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Spider drive ships and technical limitations

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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 11:46 am

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noblehunter wrote:
Joat42 wrote:From what I understand about the spider drive it's a huge disadvantage when you have the typical standard battle - but it's just fine if you want the ability to sneak into a system, dump a bunch of missiles and then sneak out. I can't see it working in any other way. There are some permutations on that scenario though, but they all come down to pure hit'n'run scenarios.

But that's just my opinion...


They're also ridiculously hard to see. Without a wedge to light up passive sensors the MA believes spider drive ships will be nearly impossible to localize at significant ranges. We'll have to wait until they actually see a battle to find out how that works in practice.

Maybe they can even get close enough to use a grav lance and energy torpedoes. *hides*

Ha ha. Though without a wedge they can't actually produce TWTSNBN, as that refocused the wedge to do create the grav spike that kills sidewalls. (And RFC already said ages ago that a spider drive's overpowered tractor isn't enough to drop a sidewall.

They are damn hard to see though. Right up to the point where they roll pods and fire off their Cataphract swarm - then its blindingly obvious where they were. So if those missiles don't obliterate the entire enemy force you better run away fast. Heck even if you move away from the missiles before launch someone might be able to detect your fire control links to them - you're blasting fairly high bandwidth radio more of less up the backsides of the missiles (so roughly towards your target) over millions of km. So it's not impossible for someone to get a direction finding hit pointing back at you.


Now with enough time to set an ambush they can deploy the fire control relays that the Ghosts snuck deep in-system before Oyster Bay so (baring the extreme bad luck of having a stealthed enemy out on the extended line from the ship to the relay) and backtrace would lead to an expendable relay rather than your LennyDet.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by noblehunter   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 12:12 pm

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I forgot you needed a wedge for TWTSNBN. Whew.

I think you'd need more than just the locus of a missile launch to get solid hits, especially at MDM ranges.

ETA: this is where skimming over the numbers comes back to haunt me. I'm sure there's enough math in the books about sensors and missile speed to get a better sense of how hard it would be to shoot at someone with only the barest sense of where they are.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by Joat42   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 1:43 pm

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noblehunter wrote:I forgot you needed a wedge for TWTSNBN. Whew.

I think you'd need more than just the locus of a missile launch to get solid hits, especially at MDM ranges.

ETA: this is where skimming over the numbers comes back to haunt me. I'm sure there's enough math in the books about sensors and missile speed to get a better sense of how hard it would be to shoot at someone with only the barest sense of where they are.

Well, I had an idea of detonating nukes near possible stealthed targets and use the particle backscatter to find them. There is no way a stealth system can handle those types of energies and particle interaction with solid matter.

Don't know how feasible it is though and it's not like ships tend to stay still but spider drive ships have limited acceleration so they wouldn't be able to move very far after incidental detection.

---
Jack of all trades and destructive tinkerer.

Anyone who have simple solutions for complex problems is a fool.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by kzt   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 2:17 pm

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R^2 kills you. You have to know where it is to get enough energy back to find it. And the return is light speed, so at a light minute you low where it was a minute ago and you missiles will take x minutes to get there, so no, not going to work.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 2:32 pm

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noblehunter wrote:I forgot you needed a wedge for TWTSNBN. Whew.

I think you'd need more than just the locus of a missile launch to get solid hits, especially at MDM ranges.

ETA: this is where skimming over the numbers comes back to haunt me. I'm sure there's enough math in the books about sensors and missile speed to get a better sense of how hard it would be to shoot at someone with only the barest sense of where they are.

Probably not enough of a locus to fire back at. (Well maybe a small salvo in the hopes of provoking a defensive CM launch - kind of analogous of dropping an anti-submarine torpedo on a suspected contact in the hopes that they make noise trying to run).

But with a LennyDet on emergency boost having something like 1/4 the acceleration of an Manticoran SD(P), and 1/33rd the accel of a Ghost Rider recon drone, providing even an approximate locus might be enough to get yourself hunted down and cornered. (Unless the ambush is from outside the hyper limit, in which case you can slip away before any response can pin you down)


And of course if you attack with the larger, slower, but much much stealthier graser torps then you don't have even an approximate launch locus like you do from a missile (or CM) launch.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 3:58 pm

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Louis R wrote:Second, if you're going to go to the trouble of installing a massive set of alpha nodes in the first place, I wouldn't think that it would be a huge extra effort to install a compensator to go with them. And if you've done that, the whole problem goes away.


No wedge = no compensator, period.

Consider the battle of Cerberus. While Honor was sneaking in on thrusters she could not use her compensators despite having every bit of hardware required.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 4:03 pm

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noblehunter wrote:Maybe they can even get close enough to use a grav lance and energy torpedoes. *hides*


Even if they could they normally wouldn't.

Sneak in, fire on a ship. It will be devastating, expect to kill the ship--but you just left a huge energy signature that tells the friends of the ship you killed exactly where you are. Spider = no wedge = vulnerable from any aspect. Bubble sidewalls won't protect you from practically point blank graser fire.

Other than if you have numerical superiority it's a suicide tactic.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 4:14 pm

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kzt wrote:R^2 kills you. You have to know where it is to get enough energy back to find it. And the return is light speed, so at a light minute you low where it was a minute ago and you missiles will take x minutes to get there, so no, not going to work.


I wouldn't consider it an impossible tactic.

Yes, in a ship to ship engagement r^2 makes it utterly useless. However, consider the Mistletoe system. While it's not going to do any good here lets look at something along these lines:

Take an Apollo pod. Half the birds are simply big booms--no rods, no targeting systems. The other half of the pod is pure sensor, no boom, no targeting. The control missile has some software changes.

You realize there's an enemy ship hiding--you know it's approximate location but not good enough to actually put rods on target. The first pod you fire is this special pod, the rest of the missiles are a bit behind.

When the birds reach the area the booms start going off. The guys hiding are going to have a very hard time maintaining stealth against the sensor birds--and when their location is revealed the attack birds are not far behind, they don't have time to slip away.

Of course the probe missiles are sitting ducks--but if the defenders fire on them it's the same thing--they just revealed their location.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by noblehunter   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 4:16 pm

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Loren Pechtel wrote:Even if they could they normally wouldn't.

Sneak in, fire on a ship. It will be devastating, expect to kill the ship--but you just left a huge energy signature that tells the friends of the ship you killed exactly where you are. Spider = no wedge = vulnerable from any aspect. Bubble sidewalls won't protect you from practically point blank graser fire.

Other than if you have numerical superiority it's a suicide tactic.

Depends on how many opponents a single ship could engage at once. I think a spider drive's configuration gives it three broadsides. But it would definitely be a high risk tactic.

ETA: Think of what Honor's SDs did to the Peep battleships at 4th Yeltsin.

I really want to see a full up fleet engagement between spider drive and impeller drive ships.
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Re: Spider drive ships and technical limitations
Post by Vince   » Tue Aug 28, 2018 4:20 pm

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Loren Pechtel wrote:
Louis R wrote:Second, if you're going to go to the trouble of installing a massive set of alpha nodes in the first place, I wouldn't think that it would be a huge extra effort to install a compensator to go with them. And if you've done that, the whole problem goes away.


No wedge = no compensator, period.

Consider the battle of Cerberus. While Honor was sneaking in on thrusters she could not use her compensators despite having every bit of hardware required.

Delete the period and add an alternative. In the Honorverse, if you are in hyperspace (or are transiting a wormhole) and are in a gravity wave, and have raised Warshawski sails, the gravity wave acts as a much more powerful gravity sump for the inertial compensator to dump felt acceleration into:
More Than Honor, The Universe of Honor Harrington, (1) Background (General) wrote:Then, in 1384 pd, a physicist by the name of Shigematsu Radhakrishnan added another major breakthrough in the form of the inertial compensator. The compensator turned the grav wave (natural or artificial) associated with a vessel into a sort of "inertial sump," dumping the inertial forces of acceleration into the grav wave and thus exempting the vessel's crew from the g forces associated with acceleration. Within the limits of its efficiency, it completely eliminated g force, placing an accelerating vessel in a permanent state of internal zero-gee, but its capacity to damp inertia was directly proportional to the power of the grav wave around it and inversely proportional to both the volume of the field and the mass of the vessel about which it was generated. The first factor meant that it was far more effective for starships than for sublight ships, as the former drew upon the greater energy of the naturally occurring grav waves of hyper-space, and the second meant it was more effective for smaller ships than for larger ones. The natural grav waves of hyper-space, with their incomparably greater power, offered a much "deeper" sump than the artificial stress bands of the impeller drive, which meant that a Warshawski Sail ship could deflect vastly more g force from its passengers than one under impeller drive. In general terms, the compensator permitted humans to endure acceleration rates approaching 550 g under impeller drive and 4-5,000 g under sail, which allows hyperships to make up "bleed-off" velocity very quickly after translation. These numbers are for military compensators, which tend to be more massive, more energy and maintenance intensive, and much more expensive than those used in most merchant construction. Military compensators allow higher acceleration—and warships cannot afford to be less maneuverable than their foes—but only at the cost of penalties merchant ships as a whole cannot afford.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.
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History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.
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