BB(P/C) for rear area security

drothgery wrote:Eh, there's not much need for new roles.

Quite, questionable wording on my part.

IIRC, RFC's current thinking (as of his last discussion of this here) is something in the Sag-C range may end up replacing the existing DD, CL, and CA.

Replacing DDs with CAs would be nasty expensive in just about all ways except the reduced need for leaders and specialists.

Training more people is probably cheaper. And better.

Tenshinai wrote:Replacing DDs with CAs would be nasty expensive in just about all ways except the reduced need for leaders and specialists.

Not if DD's become glass popguns like Frigates are. Essentially the prediction is that they will find themselves neither deliver enough missiles to be effective at killing peer ships, nor can they withstand the fire from peer vessels. At which point any mission that includes any significant chance of combat with modern vessels becomes a mission you can't assign them.

I am not in the same league as some of you in terms of figuring out force mixes for various ships. But I am very familiar with the text of David's books. Contrary to some posts in this thread, I am not familiar with anything that would establish any definite perameters for streak and spider drives. I remember the following. MA is using streak drives courior boats. Detweilers which seem to be equivelent of SDs have spider drives. They work by the novel applicatiion of tractor beams to permit useage of higher hyper bands. Use of sharks with spider (prototypes) had a different signature that permitted them to drop out of hyper without being challenged by Manticore because defences didn't recognize what they were seeing.

I would think that if the next major challenge is the MAlighn that the GA will need streaks and siders of its own.

Comments? Corrections? Elaborations? What does everybody think?

Don

n7axw wrote:I am not in the same league as some of you in terms of figuring out force mixes for various ships. But I am very familiar with the text of David's books. Contrary to some posts in this thread, I am not familiar with anything that would establish any definite perameters for streak and spider drives. I remember the following. MA is using streak drives courior boats. Detweilers which seem to be equivelent of SDs have spider drives. They work by the novel applicatiion of tractor beams to permit useage of higher hyper bands. Use of sharks with spider (prototypes) had a different signature that permitted them to drop out of hyper without being challenged by Manticore because defences didn't recognize what they were seeing.

I would think that if the next major challenge is the MAlighn that the GA will need streaks and siders of its own.

Comments? Corrections? Elaborations? What does everybody think?

Don

GA has no idea ho to build a spider. They have some really high level description. It's like a description an h-bomb given to someone who has never heard of nuclear weapons that consist of a physics undergrad saying "it's an a-bomb surrounded by lithium deuteride." You are not going to be able to start producing h-bombs next week based of that. The whole industrial chemistry part is really damn important, as are some very precise details of the geometry, none of which he can help you with.

They have the theory for the streak drive, but no idea on implementation details, as that was done by a totally different team. So they are likely years out from having a working prototype, and many years from a production design. Hyper drives that work right 99.8%, with only a 0.2% chance of the ship being utterly destroyed, are probably not good enough.

David has provided some critical data for the spider drive, like the fact that acceleration lis limited by size (small ships can't accelerate fast) and by the crew (if any) ability to stand acceleration.

Ghosts were dropped off by a freighter, they left via their own hyperdrive. Sharks took steps to minimize their alpha wall transit signature, then they ran outside of the search envelope of the responding ships. The alpha transit was still detected, but it looked mostly like noise.

As fas as I can tell, both of these are still viable tactics. A shark can run far enough in the time it takes for the detection signal to reach the sensors and for a ship to respond that it produces an absurdly large search volume. If you combine that with false targets you simply can't intercept them at transit.

It's also likely that all the MAN ships have streak drives.

n7axw wrote:..... MA is using streak drives courior boats. Detweilers which seem to be equivelent of SDs have spider drives. They work by the novel applicatiion of tractor beams to permit useage of higher hyper bands. Use of sharks with spider (prototypes) had a different signature that permitted them to drop out of hyper without being challenged by Manticore because defences didn't recognize what they were seeing.

I would think that if the next major challenge is the MAlighn that the GA will need streaks and siders of its own.......
Don

What the Alliance needs (as in has to have it for effective counteraction) is an effective means for long range scanning that can spot the spider drive at an acceptable distance. Everything else is for the short term simply icing on the cake.
The streak drive is a good thing to have (for whomever has it ), but not really a game changer in any way.
Spidy is the dangerous one, but even here actuall cappability to manufacture it is not really necessary fo the immediate future. As long as it can be detected at a good enough distance - MDMs, Appollo and Keyhole give the Alliance the ability to destroy detected spider ships and missiles from far enough away.
Which is why Herlander Simoes was a streak drive specialist /Evil, Evil RFS /

The streak drive is just a beefier hyper drive. The spider drive uses enhanced tractors to cling to the hyper wall in order to pull itself forward. They're separate technologies.

n7axw wrote:I am not in the same league as some of you in terms of figuring out force mixes for various ships. But I am very familiar with the text of David's books. Contrary to some posts in this thread, I am not familiar with anything that would establish any definite perameters for streak and spider drives. I remember the following. MA is using streak drives courior boats. Detweilers which seem to be equivelent of SDs have spider drives. They work by the novel applicatiion of tractor beams to permit useage of higher hyper bands. Use of sharks with spider (prototypes) had a different signature that permitted them to drop out of hyper without being challenged by Manticore because defences didn't recognize what they were seeing.

I would think that if the next major challenge is the MAlighn that the GA will need streaks and siders of its own.

Comments? Corrections? Elaborations? What does everybody think?

Don

n7axw wrote:I am not in the same league as some of you in terms of figuring out force mixes for various ships. But I am very familiar with the text of David's books. Contrary to some posts in this thread, I am not familiar with anything that would establish any definite perameters for streak and spider drives. I remember the following. MA is using streak drives courior boats. Detweilers which seem to be equivelent of SDs have spider drives. They work by the novel applicatiion of tractor beams to permit useage of higher hyper bands. Use of sharks with spider (prototypes) had a different signature that permitted them to drop out of hyper without being challenged by Manticore because defences didn't recognize what they were seeing.

I would think that if the next major challenge is the MAlighn that the GA will need streaks and siders of its own.

Comments? Corrections? Elaborations? What does everybody think?

Don

We don't know how big the Detweilers are, except that they are big. Since they do not use impellers or inertial compensators, they are not restricted by the size and speed limits of compensators--their speed limitation is that of the grav plates they use, about 150 gees. This has led to a lot of speculation on the forums that Detweilers could be much larger than superdreadnoughts.

We know that the Alignment is using the streak drive on courier boats, but it is likely that they also use it on their larger ships, inclding the Ghosts, Sharks, and Detweilers. The streak drive is simply a supersized hyper generator, about twice the normal size, which allows access to higher levels of hyperspace.

The spider drive is the one that uses the tractors--or something like tractors. I have argued a couple times that the term 'tractors' might have been a simplification in that description, or an application of a known term to a new technology, rather than implying that spider drives use a standard tractor. The spider drive is what Alignment stealth ships (and the graser torpedoes) use instead of impeller wedges for propulsion. An important note is that the spider drive will not protect a ship from grav waves. There has been much discussion about whether the spider drive ships could have alpha nodes, which would allow them to use wormholes and grav waves in hyper space.

kzt wrote:Not if DD's become glass popguns like Frigates are. Essentially the prediction is that they will find themselves neither deliver enough missiles to be effective at killing peer ships, nor can they withstand the fire from peer vessels. At which point any mission that includes any significant chance of combat with modern vessels becomes a mission you can't assign them.

Yes but even as they are now, they´re not designed for "big battle", and while their scouting role is at least in part taken over by long range drones, they are still needed for the classical duties of screen and light units.

Especially independent scouting and patrol away from friendly bases, this is a big thing for intelligence gathering among others, but also provide smackdown on pirates and the like, these kind of things doesn´t need bigger than a DD or at the very most a CL, but there are very common missions that does NOT expect "real" fighting, where the primary role is performed by mere presence.

Putting CAs on all those missions?
Yes it would become horribly expensive, as you still need mostly the same NUMBER of ships.

Remember how in the books, there´s always a deficit of lighter ships, never enough.
And raising the minimum size to maybe triple the current, well that would just compound the issue even more.

SWM wrote:The spider drive is the one that uses the tractors--or something like tractors. I have argued a couple times that the term 'tractors' might have been a simplification in that description, or an application of a known term to a new technology, rather than implying that spider drives use a standard tractor. The spider drive is what Alignment stealth ships (and the graser torpedoes) use instead of impeller wedges for propulsion. An important note is that the spider drive will not protect a ship from grav waves. There has been much discussion about whether the spider drive ships could have alpha nodes, which would allow them to use wormholes and grav waves in hyper space.

I believe David's response to our questions about the Spider Drive ships not being able to use a Wormhole or transit a Grav wave, was something along the lines of "Why wouldn't they?" or "They wouldn't much good if they didn't". Which, while not really defining anything, seems to give creedenance that either the Spider drive still works in those situations where a wedge cannot, the spider drive can form a set of sails, or they have a dual drive system with Alpha nodes for Hyper and wormhole travel. The Geometry aspect of wedges and sails seems to lean against the 3rd option, but ram systems are always possible to give the correct node spacing.

n7axw wrote:I would think that if the next major challenge is the MAlighn that the GA will need streaks and spiders of its own.

Need, no. And if streak drives have any bad downsides or are markedly larger than regular ones, then it becomes a very tricky matter of figuring out where they are worth the compromise.

Streakdrive courier boats will happen the moment anyone figures out how to build them, they´re simply too valuable not to build and the MA has already proven that it can be done, aside from that we just can´t say as we don´t know enough.

And spiderdrive ships clearly have good and bad sides, their low acceleration for example means any spiderdrive ships will not be able to work in concert with the regular navy ships...

Frankly the spiderdrive doesn´t feel all that useful outside of special ops ships.
I mean sure, i can come up with a variety of ways to USE it, but none as part of a battle fleet. Ambush and covert ops missions is where it would be potentially great, elsewhere not nearly so much.
The classic wedge-style drive is just too useful and effective to warrant being replaced.

And as mentioned by others and myself already, Manties and Co DOES NOT HAVE THE ABILITY TO BUILD EITHER.
And they wont have it for a while. If they´re super lucky it might take mere months to replicate the research thanks to the hints they have(or potentially by capturing a ship with either drive), more likely it will take YEARS.

There is even a small risk that they can´t replicate one or both technologies because they may be using solutions so radically different that noone can figure them out without getting either a sample or some more data on the relevant parts.