other side using wholly different weapons -like the Mesan not-submarines, you could get some differentiation, but this isn't a static universe. Anything really useful is going to get copied as much as possible. We don't have completely identical ship designs in real life. You can, if you're looking, tell the difference between a destroyer and a dreadnought (aka a battleship) by how they LOOK as opposed to internal armaments that you can't really ever see, which are really convenient for lazy-rear end authors. Like I dunno much about RCN or Schlock Mercenary, but Honorverse is principally, at least in theory, about a war in space between ships. And it seems like that ships that are suppose to fight the battles get neglected as much as the individuals inside the ships or the people back home supporting the ships. EDIT: Also by the way I think the numbers I've been using are the post-Great Resizing numbers. Before then, ships were much bigger and heavier but when the Saganami Island Tactical Simulator devs crunched the numbers they realized the ships were about as light as cigarette smoke compared to how massive they are. So Weber shrunk the ships and their weights and well... Honestly they're still probably cigarette smoke. But this might be why the armaments are so off, because Weber didn't care to adjust them, so ships now have the missile capacity of ships literally twice the size. 
Kchama fucked around with this message at 03:18 on May 5, 2020 |
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May 5, 2020 03:12
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Kchama posted:We don't have completely identical ship designs in real life. You can, if you're looking, tell the difference between a destroyer and a dreadnought (aka a battleship) by how they LOOK as opposed to internal armaments that you can't really ever see, which are really convenient for lazy-rear end authors. Like I dunno much about RCN or Schlock Mercenary, but Honorverse is principally, at least in theory, about a war in space between ships. And it seems like that ships that are suppose to fight the battles get neglected as much as the individuals inside the ships or the people back home supporting the ships. There's a few places in-universe where they talk about battlecruisers being sleek and agile-looking, while DNs and SDs are massive clumsy brutes. So the distinctions you're talking about are present, but I'm not sure how much you can do in a text medium to really convey that. Even universes with much more distinctive ship designs (like Star Wars) have the novels focus more on the specs than trying to describe them. The same is true of series like the Aubrey-Maturin and Horatio Hornblower novels - you get the number of guns and the sail plan, little else. This seems like it would be a fairer criticism in a primarily visual story, not one where the only visual aspects are the cover art (which the author doesn't really get a say in, generally) and the comic adaptation. EDIT: As far as I know, the Great Resizing didn't change the tonnages, just the dimensions that didn't take the Square-Cube law into effect. The large numbers on that image are (IIRC) the mass a ship would have to have for those length/beam/height values. Gnoman fucked around with this message at 03:26 on May 5, 2020 |
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May 5, 2020 03:22
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Gnoman posted:There's a few places in-universe where they talk about battlecruisers being sleek and agile-looking, while DNs and SDs are massive clumsy brutes. So the distinctions you're talking about are present, but I'm not sure how much you can do in a text medium to really convey that. Even universes with much more distinctive ship designs (like Star Wars) have the novels focus more on the specs than trying to describe them. The same is true of series like the Aubrey-Maturin and Horatio Hornblower novels - you get the number of guns and the sail plan, little else. You're absolutely misunderstanding those places, because a battlecruiser does not look any different, shape-wise, than a DN or SDN. And it's not like that's me misinterpretting. All the artwork makes it very clear that there's no difference. At best they're just talking about their sizes, as SDNs/DNs are much much bigger than battlecruisers. If there is any difference in the physical designs beyond side and internal armaments, then it's something Weber has retconned.   Also bonus: Can you identify either of these ships by how they look? Which one is the Dreadnought? Which one is the Battlecruiser?
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May 5, 2020 04:06
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The upper one is clearly a battlecruiser. The lower one is much stockier, and has many more weapons ports. Exactly as the book describes them.
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May 5, 2020 04:10
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Gnoman posted:The upper one is clearly a battlecruiser. The lower one is much stockier, and has many more weapons ports. Exactly as the book describes them. No way the lower one is stockier. It does have more gun ports and I basically gave away which is which, but you can't tell me the lower one looks any different besides the gun ports.
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May 5, 2020 04:15
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Yes, I can. The upper one is clearly much thinner for the length. It is as obvious as the nose on your avatar's face.
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May 5, 2020 04:18
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Gnoman posted:Yes, I can. The upper one is clearly much thinner for the length. It is as obvious as the nose on your avatar's face. YA WANNA FIGHT, BUCKO!? Jokes aside, I literally can't see it even zooming in. I tried looking for ships that have the same angle to make the comparison easier, but none actually have a close enough angle to properly compare. And the only ones that look appreciably different-looking are the models for Destroyers, which have slightly thinner hammerheads. And well, less gun ports, of course.
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May 5, 2020 04:29
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Use the radar array on the center broadside as a reference point. The books suggest that these are usually the same size between classes (supported by there never being a "the superdreadnought's larger sensors let it see/target further" scenario - also note that the bottom one is about two-thirds the size as the top one, which is similar to the size difference between the ships in-universe, compensating for the different zoom). The top one is roughly 11 sensors long by 3 high, assuming that it is centered. The bottom one is ~15 by 5. That's a ratio of 3.66:1 for the top and 3:1 for the bottom, meaning that the top one is noticeably longer than than the bottom one for the size.
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May 5, 2020 04:42
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Gnoman posted:Use the radar array on the center broadside as a reference point. The books suggest that these are usually the same size between classes (supported by there never being a "the superdreadnought's larger sensors let it see/target further" scenario - also note that the bottom one is about two-thirds the size as the top one, which is similar to the size difference between the ships in-universe, compensating for the different zoom). The top one is roughly 11 sensors long by 3 high, assuming that it is centered. The bottom one is ~15 by 5. That's a ratio of 3.66:1 for the top and 3:1 for the bottom, meaning that the top one is noticeably longer than than the bottom one for the size. That's fair. Though it still doesn't give me the feeling of the Battlecruiser being sleeker or anything. It is shaped roughly the same aside from size, as you stated. The DN is bigger for sure, but 'sleek' isn't really a function of size - you can have something huge be sleekly shaped. So we might have been thinking about this at opposing tacks.
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May 5, 2020 04:48
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Dilz
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May 5, 2020 05:55
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Kchama posted:We don't have completely identical ship designs in real life. You can, if you're looking, tell the difference between a destroyer and a dreadnought (aka a battleship) by how they LOOK as opposed to internal armaments that you can't really ever see, which are really convenient for lazy-rear end authors. Form follows function; take this image depicting various ship types of the WW2-era US Navy.  Apart from the carriers - which have a distinct function leading to their distinct form, all the designs more or less blur together: funnels roughly amidships, raised areas for improved visibility, flat deck space on which turrets are mounted, etc. The cruisers and battleships are especially difficult to pick apart at a quick glance, since most of them seem to be of comparable sizes. It's only when you zoom in and look at details like the number and placement of gun mounts and funnels that the differences become apparent. Of course, Honorverse ships have fewer external cues to their size; being space vessels they of course can't have open deck spaces, their power plants don't produce exhaust, and no ship needs more than 2 impeller rings, each mounting the same number of nodes. I suppose that in particular is a flaw in the imagination of the secondary world; if larger ships required more impeller rings, that could serve as a nice distinguishing feature, like the number of masts or funnels – but given the givens, I don't understand the complaint that Honorverse ships are hard to tell apart by the casual observer. So are lots of things IRL: military ships like those pictured above, large commercial aircraft types, small commercial aircraft, for that matter... even many makes of car look fundamentally the same as their counterparts from other manufacturers.
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May 5, 2020 06:42
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I figured that just meant the people in-universe, many of whom are experienced naval officers, can easily tell ships apart (at least by type) on sight.
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May 5, 2020 07:09
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Anshu posted:Form follows function; take this image depicting various ship types of the WW2-era US Navy. I'm more saying they're ugly and completely uninteresting in every way. You showed me those battleships and there's a good deal of difference in their forms. Sure, they have a similiar basic structure, but there's a huge amount of variety in those ships. I can actually pick them out as being distinct ships without having to rely on size. They are actually pretty appealing to me. Honor ships look like stupid studded dildos and I hate them so much. Like, I'm 100% certain that the reason why they look so drat dull is because Weber has zero imagination. Realistic doesn't mean dull.
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May 5, 2020 07:10
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Given that the only requirement is 'impeller rings at each end' you'd expect there to be some wildly un-aerodynamic hull designs. I know the setting totally ignores radiators but they'd be a great way to break up the boring dildo profile. So would sensor masts and towed arrays. In fact, since there's no need to keep the ship balanced around an axis of thrust, you can go way more asymmetrical than you would with a conventionally propelled ship. e: in fact why don't they make one broadside the missile side and one the laser side? explain yourself weber
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May 5, 2020 07:22
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I suggest that the reason you can pick out the differences between RL, WW2-era ships so easily is because you're so much more familiar with seeing them. That's practically inevitable, given the ubiquity of WW2-related media and the fact that Honorverse ships are almost exclusively presented through the medium of text.
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May 5, 2020 07:23
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WW2 ships have distinct national quirks though. Pagoda masts, Atlantic bows, zillions of AA guns, seaplane launchers and cranes, etc etc. IJN battleships don't look like USN battleships don't look like the Kriegsmarine.
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May 5, 2020 07:28
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Anshu posted:Form follows function; take this image depicting various ship types of the WW2-era US Navy. Most of these ships were built under the Washington naval treaty, which is a substantial homogenizing factor that has no analog in Weber’s writing.
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May 5, 2020 07:31
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Anshu posted:I suggest that the reason you can pick out the differences between RL, WW2-era ships so easily is because you're so much more familiar with seeing them. That's practically inevitable, given the ubiquity of WW2-related media and the fact that Honorverse ships are almost exclusively presented through the medium of text. Like they said, you posted a very specific set of US ships and said that they all looked the same, but they actually have a lot of differences in their designs that stand out, while Honorverse keeps the same shape for every single ship. Like, size and gunports are the main things that make them obviously different from another. And as stated, different nation ships have very different quirks in real life, whereas everyone has standardized ships in Honorverse for no real reason.
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May 5, 2020 07:46
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im confident the reason honorverse ships look so same-y is that it kept the younger, poorer iterations of Baen Books from having to hire an artist alternatively, it makes miniatures cheaper i think your basic honorverse spindle can probably be cranked out by just a tool & die shop Starfire has got differently-shaped ships, so i dont think homgenous ships are just a weber thing PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 13:31 on May 5, 2020 |
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May 5, 2020 13:22
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Gnoman posted:There's a few places in-universe where they talk about battlecruisers being sleek and agile-looking, while DNs and SDs are massive clumsy brutes. So the distinctions you're talking about are present, but I'm not sure how much you can do in a text medium to really convey that. Even universes with much more distinctive ship designs (like Star Wars) have the novels focus more on the specs than trying to describe them. The same is true of series like the Aubrey-Maturin and Horatio Hornblower novels - you get the number of guns and the sail plan, little else. That opens up an interesting question: Why is it like that? In the SF-series I grew up with (Perry Rhodan), a lot of time goes sometimes into describing ships. Occasionally you also get nice drawings with detailed views of the machinery inside a ship. Or a robot, or a handgun. Is that just something that doesn't happens in the anglosphere for cultural reasons, or is this something English authors would really like to do, too -but can't, because they're not part of a communist-like council of authors that holds a lot more sway to the publisher in those matters? (PR is written by committee: Back in the early 60s a bunch of SF-authors in Germany joined forces to found the project, and when it worked out really well to their own surprise, the system was set in place. By now they're deep into the 4th or 5th generation of authors, but the system, including yearly conferences of authors to do planning work, continues) jng2058 posted:They're weaponized tractor beams. Think Star Wars or Star Trek, but designed to grab a chunk of enemy ship and rip it away (Force Beams) or poke holes in enemy ships (Primary Beams). It's related to whatever they use for artificial gravity. For some reason I totally forgot about this. Man, do I feel stupid now. But this essentially makes grav lances a variation of force and primary beams (maybe torrent beams would be a good name) and it raises another question about why Weber hates this weapon so much. Did the Star Fire books came first and he hated writing about them or something?
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May 5, 2020 14:34
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 22:34 |
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Kchama posted:Like they said, you posted a very specific set of US ships and said that they all looked the same, but they actually have a lot of differences in their designs that stand out, while Honorverse keeps the same shape for every single ship. Like, size and gunports are the main things that make them obviously different from another. Oh, I would say Honorverse ships have different quirks depending on nation. -Graysonite ships are good -Manticoran ships are super-good -Mesan ships are evil -Solarian ships are dogshit -Havenite ships are poo poo -Andermani ships are bad Chinese knock-offs of real Manticoran ships See, all very different! 
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May 5, 2020 14:37
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