Hacking 2000 years from now...

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:... about Frac-C bombardments.

How would you stop one in the first place? A reasonable course of action if you were murderous enough to do so would be to: (1) translate a light-month or two out from the primary; (2) accelerate up to the maximum speed that particle shielding will allow (around 0.7c); (3) shut down the wedge and have the crew bail out (presumably to be rescued later); (4) wait; (5) boom.

Planets can't dodge. And we know where a planet will be. That means you won't need any terminal guidance or even need the wedge up when you impact. A million-ton freighter at 0.7c would easily produce a petaton-range impact which would make it very tough for any occupants of said planet.

It is kind of surprising given how many liberation movement in the verge the League has cruelly stomped on that nobody took out Earth. Yes, supposedly the Eridani Edict keeps people from doing that, but if you are already facing the firing squad from the League why not take them down with you?

David says that no one has that mentality in the Honorverse.

<Shrug>

Sadly, we know it exists in the 21st century.

Jonathan_S wrote:
But most people don't want to frag whole planets, so frac-c bombardment of planets doesn't really happen. Instead on the rare cases the tactic is used it's to try to take out orbital forts, yards, or stations when they aren't backstopped by the planet -- in situations where they're too tough a target to close with and take out with missiles still under drive.

Didn't the Faithful carry-out (or plan) frac-c strikes on Grayson?

Jonathan_S wrote:
But as you said formal modeling can't help you if you specify software for anti-missile computers capable of handling missiles up to 0.6c and you're faced with missiles doing 0.8c. (Or spec it to handle 1,000 simultaneous missile targets and someone launches an alpha strike of 10,000)

One reason the "Stringbags" survived while attacking Bismark is that they were too slow for the gun laying (mechanical) computers.

Fox2! wrote:Didn't the Faithful carry-out (or plan) frac-c strikes on Grayson?

I think they planned to go into orbit and kill anyone who objected.

Jonathan_S wrote:

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:... about Frac-C bombardments.

How would you stop one in the first place? A reasonable course of action if you were murderous enough to do so would be to: (1) translate a light-month or two out from the primary; (2) accelerate up to the maximum speed that particle shielding will allow (around 0.7c); (3) shut down the wedge and have the crew bail out (presumably to be rescued later); (4) wait; (5) boom.

Planets can't dodge. And we know where a planet will be. That means you won't need any terminal guidance or even need the wedge up when you impact. A million-ton freighter at 0.7c would easily produce a petaton-range impact which would make it very tough for any occupants of said planet.

It is kind of surprising given how many liberation movement in the verge the League has cruelly stomped on that nobody took out Earth. Yes, supposedly the Eridani Edict keeps people from doing that, but if you are already facing the firing squad from the League why not take them down with you?

The degree of accuracy you'd need to hit the planet if you cut power nearly a lightmonth out would be kind of crazy. And this would only work against a planet that lacked the deep space sensors to see you making your many hour slog up to 0.7c before cutting the drive - because if they saw you pretty much any impeller drive ship could go out and play roadblock - you slam into their wedge and you're not continuing on to hit the planet.

And if you're trying to stay out of sensor range, remember that the crew that bailed out, even if they want to escape into hyper in another ship, have to get their velocity down to under 0.3c - so that's even longer with a wedge at full power canceling out the velocity built up on the first ship.

But most people don't want to frag whole planets, so frac-c bombardment of planets doesn't really happen. Instead on the rare cases the tactic is used it's to try to take out orbital forts, yards, or stations when they aren't backstopped by the planet -- in situations where they're too tough a target to close with and take out with missiles still under drive.

I respectfully disagree there, Jonathan. The EEV of the Most Dismissive Kind thread posits specialized computers used by the MAlign dedicated to do just that - to calculate launch vectors for true impact. Honorverse computers will be highly capable. Heck, NASA does it now in reverse, with projectiles hurtling toward Earth. They know exactly by how much they will miss us. And the MAlign will have correction features after launch.

As far as attempting to stop this type of an attack -- it seems impossible at worst, or impractical at best. Planets don't have wedges or CMs. It reminds me of how difficult it was playing pong. Even if one could get such response times out of ships. I'm afraid the Frac-C score would be sky high. Pardon the pun.

Stopping an attack by a purpose built anti-planet missile would be essentially impossible. Hell, you probably wouldn't even be able to retaliate because the attacker could launch it from a light-year out and it might take five years to hit.

but you could try and defend against a improvised anti-planet weapon. The "typical" threat would probably be missiles fired from extreme range to "accidentally" wreck the planet. Those can be blocked by existing methods.

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:The degree of accuracy you'd need to hit the planet if you cut power nearly a lightmonth out would be kind of crazy. And this would only work against a planet that lacked the deep space sensors to see you making your many hour slog up to 0.7c before cutting the drive - because if they saw you pretty much any impeller drive ship could go out and play roadblock - you slam into their wedge and you're not continuing on to hit the planet.

And if you're trying to stay out of sensor range, remember that the crew that bailed out, even if they want to escape into hyper in another ship, have to get their velocity down to under 0.3c - so that's even longer with a wedge at full power canceling out the velocity built up on the first ship.

But most people don't want to frag whole planets, so frac-c bombardment of planets doesn't really happen. Instead on the rare cases the tactic is used it's to try to take out orbital forts, yards, or stations when they aren't backstopped by the planet -- in situations where they're too tough a target to close with and take out with missiles still under drive.

I respectfully disagree there, Jonathan. The EEV of the Most Dismissive Kind thread posits specialized computers used by the MAlign dedicated to do just that - to calculate launch vectors for true impact. Honorverse computers will be highly capable. Heck, NASA does it now in reverse, with projectiles hurtling toward Earth. They know exactly by how much they will miss us. And the MAlign will have correction features after launch.

As far as attempting to stop this type of an attack -- it seems impossible at worst, or impractical at best. Planets don't have wedges or CMs. It reminds me of how difficult it was playing pong. Even if one could get such response times out of ships. I'm afraid the Frac-C score would be sky high. Pardon the pun.

The math is straightforward. The physical ability to align a ship perfectly, and have sensor so accurate you can verify that alignment, so that it can hit it without course correction is the part I'm saying is difficult.

Yes NASA does the inverse, but they still have fairly large uncertainty bars around the projections even after tracking it for a significant time at much closer ranges than we're talking about here.


The original suggestion was to aim from at least a lightmonth out and let the ship go in pure ballistic from there. At just 1 lightmonth a planet the size of earth is a target just 0.00000094690379 degrees wide.
Not impossible, but crazy difficult, especially with a random freighter's sensors and computers.

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:The degree of accuracy you'd need to hit the planet if you cut power nearly a lightmonth out would be kind of crazy. And this would only work against a planet that lacked the deep space sensors to see you making your many hour slog up to 0.7c before cutting the drive - because if they saw you pretty much any impeller drive ship could go out and play roadblock - you slam into their wedge and you're not continuing on to hit the planet.

And if you're trying to stay out of sensor range, remember that the crew that bailed out, even if they want to escape into hyper in another ship, have to get their velocity down to under 0.3c - so that's even longer with a wedge at full power canceling out the velocity built up on the first ship.

But most people don't want to frag whole planets, so frac-c bombardment of planets doesn't really happen. Instead on the rare cases the tactic is used it's to try to take out orbital forts, yards, or stations when they aren't backstopped by the planet -- in situations where they're too tough a target to close with and take out with missiles still under drive.

I respectfully disagree there, Jonathan. The EEV of the Most Dismissive Kind thread posits specialized computers used by the MAlign dedicated to do just that - to calculate launch vectors for true impact. Honorverse computers will be highly capable. Heck, NASA does it now in reverse, with projectiles hurtling toward Earth. They know exactly by how much they will miss us. And the MAlign will have correction features after launch.

As far as attempting to stop this type of an attack -- it seems impossible at worst, or impractical at best. Planets don't have wedges or CMs. It reminds me of how difficult it was playing pong. Even if one could get such response times out of ships. I'm afraid the Frac-C score would be sky high. Pardon the pun.

Jonathan_S wrote:The math is straightforward. The physical ability to align a ship perfectly, and have sensor so accurate you can verify that alignment, so that it can hit it without course correction is the part I'm saying is difficult.

Yes NASA does the inverse, but they still have fairly large uncertainty bars around the projections even after tracking it for a significant time at much closer ranges than we're talking about here.


The original suggestion was to aim from at least a lightmonth out and let the ship go in pure ballistic from there. At just 1 lightmonth a planet the size of earth is a target just 0.00000094690379 degrees wide.
Not impossible, but crazy difficult, especially with a random freighter's sensors and computers.

Not any more difficult than calculating the particulars of launching John Glenn into orbit or sending and retrieving Apollo 11 to the moon and back -- using the computer of the time. The computing power used in the movie Hidden Figures was the IBM 360 series.

During Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary, Neil Armstrong said “We have more computing power in our current cars than we had in the computers used in Apollo 11 to go to the moon.” Consider the fact that when IBM introduced it’s first Personal Computer with a hard drive, the size of the drive was 10mb. Even the current Computers in the Honorverse are much more capable and up to the task. I simply cannot believe that amassing sufficient sensor data of said target, even at those distances, would be a problem. Certainly given time and Honorverse technologies.

NASA's uncertainty bars are a factor of the limited speed and precision of their computers and a lack of all the necessary data. Such as the inherent wobbling aberrations of the object and the inability to go to the object and attain that data. Compounded by the limited precision of the vector of the object itself. There would be no aberrations of a launched missile causing it to behave like a screw ball. The purposely built behemoths used by an entity like the MAlign, who has time on their hands to simply sit in space and allow these behemoths the time they need, is a game changer.

Besides, so many methods could be employed if Frac-C bombardment becomes a reality. Heck, someone could simply activate a signal on planet or while in orbit in space to act as a homing beacon, like the device utilized in the attempted assassination using the moon stone as a homing beacon in Yeltsin. However, I doubt that that would even be needed with Honorverse computers and tech. Honorverse tech would be highly adaptable to Frac-C bombardment. IMHO. YMMV. YCMDMP (Your computer may deliver more precision.) It is those damn decimal places. LOL

* I recently concluded a three day discussion of this book after reading and watching the movie with, mostly, female friends in a literary club. The movie is really good. The book is even better.

Even if you need slight course corrections the Honorverse has reaction engines. In fact, the technology to hit a planet from several light-years away was first used in year 0 of the Disporia.

A random freighter coasting in on ballistic probably would have trouble hitting their target.

cthia wrote:Heck, someone could simply activate a signal on planet or while in orbit in space to act as a homing beacon, like the device utilized in the attempted assassination using the moon stone as a homing beacon in Yeltsin.

Actually, this brings up a good point. You could just use one of those assassin missiles/drones. It wouldn't even need a weak little homing signal because you're trying to hit a planet that's lit up across a huge spectrum! None of the wedges or magic stealth fields that come standard on a (Head of State's) Honorverse ship.

The resulting doomsday weapon would look something like this:

Stage One: Hyper-capable freighter hauls in some stealthy sublight ships and sends them on a ballistic course near the target planet.
Stage Two: Stealthy ships launch stealthy assassin missiles as soon as they get close enough to the target.
Stage Three: Stealthy assassin missiles impact on the planet and either nuke it or KEW it. This might include multiple missile heads depending on a gaggle of details.

I was trying to remember the related webpage I viewed quite some time ago. I couldn't remember it, but remembered discusing it with my niece and knew she'd probably retained the page because of some coding she was doing on orbital mechanics at the time. A quick call to her and she sent me the link.

snip

It is important to understand that an object’s orbit is never known perfectly. Although the nominal orbit solution fits the observations best, slightly different orbits may still fit the observations to within their expected accuracies. There is in fact a whole set of orbits around the nominal that will fit the observations acceptably well: these all lie within what we call the uncertainty region about the nominal orbit. The ‘true’ orbit is expected to lie somewhere within this region. As new observations of the object are made, the uncertainty region becomes more tightly constrained and the range of possible values for the orbital elements narrows.

snip

Working in reverse, a planet's orbit is known.