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Re: ?
Post by tlb   » Sat Oct 17, 2020 7:09 pm

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cthia wrote:On that note, are we sure the graser torp didn't self-detruct because that is an intended design element? Wouldn't want that to fall into enemy hands. I think I remember textev saying it is a byproduct, but that doesn't mean the MA didn't accept it as providence. It's secrets are secure, perhaps, because the MA may have accepted its imminent destruction as a fortunate byproduct. After all, no self-destruct mechanism is needed.

You could read it as though that was a design element, but it seems to me that it was unavoidable design limitation that fortuitously precluded the need for a self-destruct device.

Here is the test from Mission of Honor, chapter 28;
The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there'd never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN's designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren't looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.
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Re: ?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sat Oct 17, 2020 9:09 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:The Silver Bullet found the Mycroft stealth stations in Beowulf, but it spent a lot of time looking for it. It wasn't an arrive-and-fire. An LD would have to lurk in the inner system for days on end to find a stealth ship, which unlike a station is highly mobile. I don't see this happening. In fact, an RMN or RHN ship with no wedge and under stealth is probably less detectable from a distance than the spider drive. An LD looking for such a ship is running the risk of being detected first.

And the Silver Bullets found the Mycroft nodes because they'd periodically use their FTL transmitters in systems tests. Those are fairly directional, but a Silver Bullet whose position was anywhere near being between a pair of Mycroft that started talking would get a decent bearing on both platforms. (If you're lucky and two or my ships can hear both you can get cross bearing any really narrow down the search area).

You've got to wait for a periodic test to happen, and then that will at least let you narrow down their position each test until you've finally located the relay.

Manticore seems to have failed to considered the vulnerability of systems tests to someone with stealth drones capable of devoting many weeks to slowly sniffing out the relays as they broke "radio silence"


But a ship moving under stealth would have no reason to broadcast in FTL. And we know that in especially sensitive RD scouting runs the transmitters will be physically locked down to eliminate the risk of a transmission that might give it away. So a Spider ship trying to sniff out stealthed defenders [edit: defending ships] is unlikely to get the helpful breadcrumbs of detectable FTL transmissions from them.
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Sat Oct 17, 2020 11:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ?
Post by kzt   » Sat Oct 17, 2020 9:54 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:So a Spider ship trying to sniff out stealthed defenders is unlikely to get the helpful breadcrumbs of detectable FTL transmissions from them.

Depends. A defense network will have housekeeping traffic, unless you don't care if it works or not.
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Re: ?
Post by cthia   » Sat Oct 17, 2020 11:48 pm

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kzt wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:So a Spider ship trying to sniff out stealthed defenders is unlikely to get the helpful breadcrumbs of detectable FTL transmissions from them.

Depends. A defense network will have housekeeping traffic, unless you don't care if it works or not.

LOL

"Oh shit! The last crew to service them left them in maintenance mode!"

On that note. How exactly does a GR drone paint a target?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: ?
Post by Theemile   » Sun Oct 18, 2020 12:34 am

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cthia wrote:LOL

"Oh shit! The last crew to service them left them in maintenance mode!"

On that note. How exactly does a GR drone paint a target?


Ghost rider drones are not used for target acquisition in the fire control loop. They don't paint targets.

Mistle Toe drones use passive systems until their attack runs. They are visible in the final 100k km of their attack run, but the exact reason has never been mentioned.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: ?
Post by Vince   » Sun Oct 18, 2020 6:55 am

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cthia wrote:Remember the grasers which ignited the Byng incident? Initially, none of the ships even knew what had happened.
tlb wrote:I agree that if the sidewalls and the wedges are down, then the ships will not know what hit them; which was the situation with the destroyers at New Tuscany. However the ignition point was the destruction of the space station. in the way that the Malign would later repeat at Beowulf. From Storm from the Shadows, chapter 41:
That meant there was no one who could possibly have tied Lieutenant Rochefort to Manpower or Mesa before he pressed that function key.
And no one could possibly tie the lieutenant to anyone after that, since the message he transmitted was actually the detonation command for the two-hundred-kiloton device hidden inside a cargo container a Jessyk Combine freighter had transshipped to Giselle a month before . . . and which was now stored in a cargo bay approximately one hundred and twelve meters forward and three hundred meters down from Lieutenant Rochefort's compartment.
cthia wrote:That is not what I meant. Of course a ship won't know what hit them if the victim of one of these attacks. And no, the destroyers at New Tuscany didn't know what hit them.

I'm talking about the warships from both Navy's didn't know what destroyed the space station. The SLN didn't know. The RMN didn't know. IINM, it was speculated to be an energy beam after a missile was ruled out. That tells me energy beams aren't readily detected by the fleet. Am I wrong about that?

Yes, you are wrong about energy beams not being readily detected by naval ships. When HMS Madrigal and the GSN ships were ambushed by Alfredo Yu and Thomas Theisman in:
The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 14 wrote:And, in a way, Yu was just as happy his energy weapons would be out of it. His jamming and other precautions should make it almost impossible for even the Manticorans to localize him if he used only missiles, but energy fire could be back-plotted far too precisely, and hiding his ships had required him to shut down his own drives, which deprived him of any sidewalls. Besides, Principality was one of the new city-class destroyers. She was short on energy weapons . . . but she packed a missile broadside most light cruisers might envy.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

The quote suggests that even the Graysons could back-plot energy fire, but that even the Manticorans would be almost unable to localize Thunder of God and Principality if they only used missiles and hid under jamming and stealth.
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Re: ?
Post by tlb   » Sun Oct 18, 2020 8:32 am

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Vince wrote:Yes, you are wrong about energy beams not being readily detected by naval ships. When HMS Madrigal and the GSN ships were ambushed by Alfredo Yu and Thomas Theisman in:
The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 14 wrote:And, in a way, Yu was just as happy his energy weapons would be out of it. His jamming and other precautions should make it almost impossible for even the Manticorans to localize him if he used only missiles, but energy fire could be back-plotted far too precisely, and hiding his ships had required him to shut down his own drives, which deprived him of any sidewalls. Besides, Principality was one of the new city-class destroyers. She was short on energy weapons . . . but she packed a missile broadside most light cruisers might envy.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

The quote suggests that even the Graysons could back-plot energy fire, but that even the Manticorans would be almost unable to localize Thunder of God and Principality if they only used missiles and hid under jamming and stealth.

However in this particular case the Havenite ships were hiding in dust clouds in an asteroid belt, which is the only situation where energy beams can be tracked, I believe. From the same paragraph:
“I can’t really say, Sir.” The ensign made careful adjustments. “It’s like snow or something along the asteroid belt ahead of us.”
“Put it on my display,” Alvarez decided.
Jackson did better than that and dropped the same data onto Courvosier’s plot, and the admiral frowned. He wasn’t familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the Yeltsin System, but the two clumps of cluttered radar returns certainly looked odd. They were fairly far apart and neither was all that big, yet the returns were so dense Madrigal couldn’t see into them, and his frown deepened. Micrometeor clusters?
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Re: ?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Oct 18, 2020 11:34 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:You've got to wait for a periodic test to happen, and then that will at least let you narrow down their position each test until you've finally located the relay.

Manticore seems to have failed to considered the vulnerability of systems tests to someone with stealth drones capable of devoting many weeks to slowly sniffing out the relays as they broke "radio silence"


Especially since that's exactly what Mistletoe was designed to do against the original Havenite Moriarty. So when the GA designed the improved version of Moriarty as Mycroft, it didn't add in the solution to the weakness that allowed Manticore to target them.
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Re: ?
Post by Theemile   » Sun Oct 18, 2020 12:19 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:You've got to wait for a periodic test to happen, and then that will at least let you narrow down their position each test until you've finally located the relay.

Manticore seems to have failed to considered the vulnerability of systems tests to someone with stealth drones capable of devoting many weeks to slowly sniffing out the relays as they broke "radio silence"


Especially since that's exactly what Mistletoe was designed to do against the original Havenite Moriarty. So when the GA designed the improved version of Moriarty as Mycroft, it didn't add in the solution to the weakness that allowed Manticore to target them.



My favorite part of the whole Beowulf morierty mess: the same pods, which take 8-10 minutes to retask, retask inside of 12 seconds when connected to a SD's fire control, and have the universe's best autonomous speakers AND, a system defense role.

Plot armor at it's best.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: ?
Post by cthia   » Sun Oct 18, 2020 6:24 pm

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tlb wrote:
cthia wrote:On that note, are we sure the graser torp didn't self-detruct because that is an intended design element? Wouldn't want that to fall into enemy hands. I think I remember textev saying it is a byproduct, but that doesn't mean the MA didn't accept it as providence. It's secrets are secure, perhaps, because the MA may have accepted its imminent destruction as a fortunate byproduct. After all, no self-destruct mechanism is needed.

You could read it as though that was a design element, but it seems to me that it was unavoidable design limitation that fortuitously precluded the need for a self-destruct device.

Here is the test from Mission of Honor, chapter 28;
The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there'd never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN's designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren't looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.


Thanks for the textev. At first I thought you were simply being nice after I reread it, because it sounds as if it is a design limitation. But when I read it again I'm not so sure. In fact, it seems to hint at other possibilities of the tech ...

...course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability,

Could several of these godawful grasers be placed in a single torpedo?

Can this tech be used to achieve a longer duration of fire from its shipboard grasers? What is a GA graser's duration of fire? According to that textev sidewalls are pretty much toast against a gtorp. What does that promise from an LD's grasers. That fact upholds my notion that a battery of five LD graser's will lay waste to an SD. The GA better hope the MAlign don't break, or steal, their reactor secret.

Vince, firing a graser in a dust cloud will light it up like a lightbulb. Other than that, the beam shouldn't be detected by enemy ships until after the fact. Lest enemy ships are debris after the fact.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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