Somtaaw wrote:Missile launchers are mass drivers, which at a very very simple level, simply "fling" something.
Think of the sport paintball, the paintball is a wedge-less camera, the marker is now a missile launcher, and players are ships. I don't need paintballs with scram-jet propulsion to get them to hit you at long range, I just need to adjust my aim for where you are moving towards and you walk into my rounds.
The same with a wedge-less camera, I point the ship and "fire" my camera, and simply wait until it gets near you. If it's made even half decent, it'd be low detection composites to defeat most radar (think the mine ambush in Hancock), no wedge and the two combined means a warship would probably not even realise you just threw camera's on a close approach.
Think of the "drone" I'm proposing more like... you probably have a cell phone, that has an inbuilt camera. You tape your phone with the camera sticking out to a cylinder, and then add some gyro's to give it some turning possibility. Add a small processing core, and some programming that allows it to orient your phone to aim at a specific target. Lastly add an antenna for long-range communication. Congratulations, you now have a pirate "Long Range Warship Detection Probe", for the low low cost of what, $500?
Obviously it would be slightly better constructed, but that's more or less all thats needed to check a potential prize for hammerheads, hours before you get nearby. The longest bit of construction is doing the programming for aligning your camera, and the communication protocols so the camera sends the picture (or live camera stream, like our Mars probes send back to Earth) back to the pirate ship.
I don't think anyone disputes that the "recon bullet" wouldn't be cheap. The recon bullet would not reliably get to a target.
Consider an interception. Freighter has a bunch of base velocity plus 200g acceleration - used as much as possible to frustrate interception by the pirate. Pirate has a bunch of base velocity (or not), which matches the freighter's only to the extent the pirate has done a very, very good job of setting this up or is very, very lucky, plus 500g or so of acceleration.
Recon bullet has exactly the pirate's base velocity when fired, plus one initial chunk from the mass driver and no further acceleration whatever.
Chances are, the recon bullet is just left behind. If the freighter is keeping its wedge toward the pirate, the wedge will remain toward the recon bullet for a long time.
Eventually the bearings will change enough - perhaps especially if the pirate fires the recon bullet
away from the freighter - that the RB will get a wedge-avoiding peek at the freighter. But by that time, you start getting odds favoring the interception happening already, or at least that (given additional speed of light delays too for freighter to optical sensor, RB to pirate) it's still too late for the pirate if it is a warship.
Sometimes, something like this may work. And if anyone builds it - it's likely to be a niche thing, and putting it together in your garage such that it can handle firing out the mass driver and the other hazards of the use isn't too promising - pirates and warships even may have a use for a small supply of them. But they're not going to fix the problem.
