cthia wrote: Inta da fire...
My opinion seems to differ quite a bit about how easy it should be to attack Darius.
Maybe a siege may be better. If the GA can take and hold the terminus, Darius is cut off from rapid deployment.
I don't know about you, but I am having nightmares about a Home System that makes the perimeter that the MBS has established look like a Boy Scout Camp.
I don't think that's either possible or likely.
The MBS defences are nothing to sneeze at. To make them look pale in comparison requires such a great amount of firepower and sensing technologies that it would be inconceivable in the HV. We'd be talking about the single most industrialised system in the Galaxy, equivalent to 20 core systems, and populated for less than 2 centuries. it also requires a much larger population base than there is on Darius. And a much larger shipyard than we know is there.
The other problem is the likelihood of this happening. Such thick defences imply a lot of officers and a lot of ships, most of which are hyper capable and any of which is capable of destroying the planet if it got the chance. Are the Detweilers trusting of their subordinates? Because if they're not, they're not likely to trust large fleets in system because those could turn on them. And it only takes a single hyper-capable ship leaving to betray the secret of Darius' existence and location. The more ships you have, the easier it would be to get lost in the noise, and coast to the hyperlimit with wedges down.
Plus all those stealth ships that their own sensors can't detect. How do the Detweilers know those aren't conspiring against them to attack or leave?
Spider
--The system defense variant.
Spider is a propulsion system. You'll have to explain what you meant by this.
Sharks
--Hungry officers looking for promotion? LOL
On the problem with ambitious officers, see above. I'd much rather have non-ambitious officers who just want to get their jobs done well.
Massive Forts w/ Spider Drive
-- Surrounded by shoals of system defense graser pods.
Those are likely, but no more so than there would be in the MBS, except for the spider. The spider itself is not a gain here, since the fort is still limited to paltry acceleration in the order of 100 gravities. That's 2x more than a Manticoran fort, but nothing compared to the ships flying rings around it.
But there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between a fort and an LD. Maybe the difference is whether it mounts a hyperdrive (and streak drives are big) and impeller rings for the Warshawski sail so they can transit through wormholes. Therefore, the non-hypercapable version of the LD (a corvette?) could free up some internal volume to be rededicated to missiles or torpedoes.
But is that worth it? A defender can't rely on stealth to sneak up on the enemy, they have to be around the objective they're defending. Those spider emitters on their hull are also surface that they can't have a missile tube on. Plus, the moment they raise the bubble wall, the stealth is gone.
So I fail to see the purpose of a spider-driven fort. It's much cheaper and useful to have a regular fort, maybe with no propulsion other than thrusters.
Finally, there's the question of how to build them. Each one costs as much time, resources, and treasury as an LD. And we know they hadn't built a lot of them yet. That also means they're far more likely to have pre-spider forts, because those they could have begun building a century ago, even with paltry industries.
Massive Graser Installations
--They don't even have to have much mobility, because they are built in enormous numbers. When you have invisible weapons platforms seeded throughout your system, you can maneuver and engage the enemy with those invisible installations in mind, thus setting a trap.
Do you really think you can hyper into Darius without receiving a very warm welcome?
The problem again with the spider is how slow they are compared to a wedge. A graser torpedo is going to be manoeuvring around 50 gravities, while the ships they're tracking are moving at 550+. Those ships are also getting screened by LACs that can get up to 800.
And how mind-boggling huge space is. It takes a lot of industry to build sufficient graser torpedoes and seed them throughout the system so they can reach all possible approaches to Darius Gamma. So if they go for this strategy, I imagine it's a close-in defence (a light-minute or two out, at most) of the planet, meaning the entire rest of the star system is left to fend for itself. That in turn means it's the end of the space industry, since no further resources from asteroids are going to be fed into their orbital industries too.
Trying to trap an incoming fleet further out just doesn't seem feasible or effective. No fleet is going to come on a straight line, because they
know such stealth exists. Tom Clancy had it right with the Crazy Ivan manoeuvres. And you need a lot of torpedoes to take out a fleet as big as the Grand Fleet. It's going to be at least one torpedo firing and striking per capital ship to kill it and the GF is going to come with 500 of those. How many torpedoes do you need to guarantee a hit? The fleet is going to be evading, will be inside wedges (through which the torpedoes can't see), obscured by sidewalls (through which torpedoes have trouble seeing), protected by such sidewalls and by lighter ships which will be pushed out to screen against stealth attacks.
So I'd expect at least 5x the number of torpedoes to capital ships and I'm being generous. So just how many 5000-torpedo groupings can the MAlign have in Darius?
Finally, nail in the coffin for spider stealth is the spider activation: we know there are betraying emissions when that happens. 5000 torpedoes activating at once paints them pretty clearly.