cthia wrote:I'm talking about a coordinated attack with all of those BCs they've got, when there is no need for the BCs to be stealthy. They would purposely come over the hyper wall flashing bright neon signs which say "look at me." The suppressing active scans would be laid down by the conventional ships to assist the LD in its maneuvers to establish nests in intimate places. It would be made to look like a sweep by the BCs for stealthy Manty ships. That wave of BCs doesn't even have to be the main prong of attack. That will come after the LDs have set up nests all over the system. The LDs will not tip their hand during the first operation. Heck, the RMN won't even know nor suspect that these ships are MA related, thus will see no need to scan the system. They will be completely oblivious to the fact that they've been infiltrated.
You're probably right about killing the Forts in that manner because I was thinking too small. Which is totally unlike the MA. The nanites should be used in conjunction with embedded software to compel the Forts to fire on each other. It's a little rough around the edges but you get the message.
How close do the BC's need to be in order to pump out enough EM to dazzle and distract the defenders and their sensors?
Based on the infodump about hyper generator states we've got to assume it's going to take at least 10 minutes after dropping out of hyper before a BC can hyper back out again (and it might be as much as 45 minutes (It depends on how discharged a hyper generator gets when used; which we're not told). At only 10 minutes before they can escape they'd have to be over 75 million km away from the nearest fort or system defense missile pod to be able to escape before Apollo wiped them from the heavens...
(And if it's 45 minutes then, god help them, they've got to emerge almost 30 light minutes away, nearly half a billion km, from any defense) [And that's assuming 3 drive Apollo missiles. If Manticore has their 4 drive system defense missiles deployed then those minimal safe ranges go up]
From that closer distance they might distract the sensor operators, simple because people focus on the new surprising thing. But even "hull mapping" levels of radar will fade/spread to fairly insignificant levels by the time the pulses reach across 75 million any defender. (much less 475 million!)
And remember how badly even a skilled military navigator can miss their emergence point; a Peep fleet missed by about 24 million km when they tried to mousetrap the Basilisk terminus! If you're trying to hit a sweet spot of landing close enough to distract the defenders but not so close the angry fist of Manticores fixed system defense smite you down before you can scamper away that ups that kind of imprecision ups to pucker factor significantly.