How do spider drive SD(P)'s fight?

Jonathan_S wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:Again, this appears to be a case of "we can't see them, so nobody can see them", which is not an assumption I'd like to be making about my theoretically invisible ships, or I'm going to get surprised some day, whe Oops, turns out the Manties have this new detector that makes the Lenny Det stand out ike a sore thumb, and the first you know about it is when they blow away your entire fleet of Lenny Dets as well as your pet Sharks.

It still plays on their stealth, but I wonder if the guidance platforms used for Oyster Bay to remotely control the missiles and torps were a one-off, or whether they were designed to be a normal part of Spider attacks.

I figure they were meant to be a normal part of operations against well-defended immobile targets, at least, along with other functions like sheer system observation. How well you could use them in a mobile battle is another question.

Because if you could use a Ghost, or otherwise slip a (large) guidance package close enough to your target you could drop pods, and maneuver well clear before launching them.

In that case it's just another way to evade and counter-fire or scouts trying to backtrack the pod launch to find you - it doesn't help if a really good anti-spider detector gets built. And it doesn't help you in a stand-up fight against Apollo equipped RMN forces.



Though a forward deployed Ghost, or guidance platform might give you a solid edge against conventionally guided MDMs at extreme range. By pushing your guidance decisions far forward you've got less laggy control despite trying to keep your launch platform far enough back to make the enemy's missiles wildly inaccurate. (On the other hand, designing a ship that pretty much requires you to control combat range, while having less than half the accel of your targets, seems sub-optimal shall we say)

Yeah. "Barmy" comes to mind as another fine description.

They've tested the spider drive against their current sensors and had a difficult-to-impossible time finding the targets, even knowing they were there to look for. Let's suppose they were conscientious about it and genuinely doing their best, despite hoping desperately to fail. (As has been noted, this is a huge opportunity to fall on your face, but we're also assuming they're not fools and know all about avoiding stupid mistakes like that in the details at least.)

We haven't been told that how hard to detect it may be for sensors other than those in current use, e.g., sensors designed by people who built the spider drive to detect the spider drive. Maybe "the" spider drive detector is in MAN hands and they know that there's only so much good it can do. If they're right, and there really isn't another spider drive detector possible, or a much better way to do it that the GA toolkit can produce, then they may be genuinely reasonable in leaning so hard on their stealth. I'd count that as a bit more reason for them to be responsibly confident in what they've got and building around the assumption of staying unseen - but I'm still not sure it gets them out of "foolish" territory.

JeffEngel wrote:Yeah. I don't think a graser torpedo is likely to be all that effective on a moving target with a wedge and sidewalls - you won't have a shot at it long enough to absorb much of its "slice". So I'm thinking the graser torpedo is probably a special purpose weapon (like the contact nuke in the laserhead era), and either the launchers for them represent a small portion of the hull as a special purpose device, or that the launchers in fleet combat would normally be firing something else (exactly like missile launchers usually chugging out laserhead missiles can chuck out one of the contact nukes as the occasion arises).

How effective it is probably depends on the intercept geometry and whether the target is maneuvering evasively, or simply moving.

If you happened to be on the right part of a system's hyperlimit and had a BatRon moving in a straight line roughly towards you (because they were leaving the system) it shouldn't be too hard for even a slow-ass grav torp to maneuver itself into position for a clean down the throat shot. That'd do a hell of a lot of damage before they can maneuver to interpose wedge or sidewall.

Makes routine transits potentially very risky. You'd want to be changing heading semi-unpredictably, and probably keep your buckler wall up. (It's nowhere close to perfect against a target you don't know to keep it pointed out -- but it certainly doesn't hurt). Oh, and almost forgot what was probably the biggest one, don't use predicable parts of the hyper limit when leaving (for example approximately the closest point to the main planet, and directly on the ecliptic). Vary your departure points significantly and it's less likely a spider ship will be sitting close enough to your route to get a graser torp ahead of you.

fallsfromtrees wrote:One has to wonder, if without a wedge, the Lenny Dets are vulnerable to something with a wedge sweeping across it, as what happened to Tepes when a pinnace brought up its wedge inside the boat bay.

It's a plate of tens of thousands of gravities of twisted space. It's gonna eat ya if you haven't got some sort of cover against it, and a spider drive is nothing more than an array of tractor beams dragging you along the alpha wall. The problem isn't going to be wrecking something like that with a wedge, it's going to be getting the wedge into contact with it, what with space being big and it being (to some degree) hard to spot.

fallsfromtrees wrote:One has to wonder, if without a wedge, the Lenny Dets are vulnerable to something with a wedge sweeping across it, as what happened to Tepes when a pinnace brought up its wedge inside the boat bay.

As far as we know you need either a wedge or a sidewall to block a missile's wedge from contacting (and shredding) your hull.

Dunno if a sidewall is strong enough to block a pinnace wedge, but I suspect it is. Wouldn't expect it to block a LAC's though.


So the Lenny Det is at some risk of a wedge strike, but should have a bubble sidewall it can raise to mitigate that. (At the risk of being a lot more visible since that sidewall should cause some FTL signature; aka ripple on the Alpha wall)

Torlek wrote:My problem with the supposed invisibility of the spider drive, is that the experiments to test that invisibility were made by scientist emotional invested in the success of the spider drive.

No, they were made by the MAN, who has their lives invested in this working.

Jonathan_S wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:One has to wonder, if without a wedge, the Lenny Dets are vulnerable to something with a wedge sweeping across it, as what happened to Tepes when a pinnace brought up its wedge inside the boat bay.

As far as we know you need either a wedge or a sidewall to block a missile's wedge from contacting (and shredding) your hull.

Dunno if a sidewall is strong enough to block a pinnace wedge, but I suspect it is. Wouldn't expect it to block a LAC's though.


So the Lenny Det is at some risk of a wedge strike, but should have a bubble sidewall it can raise to mitigate that. (At the risk of being a lot more visible since that sidewall should cause some FTL signature; aka ripple on the Alpha wall)

That last brings up something else I've been thinking:

The MAN may not have all the advantages the GA has when it comes to spider drive detection. They do certainly have going the fact that they built it, know how it works, and have been in a position to consider how to look for it and try for a lot longer. On the other hand, it works by an interaction with the alpha wall. FTL communications work by an interaction with the alpha wall. The GA has been making leaps and bounds listening for and generating twangs on the alpha wall with increasing speed and delicacy for the last couple decades. I wonder if that may not give them an avenue on spider drive detection the MAN did not count on.

JeffEngel wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:So the Lenny Det is at some risk of a wedge strike, but should have a bubble sidewall it can raise to mitigate that. (At the risk of being a lot more visible since that sidewall should cause some FTL signature; aka ripple on the Alpha wall)

That last brings up something else I've been thinking:

The MAN may not have all the advantages the GA has when it comes to spider drive detection. They do certainly have going the fact that they built it, know how it works, and have been in a position to consider how to look for it and try for a lot longer. On the other hand, it works by an interaction with the alpha wall. FTL communications work by an interaction with the alpha wall. The GA has been making leaps and bounds listening for and generating twangs on the alpha wall with increasing speed and delicacy for the last couple decades. I wonder if that may not give them an avenue on spider drive detection the MAN did not count on.

You might be on to something. Certainly there's been plenty of speculation that the ability to transmit highly modulated ripples along the alpha wall, and detect faint versions of same (inherent in high bandwidth FTL comms) might translate into some kind of active-sonar like detection system.

Speculation that while the spider leg is "grabbing" the alpha wall that it might do something that could cause those comm ripples to distort or reflect.


Reflection would obviously be best, since a single ship or drone could both send and listen for reflected echos. But even causing 'in-line' distortion could be a lot better than nothing. Sure you'd need more platforms, constantly talking to each other waiting to see distorted ripples, but it still beats the heck out of hoping you stumble across the highly directional waste heat of a spider ship.

Graser torps aren't real fast, but it seems to me that without the need to shield a human crew with grav plates, they can be plenty fast enough to maneuver for an up-the-throat/down-the-kilt shot on warships. If they can't be tracked then the warship has no idea which direction it needs to cover with wedge and sidewalls. Geometry will limit intercepts, but even a few hundred gravitates of acceleration ought to give them a chance.

Cripple someone with torps, finish them off with energy weapons or conventional missiles.

Sneak up into energy range of somebody and nail them hard (probably wouldn't work against a fleet, but you can certainly pick on individual ships that way.). An LD could eat a bunch of LACs for breakfast and then use its pods on the ships the LACs were covering against. And, yes, delayed pod activation is a perfectly valid tactic...

So far the spiders have been used once in the shark form at OB with the victim not having any idea at all what to look for or even that such an attack was possible.

We've been talking a lot about the stealth and there is no question at all but what it is very good. But do we really know that it is as infallible as we seem to be assuming? Benjamin Detweiler in his after action report to Albrecht wasn't so certain. When Albrecht presented the idea of an attack on the fleet at Trevor's Star, he warned that he didn't know that the Manties wouldn't be able to detect the Sharks now that they have been hit once and know what to look for. Would the MAlign's stealth really be proof against a hoard of Ghost rider drones? At this point, we really don't know.

Then there is Hamish's after action report to Elizabeth in which he states that he believes they have identified the hyper footprint of the attackers, that they would be able to flood the area with Ghost rider and that it should be sufficient to interdict intruders and that he felt confident within reason that the Yawata Strike couldn't be repeated.

None of this is definitive, of course. But I do find myself wondering if perhaps we might be assuming a bit too much about the MAlign's capabilities.

Don

Another interesting question. If the spider drive works by tractoring against the alpha wall, then do the Lenny Dets have a set of Warshawski sails they use when in hyper, or do they power themselves in the alpha band by tractoring against the beta wall?