GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I think you're going to have to wait for the signal to come in and then saturate the zone the ship could have moved to within the hours it'll take to get reaction forces out to where a remote hyper footprint was detected. That's still a vast area; but orders of magnitude smaller the entire light month+ around the star system.

This has a chance of working if your opponent is an idiot.

If they are not an idiot you'll detect a large series of footprints in rapid sequence as MAN ships bounce in and out, with at least some created by MAN conventional ships that just leave in hyper. How many RMN ships does it take to effective respond to 50 different hyper footprints in 24 hours, at a range of 1 to 3 light-months roughly evenly spread over a sphere? Most of these are nothing by the time they arrive, #37 is 12 Lennie SDs.
How many ships will it take to effectively respond to each of these footprints?? How many ships do they have on standby? If they find them, can their forces handle 12 SDs?

A lot less than the 26 million it takes to pre-saturate the light-month around the system

But seriously, yes playing games with multiple emergence masking the real one (or simply to provoke a response) is going to be a real problem. But short of inventing a detector or sensor that can see the spider drive itself in use (at reasonable range) I'm not sure the GA currently has a better option.

Well detecting a spider-drive ship should be fairly simple if boringly conventional. Spider driven ships exist is space, they have mass and energy and they are often moving objects which can reflect light and other radiation and all of these can be detected by other vessels if they are looking for it.

What doomed Greyson and Manticore was the power of assumption and not a bit of operational laziness. Every starship made in the last XXX years uses impeller drives and simple gravitic sensors can detect impellers from a great distance. There are other sensor systems available but these are largely used to refine information about vessels which have already been detected under impeller drive. Since this is the way things are and have been for centuries, why spend a lot of energy trying to detect something else? Well, the Manties and Greysons didn't.

The answer, at least part of it anyway, is shift the emphasis on your scanning protocols away from gravitic systems to the sensors which pick up everything else.

Spider equipped Sharks still mass somewhere between 2 and 4 million tons, they still need to generate large amounts of energy, they will still reflect radiant energy and they are still moving objects in space and possibly maneuvering objects in space. And yes there is going to be some degree of gratvitic distortion, they are going to have mass.

You have sensors that can detect these but they aren't necessarily the first place you turn for information allowing you to detect an enemy. You have active sensors which can send energy waves out attempt to get one to bounce back revealing the objects location.

These secondary systems need to become your primary sensor systems in the hunt for Spider equipped vessels. The problem is that all of these systems, when compared to what the Alliance is used to, have a pretty short range.

To reasonably defend a planet, you need to create an environment where an enemy needs to work to gain admittance. You need sensor platforms, LOTS of platforms. You can't defend everywhere so you layer your defense with patrolling warships maneuvered so that their search pattern is highly aggressive and unpredictable creating difficults for any enemy attempting to predict where they will be and when.

Drones have shorter legs but you can layer them behind patrol zones or between then as most enemies will try to find the "gaps" in the patrol pattern rather than try and glide through the area of a patrolling warship that if it finds you is going to turn you into dust bunnies.

Now the purpose of these "shells" is to detect an infiltrating enemy if possible but it does so not only through the sensors but through deterrence, by creating opportunities for the enemy to do something stupid, to make a mistake or simply for bad luck to overtake them as they attempt to thread their way through each shell.

Build as many likely layers as you can but you have to be aware that an enemy like this can slip past the best defenses you can build, so you need to expect that some of an attacking force is going to break through and enter weapons range of your orbital infrastructure. Hence your last like need to be vessels with a lot of CML's and other point defense systems so that you can have a reasonable chance of defending the ultimate target.

Of course the real problem here is the numbers of platforms you are going to need which is FAR more than you'd need for any kind of Honorverse conventional approach.

Alizon, that's a lot harder than you think.

Mesan stealth ships project all their waste heat in a narrow beam, deliberately aimed away from potential observers.

They also have a smart skin which projects a view of the opposite sky, as if you were seeing through the ship.

There are limits to the effectiveness of these protections. We've had some (long and boring for most people ) discussions about how such a smart skin could work (basically, it would have to be holographic). But it is safe to say that these protections could probably make it extremely to detect outside of the stealth ship's own missile range, unless you happened to pass through the narrow waste heat beam.

Alizon wrote:Well detecting a spider-drive ship should be fairly simple if boringly conventional. Spider driven ships exist is space, they have mass and energy and they are often moving objects which can reflect light and other radiation and all of these can be detected by other vessels if they are looking for it.

Yes, yes, no and no.

They are possible to detect, if you are within a light second and had had the design team who knows exactly what to look for construct detectors. I don't think the MAN sold any to Manticore.

SWM wrote:Alizon, that's a lot harder than you think.

Mesan stealth ships project all their waste heat in a narrow beam, deliberately aimed away from potential observers.

They also have a smart skin which projects a view of the opposite sky, as if you were seeing through the ship.

There are limits to the effectiveness of these protections. We've had some (long and boring for most people ) discussions about how such a smart skin could work (basically, it would have to be holographic). But it is safe to say that these protections could probably make it extremely to detect outside of the stealth ship's own missile range, unless you happened to pass through the narrow waste heat beam.

If it is holographic, would it be possible to create area interference to disrupt the holograph?

Also, how close do drones need to be to break through the stealth? We know that ghost rider drones are quite speedy and could be programed to cover large areas of space with unpredictable crisscrossing patterns that might do the job if proximity to a stealthed ship allows the drone to detect it.

Don

Spiders can accelerate at 150g and the minimum detection time is 12 hours. How far can they go in 12 hours and how fast is the search volume expanding at that point? It's very, very ugly from the pov of the defender.

Oh, and the defector probably had nothing at all to do with the anti-detection systems. He may well not even know about them.

kzt wrote:The critical time is the time the hyper footprint takes to travel to the big sensors (like 8-12 hours) and the time that it takes to get a response team to the site of the footprint. (1-4 hours)

Every other time increment is tiny compared to those.

My FUBAR!

I forgot to consider the difference between a few light minutes and a light month. About 45,000:1

n7axw wrote:

SWM wrote:Alizon, that's a lot harder than you think.

Mesan stealth ships project all their waste heat in a narrow beam, deliberately aimed away from potential observers.

They also have a smart skin which projects a view of the opposite sky, as if you were seeing through the ship.

There are limits to the effectiveness of these protections. We've had some (long and boring for most people ) discussions about how such a smart skin could work (basically, it would have to be holographic). But it is safe to say that these protections could probably make it extremely to detect outside of the stealth ship's own missile range, unless you happened to pass through the narrow waste heat beam.

If it is holographic, would it be possible to create area interference to disrupt the holograph?

No, you can "disrupt" a holograph like that. The light from a holograph is essentially the same as if it were coming from the original source.

Also, how close do drones need to be to break through the stealth? We know that ghost rider drones are quite speedy and could be programed to cover large areas of space with unpredictable crisscrossing patterns that might do the job if proximity to a stealthed ship allows the drone to detect it.

Don

That's really hard to say. I'll try to summarize pages of material I posted in the previous discussions of holographic camoflage in space.

In space, the real problem is that the stealthed ship would appear to be pretty close to the blackness of space unless it happened to be directly between you and a star. If you are very far away from the ship, the probability that the ship will occult a star is incredibly low. If you are really close to the ship, the holography could work pretty well and show the star nearly as if there were no ship in the way. It is an intermediate zone that is the tricky part.

The holographic image of a star will work well in a very long cone based on the ship, while the occultation zone (the shadow) for that star is an infinite cylinder, based on the ship. If you are outside the cylinder you won't see anything wrong. (Technically it is not a cylinder, but at the interplanetary scale it is close enough.) If you are inside the cone, you probably won't see anything wrong. If you are in the cylinder but outside the cone, you will see the star disappear--an occultation. I calculated that the holographic image cone of a diffraction-limited holographic system (i.e. the surface of a ship) a half-kilometer in radius would be a couple light-seconds long.

So, your detection system would basically have to be observing stars for potential occultations. Depending on how fast the detector is moving relative to the target ship, the occultation could be milliseconds long, even microseconds. So you need ultrahigh-speed photometry, which means there is a limit to the faintness of the stars you are observing. That in turn limits the number of observable stars, and limits the number of potential observable occultations. Multiple observers will multiply the potential occultation observations.

The end result is that you need vast numbers of detectors scattered around to have any likelihood of detecting the ship this way. Another problem is that graser and stand-off ranges for laserheads are inside the zone that the holographic system works well. So even if you identify a ship at a distance, your weapons systems will be hampered by the time they get in range.

The answer, at least part of it anyway, is shift the emphasis on your scanning protocols away from gravitic systems to the sensors which pick up everything else.

The challenge with that is the classic signal to noise problem, which is not an easy one to solve.

Lacoon
Just re-read “A rising thunder”for the 3rd or 4th time. I guess its my favorite in the recent series of Sollie skirmishes. Some of the most interesting parts to me are:
1. The conversation betw Manty merchant marine Captn & the Sollie shipping manager.
2. Activation of Lacoon 2
3. Raj ate his gun.
4. Meeting between SNL officers Daud al-Fanudahi, Teague, Tarkovsky & Okiku

Here are some ideas for expanding the Lacoon concept:

Action Goal Intended & unintended consequences.

Lacoon 1 Recall Manty merchant marine from Sollie space
1. convince Sollies that Manties are not gonna roll over.
2. Remove merchant marines from the line of fire.
3. Free up skilled manpower for offensives against Sollies & MalAlign.

Mandarins discover the error of their ways but their belligerence keeps them calling plays from the same “tried and true” playbook for dealing with neo-barbs.

Sollie economy slows, then goes into recession because transportation stalls. “Who can destroy a thing controls it” – quote from Dune

Sollie citizens believe that govt can solve their problems and become more willing to swallow govt propaganda rather than believe their lying eyes or engage their brains.

Lacoon 2 Close key jump points to Solarian shipping. Raise the stakes Negatively impact the Solarian economy to force the Mandarins to take responsibility for SNL’s actions. Manty’s begin prosecuting war with SNL.

Sollie trans-stellars attempt a coup that fails, solidifying the Mandarins power, but increasing their fear & paranoia. Sollie R&D starts to move forward, intending to close the technology gap.

Lacoon 3 Manty’s submit declaration of War to Chamber of stars.

2. Identify and target Sollie infrastructure, starting with military R&D facilities, like Technodyne.

3. Task commandos (ninjas) to infiltrate and provide covert assistance to revolutionaries in Verge protectorates (ie do what Firebrand pretends to do).

Keep the Mandarins and the Sillies off balance so they take too long to get their act together. Buy enough time for the Solarian Leauge ship to come apart before they can bridge the technology gap wth the Manicore Alliance.

Mandarins engage the theory of “the big lie”.

SNL starts raiding Manty shipping using Frontier fleet. Frontier fleet takes their frustrations out on any Manty ships they catch. Few survive the experience. MalAlign agents help bureaucratic inefficiency to keep Sollie technology in a “not invented here” mindset. This results in R&D stalling out.

Lacoon 4

1. Public relations campaign to discredit the Mandarins policies.
2. Publicize Frontier Fleet’s secret contingency files from their captured computers.
3. Expose corruption in OFS protectorates & client states including Manpower corporate records and client lists.

Create political division and possibly a constitutional crisis Verge systems try to declare independence.

Most Sollie citizens remain brain dead. However, Daud al-Fanudahi’s coalition makes contact with the Beowulf Biological Survey Corps.

Mandarins institute a military conscription program and begins a reign of terror to keep Verge (and core) systems from succeeding.

Lacoon 5 Initiate banking, corporate & infrastructure cyber warfare & espionage. Prosecute the war on multiple fronts, not just militarily. Destabilize the Solly economy. Follow the money trail to the MalAlign. Anarchy reins, people die & things get blown up. Manty’s get a lead on the Verdant Vista (now Torch) wormhole bridge terminus. Manty’s get wind of the Prometheus or Darius plots.