Defense of Felix

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:The Silver Bullets have spider drives?

The thought of buying a system still shocks me. Who would a system be bought from? Who has the deed to Felix?

I do not have text after Mission of Honor, but clearly they had to have undetectable drives to detect and move close to the Mycroft platforms after they were dumped out of the freighter(s?).

As I understand it the system belongs to the company that surveyed it. The same as the rights to Manticore were purchased before the colony ship left to settle it.

The rights to Felix are in dispute.

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually it's in Uncompromising Honor. I think there's a biggest description of the Silver Bullet elsewhere in the book; but here's a quite quote that confirms that, yes, it has a spider drive

Uncompromising Honor wrote:Silver Bullet Q-12 was far larger than most people’s drones, larger even than one of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Ghost Rider platforms. It was, however, at least as stealthy as Ghost Rider as it swept slowly along on its spider drive.

Well, it isn't just the Silver Bullets that break with the thing I thought was written in stone. I thought the Spider drive had to have a certain shape. The SBs are an elongated fat cigar. A bullet.

It also surprised me that it is/was too big to be tube launched by the LDs.

BTW, the SBs employed a trickle charge for the plasma capacitors. A trickle charging plasma capacitor sounds like an oxymoron to me.

penny wrote:Well, it isn't just the Silver Bullets that break with the thing I thought was written in stone. I thought the Spider drive had to have a certain shape. The SBs are an elongated fat cigar. A bullet.

It also surprised me that it is/was too big to be tube launched by the LDs.

How do we know that they too big to be tube launched by an LD? All we know is that a freighter was used which then transited the wormhole (I think). Are any LDs ready that that point? On the other hand; if they are bigger than the G-torp, that should not be surprising with the need for additional electronics to locate the Mycroft platforms and bigger capacitors for longevity.

The part that is written in stone is the three keels, so they could look like a fat cigar as long as they have a triangular cross-section.

penny wrote:The thought of buying a system still shocks me. Who would a system be bought from? Who has the deed to Felix?

That is indeed the reason why they haven't bought yet: they can't find who has the deed. Apparently the colony company that was formed to colonise the system went into receivership centuries ago (before beginning the colonisation, so no one is there) and the deed passed down from creditor to creditor to the point that there are now competing claims.

This was explained a few books ago when we learned about Felix.

penny wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually it's in Uncompromising Honor. I think there's a biggest description of the Silver Bullet elsewhere in the book; but here's a quite quote that confirms that, yes, it has a spider drive

Uncompromising Honor wrote:Silver Bullet Q-12 was far larger than most people’s drones, larger even than one of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Ghost Rider platforms. It was, however, at least as stealthy as Ghost Rider as it swept slowly along on its spider drive.

Well, it isn't just the Silver Bullets that break with the thing I thought was written in stone. I thought the Spider drive had to have a certain shape. The SBs are an elongated fat cigar. A bullet.

It also surprised me that it is/was too big to be tube launched by the LDs.

BTW, the SBs employed a trickle charge for the plasma capacitors. A trickle charging plasma capacitor sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Where'd you see them described as a bullet shaped elongated fat cigar?
Because they only seem to be talked about in Uncompromising Honor and I can't find a single description of what they look like in that book. Nothing to indicate that they're in any way bullet shaped, only a length and diameter. But a diameter doesn't mean that they've got a cylindrical cross section - it can just define the smallest ring that could circumscribe all the bits they'd got sticking off them.

So, baring any text-ev to the contrary (which I certainly don't remember reading, and can I turn up with a keyword search), I'm going to assume that they look more or less like any other spider drive equipped ship / device. 3 equally spaced skegs running down the length of the hull, with the drive's tractor projectors attached to them.

But yeah, they are large. UC describes them as "at least two or three times as big as the MAN’s graser torpedo…which was already nearly twice the size of a Manticoran Mark 23 MDM" "sixty-eight meters long and right on eleven and a half in diameter" "over ninety percent the size of a Manticoran Shrike-class LAC". "The final version’s going to be at least a couple of meters longer"

And yep it says they're too big to be launched from a Detweiler’s torpedo tubes. Even the smaller Wraith RDs would presumably be launched from boat bays (the Mantie RDs certainly are), so if an LD can manage to carry any Silver Bullets (hardly a given, since they're a one-off special purpose munition) I image it'd be on external racks or within a boat bay.

The elongated fat cigar shape is what popped into my head when I read the dimensions; which was probably also influenced by its name, the Silver 'bullet.' My badd.

Thanks for clearing up the part about the keels being written in stone, tlb, Jonathan. That was really bugging me.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Uncompromising Honor wrote:Silver Bullet Q-12 was far larger than most people’s drones, larger even than one of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Ghost Rider platforms. It was, however, at least as stealthy as Ghost Rider as it swept slowly along on its spider drive.

The gtorp is apparently modular, you can removed the graser and bolt another type of warhead instead.

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually it's in Uncompromising Honor. I think there's a biggest description of the Silver Bullet elsewhere in the book; but here's a quite quote that confirms that, yes, it has a spider drive

Uncompromising Honor wrote:Silver Bullet Q-12 was far larger than most people’s drones, larger even than one of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Ghost Rider platforms. It was, however, at least as stealthy as Ghost Rider as it swept slowly along on its spider drive.

Uncompromising Honor
"Wraith was the Mesan Alignment Navy’s equivalent of the Manty Ghost Rider recon platforms, and without Manticore’s new stealth systems—and their damned thumbnail fusion plants—building something equally hard to see had been a challenge. The good news was that the spider drive’s gravitic signature was incredibly faint compared to conventional impellers, so it didn’t require as much stealthing in the first place."

That's what they used to build the several Silver Bullets.

I don't understand why the Mesan Alignment would spend so much effort developing the Silver Bullet. Even w/o Mycroft, Manty missile launches are too effective for the MAN defense. But the wiki says that the MAlign found out about Mycroft from an operative on Beowulf.

Now, I understand developing the Silver Bullet for an all out attack on GA systems that have Mycroft installed. But in the manner in which the SB was used at Beowulf seems like a wasted opportunity, and tech revealed too soon.

It seems like a lot of development and resources went into the effort, at the risk of compromising an operative for what seems to me like a small return or little reward. Unless they think Mycroft will continue to be vulnerable to the Silver Bullet.

penny wrote:I don't understand why the Mesan Alignment would spend so much effort developing the Silver Bullet. Even w/o Mycroft, Manty missile launches are too effective for the MAN defense. But the wiki says that the MAlign found out about Mycroft from an operative on Beowulf.

Now, I understand developing the Silver Bullet for an all out attack on GA systems that have Mycroft installed. But in the manner in which the SB was used at Beowulf seems like a wasted opportunity, and tech revealed too soon.

It seems like a lot of development and resources went into the effort, at the risk of compromising an operative for what seems to me like a small return or little reward. Unless they think Mycroft will continue to be vulnerable to the Silver Bullet.

My assumption is that the MAlign badly underestimated how effective Apollo would be after being unexpectedly stripped of its FTL fire control.

IOW they expected killing the Mycroft fire control relays to either prevent, or utterly cripple, the the Apollo launch.

And, in their defense, the missiles had to fly 11.4 lightminutes from their launchers - and probably more like 20+ lightminutes from the remaining (light-speed) fire control bases/forts.

That's at least 5 times farther than Apollo had ever been demonstrated at - and no other missile in history would have had a prayer of chasing down maneuvering targets at that ludicrous range.


That said, I doubt they expected it Silver Bullets to remain particularly effective at anti-Mycroft work; because Manticore would take measures to protect against them once they'd been revealed. On the other hand, the exact same logic applies to Manticore developing Mistletoe as an anti-Moriatry measure - yet they thought that was worth investing in.

But honestly, Silver Bullets probably weren't all that big an investment. At their core they're a pair of off-the-shelf Wraith RD power packs, crammed into an oversized chassis with the graserhead off a g-torp, and some deployable solar sails. For all we know they might have just used the off-the-shelf Wraith sized Spider drive despite the larger chassis which would reduce the R&D even more -- it's not like their flight profile required higher acceleration than the g-torp or RD; so even if the hull length would let you build a more powerful Spider drive; why bother?.

In the Detweiler discussion about building the Silver Bullets, there is a mention of two Rhino Heavy Cargo Containers connected together to transport an SB. Then, we have part of the crew of the fighter that delivered them to Beowulf taking about "that is the last of them'" in the deployment. What is NOT clear is if they dropped the entire container (two joined) and then the Silver Bullets exited the containers or the Freighter crew had to unload the containers and then drop each Silver Bullet separately. Better to have the containers open after dropped (with some speed on a vector (by compressed gas or something simple) not directly for anything Beowulf might value. Then you don't have to worry about the crew learning anything about the contents- what they don't know they can't talk about.
My thought was that the Rhino containers were dropped and then each opened to deploy it's Silver Bullet. Primarily that would be for operational secrecy and security. Nobody in the freighter crew would get a good look (if any) at the Silver Bullets since they were were enclosed in transit which would also keep any purely visual inspection of cargo from noticing the rather odd shaped contents. Sure, there could be one of these -often random- detailed customs inspections which require the opening and unloading of containers- but I doubt that the containers were coded on the manifest or any tagging to be delivered to Beowulf. Probably some place a long way down the deliver chain for this freighter but would end up being scrubbed from the cargo manifests somehow after Beowulf's deliver of whatever else was supposed to be landed there.
The empty containers (and they were dropped well out from where the ship was to discharge cargo specifically so none of the operation should be observed and monitored) would just become a bit more of debris traveling though the system. Given that Darius knew when the Buccaneer strike was to take place, they could be confident that a few (at leas 12 since we are given information about SB # 12) large shipping container - which are otherwise not emitting any signals or power signatures- are going to get overlooked in all the things flying through the system when the SLN shows up. They are inert, they have some now ballistic trajectory which probably isn't going to take them close to Beowulf (the planet) nor though the various manufacturing installations or habitants obits, so nobody is going to pay much attention since they are unlikely to trigger any flags with local Astro Control.
Since the freighter may or may not have already started it's declaration to come to a Zero/Zero with the appropriate cargo platform, the containers will have a good deal of speed and will have gotten past the critical areas of the system before the freighter makes it's scheduled delivery at a cargo area.