Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:I don't think you are considering the bigger picture of the entire financial model. Someone cannot be allowed to have firsthand knowledge of stock quotes and commodities too far ahead of time in order to corner entire markets.

Indeed, someone with a faster ship could go from a location where some production is going well or poorly to a location where investments happen, and be able to short or go long on financial products, reaping a lot of money in the process. In fact, this may be a way that the MAlign had been making money in the past couple of decades.

But I don't think they had enough streak DBs and couriers of their own to watch for all potential market opportunities and in time. It basically means having one per large production system staying there at all times until the opportunity arose.

That's different from trying to disrupt communications for a single, specific entity that the belligerent is fighting.

penny wrote:Invisible ships can eliminate DBs in some areas on the strategic map. An invisible pirate! Heavens! No!

I meant it would have to use the tactics of a pirate, not to be a pirate. The only way it can catch a DB that stays only 20 minutes in system is to lie doggo near the arrival point.

If the DB is not time-sensitive, it will come into orbit, refuel and maybe allow the crew to disembark. That would mean a 12-hour turnaround time minimum. With those times, it would be possible to launch a g-torp from far away and let it slowly come into range, then fire at the DB. Or just fire a Hasta III at low speeds; there's no need for g-torp in this case.

penny wrote:So, I was thinking more like run and gun them down in hyper. In hyper in the same band their speed is equal. But the route of each DB is probably known. So, a streak drive can simply kick it up into the iota band and overtake the target then drop back down into the previous band and allow the target to approach from behind while preparing to blast it with the unobtrusive energy weapon that [i] shouldn't[/b] be there.

That's possible, but given we haven't heard much of hyperspace battles, it seems they are difficult to produce. Hyperspace battles happen at specific points in hyperspace, like entry and exit points of grav waves. So I would conclude that the issue is hyperspace travel is too unpredictable to do so anywhere else, the target may have veered off course and thus be sufficiently far away to be impossible to spot and engage in time (in cruise, they're making 0.5 or 0.6c).

Why battles don't happen in hyperspace near the hyperlimits I don't know. I haven't heard any reason why they shouldn't be possible, and yet we haven't heard about them at all.

I don't think it has been possible before, maybe. Perhaps it was impossible to generate a significant accel advantage. As I said before, the MA's unprecedented technology enables unprecedented tactics. A streak drive can overtake an adversary in the iota band and "head 'em off at the pass".

Question. Let's say you have a freighter that is stocked full and you cannot exactly pack the rest of the load. Can merchandise be tractored inside the wedge of a freighter? I wonder if it breaks any rules or restrictions.

If you corner the market, you've got to move some goods.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:DBs and other ships can and do use burst transmission of messages and data to push information to their owners/chains of command. You come out of hyperspace and fire off an encrypted message aimed at where the intended receiver should be when the transmission gets close enough to be received. Heck, you could use RDs to send massive amounts of information more securely than just an encrypted transmission but you are going to need to be operating mostly at the level of a system's military since most systems are not happy with random drones barreling in the direction of their inhabited planets.\

Though the one place we've had a somewhat detailed look on how courier DBs operate (within the Pierre regime of the PRH) the DB seem to wait to send their secure messages until they've reached practical two-way communication range of the planet, or even planetary orbit, before they begin the message transfer and verification. Seemingly at that point they get notified how many messages (if any) require them to wait for immediate response. (So they know whether or not they can immediately move on).

While the message download, upload, and then confirmation that all messages arrived intact could be done from out by the hyper limit that would involve some very long message delays (especially if the encryption protocol required multiple round trip messages to establish the transmission protection and integrity keys) - as the hyper limit could be 10 light minutes or more from the inhabited planet. And the Peeps pretty clearly did not do that.

Of course, with only one example, we can't tell if that's a peculiarity of the Peep regime, or if that's pretty standard for everybody's high security message carriage by DBs.

Dispatch boats are exchanging a lot of data. High priority data. It is not sent in a burst transmission. One does not send that kind and amount of data in a burst transmission. You want to be as close as possible to the receiver to ensure 100 % error free transmission. Both ways. One does not choose an error prone method.

Plus, the data is also of a high security classified type. The least amount of distance between the communication the harder it becomes to intercept.

penny wrote:

Why battles don't happen in hyperspace near the hyperlimits I don't know. I haven't heard any reason why they shouldn't be possible, and yet we haven't heard about them at all.

I don't think it has been possible before, maybe. Perhaps it was impossible to generate a significant accel advantage. As I said before, the MA's unprecedented technology enables unprecedented tactics. A streak drive can overtake an adversary in the iota band and "head 'em off at the pass".

Overtaking or lying in wait are just two different ways of generating an interception. We haven't heard of anyone lying in wait at any point except "at the pass" (known points in hyperspace, like entering or exiting grav waves), so I don't think the streak drive can help generating more interceptions than otherwise should be possible. Mind you, I think they should be, but since they haven't happened, there's probably a reason.

What it does allow is to have better timing. Instead of having to wait for someone who may not come at all be late, which means dedicating a number of platforms for an extended period of time, the streak attacker can overtake, as you said. That's a better utilisation of resources. It won't help if the intended victim changes course and deviates too much.

penny wrote:Dispatch boats are exchanging a lot of data. High priority data. It is not sent in a burst transmission. One does not send that kind and amount of data in a burst transmission. You want to be as close as possible to the receiver to ensure 100 % error free transmission. Both ways. One does not choose an error prone method.

That flies in the face of current transmission and error-correction methods. We can receive data from a 50-year-old probe 18 light-hours away, albeit at a very low bit rate. We receive data from Juno (up to 54 light-minutes away) at 18 kbit/s. When Mars is close to us (6 light-minutes), the MAVEN probe could achieve 2048 kbit/s. All of this is done with directional radio (microwave) antennae, not with lasers and without any type of relays.

We know how to send transmissions with error correction codes so it arrives intact, or at least so errors can be detected, for a given noise level. That means we could ensure that any transmission from the hyperlimit would arrive intact, if we wanted to. I'd still design it so an acknowledgement transmission was required to confirm everything arrived intact, so one round-trip would be required.

With a store-and-forward relay system relying on lasers, the bandwidth would be much, much greater because the channel noise level would be much lower. The round-trip would also be smaller because it would only need to communicate with each relay in the chain. A star system with a high DB traffic would definitely have such facilities, especially if time is money.

Plus, the data is also of a high security classified type. The least amount of distance between the communication the harder it becomes to intercept.

You're not trying to hide the fact that you're transmitting, only the contents. Therefore, encryption and authentication suffice. It doesn't appear computers in the HV are much more powerful than what we have today. And no, quantum computing is not going to be a revolution in processing power for everything, only certain types of algorithms, though admittedly one of them is of a commonly-used type of encryption today.

If you did have this type of paranoia or if a physical delivery of something (be it a mass storage device or some other item) and time were of the essence, you could simply position a sub-light craft nearby to perform the exchange. That would be a target for an attacker, but they still can't get too close for too long.

All of that said, I don't think any of this is going to happen. Nothing is that time-sensitive that a couple of extra hours is going to be a problem, when the whole trip is a minimum of 4 days, more likely several weeks.

If it were the case, you'd probably also have several DBs coming in sequence, spaced a day or so or maybe a few hours, with updates. Intercepting one of them is not going to stop the rest, but will alert the defenders.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Overtaking or lying in wait are just two different ways of generating an interception. We haven't heard of anyone lying in wait at any point except "at the pass" (known points in hyperspace, like entering or exiting grav waves), so I don't think the streak drive can help generating more interceptions than otherwise should be possible. Mind you, I think they should be, but since they haven't happened, there's probably a reason.

What it does allow is to have better timing. Instead of having to wait for someone who may not come at all be late, which means dedicating a number of platforms for an extended period of time, the streak attacker can overtake, as you said. That's a better utilisation of resources. It won't help if the intended victim changes course and deviates too much.

I believe there are several factors that make hyperspace interception especially difficult. At least against a ship with military grade rad shielding.

1) Very limited sensor ranges (usually) -- it's hard to keep your target in sight, and you need to be going in about the right direction at about the right velocity when you sight them or they'll simply disappear out of view before you can build up an intercept course.

2) Identical top speeds - ships spend most of their time in hyper going as fast as their rad shielding will let them; and nobody seems to have developed improvements there -- so everybody with military grade shielding tops out at 0.6c. Acceleration advantage doesn't help once both ships are at top speed -- so you need an acceleration AND a positional advantage to pull off an intercept without changing hyper bands. Otherwise angling to move laterally towards your target just puts you further behind them.

3) Jump errors - these presumably apply when switching between any bands of hyperspace, not just when dropping out into normal space. So even if you can out climb your target and move ahead of their predicted position there's a decent chance that when you drop back down you'll emerge too far to a side, or the rear, to engage them; or emerge outside of sensor range entirely!

4) Transition bleed-off - if you try to outclimb them you'll lose a major amount of your velocity going into the next higher band. We don't know the Kappa wall bleed-off, but the Iota wall is down to "only" costing you 48% of your velocity each time you cross it. So after making that transition you've got to spend more time there regaining velocity in the new band in order to overtake your target's estimated position. (Being in the Iota bands gives you a roughly 16.4% advantage over a ship in the Theta bands -- but only after you make up for that 48% velocity loss. And if you can accelerate at 650g it'll "only" take you a bit over 4 hours to regain that lost 0.312c from going from Theta to Iota -- unless you're lucky enough to have a grav wave going your way in the Iota band, which would give you the accel to overcome that velocity loss way, way, quicker)
Then you lose that velocity again dropped back down - so if you didn't emerge somewhere where your target can't avoid flying into your weapons range you'll never catch them because you can't exceed the target's top speed.

5) The target can leave hyper (or drop to lower bands) to attempt to evade you. Or change course, or just slow down then cut their drive and hide. All of which likely put them beyond your sensor range when you drop back down. Or at least hide them from your sensors.


So outside of very unusual circumstances you can only pull off an intercept of a ship with military grade rad shielding if you've got enough warships playing beater that stay in the hyper band with the target to keep chasing them down basically the same source for the time (likely hours) it'll take another warship to climb into a higher band, overfly the target, then (hopefully) drop out ahead of it. Those beaters will need to be close enough to prevent the target from radically changing course (without getting engaged by at least one pursuing warship), find it if it tried to cut it's drive, or follow it if it dives into a lower band (or normal space) to try and hide.

Oh, and each group of beaters needs to be powerful enough to take on the target -- it does little good for a single destroyer to intercept an evading BC if the BC can blow it to dust bunnies and continue its escape.


Now if you're hunting freighters that becomes slightly easier. They unusually have civilian rad shielding, maxing out at 0.5c so you've a velocity and acceleration advantage. But the other factors are still in play.

Pirates and commerce raiders (that being either a Q-ship or a warship) are both in the job of finding a freighter they can successfully attack. At that point what they do with the target "depends".

Pirates want to capture the ship and -hopefully- sell both the ship and cargos. What they do with the crew/passengers depends on where they are and if there is any practical way of getting a ransom for the people captured.

Commerce Raiders are primarily interested in denying both the ship and its cargos to whatever opponent they are looking to damage by cutting off supplies and removing shipping from them. Depending on who your raiders are, they might take the crew/passengers as hostages but then they would have to have enough capacity to send them somewhere while not cutting down their ability to keep hunting ships.

Historically, captured merchant shipping could be sent to a friendly port (of the nation doing the raiding) which accrues (or did, not sure if Manticore is doing this now) prize money from the disposition of said ship and cargo. If you have retaken a pirated ship, the prize money would probably be the recovery value of the insurance on the vessel & cargos. If an enemy ship (or pirate) then you might not have any insurance involved but your star nation could well off ship and contents (or retain various goods or the ship itself and pay the market values.

The other thing with commerce raiders is that the primary mission is denying the ships and cargoes to the enemy so just sinking them is enough. Taking off crews or just letting them abandon ship is an option but -particularly in the case of submarines- you have no capacity to do that. So mostly it's sink and move on and let crew/passengers take their chances in lifeboats unless the order is" no survivors". Human

So that brings us back to the Alignment doing interceptions to either cut communications of damage/deny trade. Being the Alignment, the lives of any crew are probably moot since they really really really don't want anybody to know who or what is either causing ships to go missing or be destroyed soon after exiting hyperspace. Heck, at that point you can just either seed an area with "acquired" SLN shipkillers and control them remotely or do the same with G-torps (which eliminates any impeller tracking). So send spider drive ships and just butcher merchant shipping and dispatch boats...the dispatch boats are probably going to be the harder targets because of size and speed.
Mostly the question is why expend the time and effort by the Alignment unless they are looking to play yet another game of misdirection and terror. That part I can understand- they are the Alignment.

Jonathan_S wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Overtaking or lying in wait are just two different ways of generating an interception. We haven't heard of anyone lying in wait at any point except "at the pass" (known points in hyperspace, like entering or exiting grav waves), so I don't think the streak drive can help generating more interceptions than otherwise should be possible. Mind you, I think they should be, but since they haven't happened, there's probably a reason.

What it does allow is to have better timing. Instead of having to wait for someone who may not come at all be late, which means dedicating a number of platforms for an extended period of time, the streak attacker can overtake, as you said. That's a better utilisation of resources. It won't help if the intended victim changes course and deviates too much.

I believe there are several factors that make hyperspace interception especially difficult. At least against a ship with military grade rad shielding.

1) Very limited sensor ranges (usually) -- it's hard to keep your target in sight, and you need to be going in about the right direction at about the right velocity when you sight them or they'll simply disappear out of view before you can build up an intercept course.

2) Identical top speeds - ships spend most of their time in hyper going as fast as their rad shielding will let them; and nobody seems to have developed improvements there -- so everybody with military grade shielding tops out at 0.6c. Acceleration advantage doesn't help once both ships are at top speed -- so you need an acceleration AND a positional advantage to pull off an intercept without changing hyper bands. Otherwise angling to move laterally towards your target just puts you further behind them.

3) Jump errors - these presumably apply when switching between any bands of hyperspace, not just when dropping out into normal space. So even if you can out climb your target and move ahead of their predicted position there's a decent chance that when you drop back down you'll emerge too far to a side, or the rear, to engage them; or emerge outside of sensor range entirely!

4) Transition bleed-off - if you try to outclimb them you'll lose a major amount of your velocity going into the next higher band. We don't know the Kappa wall bleed-off, but the Iota wall is down to "only" costing you 48% of your velocity each time you cross it. So after making that transition you've got to spend more time there regaining velocity in the new band in order to overtake your target's estimated position. (Being in the Iota bands gives you a roughly 16.4% advantage over a ship in the Theta bands -- but only after you make up for that 48% velocity loss. And if you can accelerate at 650g it'll "only" take you a bit over 4 hours to regain that lost 0.312c from going from Theta to Iota -- unless you're lucky enough to have a grav wave going your way in the Iota band, which would give you the accel to overcome that velocity loss way, way, quicker)
Then you lose that velocity again dropped back down - so if you didn't emerge somewhere where your target can't avoid flying into your weapons range you'll never catch them because you can't exceed the target's top speed.

5) The target can leave hyper (or drop to lower bands) to attempt to evade you. Or change course, or just slow down then cut their drive and hide. All of which likely put them beyond your sensor range when you drop back down. Or at least hide them from your sensors.


So outside of very unusual circumstances you can only pull off an intercept of a ship with military grade rad shielding if you've got enough warships playing beater that stay in the hyper band with the target to keep chasing them down basically the same source for the time (likely hours) it'll take another warship to climb into a higher band, overfly the target, then (hopefully) drop out ahead of it. Those beaters will need to be close enough to prevent the target from radically changing course (without getting engaged by at least one pursuing warship), find it if it tried to cut it's drive, or follow it if it dives into a lower band (or normal space) to try and hide.

Oh, and each group of beaters needs to be powerful enough to take on the target -- it does little good for a single destroyer to intercept an evading BC if the BC can blow it to dust bunnies and continue its escape.


Now if you're hunting freighters that becomes slightly easier. They unusually have civilian rad shielding, maxing out at 0.5c so you've a velocity and acceleration advantage. But the other factors are still in play.

Thanks for the post. Makes lots of sense. It appears that a slight adjustment of tactics might solve some of the biggest hurdles. In major hubs where the the density of dispatch boats is greater, I would simply jump ahead in the iota band immediately, then drop back down ASAP. That might ensure sighting at least one dispatch boat upon "immediately" leaving the system. Similar to shooting a shotgun into a flock of geese. You are sure to hit something.

Your thoughts about sensor coverage in hyper resonates well. And a dispatch boat should be even harder to see on sensors. The fact about hyper jumps not being perfect also resonates well, so, perhaps an immediate jump into the iota band and dropping back down ASAP may ensure spotting at least one boat. But if it is that difficult, a war on the enemy's DBs might not be worth the trouble. Except perhaps with spider drive warships awaiting the flies. Although I still think that denying communication and financial data would be worth it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Dispatch boats are exchanging a lot of data. High priority data. It is not sent in a burst transmission. One does not send that kind and amount of data in a burst transmission. You want to be as close as possible to the receiver to ensure 100 % error free transmission. Both ways. One does not choose an error prone method.

That flies in the face of current transmission and error-correction methods. We can receive data from a 50-year-old probe 18 light-hours away, albeit at a very low bit rate. We receive data from Juno (up to 54 light-minutes away) at 18 kbit/s. When Mars is close to us (6 light-minutes), the MAVEN probe could achieve 2048 kbit/s. All of this is done with directional radio (microwave) antennae, not with lasers and without any type of relays.

We know how to send transmissions with error correction codes so it arrives intact, or at least so errors can be detected, for a given noise level. That means we could ensure that any transmission from the hyperlimit would arrive intact, if we wanted to. I'd still design it so an acknowledgement transmission was required to confirm everything arrived intact, so one round-trip would be required.

With a store-and-forward relay system relying on lasers, the bandwidth would be much, much greater because the channel noise level would be much lower. The round-trip would also be smaller because it would only need to communicate with each relay in the chain. A star system with a high DB traffic would definitely have such facilities, especially if time is money.

Plus, the data is also of a high security classified type. The least amount of distance between the communication the harder it becomes to intercept.

You're not trying to hide the fact that you're transmitting, only the contents. Therefore, encryption and authentication suffice. It doesn't appear computers in the HV are much more powerful than what we have today. And no, quantum computing is not going to be a revolution in processing power for everything, only certain types of algorithms, though admittedly one of them is of a commonly-used type of encryption today.

If you did have this type of paranoia or if a physical delivery of something (be it a mass storage device or some other item) and time were of the essence, you could simply position a sub-light craft nearby to perform the exchange. That would be a target for an attacker, but they still can't get too close for too long.

All of that said, I don't think any of this is going to happen. Nothing is that time-sensitive that a couple of extra hours is going to be a problem, when the whole trip is a minimum of 4 days, more likely several weeks.

If it were the case, you'd probably also have several DBs coming in sequence, spaced a day or so or maybe a few hours, with updates. Intercepting one of them is not going to stop the rest, but will alert the defenders.

You may have a point, with HV communication methods. Plus I didn't consider that it might not be SOP for DBs to travel deep into a system in case a war breaks out. A DB does not need to be trapped in a system.

Brigade XO wrote:Pirates and commerce raiders (that being either a Q-ship or a warship) are both in the job of finding a freighter they can successfully attack. At that point what they do with the target "depends".

Pirates want to capture the ship and -hopefully- sell both the ship and cargos. What they do with the crew/passengers depends on where they are and if there is any practical way of getting a ransom for the people captured.

Commerce Raiders are primarily interested in denying both the ship and its cargos to whatever opponent they are looking to damage by cutting off supplies and removing shipping from them. Depending on who your raiders are, they might take the crew/passengers as hostages but then they would have to have enough capacity to send them somewhere while not cutting down their ability to keep hunting ships.

Historically, captured merchant shipping could be sent to a friendly port (of the nation doing the raiding) which accrues (or did, not sure if Manticore is doing this now) prize money from the disposition of said ship and cargo. If you have retaken a pirated ship, the prize money would probably be the recovery value of the insurance on the vessel & cargos. If an enemy ship (or pirate) then you might not have any insurance involved but your star nation could well off ship and contents (or retain various goods or the ship itself and pay the market values.

The other thing with commerce raiders is that the primary mission is denying the ships and cargoes to the enemy so just sinking them is enough. Taking off crews or just letting them abandon ship is an option but -particularly in the case of submarines- you have no capacity to do that. So mostly it's sink and move on and let crew/passengers take their chances in lifeboats unless the order is" no survivors". Human

So that brings us back to the Alignment doing interceptions to either cut communications of damage/deny trade. Being the Alignment, the lives of any crew are probably moot since they really really really don't want anybody to know who or what is either causing ships to go missing or be destroyed soon after exiting hyperspace. Heck, at that point you can just either seed an area with "acquired" SLN shipkillers and control them remotely or do the same with G-torps (which eliminates any impeller tracking). So send spider drive ships and just butcher merchant shipping and dispatch boats...the dispatch boats are probably going to be the harder targets because of size and speed.
Mostly the question is why expend the time and effort by the Alignment unless they are looking to play yet another game of misdirection and terror. That part I can understand- they are the Alignment.

Commerce raiding is what attacking an enemy's DB would be. A DB equals commerce. Although, it certainly might break some treaties being that DB boats might not actually fit the designation of a military target. Not that the MA would care.

DBs would appear to be the backbone of a navy's communication. Breaking those lines of communication has always been an acceptable strategy. Getting the enemy to redeploy has always been a strategy as well. Getting the same enemy to redeploy larger vessels to replace destroyed DB boats, or simply to ensure a more reliable means of communication is an acceptable outcome as well.

A Dispatch boat is the epitome of commerce.