ThinksMarkedly wrote:Thank you, now I have found the passage. It's indeed there.
However, you've skipped past this, in the same paragraph (emphasis mine):
Uncompromising Honor wrote:Aside from the two suadrons of Agamemnon-class BC(P)s of the ready response force, Third Fleet's hyper generators were powered completely down. The Beowulf Junction lay at the heart of a sensor bubble fifteen light-minutes across that a microbe would find difficult to penetrate, and the fixed defenses were... formidable. Under those circumstances, there was little reason to put wear on the hyper generators and nodes by holding the fleet at instant readiness. The ability tostand those systems down was the real reason there were fixed defenses, and any admiral worth her beret was grateful for them.
First, let me agree this corroborates the
nodes were down completely. It wasn't just a mistaken wording in the next couple of sentences, because it appears twice.
But the passage says that they had a sensor bubble of
fifteen light-minutes. Not light-seconds, light minutes. That's a sphere of roughly 1 AU in radius. The thinking at this point is that they can catch anything, including graser torpedoes and spider ships, before they reach target range of anything, and that those fixed defences could deal with such a threat.
To me, this doesn't say "haven't learnt anything from the Yawata Strike," but instead that they did, and they put a lot of scanning technology to ensure the attack couldn't be repeated.
How effective that can be against a spider drive, we don't know.
And the other question that immediately follows is: why weren't the Mycroft inside such a sensor bubble? 15 light-seconds would have been enough for them.
Good question.
And without first hand evidence that the sensors do pick up the kinds of weapons used against Manticore and Grayson I don't think I'd be so complacent about leaving 3rd fleet (less some ready response BC squadrons) with cold nodes.
And that's doubly true around a Junction terminus with its relatively tiny hyper limit (less than a million km). An attacker with good astrogation, and a willingness to risk clipping the RZ (with the destruction that would entail) could drop out of hyper within missile range of the Junction and the fleet anchoring there. I don't care how good your sensors are when someone can pop out of hyper within a couple million km and have missiles hitting you in just a handful of minutes; long before any of the ships could get their wedges and sidewalls up. You better pray that the fixed defenses can confuse, kill, or, lacking, that soak up all those missiles or you'd lose a lot of hideously vulnerable ships. (Though the attacker likely wouldn't survive the counter battery fire)
Of course the Mycroft platforms defending the inner system wouldn't be inside the
Junction's sensor bubble -- they're 362 LM from the primary -- but how about sensor bubbles of their own?
We know, because the SLN saw them blow up, that the system defense Mycroft platforms had been "scattered all around the [...] half of the hyper sphere we [the SLN forces] can see" -- that implies those platforms, or at least the outer shell of them, were covering the full 360x360 degree sphere are some depth inside the hyper limit (I'd guess maybe 5 LM inside -- deep enough to be difficult to pick out and target, but close enough to provide FTL fire control against targets crossing the limit)
Now there would likely be multiple shells of platforms, though the inner shell may, or may not, provide full coverage -- but you'd want enough that you'd have multiple redundant paths of relays between the planet(s) and the outer shell of platforms. Specifically so some malfunction, sabotage, or attack, can't easily cut the planets off from those.
However I don't know if
any Mycroft platforms would be close enough to a planet to be inside its own sensor bubble (which is hopefully just as tight as the one around the Junction) -- though
possibly at least one of the "master platforms" would be close enough to Beowulf to be within its sensor bubble (in which case, since they seem to have all gotten blown up, we'd have evidence that those sensors failed to detect the Silver Bullet(s) that killed those platforms).
However, I don't think each of the outer shell of Mycroft platforms would sit within its own sensor bubble. That would either require covering the surface area of a ~20 LM sphere with sensors -- which would require a ludicrous number of sensor platforms -- or else providing a little pinprick sensor bubble around each Mycroft platform -- which would rather highlight where they are for any attacker trying to take them out. They're
supposed to hide until needed -- sticking a bunch of radars and other active sensors around them rather defeats that.