Scenario of War with the League

One question is which is more cost effective replacing pods or making them more durable to soft kills/EMP effects?

Theemile wrote:Probably depends on the Stealth technology. The B-2, according to several sources I've read, has a copper mesh behind the skin to absorb radio frequencies, which would help in hardening against EMP.

B2 has the copper mesh for the exact same reason the 787 has a copper mesh. LIGHTNING. The only difference is that in the 787 they integrated it INTO the skin instead of sub surface for obvious reasons... namely stealth. Problem is every time it gets hit by lightning, the bolt, punches a hole in the skin...

Fiberglass is NOT RADAR transparent. You can orient the fibers and specifically select the plastic, to let a certain narrow range of frequencies through, and why it is used for RADAR cones over the noses of airplanes, but all others it will reflect. Why stealth planes lose their stealth at high speeds. Temperature increases to the point that the RAM on the fiberglass surfaces, peels off the fiberglass. No real way around this. One must have communications, jamming, RADAR, IRST ports.

pnakasone wrote:One question is which is more cost effective replacing pods or making them more durable to soft kills/EMP effects?

To me it would depend on their use. If the goal was for defensive purposes(system defence), then the price for will be worth paying if on the other hand they are for offensive purposes(invading another system) then making them more durable might not be necessary.

pnakasone wrote:One question is which is more cost effective replacing pods or making them more durable to soft kills/EMP effects?

It's not a money issue.

The issue is whether deployed pods can have a reasonable survival chance when warheads are going off. As stated they don't--but the only case that's actually been considered is pods that come off a ship that's being targeted.

That doesn't address whether pods spread across millions of km would be subject to any substantial soft kills.

Loren Pechtel wrote:It's not a money issue.

The issue is whether deployed pods can have a reasonable survival chance when warheads are going off. As stated they don't--but the only case that's actually been considered is pods that come off a ship that's being targeted.

That doesn't address whether pods spread across millions of km would be subject to any substantial soft kills.

One straw i n the wind on that was the first use of the nuke armed mistletoe drones.

At All Costs wrote:"It looks like we're going to have to start deploying the system defense pods further apart. They just took out three-quarters of the Beta echelon and almost that many of the Delta birds."
"How?" Giovanni asked flatly.
"More of their damned recon platforms. It had to be. They got old-fashioned nukes—the yields are somewhere in the five-hundred-megaton range—close enough to the pods to take them out with proximity explosions."
Giovanni nodded silently. Of course. If you could put laser heads on the things, then why not regular nukes? Not that they'd really had to. Given the accuracy they'd just shown against Giscard, they could take the pods out with proximity-armed MDM launches from beyond any range at which she could possibly expect to score hits in return.

So an unspecified number of nuke equipped recon drones prox killed roughly 3/4 of a pair of echelons of Havenite MDM system defense pods.

That's no guarantee that you couldn't spread SDM pods far enough apart to make it impractical to attrit them with balistic missiles; but is does show that even as late as the 2nd war people weren't thinking in those terms. (Probably because especially with MDMs you'd expect to have fired the pods off before the enemy could locate and lob missiles at them - plus you'd have over 9 minutes to react to a ballistic lob; and unlike SDMs at least MDMs fired early are still a little bit of a threat)