cthia wrote:bluesqueak wrote:I could be wrong, but I thought the main problem with finding missiles, pods, etc was the considerable amount of stealth tech dedicated to making them hard to find. Scrap probably won't have any surviving stealth.
Mathematically, you should have an expanding sphere of metal radiating from the location of the battle - which would be a known factor. That expanding sphere would be acted upon by gravitational forces of the large system objects - also a known factor. Variables would be the initial acceleration created by the force of each initial explosion, plus any acceleration/velocity of each ship before it was destroyed.
So I think it would be possible to calculate a likely loci that's small enough for a mining ship's sensors. And once you've found some of the debris, you could maybe refine the variables, because you'd then know the final velocity and the distance from the battle.
I could easily be underestimating the difficulties, but that's where I'd start.
That's the best case scenario. There are going to be cases where the number of skirmishes inside the system are unknown. The location of said skirmishes are also unknown. The location of any explosions are also unknown. The relief force stumbled into a system where eight hundred ships fought it out. All but two are destroyed or are dying wrecks. There has been weeks to months of elapsed time since this battle raged all over the system.
Indeed, but then you've got the same problem that you have with finding high metal asteroids. That is, there's bits of stuff wandering all over your star system. Unlike finding high metal asteroids, however, you know this stuff is going to consist largely of ship-building materials.
Though if eight hundred ships duked it out, and only two survived, those two are going to know where they were. At least, if space ships are anything like ocean ships, they will, because if you don't know where you are, you have a very high chance of crashing into something. That's why RMN ships which arrive in a system with not much to do tend to update their charts. Sudden course changes are so embarrassing.
Okay, so given a worst-case assumption that no ship survived -
the two 'survivors' had damage to their fusion bottles, and blew up after the battle. Also presume that the people on the planet don't know where the various battles were fought - which means they don't have enough technology to spot a small fusion explosion. Which we know, from
Service of the Sword, could be seen from the planetary surface using Mk 1 Eyeball.
Even so, we're left with an argument that the technology available in the Honorverse, to ships which would specialise in finding chunks of space metal - is worse than NASA's, which has found lost metal objects orbiting the moon which were less than 1.5 cubic metres in size.
Current Earth based radar can find objects about 10 cubic centimetres at a distance of 2000 km. They've observed objects around 6 cubic mm. They can find this debris - the only question is whether it's worth money to find it.
For the relief force, the problems are going to be 'are there any survivors?', 'what do we do with the bodies?' and 'chart position, orbit and/or velocity.' So they're likely to want to find the ships as well - and they have very good sensor suites.
For the planet concerned, if they want space ships to visit them, they are going to need somebody to clear all that potentially dangerous junk out from between the hyper-limit and their planet. If they honestly haven't a single clue where the battle was fought, they're probably going to have to sweep the ecliptic between their planet and the hyper limit, because that's where most ships tend to come in.
And which class of ship is designed to find and retrieve chunks of space junk?
