Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

Galactic Sapper wrote:It's probable that missiles can't work in the terminus. It seems reasonable that if the interference is enough to keep a ship from raising a wedge it would also be enough to make bad things happen to missile wedges.

Missiles don't work in the grav wave, but the range of the xray lasers allows them to be set off clear of the grav wave.

Now i have to wonder how accurate you are firing into a grav wave, as the grav distortions will also deflect and decollimate your energy weapons, but David has apparently chosen to ignore that.

Jonathan_S wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The problem with raising sidewalls is that you have to drop your stealth, as the sidewalls are very visible at a distance. So you'd do it only if you find yourself already in a pickle, usually having lost your stealth by other means. And raising a bubblewall is a last resort activity, since you become ballistic after this.

I haven't seen anything that says bubble sidewalls are incompatible with fusion thrusters. Of course those aren't especially stealthy if sensors are looking in the right direction - but that hardly matters once you're forced to abandon stealth by deploying the sidewall anyway.

As long as the fuel lasts the LDs should be able to pull almost as many Gs on thrusters as they could with their spider drive. So I think the lack of maneuvering under bubble shield is probably being oversold as an issue. The big one is that all your propulsion is slower than any warship you'd be fighting so you still can run away or run them down.

Oh, thanks for reminding me of reaction thrusters. That's one other of the things that got under my skin during the Battle of Cerberus. Since this is based on known physics, we can more or less estimate how much reaction mass would be required to push hundreds of thousands of tons of ships at 100 gravities. It literally is rocket science. And the math doesn't add up.

So there has to be some other kind of technology that allows thrusters to violate Newton. After all, grav plates are basically inertial dampeners. If it can make a body feel less acceleration than it's really accelerating, what's to say it can't make the engine accelerate the body more than the force it is producing? (perpetual motion machine aside)

Anyway, we don't know whether thrusters work with bubblewalls. Even if they do, we're talking about a very visible target that is moving at ~100 gravities and won't be for long. This still makes it "last resort".

Everything about that battle violates the laws of physics. I did a back of the envelope calc as to how much energy was released by the fusion bottle blowing. It was like a few trillion megatons. Enough that when the bottles on the orbital stations around manticore blew they would have (at least) set fire to the entire hemisphere.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Theemile wrote:2 items - The Mannerheim BCs used Grasers (small quibble) at the twins and Graser Torps are limited to ~250 Gs accel.

It's probable that missiles can't work in the terminus. It seems reasonable that if the interference is enough to keep a ship from raising a wedge it would also be enough to make bad things happen to missile wedges.

Missiles can't work in the terminus - but laser heads, and graser torps, have enough standoff range than missiles/torps fired towards the terminus can engage ships transiting from beyond the range the terminus's gravity effects would destructively interact with the missile/torp's drive.

One more reason that a forced transit in the age of laserheads is a suicide move. The defenders don't even have to get within the attacker's weapon range in order to crush the attack.

Jonathan_S wrote:Missiles can't work in the terminus - but laser heads, and graser torps, have enough standoff range than missiles/torps fired towards the terminus can engage ships transiting from beyond the range the terminus's gravity effects would destructively interact with the missile/torp's drive.

One more reason that a forced transit in the age of laserheads is a suicide move. The defenders don't even have to get within the attacker's weapon range in order to crush the attack.

Especially in the age of pod-launched laser heads. The defender can saturate even a maximum transit of SDs. The only reason they wouldn't get them all would be if somehow some blocked direct line of sight to others.

So how do you storm such a defended position? My guess is that you have to go the long way around and attack from hyper, which means finding the location of the terminus. The answer may come from the Starfire series: a wormhole capable reconnaissance drone. In that series, they have a second generation RD (RD2) that is warp-capable and can transit through a warp-point and come back. In the Honorverse, RDs have beta notes already, so why not give them alpha nodes too so they can create a sail?

Would you put nodes on a pod too, so the pods can transit and launch missiles after transit at the defenders? That's another technology from Starfire, the warp-capable strategic bombardment missiles. Maybe not, given RFC's dislike for automated, un-supervised weapons.

Can you transit with just one sail? Or do you need two, fore and aft? That would place a minimum length in the RD2, but not necessarily increase the mass too much.

And what do you call an RD2 with beta-squared nodes? R²D2.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Missiles can't work in the terminus - but laser heads, and graser torps, have enough standoff range than missiles/torps fired towards the terminus can engage ships transiting from beyond the range the terminus's gravity effects would destructively interact with the missile/torp's drive.

One more reason that a forced transit in the age of laserheads is a suicide move. The defenders don't even have to get within the attacker's weapon range in order to crush the attack.

Especially in the age of pod-launched laser heads. The defender can saturate even a maximum transit of SDs. The only reason they wouldn't get them all would be if somehow some blocked direct line of sight to others.

So how do you storm such a defended position? My guess is that you have to go the long way around and attack from hyper, which means finding the location of the terminus. The answer may come from the Starfire series: a wormhole capable reconnaissance drone. In that series, they have a second generation RD (RD2) that is warp-capable and can transit through a warp-point and come back. In the Honorverse, RDs have beta notes already, so why not give them alpha nodes too so they can create a sail?

Would you put nodes on a pod too, so the pods can transit and launch missiles after transit at the defenders? That's another technology from Starfire, the warp-capable strategic bombardment missiles. Maybe not, given RFC's dislike for automated, un-supervised weapons.

Can you transit with just one sail? Or do you need two, fore and aft? That would place a minimum length in the RD2, but not necessarily increase the mass too much.

And what do you call an RD2 with beta-squared nodes? R²D2.

IIRC the wormhole transits in Starfire didn't require any sort of mass-intensive hyper generator like the one necessary for transits in Honorverse. Any recon drone or missile pod would have to be the size of a dispatch boat, as those are built around the minimum possible mass required to support sails and a hyper generator.

Galactic Sapper wrote:IIRC the wormhole transits in Starfire didn't require any sort of mass-intensive hyper generator like the one necessary for transits in Honorverse. Any recon drone or missile pod would have to be the size of a dispatch boat, as those are built around the minimum possible mass required to support sails and a hyper generator.

Granted. But that's barring a technological breakthrough, which could be coming. Or if the needs must: if this is the only way to find Darius, building 100 automated dispatch-boat sized RDs is comparatively cheap. Cheaper than an SD, probably than a BC.

By the way, aren't Washawski sails effectively vertical shields? Wouldn't RDs in front shield those behind from missile and graser attacks? If so, those behind can leisurely take snapshots of the hemisphere behind them, then turn around and return. Should take 5 or 10 seconds.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Granted. But that's barring a technological breakthrough, which could be coming. Or if the needs must: if this is the only way to find Darius, building 100 automated dispatch-boat sized RDs is comparatively cheap. Cheaper than an SD, probably than a BC.

By the way, aren't Washawski sails effectively vertical shields? Wouldn't RDs in front shield those behind from missile and graser attacks? If so, those behind can leisurely take snapshots of the hemisphere behind them, then turn around and return. Should take 5 or 10 seconds.

True about the sail, but that only protects along the transit line; anyone sitting off to the side sees the unprotected hull.

Also, I believe RFC has decreed that there will be no unmanned hyperspace capable ships.

tlb wrote:True about the sail, but that only protects along the transit line; anyone sitting off to the side sees the unprotected hull.

The size of the RD compared to the diameter of the sail is probably something like 1000:1. That means there's a narrow angle where you can fire on the RD's body.

Even if you can fire through the wormhole terminus, the RDs in the back protect the ones in the front and the middle. So the ones in the middle are protected aside from ships positioned exactly perpendicular to the terminus' transit vector. At a 1000:1 sail-body ratio, the angle where an attacker can see the body is a mere 1/1000th radian = 0.56° = 34'. If the attacker is one light-second away, that translates to a linear distance of 300 km: any ship outside this narrow band around the terminus can't attack the RD.

The distance is another factor: by the time the defenders know there's a drone, it's been in your system for a full second. If the drone is manoeuvring at a mere 10 gravities on thrusters, it can move 98 m, which is 3x the length of a 30-metre RD and just under 2x of a 50-m RD; twice that by the time the graser beam arrives. And that's assuming they're all moving parallel to each other: if they're pitching or yawing or rolling, then it gets more difficult.

During the Battle of the Prime-Ajay Hyperbridge, the Solarian ships transiting to Ajay probably dropped their sails, not knowing there was a danger.

One thing I didn't take into account is the destabilisation of the WH. A dispatch boat is 40,000 tonnes, so if 100 drones transit, it's the equivalent of a 4 million tonne BB and you can't transit back for about a minute. If they have to stay in system for that long, the RDs will be mincemeat, because now the defenders can come to general quarters, manoeuvre into position and they know exactly where the RDs want to go.

Also, I believe RFC has decreed that there will be no unmanned hyperspace capable ships.

Bummer.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Bummer.

For multiple reasons. Wormholes have to be surveyed extensively to find the correct entry vector and such for a successful transit to be made. Any RDs making that transit are not going to come back even if there isn't any opposition at all. Unlike in Starfire, you can't just accidentally run into a wormhole and survive.

When the Lynx terminus was first transited, it took the Harvest Joy days (weeks?) to nail down the return vector and that was with a specialized survey ship.