Nitpicking at A Rising Thunder...

Relax wrote:You know, I had never read that thread before. I must have been buried at work when it came up.

In short, defending ships on a terminus better be OFF the terminus hiding against a hyper attack. No one is transiting to warn the other side unless there are quite a few ships in a target rich environment.

I suppose one could preposition a ship having their W-sails up and hyper generator always hot at the entrance to the WH. Sitting waiting for the word to run through.

In that possition you only have to worry about the cycle time on your hyper generator (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/267/0)

For a dispatch boat that's 30 seconds from the highest readiness state. Quick enough to have a decent chance of escaping before an SDM laserhead could reach detonation range. But for an SD it's 240 seconds.


Assuming that delay is linear with tonnage a Roland would need about 34 seconds, a Sag-C about 42, and a Nike about 95.

So the smaller ships would be at some risk - sitting in an obvious position waiting for their generators to go from the highest readiness state to actually peaking and taking them through the wormhole -- but not quite as much as I thought before crunching the numbers.

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I used 40k tons for the dispatch boat, and 8m tons for the SD, resulting in an equation (after rounding off) of seconds=tons*0.000026+29

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:You know, I had never read that thread before. I must have been buried at work when it came up.

In short, defending ships on a terminus better be OFF the terminus hiding against a hyper attack. No one is transiting to warn the other side unless there are quite a few ships in a target rich environment.

I suppose one could preposition a ship having their W-sails up and hyper generator always hot at the entrance to the WH. Sitting waiting for the word to run through.

In that possition you only have to worry about the cycle time on your hyper generator (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/267/0)

For a dispatch boat that's 30 seconds from the highest readiness state. Quick enough to have a decent chance of escaping before an SDM laserhead could reach detonation range. But for an SD it's 240 seconds.


Assuming that delay is linear with tonnage a Roland would need about 34 seconds, a Sag-C about 42, and a Nike about 95.

So the smaller ships would be at some risk - sitting in an obvious position waiting for their generators to go from the highest readiness state to actually peaking and taking them through the wormhole -- but not quite as much as I thought before crunching the numbers.

------------------
I used 40k tons for the dispatch boat, and 8m tons for the SD, resulting in an equation (after rounding off) of seconds=tons*0.000026+29

So, it would seem having several Dispatch boats lying "in the lane" of the wormhole might be the optimal solution (I say several since keeping those generators in high readiness 24-7 might be a bit of a strain, so 8 hours on/16 off might work better), while the defending force takes positions off the wormhole (changing position at non-predictable times to throw off any probes).

It could be interesting to see what happens, if the MWW favors us with an incident during the next novel.

Hutch wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:In that possition you only have to worry about the cycle time on your hyper generator (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/267/0)

For a dispatch boat that's 30 seconds from the highest readiness state. Quick enough to have a decent chance of escaping before an SDM laserhead could reach detonation range. But for an SD it's 240 seconds.


Assuming that delay is linear with tonnage a Roland would need about 34 seconds, a Sag-C about 42, and a Nike about 95.

So the smaller ships would be at some risk - sitting in an obvious position waiting for their generators to go from the highest readiness state to actually peaking and taking them through the wormhole -- but not quite as much as I thought before crunching the numbers.

------------------
I used 40k tons for the dispatch boat, and 8m tons for the SD, resulting in an equation (after rounding off) of seconds=tons*0.000026+29

So, it would seem having several Dispatch boats lying "in the lane" of the wormhole might be the optimal solution (I say several since keeping those generators in high readiness 24-7 might be a bit of a strain, so 8 hours on/16 off might work better), while the defending force takes positions off the wormhole (changing position at non-predictable times to throw off any probes).

It could be interesting to see what happens, if the MWW favors us with an incident during the next novel.

Although there's always a shortage of dispatch boats, and even a really big DD like Roland doesn't appear to be that much slower on the generator.

So using a rotation of DDs instead seem more likely to me that tying up a bunch of scarce dispatch boats just to sound and emergency. (You might even attach 3-4 Legacy DDs to a wormhole force for that purpose)


OTOH you could achieve most of the same end without a lot more risk simply by periodically sending a ship through saying "still ok". If you don't heard back on schedule assume that the far side has fallen and stop all wormhole traffic.
It's risky for the ship making transit; since the other side could have fallen. On the other hand it means that most of the time there isn't a ship sitting on the terminus vulnerable to a pounce from hyper. On the gripping hand, to get weapons on target in under 30 seconds the attacker basically has to drop out within energy range. [size-85][In 30 seconds an SDM in full power mode + laserhead standoff range can only reach out to about 430-450,000 km; while a graser is good for 500,000 km against a sidewall or twice that against the bare hull a ship in the terminus lane would have][/size]

Jonathan_S wrote:In that possition you only have to worry about the cycle time on your hyper generator (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/267/0)

For a dispatch boat that's 30 seconds from the highest readiness state. Quick enough to have a decent chance of escaping before an SDM laserhead could reach detonation range. But for an SD it's 240 seconds.


Assuming that delay is linear with tonnage a Roland would need about 34 seconds, a Sag-C about 42, and a Nike about 95.

So the smaller ships would be at some risk - sitting in an obvious position waiting for their generators to go from the highest readiness state to actually peaking and taking them through the wormhole -- but not quite as much as I thought before crunching the numbers.

------------------
I used 40k tons for the dispatch boat, and 8m tons for the SD, resulting in an equation (after rounding off) of seconds=tons*0.000026+29

Hutch wrote:

So, it would seem having several Dispatch boats lying "in the lane" of the wormhole might be the optimal solution (I say several since keeping those generators in high readiness 24-7 might be a bit of a strain, so 8 hours on/16 off might work better), while the defending force takes positions off the wormhole (changing position at non-predictable times to throw off any probes).

It could be interesting to see what happens, if the MWW favors us with an incident during the next novel.

Jonathan_S wrote:Although there's always a shortage of dispatch boats, and even a really big DD like Roland doesn't appear to be that much slower on the generator.

So using a rotation of DDs instead seem more likely to me that tying up a bunch of scarce dispatch boats just to sound and emergency. (You might even attach 3-4 Legacy DDs to a wormhole force for that purpose)


OTOH you could achieve most of the same end without a lot more risk simply by periodically sending a ship through saying "still ok". If you don't heard back on schedule assume that the far side has fallen and stop all wormhole traffic.
It's risky for the ship making transit; since the other side could have fallen. On the other hand it means that most of the time there isn't a ship sitting on the terminus vulnerable to a pounce from hyper. On the gripping hand, to get weapons on target in under 30 seconds the attacker basically has to drop out within energy range. [size-85][In 30 seconds an SDM in full power mode + laserhead standoff range can only reach out to about 430-450,000 km; while a graser is good for 500,000 km against a sidewall or twice that against the bare hull a ship in the terminus lane would have][/size]

There's also the fact that nobody is normally going to aim to come out in energy range of the wormhole itself - there's the whole uncertainty induced by the resonance zone.
Plus, I'd expect that even in peacetime conditions, dropping out of hyper that close to a wormhole gets seriously frowned upon, to the extent that nobody who isn't trying to attack the wormhole pickets will try it.
I expect the peacetime buffer zone to be at least a light minute, and in wartime, more like several.

My impression is the RZ is much more of a problem going out of the RZ than hypering into the RZ.

kzt wrote:My impression is the RZ is much more of a problem going out of the RZ than hypering into the RZ.

With due respect that is backward. Unless this passage from AAC has been retconned.

It is less reliable to translate in than out.

Bold is my emphasis.

AAC Chapter 62 wrote:The Junction’s position also put it over eleven light-hours from Manticore-B, which created Home Fleet’s commander’s second problem. But, fortunately, Manticore-B also lay far outside the resonance zone—the volume of space between the Junction and Manticore-A in which it was virtually impossible to translate between hyper-space and normal-space. Any wormhole terminus associated with a star formed a conical volume in hyper, with the wormhole at its apex and a base centered on the star and twice as wide as its hyper limit, in which hyper-space astrogation became less than totally reliable. The bigger the terminus or junction, the stronger the resonance effect . . . and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, with its multiple termini, was the largest ever discovered. The resonance zone it produced was more of a tsunami, and it didn’t just make astrogation “less than reliable.” It made it the next best thing to flatly impossible. Any translation out of the resonance zone risked serious astrogational uncertainty, and any translation into the zone would have been no more than a complicated way to commit suicide. But since the Manticore Binary System’s secondary component lay outside the resonance (and would for the next few hundred years or so), Home Fleet had actually been closer from its position covering the Junction—in terms of travel time—to Manticore-B than to Manticore-A.

Though the suicide success rate will apparently vary with the size of wormhole.

Have fun,
T2M

Hutch wrote:So, it would seem having several Dispatch boats lying "in the lane" of the wormhole might be the optimal solution (I say several since keeping those generators in high readiness 24-7 might be a bit of a strain, so 8 hours on/16 off might work better), while the defending force takes positions off the wormhole (changing position at non-predictable times to throw off any probes).

It could be interesting to see what happens, if the MWW favors us with an incident during the next novel.

Yeah, you could do that. It would be awfully rough on the chosen ship, of course. We're talking about having a ship at highest readiness, nodes hot and running, power generation at full, ship locked down ready for transit, burning out the nodes at enormous speed. For weeks or months at a time. I doubt a ship could do that for more than four hours at a time. And after a few times, I think you'd have to put it in for repairs. You'd go burn out an awful lot of ships doing it, but you could.

I'd have to say, SLN would be unlikely to even think of trying to transit in on top of the wormhole.
It's dangerous, completely outside their training, and any SLN officer who suggested it would likely be sent to some hell of a desk job.
Current SLN ships are the same SLN ships they had back before the Manticore and haven navies started fighting and upgrading. They and their weapons are generations behind anything in the alliance, and inferior in every way. If an alliance force was faced with number so huge they did have to retreat, it would still be a fighting retreat, with higher acceleration and maneuverability than the enemy, and able to pick off their choice of attackers, while taking little damage, being able to stay out of "effective" range of the enemy. SLN stealthed recon drones would be easily seen by Manticore sensors, and possibly would be allowed to pass through, because the defender would know that the drone is seeing what they want it to see, which would probably be drones and LACs acting like SDs, while the more powerful ships are either invisible or pretending to be LACs. Other option on sighting a drone is immediately blow it up, before it collects and relays anything, to discourage the attack, make it obvious it's not going to work.

kevinrs wrote:I'd have to say, SLN would be unlikely to even think of trying to transit in on top of the wormhole.

Right, cuz the bad guys are all stupid and incompetent who can't even read a map for RZ distance of a wormhole termini.

Relax wrote:

kevinrs wrote:I'd have to say, SLN would be unlikely to even think of trying to transit in on top of the wormhole.

Right, cuz the bad guys are all stupid and incompetent who can't even read a map for RZ distance of a wormhole termini.

Kevin's next sentence is probably true:

It's dangerous, completely outside their training, and any SLN officer who suggested it would likely be sent to some hell of a desk job.

It is almost certainly true for Battle Fleet, and probably true for Frontier Fleet, that close assault on a wormhole terminus is not something their lax training standards would make a simple matter of reading charts and whipping out an off-the-cuff Nav computation.

I'm not sure that Kevin's prediction of dire consequences for any SLN officer who suggested the tactic, but the RHN's overshoot of the Basilisk Terminus would likely look like pinpoint navigation by the SLN's demonstrated capabilities.

The "bad guys" may not be "all stupid and incompetent" but the majority of SLN commanders we've been introduced to have needed to be force-fed a large dose of Reality (tm) before they can recognize the need for more realistic training and/or higher standards of spacemanship.