New Ship: the Corvette

Relax wrote:If you want to inspect: Do it outside the hyper limit. Can jump around quickly with... a hyperdrive for multiple contacts on multiple vectors. Or at dedicated spots inside the hyper limit so can't escape and still far from planet. Both would only require a shuttle as they can destroy any civi freighter.

Drug smuggling? Has nothing to do with reality as this is cargo based and only way to do this is open EVERYthing... yea right good luck. No one will ever do this and no one ever has.

I agree on the points inside the hyperlimit, like for example 2 million km (6-7 light seconds) away from your stations if you're really worried about your infra. That's close enough that you can hold real-time conversations but far enough that even energy weapons wouldn't hit. A ship at 2 million km and decelerating at freighter compensators (@ 250 gravities) is 10 minutes away from a zero-zero and would be moving at 1585 km/s. A missile fired from there and accelerating at 100000 gravities has a travel time of about 30 seconds, which is enough to bring up bubblewalls on stand-by and warm up your PD, especially if you have an FTL transmitter at the inspection location.

Rendezvousing outside the hyperlimit, on the other hand, makes no sense. A 20-light-minute hyperlimit translates to 2.26 billion km of circumference. Meeting a ship that's just arrived is a 10-minute proposition, if not under battle conditions. And the smallest hyper-capable unit is a destroyer, which is hardly cost-effective for customs work. What's more, if your target wanted to escape, they could just translate out. Better to wait for them at a designated location deep in the hyperlimit after they've already been decelerating for a couple of hours, like above.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:If you want to inspect: Do it outside the hyper limit. Can jump around quickly with... a hyperdrive for multiple contacts on multiple vectors. Or at dedicated spots inside the hyper limit so can't escape and still far from planet. Both would only require a shuttle as they can destroy any civi freighter.

Drug smuggling? Has nothing to do with reality as this is cargo based and only way to do this is open EVERYthing... yea right good luck. No one will ever do this and no one ever has.

I agree on the points inside the hyperlimit, like for example 2 million km (6-7 light seconds) away from your stations if you're really worried about your infra. That's close enough that you can hold real-time conversations but far enough that even energy weapons wouldn't hit. A ship at 2 million km and decelerating at freighter compensators (@ 250 gravities) is 10 minutes away from a zero-zero and would be moving at 1585 km/s. A missile fired from there and accelerating at 100000 gravities has a travel time of about 30 seconds, which is enough to bring up bubblewalls on stand-by and warm up your PD, especially if you have an FTL transmitter at the inspection location.

Rendezvousing outside the hyperlimit, on the other hand, makes no sense. A 20-light-minute hyperlimit translates to 2.26 billion km of circumference. Meeting a ship that's just arrived is a 10-minute proposition, if not under battle conditions. And the smallest hyper-capable unit is a destroyer, which is hardly cost-effective for customs work. What's more, if your target wanted to escape, they could just translate out. Better to wait for them at a designated location deep in the hyperlimit after they've already been decelerating for a couple of hours, like above.

If you have a set point for customs, there is no need for a mobile unit: you build a customs waystation, with integrated LAC and shuttle bays. After the initial clearance by a boarding party, the cargo is offloaded, certified, and scanned, then loaded into a local short haul freighter to go to it's final dedtination. ( Some short hull freighters could be detained for thorough searches, or be specially used to house questionable cargo in a safe orbit until it is cleared. )

The cost and delay of building/assembling these things on location would easily negate any savings on construction and operation for the first few year of service if you instead simply used an older destroyer design fresh from the builders in Manticore orbit. Plus buying prebuilt gets you things like builder's trials with the dockyard right there to fix any issues as well as the tactical flexibility. They might even be able to buy some soon-to-be-surplus destroyers from Frontier Fleet instead of new Manticoran construction.

Maybe obsolete destroyers could even be refitted for the purpose, stripping out some broadside tubes and a magazine to make more room for Marines.

Theemile wrote:If you have a set point for customs, there is no need for a mobile unit: you build a customs waystation, with integrated LAC and shuttle bays. After the initial clearance by a boarding party, the cargo is offloaded, certified, and scanned, then loaded into a local short haul freighter to go to it's final dedtination. ( Some short hull freighters could be detained for thorough searches, or be specially used to house questionable cargo in a safe orbit until it is cleared. )

I was thinking of a moving rendezvous. If you send an LAC out to meet a decelerating freighter, you can have it match velocity of 1585 km/s relative to the planet, so the inspection is done without adding too much time to the transit time. Then the freighter would proceed to the orbital warehouses around the planet.

If we're thinking instead of a customs inspection point where the freighter must actually stop at, you double the time to reach the planet. And if this is a station, not just a point in space, then you also create a target and that negates the objective of detecting a Q-ship before it comes close to your assets.

kzt wrote:A typical ISO cargo container can weight up to 10 tons. So an average 8MT freighter has somewhere around 700,000 of these. Densely packed in, nose to tail and deck to roof.

Can you provide to me a search strategy to find 50 kilos of contraband hidden in that load? Note that the holds are in vacuum and zero g, and the containers are typically fully sealed.


(OK, technically the Honorverse uses more like 80 ton cargo containers, but there are still tens of thousands of identical mass produced cargo containers crammed into the holds.)

The only way you realistically can; by having the individual containers vetted by dispatching customs before they ever make it onto the ship - at which point you only have to 'prove' that no containers have been interfered with since export - hence stuff like the 'jiggered' customs seals in On Basilisk Station.

In a setting with molycircs, I would imagine the seals and containers would probably be designed to be 'smart' so a hold's contents can be interrogated by the customs team. And yes, that does open up the possibility of hacking and deception, but then you're pitting the software and cryptographic capabilities of your government and major corporations against jim and betty-lou in their basement; the smugglers will find occasional weaknesses to exploit that you'll have to detect and fix, but overall it's a pretty good bet.