Eridani Edict Violation of the most Dismissive Kind...

I'm still looking for a response regarding any contingency plans, in light of current MAlign capability, are reasonable yet effective enough to ensure survivability.

What would be your designated survivor protocols?

munroburton wrote:

cthia wrote:I thought the missions were completed by dropping virtually undetectable probes into the system then coming back later to get a report. The same tactic the RMN always used. I'll have to have a reread since you are implying that I am mistaken, and I doubt that you're leading me astray.


Be careful what you ask for.

And I did ask to be corrected if I was wrong.

I do recall Manty ships avoiding detection in storyline. But I thought it was just as much a factor of distance, luck, inferior Havenite hardware and a non-Foraker-like entity at tactical. I don't equate being out of range with being invisible.

A question that jumps to my front burner now...

How good is the MAlign's detection of Manty wedges?

I'm looking at it right now in AAC.

"As you know, we planned and executed a feint attack on the Suarez system three weeks ago. We sent in scouting destroyers, then, after a couple of days, sent in Admiral Truman's carrier squadron, escorted by a single squadron of battlecruisers and one of heavy cruisers."

They did use their unmanned platforms extensively. But they have to keep someone nearby to operate the platforms by remote.

And from Chapter 57,

"What's the latest on our visitors?" Admiral Alessandra Giovanni asked.
"Pretty much unchanged, Ma'am." Commander Ewan MacNaughton replied. "Their starships are still stooging around outside the hyper limit, but their platforms are dancing all over the damned place... and making sure we know it."

As for MAlign's ability to detect stealthed RMN ships - I may be wrong, but I think during Oyster Bay's recon phase, they had a close call or two thanks to enemy training maneuvers they couldn't keep track of. It's hard to find textev for this, because the OB operation takes place over the course of several books.

So far, when both are operating under full stealth, we know the spider ship is more likely to detect the impeller ship first. But not with enough separation to avoid a potentially unfavourable tactical situation.

I've searched and searched and caught no joy, but I could have sworn that there is a scene where the RMN did NOT leave a ship behind to play station keeping on the platforms. I distinctively remember some CO, after reentering said system, saying something akin to "Let's contact the drones to see how busy our friends have been."

I distinctly remember wondering what kept the drones out of trouble and decided that it must be preprogrammed instructions to keep a certain distance.

cthia wrote:I've searched and searched and caught no joy, but I could have sworn that there is a scene where the RMN did NOT leave a ship behind to play station keeping on the platforms. I distinctively remember some CO, after reentering said system, saying something akin to "Let's contact the drones to see how busy our friends have been."

I distinctly remember wondering what kept the drones out of trouble and decided that it must be preprogrammed instructions to keep a certain distance.

That scene would be in one of the Shadow books. When four RMN destroyers showed up at New Tuscany and spotted Byng's battlecruiser task group, they deployed a recon network.

After Byng blew away the three DDs which went into New Tuscany orbit, the fourth one ran away to fetch Tenth Fleet. It left the recon drones in stand-by mode, distant from the Solarians.

The crucial difference is, the Havenites knew to look for them and were looking - canned programs wouldn't work. Byng? Pah! As blind as a deaf bat in a rave.

Or possibly in SVW - when the Havenites were collecting data from their Argus network.

munroburton wrote:That scene would be in one of the Shadow books. When four RMN destroyers showed up at New Tuscany and spotted Byng's battlecruiser task group, they deployed a recon network.

After Byng blew away the three DDs which went into New Tuscany orbit, the fourth one ran away to fetch Tenth Fleet. It left the recon drones in stand-by mode, distant from the Solarians.

The crucial difference is, the Havenites knew to look for them and were looking - canned programs wouldn't work. Byng? Pah! As blind as a deaf bat in a rave.

Or there was a slightly similar situation when, in Shadow of Saganami, they use a recon drone deployed from a 'borrowed' freighter to scout the Monica system. The freighter was in system the whole time, but had no communications with the drone after kicking it loose on the inbound leg.
The ghost rider drone was following a preprogrammed scouting mission through the system and then piloting itself back to a pre-planned rendezvous point with the now outbound freighter.

Clearly, against people who don't know its capabilities and have no particular reason to suspect a recon drone is present, a ghost rider drone running only passive sensors and not broadcasting anything is very hard to accidentally stumble upon.

Jonathan_S wrote:

munroburton wrote:That scene would be in one of the Shadow books. When four RMN destroyers showed up at New Tuscany and spotted Byng's battlecruiser task group, they deployed a recon network.

After Byng blew away the three DDs which went into New Tuscany orbit, the fourth one ran away to fetch Tenth Fleet. It left the recon drones in stand-by mode, distant from the Solarians.

The crucial difference is, the Havenites knew to look for them and were looking - canned programs wouldn't work. Byng? Pah! As blind as a deaf bat in a rave.

Or there was a slightly similar situation when, in Shadow of Saganami, they use a recon drone deployed from a 'borrowed' freighter to scout the Monica system. The freighter was in system the whole time, but had no communications with the drone after kicking it loose on the inbound leg.
The ghost rider drone was following a preprogrammed scouting mission through the system and then piloting itself back to a pre-planned rendezvous point with the now outbound freighter.

Clearly, against people who don't know its capabilities and have no particular reason to suspect a recon drone is present, a ghost rider drone running only passive sensors and not broadcasting anything is very hard to accidentally stumble upon.

Aww, understood.

A technical question. It seems feasible that a drone could be forced way off course by sudden incidental maneuvering of enemy forces. What contingency plans would a drone conceivably take? It can't stop on a dime once launched, or how would it regain momentum?

Simply all I can figure out are emergency maneuvers involving continuous vector changes that could conceivably send it way out of position having to recover.

And can it always recover? My limited tech can conceive of situations where it may not be able to recover. A drone's endurance isn't infinite and if persistent cause for emergency maneuverings endlessly persist could kill its endurance, no?

Which begets another question. If a drone's endurance is tested and it nears failing, would it self-destruct?

cthia wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:in Shadow of Saganami, they use a recon drone deployed from a 'borrowed' freighter to scout the Monica system. The freighter was in system the whole time, but had no communications with the drone after kicking it loose on the inbound leg.
The ghost rider drone was following a preprogrammed scouting mission through the system and then piloting itself back to a pre-planned rendezvous point with the now outbound freighter.

Clearly, against people who don't know its capabilities and have no particular reason to suspect a recon drone is present, a ghost rider drone running only passive sensors and not broadcasting anything is very hard to accidentally stumble upon.

Aww, understood.

A technical question. It seems feasible that a drone could be forced way off course by sudden incidental maneuvering of enemy forces. What contingency plans would a drone conceivably take? It can't stop on a dime once launched, or how would it regain momentum?

Simply all I can figure out are emergency maneuvers involving continuous vector changes that could conceivably send it way out of position having to recover.

And can it always recover? My limited tech can conceive of situations where it may not be able to recover. A drone's endurance isn't infinite and if persistent cause for emergency maneuverings endlessly persist could kill its endurance, no?

Which begets another question. If a drone's endurance is tested and it nears failing, would it self-destruct?

Self-destructing if you run out of endurance seems like a good practice - you wouldn't want someone to capture and reverse engineer your drone -- however unlikely that is.

I don't recall offhand if we were tole the endurance of a Ghost Rider recon drone, but depending on it's use profile it seems to be good for somewhere between a day and several weeks (staying at low power passively observing presumably takes far less power than swanning around the system with full stealth systems at 5000 gees)

However they're stealthy enough that at moderate range (say more than 1-2 million km from an enemy) they can't be detected even while accelerating at up to the aforementioned 5000 gees (and hints are that they're capable of 10,000 gees, flat out, if they don't care about being tracked)

A recon drone without the microfusion plant of a Ghost Rider would have vastly less endurance. In a high speed closing engagement they don't even seem to be able to circle back and follow an enemy force after an initial high speed recon pass. (Which, I'm presuming, is why we saw so much less use of them before Ghost Rider)

But the drone that was kicked out to survey Monica didn't (as far as I can see) have its drive locked down - so it wasn't on a purely ballistic course or even restricted to solely reaction thrusters.

So if it spotted something it needed to divert away from it'd easily be able to do so using fairly low accelerations of say 50 - 100 gees (which are still vastly higher than any powered vehicle yet built here on Earth) which could trivially be hidden from any plausible observer.

It should then have plenty of reserve acceleration to get back on it's preprogrammed route and still make rendezvous on schedule.

Jonathan_S wrote:.

I don't recall offhand if we were tole the endurance of a Ghost Rider recon drone, but depending on it's use profile it seems to be good for somewhere between a day and several weeks (staying at low power passively observing presumably takes far less power than swanning around the system with full stealth systems at 5000 gees)

As far as I know we've never been told the maximum endurance, but we know it is at least as long as it takes Tristram to get into hyper, reach Spindle, and for 10th Fleet to return to New Tuscany, at which point the fleet is able to receive up to date intelligence from the drones that were left behind after the three Roland-class ships were destroyed by the SLN.

Andy33 wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:.

I don't recall offhand if we were tole the endurance of a Ghost Rider recon drone, but depending on it's use profile it seems to be good for somewhere between a day and several weeks (staying at low power passively observing presumably takes far less power than swanning around the system with full stealth systems at 5000 gees)

As far as I know we've never been told the maximum endurance, but we know it is at least as long as it takes Tristram to get into hyper, reach Spindle, and for 10th Fleet to return to New Tuscany, at which point the fleet is able to receive up to date intelligence from the drones that were left behind after the three Roland-class ships were destroyed by the SLN.

Yep, that was the "several weeks" scenario I was thinking of. Of course they were just floating there passively listening, so the power draw was probably quite low.


Though, since fusion plants in the Honorverse don't seem to have their efficiency scale linearly down to relatively low power levels, I wonder if they found room in the Ghost Rider drones to also pack in a pile of plasma capacitors. For long duration surveillance missions that'd let them operate the reactor only sporadically, but at high efficiency (high output), to rapidly recharge the capacitors.
I guess it would depend on how much volume you'd have to devote to those capacitors* and how important they view long duration low power surveillance. (in other words what's the opportunity costs of including them vs how valuable they'd be)


And remember you need enough capacitors to not just run the drone also to provide the significant restart power to fire the reactor back up

Andy33 wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:.

I don't recall offhand if we were tole the endurance of a Ghost Rider recon drone, but depending on it's use profile it seems to be good for somewhere between a day and several weeks (staying at low power passively observing presumably takes far less power than swanning around the system with full stealth systems at 5000 gees)

As far as I know we've never been told the maximum endurance, but we know it is at least as long as it takes Tristram to get into hyper, reach Spindle, and for 10th Fleet to return to New Tuscany, at which point the fleet is able to receive up to date intelligence from the drones that were left behind after the three Roland-class ships were destroyed by the SLN.

Jonathan_S wrote:Yep, that was the "several weeks" scenario I was thinking of. Of course they were just floating there passively listening, so the power draw was probably quite low.


Though, since fusion plants in the Honorverse don't seem to have their efficiency scale linearly down to relatively low power levels, I wonder if they found room in the Ghost Rider drones to also pack in a pile of plasma capacitors. For long duration surveillance missions that'd let them operate the reactor only sporadically, but at high efficiency (high output), to rapidly recharge the capacitors.
I guess it would depend on how much volume you'd have to devote to those capacitors* and how important they view long duration low power surveillance. (in other words what's the opportunity costs of including them vs how valuable they'd be)


And remember you need enough capacitors to not just run the drone also to provide the significant restart power to fire the reactor back up

Wouldn't that 'several weeks' endurance rating be at nominal power? Akin to the battery life of laptops given at nominal power which doesn't include the screen brightness dialed all the way up, surfing, game playing, apps in the background, all simultaneously. Full power draw.

I was considering scenarios like the conditions a drone would be up against if they were dropped in a system where wargames were about to take place and ships are being sent all over the place. Friendlies hypering in all of the time. LACs all over the place.

IOW, a Ghost Rider drone finding itself in a hornet's nest. Probably rare but certainly not out of the question. Which would probably decrease those "weeks" to days.

"Oh my, they didn't program me for this!"

As a last resort contingency, I imagine they are programmed to eat a cyanide capsule. LOL

cthia wrote:

Andy33 wrote:As far as I know we've never been told the maximum endurance, but we know it is at least as long as it takes Tristram to get into hyper, reach Spindle, and for 10th Fleet to return to New Tuscany, at which point the fleet is able to receive up to date intelligence from the drones that were left behind after the three Roland-class ships were destroyed by the SLN.

Jonathan_S wrote:Yep, that was the "several weeks" scenario I was thinking of. Of course they were just floating there passively listening, so the power draw was probably quite low.


Though, since fusion plants in the Honorverse don't seem to have their efficiency scale linearly down to relatively low power levels, I wonder if they found room in the Ghost Rider drones to also pack in a pile of plasma capacitors. For long duration surveillance missions that'd let them operate the reactor only sporadically, but at high efficiency (high output), to rapidly recharge the capacitors.
I guess it would depend on how much volume you'd have to devote to those capacitors* and how important they view long duration low power surveillance. (in other words what's the opportunity costs of including them vs how valuable they'd be)


And remember you need enough capacitors to not just run the drone also to provide the significant restart power to fire the reactor back up

Wouldn't that 'several weeks' endurance rating be at nominal power? Akin to the battery life of laptops given at nominal power which doesn't include the screen brightness dialed all the way up, surfing, game playing, apps in the background, all simultaneously. Full power draw.

I was considering scenarios like the conditions a drone would be up against if they were dropped in a system where wargames were about to take place and ships are being sent all over the place. Friendlies hypering in all of the time. LACs all over the place.

IOW, a Ghost Rider drone finding itself in a hornet's nest. Probably rare but certainly not out of the question. Which would probably decrease those "weeks" to days.

"Oh my, they didn't program me for this!"

We have been told that a missile pod ( using the same or a similar reactor) can run in "System Defense" mode (ie: active reactor, station keeping and coms) for roughly a month before needing a refuel, and can run the tractor for a "tactical lifespan" of more than a day and less than a week ( roughly 60-120 hrs).

I would guess that the month is probably the lowest power setting for the reactor, generating "a bit" more power than just what was needed for basic functions; which would track accordingly with a drone passively listening outsystem, occasionally pinging it's brethren with updates.

On the other end, 4 or so days endurance at the highest power levels ( stealth systems, high speed wedge) tracks with the Copenhagen's drone's flight plan, so is probably close to the other end of reactor endurance at high power levels.

Don't forget, high speed for a Ghost Rider drone is ~5000 GS, or ~ 10x what an opposing ship can pull, and has stealth systems that make them invisible inside of 1 million Km even to Silly and Havenite systems. So any evasive maneuvers would be short, and probably factored into the spare energy budgeted in any flight plan.