Adapting Wolfpack Tactics to HV

What kind of maneuverability does a recon drone have, ie., we know they have enormous accelerations, but can they come to a full stop? And continue? I don't know why but I always felt like an RD is ever moving.

About the bow wave. Speculate, would a single missile cause enough of a bow wave?

penny wrote:What kind of maneuverability does a recon drone have, ie., we know they have enormous accelerations, but can they come to a full stop? And continue? I don't know why but I always felt like an RD is ever moving.

About the bow wave. Speculate, would a single missile cause enough of a bow wave?

Without checking, I believe that a recon drone can fly a preassigned course and even stop for a while to observe.

I expect any missile that goes fast enough will create a bow wave. "Fast enough" depends on the particle density in that region of space.

penny wrote:What kind of maneuverability does a recon drone have, ie., we know they have enormous accelerations, but can they come to a full stop? And continue? I don't know why but I always felt like an RD is ever moving.

About the bow wave. Speculate, would a single missile cause enough of a bow wave?

Pretty sure we've seen Ghost Rider RDs slip into planetary orbit and kill their drive, then later return. Certainly RD style drives are capable of varying their acceleration and being shut down and restarted.

Mind you most navy's drones still have quite short powered endurance (some as few as 10 minutes) and so they do tend to "run out of gas" and continue ballistically. But that's a limitation of the amount of stored power shoved aboard them, not of the drive system.

As for a bow wave, it'd probably depend on how fast it was moving. If it's a single missile costing along at .42 cee it presumably wouldn't produce as anywhere neas as large a bow wave as fourteen thousand Hasta IIIs did -- and quite likely might be missed even by a shell of RDs. Same is probably true (though the bow wave should be a bit more detectable) if it's coasting at the 0.54 c that an MDM can reach by burning out its first two drives from rest. But the faster you go the more energetic the bow wave and the easier it'll be to detect - if it's a 4 stage MDM coasting along a 0.72c then it'll be a lot easier to detect. (Same if it's a missile with fewer drives but launched with a sufficiently high base velocity to make up for that)

Though all this leaves aside how a missile could get up to those velocities without it's wedge being detected...
If it's instead coasting along at

If the aim is chaos and the break down of civil (if not civilized) commerce and diplomacy between the maximum number of star systems, then you don't have to destroy everything either in orbit or in resource recovery in those systems. But if you take out any shipyards and major fabrication stations and big habitats, you do a grand job of crippling the system you hit.

Oyster Bay hit the major infrastructure of the three habitable planets of the MBS AND most of their active dispersed yards. Also some other stuff but that was 1) the greatest mass of military and civilian shipyards and repair facilities, 2) the primary and most secondary orbital fabrication plants and 3) various other installations. And killed 7 million odd people including the trained ship construction workforce, the military station on the three major stations (one for each planet including one more than 100klm (I think).long, The families of those people living aboard. All the service providers also living aboard, took out the three primary interstellar arrival ports for passenger ships and docking freighters and probably every military ship either then attached to the three stations and many -like Hexapuma- in long-term "mooring " locations relative to the stations pending start of work etc.
Fairly few systems have anything like that amount of manufacturing and population living and working in orbit.
Grayson lost it's Blackbird yard and related construction and fabrication but NOT it's orbital farms or any manufacturing around the planet- not enough sharks to do the job.

You don't have to destroy everything, just a few really critical things. How many systems would need 17 shark sized ships to do what was done in Oyster Bay? What happens if you "only" slam for or five ballisited delivery warheads into the only station at Saltash and 4 major extraction operations out in the system. Beyond the station's debris raining down on the planet since it is unlikely Saltash has anything like the Astro Control Tugs that Manticore had to break up a massive amount of debris that would have impacted on the planets?

No warning, high fraction of C ballistic loads or Capital ship missiles with laser heads blowing though the habitats of Hapatia, and what they might have had as one civilian yard?

Even one LD assigned to 20 of the largest systems in the SL and the surrounding multi system political systems is going to devastate their trained manufacturing population and the plants they operated- and also get a number of warships that are parked.
Then hit 20 more, and another 20 and another 20 and go back piecemeal and start hitting the stations and operations being rebuilt-----all that money, all those people (what was left of the original trained people and those now being trained, and all that equipment you had to build or acquire to build the stuff you were in the process of replacing when you lose it again?

Nobody has to ever see a LD. They just arrive, get their targetting info, send off their allocated payloads and move on.....and it could be days before the weapons come tearing in to the targets around your planet/planets with only a Ghost or so to hang around close enough to get a good look at the damage. An extra pat on the back if you make the trajectories such that they help direct the shatter stations down at the planet.

Nobody comes with aid. Anybody with any capacity to do anything is selling to help protect themselves.
Somebody parks a shark or two outside the hyper limit of a bunch of planets near the lest time approach from the highest traffic shipping lanes and shoves G-Torps into the path of freighters or warships) heading into system. And the shark just glides away in the darkness to do it again and again. What freighter is going to survive a 3 second grazer burn from a G-Torp? If it doesn't get destroyed by failure of reactor containment, it is likely not to have any control (or probably anybody left that can navigate it) as it follows it's last powered direction though the system- and everybody prays it won't hit someone with people on or in it before it passes though and out of the system.

Chaos.

penny wrote:What kind of maneuverability does a recon drone have, ie., we know they have enormous accelerations, but can they come to a full stop? And continue? I don't know why but I always felt like an RD is ever moving.

Yes.

If you're asking if they can come to a full stop, sure. Every time they stop accelerating, they are stopped relative to their local frame of reference. So it's a matter of accelerating and decelerating sufficiently to achieve zero relative velocity to what you want to be stopped with.

For sufficient power to do that, see Jonathan's answer.

If you're asking if they can shut down their wedges and re-light them later, that's a good question but the answer is also yes. We have direct evidence of that because of New Tuscany: HMS Arngrim left her RDs in the system, in low-power mode or shut down, while they went back to Spindle to report in. When Tenth Fleet (then only just one BatCruRun) arrived, they just turned those drones back on and were able to shadow Byng's task group enough to identify the flagship.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:What kind of maneuverability does a recon drone have, ie., we know they have enormous accelerations, but can they come to a full stop? And continue? I don't know why but I always felt like an RD is ever moving.

Yes.

If you're asking if they can come to a full stop, sure. Every time they stop accelerating, they are stopped relative to their local frame of reference. So it's a matter of accelerating and decelerating sufficiently to achieve zero relative velocity to what you want to be stopped with.

For sufficient power to do that, see Jonathan's answer.

If you're asking if they can shut down their wedges and re-light them later, that's a good question but the answer is also yes. We have direct evidence of that because of New Tuscany: HMS Arngrim left her RDs in the system, in low-power mode or shut down, while they went back to Spindle to report in. When Tenth Fleet (then only just one BatCruRun) arrived, they just turned those drones back on and were able to shadow Byng's task group enough to identify the flagship.

I wonder if low power mode is equivalent to warm impellers on a warship. And surely restarting a drone's wedge from a cold state might take 45 minutes????

penny wrote:I wonder if low power mode is equivalent to warm impellers on a warship. And surely restarting a drone's wedge from a cold state might take 45 minutes????

Maybe, maybe not. The time it takes to restart may depend on the size of those wedges and a drone's will be much smaller. We've never heard of boarding a pinnace and having to wait 45 minutes.

But even if it is the case, those 45 minutes may still fit into the narrative, because Byng was coming to meet Tenth Fleet, so the RD only had to meet them in the middle.

penny wrote:I wonder if low power mode is equivalent to warm impellers on a warship. And surely restarting a drone's wedge from a cold state might take 45 minutes????

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Maybe, maybe not. The time it takes to restart may depend on the size of those wedges and a drone's will be much smaller. We've never heard of boarding a pinnace and having to wait 45 minutes.

But even if it is the case, those 45 minutes may still fit into the narrative, because Byng was coming to meet Tenth Fleet, so the RD only had to meet them in the middle.

And if the passive sensors had been left on, then the various SLN ships would already be identified.