penny wrote:Is this likely? I sure hope so. Please, no more paper tigers. I hope with this enemy even the author has to hone his skills to deliver his very finest in strategy and tactics. With the LD the MA holds a significant tactical advantage. That advantage will force the GA to up their game. I have a feeling the war with the MAlign will thin the herd. Only the strong (skilled in tactics and strategy) will survive. We may finally see the meteoric rise in rank of our newly betrothed officers.
I don't think the LDs represent that major tactical advantage at all. At least, not in their current form. And it wouldn't be unlike David to hang shiny objects in front of us while the real threat is elsewhere (*cough* McQueen *cough*).
There's no way that the Leonard Detweiler is the only class of ships in the MAN or that the monitor-sized spider-drive torpedo boat is the only ship type (I think I'm going to call them "torpedo monitors" from now on, because that's "TM", though it would probably be "MT"). You have to factor in all the other ships and the tactics that they will allow.
Let the HV end in a big bang. Lots of big bangs. Yeah!
Lots yes, but I don't expect them to be big in their majority. David writes best smaller battles, probably because he's got more freedom. I liked the battles in
Toll of Honor much more than the one in
To End in Fire. I expect one or two major battles only.
I am not sure even this breakthrough in heat management will make them totally invisible. They have their limits in range, and are susceptible to drones. Targeting an LD even after a drone has discovered one still might be difficult after the drone is eliminated.
Flaming datum. You know where the drone got picked up, so that constrains the volume of whatever ship was doing the picking. Send in several drones and you constrain further. Better yet, do recon with missiles.
The MAN commander could fight smart by throwing noise into the data, by picking up drones with torpedoes, so they aren't actually close to the mothership in the first place. So long as the torpedo is able to fire a laser instead of its self-incinerating 3-second graser, it could continue on.
At any rate, given this improvement, the opening phases of the war should be devastating, prompting the GA to develop a spider drive detector via sensor readings from all over the galaxy.
Yes.
I wonder if the exhaust heat can be released on any vector at any given time. Variably-vectored exhaust heat? I'd hate to discover there is only one exhaust pipe protruding from the rear. Shouldn't the most common vector to mostly radiate waste heat likely end up being along the z-axis with respect to the galactic plane? Don't most ships travel along the galactic plane?
The galactic plane is irrelevant, since alignment with the system's ecliptic is coincidental and almost never happens. I suspect you meant the system ecliptic here, which is where, yes, most ships travel. And therefore, the easiest way to avoid detection from other passers-by is to emit heat perpendicular to the ecliptic.
Since all ships in the HV, including spider ones, travel along their longest axis, that does indeed mean the spider ships must have been constructed with the ability to project heat from their sides, not their fore and aft. And since they are axial-symmetric, that means they can emit on 360° and most likely vector it forewards or afterwards by some angle too.
Anyway, when I realized the spider drives can punch through to the alpha wall, I was surprised they can do so inside the hyper limit.
Interesting point. Not sure what that means, but it's interesting.