Prediction: Spider Drive=Grav Lance

Tyrant of Null wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't remember anywhere it has been stated that either the wedge or spider drives draw any energy from hyperspace, they both just interact with the alpha wall to give normal space acceleration. All power is supplied by shipboard reacters.
Don't you actually have to be in a gravity wave in hyper space to draw energy from it?

As explained here, wedges and hypersails both draw the majority of the power required to sustain themselves from interactions with the next higher hyper band (which in realspace is the alpha band).

The E wrote:

Tyrant of Null wrote:I don't think the MA would be building white Elephants, so theres obviously something DW hasn't told us about yet which will possibly be revealed hopefully in the next book in half a years time.
The fact the MA is building SD size ships like the Detwellers indicates they think they will be effective even when detected.

Always remember that the Alignment is currently running on a massively accelerated schedule. They wanted to wait a decade or two before kicking things off, but a few things happened that made it necessary to start things early. The Detweilers were designed to carry out the Oyster Bay strikes; while the Alignment probably had secondary uses for them in mind afterwards, there is no telling whether they're actually still needed right now.

So they a few decades early kicking things of, the MA has been research and developing all this new equipment for the last century or so as well as keeping an eye on what everyone else is doing, they not the SLN. Also they have been studing the most effective and strategic use for all this new tech for a long while, and I can guarantee they not going to build SD sized ships as a one use option. Oyster bay was just intended as the first use!

The E wrote:

Tyrant of Null wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't remember anywhere it has been stated that either the wedge or spider drives draw any energy from hyperspace, they both just interact with the alpha wall to give normal space acceleration. All power is supplied by shipboard reacters.
Don't you actually have to be in a gravity wave in hyper space to draw energy from it?

As explained here, wedges and hypersails both draw the majority of the power required to sustain themselves from interactions with the next higher hyper band (which in realspace is the alpha band).

Thanks
I haven't read much of the extra info that isn't in the books. Although wedge powered ships still need to produce 40% of the required power which is still significant.
If the spider drive has less of a footprint and is much harder to detect, the amount of energy it draws from the aplha band maybe significantly less. Has anyone seen this stated anywhere?

Tyrant of Null wrote:So they a few decades early kicking things of, the MA has been research and developing all this new equipment for the last century or so as well as keeping an eye on what everyone else is doing, they not the SLN. Also they have been studing the most effective and strategic use for all this new tech for a long while, and I can guarantee they not going to build SD sized ships as a one use option. Oyster bay was just intended as the first use!

Yes, as I've pointed out already. The open question is whether or not the Detweilers are necessary to achieve the Alignment's objectives. Personally, I believe they aren't; the Alignment has achieved a lot of its major goals already, and as their most dangerous assets are ideas and philosophies, not superstealthy assault platforms, the need for big lumbering weapon carriers is better served by conventional forces.

The big problem with the Detweilers is that they were designed for an environment that didn't have the Manticore vs Haven tech race in it. Whatever their planned missions are, they'll work pretty well against Solarian forces, but any engagement with Haven Quadrant ones will at the very least not go as planned.

Given that the Alignment planners seem to be as prone to the sunk cost fallacy as normal humans are, I would expect them to use the Detweilers anyway, of course. But I strongly doubt they're going to be massive game changers.

Tyrant of Null wrote:
I'm pretty sure sidewall shape can be change to fit the need, don't the spider drive ships have 3 sidewalls 1 between each keel? I assume they would have bow and stern walls as well as no wedge to deal with. I've actually wondered if there would be a weakness around where the sidewalls meet the spider drives gravity hooks. Also are they continous? could a lucky shot dissable one keel?
how fast do the gravity hooks move down the keel? considering stated acceleration rates probable pretty fast how many are there? How well does the gravity distortion they produce cover the keels?

I think the buckler walls on RMN ships cover most angles at each end from attack, and any spider drive ship trying to maneuver to get an energy torp shot is likely to be picked up by normal threat radar which has a detection range of about 1 mil km'slong before they get that shot. So some sort of sidewall eliminator is still likely to be required for any real chance of success with energy Torps.

Conventional sidewalls require an active wedge to tie into; and RFC said that you can't use a spider drive through an active sidewall. So spider ships, when using the spider drive can't deploy conventional sidewalls (no wedge) nor bubble sidewalls (unless they're willing to stop accelerating to do so).
Bucklers are a bit more of a question, but even if you can freely project those they're not going to really interface with the spider drive's super-tractor spurs.

And the buckler really doesn't protect from many angles. If I did the math correctly a buckler twice the diameter of the max beam (text-ev for it's size; at least on Hexapuma) and 10 km off the nose (standard standoff range for sidewalls) only fully protects against targets approximately +/- 0.5 degrees from dead ahead.[1] Any more than that and a perfect shot past the edge of the buckler can hit the backside of the aft hammerhead. [2]

Like a swordman's buckler shield, it's a surprisingly small protection that has to be used with skill to be effective. Doing so against a ship you can't see, and don't know is there, seems near impossible.

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[1] Calculated angles for a Gryphon-class SD, using the wedge geometry numbers from the infodump
[2] Though if you get more than +/- 3.8 degrees off to the side the sidewalls, which project the whole length of the wedge, will cut off your shot.
However the vertical direction provides a vastly greater vulnerable zone:
A down the throat shot has to be beyond +/- 32.2 degrees up/down for the wedge to block it.
An up the kilt shot is harder, only +/- 7.5 degrees vertical before it's blocked.

Jonathan_S wrote:And the buckler really doesn't protect from many angles. If I did the math correctly a buckler twice the diameter of the max beam (text-ev for it's size; at least on Hexapuma) and 10 km off the nose (standard standoff range for sidewalls) only fully protects against targets approximately +/- 0.5 degrees from dead ahead.[1] Any more than that and a perfect shot past the edge of the buckler can hit the backside of the aft hammerhead. [2]

Bravo on doing the math on this. I'd just add that, since the Buckler can be moved around within the throat/kilt area, its defensive value is higher than these numbers make it seem. In a single-ship duel, or in situations like the one Hexapuma found itself in at Nuncio, it's almost as good as a full wall (at least when it comes to fending off main battery energy weapons; missiles have quite a lot of maneuvering potential to get into good positions for clean shots at the ship).

The E wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And the buckler really doesn't protect from many angles. If I did the math correctly a buckler twice the diameter of the max beam (text-ev for it's size; at least on Hexapuma) and 10 km off the nose (standard standoff range for sidewalls) only fully protects against targets approximately +/- 0.5 degrees from dead ahead.[1] Any more than that and a perfect shot past the edge of the buckler can hit the backside of the aft hammerhead. [2]

Bravo on doing the math on this. I'd just add that, since the Buckler can be moved around within the throat/kilt area, its defensive value is higher than these numbers make it seem. In a single-ship duel, or in situations like the one Hexapuma found itself in at Nuncio, it's almost as good as a full wall (at least when it comes to fending off main battery energy weapons; missiles have quite a lot of maneuvering potential to get into good positions for clean shots at the ship).

Very true.
Against a single enemy a buckler is still really nice, and at 400,000 km an enemy has to move a long way to display even half a degree; you've got time to shift the buckler or change heading to keep it interposed.


There were some simplifying assumptions in that math - like not dealing with the ability to move it around. Though the biggest one was treating the end of the hull as a point and calculating that you were protected until that point could be seen.

(Rather than modeling a hull profile to determine what point would be exposed to line of sight first. The hammerhead flare is much wider than the actual stern plate; OTOH it's further forward, so I just ignored it and treated wider but closer as a wash.)


What I've half thought about doing, but don't have the software or skill for, is to do this as a rendering. Model the ship, wedge, sidewall,s buckers all to scale then render translucent cones/wedges showing vulnerable angles. No color = no shot, maybe yellowish is a shot through a sidewall/buckler, and reddish would be an unprotected, no sidewall, shot.
(If you wanted to be really fancy weight the translucency based on the percentage of shots passing through a point that hit unarmored targets (top, bottom, nodes) vs armor. Less translucent could mean more shots that wouldn't hit armor)

Then do a short rendered video of the camera looping around so you can see the zones clearly.

Weird Harold wrote:IIRC, Spider Drive ships have sperical sidewalls -- one per ship -- and can't use the spider drive through the "sidewall;" more of a spherical shield than a sidewall although it's the same technology as Forts use.

It's been widely speculated that they do (or that the Lenny Dets do), but there's absolutely no textev or Word of Weber saying this AFAIK. I believe there's explicit textev that the Ghosts do not have them.

The E wrote:

Tyrant of Null wrote:So they a few decades early kicking things of, the MA has been research and developing all this new equipment for the last century or so as well as keeping an eye on what everyone else is doing, they not the SLN. Also they have been studing the most effective and strategic use for all this new tech for a long while, and I can guarantee they not going to build SD sized ships as a one use option. Oyster bay was just intended as the first use!

Yes, as I've pointed out already. The open question is whether or not the Detweilers are necessary to achieve the Alignment's objectives. Personally, I believe they aren't; the Alignment has achieved a lot of its major goals already, and as their most dangerous assets are ideas and philosophies, not superstealthy assault platforms, the need for big lumbering weapon carriers is better served by conventional forces.

The big problem with the Detweilers is that they were designed for an environment that didn't have the Manticore vs Haven tech race in it. Whatever their planned missions are, they'll work pretty well against Solarian forces, but any engagement with Haven Quadrant ones will at the very least not go as planned.

Given that the Alignment planners seem to be as prone to the sunk cost fallacy as normal humans are, I would expect them to use the Detweilers anyway, of course. But I strongly doubt they're going to be massive game changers.

Yep - and perhaps even more importantly, modern pre-war superdreadnoughts were both a lot slower and a lot smaller than they are now. A Spider Drive ship, while still slower, wasn't as much slower than a 1900 superdreadnought as it is relative to a 1920 superdreadnought.
Compensator technology had been more or less plateaued for quite a while, and the Alignment had every expectation that things would not change in that respect.

A ~400g 6mt ship armed with tube-launched single drive missiles and heavy energy batteries is a massively different threat environment from a 12mt MDM podlayer with over 500gs.

Mix in the apparently huge degree of sensor technology advancement that Manticore has over the SLN, and it's not unreasonable to think that Lenny Dets would easily be able to sneak up on basically any SLN/equivalent tech force/base whenever and wherever they wanted to. Especially when one considers the original plan was Peeps vs League, both of which the MAlign has/had a massive amount of penetration in nearly every aspect of the government and the media.
After all - in the aftermath of Oyster Bay, one of the Detweillers says something along the lines of "as long as they don't expect us to have a fleet of them [Lenny Dets] to sail into orbit over Chicago tomorrow". That is the kind of thing Lenny Dets are designed for - sneaking in and blowing away anything within energy range and then demanding surrenders - or just disappearing and making the defenders and the local government and allies look like incompetents and in need of replacement with someone who can stop these mysterious attackers.

Back again to what we don't know about the Lenny Dets and what they might have in the way of new systems and tech that hasn't been revealed yet. I like the comparison to the Crusier Submarines. Great idea, didn't work as planned partialy because the tech situations had evolved. It didn't mean that the subs didn't work and couldn't be used, just not as large caliber gun platforms that could pop up and then go back under cover to leave.

Another sub variation that did work but not to the extent intended was building subs to carry one or two aircraft. Japan did the most work in that area and appears to have had the most success. This is putting scout or observation aircraft (foldable or dismantled) in watertight hangers and then flying and recovering them. Some of them were armed with bombs which were used. The actual damage caused by the bombings was minimal. The greatest effect was to stir up both the military and civilian populations with fear and divert a lot or resouces and personal to watching for and defend against one more component of the feared West Coast Invasion- which was not planned and did not happen. More successful were gunfire raids on coastal instaltions by subs. Not much damage, lots of response and defensive activity generated

It's not that the Detweilers are going to be useless. To the contrary, they will probably be quite effective if employed in the same types of strikes- with the same or similar pre-attack scouting- as Oyster Bay. If the Alignment finds Bolt Hole, that would be a wonderful target.

As pointed out, the 12 members of the RF have a fair number of modern- by SL standards - ships and probably a good mix of things which are nominally SLN like Cataphracts which can be used without exposure as catspaws of the Alignment. The RF becomes the public face and force of the rebuilding of stability and "safety" as one of the sucessor states to the SL. It can't also become proof that the Alignment is actualy real be flaunting the open use of the mystery weapons and tactics reported by Manticore and believed in by Haven and the Aldermani and Beowulf.