Ah, I get what you’re saying. My guess is that the computers would detect it, but between the speed and the fact that a warp bubble is presumably unlike anything they’ve seen before, the humans would probably think it was some sort of sensor glitch. That would give the Starfleet ship a useful edge, in the first encounter at least.
Unless Foraker were aboard, of course. She’d probably figure it out in time, though I’m not sure anyone else in the Honorverse would.
The wedge would have that effect, certainly – but the sidewalls? They’re not going to stop all the damage from a photon torpedo. We’re talking about an antimatter warhead. Some of that’s going to get through a sidewall and do some serious damage to the hull underneath.
I doubt it. Without sidewall penetrators to disrupt the sidewalls, Honorverse’s much more powerful contact nukes and relativistic missiles don’t do a thing. And that is presuming photon torpedoes are immune to point defense and actually hit.
At least in the later books, the sidewalls seem to be better at making it hurt a bit less than they are at stopping it. Then again, in the later books, they have gone from fleets firing a few hundred missiles at each other at a time to firing a few tens of thousands of missiles at each other at a time.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
Well, it’s in the early books that we mostly see things physically slammed into sidewalls. Lasers & grasers are bent or degraded; it’s material things like missiles that just go splat. Which is the problem with photon torpedoes; they’ll hit the sidewall and explode, but they won’t be anywhere near the ship they were trying to hit (sidewalls aren’t hull-hugging like Trek shields).
Phasers might have some more luck punching through, as I recall they are pretty consistently presented as being very powerful short ranged weapons. They still have to get close enough to use them.
No, Honor wouldn’t die if Nimitz is killed. Treecats don’t die if their bondmate is killed and the bondmate doesn’t die if their treecat is killed. Treecats usually kill themselves, mostly by starvation, when their bondmate dies. (The only two that Honor knows of in recent history that didn’t kill themselves are Samantha (Nimitz’s mate, so Nimitz and Honor helped get her through the loss.) and Monroe (Bonded to King Roger III, who was starving himself to death when he bonded to Justin, Elizabeth’s fiance as they fought an assassin.))
The bond between Honor and Nimitz is very unusual, since Honor is also an empath, unlike any other human we know of in the Honorverse. She would be much more affected by his death than most humans. The only evidence given that regular humans are deeply affected by the deaths of their treecats is in “In Enemy Hands” in the scene where Shannon and Fritz are doing the best they can to save Nimitz’s life. Prolonged separation and distance does cause pain for the treecat in a bonding, which is one reason the RMN allows them on ships. (The main reason is Queen Adrienne saying they had to.) While the humans would miss their 'cats, there is no indication that they are harmed by the separation.
As for the OP, a well handled starship could probably take an Honorverse DN. But given the normal tactical sense displayed between Honor and Kirk, I would have to bet on Honor.
Specifically, Shannon says that Honor will die if Nimitz is killed, and Fritz corrects her, saying that while that’s certainly a known phenomenon, it only happens in about 1 in 3 cases. Though it’s implied that they’re both lying, to keep what’s-her-name from killing Nimitz.
Most likely, I think Honor would probably be suicidal if Nimitz died, though that’d be slightly more long-term. Immediate short-term, she’d probably fly into a berserk homocidal rage first. Which, given how deadly she is when she’s calm, is not something I’d want to be anywhere on the same planet with.
Yes, I didn’t complete my thought on that part. More sleep needed.
Cordelia Ransome.
Crazy McPsychoBitch. That’s what I like to call her.
[QUOTE=tracer]
In Honorverse, there are “layers” of hyperspace, with the corresponding “higher” layers allowing faster travel (from the perspective of Einsteinian space). Each layer is seperated by a “wall” of some kind. I don’t think that the RMN sensors penetrate these walls.
There was a battle related in one of the books where a small escort group of RMN ships engaged a superior force while in one of the hyperpsace bands. (The enemy force was in the same band.) The battle did not take place in a “grave wave”, so some (if not all) of the regular weapons functioned as designed.
I have no idea if, when the Enterprise creates a (subspace) warp field, if it is within Einsteinian space, or if it’s somehow creating or interacting with Honorverse hyperspace and their layers. In Honorverse, a star interferes with those ships from transitioning into the hyperspace bands until they can get outside a certain range of that star, called it’s “hyper limit”. Generally speaking, I would assume that the Enterprise has no problems traveling at warp speed within the Honorverse hyper limits.
Enterprise has the maneuver advantage, but until Kirk (or Spock) realises that they need to shoot down the throat (through the open areas of the wedge), I don’t think he can damage Honor. Even then, a BC or DN has it’s nose and ass armored for just such an emergency (although a photon is going to hammer that armor off, eventually).
For the barrage to work, the missles need to be detonated at a very fine moment. The laserheads themselves only have a sustained fire of a second or two.
The Enterprise might see the lasing rods seperate from the body of the missile a fraction of a second before it fires, but that’s still some mighty slim reaction time for Sulu manually controlling it.
I suspect that the first barrage would surprise the Big-E, but once they know what to look for, maybe Sulu or Spock can rig the computer to do some evasive manuevers for when the missles get within 100thousand km’s.
In The Honor of the Queen, Grayson’s space navy is armed with missiles that have plain old nuclear warheads, not nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers.
I seem to recall that if one of those nuclear warheads makes a direct hit on an enemy ship’s sidewall, the enemy does feel it.
If some of the damage from a nuclear warhead detonating point-blank against a sidewall can get through that sidewall, then certainly some of the damage from a detonating antimatter warhead (i.e. a photon torpedo) would also get through.
And as far as point defense goes, it may be theoretically possible to shoot down an incoming photon torpedo – this was never done in any Star Trek franchise, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility. But, don’t forget, that photon torpedo is incoming at warp nine.
Phasers present a real problem, because the details of what they are, what they do, and how they do it are not at all consistent within the Trek universe.
The TOS episode “The Ultimate Computer” had Federation starships travelling at warp 5, firing phasers at one another. Roddenberry’s writer’s bible for TNG, however, states that phaser beams merely travel at the speed of light and are not FTL, which would prevent a starship at warp from firing them.
And, well, if the Enterprise can’t fire a weapon at the Honorverse dreadnought while closing with it (or backing away from it) at warp 1.1 … what good can such a weapon be?
As I recall, they feel it, but it’s less “We’ve been hit” and more “Did we just run over something?” Sidewalls are the reasons nukes have lasing heads in the Honorverse. The fact that a contact nuke from the Grayson missile batteries managed to make hull contact and destroy a Masadan ship was almost as big a surprise to the Graysons as it was to the Masadans.
Not the nuke; the impact of the missile itself at 25% of lightspeed. And it just shakes the ship a bit. And going by the (limited ) evidence Honorverse contact nukes are if anything more powerful than photon torpedoes.
It’s not the sidewalls, it’s point defense; contact nukes have “sidewall penetrators” that help them punch through the sidewall. If they get close enough; and modern point defense makes that almost impossible. The Grayson nuke on the other hand managed to do a down-the-throat attack and had no sidewall in the wall.
Two relevant quotes:
If the impact kinetic energy of the “contact nuke” is what delivers the majority of the punch, then a photon torpedo has it beat. How much kinetic-energy-per-kilogram would an object have, if it were travelling at warp 9 (i.e. 1000c)?
This was my initial thought as well, but I don’t think it holds up to further inspection.
I don’t know if it’s Star Trek canon, but I’d have to imagine that “Warp drive” is achieved by, I guess, warping space, so that you’re moving the equivalent of 1000x light speed without the energy input. And when you come out of warp, you’re going at the same speed you were going when you came in. Otherwise, the Star Trek universe would make even less sense from a physics point of view than it does now. If the Enterprise had access to the kind of energies it would take to actually accelerate/decelerate a few hundred thousand tons of spaceship to 1000x light speed in a few seconds, then we wouldn’t even be having this debate because they’d be wiping out Superdreadnaughts with supernova level energy weapons.
And you pretty much have to assume that there’s no physical interaction between an object traveling at warp speed and an object in normal space or a collision with a microscopic chunk of space crap would vaporize the Enterprise when it was traveling at full speed.
[QUOTE=Finagle]
This was my initial thought as well, but I don’t think it holds up to further inspection.
I don’t know if it’s Star Trek canon, but I’d have to imagine that “Warp drive” is achieved by, I guess, warping space, so that you’re moving the equivalent of 1000x light speed without the energy input. And when you come out of warp, you’re going at the same speed you were going when you came in. Otherwise, the Star Trek universe would make even less sense from a physics point of view than it does now. If the Enterprise had access to the kind of energies it would take to actually accelerate/decelerate a few hundred thousand tons of spaceship to 1000x light speed in a few seconds, then we wouldn’t even be having this debate because they’d be wiping out Superdreadnaughts with supernova level energy weapons.
And you pretty much have to assume that there’s no physical interaction between an object traveling at warp speed and an object in normal space or a collision with a microscopic chunk of space crap would vaporize the Enterprise when it was traveling at full speed.
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Warp drive: Warp drive | Memory Alpha | Fandom
There were several episodes in TOS/TNG/Voy where the hero’s starship was involuntarily dropped out of warp by some other force.
Deflector dish: Navigational deflector | Memory Alpha | Fandom allows travel at high speeds safe. Apparently, space crap in Einsteinian space can affect a ship at warp (encased in it’s own sub space bubble).
Star Trek is full of contradictions and canon violations. 
I’d also like to add that “accelerating to 1000x light speed” doesn’t have any real meaning in Einsteinian space. You can’t accelerate across the light barrier – not only would it require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to 1x light speed, an object travelling faster than light speed in Einsteinian space would be in the tachyon realm, with an imaginary mass (and a negative imaginary mass at that). Its kinetic energy would be some multiple of i.
So, I take back what I said about a warp 9 photon torpedo having more kinetic energy than a 0.25c contact nuke. “Kinetic energy” doesn’t really have meaning when discussing an object at warp.