Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We are definitely told that further WH termini from the primary imply longer WH bridge lengths. That may not apply to Junctions, though.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We are definitely told that further WH termini from the primary imply longer WH bridge lengths. That may not apply to Junctions, though.

If you would, please point us to your source. When you have support from a canonical source, then there can be no argument.

I am not saying this because I doubt you, but because it is good to see the original wording and what else was stated to expand our knowledge.

Torch of Freedom, Ch. 13 wrote:"In addition to making it hard to find in the first place, the faintness of the terminus' Warshawski signature, coupled with its unusually close proximity to the primary, also indicates that it's almost certainly not especially huge."

Torch of Freedom, Ch. 13 wrote:"That's interesting," he said out loud. "Especially given the persistent rumors before the iberation that Torch was 'at least' a three-nexii junction"

"And what someone who isn't a hyper-physicist may not realize is that unless they're particularly big, you have to get within, oh, maybe four or five light-minutes before they're going to show up at all. There are certain characteristics—we call them 'wormhole fingerprints'—we've learned to look for them when there's a terminus in the vicinity, but they aren't always present."

"Despite their mass, F-class stars are statistically less likely to possess termini at all, and when they do, the 'fingerprints' are almost invariably fainter than usual"

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We are definitely told that further WH termini from the primary imply longer WH bridge lengths. That may not apply to Junctions, though.

tlb wrote:If you would, please point us to your source. When you have support from a canonical source, then there can be no argument.

I am not saying this because I doubt you, but because it is good to see the original wording and what else was stated to expand our knowledge.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Torch of Freedom, Ch. 13 wrote:"In addition to making it hard to find in the first place, the faintness of the terminus' Warshawski signature, coupled with its unusually close proximity to the primary, also indicates that it's almost certainly not especially huge."

Dr. Jordin Kare. This passage is saying that the faint signature and the closeness are factors indicating that the wormhole bridge is short. but you could read it as saying the faintness at the range is the indication and that .

ThinksMarkedly wrote:A couple of other interesting pieces of informatiton that could be useful on the improbability thread:

Torch of Freedom, Ch. 13 wrote:"That's interesting," he said out loud. "Especially given the persistent rumors before the Liberation that Torch was 'at least' a three-nexii junction"

Dr. Jordin Kare. Could it be? Or was it just disinformation by the MAlign? From the rest of the chapter, he's arguing it's so faint that it's more likely to be a bridge than a junction.

tlb wrote:Again I point to all the civilian orbital structures that were destroyed by Haven at Basilisk with attendant loss of civilian life. That was not an EE violation nor a war crime. Manticore can try people for war crimes (which EE violations certainly are), but not directly for violating the Eridani Edict - since that is a foreign policy statement by the Solarian League.

Galactic Sapper wrote:We don't know exactly how extensive the loss of life was at Basilisk. Assuming the stations were designed with the same considerations the major stations in Manticore were, it should have been fairly low. Even the major stations were designed for relatively rapid evacuation, given the Star Kingdom was in a state of cold or hot war for nearly a century. Note nearly the entire population of Weyland being evacuated in short order - minutes, not hours - rather than the days needed to evacuate the stations in Hypatia and Beowulf.

As for other "scorched earth" type strikes in both phases of the war, in every other case the attacking force at least temporarily took control of the system to give time for infrastructure to be evacuated before it was destroyed. No doubt a few people were on board but most were not. Harrington specifically left purely civilian structures alone; while the Havenites did not, the systems they hit had much less civilian infrastructure to begin with. The Solarians most certainly destroyed everything in reach, regardless of military value.

Theemile wrote:The Basilisk orbital structures were mostly. warehousing transfer points for ships to transfer cargo from Foreign flagged vessels to RMN vessels (for lower wormhole costs and (earlier) to avoid detailed customs procedures). While we were never told the deaths from the strike, it was probably measured in the thousands, not millions.

Galactic Sapper wrote: It's not even questionable; attacks on occupied civilian structures are a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Edict.

tlb wrote:Even if the loss of life was low (as you state, but we do not really know), it is still a fact that the destroyed structures were occupied; just not at normal capacity. Civilian structures are not necessarily built with the same safeguards as military ones, since civilian contractors are more concerned about cost; so we have no idea how long it would take to evacuate them (they may be designed to be serviced by shuttles, with NO life pods). Therefore it cannot be true that it is a war crime to destroy a civilian structure with people in it (and so "occupied"), because that is what happened at Basilisk.

Basilisk had become an immensely important and valuable possession. The traffic through the Basilisk terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction had grown by leaps and bounds, until it accounted for almost a third of all traffic through the Junction, and Lieutenant Reynaud had advanced steadily through Commander Reynaud, to Captain Reynaud, to Admiral Reynaud, commanding officer, Basilisk Astro Control.
And then, of course, the Peeps had blown the entire Basilisk infrastructure to Hell.
Remembered pain twisted Reynaud's face as he recalled the devastating Havenite raid which had utterly demolished a half-century of investment and development. Warehouses, repair facilities, building slips, solar power satellites, orbital farms, transient housing, orbital factories and refineries . . . It had been the single most successful Peep attack of the entire war, and Reynaud had gotten entirely too close a look at it. Indeed, Astro Control had been on the Peep list as well, and only the fact that Eighth Fleet had gotten there in time had saved it. And, he conceded, that was probably the only thing that had saved his own life, as well.

tlb wrote:We do know that the distance is unknown ahead of time.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We also know that there's a relationship between how far the WH is from the primary and how long the bridge is. They also know a bit more about wormhole physics, so I made an educated guess that there's a relationship between the entry vector and the WH vector. That may not be true.

There was no way to know how far Harvest Joy had come in Einsteinian terms, because a junction transit could theoretically be of literally any length. In fact, the longest transit "leg" for any known junction spanned just over nine hundred light-years, and the average was considerably shorter than that. Basilisk, for example, was barely two hundred light-years from the Manticore System, while Trevor's Star and Gregor were both even closer than that. Sigma Draconis and Matapan, on the other hand, were each the next best thing to five light-centuries from Manticore, while Phoenix was over seven hundred light-years away, although in terms of actual transit time all of them were equally close.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

noblehunter wrote:Unless the SD(P) were far enough out they could get back into hyper before the missiles showed up. Given how many of the battles in UH went, it seems like the balance is firmly weighted towards attackers. With the current missile ranges, attackers can shoot at defenders with impunity.

Not exactly impunity.

If you translate back into hyper, you're not controlling your missile swarm, any of the waves, for several minutes (you can't translate back down immediately). And it's pretty easy for the defenders to make sure you can't translate back at the same spot, so you'll also incur navigational errors due to short jumps.

Loren Pechtel wrote:
Divide your fleet into multiple parts. Some of the ships lie doggo well away from the main body of the fleet. When the missile swarm comes at the fleet the ones hiding out are far enough away that the missiles aren't going to see them. When the main fleet hypers out the others lie waiting. Once the missile storm can no longer make the turn to go after them they go active and resume guiding the missiles. (They have been listening all along, they know what needs to be done.) Even if they are driven off by a second wave they can stay there long enough to guide their missiles home.

Thus, so long as missile flight times exceed the hyper cycle time the guys outside the hyper limit can attack without coming under meaningful return fire. With Honor vs Ganymede there was no need for a secondary fleet as her birds were faster, but it's basically the same thing she did.

Theemile wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
Divide your fleet into multiple parts. Some of the ships lie doggo well away from the main body of the fleet. When the missile swarm comes at the fleet the ones hiding out are far enough away that the missiles aren't going to see them. When the main fleet hypers out the others lie waiting. Once the missile storm can no longer make the turn to go after them they go active and resume guiding the missiles. (They have been listening all along, they know what needs to be done.) Even if they are driven off by a second wave they can stay there long enough to guide their missiles home.

Thus, so long as missile flight times exceed the hyper cycle time the guys outside the hyper limit can attack without coming under meaningful return fire. With Honor vs Ganymede there was no need for a secondary fleet as her birds were faster, but it's basically the same thing she did.

This would work as long as you have FTL firecontrol and can pass it off to another controller after launch. If you don't have FTL, firecontrol's light speed limit makes it worthless after 10 million km or so.

Brigade XO wrote:You might also add some sort of random and irregular (but frequent) changes of location and orbital speed/direction to your facilities. That does make them a bit harder to hit with something like the delivery from long range by what were essentialy ballistic weapons systems till they engered engagement range.
Remember that what the Alignment had going for it- in addition to a new and then undetectable drive system for the ships (and the G-torps) and extreme stealth systems, was that the targets were all in nice predictable orbits for which you can plot intercepts from much of the way across a system.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Yeah, this the only way to hide a shipyard in the long term--build the whole thing mobile and cruising around in interstellar space. Obviously the acceleration will be quite low but that's enough to make it awfully hard to drop out of hyper on it.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:This would work as long as you have FTL firecontrol and can pass it off to another controller after launch. If you don't have FTL, firecontrol's light speed limit makes it worthless after 10 million km or so.

It also only works once. Then they go to a different fire distribution plan.