Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

TheMadPenguin wrote:Exploring a (probable) hostile WH:

Bolt/tractor two ships together at right angles.

One raises sails and enters/exits the WH. (tugs can help get there and get aligned for entry). The two ships then appear on the other end of the WH. The Sail ship will experience a time penalty before it can either raise wedges, or return through the WH on the anti-vector. That's why the second ship is tractored/bolted to the first.
The second ship has hot nodes configured for wedge, but wedge OFF. Upon arrival, the second ship enters hyperspace, taking the first ship with it.

If the entry into hyperspapace is an entry into a GravWave, the first ship is still under sail, and the second (tractored) ship does not have a wedge up, just the hyper engine jumping into the alpha band. If not in a wave, the fist ship can activate forward nodes and 1/2-speed wedge away from the WH until the two ships are separated and configured for wedge.

Weaponry (in case the LZ is hot): Each Graser is swapped out for EMI/Lorelei/Mistletoe/keyhole emitters. Each missile tube is loaded with counter-missile canisters. Both ships have tractored LACs configured for EMI/CM duty. Upon exit from WH, both ships drop LACS and FIRE EVERYTYHING. That should give time for the second ship to enter hyper. Now we know what's at the other end, and we've survived it. We can hyper a LY in some random direction, drop back to nspace, and figure out where we are.

If the LZ was in fact hot, we lost the LACs, but were going to lose them anyhow. If not, we go back and pick them up. Thes LACs could be robotic, like a Keyhole II is.

Now ... if the WH opens inside a star, or in close proximity to a star, we're still screwed.

kzt wrote:It takes minutes, not seconds. Assuming you know where the carefully surveyed exit lane is. I have no idea how long it takes to do that survey. In this case, my guess is it takes your entire lifetime.

And when the first ship activates it’s sail it will cut the other ship into three pieces, so I’m not thinking this is going to work out...

Jonathan_S wrote:One - IIRC RFC said powered up hyper generators interfere with each other. But even if I misremembered ...

Theemile wrote:Once you exit the emergence lane, You also will need to clear the resonance zone around the wormhole before you jump into hyper. it's size varies from wormhole to wormhole, but I believe the Manticore junction is at least a light second across.

Theemile wrote:Once you exit the emergence lane, You also will need to clear the resonance zone around the wormhole before you jump into hyper. it's size varies from wormhole to wormhole, but I believe the Manticore junction is at least a light second across.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Space dust is very thin. The plasma cloud of a vaporized missile packs an energy that makes even a contact nuke look like a wet firecracker.

Perhaps not as thin as you might think.

David Weber wrote: As far as the effectiveness of a "down-the-throat" attack on a major combatant, the particle shielding definitely would present difficulties. I'd have to run the numbers, but the particle shielding is basically designed to handle collisions with solid objects massing up to about two metric tons at velocities of up to 60% of light-speed. More massive objects can be dealt with it lower velocities, and as the velocity rises above .6c, the size of the object the system can handle goes down. There is, however, a reason warships mount massively redundant point defense to cover the bow-aspect of their wedges, and a reason besides the need to engage an enemy vessel for mounting the most powerful chase weapons possible and mounting them in multiple numbers, instead of simply settling for the biggest, nastiest spinal mount weapon you can cram in. When an object too large for the particle shielding to deal with turns up, it is automatically engaged by the ship's point defense and -- if the ship has been cleared for action -- its chase energy weapons, as well. And the fire control on those systems is designed to engage targets coming in at better than 80% of light-speed. and they're also designed to begin engaging them at ranges in excess of 200,000 kilometers. So, I doubt that you'd be able to get your warhead close enough to score a hit before detonating, even if the slug were massive enough to punch through the particle shielding in the first place. Obviously, you'd have a better shot at scoring a hit with an "up-the-kilt" shot, where the particle shielding wouldn't be a factor… except for the minor point that the after end of the ship is designed to be the forward end of the ship when the vessel is decelerating. Which means -- you guessed it -- that the stern hammerhead is equipped with exactly the same sort of massively redundant, space debris-killing energy weapons and particle shielding as the bow. So, if this sort of weapon was known to be out there, the Skipper would simply be sure that he had his particle shielding up at both ends of his wedge, and his debris-zapping armament would do the rest.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:Once you exit the emergence lane, You also will need to clear the resonance zone around the wormhole before you jump into hyper. it's size varies from wormhole to wormhole, but I believe the Manticore junction is at least a light second across.

It may be a bumpy ride to jump out from within the RZ but the actually dangerous thing is jumping into an RZ.

However you remind me that, in addition to the RZ stretching from the termini towards the system's star, wormhole termini also have hyper limits. OBS chapter 5 says "Both wormholes and stars had hyper limits, within which no ship could enter or leave hyper. For junctions, the limit was, less than a million kilometers" (so less than around 3.4 lightseconds). Inside that boundary the only place you can jump is down the wormhole.

Now a single terminus is going to be less powerful than the junction so probably as a smaller hyperlimit. But the hyperlimit caused by the gravity effects of the terminus and its exit lane pretty much have to extend further than the exit lane itself. So you're right that you can't jump from within the lane or even just after you clear it. You've got to cover some additional unknown distance before you can successfully jump out.



Hmm, can ships directly detect the hyper limit? (from within n-space; I know they can't from in hyper). Or could they calculate the hyperlimit size of an unsurveyed terminus on the fly in near realtime?
Or would they instead have to assume a worst case and go out at least as far as the largest known termini associated hyper limit?
(Because while it apparently doesn't damage the hyper generator to try to jump into hyper from within the limit you would fruitlessly discharge your capacitors and require 10+ minutes to recharge them before you could try again. That's likely to be a fatal mistake if attempting to flee under fire)

kzt wrote:Well, a 2m diameter nickle-iron meteoroid masses somewhere about 30 tons. This is probably more than the wreckage of an MDM is going to be. When you hit them with a PD (which you will - laser heads are used because missiles can't survive to reach burn or especially boom range) you are going to either crack the reactor or the plasma capacitor, so what it going to hit the particle screen is essentially plasma.

Galactic Sapper wrote:
The second question is whether any of the above matters. Boom or burn warheads aren't particularly efficient at killing ships - and if the ship is turned wedge-on to the salvo the way new Manty ships are, Boom or Burn warheads have almost no effectiveness against a ship with its wedge up. The main purpose of those warheads were to weaken the defenses of the ship so later missiles or energy fire could finish it - NOT generally to kill the ships themselves. Why would you use weapons designed to weaken the enemy's defenses when the same number of missiles could destroy him outright?

Galactic Sapper wrote:

kzt wrote:Well, a 2m diameter nickle-iron meteoroid masses somewhere about 30 tons. This is probably more than the wreckage of an MDM is going to be. When you hit them with a PD (which you will - laser heads are used because missiles can't survive to reach burn or especially boom range) you are going to either crack the reactor or the plasma capacitor, so what it going to hit the particle screen is essentially plasma.

One should question whether that is still true in the age of pod-format missile launches. If you're throwing so many missiles at an enemy that you're literally overwhelming their ability to physically stop them all, some of those missiles would get into burn range if not boom range - limited more by their own wedges than enemy defenses. I mean, the whole point of the laser head standoff range is that the target's point defenses would pick the warheads off before they could get in burn range, right? Now they're throwing so many missiles that the point defense simply does not have enough time to shoot down all the missiles, even if every single defensive shot hits its target. Getting a single proximity nuke warhead just ahead of the throat of the wedge would be mathematically certain in a 100k missile launch. Odds are you'd get multiple warheads that close on every single launch, especially if you went to a MIRV-style multiple warhead bus instead of all the laser rods and targeting equipment. If they separated just outside of point defense range, each missile could get 3 or 4 warheads that close rather than just one.

The second question is whether any of the above matters. Boom or burn warheads aren't particularly efficient at killing ships - and if the ship is turned wedge-on to the salvo the way new Manty ships are, Boom or Burn warheads have almost no effectiveness against a ship with its wedge up. The main purpose of those warheads were to weaken the defenses of the ship so later missiles or energy fire could finish it - NOT generally to kill the ships themselves. Why would you use weapons designed to weaken the enemy's defenses when the same number of missiles could destroy him outright?