?

The qualifier I included is "For all intents and purposes."

Considering the capabilities of a Lenny, 1-2M km is a zero intercept. If Lennys are designed to launch GTs from stealth in the same manner as the Sharks with spider drives, they will not be picked up. Manticoran RDs cannot be picked up. And MA tech is better. SL drones were picked up, but their stealth tech is below the curve.

Pods cannot risk firing on something "between" them and the planet, in such close proximity to the planet. Even IF at that point, Lennys are detected. No?

I saw your calculations. I'm just not certain they will alter the equation if Lennys can get that close. Consider the range the Sharks had to launch GTs and the range the Lennys will launch. Even if TOA is an hour, then Christmas dinner isn't exactly late. And, even if Lennys launch normal, first generation GTs from their closest range, time on target will still be too short for any target to enjoy Christmas.

I don't expect Lennys to risk less than a light second either. Albeit I'm not prepared to think they can't achieve it under ideal conditions -- whatever ideal conditions might entail. I'm considering that the author is using the analogy of modern subs. Those subs launched from mocking distances as well, but in certain instances fired from "within" the blockade.

I'm also considering the fact that the MA may still have operatives. Even operatives who don't have much security clearance should be able to obtain normal traffic patterns about the planet to enable a pre-planned route. I don't imagine their run in will be arbitrary. They'll come in in the system's "for all intents and purposes" blind side. And, we cannot overlook the use of nanites utilized in a more subtle fashion.* Instead of killing, causing someone to overlook what they just saw. Causing them to suddenly grow a conscious like Shannon, then Tourville -- which allowed Honor's possy to escape.

*The concept of a more subtle use of nanite tech was championed by Annachie and I in another thread . . .

Annachie wrote:Damn, the subtle uses of that MAlign control tec can be nasty.

Get a mole in to the office somewhere, inplant the target with a "automatically sign when you smell this on something with that colour on it" or similar.

(Ok stretching, but you get the idea)

cthia wrote:The qualifier I included is "For all intents and purposes."

Considering the capabilities of a Lenny, 1-2M km is a zero intercept. If Lennys are designed to launch GTs from stealth in the same manner as the Sharks with spider drives, they will not be picked up. Manticoran RDs cannot be picked up. And MA tech is better. SL drones were picked up, but their stealth tech is below the curve.

Indeed, SL stealth tech is lacking, but the point is we have little direct comparison between RMN scanning tech and MAlign's stealth. We know they didn't see the GTs during Oyster Bay, but those were flying on a significant fraction of the speed of light and they turned their spiders on a day out.

At 1 to 2 million km, the Lenny is relatively stationary to the target. If it fires a conventional missile from that distance, the missile will take 1 to 2 minutes to hit the target, which is plenty for the defenders to bring up walls and to fire back. At that distance, a conventional missile is a suicide mission for little upside.

If it fires a GT, then the torpedo will take even longer to reach the target. Its range probably is much bigger, so it doesn't need to get that close. But even if it needs to go from 1.1 million km to 700,000, the travel time is 368 seconds. On the other hand, it will be bringing its spider up MUCH closer to the defenders' sensors. There's a good chance that it'll be picked up. And the time is long enough for RDs to be vectored in to see what's going on.

Pods cannot risk firing on something "between" them and the planet, in such close proximity to the planet. Even IF at that point, Lennys are detected. No?

Right, but unless it's in low- or medium orbit, there may be pods that can have a firing solution without endangering the planet. Plus there's telemetry from the ground, which can guide the missiles to target and not the planet.

And don't forget that this is the defenders' planet. It's not an EE violation if they accidentally strike their own planet. They may reason that it's better to risk a missile grazing the atmosphere than to surrender to the MAlign.

But those are good points in favour of having OWPs. If those are in mid- or even high orbit, the planet is always behind them.

I saw your calculations. I'm just not certain they will alter the equation if Lennys can get that close. Consider the range the Sharks had to launch GTs and the range the Lennys will launch. Even if TOA is an hour, then Christmas dinner isn't exactly late. And, even if Lennys launch normal, first generation GTs from their closest range, time on target will still be too short for any target to enjoy Christmas.

The difference is the final speed. At 150 gravities, a torpedo would need over 45 hours and 130 AU to reach 0.8c. Even for 0.3c it's nearly 17 hours and over 18 AU (2.75 billion km) under acceleration.

The only alternative is that the LD itself accelerates to such a high speed in the general direction towards the target before launching from MUCH further out. At that point, the LD picks a random direction and accelerates away, while the torpedoes accelerate towards it. This is a workable attack mode, but it's the exact opposite of firing from close range.

The problem in this scenario is that the LD will still come close. The best it can hope for is a close fly-by. If the GT has a constant acceleration of 150 gravities and the the LD can pull an emergency acceleration of 250, then they separate at 400 gravities. It would need to launch at about 65 million km at no more than 0.3c to be over 1 million km from the target when the GTs fire.

In this scenario, the spiders were turned on very far out, so the likelihood of being picked up is small.

I don't expect Lennys to risk less than a light second either. Albeit I'm not prepared to think they can't achieve it under ideal conditions -- whatever ideal conditions might entail. I'm considering that the author is using the analogy of modern subs. Those subs launched from mocking distances as well, but in certain instances fired from "within" the blockade.

No military planner works with ideal conditions, at least not for long. The first attempts will be made under worst conditions planned and then they can refine as data indicates how well the stealth is performing.

For Oyster Bay, the Sharks -even with Spider Drive, had to be transported to Manticore (and we presume Grayson) and for Manticore were essentialy "dropped off" by a ship with traditional hyperdrive and coasted down to sublight. Same with the Ghosts. Ghosts are ultrastealthy scout ships which did the final system recons and provided the targeting data for everybody else. And, once they had leased thier various wepons systems they moved quietly off and out of the systems. Possibly the Ghosts remained behind for last minute updating. So the Sharks- which were carrying the GT outboard of the hulls- could have gone from "home" to Manticore but they didn't have the time and so settled from dropping the Sharks at extreem distance and letting the ready responce DDs chase the probable sensor ghosts .

The LD's a not going to hitch rides and they are going to be able to cruise right into the Manticore and other systems.
The LD's are massive and are designed to carry and launch the GT's from internal magazines. God (and the author) only knows what elce they are carring but a couple of LD's and a small fleet of Sharks use Spider Drives from their sortee point they are all going to avoid even Manticore's very wide net.

So, LDs and Sharks (they may have been test-beds but they worked and could have been being tweeked for the joint missions) creep into the primary orbital bands for the three inhabited planets for the Manticore Binary system and start dropping both GT's and ballistic pods of impeller driven missles. They might even have Ghosts which preceed them and pass targeting data. Once several Spiders are at the primary orbital levels they use GT's to hit the pairs of new major stations at each planet and impeller missles from the ballistic pods to go for any warships in range. At that point they are INSIDE everything elce Manticore has in-system and as the Spiders themselves are effectively invisible, about the only thing anybody could shoot at would be any pod that lauched. Who is going to open fire down into your main planitary orbital spaces with no targets? Once flushed, it doesn't matter the pods are of little consequence.
Demand surrender and make it a dam short responce time.....like one minute. No immediate surrender and fire other ballistic pods at targets on the surface.

Remember, the Alignment doesn't care about EE violations other than it could have pulled several opponants together against them. If they have enough ships to hit Manticore, Grayson, Beowulf, the Alderman and Haven, just who is going to go after them?
Oh, sure, there are going to be a lot of scattered but now orphaned Naval groups, even significant ones. But the HOME SYSTEMS are taken. The entire populations are hostage.

How to press this.....well, just because we only prestly know of the Mannerheim SDF as the only signifiant naval force in the RF, that doesn't mean that there arn't more. Take Mantiore, then pull a Paul Revere and send a Shark to hyperspace after the stand-down has been ordered to the Junction and Home Fleet. and you control the Junction and start sweeping up one naval command after another.
Erwhon and Maya....are going to do what? You send a former Manticorian Diplomat with your terms......wrong answer and your planet looses a major if not the captial city. Litteraly guns to your head.
The wider part of Haven and Bolthole.....well, you hold Haven and the government and head of the military forces....might just butcher everyting around Bolthole with no demand to surrender.

The still figuring it out SL......oh, sure, RHN and RMN surrenderd ships would be able to go through the SLN like shit through a goose.....why? Becuase if they don't the Alighment will kill their loved ones back home, wherever it might be.

The Alignment doesn't care how many people it kills, Once it come out into the open there really isn't any incentive to play by any rules but their own.

I didn't say this was a nice clean scenario....but it would fit with the Alighment.

Brigade XO wrote:For Oyster Bay, the Sharks -even with Spider Drive, had to be transported to Manticore (and we presume Grayson) and for Manticore were essentialy "dropped off" by a ship with traditional hyperdrive and coasted down to sublight. Same with the Ghosts.

Actually no. Ghosts were dropped off by freighters. But Storm from the Shadows (Sh 51) spends much of a page decribing how the Shark-class ship hypered themselves into Manticore. (So a bit long to simply quote)

Twenty of Sharks transitioned in, moving dead slow, tractored together. After entering normal space they deactivate the tractors, seperated, then headed away from the emergence point, under spider drive, at 75 gees.


They knew the signal of their emergence almost assuredly be detected and that it probably wouldn't just be written off, without follow-up as a sensor ghost. So they planned on somebody showing up to check it out. But their spider drive let them slip out of the search locus in a way they were pretty sure even a stealthed wedge couldn't manage -- not that close, not against Manticore's ultra sensitive long range sensor arrays.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:There's no evidence that the MAlign has access to Ghost Rider tech. They may have better hull and active stealth while using a spider drive, but do they know how to make a wedge capable of pulling 3500 G undetectable at a light second?

And I disagree that a target that knows they're coming wouldn't pick them up. RMN sensors are pretty good too and did pick up any RDs the SLN threw close at them. The only question is range: can the GT fire from a million km out, which is probably outside detection range unless an RD is at spitting distance? Or does it have to close to within a light-second?

No, they don't have Ghost Rider tech, but they do have equivalent or better stealth. Even if the grazer torpedo was limited to 500 G to be undetectable at 1 ls it would still be terrifying.

And of course the premise of the topic is contemplating the most important tech from one side to fall into another's hands, so postulating the results of GR tech falling into MAlign hands is part of the discussion.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:There's no evidence that the MAlign has access to Ghost Rider tech. They may have better hull and active stealth while using a spider drive, but do they know how to make a wedge capable of pulling 3500 G undetectable at a light second?

And I disagree that a target that knows they're coming wouldn't pick them up. RMN sensors are pretty good too and did pick up any RDs the SLN threw close at them. The only question is range: can the GT fire from a million km out, which is probably outside detection range unless an RD is at spitting distance? Or does it have to close to within a light-second?

No, they don't have Ghost Rider tech, but they do have equivalent or better stealth. Even if the grazer torpedo was limited to 500 G to be undetectable at 1 ls it would still be terrifying.

And of course the premise of the topic is contemplating the most important tech from one side to fall into another's hands, so postulating the results of GR tech falling into MAlign hands is part of the discussion.

Yes and no. The MAlign's stealth is amazing, but quite differently oriented than Ghost Rider's. Yes the MAlign have hull stealth that seems significantly in advance of anything Manticore has. And of course their spider drive sets utilized a totally novel propulsion which basically doesn't register on grav sensors. But there's no indication they've make breakthroughs in hiding active wedges - and that's the primary mechanism of the Ghost Rider recon drone's stealth capabilities. Those Ghost Rider drones are able to hide several thousand gees of acceleration at ludicrously short ranges.

So going back to the original proposal to equip graser torps with recon drone drives - there is no evidence that the MAlign would be able to make a wedge powered recon drone remotely as stealthy against wedge detection as Manticore managed with Ghost Rider.

I'll point out that the MAN spider vessels are not running a wedge. So what is undetectable to a normal ship might will not be undetectable to a spider.

Plus I'd assume the passive sensors like thermal are much more heavily featured on a MAN spider. And drones running a fusion reactor are very damn hot.

kzt wrote:Plus I'd assume the passive sensors like thermal are much more heavily featured on a MAN spider. And drones running a fusion reactor are very damn hot.

The thermal footprint is one of the things that Isaac Arthur always points out in his YouTube channel: there's no stealth in space if you've got a damn hot reactor running. All that thermal energy you're producing needs to go somewhere. It's either going to be your rocket exhaust (if your ship is propelled by rockets) or thermal vents or simply radiation.

For a limited time, you could dump your heat into a heat sink. The key word here being "limited".

In the Honorverse, I get the impression that the excess thermal energy can be dumped into the alpha wall through an active wedge. Since a Graser Torpedo lacks a wedge, it wouldn't be able to use this (hypothetical) technique. It may have a heat sink, which is why it has a very limited endurance.

The LD's stealth must work on other principles, though. It's possible it was using its heat sinks while trying to avoid detection in Darius, but I don't think that's likely.

David implied (or actually stated) that the spiders essentially beams out the waste heat in a very tight beam. Which I'm pretty sure is a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

kzt wrote:David implied (or actually stated) that the spiders essentially beams out the waste heat in a very tight beam. Which I'm pretty sure is a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

Waste? Not. Want? Not.

Interesting. I wonder if that "tight" beam can be used as a weapon. A thin thread coming from a spider. So apropos.


Do pardon the sleepy idiot from the rear. Again.

Conventional warships and missiles have to worry about wedge on wedge fratricide. Does the same fratricide apply to spider drives? Can a Lenny launch a GT with it's drive already engaged? If Harkness brought up a spider drive inside a MA boat bay, will it go BOOM?