Reserve destruction

There were a lot of ballistic, wedge-down LAC strikes during Operation Buttercup. And still more by Republic of Haven during the counter-offensive, Beatrice I think.


And some of the systems that were struck by ballistic, wedge-down LAC strikes (fission piles are pretty hot too) were both covered by extensive remote scanner arrays, and the LACs took anywhere from 1 or 2 days to beyond a week to do some of those strikes.


Thermal detect seems to be very heavily weighed on "does the plot require the ship to be detected? If yes, then ship is detected, if no - handwave the heat issue away and ignore lack of wedge"

The Bu9 guys said there are certain topics that they just won't deal with, and David's stealth in space is one of them.

As main objective the reserves are low priority for the grand alliance. Now destroying them as part of a larger plan of eliminating the infrastructure that supports the SLN will occur since they will be in the same systems.

Assuming the ships of the reserve have been properly maintained they will still take a few months to get ready for travel. To fight will take a few more months. We must take in to account that ships put in to the reserve are not going to be in the best of condition. This dos not even touch the corruption issue.

I think the reserve was never intended to grow as large as it did. Maintaining a smaller number of ships at a higher level readiness would be a more cost effect approach to having ships you can put into service quickly. Given that money is being skimmed from the funds for maintaining the reserve. The larger the reserve the more money that can be skimmed.

The biggest enemy of Solarian League and its Navy is time. They are being straggled economically by the GA. They are facing internal fracturing that will hinder any cohesive strategy to deal with its problems. On paper they should have the resources to steamroller pretty much every one. The corruption level they have prevents them from taping its resources effectively.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:What's the detection range for being warm vs the detection range for the wedge, though?

Real world, thermal detection is very easy and very long ranged. It's based on T squared, where T is in Kelvin (Room temp is ~285K) and the square root of the surface the observer can see. A shrike is maybe 400 square meters nose on. So using modern technology you could see it at 21.8 million km assuming the entire hull was at about room temp. Less if you somehow cooled it, more if it was heated up from the reactor.
See: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... h_In_Space


I have no idea how David is handing this.

1) You're going to have to be running a full sky survey very fast indeed in order to actually detect it at that 21.8mkm distance. In practice active ships aren't running full sky surveys anyway--you can't do it through the wedge.

2) You're going to cross that distance in 90 seconds. How fast is that sky survey running???

3) You're not radiating that much above ambient temperature for the area you're in--even if they see you they have to sort you out from a random space rock.

4) The books do not consider thermal detection meaningful. Look at the battle near Hell--with full up warships and not merely LACs she was picked up at less than 1 mkm and even then they weren't sure what they were looking at until too late. 1 mkm at .8c is 4 seconds of flight time.

5) Consider another case where the defenders are facing such a situation: An incoming three-stage MDM. Do they use thermal detection to see the incoming missiles for aiming the point defenses? No--neither the dazzlers nor the jammers would do anything about that.

Somtaaw wrote:There were a lot of ballistic, wedge-down LAC strikes during Operation Buttercup. And still more by Republic of Haven during the counter-offensive, Beatrice I think.


And some of the systems that were struck by ballistic, wedge-down LAC strikes (fission piles are pretty hot too) were both covered by extensive remote scanner arrays, and the LACs took anywhere from 1 or 2 days to beyond a week to do some of those strikes.

Except in those cases they went hot when they engaged.

I'm saying to not go hot even when they fire--engage while drifting, wedge down. The point is to leave the defenders unaware of what happened--the reserve ships just go boom without an attacker ever being seen. Psyops, not because they have to do it that way.

I think in stealth in space we are misreading what it is. No ship is truly undetectable if someone is looking where it is at, knows what to look for, and/or understands what the sensors are telling them. The trick is to convince the sensor computers and its operators that there is nothing to worry about.

A ships sensor computer would have programmed thresholds on what to ignore and what to bring to the operators attention. The operator then has to decided if what the computer is showing them is some thing worth investigating. All of this takes time in which a clever enemy can hit you over the head. In a busy star system there may be hundreds of sources of EM energies that you would have to sort threw.

Conventional military wisdom until operation Butter Cup was no ship would try and attack with out its impeller drive up and ready. So the detection technology and doctrine favored Gravitic sensors being the primary method of detection of ships at long range.

Loren Pechtel wrote:
1) You're going to have to be running a full sky survey very fast indeed in order to actually detect it at that 21.8mkm distance. In practice active ships aren't running full sky surveys anyway--you can't do it through the wedge.

You do not have to run a full sky survey. Partial is plenty good. When the ships radiator becomes the 2nd brightest object in the sky, maybe the singular brightest object in the sky if it is throwing out neutrinos and gamma rays etc at that temperature..... Pretty danged easy to detect. Once one has a locus, one can then do a tight scan and track.

Now maybe if the background is the core of the milky way it would be hard to detect, but everywhere else?

It is double handed handwavium. Unless his ships are effectively 100% efficient at 1) producing power and 2) converting that power to propulsive power. Then, and only then would it be hard to detect. At least he is dumping the heat into the wedges which tie into the alpha wall. How the bloody H#)@(*$LL do the spider drive ships do it????? Talk about obvious objects unless they are not accelerating at all. Then they could become very hard to detect

All sci fic has the same "issues". Read, and move on. Only the best of the best Sci-fic has plausible handwavium, that is consistent and semi believable. Its a bit like watching The Walking Dead... 5 years later, all those zombies should be dried out husks yet there they are.... thousands of them..... Why can't someone figure out that zombies are free energy producing machines, harness them and start ploughing fields, running them in large squirrel cages, etc.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:There were a lot of ballistic, wedge-down LAC strikes during Operation Buttercup. And still more by Republic of Haven during the counter-offensive, Beatrice I think.


And some of the systems that were struck by ballistic, wedge-down LAC strikes (fission piles are pretty hot too) were both covered by extensive remote scanner arrays, and the LACs took anywhere from 1 or 2 days to beyond a week to do some of those strikes.

Except in those cases they went hot when they engaged.

I'm saying to not go hot even when they fire--engage while drifting, wedge down. The point is to leave the defenders unaware of what happened--the reserve ships just go boom without an attacker ever being seen. Psyops, not because they have to do it that way.

That sort of strike wouldn't even be a naval operation then. It'd be more something from ONI, with spies setting up nuke charges, and a destroyer or light cruiser that gets inserted from light-months out to get close enough to pick up shuttles and sneak back into hyper without being detected.

Even if the base course is plotted to allowed any ballistic strike to never activate their wedge, doesn't guarantee they'd have (good) firing angles for energy weapons. And even with a swarm of only Shrike-B's, you can't get enough grasers into a small enough space to really tear apart full superdreadnoughts without using missiles. Which means wedges being detected, which means the SLN would know somebody had been there.

So you'd have to get agents inserted into the Reserve mothball yards, supply them with multiple nukes to deploy and an escape ship so they can sneak off to meet with the stealthily inserted hyper-capable craft. Then send the radio (or other) signal to detonate the nukes, and self-destruct any other assets that might have been deployed as support (ghost rider drones or other)

Thermal radiation is a range of electromagnetic waves propagated based on temperature. The higher the temperature, the higher and stronger the frequency of the hump.

So I'd go with programmable metamaterials able to generate interference patterns against the radiation, and bend it away from known observers.

Relax wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
1) You're going to have to be running a full sky survey very fast indeed in order to actually detect it at that 21.8mkm distance. In practice active ships aren't running full sky surveys anyway--you can't do it through the wedge.

You do not have to run a full sky survey. Partial is plenty good. When the ships radiator becomes the 2nd brightest object in the sky, maybe the singular brightest object in the sky if it is throwing out neutrinos and gamma rays etc at that temperature..... Pretty danged easy to detect. Once one has a locus, one can then do a tight scan and track.

Now maybe if the background is the core of the milky way it would be hard to detect, but everywhere else?

It is double handed handwavium. Unless his ships are effectively 100% efficient at 1) producing power and 2) converting that power to propulsive power. Then, and only then would it be hard to detect. At least he is dumping the heat into the wedges which tie into the alpha wall. How the bloody H#)@(*$LL do the spider drive ships do it????? Talk about obvious objects unless they are not accelerating at all. Then they could become very hard to detect

All sci fic has the same "issues". Read, and move on. Only the best of the best Sci-fic has plausible handwavium, that is consistent and semi believable. Its a bit like watching The Walking Dead... 5 years later, all those zombies should be dried out husks yet there they are.... thousands of them..... Why can't someone figure out that zombies are free energy producing machines, harness them and start ploughing fields, running them in large squirrel cages, etc.

ti3x wrote:So I'd go with programmable metamaterials able to generate interference patterns against the radiation, and bend it away from known observers.

Now if that isn't a giant handwavium statement, I do not know what is.