Star Knight wrote:Hello RFC
Sorry to hear about your health. Hope you get better soon.
Please don’t feel obligated to reply … and I hate to be that guy but…
Personally I think the arguments for why it is difficult to destroy a planet with a ship and an active wedge are sound.
Although I have to wonder about reaction times, if someone fires off the wedge in orbit, how fast can anyone do something about it? Probably wouldn’t result in an extinction level event but still…
Thinking back to OBS, Sirius was sitting in orbit with hot impellers if I’m not mistaken.
Anyway, I’m uncertain about anything without wedges (be it ballistic missiles or sand). Confused actually.
You write that they would most likely be detected in time by radar.
Fair enough I suppose but as I said before, ‘you wont find it because you don’t look for it’
Prominent example, during the Battle of Cerberus Honor manage to get into energy range without detection by using reaction thrusters.
Admittedly she wasn’t up against the most competent Haven had to offer at this point but she was still up against a squadron cleared for action.
Of course there is stealth and all, but if they can get within 730.00km before detection, its difficult to imagine that they can detect a anything moving at 1 billion kmh in time.
Also this is straight from Echos of Honor:
On the scale to which God built star systems, active sensors had a limited range at the best of times. Officially, most navies normally monitored a million-kilometer bubble with their search radar. In fact, most sensor techs—even in the RMN—didn't bother with active sensors at all at ranges much above a half-million kilometers. There was no real point, since getting a useful return off anything much smaller than a superdreadnought was exceedingly difficult at greater ranges.
I guess this quote specifically refers to ship systems, but I guess actives search radars in star systems wont be much better?
Thing here is, an object moving at .7c will need just 4.8 seconds to travel one million kilometers (210k kps). You need and awful lot of sensor platforms to set up some kind of detection sphere around your inner solar system to do something about it.
In fact if you want to give Earth 5 minute reaction window youll need to create a detection sphere with a radius of 300sec * 210k kps = 63 mil km. Such a sphere has a surface of almost 50 billion km² while at optimal (impossible) placing a detection bubble with 1 mil km radius will cover a ‘surface’ area of 12 mil km². That would translate to 4.000 radar platforms.
And then there is the question about what to do with the signal. It travels also only a lightspeed, by the time the alert message reaches anyone the bogey wont be far behind.
So I guess, even if system radars are much more capable than shipborne ones it makes a lot of sense why everyone just looks for wedges.
And didn’t we actually have a similar situation before OysterBay? The MAN got an awful lot of hardware into the inner system without detection. Of course the equipment was all shielded as hell and was moving rather slowly, but against an unsuspecting opponent who doesn’t deploy a gazillion sensor platforms ?
Another angle with underlines the issue IMO is Fourth Yeltsin and Honors fears about cee fractional bombardment of Grayson infrastructure. The only reason shes going out to meet Thurston is because 'we don’t have a choice […] if we don't go to meet them, and in that case they can use cee-fractional missile strikes to take us all out.’
And after the first engagement she was willing to die because of it: ‘If she wants to, she can carry out a long-range cee-fractional bombardment of Grayson, and we can't stop her.’
I’d think that if an entire Battle Squadron at full alert isnt enough to defend against cee fractional (missile/anything) strikes whatever sort of system traffic police will have a hard time as well.
Another example of this I can think of is Second Yeltsin.
BatDiv17 attacked Thunder of God from over a 100 mill km out and the battlecruisers ‘radar had a maximum range against such small targets of just over a half million kilometers, and that was less than five seconds at their velocity.’
Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t think this has changed significantly.
On the other hand, I guess one can make the argument that someone will notice a million ton on sand hitting crap on the way somehow. I don’t know how that would work but ok. Wont work for missiles though.
I think you missed the critical part of the paragraph in which radar appears.
runsforcelery wrote:The problem with that sort of attack is that the cloud of projectiles (or gravel or sand or whatever) would be pretty damned noticeable as it made its way towards the planet. I’m sure there’d be all sorts of micro collisions which at relativistic speeds would be pretty obvious. It would also represent a fairly easy to see radar target, so it would almost certainly be detected well short of its target unless its target is so strapped for any sort of space infrastructure that there wouldn’t be any reason to use such a “launch and leave” weapon against it in the first place. And once it’s spotted, a planet with any impeller drive starships — or even purely intrasystem craft — could easily use those vessels’ impeller wedges to “sweep up” the attack cloud.
The "radar target" aspect is purely secondary to what would be apparent from passive sensors as your cloud of whatever came screeching across the system leaving a "wake" of highly excited particles. It's true that without the stealth capabilities built into Honorverse warships, a naked cloud of debris is going to be a
very obvious radar target, which is what I meant in the paragraph above. That's not going to be the
primary way in which such an attack would be detected;
that's going to rely on your passive sensors and the fact that to do the deed the cloud of debris needs to be moving at a speed which is going to create the "wake" I mentioned above. Although, to be fair, it would probably be more accurate to call it a "bow wave" than a "wake." As for detection ranges and the time loop available for you to do anything about it, your "detection zone" is probably light-hours across against that stellar phenomenon. Assume that your whatever particles are moving at 80% of lightspeed and the range at which the unexplained chain of what look an awful like fusion reactions ripping straight towards an intersection with your planet is detected at only 45 light-minutes, you have over 56 minutes to do something about them, and most developed systems have space stations and most space stations have standby tugs — like the ones attempting to protect Sphinx against the debris fall from Oyster Bay. The main problem the freighter trying to protect Sphinx had was that it had to chase debris that was already headed towards the planet. It couldn't pre-position itself and interpose before scatter had begun turning the debris cloud into a much larger target. It had to physically fly through the debris
coming in from above and to the side rather than interposing itself on the pre-plotted vector of a cloud of whatever.
In a complete surprise attack, you
might have a star system so asleep at the switch that it wouldn't notice the newest, most glaring astronomical phenomenon in its vicinity, but that's not going to happen with a well-developed star system like Old Terra or Manticore, which I understood to have been mentioned specifically as targets. If you want to kill everybody on a planet that
doesn't have the sort of infrastructure needed to see something like this coming, then there are far simpler and less laborious ways you could go about it. You don't need an elephant rifle to shoot baby chicks.
I believe you referenced Oyster Bay, as well. By comparison to the cloud of micro projectiles needed to do the job, the Oyster Bay weapons were a far smaller target. Nobody was looking for them on radar, and it wouldn't have mattered a great deal if they were, given the stealth features built into them and the limited — as you point out — reaction time, even with the FTL com, far less with light-speed limited communications. As for the ships sneaking around the system, they were moving at a very low speed — far from any relativistic velocities — using a drive technology no one had ever heard about and employing the best active and passive stealth systems in the galaxy. They were also very carefully avoiding any heavily traveled areas of the star system. I sort of doubt that a cloud of gravel or ball bearings moving at 80% of light-speed is going to be equipped with similar stealth capabilities.
Honor is worried about cee-fractional bombardments in her defense of Yeltsin because the attack platforms could be spread widely enough to create too many attack vectors for
her platforms to intercept. In addition, at that time Yeltsin's space infrastructure — including its communications systems, its basic sensors, and its defensive capabilities — remained distinctly pre-Alliance. The
fleet units in the Yeltsin system work Grayson's primary defense; the sort of systemic defenses needed to handle a deliberate bombardment of potentially many hundreds of missiles in a carefully sequenced attack coming in from a 270° sphere of space simply didn't exist outside Honor's ships, and Honor's ships had already been shot to crap. Not only that, she didn't have a whole huge bunch of them.
As for ships with hot nodes and their ability to rush an attack, I'm pretty sure that I posted here on the forum quite some time ago the stages and time requirements for going from standby to movement under impeller wedge.
Sirus wasn't able to begin acceleration immediately even though her nodes were hot. There would have been plenty of time for Honor to intercept the ship
with weapons fire before her wedge came up or she was able to attack the planet. Not only that, but until her tactical people told her that the freighter's nodes were hot, she had every reason to believe that they weren't — that they were at the lower "cold" level readiness required by standard interstellar regulations. The fact that they weren't represented another failure on Pavel Young's part. The confused situation where sovereignty of the Basilisk System was concerned meant there was a certain . . . confusion about exactly who had the authority — and right — to
enforce those standard interstellar regulations, and Honor was already beginning to suspect that the situation was much more complex than she'd originally thought. That's why she chose to ponder on what the hot nodes might portend rather than directly confronting
Sirus' skipper over them. At any rate, the real point here is that no ship in orbit around a sovereign planet is going to have its nodes ready for instant use without radiating one hell of the gravitic signature. And if it doesn't already have its wedge ready for instant use, there will be a
significant window in which it will be fairly obvious to any close-range sensor — like the kinds of sensors used by traffic control systems — long before the ship begins moving under impeller drive.
In short, I stand by what I said. And I'm with Duckk when it comes to an inability to understand the fascination with killing habitable planets. Even most totally-round-the-bend, revenge-seeking, frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic would probably settle for taking out New York City or Old Chicago. Killing an entire planet to make a point certainly wouldn't be beyond some people, but I strongly suspect that the number of people prepared to undertake something that would be the next best thing to vanishingly small. Sure, somebody
could try it, and a story about how he was thwarted (or, unlikely though I may think it is, succeeded) would probably be interesting. For most people in the Honorverse, however, the truth is that they'd be far more likely to be struck and killed by lightning on a sunny day than to find themselves on a planet blotted from the face of the cosmos by a cloud of relativistic pebbles.
Just saying.
