penny wrote:I would tend to think that stealthy buoys and drones inspired themselves. In the early history of the HV, I always thought navigation buoys would be broadcasting some sort of warning to traffic to keep from having to replace them because they were run over like construction cones placed in the street.
But then, belligerents would intentionally destroy them along with infrastructure. I can see some pirate using them for target practice. So, a stealthy buoy was born.
tlb wrote:The need for a stealthy recon drone is obvious. But how exactly, would a stealthy navigation buoy work? Turn off the signal and it is no longer helpful for navigation.
penny wrote:Exactly! Akin to the age of sail when you turned off the beacon in the lighthouse to let enemy ships crash into the rocky shores. Dunno how that would work in the HV. Unless everyone you expected to visit had codes to temporarily activate the beacon.
I am none too sure recon drones employed any amount of stealth in their early primitive form. You just wanted to get something out there asap to give you enough of a warning against pirates.
The earliest recon drones might have been used by survey ships and so need not be stealthy, but any armed force would want stealth from the very beginning; now that might not be considered very stealthy by modern standards. Those drones would most likely be deployed after it was already determined that the incoming ships were not friendly.
If there really are navigation buoys in the Honorverse, then it would not be practical to require tramp freighters to have the code for every system they visited. If that were the case, then a pirate capturing one of these freighters would also have all the codes.
A better way would be to turn off the buoys by a coded signal from a central system command post, when the self-defense force determines that pirates are approaching. Then if a tramp freighter familiar with the system sees that the buoys are off, they can run away. Once the pirates are gone another coded signal could turn the buoys back on.