Eridani Edict Violation of the most Dismissive Kind...

cthia wrote:Do realize the operational nature of these things.

You mean the six-month lead time to get into position without detection?

That 100G acceleration limit is going to make Spider Drives severely limited in any sort of coordinated operation with conventional impeller-drive ships difficult.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:Do realize the operational nature of these things.

You mean the six-month lead time to get into position without detection?

That 100G acceleration limit is going to make Spider Drives severely limited in any sort of coordinated operation with conventional impeller-drive ships difficult.

You are severely limiting the scope of "coordinated." As a distraction, my good fellow. As a distraction.

Also, the MAlign has been sitting and watching Manty doctrine. How will the Manties respond to certain criteria? "I can see GA ships being "lured" to the waiting Spiders," said the flies.

If the Malign manage to get enough Spiders in system and are methodically casting a deceptive and surprising web, then they may not need the acceleration. Remember what happened to Courvosier? You are forgetting that the MAlign will not be like silly Sollies. They will have an Operational Doctrine. It is a tactic that will allow the Malign to get inside of the longer reach of GA ships. If they haven't duplicated their longer reach with conventional missiles by then.

The pack mentality of the subs in WWII didn't have the acceleration either. What they had was supporting doctrine -- tactics and coordination and the element of surprise. And they didn't have supporting naval ships like the MAN will.

You are not being realistic. Or willing to give Weber credit for not delivering another order of meat for the grinder, as is the unworthy Sollies.

Unlike you, I don't think fighting the MA will be business as usual.

Wait! It already isn't business as usual.

I also note that while spider drives are relatively slow, if they wait in hyper they can trivially outpace any ship crawling along inside the hyper limit. If the Manties do the usual thing of taking a least time course out of the hyper limit, they can be waiting in hyper ready to vaporize the ships. They even generally use sails for crossing the hyper limit.

Although assuming the Manties think one step ahead, they'll start choosing less predictable courses, but if you have a reasonably constant stream of ships hypering up that could give the spiders enough accurate information to pounce anyway. Also if there hyperdrives are ready to hop up a band while the Manty drives are on cooldown they could still get off a wave of missiles before hoping out. And make the Manties waste theirs.

Also these tactics could be used by the Sollies, but there would be a decent chance a random dispatch boat or frieghter would notice the massive fleet of dreadnoughts prowling around in the Alpha band.

quite possibly a cat wrote:I also note that while spider drives are relatively slow, if they wait in hyper they can trivially outpace any ship crawling along inside the hyper limit. If the Manties do the usual thing of taking a least time course out of the hyper limit, they can be waiting in hyper ready to vaporize the ships. They even generally use sails for crossing the hyper limit.

Although assuming the Manties think one step ahead, they'll start choosing less predictable courses, but if you have a reasonably constant stream of ships hypering up that could give the spiders enough accurate information to pounce anyway. Also if there hyperdrives are ready to hop up a band while the Manty drives are on cooldown they could still get off a wave of missiles before hoping out. And make the Manties waste theirs.

Also these tactics could be used by the Sollies, but there would be a decent chance a random dispatch boat or frieghter would notice the massive fleet of dreadnoughts prowling around in the Alpha band.

If the Manties figure out the wait tactic all they have to do is deliberately use less logical targets. Remember talking about pulling some of the Cutworm targets out of a hat?

Also, once they figure out how to really locate and follow a trace (we know they've spotted traces) which should not take all that long with top scientists working on the problem, they should be able to get a good handle on the whole thing.

Have a stealth destroyer following task forces. If they are attacked by spider drive ships, wait and follow the ships home.
First time, if you can get close while stealthed, damage one. Having a spider drive would really push things along.

ldwechsler wrote:
If the Manties figure out the wait tactic all they have to do is deliberately use less logical targets. Remember talking about pulling some of the Cutworm targets out of a hat?

Ah that's the beauty of hovering in hyperspace, and waiting for them to pop over. You sit "over" the location of their main fleet. Its not like anyone carefully scouts the area over the hyper limit. Indeed, fleets waiting to mousetrap attackers routinely get missed.

You'd need to be sneaky to get observer ships in though, but Manticore is so nice to allow news ships.

ldwechsler wrote:Also, once they figure out how to really locate and follow a trace (we know they've spotted traces) which should not take all that long with top scientists working on the problem, they should be able to get a good handle on the whole thing.

They don't actually know how to make a spider drive, so they can't generate anything to test their theories. Science involves testing theories. You can't learn about something if you can observe and experiment on it.

Have a stealth destroyer following task forces. If they are attacked by spider drive ships, wait and follow the ships home.

Any destroyer close enough to follow a spider drive ship, is close enough to be detected quite easily.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:Do realize the operational nature of these things.

You mean the six-month lead time to get into position without detection?

That 100G acceleration limit is going to make Spider Drives severely limited in any sort of coordinated operation with conventional impeller-drive ships difficult.

To be fair you only need that 6+ month lead time when infiltrating systems covered by what is probably some of the very best long range grav sensors built by man.

Even with the SKM I don't think they can affort to quickly outfit every one of their worlds with the km sized arrays of grav sensors that cover Manticore. So with good intel on the target system you could drop out of hyper maybe a lightweek out. And against a system with no better sensors that shipboard ones in the inner system maybe just a couple times further out than the hyper limit.


(Or you can always got for, IIRC kzt's approach, and alert the system by spamming it with so many hyper exit signals that they can't possible chase down all of them to find the Spiders. Just a couple normal hyper capable ships would be plenty to bounce around the periphery beyond the limit entering and exiting hyper at random; and then leave. And since entering hyper doesn't leave a signature...)

A limitation, but not always a 6 month delay one.

Jonathan_S wrote:To be fair you only need that 6+ month lead time when infiltrating systems covered by what is probably some of the very best long range grav sensors built by man.

Even with the SKM I don't think they can affort to quickly outfit every one of their worlds with the km sized arrays of grav sensors that cover Manticore. So with good intel on the target system you could drop out of hyper maybe a lightweek out. And against a system with no better sensors that shipboard ones in the inner system maybe just a couple times further out than the hyper limit.


(Or you can always got for, IIRC kzt's approach, and alert the system by spamming it with so many hyper exit signals that they can't possible chase down all of them to find the Spiders. Just a couple normal hyper capable ships would be plenty to bounce around the periphery beyond the limit entering and exiting hyper at random; and then leave. And since entering hyper doesn't leave a signature...)

A limitation, but not always a 6 month delay one.

Or you can use my option. use a normal freighter, and drop off the Gtorps on the way in on courses to dwaddle for awhile, then to attack several months out. Stop the freighter by the planet, buy/sell whatever, then leave. In July, or August, or what-eber the Gtorps attack from a random vector - and no one knows who attacked them.

Jonathan_S wrote:
(Or you can always got for, IIRC kzt's approach, and alert the system by spamming it with so many hyper exit signals that they can't possible chase down all of them to find the Spiders. Just a couple normal hyper capable ships would be plenty to bounce around the periphery beyond the limit entering and exiting hyper at random; and then leave. And since entering hyper doesn't leave a signature...)

If I was going to do that approach, I'd stick ambushes on the least time course to the footprints. See how many response teams you could pop before they notice. Then you can start the real swarming.

Plus hyperspace is a crap place for Manticore to fight anyway. You can dodge those missile waves if you have your hyperdrive ready to start with.

The problem the defender has is ‘which of these 60 signatures is real?’ And then ‘if it is real and has a dozen invisible ships loaded with hundreds of missile pods and dozens of graser torps, what will that do to my response force if they just wait for them?’

quite possibly a cat wrote:If I was going to do that approach, I'd stick ambushes on the least time course to the footprints. See how many response teams you could pop before they notice. Then you can start the real swarming.

Plus hyperspace is a crap place for Manticore to fight anyway. You can dodge those missile waves if you have your hyperdrive ready to start with.

Sure ambushing responders can be a nice touch

Though whether you can hyper away from missiles seems to depend on the missile flight time. I'm assuming that even with the hyper generator in standby sustaining mode that the time from initiate to a hyper band change is the same as from fully powered-up standby in n-space into hyper.

That other advantage of fighting Manticore in hyper is their FTL transmissions become less FTL. (They travel at speed of light of next higher band, so the ratio between the adjacent bands' speed of light dictates how FTL the signal is in your band). Alpha to Beta just 12.37c, Beta to Gamma a pittiful 1.92c, then 1.47c, 1.32c, etc. Though that primarily impacts the very long ranger performance of Apollo, and as you pointed out at extended range targets can just skip away to another band.


Anyway -- hyper delay. We're told that for an 8 million ton SD that interval is 4 minutes; from hitting "go" until the generator's spun up and its gone. A Lenny Det reportedly being noticeably larger should take even longer; but for the sake of number let's use that SD time.

In 4 minutes an Mantie MDM can cover just over 22.7 million km[1], so you'd need to be a bit further out that that to be able to evade, even with a computer triggering the generator the instant it sees missile launch. Now if you correctly anticipate the missile launch you can cheat that by hitting go before seeing missiles fly - but while you could hit abort at the last second it'd take way more than 4 minutes before you could leave again -- so better to just jump out and try to require later.

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[1] Best flight profile over that shorter time is the 3 drives at full-full-half power (120s at 92000 gees and 120 more at 46000 gees which results in 22.720,320 km in that 4 minutes.