?

The Alignment sort of knew what had been deployed at Beowulf as they had a name from a mole/agent in Beowulf-if my memory is correct- at a fairly low level and they had reports of what the most current in-system defense shell that was used against Haven.
The challenge is that Mycroft uses a nodal control system tied together with FTL communications providing the tactical data.

Silver Bullet is a honking big, but very stealthy, sensor platform which is designed to passively look for FTL transmissions. That would be using sensors for gravitational pulses and with the thing about the size of two Rhino Heavy Transport Containers outfitted with a Spider drive to let it both slow down after the release from the freighter and do stationkeeping in the Beowulf System. And not get any gravitational pulsing....too much of station to ship and ship to ship stuff in the GA....no, they are looking for essentialy to short burst pinging between the deployed pods and the more or less stationary (relative to the system/planet) Keywhole (which the Alignment doesn't seem to know the name of) platform that will update the pods as needed for firing on attackers.
And the Silver Bullet has at least one major graser or some GTs which it would deploy to fire on what they expect to be a coordination node. At least one of the grasers is internal to the Silver Bullet since that would provide the self destruct system and eliminates the silver bullet as it burns out and overloads.
Or it could just be the one graser and the SB started creeping to what was identified as the destination of all that short pinging so it was well within the range for the graser.
Looking for something that is 1) not a ship 2) is relatively stationary and 3) is trading really sort pings to keep the telemetry updated.

The Alignment sort of knew what had been deployed at Beowulf as they had a name from a mole/agent in Beowulf-if my memory is correct- at a fairly low level and they had reports of what the most current in-system defense shell that was used against Haven.
The challenge is that Mycroft uses a nodal control system tied together with FTL communications providing the tactical data.

Silver Bullet is a honking big, but very stealthy, sensor platform which is designed to passively look for FTL transmissions. That would be using sensors for gravitational pulses and with the thing about the size of two Rhino Heavy Transport Containers outfitted with a Spider drive to let it both slow down after the release from the freighter and do stationkeeping in the Beowulf System. And not get any gravitational pulsing....too much of station to ship and ship to ship stuff in the GA....no, they are looking for essentialy to short burst pinging between the deployed pods and the more or less stationary (relative to the system/planet) Keywhole (which the Alignment doesn't seem to know the name of) platform that will update the pods as needed for firing on attackers.
And the Silver Bullet has at least one major graser or some GTs which it would deploy to fire on what they expect to be a coordination node. At least one of the grasers is internal to the Silver Bullet since that would provide the self destruct system and eliminates the silver bullet as it burns out and overloads.
Or it could just be the one graser and the SB started creeping to what was identified as the destination of all that short pinging so it was well within the range for the graser.
Looking for something that is 1) not a ship 2) is relatively stationary and 3) is trading really sort pings to keep the telemetry updated.

Brigade XO wrote:The Alignment sort of knew what had been deployed at Beowulf as they had a name from a mole/agent in Beowulf-if my memory is correct- at a fairly low level and they had reports of what the most current in-system defense shell that was used against Haven.
The challenge is that Mycroft uses a nodal control system tied together with FTL communications providing the tactical data.

Silver Bullet is a honking big, but very stealthy, sensor platform which is designed to passively look for FTL transmissions. That would be using sensors for gravitational pulses and with the thing about the size of two Rhino Heavy Transport Containers outfitted with a Spider drive to let it both slow down after the release from the freighter and do stationkeeping in the Beowulf System. And not get any gravitational pulsing....too much of station to ship and ship to ship stuff in the GA....no, they are looking for essentialy to short burst pinging between the deployed pods and the more or less stationary (relative to the system/planet) Keywhole (which the Alignment doesn't seem to know the name of) platform that will update the pods as needed for firing on attackers.
And the Silver Bullet has at least one major graser or some GTs which it would deploy to fire on what they expect to be a coordination node. At least one of the grasers is internal to the Silver Bullet since that would provide the self destruct system and eliminates the silver bullet as it burns out and overloads.
Or it could just be the one graser and the SB started creeping to what was identified as the destination of all that short pinging so it was well within the range for the graser.
Looking for something that is 1) not a ship 2) is relatively stationary and 3) is trading really sort pings to keep the telemetry updated.

I just don't see how the SB's pulled it off. I can accept that they could be taught to look for grav pulses without being able to produce them themselves. But a test mode shouldn't be active for very long. No more than for four pulses.

Testing... testing... one... two.

Then the Silver Bullets have to get to that general area very quickly before they lose the signal. Space is big. Huge. And the SB's are slow. Even if they were quicker, they had to creep, so they wouldn't be detected themselves. Plus, Mycroft is supposed to be a network of platforms. These platforms wouldn't all be sitting near each other. So it should have been impossible for the SB's that were dropped off with the freighters to be close enough to each Mycroft platform when they all began to ping to maneuver for a shot, after (triangulating?) their position. If they used triangulation, they shouldn't have been able to locate the Mycroft platforms quickly enough. And then have gotten to all of them quickly enough without wedges.

The RMN did the same thing to the Peeps, but those RDs had the acceleration of impellers for propulsion. And there were enough of them for triangulation.

Another thing. If the MA were so sure about being able to locate the Mycroft platforms, why didn't they try to capture one of them? A quick EMP burst to disable it for retrievable by an invisible ship. A Mycroft platform would house a lot of secrets. Albeit, that may have been too ambitious of a mission.

.

The mycroft platforms active fusion reactors. And they are stationary. So once you have a cone to search you just look for the stationary hot targets against the 4K background and then wait for them to send another grav pulse to provide final confirmation.

So, anybody feel uncomfortable with ONE Mycroft platform controlling the entire Mycroft system in Beowulf? One?

Then there is the discussion by the Detweiler clones about the SB (the one SB) being two heavy Rhino containers together and the description from the perspective of the delivery freighter which deployed the ONE Silver Bullet device into the Beowulf system where the sb had to slow down and essentially park really close in (in relative terms) within the Beowulf system and watch for those FTL pulses going somewhere other than to ships or orbital facilities?

ONE Silver Bullet. With passive sensors. Which had to deploy solar panels (well, any solar radiation collection devices) to extend the life of the on-board power which it was going to need to do it's data gathering and data crunching plus keep the capacitor of the graser (again, it seemed to be one). How do you triangulate from one station keeping position? Or was the SB not relatively stationary but slowly coasting -do you really want to run that spider drive that close to the planetary orbital and defence net deep in the Beowulf system- so you are going to move "a little bit" and then start to work out the relative directionality of FTL pulses from/to pods from a single coordinating platform?

Not quite the same as the analog situation of having a WW II submarine looking for radio transmissions (from ships under radio silence) in the middle of the North Atlantic and then trying to run down the PROJECTED intercept vector based on a single intercept with a Radio Direction Finder and the estimated speed of the target.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Brigade XO wrote:So, anybody feel uncomfortable with ONE Mycroft platform controlling the entire Mycroft system in Beowulf? One?

Then there is the discussion by the Detweiler clones about the SB (the one SB) being two heavy Rhino containers together and the description from the perspective of the delivery freighter which deployed the ONE Silver Bullet device into the Beowulf system where the sb had to slow down and essentially park really close in (in relative terms) within the Beowulf system and watch for those FTL pulses going somewhere other than to ships or orbital facilities?

ONE Silver Bullet. With passive sensors. Which had to deploy solar panels (well, any solar radiation collection devices) to extend the life of the on-board power which it was going to need to do it's data gathering and data crunching plus keep the capacitor of the graser (again, it seemed to be one). How do you triangulate from one station keeping position? Or was the SB not relatively stationary but slowly coasting -do you really want to run that spider drive that close to the planetary orbital and defence net deep in the Beowulf system- so you are going to move "a little bit" and then start to work out the relative directionality of FTL pulses from/to pods from a single coordinating platform?

Not quite the same as the analog situation of having a WW II submarine looking for radio transmissions (from ships under radio silence) in the middle of the North Atlantic and then trying to run down the PROJECTED intercept vector based on a single intercept with a Radio Direction Finder and the estimated speed of the target.

Inquiring minds want to know.

I think that's a misreading of the text. Certainly when describing the Silver Bullet to Benjamin Detweiler it was described as a singular, fitting into a pair of Rhino containers.

But it then talks about putting Silver Bullet into production (which is an odd phrase if it was a one off) - and then "Once we get the Silver Bullets to Warner and get them loaded, they’ll change their tune, and off the ship—it’s called the Star Galleon—will go to Beowulf" sounds like there's more than one. And then we get "SBQ-12 was, in fact, one of the last units of the constellation Star Galleon had deployed to reach its as-signed position." where again a constellation of Silver Bullets sounds like many more than one.

Also in the action at Beowulf why would it call out one Silver Bullet in particular, Q-12, if it was the only one?

Also when asking "What's the status on Mycroft?" Its described as uploading targeting to the master platforms (plural). And when its lost we get "We just lost the FTL feed from the master platforms." and "some of the Ghost Riders picked up graser fire right on top of the platforms.”" (again plural)


But I think the decisive evidence that there were lots of Mycroft platforms and lots of Silver Bullets is from the SLN Task Force 790's point of view:

Uncompromising Honor: pg418/512 RTF edition wrote:“What the hell was that?” Vincent Capriotti demanded.
“Sir, I don’t have a clue.” Rear Admiral Rutgers was bent over one of Québec’s tactical displays. Now he straightened and shook his head, his expression baffled. “It was some kind of energy fire. The recon plat-forms got a pretty good look at some of it, but I don’t have any idea at all what the hell they thought they were shooting at. Whatever it was, it was scattered all around the hyper sphere.”
“You mean all around the half of the hyper sphere we can see, Sir,” Commodore Schlegel put in. The ops officer turned towards him, and TF 790’s staff intelligence officer shook his head. “I’ve been looking at the distribution of the energy fire we picked up,” he said, and looked at Capriotti. “Sir, it matches almost perfectly with ONI’s estimate of how the Manties would have to distribute the FTL control platforms Admiral Gweon’s sources reported, allowing for the fact that our platforms are only far enough out to see half—a little less, really—of the total hyper sphere.”

So that isn't just one platform blown up, and it sounds like it's not just a couple either - that's enough Mycroft platforms to cover at least the near half of the entire hyper sphere.


Still the apparent use of Silver Bullet and Mycroft as collective nouns for the entire constellation of drones or entire deployment of platforms does make it harder to pick up on the fact that it wasn't one drone vs one platform.

Jonathan_S wrote:Still the apparent use of Silver Bullet and Mycroft as collective nouns for the entire constellation of drones or entire deployment of platforms does make it harder to pick up on the fact that it wasn't one drone vs one platform.

Ok, I was working from memory. Silly but there it is.
So the Silver Bullets are now a production item for the Alignment and they would clearly want to use them in anything that might be defended by the GA.
And using them at Beowluf gives the GA another potential look at what was in the system and possible bit of information about Spider Drive. I'm fairly sure the combination of graser fire from things that were not noticed by the System Defense net and Beowulf didn't suffer the losses in Command and Control plus sensor nets that either Manticore and Grayson lost with the destruction of the Manticore Orbital and other facilities plus the Graysons around Blackbird.

Breadcrumbs......Humm, is the Alignment getting careless or possibly over confident?

I've been meaning to reread UH before I get my hands on To End in Fire. I always assumed that there was a network of Mycroft platforms. After all, we're talking about Manticore's very important girlfriend who had an angry SL husband hanging over "her" head. Who would doubt there'd be plenty of redundancy.

But the Silver Bullets are huge platforms that would fit in two carriers. I didn't think there were that many of them, but certainly more than one because the Mycroft platforms just disappeared.

But I still can't accept that ALL of the platforms were destroyed. Why would a network of platforms be so close to each other when their range is so great? Why would they all be essentially in a huddle? Making it easy to kill several birds with one deployment. Unless there were an awful lot of freighters littering a huge volume of space.

Kzt implied that they could have found them by their heat signature. Which is possible I guess. I suppose their reactors would be at idle. But textev indicates that the test signal was the tell.

It's simply another one of those hard pills for me to swallow.

Also, aren't the Mycroft platforms armed with point defense clusters AND sensors? Which means they didn't see what hit them. Which had to be energy weapons at a range of no more than a million kilometers for timely kills. Unless the MA has developed longer ranged energy weapons.

'Cough cough. It's a very big... cough... cough... pill.'

cthia wrote:I've been meaning to reread UH before I get my hands on To End in Fire. I always assumed that there was a network of Mycroft platforms. After all, we're talking about Manticore's very important girlfriend who had a dirty SL cloud hanging over "her" head. Who would doubt there'd be plenty of redundancy.

But the Silver Bullets are huge platforms that would fit in two carriers. I didn't think there were that many of them, but certainly more than one because the Mycroft platforms just disappeared.

But I still can't accept that ALL of the platforms were destroyed. Why would a network of platforms be so close to each other when their range is so great? Why would they all be essentially in a huddle? Making it easy to kill several birds with one deployment. Unless there were an awful lot of freighters littering a huge volume of space.

Not sure why you think they're close together?

We already covered recently on another thread that just about 10 Mycroft platforms would technically be enough to cover the entire volume inside the hyper limit of a typical system. (22 LM radius - everything from the Sun to ~half-way to Jupiter)

And the quote I proved a couple posts back show that the SLN forces saw graser fire (presumably at Mycroft platforms) scattered across the half of that entire vast volume that they could see. So no, these things weren't close, except on an interstellar scale. There probably were more than 10 platforms, but even if there were, say, 50, scattered across that zone they'd be millions of km apart from each other. However even at the slow speeds of a spider drive millions of km, in fact the entire sphere within the hyper limit, simply isn't so large. It can be traversed in less than a day -- and it sounds like the Silver Bullets had weeks, at the minimum, to slowly sniff out the occasional test transmissions of the Mycroft platforms and use them to stalk the platforms.

So if you send in at least as many Silver Bullets as there are platforms you can still kill them all in a coordinated strike. (And we're specifically told in UH that the triggering event for destruction was the moment each Silver Bullet saw its Mycroft platform go active)


But being the size of two cargo containers doesn't mean much on the scale of an interstellar freighter. I get the impression that a big freighter can carry at least a thousand such containers, to sneaking in an extra 100 or two that get dropped overboard when nobody is looking isn't beyond the capability of the single ship we're told deployed the constellation of Silver Bullets.


Coast balletically inside the recon shell, then bring up the drives nobody has figured out how to detect and start spreading out to cover the volume and listed for betraying scraps to FTL comms signals from those systems checks (which any normal grav sensor near the communication path can pick up, if not necessarily decode). And while Mycroft is undoutably armed it is going to be limited in its sensors by its need for stealth -- it can use the active radars and LIDARs that might pick up a stealth object sneaking to within a million km or so. And the Honorverse's primary passive sensor, the grav sensor, is looking for emissions a spider drone wouldn't really produce.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:I've been meaning to reread UH before I get my hands on To End in Fire. I always assumed that there was a network of Mycroft platforms. After all, we're talking about Manticore's very important girlfriend who had a dirty SL cloud hanging over "her" head. Who would doubt there'd be plenty of redundancy.

But the Silver Bullets are huge platforms that would fit in two carriers. I didn't think there were that many of them, but certainly more than one because the Mycroft platforms just disappeared.

But I still can't accept that ALL of the platforms were destroyed. Why would a network of platforms be so close to each other when their range is so great? Why would they all be essentially in a huddle? Making it easy to kill several birds with one deployment. Unless there were an awful lot of freighters littering a huge volume of space.

Not sure why you think they're close together?

We already covered recently on another thread that just about 10 Mycroft platforms would technically be enough to cover the entire volume inside the hyper limit of a typical system. (22 LM radius - everything from the Sun to ~half-way to Jupiter)

And the quote I proved a couple posts back show that the SLN forces saw graser fire (presumably at Mycroft platforms) scattered across the half of that entire vast volume that they could see. So no, these things weren't close, except on an interstellar scale. There probably were more than 10 platforms, but even if there were, say, 50, scattered across that zone they'd be millions of km apart from each other. However even at the slow speeds of a spider drive millions of km, in fact the entire sphere within the hyper limit, simply isn't so large. It can be traversed in less than a day -- and it sounds like the Silver Bullets had weeks, at the minimum, to slowly sniff out the occasional test transmissions of the Mycroft platforms and use them to stalk the platforms.

So if you send in at least as many Silver Bullets as there are platforms you can still kill them all in a coordinated strike. (And we're specifically told in UH that the triggering event for destruction was the moment each Silver Bullet saw its Mycroft platform go active)


But being the size of two cargo containers doesn't mean much on the scale of an interstellar freighter. I get the impression that a big freighter can carry at least a thousand such containers, to sneaking in an extra 100 or two that get dropped overboard when nobody is looking isn't beyond the capability of the single ship we're told deployed the constellation of Silver Bullets.


Coast balletically inside the recon shell, then bring up the drives nobody has figured out how to detect and start spreading out to cover the volume and listed for betraying scraps to FTL comms signals from those systems checks (which any normal grav sensor near the communication path can pick up, if not necessarily decode). And while Mycroft is undoutably armed it is going to be limited in its sensors by its need for stealth -- it can use the active radars and LIDARs that might pick up a stealth object sneaking to within a million km or so. And the Honorverse's primary passive sensor, the grav sensor, is looking for emissions a spider drone wouldn't really produce.

I certainly don't think there were many more than 10 employed at Beowulf. But, wouldn't that be the minimum number needed to cover their area of concern? Which means that they would have been emplaced near their maximum effective range.

When I say close, I mean relatively close considering their maximum range. "Practically" close for MAlign consumption. Pun intended. If they would have been deployed at their maximum effective range, that would have been a lot of real estate to cover, having only a general idea of their location. If they had only a "general" idea, then I have a problem.

Mycroft represents lots of trade secrets housed in a single platform that could fall into enemy hands. And the GA knows there is a silent drive system out there. They also know they did the same thing to the Peeps, and they should have known that a lot of what made that possible was that the Peep platforms were in close proximity to each other, and that their ships would be the beacon. So, armed with all of this knowledge and the need for security, only someone very high up in the food chain would know the location of those platforms. And every one of those people would be found in the MBS. Whoever the rat bastard mole was on Beowulf certainly didn't know the exact coordinates. And as textev testifies that the logic is sound, he only knew a general location. So, for those same security reasons, how general an area would be known? I think too much so to find stealthy platforms that would be distributed at their maximum effective range, in just two weeks.

What, the MA gave the SB's carte blanche to execute a standard search pattern behind enemy lines? Could they risk that? I can't see them totally relying on test signals.

The Mycrofts are fairly new platforms, and remember, Beowulf wasn't made privy to the location of the FTL buoys emplaced in their system when the SL attacked. And they represent much older technology.

But okay, so they had some kind of a vague search area. But space is big. Huge. And these are humongous platforms searching an enemy's back yard. They couldn't have had free rein to just wander about - just shy of aimlessly. I also would love to think they'd have to be seeded in a 2-1 fashion to ensure success. Tester knows the RMN heavily seeded the area with a net advantage in armed drones to do what they did to the Peeps. Obviously, a single platform surviving would have been fatal to the MA's plans.

You'd also have to ask why a platform wasn't placed deep in the inner system, which was one of my initial questions. But that decision was probably political in nature, because the GA had to appear to remain neutral by staying out of the inner system?

So, the Bullets had two weeks. But two weeks shouldn't have been enough to tie down the location of every single platform which was only pulsing for four short beats very infrequently. And I suppose this would suggest that grav pulses aren't as directional as... lasers - which requires anyone trying to intercept their signal to be served up a heaping helping of providence by being smack dab between two platforms when they pulse. Another thing is I can't accept a need for the platforms to constantly break radio silence for a systems check but once when they are first deployed. After that, only a self-diagnostic program should be run. These things are highly classified. You don't keep sending out a series of "find me" pulses like a galaxy's pulsars.

Also, supposedly the Bullets were programmed to fire weapons when Mycroft goes active. What exactly constitutes "going active?" Full communication between platforms shouldn't be allowed during battle stations. Battle stations isn't the time for a system's test. But I do recall the Peeps and the SL always caught FTL chatter in the system. Still, the Bullets couldn't fire prematurely.

At any rate, textev placed emphasis on their size. They could all fit in one freighter, yes, but it is difficult to think the MA would risk more than one even if textev wouldn't have made that clear. However, that means that only one freighter would be responsible for kicking out at least a 2-1 number of these monstrous platforms all at once. Escape pods can be seen fleeing a warship like flies when abandoning ship, and they are much smaller. You may argue that that is during battle stations when you got an ever watchful eye on the enemy. True. But then, Beowulf should have been at high alert during that time. At least DEFCON 2. Which means even an air lorry full of kids would have been watched like a hawk.

Plus, why in the hell would the R-frickin-MN be caught with their pants down the same way they caught the Peeps, when they knew a great big ugly scorned belligerent stepped on angry prodded gorilla of a husband was present and loaded for bear. When a gorilla is loaded for bear, he's insane. There's gonna be trouble.

Not a single GA ship was towing a Mycroft platform for redundancy.

Disclaimer: I really need to reread UH. I wasn't aware that the freighter which dropped off the Bullets had done so with a two-week lead time. But even something is fishy about that. Freighters aren't allowed to sit around that long without being unloaded. And I can't imagine the equivalence of drug sniffing, bomb sniffing dogs aren't a norm in the HV. Especially during DEFCON 2. Bombs were able to sit that long without detection? In the HV? During DEFCON 2?