penny wrote:Do understand that I am still banking on the Mad Wizard’s stroke of the pen and that a fair number of those planned 100 LDs will be complete. Enough to give the GA hell anyway.
All this depends on the time until Darius is found. We don't know how long that will be.
If there are a fair number of LDs completed, why not forward deploy them? Forward deploying LDs in my book would mean deploying the bulk of them outside the hyper limit. And do note that I don’t think LDs will be in the habit of operating with their drives down. Even if their drives are down, I doubt they’d be detected unless the fleet hypers in on top of one of them.*
Agreed. If you have the stealth assets, deploy them. And assuming they get forewarned that a fleet is going to come a-knocking, they should do exactly that: disperse their stealth assets.
They could get that foreknowledge either by having embedded spies who relayed the information through the Felix Junction or by seeing a scout ship hyper in. That is not a guarantee, though: Galton didn't see the scouts at all and OpSec held for the Grand Fleet. But Galton did not have access to a shortcut, so it's possible someone noticed the GF assembling, because that many ships being deployed can't be hidden for long, but the message never made it to Galton before Honor paid a visit. That can be different for Darius, if Felix isn't blockaded by then.
An LD with its drive down will simulate a hole in space; ordinarily impossible to detect. Like a sub, its emissions will be minimal. Silent running. Bringing up the spider drive might be instantaneous. We also shouldn’t become too wed to the MTBF of spider drives being anywhere near the bucket of “Cogswell cogs and Spacely sprockets"used by conventionsl warships; recognizing of course that the MTBF could be a lot worse. But also it could be much better. And replacing those parts for a spider drive could turn out to be much easier and faster, making the entire economics cheaper as a whole and saving on installation costs. The parts might even be much cheaper.
Right, they could loiter for months awaiting the arrival of the fleet, with minimal time put on the drives. If they are far enough away from the fleet's arrival point, then the power spike associated with the spider coming online will also be missed. Plus, having home court advantage, they can simply hide behind a suitable rock to hide that signal even further.
But I don't think they could or would do that for years. There would need to be the advance notice I mentioned above. Otherwise, if the MAN has such a large fleet of ships, it will be used for their intended purpose: wreak havoc outside of Darius.
*As someone pointed out again, space is vast. The possibility of hypering in atop a fort or an LD operating outside the limit is slim, even with the lion's share of the projected 100 LDs complete. Especially if the MAN is methodical with their placement. But the MAN would want that possibility to be slim; however, they would still like the opportunity to fire upon anything that does manage to hyper in too close. Please don't count on the fleet zig-zagging outside the hyper limit.
Quite. At 25 light-minutes in radius, the hyper limit has a circumference of 157 light-minutes. That's 15.7 light-minutes on average per LD. Though I expect they wouldn't be spread out in such small penny packets, since that is not efficient use of resources. Plus, an enemy is more likely to arrive somewhere near the least-time course, if they have scouted the system (and they will have).
But that works against them too: the chance that they are near enough to deploy a torpedo attack before the fleet has assembled with screens, LACs and recon drones is small. Past that small window of opportunity, the torpedoes will need to fly through the gauntlet to orient on the high-value targets. And there need to be sufficiently many torpedoes to cause substantial losses.
Tactically, any LDs that are deployed outside the limit would want to be behind the enemy fleet after their transition. One, because traditionally subs stalk their prey. And because an enemy fleet hypering in isn’t going to be too concerned with wasting sensors on the space behind them. Sensors have to be directed at an LD if they’re going to have any hopes of detecting it. The MAN knows the enemy is going to proceed on the least time course for the edge of the limit to lob missiles. The GA fleet will be ignorant of the LDs pursuit at maximum military power.
True, but there won't be zero sensors. Ideally, they'd know about stealth ships that couldn't be detected, so they'd deploy sufficiently many all around the fleet, something Honor should have done at Galton but we didn't hear of.
Plus, this tactic only works once. If any ships escape -- and some will, even if the attack is a massive victory taking every single capita ship -- they will relay the need to set up eyes to the back of the system. The second time a fleet arrives, it won't make the same mistake.
Let’s proceed on to any forts deployed outside the limit. I’m not too sure they will be seen. The MAN is concerned with total stealth. We don’t know if there isn't an asteroid belt where a fort or a space station for that matter can hide inside. Or oh so close that sensors cannot get a good read. We also don’t know how effectively the smart cloth can help to hide a space station or fort at long ranges. We are also ignorant of any possibility of the smart cloth and its technology being even more effective on larger objects with a bigger power budget.
That's not a fort, per se. That's basically a command-and-control station with a shoal of missiles or torpedoes. Asteroids can be that, indeed, and the base could be very well hidden if it is radiating heat anywhere but down towards the inner system. That is far more likely a scenario than a hundred of LDs.
There's still a reason for being outside the hyperlimit: the pathetic acceleration of the torpedoes. Assuming they are best used at 0.3c, they need 17 hours to get up to speed, which they need 76.5 light-minutes of runway to do so.
The MAN has limited range FTL capability. I have been toying with the application of deploying the necessary number of platforms outside the limit at the edge of the system that can sprint news of a hyper footprint much faster than the light speed emergence itself. Giving forts and LDs time to bring up their drives; if indeed spider drives can be brought up almost instantly.
Quite unnecessary for this purpose. The hyper translation's footprint is an FTL signal all by itself, announcing the arrival. Knowing it's not one of your scheduled arrivals in expected emergence zones, the installations should go to battestations immediately. Worst thing that happens is that they've performed an unscheduled drill.
I still think any scouts that hyper into Darius will be lucky to limp back home with anything but their compensators intact. How can a scout scout the invisible in the most paranoid system mankind has ever known; a system that has the most advanced stealth technology ever invented. You simply cannot scout what you cannot see. Your sensors must have time to spot what they can't see before you are spotted by an ultra paranoid sect who has surely emplaced... contingencies. Keep in mind that Galton was a misdirection of existing technology and culpability.
The scout is itself hard to pinpoint. Its purpose is to take the news home, so it will not be standing in one place. This is a game of mouse and mouse, both with their own capabilities of stealth. One is a much smaller ship; the other has better stealth but is much bigger and slower. Plus, the scout does not need to stay in the system: it only needs to launch a flight of drones and then hyper back out. That's a 10-minute stay, if at that. What's more, it doesn't need to arrive at the hyperlimit either to launch drones, which means interception is that much harder due to distances.
I do think the scout will make it out, then back in on the other side to collect the drones' telemetry, then back out again with the data. What it will have found is a whole other story.
[/quote]As far as delivering supplies to forts and space stations, why must a ship dock to do so? There can be a forward deployment system. The goods can be ejected towards the station/fort and caught by tractors.
Such a launch system can be easily noticed and calculating the trajectory is child's play. Once you observe that happening, you vector some drones along the line of flight of the cargo pods to see who's there.
The solution to that is that the RV points are basically random: the spider-driven forts and ships are constantly moving (using their engines, which does put time on their clocks). Unless the drone is following the cargo pod for its entire flight, it's not going to see anyone.