Peregryn46 wrote:The Other thing you might want to keep in mind is what Mistletoe was used against. Moriarty was ONLY protected by it's stealth and the clusters of Missile pods likewise.
In the moment targeting goes active your drone would be a sitting duck to active defenses (unless your target doesn't have defenses).
The Honorverse is moving into the Modern Artillery Problem; anything that can be seen can be killed. You really don't want to be seen.
So it may become the case that light combatants, anything short of a full fleet coming in to attack, operates in stealth; you send out a drone shell for sensor coverage with fixed spacing, and you send out another group of drones to be "curious", trying to find anyone else being stealthy.
I do think we're going to see drones operating in increasingly autonomous "clouds"; we can already emulate bird flocking behaviour with simple algorithms, it's not hard to imagine sets of drones intended to provide sensor coverage being augmented by small drone "flocks" intended to be curious, instead of reliable.
I mean, the CO will be very angry is the reliable sensor shell with even coverage starts going "ooh, what's that?" and moving out of position but that doesn't mean you can't have a second group of drones do it. Which presents someone trying to be stealthy against the drones with a problem; you can never really know if they've seen you, and if you light up to be sure you've found them whoever launched them has found you. If you're a CA and they're a DD, fine. If they're a division of BCs, oops.
This is how I expect the initial response to spider-drive vessels to go; if the drones are armed, or there's a central, large drone and a bunch of smaller expendable "feeler" drones, on the Apollo principle of separating the smarts from the boom, great. Though we still don't know if spider-drives involve wedge interference; if they don't, the fix for spider-drive ships is to sweep them with drone wedges.
"Sir, we've got a good visual on one of the Manty drones."
"Outstanding!"
"No sir. It's on the hull. It has a wrench."
And back on the RMN ship -- "next time, turn the curiosity down a bit."