Theemile wrote:We're Forgetting about Missile Toe - what if the DD in question has seeded the SLN formation with bunches of stealthed drones, and a couple Missiletoe drones. After mysteriously blowing up a couple BCs with the handful of MissileToe drones she actually has, the DD commander could flash the stealth systems of all the other drones she has stalking their formation, just enough to show there are enough drones to get "all yall" - even if those drones can't really do that (but the SLN doesn't have to know that....)
A Mistletoe drone carries basically one missile warhead, either a 'contact' nuke or a laserhead.
Even against SLN sensors it's damn unlikely that a Mantie armed recon drone can get into contact nuke range of a SLN BC. (Unless you're going for sidewall burning only you'd need to get the warhead to, and penetrate through, the sidewalls just 10 km off the BC's flanks before detonation. A down the throat shot would have more standoff but still you're talking about at the very most maybe a thousand km.
So I don't think that's plausible.
But you'd need a contact nuke to hope to kill a BC in one hit.
Now a Mistletoe with a laser head has a much better chance of slipping in, dead ahead or astern, within ~50,000 km. That would let them fire the laserhead directly into the armored, but not sidewall protected, hammerhead. That's not going to kill a BC but it might lame it a bit.
What I don't know is if they're good, and accurate, enough to go for a deliberate golden BB. If you could pull it off probably the most devastating single laserhead strike would be to position the drone out very high (or low) but still ahead of the BC. From that spot there's a narrow angle that just clears the wedge yet skims past the armored forward hammerhead to hit the lightly armored ventral (or dorsal) surface and better yet the aft impeller nodes.
The golden BB would be a shot that pithed enough nodes and impeller rooms to destabilize and drop the aft rings. That'd drastically cut the BC's acceleration. (So it's consorts have to decide whether the abandon it, or to slow to a crawl to keep their defensive umbrella covering it)