Countering the Spider – Real World Inspirations

Jonathan_S wrote:But I assume nobody in the Honorverse is likely to make the same mistake of sending ships to roam the depths of hyper hoping to stumble across a spider ship at random. If nothing else the shear volume of space dwarfs that of the ocean and should convince people it's a waste of effort.

The Ocean is far too big for an effective "hunt" unless you have some info to tell you where to look. In space, if faced with a spider drive raiding campagn, some Admirals may think it's possible to have HK groups searching choke areas (like the ends of grav-waves or near the hyper limit of a system in the direction of a system with heavy trade between them).

Dafmeister wrote:I'm curious as to where this theory that the spider drive won't work in hyperspace comes from. Wouldn't the 'legs' simply latch onto the wall to the next-highest hyper band? So in n-space they use the alpha wall, in the alpha band they use the beta wall etc.

The streak drive doesn't provide any motive power, so strictly speaking it's not a 'drive' at all. It's an improved hyper generator that lets you survive translation through the iota and kappa walls, giving you a higher effective n-space speed by travelling in higher hyper bands than everyone else can access.

I have listened (since I Audio-book the series) to the sections that describe the Spider Drive and there was no mention of whether the Spider would work in Hyper at all. Given the purpose of that section was describing the attack as it hit, that detail was not required but it did get me thinking.

Darius is clearly a long way away from Manticore and Oyster Bay never used the Wormhole Junctions, and are described using a very slow and careful translation to minimise their hyper-footprint, it is a given that they used Hyperspace to reach their target. Given the Streak Drive is capable of being used on smaller vessels (Streak Boats) and battlecrusier sized vessels (Deitweilers personal luxury liner) it would make sense for the Alignment to equip their Spider ships with a very fast Hyperdrive to compensate for the very slow accelerations that the Spider can pull off.

If the Spider cannot be used in hyper, one alternative is to have a pair of "Alpha-only" impeller rings in order to create a Warshawski sail, otherwise we are waiting on a description to see if a Spider is usable in hyper or not.

Well, considering that they arrived and left via hyper, they can probably travel through hyper.

As to sails, David's comment was something to the effect of "What makes you think they can't use a wormhole?"

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?

MAD-4A wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:But I assume nobody in the Honorverse is likely to make the same mistake of sending ships to roam the depths of hyper hoping to stumble across a spider ship at random. If nothing else the shear volume of space dwarfs that of the ocean and should convince people it's a waste of effort.

The Ocean is far too big for an effective "hunt" unless you have some info to tell you where to look. In space, if faced with a spider drive raiding campagn, some Admirals may think it's possible to have HK groups searching choke areas (like the ends of grav-waves or near the hyper limit of a system in the direction of a system with heavy trade between them).

I still think they'd be wrong about monitoring the choke points, but I did consider that scenario and almost threw a tangent about it into my earlier post.

Because it had occurred to me that, in addition to being a possible choke point, a spider ship using a grav wave would be much more visible that normal. To use the wave it would have to deploy sails, so it would no longer be any stealthier than your average military ship riding the wave. (And it hasn't been confirmed whether any specific classes we've seen yet have sails, RFC did imply, as kzt mentioned above, that there was no reason they couldn't use a wormhole - which presumably requires alpha nodes meaning you could build a ship with spiders and sails)


But even in increased visibility while under sail doesn't, in my mind, make it an effective use of resources to deploy the number of ships it would take to monitor a grav wave on the off chance of a spider ship coming through.

There were always two ways to hunt for subs. The first was by monitoring choke points, harbors and strategic channels. This would be the equivalent of checking areas like the Selkirk Shear, the end of a hyperwave, or a hyper-limit. The other way to go hunting for submarines was to look at the pattern of where ships were disappearing and then guess where the next strike will be and wait for the sub to appear. The biggest aid to detecting subs is determining what detectors they are obvious on. Once you know that, nailing them becomes a bit easier.

MAD-4A wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:But I assume nobody in the Honorverse is likely to make the same mistake of sending ships to roam the depths of hyper hoping to stumble across a spider ship at random. If nothing else the shear volume of space dwarfs that of the ocean and should convince people it's a waste of effort.

The Ocean is far too big for an effective "hunt" unless you have some info to tell you where to look. In space, if faced with a spider drive raiding campagn, some Admirals may think it's possible to have HK groups searching choke areas (like the ends of grav-waves or near the hyper limit of a system in the direction of a system with heavy trade between them).

Historically, randomly sweeping even high-traffic routes) on the ocean did not work. The ocean is really big.

Space is REALLY REALLY MUCH BIGGER, with billions of kilometers instead of thousands, and a third dimension (volume goes up as the cube of the radius, area only as the square). I would be very surprised if anything even remotely resembling a random search, or randomly firing CMs, or just randomly sweeping areas, was tried by anybody with a clue.

The only way to defend merchant shipping will be to have escorts -- remember, spider ships not within weapons range of merchant ships totally can't hurt them and are just about wasted as commerce raiders. Convoy is an offensive tactic -- it forces raiders to come within range of your weapons if they want to use theirs, at which point you can fight them.

tonyz wrote:The only way to defend merchant shipping will be to have escorts -- remember, spider ships not within weapons range of merchant ships totally can't hurt them and are just about wasted as commerce raiders. Convoy is an offensive tactic -- it forces raiders to come within range of your weapons if they want to use theirs, at which point you can fight them.

Not really. How long were the graser torpedoes running inbound during the attack on Manticore? How are you going to respond to someone leaving a few outside the hyper limit waiting for a merchant ship to start outbound in their general direction? Even if you are escorting the ship, the sign that it is under attack is going to be that the reactor blows up when the graser cuts the ship in half along the long axis.

The two basic ways in the North Atlantic according to M. Gannon in Black May : Fight them around the convoys as that is the one area of the ocean you can be sure they will be drawn to or fight them in the Bay of Biscay as they must cross it both outbound and inbound. The former strategy was much more successful, though of course it always had priority of resources. (There were other chokepoints and concentrations, but you get the idea.)

Greentea wrote:There were always two ways to hunt for subs. The first was by monitoring choke points, harbors and strategic channels. This would be the equivalent of checking areas like the Selkirk Shear, the end of a hyperwave, or a hyper-limit. The other way to go hunting for submarines was to look at the pattern of where ships were disappearing and then guess where the next strike will be and wait for the sub to appear. The biggest aid to detecting subs is determining what detectors they are obvious on. Once you know that, nailing them becomes a bit easier.

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.