Malign contingency Strats and Tacts

Theemile wrote:Where are you getting zero time? In every book, It takes hours to get data on planets they know the positions of. If there is any kind of emcom going on, or habitats in the outsystem, you need to take a serious look, then you need to sift the wheat from the chaff. Is it an "lost" colony? A mining outpost? Anoither survey ship? A derilict? a failed colony? Just some minor slavers or pirates?

Check out the short story Service of the, Sword it is plausible for a Heavy Cruiser to spend days or weeks surveying a system.

David once said that for every dot on his map, there are at least 50 other systems with human habitations, past or present.

This isn't an easy task.

Brigade XO wrote:The Renaissance Factor is the ideal blind to advance the Alignment's plans, that is why they did it. It's future rational for existence is as a series of nodes around which fragments of the SL can reform in a quest for preservation from the chaos that the fall and fragment of the League is expected to bring.

The RF does NOT have to become actual allies of the GA. It's components only need to establish trade relations with both Haven and Manticore plus other powerful polities outside of the Core and the fringes of the SL. Mannerheim is working quietly to gain ownership of the system with the secret wormhole and probably will not expose the existence of that wormhole. They don't need to. If they actualy hold the ownership of the system they can both use it as a working-up area and begin to expand whatever type of industrial development they need to enhance their military and various commercial ventures. Don't recall that there is a habitable planet in the system but they don't need one.

Brigade XO wrote:One option (and the design) for the Renaissance Factor is "just" to grow into a strong alliance of systems and that is "eventually". The underlying rational is that the various systems in the RF will start implementing a lot of the Alignment's plans of shifting of various ethical parameters in medical and other areas. None of that should be obvious to people like Beowulf and Manticore or even Torch should they be looking for them. It starts quietly and just grows. It will be introduced into the education and training systems and institutions in those systems (which join the various RB proto-members) which don't adopt the Alignment changes will just not get supported by the governments or various "charitable" organizations that would normally support schools and research. Don't have to do a lot of "wet work", just academic dirty tricks and impediments to hold them back and divert talent to the "proper" institutions.

Subversion, quiet subversion is the key. The Alignment could sink back into the shadows and wait. Truly, they never need to come out into the open once the RF gets running. Why bother, they will be the puppet-masters.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Theemile wrote:Where are you getting zero time? In every book, It takes hours to get data on planets they know the positions of. If there is any kind of emcom going on, or habitats in the outsystem, you need to take a serious look, then you need to sift the wheat from the chaff. Is it an "lost" colony? A mining outpost? Anoither survey ship? A derilict? a failed colony? Just some minor slavers or pirates?

Check out the short story Service of the, Sword it is plausible for a Heavy Cruiser to spend days or weeks surveying a system.

David once said that for every dot on his map, there are at least 50 other systems with human habitations, past or present.

This isn't an easy task.

A first check is whether there are any electromagnetic emissions. No emissions--nobody living there, cross it off the list and go on to the next one. You don't need anything complex to do this, simply check the normal communications frequencies for energy above background. If a stock ship can't do that in seconds a module certainly could be made to do so.

Theemile wrote:Another case - Manticore never found Bolthole. They looked actively for 3 years and never found it - and Manticore knows the "relative" area of space Bolthole has to be in.

Theemile wrote:No where have we seen system omniscience from just a few minutes in a system. And to thow up a shell of drones in a system is expensive - The cost of drones in hundreds of systems is prohibitive.

Somtaaw wrote:

Theemile wrote:No where have we seen system omniscience from just a few minutes in a system. And to thow up a shell of drones in a system is expensive - The cost of drones in hundreds of systems is prohibitive.

The closest we've come to seeing system-wide omniscience in a short timeframe, was the opening night of Buttercup, arrival of White Haven's Eighth Fleet in Barnett. And even that took more than a few hours, with a hundred-ish ships providing the RD shells to do.

<snip>

2) White Haven's LACs had been inserted into Barnett space 2-3 days earlier and were slowly making their way inward for the strike

Theemile wrote:I'd even hesitate to say that in Barnett's case. 1) Barnett was heavily scouted for years, and the locations of military installations, defenses, and fleet anchorages were well known. 2) White Haven's LACs had been inserted into Barnett space 2-3 days earlier and were slowly making their way inward for the strike - their carriers and scout DDs would have made initial system readings and reported back to White Haven so he could focus His RDs for the optimal coverage in the minimal time once the main task force arrived. But you are right, that is probably the best example.

Ashes of Victory, Chapter 35 wrote:"Stand by for translation . . . now."
Captain (Junior Grade) Jonathan Yerensky announced the return to normal-space, and Hamish Alexander grimaced as the familiar discomfort and disorientation lashed through him. That was one nice thing about being a senior admiral, he thought. By the time you acquired as much rank as he had, you no longer had to worry about impressing uppity juniors with your stoicism. If crossing the alpha wall made you feel like throwing up, you could go ahead and admit it . . . and nobody dared laugh.
He grinned at the reflection, but his eyes were already flicking over his repeater plot on Benjamin the Great's flag deck. At the moment, CIC was feeding him a schematic of the entire star system. Which didn't tell him a thing, of course. As soon as the scanner crews had anything besides stock projections of the system's astrography to show him, CIC would throw it on his plot.
He listened to a murmured litany of background reports without really hearing them. His staff had been with him for over three T-years. They might have spent all too much of that time floating in orbit around Trevor's Star, but it had given them plenty of time to train in exercises and sims. By now, they knew exactly what he needed to know immediately and what he expected them to handle on their own, and he knew he could rely on them to do just that.
Which freed Hamish Alexander to study his bland, uninformative plot and worry.
Well, uninformative from the enemy's side, he amended, for quite a few Allied icons burned on the display. First, there were the seventy-three superdreadnoughts and eleven dreadnoughts of his wall of battle. Then there were the traditional screening elements, already spreading out to assume missile defense positions. And last, there were the seventeen CLACs of Alice Truman's task group and their escorts—battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, with four attached dreadnoughts to give them a little extra weight—astern of the main formation. A blizzard of diamond chips erupted outward from the CLACs as he watched, and he smiled grimly as they began to shake down into formation even as they accelerated ahead of the main body. CIC had a tight lock on them when they launched, but their EW was already on-line, and within minutes even Benjamin the Great's sensors began to lose them.
A second blizzard, almost as dense, sped outward at accelerations even a LAC could never hope to match, and White Haven tipped back his command chair as the FTL-capable recon drones darted in-system.

Theemile wrote:Another case - Manticore never found Bolthole. They looked actively for 3 years and never found it - and Manticore knows the "relative" area of space Bolthole has to be in.

Somtaaw wrote:

Theemile wrote:I'd even hesitate to say that in Barnett's case. 1) Barnett was heavily scouted for years, and the locations of military installations, defenses, and fleet anchorages were well known. 2) White Haven's LACs had been inserted into Barnett space 2-3 days earlier and were slowly making their way inward for the strike - their carriers and scout DDs would have made initial system readings and reported back to White Haven so he could focus His RDs for the optimal coverage in the minimal time once the main task force arrived. But you are right, that is probably the best example.

I'll grant you the first point, that the moons, planets, installations, etc were already known.

But the second point, the LAC's launched after the arrival of the CLAC's and the podnoughts. It was one of the later strikes where they came in ballistic.

Ashes of Victory, Chapter 35 wrote:"Stand by for translation . . . now."
Captain (Junior Grade) Jonathan Yerensky announced the return to normal-space, and Hamish Alexander grimaced as the familiar discomfort and disorientation lashed through him. That was one nice thing about being a senior admiral, he thought. By the time you acquired as much rank as he had, you no longer had to worry about impressing uppity juniors with your stoicism. If crossing the alpha wall made you feel like throwing up, you could go ahead and admit it . . . and nobody dared laugh.
He grinned at the reflection, but his eyes were already flicking over his repeater plot on Benjamin the Great's flag deck. At the moment, CIC was feeding him a schematic of the entire star system. Which didn't tell him a thing, of course. As soon as the scanner crews had anything besides stock projections of the system's astrography to show him, CIC would throw it on his plot.
He listened to a murmured litany of background reports without really hearing them. His staff had been with him for over three T-years. They might have spent all too much of that time floating in orbit around Trevor's Star, but it had given them plenty of time to train in exercises and sims. By now, they knew exactly what he needed to know immediately and what he expected them to handle on their own, and he knew he could rely on them to do just that.
Which freed Hamish Alexander to study his bland, uninformative plot and worry.
Well, uninformative from the enemy's side, he amended, for quite a few Allied icons burned on the display. First, there were the seventy-three superdreadnoughts and eleven dreadnoughts of his wall of battle. Then there were the traditional screening elements, already spreading out to assume missile defense positions. And last, there were the seventeen CLACs of Alice Truman's task group and their escorts—battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, with four attached dreadnoughts to give them a little extra weight—astern of the main formation. A blizzard of diamond chips erupted outward from the CLACs as he watched, and he smiled grimly as they began to shake down into formation even as they accelerated ahead of the main body. CIC had a tight lock on them when they launched, but their EW was already on-line, and within minutes even Benjamin the Great's sensors began to lose them.
A second blizzard, almost as dense, sped outward at accelerations even a LAC could never hope to match, and White Haven tipped back his command chair as the FTL-capable recon drones darted in-system.

Bold is my emphasis, italics are authors. They arrived in Barnett, then launched LAC's, and lost them within minutes, even knowing they were there.

And I also included that last paragraph, because although Maxx has stated that over at Bu9, they've decided that the Ghost Rider RD's are launched from the shuttle bays, between that little snippet, and from the brief bit during Honor's Silesia/Marsh command, Ferrero and the Jessica Epps had her Ghost Rider drones swim out of the tubes when they realised the Andermani were using RD's for tracking.

For a blizzard to be launched fast enough that they could be off the ships and lighting off their wedges to accelerate even faster than LACs. Even though the LAC's have systems specifically to get them away from the CLAC fast enough that wedges can be lit quickly, indicates Ghost Rider drones can also be thrown down a missile tube for fast deployment.

Edit: 17 CLAC's works out to just about exactly 1700 LACs, the Ghost Rider drone shell being almost as dense, means that off the 100 wallers (including CLACs and DNs) plus screen, every ship had to get between 2 and 10 Ghost Rider drones out of their shuttle bays in less than a minute. And Ghost Rider drones are what.... upto 100 tons, and anywhere upto a few metres long? Even with grav pressor/tractors, that's quite a bit of mass to be shoving out a shuttle bay, at a rapid enough pace to lit off drives without having to drop the ship's wedge.