Congratulations! The war is over! Now what?

munroburton wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:They felt they could stop them at Manticore now that they knew what they needed to look for. I don't know how they planned to do it.

They were talking about the hyper footprints of the Oyster Bay insertation. The same one they sent a few destroyers out to investigate for a week.

My guess is, they plan to have those destroyers search harder(swarms of recon drones with active sensor scanning), maybe use more vessels to search a larger sphere. Unfortunately, KZT has a point about how that strategy can be used against Manticore - just one ship(doesn't have to be a spider ship) can jump in and out all over the 2 light month radius, generating hundreds of real sensor traces that each have to be equally scrutinised.

Damn, beat my post by a few seconds LOL. Both with how the Manticore thinks they can detect a future Yawata by shotgunning, and that you can do a shadowplay for mind games and pulling the scouts out of position.

Somtaaw wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
They felt they could stop them at Manticore now that they knew what they needed to look for. I don't know how they planned to do it.

They felt that they think they could prevent another attack of the same sort from succeeding.

But their whole prevention strategy boils down to: next time we think someone dropped out of hyper we're going to shotgun so many ships, and deploy so many Ghost Rider drones, you could EVA and jump from drone to drone back to Manticore.

With enough drones in space, and enough tin cans and light cruisers using both active/passive sensors, and GR drones looking, we know from the MAlign side that the Sharks couldn't possibly stay undetected because they directionally emit heat for stealth.

However, that's still not a guarantee that Sharks couldn't pull a repeat of the Yawata. If they dropped out at 2 light-months, like the Yawata did, and accelerated fast enough, by the time DDs/CLs could be ordered to that location and actually arrive, the Sharks might have gotten far enough out to stay undetected. It all depends on exactly how fast they can accelerate, and how long a response takes, and whether you played any shadow games, and just drop out of hyper long enough to summon the Manticoran response as bait before running away.

Yeah, if memory serves, it took greater than 12 hours to get the ready reaction squadron to the hyper entry point to start hunting. That's why I've said in the past (and kzt said above) a freighter could make a successful graser torp attack - the freighter has plenty of time to kick out torps and leave while the torps have plenty of time to putter away before any manty reaction can get to their location and start searching.

Theemile wrote:Yeah, if memory serves, it took greater than 12 hours to get the ready reaction squadron to the hyper entry point to start hunting. That's why I've said in the past (and kzt said above) a freighter could make a successful graser torp attack - the freighter has plenty of time to kick out torps and leave while the torps have plenty of time to putter away before any manty reaction can get to their location and start searching.

The footprint propagates at 61x C Iirc, which is a LOT of time for a ship pulling 150g to hide at 3 light months. You need a LOT of ships, in at least division strength each, to cover the space. And the RMN doesn't know how fast they can accelerate. So to produce a sphere that is 100% certain to encompass a ship accelerating at 250g for the propagation time at 3 LM plus travel in the highest band plus 3 hours to get going, how big is the radius?

Assume you need to be no more than one light hour apart to avoid any leakers. How any divisions do you need? (You need a division to avoid them just whacking on DD.). What percent of the active RMN is that? How much of the entire RMN is going to be dedicated to this?

Oh, and the graser torp attack doesn't rely on that. It's a normal looking merchant that drops out of hyper to use the WHJ, but misses it by a little bit. By the time it arrives at the WHJ it just has an empty cargo hold, with the rest holding totally legit merchandise.

Nothing will then happen for days, so connecting the dots will be hard.

Somtaaw wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
They felt they could stop them at Manticore now that they knew what they needed to look for. I don't know how they planned to do it.

They felt that they think they could prevent another attack of the same sort from succeeding.

But their whole prevention strategy boils down to: next time we think someone dropped out of hyper we're going to shotgun so many ships, and deploy so many Ghost Rider drones, you could EVA and jump from drone to drone back to Manticore.

With enough drones in space, and enough tin cans and light cruisers using both active/passive sensors, and GR drones looking, we know from the MAlign side that the Sharks couldn't possibly stay undetected because they directionally emit heat for stealth.

However, that's still not a guarantee that Sharks couldn't pull a repeat of the Yawata. If they dropped out at 2 light-months, like the Yawata did, and accelerated fast enough, by the time DDs/CLs could be ordered to that location and actually arrive, the Sharks might have gotten far enough out to stay undetected. It all depends on exactly how fast they can accelerate, and how long a response takes, and whether you played any shadow games, and just drop out of hyper long enough to summon the Manticoran response as bait before running away.

it took 4 hours for the DD's searching reached the area.
D=1/2At^2 502 G's, 5 hours = 810Mkm radius = 1000 light seconds.

What I would use is a squadron of CLAC's supported by 10,000 recon drones.

Also, although conventional shipboard gravitic sensors can't find spider drive ships at 1 light second, I notice that RFC didn't say that they weren't detectable at longer range by other methods . . . . . . . .

In addition, the spider drive ships shut down their drives a couple of hours out. I believe that the deep space arrays that can detect hyper transits many months out can detect the spider drive from several light hours out.

If you know what to look for, you can filter for that signal and find it at a much longer range. so if the deep space arrays got a reading on the spider drive that was part of the graser torpedo, where an unfiltered gravitic arry wouldn't see the drive at 1 light second, with the correct filter the drive might be spotted at 5-10 light seconds.

Theemile wrote:Yeah, if memory serves, it took greater than 12 hours to get the ready reaction squadron to the hyper entry point to start hunting. That's why I've said in the past (and kzt said above) a freighter could make a successful graser torp attack - the freighter has plenty of time to kick out torps and leave while the torps have plenty of time to putter away before any manty reaction can get to their location and start searching.

from Storm From the Shadows:

Given the range on the possible footprint, the datum was over twelve hours old. Footprints, like gravitic pulses, were detectable by the fluctuations they imposed on the alpha wall interface with normal-space, which meant they propagated at roughly sixty-four times the speed of light. For most practical purposes, that equated to real-time, or very near to real-time, but when you started talking about the detection ranges possible to Perimeter Security Command's huge arrays, even that speed left room for considerable delays.

note: 12 hours at 64C = just over a light month

"The datum is already almost thirteen hours old," Carus pointed out. "I feel sure our lords and masters would like us to go check it out before it gets a bunch older. So I'd say a certain degree of haste is probably in order."

note: indicates that it took less than an hour for the order to be sent to the destroyer division.

"Yes, Sir," Petersen acknowledged with a grin. "Anyway, what I meant to say is that I'd just as soon not get much above forty-two thousand KPS as our base velocity. That gives us a total flight time of about three hours—a tad less than that, actually—if we hit the theta bands."

So from the actual translation to the destroyers arriving was 16 hours or less.

darrell wrote:In addition, the spider drive ships shut down their drives a couple of hours out. I believe that the deep space arrays that can detect hyper transits many months out can detect the spider drive from several light hours out.

If you know what to look for, you can filter for that signal and find it at a much longer range. so if the deep space arrays got a reading on the spider drive that was part of the graser torpedo, where an unfiltered gravitic arry wouldn't see the drive at 1 light second, with the correct filter the drive might be spotted at 5-10 light seconds.

You may think so, but you will notice that the MAN people running the ships disagreed. They had absolutely no fear of being noticed by the system grav sensors. They were a bit concerned about recon drones in close.

The perimeter sensors are very carefully tuned to pick up a particular pretty high density event a long way away. These are very low energy events. It's like trying to make your gunshot detector array pick up someone picking locks.

In addition, they are blind in close, as in a light hour or so Iirc. I suspect the MAN has plans to try that trick too.

munroburton wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:They felt they could stop them at Manticore now that they knew what they needed to look for. I don't know how they planned to do it.

They were talking about the hyper footprints of the Oyster Bay insertation. The same one they sent a few destroyers out to investigate for a week.

My guess is, they plan to have those destroyers search harder(swarms of recon drones with active sensor scanning), maybe use more vessels to search a larger sphere. Unfortunately, KZT has a point about how that strategy can be used against Manticore - just one ship (doesn't have to be a spider ship) can jump in and out all over the 2 light month radius, generating hundreds of real sensor traces that each have to be equally scrutinised.

That would at least be an indication that something's up.


Another, complementary, tactic is to harden the targets by routinely moving them. Make it SOP for all the new stations to shift their orbits slightly every few weeks, so months-old scouting data is obsolete. It'd mean assigning each a toroidal volume rather than a specific orbit, but hey, "space is big."

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:Yeah, if memory serves, it took greater than 12 hours to get the ready reaction squadron to the hyper entry point to start hunting. That's why I've said in the past (and kzt said above) a freighter could make a successful graser torp attack - the freighter has plenty of time to kick out torps and leave while the torps have plenty of time to putter away before any manty reaction can get to their location and start searching.

The footprint propagates at 61x C Iirc, which is a LOT of time for a ship pulling 150g to hide at 3 light months. You need a LOT of ships, in at least division strength each, to cover the space. And the RMN doesn't know how fast they can accelerate. So to produce a sphere that is 100% certain to encompass a ship accelerating at 250g for the propagation time at 3 LM plus travel in the highest band plus 3 hours to get going, how big is the radius?

Assume you need to be no more than one light hour apart to avoid any leakers. How any divisions do you need? (You need a division to avoid them just whacking on DD.). What percent of the active RMN is that? How much of the entire RMN is going to be dedicated to this?

I'd say if they're deploying en masse, singleton destroyers would be fine. There'd be so many RD's deployed too, that while yes a singleton destroyer might get nailed, there'd be so many eyes by engaging the destroyer, you'd doom yourself.

And it's not like a spider-drive ship couldn't plot it's route just so to take out two, or even a full 3-ship destroyer division if everything went its way. So ideally, Manticore would actually be using CLAC's and swarms of LACs to handle the light-month hyper exit scouting, even more ideally you'd use Havenite CLAC's because they're even larger and carry over 600 Cimeterre's. And Cimeterre's also had a recon variant that was specifically designed for scouting and working with RD's.

It's all well and good to say "we'll use LACs", but deploying them over a volume of light hours has certain minor practical issues.

Not to mention that they are in deep space and can just hyper out unless they have accelerated past .3C. This has no signature on real space and they can just move somewhere else (in a hyper band that you don't have access to) and do it again faster than you can recall and retask your ships searching for them. Or, the aggressive version, you launch graser torps to target the major ship ahead of you, then hyper out before they attack. You might want to not do this, as keeping them chasing ghosts without any evidence of an actual contact is kind of frustrating and will tend to result in sloppiness.

But essentially you can easily produce far more signatures that need to be investigated than the RMN has ships to investigate them. And at a response time of 12 plus hours, you can do this with a squadron of dispatch boats that essentially do touch and go's all around a system, each pair creating a signature every 2 hours until they grow bored.

kzt wrote:But essentially you can easily produce far more signatures that need to be investigated than the RMN has ships to investigate them. And at a response time of 12 plus hours, you can do this with a squadron of dispatch boats that essentially do touch and go's all around a system, each pair creating a signature every 2 hours until they grow bored.

Little reminder that this is exactly what 8th Fleet did for a time while Imperator was undergoing repairs.

The problem is that this whole strategy of sending ships out to investigate probable signals light weeks or months out from the hyper limit is security theater at its finest. It will only ever catch attackers that are too stupid to find a workaround, while the actually dangerous ones will continue to operate unimpeded.