Changes in Battle tactics outside planetary hyper limits

Relax wrote:Well, kzt, RFC caboshed that in ART... He placed a cycle time for SD's at 12+ minutes as I recall...

Off to go look it up... Not sure I have the time... Someone will have to do it though.

A Rising Thunder, Chapter 20 wrote:Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer’s generator could return to standby readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes’ flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

Vince wrote:

Relax wrote:Well, kzt, RFC caboshed that in ART... He placed a cycle time for SD's at 12+ minutes as I recall...

Off to go look it up... Not sure I have the time... Someone will have to do it though.

A Rising Thunder, Chapter 20 wrote:Oppenheimer’s generator could return to standby readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

Yep. So if you jump in (with an SD) within 133 million Km (7.4 lm) of an MDM pod the return fire can arrive just before you can jump out again - and since that's further than IIRC even an Apollo missile can be controlled (without Mycroft style FTL fire control relays) jumping in anywhere half-near people with MDM pods is going to subject to to their fire.

For that matter even an DDM, with a longer ballistic segment, can cover 77 million km in 16 minutes.


The obvious counter to that is to drop out much further out so you spend the 12 minutes recovering you hyper generator to standby before entering effective missile range; that shortens your response time to a "mere" 4 minutes; so that's where things get interesting.

An MDM in a high-high-low accel profile can cover 22 million km in those 4 minutes; though for DDMs that danger zone is smaller, a 4 minute high-low accel profile covers 18 million km.
Inside that range though the SD has to have hit the escape button before they see the missile launch or they're going to get hit.

So closer than that and you're playing chicken, with whoever acts first surviving. If the SDs want to press into energy range they can't ever hit preemptively hit the button, so if the defenders launch inside those ranges the SDs will get hit. But if the SDs are just trying to psych the defenders into wasting missiles... At the highest velocity at which you can safely escape back into hyper you cover 10.7 million km in 4 minutes; but you can't just wait until they make it that far in and assume that means they didn't hit the button because they could have done so at any point along that path. Also their closing velocity against your ships (which have no built up base velocity relative to the attackers) means that their SDMs can be launched from further out, so you need to launch earlier if you want your missiles to hit them before they can successfully launch SDMs at you...

And the really sneaky thing is that IIRC we've also been told that you can abort a hyperjump much closer than 4 minutes out. So you can commit to the escape, then cancel it if the defenders haven't launched. OTOH if you do cancel you're then committed for at least another 4 minutes (and probably the full 16)


Once the attackers cross that 4 minute missile flight line it's a mental game to see who acts when and whether their actions pay off as desired.

They won't have SDMs, they will have DDMs. Whosmacallit turned the design over to the SLN for production, though presumably they still get paid a license fee.

Early in the thread it was pointed out that simply by withdrawing through the wormhole as a group, you close it for long enough to set up a good defense on the other side. Plus, IIRC the RMN brought LACs to the party, and I can guarantee those little buzzards are making like little tiny black holes in space. A few shrikes can make a nice hole in SLN ships trying to transit, methinks, and quite economically too.

My thought is that per captured wormhole you've likely got one ship playing spotlight operator telling everyone to stay the hell away, and the remaining ships are dark, simply monitoring the take on whatever recon shell they've got in place. It's not like the SLN can simply sail in, find everyone and start shooting. I look at as being something akin to sending a division of infantry into a valley that is completely covered by a large group of competent snipers covered by howitzers. The division might eventually win, but the cost will be ridiculously high before the snipers withdraw.

Not unless your takes force includes a bunch of capital ships or a freighter fleet. Cruisers and below won't do it unless you had scores or hundreds.

kzt wrote:They won't have SDMs, they will have DDMs. Whosmacallit turned the design over to the SLN for production, though presumably they still get paid a license fee.

Ok, yes there's a decent chance that "Technodyne" (really the MAlign) turned over Cataphract plans to the whole SLN not just provided some to equip Filaretta's Raging Justice fleet.
That changes when you have to fire to avoid effective counterfire but not so much the rest of the numbers.

And if the attacker launched Cataphracta then they've upped the stakes on this game of Chicjen, because if they hang around long enough to couch their missiles into terminal attqck possition the full up DDMs or MDMs have time to land counter punches. But if they hit the escape button then they're the ones throwing away missiles and depleting their magazines...

Jonathan_S wrote:And if the attacker launched Cataphracta then they've upped the stakes on this game of Chicjen, because if they hang around long enough to couch their missiles into terminal attqck possition the full up DDMs or MDMs have time to land counter punches. But if they hit the escape button then they're the ones throwing away missiles and depleting their magazines...

If they hyper out with 6 waves of 200 DDMs at 20Mkm and up those missiles will still arrive on target and will be just as accurate as if the SDs were still there, as the control loop time is greater than the time to impact. And a single DD or CL is going to have a very bad day.

Edit: The most effective way to deploy multi-drive missile salvos appears is to deliver them such that all salvos arrive in a narrow window. So you are not dealing with 6 salvos of 200 arriving 45 seconds apart, but with one salvo of 1200 arriving over perhaps 20 seconds.

Jonathan_S wrote:So closer than that and you're playing chicken, with whoever acts first surviving. If the SDs want to press into energy range they can't ever hit preemptively hit the button, so if the defenders launch inside those ranges the SDs will get hit. But if the SDs are just trying to psych the defenders into wasting missiles... At the highest velocity at which you can safely escape back into hyper you cover 10.7 million km in 4 minutes; but you can't just wait until they make it that far in and assume that means they didn't hit the button because they could have done so at any point along that path. Also their closing velocity against your ships (which have no built up base velocity relative to the attackers) means that their SDMs can be launched from further out, so you need to launch earlier if you want your missiles to hit them before they can successfully launch SDMs at you...

And the really sneaky thing is that IIRC we've also been told that you can abort a hyperjump much closer than 4 minutes out. So you can commit to the escape, then cancel it if the defenders haven't launched. OTOH if you do cancel you're then committed for at least another 4 minutes (and probably the full 16)


Once the attackers cross that 4 minute missile flight line it's a mental game to see who acts when and whether their actions pay off as desired.

You and I are interpriting the provided information differently. I understood it to say that it would take a total of 16 minutes to prepare to jump, not that you would "have" to jump at the very instant things became ready.

I would think that once the engines had powered up to a ready state, they could be held at the state for several minutes. Then once a jump became necessary, the ships would sync up and jump within seconds.

I give you a snippet from the end of chapter 21 in ART.

"So far, the exchange had used up two and a half minutes, leaving him just over three minutes from the hyper limit. He'd bought himself a little extra cushion with his instructions to Daniels, but even so, he had to make the call with in the next two minutes."

So it would seem that Filareta's jump engines were ready to go, and he could use them at any time in the next 2 minutes before he got to the hyper wall. How long the engines could be held at that state I don't know. But surely, they could be held in that state for long enough to pick a point to jump after the opponent's missiles had been launched.

I think with a repeated approach that started way beyond missile range, far enough to give your ships a chance to ready the jump engines, you could make a fairly close approach, close enough to tease out a missile launch from your opponent, and then jump.

How frequently you could make these approaches would depend on the number of ships available to you. If it was just your one battle group, maybe once in the morning and once again in the afternoon. If so, how long would it take to exhaust the defender's missiles? The defender is to far from home to get an endless supply of new missiles.

So this may be a reasonable tactic, a siege of sorts, of a lightly defended wormhole. It would take time but what's time if that's all it costs you to get at your opponent and eventually defeat them.

So then the defenders have to come up with a tactic to counter that kind of siege. But what? I keep saying mines but people don't seem to like that idea. But there has to be something.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And if the attacker launched Cataphracta then they've upped the stakes on this game of Chicjen, because if they hang around long enough to couch their missiles into terminal attqck possition the full up DDMs or MDMs have time to land counter punches. But if they hit the escape button then they're the ones throwing away missiles and depleting their magazines...

If they hyper out with 6 waves of 200 DDMs at 20Mkm and up those missiles will still arrive on target and will be just as accurate as if the SDs were still there, as the control loop time is greater than the time to impact. And a single DD or CL is going to have a very bad day.

The Cataphract only have a total continuously powered range of 16 million km. Are you suggesting that they're just as accurate if launched fully autonomous?
Or did you mean launched from such a range that the ships are 20 million in away when the Cataphracts begin their terminal attacks?

Sure there's a range partway along the missile's flight where the light speed lag prevents any further useful updates. You could time you jump out to that range.

Let's see how that works out. Assuming for simplicity that all ships are stationary and are 20 million km apart. The Cataphract need a 41 second coast phase to make it that distance. Let's furthter look at a single salvo and ignore anything the ship might learn by deeper pattern analysis of defenses again bet earlier salvos that could be pushed out "blind" and assume the last useful update can only be sent based on lightspeed data the ship sees and beams back. So I make that 112 second seconds from impact you see the last update for the target that you have time to send back to the missile. At that point to missile is already 183 seconds into overtime to flight and 7.8 million km downrange. Though this is probably far too pessimistic as the target has nearly five minutes of total missile flight to accelerate away and try to go dark or launch decoys before the tiny sensor on the missile is close enough to track the target's wedge. The more sensitive sensors on the launching ship can see than wedge attempting to reposition the ship in near realtime and update the missile on where to look. For that kind of data the last useful update moves way up to more like 220 seconds after launch and only 75 seconds till impact. So the missile is at 10.9 million km.

If we take the former number 183 seconds and assume the launching SD hit the escape button 4 minutes prior to that so they hyper out as their Cataphracts reach that point MDMs fired back can't reach them. In 183 seconds a high-high-coast 3s-high accel will only reach 14.9 of the 20 million km. However if we take the later number an MDM on a high-high-low accel needs only 223 of the 229 seconds to reach 20 million km. Still from that range, if you're willing to accept fairly crappy accuracy, you can launch and flee and likely still achieve some hits.

Thought guess the flip side we haven't discussed yet is that smaller ships can cycle their hyper drives significantly quicker. So if the targeted cruisers aren't inside a hyper limit, and happened to have their generators on standby, they could jump out in less time than it takes the Catalhract to cover 20 million km: now defenders couldn't keep all their hyperdrives on permanent standby. But if they take turns being the alert ship and the "off duty" ships are hiding then the alert ship probably could keep its hyper generator on standby throughput its alert rotation.

StealthSeeker wrote:

You and I are interpriting the provided information differently. I understood it to say that it would take a total of 16 minutes to prepare to jump, not that you would "have" to jump at the very instant things became ready.

I would think that once the engines had powered up to a ready state, they could be held at the state for several minutes. Then once a jump became necessary, the ships would sync up and jump within seconds..

I'm not going to try to quote it since I'm on my phone and the book isn't, but earlier in chapter 21 we see the actual instruction - to schedule a fleet "alpha transition for 20 seconds short of they [hyper] limit". And it follows up that the translation can be aborted up until the last fifty seconds. Thus gaining 3 minutes if you need them.
Combine that with RFC's infodump on Hyper Generator Modes of Operation which says the absolute minimum time for an SD to translate is 240 seconds and you can hopefully see where I got my belief that you couldn't 'hold' and anything under T minus 4 minutes.
If so then I thought it logical that an abort would at minimum knock you back to the 'Standby' 4 minute readiness state (though I wouldn't be surprised if it was even more delay than that)