Relax wrote:There is never a need for a new build or old build SD to hunt down a freighter. Certainly with FTL MDM's that now have 62X the range of old missiles limited by light speed hunting freighters is an absurd joke. With FTL missiles they can literally fire light hours away. This puts an ENTIRE solar system under direct control of a single FTL equipped missile ship.
Oops. The control loop is 62x faster if both sender and receiver are using FTL links. It will be 31x faster if you only have Ghost Rider drones look at your targets but you need to send updates to the missiles via lightspeed (no KH2).
But that does not translate to 62x longer range. It barely translates to 1.25x longer range.
The same FTL-equipped Mk23E missiles do increase the effective range by a very long margin, as seen in the Battle of Beowulf during Operation Fabius, but it wasn't because of the FTL capabilities. And 62x the previous range of of 3.6 light-minutes would put any target outside the hyperlimit and several hours away at any n-space speed (limited by the speed of light), so the target can simply translate to hyper and come back at a different place. An engagement over half a light-hour away makes no sense.
True, currently DW has said FTL's range is not that great, but we already know range is hundreds of millions of kilometers. Maybe not quite a light hour(1 Billion kilometers), but range ability is only increasing not decreasing and we have already seen several hundred kilommeters range. This already means any habitable planets infrastructure can be targetted from outside the hyper limit.
It's much less than that, without relays. See Jonathan's reply.
Manticore sits at 10 light-minutes from the primary and the Manticore-A hyperlimit is 22 light-minutes. That would place its closest approach at 12 light-minutes from the hyperlimit. Any dual-drive missile can make the flight; whether it can find its target once it gets there is the big question.
BTW, that places Sphinx at 20 light-minutes, per Kepler's Third Law.
1 light hour on the Sol system is a distance between SOL and between Jupiter and Saturn. DW has the hyperlimit barely outside of mars itself.
Indeed, but Jupiter has a hyperlimit of its own of 3 light-minutes and is better protected than Sphinx. Saturn would have something too. Though all three are within range of the original MDMs' powered range.
With FTL missiles it actually means Manticore and any other planetary system with a wormhole are the SAFEST planets around as the resonance zones make their defensive depth deeper for at least SOME portion of the local year.
It's possible to emerge there. But emerging on the hyperlimit at the least-time course is also the worst possible location, since it's the most obvious and therefore the one most likely to get a brace of missiles back before you can cycle your hypergenerators. One should emerge at least 3.5 minutes of missile flight time away from that point.
They must start building infrastructure near Mercury or equivalent and in resonance zones of solar systems with wormholes.
Of course. Added benefit: increased solar incidence per unit of area. That means more power available. There's even an orbital location where the push of the solar wind equals the gravitational attraction of the star, allowing something to remain fixed in the star system. Don't ask me to calculate this.
This also makes ships defending systems from OUTSIDE the hyper limit able to truly cover an entire perimeter from pirates. Yet one more nail in the coffin of a Frigate. Of course governments will still build them to cut costs not to actually fight a war.
Actually at this point, why bother with a hyper generator at all? Just build permanent stations at the periphery somewhere where all traffic is directed and can be covered, Cerberus style.
It's very difficult to defend anything outside the hyperlimit. It's just too big and the attacker has the option to escape back into hyperspace, especially if they're using light units with very short hypergenerator cycle time.
So, yes, the only way to defend is to do as you say: concentrate the important installations in narrow regions that you can cover against surprise attack. As for the traffic and resource extraction, you simply make it non-profitable to attack, by dispersing them so much that no attacker could hope to cause significant damage before being intercepted.