Return Of The Frigate

Weird Harold wrote:

Theemile wrote:Now, will the Grav lance work on a "bubble" sidewall, ...

Probably not.

If the target is armed, the TWTSNBN won't survive to get in range more than about one time in a thousand.

If the Target isn't armed, TWTSNBN isn't needed because the target will have no choice but to surrender when discovered.

In the one in a thousand instance, TWTSNBN would burn out the bubble sidewall if more conventional energy weapons or missiles left any sidewalls to attack.

I nnever questioned whether it tactically would work (Cause you need an Honor Harrington Death Ride to do so), but Technically whether it would work But, since linguistically a lance would burst a bubble, sure, of course it will

Theemile wrote:
But the same infodump does state that the installations are not incompatable - just their operations are incompatable. (don't remember wich precludes the use of the other, but they won't work together.)

Hence we've been saying if a Spider SD ever loses stealth, it better be darned tough - it can't outrun it's pursuerers and once the bubble is up everyone will know exactly where it is at. The only options a Spider SD has are Stealth or a fight to the death.

That depends how they're engaged and by what.

A: missile salvos - the spider can temporarily cut acceleration and put the bubble up, take the hits, drop the bubble and resume acceleration. In much the way the first bow walls were used. Time between salvos is pretty low for Manticoran launchers, however...

B: A continious peppering of missiles launched sequentially to prevent the above. In this case, the spider ship has to choose between acceleration or bubble. No hard numbers are given, but IIRC, spider ships have extensive missile defense.

As for the what, only RFC knows. A handful of Rolands might be able to kill a single Detweiler SD or it might require a pair of Apollo-capable Invictuses backed up by a LAC wing.

Jonathan_S wrote:<snip>
Piracy, even in poorly defended Silesia, wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad if there hadn't been many system governors working with and protecting the pirates.


And even old style LACs can be pretty effective in harassing pirates enough to drive them away. So even those SDFs with nothing more than a LAC (who would be pretty vulnerable to raids or warlord-ism) can discourage most pirates.

Yes, It's important to remmeber the Pirates "mindset" - in one way they are like small business owners. Yes, they are sadistice and want to hurt others, but they DO NOT want to incur costs because it cuts into their bottom line. They have to fix any damage on their own and pay for any ordinance out of pocket, so they want one sided fights.

So like most sadistic people, they also have a bully mindset - they target the weak and those unable to fight back effectively. They shy away from confrontations where they may lose.

They will only take on someone powerful when the Risk/Reward is firmly on their side - Like the ability to take over a lightly crewed more powerful ship by swarming it with smaller ships.

In short, just the presence of a LAC is usually enough deterance for a Pirate - even if it can intercept a target, the LAC in the area will keep the Pirate from looting it and even a LAC has the ability to cause damage to a powerful Pirate (and destruction to a weak one.)

It is important to remember that a commerce raider is a completly different animal (even a privateer) who will take risks.

munroburton wrote:That depends how they're engaged and by what.

A: missile salvos - the spider can temporarily cut acceleration and put the bubble up, take the hits, drop the bubble and resume acceleration. In much the way the first bow walls were used. Time between salvos is pretty low for Manticoran launchers, however...

And every missile will KNOW exactly where to aim, as the bubble wont hide the ship, and if it can´t maneuver, there´s zero unpredictability involved in its location.

Expect missile hit ratio to jump skyhigh under such circumstances.

munroburton wrote:B: A continious peppering of missiles launched sequentially to prevent the above. In this case, the spider ship has to choose between acceleration or bubble. No hard numbers are given, but IIRC, spider ships have extensive missile defense.

I expect that it will be hard to just turn engines on/off and bubble off/on at all even between normal launches(the bigger and more powerful a system is, the more it takes to manipulate it, ie longer time), so i think it likely that that choice would always be forced.

And as seen so far, missile defenses are rarely able to do "clean sweeps".

munroburton wrote:As for the what, only RFC knows. A handful of Rolands might be able to kill a single Detweiler SD or it might require a pair of Apollo-capable Invictuses backed up by a LAC wing.

I´ve always had trouble believing spider drives to be a good general propulsion system.
The problems above should make them suck bigtime except when they can strike unseen.

BTW, do even KNOW for sure that the Detweiler SDs use spider drive?

Tenshinai wrote:BTW, do even KNOW for sure that the Detweiler SDs use spider drive?

Yes, we do. The Shark was a testbed for building the Detweilers. The original Oyster Bay plan called for using the Detweilers instead of the Sharks, but they weren't ready when the Alignment decided to launch Oyster Bay early. The Detweilers are definitely spider drive ships.

SWM wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:BTW, do even KNOW for sure that the Detweiler SDs use spider drive?

Yes, we do. The Shark was a testbed for building the Detweilers. The original Oyster Bay plan called for using the Detweilers instead of the Sharks, but they weren't ready when the Alignment decided to launch Oyster Bay early. The Detweilers are definitely spider drive ships.

Have we figured out the point of building sneak-attack, cannot-stand-up-to-anything-that-can-see-them units on an SD scale anyway? Is it purely economies of scale?

Or is there some trick, of which there hasn't been a hint (that I know of, I encourage you to remind me!), that would make these huge spider drive units an actual wall of battle?

Tenshinai wrote:BTW, do even KNOW for sure that the Detweiler SDs use spider drive?

SWM wrote:Yes, we do. The Shark was a testbed for building the Detweilers. The original Oyster Bay plan called for using the Detweilers instead of the Sharks, but they weren't ready when the Alignment decided to launch Oyster Bay early. The Detweilers are definitely spider drive ships.

JeffEngel wrote:Have we figured out the point of building sneak-attack, cannot-stand-up-to-anything-that-can-see-them units on an SD scale anyway? Is it purely economies of scale?

Or is there some trick, of which there hasn't been a hint (that I know of, I encourage you to remind me!), that would make these huge spider drive units an actual wall of battle?

I don't think we have been told anything about the Detweilers except that the Sharks were originally intended as the training testbeds for them.

munroburton wrote:

Theemile wrote:
But the same infodump does state that the installations are not incompatable - just their operations are incompatable. (don't remember wich precludes the use of the other, but they won't work together.)

Hence we've been saying if a Spider SD ever loses stealth, it better be darned tough - it can't outrun it's pursuerers and once the bubble is up everyone will know exactly where it is at. The only options a Spider SD has are Stealth or a fight to the death.

That depends how they're engaged and by what.

A: missile salvos - the spider can temporarily cut acceleration and put the bubble up, take the hits, drop the bubble and resume acceleration. In much the way the first bow walls were used. Time between salvos is pretty low for Manticoran launchers, however...

B: A continious peppering of missiles launched sequentially to prevent the above. In this case, the spider ship has to choose between acceleration or bubble. No hard numbers are given, but IIRC, spider ships have extensive missile defense.

As for the what, only RFC knows. A handful of Rolands might be able to kill a single Detweiler SD or it might require a pair of Apollo-capable Invictuses backed up by a LAC wing.

Though if the Spider ship is outside the hyper limit a bubble sidewall might buy it enough time (after detection) to bring up its hyper generator and escape.

Even with the hyper generator queued up and ready to go it's still a few minutes from when you hit "go" until you actually jump out. Having extra protection during that time (assuming you've already been detected and engaged) doesn't seem like a bad thing. And ability to run in n-space isn't all that important if you're just waiting for the hyper generator to finish spooling up.


But if you're caught in-system and you can't quickly smash down the defenders with your pod-based missile storm you're pretty much screwed - whether or not you have a bubble sidewall available. That said, a Lenny Det is apparently at least SD sized; and the offensive power of an SD(P) with even crappy multidrive/stage missiles (like the Cataphract) is damned scary to anything lighter than, say, a BC(L) squadron. Enough of a sidewall to prevent a wedge-to-hull impact while swapping down lighter ships that might have stumbled across you sounds good.

Though on the gripping hand if you're in a Manticoran system you're damned likely to eat a Moriarty controlled Apollo strike before you can disappear again - even if the poor Rolands or Shrikes that found you are already vapor. That, to my mind, is really what screws them. Prior to Apollo (or Mycroft) if you could kill the nearby units (so they couldn't take over fire control) an MDM missile swarm at extreme range (such as from system defense pods that you'd stuck past) was so inaccurate you had a decent chance of evading. So getting discovered while slipping into position to deliver a short ranged pod strike on an unsuspecting target, or evading afterwards, seemed much more practical (even better if you could locate the nearby system-defense pods and take them out with graser torps as you launch your ambush). But now, as long as the Mycroft network is in place and reasonably distributed, any spot within the hyper limit can have fire control equal to at least the terminal control latency of old-style SDM missiles.
So system defense pods even over on the far side of the system are a non-trivial threat.

fallsfromtrees wrote:I don't think we have been told anything about the Detweilers except that the Sharks were originally intended as the training testbeds for them.

We also know the LDs were larger than the BB/DN (this dividing line is ~5-5.5 Mtons) sized sharks before they were 50% complete, so the inferrence is they are > than 11 Mtons.

They can carry and fire the huge Graser torps internally rather than being carried externally by the Sharks in addition to being a podlayer.

David also dumped that the Malign considers them to be Capital Ships and plans to use them as such. It wasn't exactly telling, but I took that to mean that they were intended to get into a fray with competing enemy warships and be survivable, unlike the Sharks, which were essentially stealthed mil-spec freighters.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:BTW, do even KNOW for sure that the Detweiler SDs use spider drive?

SWM wrote:Yes, we do. The Shark was a testbed for building the Detweilers. The original Oyster Bay plan called for using the Detweilers instead of the Sharks, but they weren't ready when the Alignment decided to launch Oyster Bay early. The Detweilers are definitely spider drive ships.

JeffEngel wrote:Have we figured out the point of building sneak-attack, cannot-stand-up-to-anything-that-can-see-them units on an SD scale anyway? Is it purely economies of scale?

Or is there some trick, of which there hasn't been a hint (that I know of, I encourage you to remind me!), that would make these huge spider drive units an actual wall of battle?

I don't think we have been told anything about the Detweilers except that the Sharks were originally intended as the training testbeds for them.

We've also been told that they were intended to be used as stealth ships in the original version of the Oyster Bay plan. That means they are spider ships.

David has also A) the Detweilers are capital ships, B) it would be foolish for the Alignment to build capital ships that could not stand up to other capital ships, and C) the Alignment is not foolish.