PeterZ wrote:Indeed the torps coasted, but Silver Bullet was spider driven into position after they were jettisoned from the Kolikainos freighter in Beowulf. This bit suggests that the spider does a a gravatic signature. It is simply very weak.
Armed Neo-Bob wrote:The thing about this is, yes it is faint, but they brought the drives up in a region well inside of the sensor shell; no one was looking for it; the ship making the drop was a known "friendly"; and their stealth is very good. But "faint" is neither "undetectable" nor "invisible"--and one of the main reasons they were never deployed to Trevor's Star is that the Malign knows that Manticoran sensors are better than theirs.
They couldn't take the risk that the Manties could figure out a means of detecting them, and blow all their training cadre out of space. In particular, the Ghost Rider deployed drones are as good or better than the SLN's cruisers' ship-board sensors--and by now, the Malign knows it. Get a drone close to a spider, and it can detect it--and the spider ship may not be able to detect the drone.
If spider-ships were really that dangerous, the Detweilers' revenge for Daddy would have been in Manticore, not Beowulf. I am sure they are tracking the (by SL standards) astonishing pace of recovery.
Another thought: I don't think the text has shown them to have completed any of the Lennies. So, so far, using them may not be on the table --yet.
Of course, if RFC didn't intend to use them . . . .
Regards,
Rob
PeterZ wrote:Agreed. The underlying point was that SDPs are not a priority until spider drive can be detected at sufficient ranges. The current number of deployed SDPs by the GA is seen as sufficient by their leadership. Once detection ranges are quantified, the risk of a spider ship can be more accurately assessed. At that point, build either more screening cruisers/DDs or SDPs for the battle fleets to best address the risk. I am assuming LACs will remain close in for missile support.
In the mean time build cruisers to patrol and escort merchies as those ex-FF BCs begin to find private buyers. Buyers that will somehow manage to lose those ships to pirates.
A thought. The MAN has the Ghost class ship. I am guessing these are bigger than GA LACs but smaller than pre-Roland DDs. Call it a frigate. If the GA develops their own spiders, would it make sense to do a stealth LAC? Something that works with a carrier to either search out enemy spider drives or sneak past defenses.
We know that the graser torpedoes (at least the ones targeted on Hephaestus) were actively using their spider drives as they closed, and the spider drive can be detected, although it is very difficult to do so:
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.Shadow of Victory, Chapter 36 wrote:“What the fuck?”
Jansen Mandrapilias, third officer of the liquid gas tanker Bernike, looked up sharply from the shipping manifest he’d been updating for their arrival at the Draco Seven orbital refinery. At the moment, Bernike was accelerating steadily away from Hephaestus, fourteen minutes and 691,000,000 kilometers out from the station on her regular bi-monthly round-trip to Draco, the central of the Manticore-A’s system’s three gas giants. Trundling back and forth between the refinery and Hephaestus’ enormous tank farm wasn’t the most exciting occupation in the world, but there was a certain solid satisfaction to the job.
Besides, Jansen had earned his watch-standing ticket just last December, barely two T-months ago, so it was all still brand, shiny new for him. Especially when the Skipper had seen fit to hand over to “Mister Mandrapilias” after clearing the Hephaestus departure perimeter. Zinaida Merkulov, who had the sensor watch, on the other hand, was at least two and a half times Mandrapilias’ age and made it a point of pride never to be surprised by anything. In fact, Jansen rather suspected the Skipper had left her unofficial instructions to keep an eye on the newbie, given that she was something of a legend in the Hauptman Cartel’s service who probably should have retired at least a T-decade or so ago. Unfortunately for those who felt she’d earned a vine-covered cottage somewhere, she routinely maxed the cartel-wide proficiency tests every year. In fact, she’d been seriously pissed this year when she came in third, instead of first.
She’d also been known to refer to one Jansen Mandrapilias as “Sonny” on certain off-duty occasions.
Under some circumstances, that could have led to a discipline problem, but not aboard Bernike, and not with Zinaida Merkulov, who was always professional on duty. Which made the totally unexpected outburst even more shocking than it might have been out of someone else.
“What?” Jansen demanded now, but she ignored him. She was punching numbers into her console at lightning speed, and then she whipped around to Cathal Viñas, the helmsman of the watch.
“Hard skew one-two-five, niner-seven-zero!” she barked. “Now!”
Jansen’s mouth dropped open, but Cathal had known Zinaida longer than Jansen Mandrapilias had been alive, and he recognized the hammered-battle steel urgency of her tone.
He snapped his joystick hard over, sending six million tons of tanker into a steeply climbing starboard turn. Warning hooters sounded as she departed radically from her filed course profile, and Jansen could already hear the reaming Management would give all of them when ATC levied the fines. If they docked his pay to cover it, he’d still be working it off when he was twice Zinaida’s age!
“Zinaida, what the hell do you think—?!”
Then another alarm sounded, and Jansen’s eyes jerked back to his own panel. He’d never heard that strident, two-toned, ear-piercing wail outside a training simulation, and he couldn’t really believe he was hearing it now.
But he was.
Something slammed into the interposed belly of Bernike’s impeller wedge and vanished with the instantaneous ferocity of a several hundred thousand-kilometers per second gravity gradient. But something else missed the wedge. It came sizzling through the tanker’s wide-open throat on a reciprocal course with a closing velocity of over 60,000 KPS, crossed the wedge’s interior at a sharp angle in approximately five-thousandths of a second, missed her enormous hull by no more than sixty or seventy kilometers, and went racing out the wedge’s kilt.
Then it was gone. The collision alert continued to sound, and Mandrapilias felt echoes of terror that hadn’t had nearly long enough to register at the time whiplash up and down his nervous system. His head jerked around to Zinaida.
“What the fuck was that?” he demanded.
He didn’t know—then—that he would never, ever forgive himself for not reporting the incident instantly to ACT. Not that three and a half minutes of warning would have done any good.
* * *
Even the inner reaches of a star system represent a vast volume, against which even the largest spacecraft is very, very tiny. On the face of things, collisions and near collisions between spacefaring vessels were low-probability events, even for those moving along well-traveled shipping lanes. They weren’t made any more likely by the fact that an active impeller wedge was among the galaxy’s most…energetic energy signatures, which made it very hard for even the least attentive sensor tech to not see one coming. And, of course, Astro Traffic Control kept a very close eye on the multi-billion tons of military and civilian shipping passing through the Manticore Binary System at any given moment.
But the interlopers slicing into the heart of the Manticore System at twenty percent of light-speed, cutting straight through the heart of the primary shipping lane from the Draco Seven gas facility, didn’t care about ATC, and their lead wave wasn’t using an impeller wedge to accelerate. It was using something the Royal Manticoran Navy had never heard of, and it was unlikely any other sensor tech—especially any civilian tech, with commercial-grade sensors—would ever have noticed the tiny gravitic anomaly which had drawn Zinaida Merkulov’s attention. She hadn’t felt any sense of alarm, really; only the inveterate curiosity which had led her to her career in the first place. It was an itch she lived to scratch, and she’d redirected the sensors Klaus Hauptman had been kind enough to provide for her personal use towards it.
She never actually “saw” the incoming graser torpedoes at all, but she’d tracked those gravitic anomalies coming straight at her ship and extrapolated their trajectory in the nick of time.
The rest of the Manticore Binary System was less fortunate.
Also, the graser torpedoes themselves, apart from the spider drive, can be detected at very close ranges, even by civilian (apparently non-gravitic) sensors. Bernike’s collision alarm sounded automatically, after Zinaida Merkulov detected the gravitic anamollies, passed the course correction to the helm, and Cathal Viñas executed the course correction.
And we can easily slip a few pocket nukes onto Beowulf habitat platforms. Since we blew up all the Manticoran ones during Oyster Bay, we do not have that option.