Loren Pechtel wrote:Detect it with what?? We see hyper footprints. We wedges. We see things at a 1Mkm by radar. Big radar installations can probably do better, but not all that far.
Telescopes. We're not talking about a stealth craft with active camouflage, heat sinks, and directed irradiation. We're talking about a rock. Low albedo is not invisible, it's just low. With enough exposure, you can detect low reflectivity objects.
I'm assuming any space-faring civilisation has telescopes. Moreover, a system like the MBS has thousands of sensor platforms in the form of all the ships going through the system. None of them may be paying attention to the specific location where the object is coming from, but that's what software is for. All the Manticore-flagged ships probably download their records when they dock, and some background process scans.
Grabbing something from out there means it has no wedge. No hyper footprint. It's going to be found when someone happens nearby (note that there are very few wandering around outside the hyper limit) or in the last seconds of it's flight.
Not seconds. Even if it isn't detected before, when it comes in the inner system, near the hyperlimit, it will likely be detected by someone. There are a lot of ships crawling around and their vectors can't be accurately predicted weeks in advance. Even if it is aiming at Sphinx at 4 light-minutes from the hyperlimit, that's a 40-minute warning.
Consider Oyster Bay. Nobody saw the missiles until a ship passed nearby and they didn't realize what they had seen in time to do anything about it. Those missiles were going far faster and thus had a far more visible particle shockwave.
But were MUCH smaller and were artificial. Each pod is a thousand tonnes, maybe? Dimorphos is 5 million tonnes and wouldn't be big enough to cause an extinction-level event. It's within the the capabilities of wedge destruction too.
And where in the Honorverse can you find a rocket with that kind of spec? There's nothing remotely like it. And I would be amazed if it didn't simply come apart under .1g. I wouldn't be surprised if it came apart under .01g. (Accelerating it originally is going to be a very long, slow process.)
The ones that accelerated half a million tonnes of cruisers in Honor's defence of Cerberus at 50 gravities. That's something I've had issues with, but is canon.
The same force that accelerates half a million tonnes at 50 gravities accelerates Dimorphos 5 gravities or Didymos (which is 52 million tonnes) at half a gravity. It only needs to work for one minute under those conditions.
Disagree--for a perfectly aimed object it doesn't matter which direction you deflect it, all have equal effects.
Well, not exactly. My point is that this is actually a two-dimensional problem (the third is not helpful). Think of all cartoon characters that run from a tumbling boulder in the direction it's going and then get smashed. What they should have done is go sideways. And the perpendicular direction is the best.
I was figuring a lot more than 2 weeks to carry it out. This is probably a project of years. And how would they be detecting said bodies? We have seen a few that are close and many miles across. Nobody's sitting there continually rescanning space, even if it's within a theoretical detection range doesn't mean it will actually be seen in time.
You're underestimating our
current detection capability. According to
Wikipedia, we know of over 30,000 near-Earth asteroids. Of the 2304 that cross Earth's orbit and are larger than 140 m wide, only 153 are larger than 1 km across.
All of those have been detected with ground or NEO telescopes, so from a single vantage point. If you can cheaply emplace big telescopes in space, you get better resolution. This type of service is something that the Manticore Astro Control would have been doing for centuries, as it's required for proper navigation in the system.
You're probably thinking of what happened in The Expanse, where Marco Inaros' faction coated the asteroids with Martian stealth technology and launched them in an orbit such that they'd arrive on Earth from sunwards, making detection difficult. It is possible for such a thing to happen, but it also requires complacency on the target, assuming they'd have mapped everything and the picture was static. And even then, only three rocks landed on Earth, neither of which was extinction-level; all others were intercepted further out. Book Seven also told us the Earth economy had recovered within 30 years. Plus, none of the polities in the Alliance would be as vulnerable, given that they have multiple planets in each one (even the Republic of Beowulf) and the one that doesn't is also the one where the population is living inside domes and wouldn't be affected by ecological damage (Grayson). not to mention, of course, they have
each other.