Countering the Spider – Real World Inspirations

MAD-4A wrote: {snip}
generally a good idea though the CAM ships were anti-air ships and unable to recover the fighters they launched to counter the enemy air attack, so old worn out fighters, patched together for “one last run” were used, usually Hurricanes. A use of this may be to simply expand the merchies existing small-craft bay into the cargo area to accommodate 1 LAC and give them an old 1st gen boat as they are replaced with newer models on the line(particularly useful tactic for the Andies & Solies who are behind in carrier/LAC production)
{snip}

SWM wrote:

Valen123456 wrote:1) CAM ships and Merchant Aircraft Carriers, (merchant vessels equipped with aircraft and launch platforms)

David has already explicitly mentioned that this is likely to happen--freighters with LACs attached externally as protection.

2) Escort carriers (underweight, mass produced aircraft carriers)

David has explicitly stated that Manticore would not build escort carriers, as you describe them. However, he has stated that they might build two different kinds of carriers--one similar to the current designs, intended to stay out of range of fighting, and a combat CLAC with heavier armor and defenses, intended to resupply LACs in the middle of combat.

3) High frequency direction finding (HF/DF) (locates an enemy submarine from its radio transmissions)

Somewhat problematic in the Honorverse. Most communications are done by narrow lasers, so there is an extremely low probability that you would get one of your detectors in the beam path.

4) Airborne/Seaborne Radar
5) The Leigh light airborne searchlight, Magnetic anomaly detection, Diesel exhaust sniffers, Sonobuoys (all methods used to provide passive and active early warning for U-boats on approach)

There has been previous speculation on these forums on the development of some kind of gravitic radar. But there is no textev on which to base such speculation, so there is no way to evaluate whether such a thing is possible. We will not know more until David shares more data. Given the active camouflage given by Spider super-smart paint, electromagnetic detectors will have a very difficult time detecting anything.

Theemile wrote:Each CM "corkscrews" randomly away from the their central launching point sweeping portions of a conical volume.
In the end you have a sphere 1-6 Million KM in diameter (depending on how we could tweak the CMs) where 1-5% of the volume has been swept (randomly) by the CMs.

tonyz wrote:anybody with a clue.

jgnfld wrote:...or fight them in the Bay of Biscay...

Theemile wrote:Possible spider killer....

This has been rattling around in my head for awhile, so I might as well get it down and see what the consensus is.

The main protion of the device is a large drone chassis. The "warhead" is 6 modiffied CMs.

The Drone Chassis is propelled to the center of a region you want to search for Spiders - it needs to be at least several million klicks away from any friendly ships.

At the appropriate point, the 6 CMs are deployed orthogonal to each other (North, South, East, West, Up, down). When they are far enough apart not to interact with each other, they fire off their drives - These drives are the largest you can make in a CM (instead of 10 KM wide, we tweak them to 30, 50 or 100KM, and accept a lower accel or shorter burnout time.) Each CM "corkscrews" randomly away from the their central launching point sweeping portions of a conical volume.

In the end you have a sphere 1-6 Million KM in diameter (depending on how we could tweak the CMs) where 1-5% of the volume has been swept (randomly) by the CMs.

Any time a wedge touches anything solid it is going to be shreded, so a Spider in the Volume runs the risk of a CM running into it - or putting up it's bubble in defense.

Thoughts?

dreamrider wrote:...A 1st gen Shrike is right on 20,000T, or ~30% the size of a circa 1905 PD destroyer...

SWM wrote:To reiterate a well-known quote, space is big. Mind-bogglingly big.