kzt wrote:Sure. But play it out. How fast are you moving at the end of that hour? At 5km/sec2 you are moving at 18,000km/sec and have moved 32 million KM, and by the time you stop you've gone 64 million km.
Why would you stop? Just keep adding to your vector (vector addition, so the direction changes, not just amplitude). There's a lot of space in 3D even if you keep away from the red zones of 2 light-minutes from the hyperlimit and the inner planets. What matters is not your speed relative to anything, it's where you are. Or, more to the point, where you're not. If the other side can't predict where you'll be, they can't generate an intercept.
(BTW, if you change vector once or twice an hour, that's a change an average of every 45 minutes)
Anyhow, the problem is that the MAN spiders are effectively undetectable at any reasonable range and have likely payloads of several thousand missile pods each. Boy, it might be kind of sucky if you were busy trying to slow down at the end of the run and someone launched 20,000 very bright but SD missiles at say 2-3 million km along your path, wouldn't it?
Interesting. You're thinking of spider pods, not spider torpedoes. So they are moving the Cataphracts out and then launch them at optimum range. Indeed,
that can generate possible intercepts, because the Cataphracts have ~2-light-minute range and can accelerate much, much faster than their targets.
But 20k Cataphract missiles is something any decent fleet that the GA would care to send to this system would shrug off. At Solon, Honor with 2 SD(P) and the LAC wings of 6 CLACs stopped 11,000 Havenite missiles, though with some cost. And at Manticore, the GF stopped the full payload of Filareta's (uncoordinated) launch with loss only of LACs.
You're going to have to do better. And with that many pods moving, the chance of detection increases. Plus, the MAN would have to have multiple shoals moving in case the fleet veers of at an inconvenient time to the wrong direction, so it's splitting its assets.
The way I see it, the only time they could be surprised with still-powered missiles is when they decide to leave. When they start moving towards the hyperlimit and breaking the pattern, a ship anywhere outside the hyperlimit can translate up, let an ambush force know where they're headed, then that one drops in with a massive alpha launch.
Do note that's a suicide mission for that ambush force.
Or say a graser torp just happened to be positioned to do an up the kilt shot? That's the great thing about weapons with an operational cycle of months, they can find good places to wait as their keepers analyze patterns.
That's luck (or bad luck, depending on the point of view). Strategists and tacticians don't count on it and can't make plans based on it. If it happens, it happens.
And a single torpedo will at most get one vessel. You'd need to roll the dice and get lucky dozens of times before the fleet decided it had had enough.
If I was them I'd have lots of not very stealthy 'spider' drones out there so the RMN can run up their score like USAF did against the Serbian tanks in Kosovo, where they destroyed 150 of the 300 tanks. Well, 150 plus or minus 140.
If I were the GA here, I wouldn't do a siege immediately. Instead, having discovered Darius, I'd do something cthia recommended on the other direction: keep sending ships, translating up and down the hyperwall. Pop in the system, deploy a bunch of Ghost Riders, make sure they see you, then after a while leave. Then keep doing that.
Over the course of a month doing this, the system has been thoroughly scanned by Ghost Riders. There's not a bolt on a shipyard that hasn't been catalogued. There's a good chance a Ghost Rider has got a good reading on a spider ship laid up for some reason (construction, refit, resupply, whatever). They'll have captured the spider start spike too and will probably have a good idea of just how many LDs there are.