cthia wrote:This bothers me a lot. Why would a combatant even worry about trash collecting in someone else's system. It is a nice gesture, I suppose, or a crazy one. I mean, all is fair in love and war.
Whoever remains in possession of the system after a battle is responsible for the security and safety of the civilian population and that includes traffic lanes. If nothing else, your own side is probably sending auxiliary ships after the battle and they'll thank you for there not being navigational hazards in their way. Later, the auxiliaries will be followed by civilian shipping.
If you've just taken possession of a system, there's something in it you want. Wrecking it is not usually in your interest.
Actually, I cannot believe that freighters don't intentionally dump huge chunks of garbage in a system during war. Like homemade debris fields. I know that a ship uses rad shields for smaller debris. And for larger debris PDLCs. However, can a warship see what it is hypering into? I know Honor was able to sit in hyper waiting for the other shoe to drop because her spider senses were tingling.
Civilian freighters doing that would be fined and their operators liable for prosecution under civilian laws of the host system. The ship could get impounded if the littering was serious. A civilian wouldn't want to do that.
A military operation might want to do that, but throwing debris in the path of civilian ships is the next best thing to directly attacking civilians. Even commerce raiding is not supposed to shoot first and ask questions later: a civilian ship of the opposing polity should be offered the opportunity to surrender first and their civilian crew should get the opportunity to be returned home.
Which means that you can see other ships in n-space from hyper. But does that also imply that you can see debris as well? You should be able to, else what is preventing ships from translating right into asteroid fields.
No, you can't do that. In any band or n-space, you can only see that band.
About killing large debris with PDLCs. If a ship in hyper cannot detect debris fields that shouldn't be there - and since downward translations cause a significant moment of a lack of concentration - the process should be automated. But what if you hyper right on top of a very large chunk of junk? Will the sensors always have time to discern between firing on junk or a disabled Yacht?
The chance of hypering right on top of a debris field is literally astronomical.
Civilian vessels, especially merchants, don't translate exactly on the hyperlimit. Their navigation isn't that good. Warships and probably some civilian fast couriers will try to translate at the hyperlimit on the least-time course to their destination. That's the only location where a translation could be predicted. But a warship would not do that on an enemy system,
because it's predictable (unless you're thumbing your nose at them, like Honor did in Galton). They'd do only where the destination is known to be safe, which means your friendlies have cleared it of possible debris.
It could be that you're just unlucky, that you hypered in right after an accident and therefore the other ship registers as debris. That doesn't mean your computers will immediately register it as a hazard and shoot at it. For one thing, as you said, you've just lost 92% of your velocity, so the debris wouldn't be moving at you.
In fact, I'd be more concerned about non-debris traffic. How do you know you're not hypering in right on top of a ship that is about to leave? I'd guess that there's an SOP for every ship to just add a bit of randomisation to the arrival. 1000 or even 10,000 km are not going to significantly delay your journey. That's about a minute more, at 500 gravities.