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TFT Snippet #2

This fascinating series is a combination of historical seafaring, swashbuckling adventure, and high technological science-fiction. Join us in a discussion!
Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by n7axw   » Tue Jun 26, 2018 12:45 pm

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Dauntless wrote:maybe it is just me but i doubt that skimmers can get much beyond orbit.

while i'm guessing, I think it reasonable to say that its job is to basically fly around the battlefield gathering info and occasionally shooting things.

after all it is called a recon skimmer. it isn't a fighter or a shuttle, assault or otherwise.

clearly orbit or low orbit is within its abilities but deep space? I don't think so.

shuttles likely have much greater range, and in other RFC universes assault shuttles are heavily armed and armoured, making them a much better choice for either a strike at the OBS or if the OBS ignores it going to asteroid belt or another planet to start fed industry out of OBS' reach.


I would suspect that they do fine in deep space. But you wouldn't want them too far away from a mother ship or supporting platform.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by Louis R   » Tue Jun 26, 2018 5:44 pm

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Probably not so bad as all that - provided you don't need to breath, drink or relieve yourself...


n7axw wrote:
Dauntless wrote:maybe it is just me but i doubt that skimmers can get much beyond orbit.

while i'm guessing, I think it reasonable to say that its job is to basically fly around the battlefield gathering info and occasionally shooting things.

after all it is called a recon skimmer. it isn't a fighter or a shuttle, assault or otherwise.

clearly orbit or low orbit is within its abilities but deep space? I don't think so.

shuttles likely have much greater range, and in other RFC universes assault shuttles are heavily armed and armoured, making them a much better choice for either a strike at the OBS or if the OBS ignores it going to asteroid belt or another planet to start fed industry out of OBS' reach.


I would suspect that they do fine in deep space. But you wouldn't want them too far away from a mother ship or supporting platform.

Don

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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by Louis R   » Tue Jun 26, 2018 6:00 pm

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True, it's not unlikely that there's little the OBS can do about at least military-grade hardware detected passing low orbit.

What surprises me is that nobody in this discussion seems to be considering the more obvious question: what would the OBS do about the place on the surface from which said hardware departed?

NervousEnergy wrote:
mhicks wrote:Who ever put the OBS in place was not stupid enough to not track and destroy anyone trying to escape off the planet. If the whole point of the "Langhorn Plan" is to keep humans on the planet and safe from Gbaba means that they don't want anyone getting off the planet and at the same time not letting anything reach the planet. I have always been in the school of those believing the OBS is a multiple OBS system allowing full coverage and a large arching defense/offence net.

To me anything leaving the orbit of Safehold would be considered hostile to the Langhorn design and shot by the OBS. Anything leaving orbit short of using hyperdrive would get destroyed the minute it was detected. Use of Hyper drive would be picked up by the Gbaba, so it is a catch 22 trying to get away from the planet. Then any colony in the star system would still be capable of getting targeted by the OBS. Kinetic Energy Weapons take objects and shoot them at super fast speeds to cause massive damage. The weapon can use just about anything it can get its hands on and put in a magnetic rail gun type sled. If they are going to get off Safehold and just try to "start over" leaving the safeholdians behind would require going far away to another system and hope the OBS doesn't send in any high speed asteroids it shot at the new colony.

I'm dubious about the ability of the system to prevent orbital departure. Kinetic weapons are great for taking out ground installations, but shooting even hypervelocity projectiles at a manuvering spacecraft with the speeds the Skimmers are capable of or faster would require an incredible amount of luck to hit.

Now, if the platforms had Honorverse-style grasers or other powerful energy mounts, then it would be a different story, but now we're getting into territory we don't have much textev about... or if we do I don't remember it. We assume the system is intently monitoring the surface of Safehold for certain energy signatures, and that Merlin has, on several occasions, worried that pushing a skimmer past certain speeds might trigger a response. That means he's pretty certain that Federation tech can hide from the OBS sufficiently to operate pretty much at will below certain speeds, and indeed he's done so throughout the books.

If a spacecraft of the same tech level of the presumably OBS undetectable skimmers leaves the atmosphere, there's no way a kinetic projectile system is going to hit it before it's gone. I can't even imagine such a programmed mission... the system exists to attempt to keep the colony at a pre-industrial, no-electrical generation level. If they're building spacecraft they've blown right past that level.

I also can't really imagine a reason for the system to care about re-entry, other than just a generic attention getter to proscribed tech. They're not going to defend against the Gbaba.
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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by tialro   » Tue Jun 26, 2018 7:39 pm

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According to OAR on Page 77, SNARCs can work outside atmosphere. Their max speed is Mach 2 in atmosphere and considerably better than Mach 2 outside of atmosphere. So if they stay away from the OBS (which will knock them out with defensive lasers), could they make it to the moon or perhaps farther? Using SMARCs and experimenting with their out of atmosphere operation and how the OBS reacts would be a good test, something like Merlin testing steam in a remote location before he started its use in Charis.
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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by n7axw   » Tue Jun 26, 2018 8:35 pm

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The OBS, for obvious reasons, seems pretty tolerant of objects that take off and land. There probably wouldn't be anything to distinguish that from the normal activity of Merlin and the "archangels" until it actually veered off into space.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by Fireflair   » Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:50 pm

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No, the MWW would never put something over on his readers or the people on this board! :P

I still stand by the notion that the OBS isn't designed to attack TF tech. Even should it have been, it hasn't smited the skimmer running about. The defensive weapons are described as exactly that, defensive. I doubt that they are meant to be an all up space control system designed to shoot down anything and everything that crosses the immediate vicinity of Safehold space.

I suspect it can detect the skimmer, after all it saw the stealthed SNARCs, and just registers it as something that's allowed to be there.

It's possible that the answer to dealing with the OBS and it's platform(s) is to do a kinetic strike on them all simultaneously from a fair distance away. Maybe not. If one of the strikes misses it's platform it would have a good probability of hitting the planet. Whatever the strike is composed of would have to be moving fast enough or for there be enough of the striking projectiles to get past the OBS defenses. A miss and hitting Safehold would be Bad.

It's also possible that the OBS might call home, namely the temple, to ask for guidance on this unexpected situation.
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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by Dilandu   » Wed Jun 27, 2018 6:44 am

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tialro wrote:According to OAR on Page 77, SNARCs can work outside atmosphere. Their max speed is Mach 2 in atmosphere and considerably better than Mach 2 outside of atmosphere. So if they stay away from the OBS (which will knock them out with defensive lasers), could they make it to the moon or perhaps farther? Using SMARCs and experimenting with their out of atmosphere operation and how the OBS reacts would be a good test, something like Merlin testing steam in a remote location before he started its use in Charis.


Considering magical stealth technologies of Terran Federation (they even managed to hide heat emission from giant ships with owerpowered reactors!) it depend of "could SNARC accelerate while remaining hidden".
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Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave,
Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave.

(Red Army lyrics from 1945)
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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by mhicks   » Wed Jun 27, 2018 5:37 pm

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We know that Schuler had descendants secretly, did Chihiro have offspring as well we don't know about yet?
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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by ywing14   » Thu Jun 28, 2018 1:43 am

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mhicks wrote:We know that Schuler had descendants secretly, did Chihiro have offspring as well we don't know about yet?


Were the descendants a secret? I thought that it originally was just oral tradition that they were able to corroborate with DNA. I don't recall if it was a secret or not.
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Re: TFT Snippet #2
Post by Dilandu   » Thu Jun 28, 2018 7:19 am

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ywing14 wrote:
mhicks wrote:We know that Schuler had descendants secretly, did Chihiro have offspring as well we don't know about yet?


Were the descendants a secret? I thought that it originally was just oral tradition that they were able to corroborate with DNA. I don't recall if it was a secret or not.


Probably not. As far as I recall, the Writ specifically mentioned that Archangels were on Safehold in their "mortal, perisheable bodies"; so, childrens from them were probably not completely unexpected. After all, it was MUCH simpler to adapt such probabilities into doctrine, then trying to constantly control who may sleep with whom.
------------------------------

Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave,
Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave.

(Red Army lyrics from 1945)
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