You make a compelling case for the Champion (and I'm not just saying that because the Honorverse is one of my favourite settings).

Round 1
I'm glad to see the Battlestar got through her first round encounter (even if she did take a bit of a kicking).

Round 2
Thor hefted his hammer. "Right," he said. "This could take a while." - loved that line :)

Although not surprised that it didn't go well for him.

Round 3
The Star Destroyer Vanquisher moved through space like a shark - what, you mean it had to keep moving forward to stop itself from sinking? (Sorry, but that was my first thought on reading that line)

Round 4
...every single one wasted itself against the roof of [Insert ship name here]'s wedge. - a line taken straight out of so many of the books.

I also thought, at first, that a salvo of 200 warheads seemed low for an SD(P). Then I wondered if that was just because I'm used to seeing the thousands and tens of thousands that battlegroups throw, rather than just a single ship.

I'm still not sure though. According to the technical specs, a Medusa-class has enough fire control links to handle salvos of 200 pods, but each pod will be carrying somewhere between (I think) 6 - 12 missiles depending on which generation they are.

Just thought I'd mention it, because the fact that HMS Masquerade fires off 200 missiles in each encounter makes it seem like you think 200 missiles is her maximum throw weight, when actually it's much higher than that.

Round 5
Nothing much to say here. Shame the Battlestar got taken out, but I agree with your reasoning.

Round 6
Masquerade's missile pods gave her a heavier weight of fire, but once rolled they were critically vulnerable to proximity kills. - not so much. See, the thing is, the early pod designs towed their (completely unshielded) missile pods outside the ship's wedge, which meant that they were exposed, and that the ship's max acceleration and turn speed was reduced - if the ship was fired on before they'd turned to present their broadside for firing, then the pods would simply be lost as collateral damage to all the bomb-pumped x-rays flying around. Heck, one decent ship-killer could probably take out dozens of pods if it went off in the right place.

But with the design of the podnaughts, the missile pods are only exposed to potential enemy fire when they are about to be fired themselves. Yes, they could still be taken out, but the Star Destroyer's primary armaments are its turbolaser batteries - and these weapons don't have blast radiuses to worry about. Sure, a hit from one will definitely destroy a pod (for the same reason that it'd shred any starfighter), but I doubt they'd be able to aim for them. Also, once your pods are rolled, you don't have to worry about them too much - if you see incoming fire that might take them out, just launch. You may not have the best firing solution at that point, but you don't have to lose the missiles.

Round 7
Nice tactic from the Masquerade there. Also, as a comment about the tournament in general, I like how the outcome of some of the fights is due to differences in the science of the settings, and how some tactics just don't work against ships that use different rules - such as the Honorverse's 'only vulnerable from the sides' quirk.

I'm not sure about the damage that Masquerade sustained though. The only comparable instance I can think of is in On Basilisk Station, when Fearless disables a Havenite courier ship with a close pass, but the courier ship has significantly less powerful nodes, and it's the nodes that get damaged - not the hull. Which to me implies that it suffers some kind of energy feedback thing on its nodes, which caused the damage. If Fearless had passed closer, then the hull would have been damaged by the gravitational stresses, just as happened to the Cataclysm, but I don't see why Masquerade's nodes would have suffered damage in this case - there was no conflicting gravity wave present to cause the kind of feedback that I think is necessary for this damage.

Of course, this is all just conjecture on my part, as I don't believe the question of what happens when wedge strikes a significant mass has ever been answered in canon.

The only incident I can think of is at the end of In Enemy Hands, when a pinnace brings it's wedge up um... very close... to the much larger mass of a battlecrusier, and the nodes certainly last a little while: it's possible that they burned out, but equally possible that they didn't - and I don't think we'll be getting any witness statements. While the pinnace is certainly destroyed, that destruction could have come from any number of sources.

But, it's your story, and I can't think of any reason why it couldn't happen like that - it just isn't what I would expect.


I have some candidates in mind for the Second Tournament, but they are mostly from more obscure series, or from canons that I know of, but don't really know that well myself, so I'm going to have to have a look around and see if there are decent reference sites for them. One thing that did occur to me about this first tournament is that the computer games were severely underrepresented.

- Irish