Congratulations! The war is over! Now what?

The E wrote:

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.

lets see. I have 5 "ghosts" midnight, 1:30, 3am 5am 6:30 8AM. all I need to do is send the investigation ships to the 8 am location.

It is a little more complex than that, as you need to pay attention to footprint size etc, but there are ways to determin which are likley threats and which are unlikely.

The E wrote:

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.

Well Manticore does have those ridiculously efficient compensators, so their ships are considerably faster than anything else in space. And I think compensators do lead to some benefits relating to hyper. The only reference to compensators and hyper is in regards to grav waves working with compensators for larger sumps, but I don't know if that applies to regular hyper. So Manticoran warships should also faster accelerating in hyper with quicker arrivals to scout events faster than you could for your system.

So unless you're dropping out at ridiculous ranges in the first place, ala Buttercup Eigth Fleet dropping out of hyper at THREE light months to send LAC broods in ballistic, then there's not a whole lot smarter you can get. You have to be far enough out to compensate for your slower speed and try to put distance between your hyper arrival and when the scouts arrive. But you also have to be close enough so you don't have to pack ridiculously large amounts of rations and fuel so you can survive a ballistic approach.

The LAC's pulled it off because their fission piles don't need to be replaced while starships require hydrogen, and they have even smaller crews than the Sharks seemed to.

darrell wrote:

The E wrote: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.

lets see. I have 5 "ghosts" midnight, 1:30, 3am 5am 6:30 8AM. all I need to do is send the investigation ships to the 8 am location.

It is a little more complex than that, as you need to pay attention to footprint size etc, but there are ways to determin which are likley threats and which are unlikely.

Not so much, Manticore sent the scouts out to where the Sharks came in, and they'd been sure it was a glitch. And Sharks are relatively small, which is a lower energy event than a great big superdreadnought or large freighter. And if the downward translation is slow enough, as the Cut Worm scouting destroyers showed, you can't be sure it even happened.

Somtaaw wrote:Not so much, Manticore sent the scouts out to where the Sharks came in, and they'd been sure it was a glitch. And Sharks are relatively small, which is a lower energy event than a great big superdreadnought or large freighter. And if the downward translation is slow enough, as the Cut Worm scouting destroyers showed, you can't be sure it even happened.

Or if you have a small ship translate with a higher velocity, you get a bigger signature.

It's the fact that it takes 12 to 36 hours to get the signal and the fact that every second from the the time you dispatch a response force until they come back they are totally out of communication that kills you. So if you send out all of home fleet to respond to a threat 3 LM out and it's a decoy the adversary that created that decoy knows that they have at least 24 hours to do bad things without you having any heavy mobile units to respond. So you can't send out all of home fleet to respond to a threat profile.

The whole question as to what you are willing to send out to what is important. And how you will handle a large number of signals. Say you get one every 3 hours. Being very efficient you have already dispatched your ready team to look at this by the time the second one comes in. Do you send more ships out to look at number 2? How about #12? When they come two signals an hour, what do you do? At what point do you say that you are going to button up the entire system and go highly defensive for 2 months, with only very limited military traffic allowed to clean up the sensor picture?

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Not so much, Manticore sent the scouts out to where the Sharks came in, and they'd been sure it was a glitch. And Sharks are relatively small, which is a lower energy event than a great big superdreadnought or large freighter. And if the downward translation is slow enough, as the Cut Worm scouting destroyers showed, you can't be sure it even happened.

Or if you have a small ship translate with a higher velocity, you get a bigger signature.

It's the fact that it takes 12 to 36 hours to get the signal and the fact that every second from the the time you dispatch a response force until they come back they are totally out of communication that kills you. So if you send out all of home fleet to respond to a threat 3 LM out and it's a decoy the adversary that created that decoy knows that they have at least 24 hours to do bad things without you having any heavy mobile units to respond. So you can't send out all of home fleet to respond to a threat profile.

The whole question as to what you are willing to send out to what is important. And how you will handle a large number of signals. Say you get one every 3 hours. Being very efficient you have already dispatched your ready team to look at this by the time the second one comes in. Do you send more ships out to look at number 2? How about #12? When they come two signals an hour, what do you do? At what point do you say that you are going to button up the entire system and go highly defensive for 2 months, with only very limited military traffic allowed to clean up the sensor picture?

The whether or not to just try to button up up your whole system is a good point, you can't just totally disqualify ghosts just because you got several in a short period, and only check one or two out.

But as to the hyper event, if you take a small ship and translate it at high velocity you won't appear all that much bigger than you are. Sails are, after all, directly related to the nodes used. So a itty bitty ship doing a crash translation at the very edge of your compensator is still going to appear as an itty bitty ship doign a crash translation. But translating at a mere 10 mps or stationary downward from far enough away, they might manage to convince you that your sensors need maintenance.

That puts frigates, destroyers and small light cruisers as your best "stealth at all costs" platforms, but frigates are possibly too small to cram enough rations in for lengthy stays. Hydrogen might also be an issue, unless you got a good grav wave leading almost directly to the system so you could save reactor mass until the hour before you cross the wall.

Somtaaw wrote:
But as to the hyper event, if you take a small ship and translate it at high velocity you won't appear all that much bigger than you are. Sails are, after all, directly related to the nodes used. So a itty bitty ship doing a crash translation at the very edge of your compensator is still going to appear as an itty bitty ship doign a crash translation. But translating at a mere 10 mps or stationary downward from far enough away, they might manage to convince you that your sensors need maintenance.

That puts frigates, destroyers and small light cruisers as your best "stealth at all costs" platforms, but frigates are possibly too small to cram enough rations in for lengthy stays. Hydrogen might also be an issue, unless you got a good grav wave leading almost directly to the system so you could save reactor mass until the hour before you cross the wall.

The strength of an emergence signal appears to be an interplay of size and velocity loss. Now in close where the sensors get a really good look at you they can probably easily tell the difference between a courier smashing in from 0.6c and a big warship making a stately transition from 1000 kph.

But out towards the fringes of their detection range, at signals that are barely above the noise floor in either case, I'm betting they can't reliably tell the difference between a BB sized Shark making a stealthy transition and a decoy courier making a faster somewhat less stealthy one.


But if they can that just means you need to tie up a could of your attack ships making all the decoy pop-ins. Annoying that you have to divert a small bit of your actual military power to do it rather than a ship you couldn't use to sneak in under the confusion; but ultimately not a breaking change in the plan to hit them with too many targets to check.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:
But as to the hyper event, if you take a small ship and translate it at high velocity you won't appear all that much bigger than you are. Sails are, after all, directly related to the nodes used. So a itty bitty ship doing a crash translation at the very edge of your compensator is still going to appear as an itty bitty ship doign a crash translation. But translating at a mere 10 mps or stationary downward from far enough away, they might manage to convince you that your sensors need maintenance.

That puts frigates, destroyers and small light cruisers as your best "stealth at all costs" platforms, but frigates are possibly too small to cram enough rations in for lengthy stays. Hydrogen might also be an issue, unless you got a good grav wave leading almost directly to the system so you could save reactor mass until the hour before you cross the wall.

The strength of an emergence signal appears to be an interplay of size and velocity loss. Now in close where the sensors get a really good look at you they can probably easily tell the difference between a courier smashing in from 0.6c and a big warship making a stately transition from 1000 kph.

But out towards the fringes of their detection range, at signals that are barely above the noise floor in either case, I'm betting they can't reliably tell the difference between a BB sized Shark making a stealthy transition and a decoy courier making a faster somewhat less stealthy one.


But if they can that just means you need to tie up a could of your attack ships making all the decoy pop-ins. Annoying that you have to divert a small bit of your actual military power to do it rather than a ship you couldn't use to sneak in under the confusion; but ultimately not a breaking change in the plan to hit them with too many targets to check.

And as KZT mentioned above - this is just to screw with an opponent and get them off kilter and waste fleet units on snipe hunts. To do an actual attack with Graser torps all you need is a freighter translating normally in a quiet part of the system which stealthfully kicks out Graser torps set to loiter for a couple of weeks before their attack.

Theemile wrote:And as KZT mentioned above - this is just to screw with an opponent and get them off kilter and waste fleet units on snipe hunts. To do an actual attack with Graser torps all you need is a freighter translating normally in a quiet part of the system which stealthfully kicks out Graser torps set to loiter for a couple of weeks before their attack.

You don't even need something as sophisticated as graser torps. All you need is patience; There's nothing stopping an attacker from making translation 4, 5 or 6 light months out, dropping a shoal of missiles (or a sufficiently massive hunk of metal, more or less anything will do) and accelerate it up to .8 or .9 c in the direction of a planet you want to kill. Make the things stealthy to avoid radar intercepts, and just sit back and wait a year or two for the fireworks to happen.

There's very little in the Honorverse that can stop something like this, and even if you do miss or the attack is intercepted, you're going to alter the course of the nation you've attacked in irrevokable ways.

The E wrote:

Theemile wrote:And as KZT mentioned above - this is just to screw with an opponent and get them off kilter and waste fleet units on snipe hunts. To do an actual attack with Graser torps all you need is a freighter translating normally in a quiet part of the system which stealthfully kicks out Graser torps set to loiter for a couple of weeks before their attack.

You don't even need something as sophisticated as graser torps. All you need is patience; There's nothing stopping an attacker from making translation 4, 5 or 6 light months out, dropping a shoal of missiles (or a sufficiently massive hunk of metal, more or less anything will do) and accelerate it up to .8 or .9 c in the direction of a planet you want to kill. Make the things stealthy to avoid radar intercepts, and just sit back and wait a year or two for the fireworks to happen.

There's very little in the Honorverse that can stop something like this, and even if you do miss or the attack is intercepted, you're going to alter the course of the nation you've attacked in irrevokable ways.

Yep. Which is why RFC has the "Eridani Edict" in place as a plot device to keep it from being an available and genocidal option. Which as a reader and an author, I heartily agree with.

SharkHunter wrote:

The E wrote:
You don't even need something as sophisticated as graser torps. All you need is patience; There's nothing stopping an attacker from making translation 4, 5 or 6 light months out, dropping a shoal of missiles (or a sufficiently massive hunk of metal, more or less anything will do) and accelerate it up to .8 or .9 c in the direction of a planet you want to kill. Make the things stealthy to avoid radar intercepts, and just sit back and wait a year or two for the fireworks to happen.

There's very little in the Honorverse that can stop something like this, and even if you do miss or the attack is intercepted, you're going to alter the course of the nation you've attacked in irrevokable ways.

Yep. Which is why RFC has the "Eridani Edict" in place as a plot device to keep it from being an available and genocidal option. Which as a reader and an author, I heartily agree with.

To be fair, habitable planets are usually considered valuable enough that destroying one should not be a primary resort.

Also ... that kind of thing that is basically self-deterring. There's no real way to get everyone from a planet you destroy. And they're going to want revenge.

And once one planet has been taken out, everybody else is going to be afraid they're next and start annihilating the planets of rivals and potential threats to themselves. It would trigger waves of planetary destruction. And nobody - not even the MAlign - wants that to happen.