THE LENNYS ARE COMING! THE LENNYS ARE COMING!

kzt wrote:And the RMN doesn't have the same tech base for locating spiders as the MAN.

That's quite possibly be the reason spider-drives will stick out like a thermite torch in a dark room. They may not be that obvious or easy to localize, but there is no telling what the differences in technology will mean to detection ranges -- or what specific (unrelated) technology might hold the key to countering the inherent stealth of Spider Drives

Weird Harold wrote:That's the best The MAlign could do. They don't have FTL comms or any of the Ghostrider tech (or Haven equivalent.)

That "light-second detection" is more range than the GA is currently capable of and far less range than the GA will soon be capable of. The GA has far more motivation and experience in countering enemy tech than the MAlign has.

Oh, I'm sure the GA will eventually be able to do better. And the FTL comm stuff will probably help, since it involves ripples in the alpha wall. But maybe not that much -- "The real trick for the FTL com was developing the ability to produce finely controlled pulses (ripples)", so their detection ability may not be as much better as all that.
(http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/153/1)

As FTL comms are effected by generating grav signals, is it possible that the grabbing of the alpha band by the spider drive legs could be picked up by the grav sensors?

Also is it possible that a powerful enough grav emitter could be turned into a weapon to disrupt the spider drive?

And how do the spider drive ships move inside the hyper limit? Surely latching onto the alpha band is making a connection to hyper which is not something that can be done within the hyper limit.

George J. Smith wrote:As FTL comms are effected by generating grav signals, is it possible that the grabbing of the alpha band by the spider drive legs could be picked up by the grav sensors?

Also is it possible that a powerful enough grav emitter could be turned into a weapon to disrupt the spider drive?

And how do the spider drive ships move inside the hyper limit? Surely latching onto the alpha band is making a connection to hyper which is not something that can be done within the hyper limit.

1) Possibly, but it might take even more sensitive grav sensors and noise filters.

2) Most likely it already exits. It's called an impeller wedge.

3) The hyper limit applies to crossing from normal space to the alpha band, and vice versa. FTL comms and impeller wedges both work inside the hyper limit in normal space, and both interact with the alpha band. So there is no reason why the spider drive wouldn't work inside the hyper limit (and we have seen graser torpedoes, which use the spider drive for propulsion, work inside the hyper limit during Oyster Bay).

Mission of Honor, Chapter 28 wrote:The ships which had mounted Oyster Bay, however, represented a radical departure from anything the galaxy had previously seen which was just as impressive, in its own way, as anything Manticore had accomplished. They weren’t a particularly graceful departure, of course. In fact, compared to any impeller-drive ship, they were squat, stumpy, and downright peculiar looking because, unlike the gravitic drives everyone else used, the spider generated no impeller wedge. Instead of using two inclined planes of focused gravity to create bands of stressed space around the pocket of normal-space which surrounded a ship, the spider used literally dozens of nodes to project spurs or spikes of intensely focused gravity. For all intents and purposes, each of those spurs was almost like generating a tractor or a presser beam, except that no one in his right mind had ever imagined tractors or pressers that powerful. In fact, at a sufficiently short range, they would have made quite serviceable energy weapons, because these focused, directional beams were powerful enough to create their own tiny foci—effectively, holes in the “real” universe—in which space itself was so highly stressed that the beams punched clear through to the alpha wall, the interface between normal-space and hyper-space.
No single beam would have been of any particular use. Powerful as it might be, it was less than a shadow compared to the output of even a single one of any starship’s beta nodes, far less an alpha node. It wasn’t even enough to produce the “ripple” along the hyper-space wall which Manticore used for its FTL communications technology. But it did lock onto the wall, and that provided the ship which mounted it a purchase point in deep space—one which was always available, anywhere, in any direction. And when dozens of those beams were combined, reaching out, locking onto the alpha wall and pulling in micro-spaced bursts, they produced something that was very useful, indeed.

Italics are the author's.

cthia wrote:Something seems to be derailing my train of thought. Or either the illogic in my head is finally catching up with me.

Surely it can't be as simple as that Maxx, or it would prove to have been lots of work on a useless one-off design. Similar to the grav lance. So I assumed there must also be a complementary tactical advantage somewhere, somehow in weaponry to offset the glaring weakness that surely must also be just as obvious to an alpha's mind. Or as you've said, the all bark and no bite platform would have such a critical weakness that could leave it seriously naked. I assumed the complementary tactical advantage had to be in the missile envelope. I initially considered missile acceleration as a possible and probable advantage as well, but I assumed the missiles would have the same limitations as the ship and reading the initial posts proposing a max accel of 150G I dismissed that thought. However, with such possible theoretical missile acceleration as Weird Harold suggests, it falls back in line with my original thoughts. The LDs have to have some sort of tactical advantage other than their stealth. Or it seems it would have been more cost effective to simply build the same small Sharks that carried out the OB attack in bigger numbers (especially if extreme 30-40M+ tonnage estimates are accurate for the LDs) and develop the appropriate launch tubes for them or even further develop the jury-rigged firing mechanism that was already used in the OB attack. Even if at the expense of a very limited payload of a "few shots to dry" each.

David has mentioned in many ways the Spider Drive ships are the equivalent of submarines. And especially if you think of WWII era subs if they didn't have stealth they've be nearly useless. Slower, even on the surface, than almost any other warship - less torpedo tubes than many destroyers, a deck gun with no real fire control, and smaller (and less numerous) than those on even corvettes or destroyer escorts; oh and little to no anti-aircraft capability. If the enemy knew exactly where the sub was it would be dead very quickly.

But nobody could say that even when engaged in a detection / evasion arms race that subs weren't major contributors to the war effort.

Lenny Dets don't need to be able engage in straight up duals with SD(P) squadrons to be very useful tools in the MAlign's bag of tricks any more than submarines needed to be able to chase down and hit aircraft carriers. (Though in both cases sometimes you get lucky and one walks through your sights)



I don't think the Lenny Dets were intended to be used as the sole or even primary warship design. They're a force multiplier, not a main battle line. They can engage in solo style raiding to try and ambush enemy units in transit, or destroy shipping that's supporting the fleet or industry. They could wipe out industrial power in a system (blow up asteroid mines and slip out undetected). They could try and wipe out forward repair bases (especially if combined against with Ghosts for the final targetting - then they can act more like a cruise missile platform and launch from beyond the hyper limit, hypering out long before the launched weapons reach their targets.
And they can work in conjunction with normal warships to attempt to lure enemy formations into ambush scenarios - imagine the disruption if even SD(P)s and CLACs get hit from behind as they're about to engage their counterparts. They've got stacked pods already rolled that are vulnerable to proximity kills - delaying their heavy initial blow. Their LACs are mostly forward deployed towards the known enemy - so totally out of possition to assist against the surprise attack.

But they can't afford to divert too many LACs or light units to hunt down the stealth ambushers because they've still got to stay concentrated and honor the threat of the enemy's conventional wall - even more pressing due to the battle damage the surprise attack landed. But if they get too focused on the conventional pod fight they might get another round of graser torps up their backsides.


So when working with normal naval detachments I see them playing the role (often attempted in WWI and WWII, but rarely pulled off) of the picket line of submarines that you deploy in the path of the enemy. Then having forced them to come out to fight your warships they must, perforce, pass through the picket line were hopefully they will suffer damage and losses. The better sensor range of a stealthed warship (compared to a sub), combined with the proportionately longer range of their weapons, and the guided nature of them, given them much better chances of maneuvering as necessary to land such an early hit.

(Or they've got enough firepower that you could actually use the conventional naval force to lure the defending fleet away from the fixed system infrastructure and then blow the forts, yards, stations, ect away with the Lenny Dets and have everyone withdraw without ever engaging the enemy's main force. Kind of like if submarines had the firepower to wipe out whole shipyards if the defending anti-submarine screen got lured away)


Low acceleration can be compensated for if you have visible units to act at matadors to lure or push the enemy to kill zones where the slower stealthy ships are waiting.


Sure in the unlikely situation that the stealth abilities were stripped bare the Lenny Dets would appear to be at a significant disadvantage over the smaller Invictus. But that makes sense due to so much of their design being spent on achieving the force multiplier of that stealth.

Could there be other, not yet seen, capabilites beyond the stealth? Sure. But "just" stealth combined with the firepower of pods and graser torps is a capability not to be despised. Even if it's not so good in a conventional wall of battle.

George J. Smith wrote:As FTL comms are effected by generating grav signals, is it possible that the grabbing of the alpha band by the spider drive legs could be picked up by the grav sensors?

Unfortunately, the Manticoran Binary System probably had millions of the best grav sensors in the known universe operating during the weeks or months the Oyster Bay ships were sneaking around getting ready. None of those got a sniff, even with hindsight analysis.

All they got, other than the entry hyper footprint, was an accidental brush with a com laser pulling the trigger.

Grav torps may not be fast, but they're fast enough -- their acceleration is, it seems, on the same order of magnitude as ships. So they can maneuver for, say, an up-the-kilt or down-the-throat shot, with considerable ease. A Lenny can probably do quite a bit more damage with grav torps than I think people are estimating, and I suspect that they have powerful energy armaments as well. Enemy is faster than you? Let them go past, angle across their rear, and give them an up-the-kilt energy broadside.

Raiding certainly has potential, but honestly they don't need the Lennys to do considerable economic damage. One freighter Q-ship getting close to a planet can cause a lot of destruction.

cthia wrote:Something occurred to me while watching a movie last night.


What would Manticore, Grayson or Haven do if a fleet of Lenny Dets were able to get in system and in optimum position, contacted the planet and insisted that the planet and navy surrender and strike its wedge or else the planet dies?

During every applicable confrontation in the Honorverse, each CO always had to extend his force and protect the planet. Sebastian D'Orville stated that he had no choice but to extend his forces (go out and meet) the Havenite force. He had to respect the possibility of an EE strike. However, if the enemy forces have already managed to get themselves into position — checkmate?

The US does not negotiate with terrorists. Yet, what if the terrorists were holding the entire planet hostage? Or the entire US and its allies? Which is effectively what the Lennys can do.

Edit:

It reminds me of the movie Independence Day when the motherships were maneuvering into strategic position around the planet, and Jeff Goldblum's character answered the question "What happens when they all get into position?" ...

"Checkmate."

"No! Don't raise your hands! Lower your wedges!"

Oh no...

"Ain't no Fun When the Wabbit's Got the Gun"

munroburton wrote:Unfortunately, the Manticoran Binary System probably had millions of the best grav sensors in the known universe operating during the weeks or months the Oyster Bay ships were sneaking around getting ready. None of those got a sniff, even with hindsight analysis.

The grav sensors in the Manticore system aren't/weren't looking at the right "place" to detect spider drives. FTL comms might have detected what the sensors didn't but dismiss the "static" as an aberration or filtered it out without analyzing it.

True, FTL comm transmitters have to generate small, discrete pulses at a high rate, but the FTLC receivers also have to be sensitive enough to detect and decode those small discrete pulses. Pulses small and discrete enough that a spider drive might interfere with them.

The interference might not show up as anything more significant than an bigger than average error log for the periods spider drives were active in the system. The information is there, someone just has to look beyond "detection" to other anomalies in the right time frame.

There's one major point that everyone here seems to be overlooking: Oyster Bay was _not_ a combat operation. Nor was it engaging maneuvering targets with active EW. The starting point for firing solutions would have been the published ephemerides of the stations - to dock with a space station, you are _supposed_ to know where it is. Refining them would be a matter of plotting the umpteen million emissions from the stations - none of which anybody was trying to confuse. OB was shooting fish in a barrel.

In real combat none of that holds - note that Cerberus is another special case, where one side once again was not anticipating actual combat with an enemy force in space - which means you have to locate your targets, very, very precisely, before you start shooting. A process that Himself has not taken the time to go in to in a lot of detail in the books [despite all the noise about infodumps, he really does trust people to figure out the more obvious bits], but which he has confirmed in various conversations over the years does require the use of a lot of active sensors. As here:

"Got 'em, Skipper!" Ensign Thomas announced.

"Well enough to guarantee lock-on?" Harmon asked sharply.

"I'll have to go active to guarantee that, Ma'am," Thomas said a little less exuberantly, and Harmon grunted.
...
"Damn!" Ensign Thomas swore as a single Peep battleship suddenly lit off every defensive electronics system she had. Those systems remained considerably inferior to the Manticoran equivalents, but they were an awful lot better than they'd been eighteen or twenty T-months earlier, and he swore again as the single ship vanished into a ball of electronic fuzz...
...
"Ma'am, CIC has just—" Hall said simultaneously, but a third voice cut them both off before she could explain.

"We're being hit with lidar!" Olivia Morris shouted. "Multiple emitters—very close, Citizen Admiral!"


"Locked up!" Thomas snapped as the ranging and targeting pulses from his lidar came back to Harpy. "Firing—now!"
...
Their fire control lashed the other pods viciously, despite the fact that the laser emissions were giving the Peeps' targeting beacons of their own, and a second fusillade of grasers ripped out even as the Shrikes' missiles tubes went to maximum rate fire.

That's from EoH, and one of the few places we get a detailed look at a firing sequence. And the effect of EW on passive sensors into the bargain. And, finally, the effect that getting that accurate data has on stealth. One of the major issues with spider-drive ships is that they have to start giving themselves away once they begin firing at any target operating fire-confusion defenses. And does anyone imagine that the GA's navies are going to be walking into combat situations with the people who pulled off OB without defending against the same kind of attack? Once, maybe, if they're feeling unimaginative. Not twice.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Something seems to be derailing my train of thought. Or either the illogic in my head is finally catching up with me.

Surely it can't be as simple as that Maxx, or it would prove to have been lots of work on a useless one-off design. Similar to the grav lance. So I assumed there must also be a complementary tactical advantage somewhere, somehow in weaponry to offset the glaring weakness that surely must also be just as obvious to an alpha's mind. Or as you've said, the all bark and no bite platform would have such a critical weakness that could leave it seriously naked. I assumed the complementary tactical advantage had to be in the missile envelope. I initially considered missile acceleration as a possible and probable advantage as well, but I assumed the missiles would have the same limitations as the ship and reading the initial posts proposing a max accel of 150G I dismissed that thought. However, with such possible theoretical missile acceleration as Weird Harold suggests, it falls back in line with my original thoughts. The LDs have to have some sort of tactical advantage other than their stealth. Or it seems it would have been more cost effective to simply build the same small Sharks that carried out the OB attack in bigger numbers (especially if extreme 30-40M+ tonnage estimates are accurate for the LDs) and develop the appropriate launch tubes for them or even further develop the jury-rigged firing mechanism that was already used in the OB attack. Even if at the expense of a very limited payload of a "few shots to dry" each.

David has mentioned in many ways the Spider Drive ships are the equivalent of submarines. And especially if you think of WWII era subs if they didn't have stealth they've be nearly useless. Slower, even on the surface, than almost any other warship - less torpedo tubes than many destroyers, a deck gun with no real fire control, and smaller (and less numerous) than those on even corvettes or destroyer escorts; oh and little to no anti-aircraft capability. If the enemy knew exactly where the sub was it would be dead very quickly.

But nobody could say that even when engaged in a detection / evasion arms race that subs weren't major contributors to the war effort.

Lenny Dets don't need to be able engage in straight up duals with SD(P) squadrons to be very useful tools in the MAlign's bag of tricks any more than submarines needed to be able to chase down and hit aircraft carriers. (Though in both cases sometimes you get lucky and one walks through your sights)



I don't think the Lenny Dets were intended to be used as the sole or even primary warship design. They're a force multiplier, not a main battle line. They can engage in solo style raiding to try and ambush enemy units in transit, or destroy shipping that's supporting the fleet or industry. They could wipe out industrial power in a system (blow up asteroid mines and slip out undetected). They could try and wipe out forward repair bases (especially if combined against with Ghosts for the final targetting - then they can act more like a cruise missile platform and launch from beyond the hyper limit, hypering out long before the launched weapons reach their targets.
And they can work in conjunction with normal warships to attempt to lure enemy formations into ambush scenarios - imagine the disruption if even SD(P)s and CLACs get hit from behind as they're about to engage their counterparts. They've got stacked pods already rolled that are vulnerable to proximity kills - delaying their heavy initial blow. Their LACs are mostly forward deployed towards the known enemy - so totally out of possition to assist against the surprise attack.

But they can't afford to divert too many LACs or light units to hunt down the stealth ambushers because they've still got to stay concentrated and honor the threat of the enemy's conventional wall - even more pressing due to the battle damage the surprise attack landed. But if they get too focused on the conventional pod fight they might get another round of graser torps up their backsides.


So when working with normal naval detachments I see them playing the role (often attempted in WWI and WWII, but rarely pulled off) of the picket line of submarines that you deploy in the path of the enemy. Then having forced them to come out to fight your warships they must, perforce, pass through the picket line were hopefully they will suffer damage and losses. The better sensor range of a stealthed warship (compared to a sub), combined with the proportionately longer range of their weapons, and the guided nature of them, given them much better chances of maneuvering as necessary to land such an early hit.

(Or they've got enough firepower that you could actually use the conventional naval force to lure the defending fleet away from the fixed system infrastructure and then blow the forts, yards, stations, ect away with the Lenny Dets and have everyone withdraw without ever engaging the enemy's main force. Kind of like if submarines had the firepower to wipe out whole shipyards if the defending anti-submarine screen got lured away)


Low acceleration can be compensated for if you have visible units to act at matadors to lure or push the enemy to kill zones where the slower stealthy ships are waiting.


Sure in the unlikely situation that the stealth abilities were stripped bare the Lenny Dets would appear to be at a significant disadvantage over the smaller Invictus. But that makes sense due to so much of their design being spent on achieving the force multiplier of that stealth.

Could there be other, not yet seen, capabilites beyond the stealth? Sure. But "just" stealth combined with the firepower of pods and graser torps is a capability not to be despised. Even if it's not so good in a conventional wall of battle.