Spider drive ships and technical limitations

ldwechsler wrote:Remember that Haven used separate pilots to bring ships from Bolthole. They never got near the action. Darius is a key element in MAlign. They can't hide it that well.

I don’t remember that being said. I do remember a fleet training up at bolthole, and my guess is that the astrogaters who cared could figure out where they were without too much trouble.

kzt wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:Remember that Haven used separate pilots to bring ships from Bolthole. They never got near the action. Darius is a key element in MAlign. They can't hide it that well.

I don’t remember that being said. I do remember a fleet training up at bolthole, and my guess is that the astrogaters who cared could figure out where they were without too much trouble.

I don't think that. The impression I got from the textev available is that the navigational computers are in lockdown while the ships are at Bolthole. There is also trivial to have software running that fudges stellar readings etc.

I don't recall any specs in the books about the Detweiler ships HaveorNot Warshawski Sails, or whether they could use impellers. There may be more info In Jane's; I have not. A larger ship than than the ones drafted for the Yawata strike is enigmatic, unless there are other resources I could research.
A side note: I would have interest in guidance to the aforementioned rulebook....

Jaynes only covers the very first books. Which is unfortunate, but how it is.
Much of the details are from David’s comments here like “what makes you think they can’t use a WH?”

I think it's pretty obvious that spider drive ships can use wormholes, though for practical purposes they would be limited to using the wormholes controlled by the Mesan Alignment. The Leonard Detweiler-class ships are, if I remember correctly, warships; and you can't bring the war to your enemies if you're wasting a lot of time getting to where the battle is. Either they have impellers (and sails) which can't be used at the same time as their spider drives or they have something else entirely that RFC isn't ready to show us just yet. Personally I'm betting on the latter.

Anyway, just try to imagine the conversation between the Detweilers and the hyperphysicists responsible for the spider drive. "Whaddya mean, you can't go through wormholes?? What's the point in having a secret planet hidden by bizarro wormholes if we can only deploy through hyper? Go back to the drawing board!"

Speaking of which, what's the chance that Zachariah McBryde works on the spider drive? There has to be a reason he's deep in the onion, and he is a physicist.

Joat42 wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:..snip..
And remember that MAlign has to worry that if any ships are captured, everyone will become aware of Darius.

Remember that Haven used separate pilots to bring ships from Bolthole. They never got near the action. Darius is a key element in MAlign. They can't hide it that well.

The MA has the nanotech to stop their crew leaking any information.

But I have been thinking, the nanotech isn't fool proof - there is one way to debrief MA personnel but it's a bitch to set up even when all the conditions align perfectly.

Let's suppose you actually manage to capture someone from a Alignment ship. There are several potential scenarios

1) He's actually a crew member with defective nano.
2) He's full of the nastiest most insidious nano-weapons Darius can create and you just doomed your empire.
3) He was lied to about Darius's location and he tells you the coordinates to another extremely anti-social star nation with a strong belief in MAD and automated weapons.
4) He doesn't know Darius's location and believes that Oyster Bay was undertaken only as a response to the Green Pines Massacre and only targeted military assets. The Treecats are sure to take that well.
5) He isn't a person at all, but a bunch of self-replicating nano and other microscopic robots capable of running brain simulations, flight, and gray gooing any organic matter; he just slaughtered your entire crew and is simulating your brain to extract every scrap of classified information you once knew. He's currently on his way to subsume the rest of the GA military.
6) Some horrifying combination of 2,3,4,5 and other ideas I haven't thought of.

Joat42 wrote:I don't think that. The impression I got from the textev available is that the navigational computers are in lockdown while the ships are at Bolthole. There is also trivial to have software running that fudges stellar readings etc.

They could easily get the location, or at east the approximate location, from looking up at the stars. They're probably told to not do that, but...

If the Mesan Alignment is clever their next batch of nano will infect people going to bolthole, record the star locations and give them Bolthole's location. This can be followed up by extreme (like 6mo.) long range missile fire. Since there isn't any civilian habitation in the system and its not even claimed by any star nation they can just let the missiles self target. Heck, they could even do something like use missile impeller wedges on planets.

Peregrinator wrote:Speaking of which, what's the chance that Zachariah McBryde works on the spider drive? There has to be a reason he's deep in the onion, and he is a physicist.

As of the end of SoV, he's on Darius, so it doesn't matter at all.

quite possibly a cat wrote:

Joat42 wrote:I don't think that. The impression I got from the textev available is that the navigational computers are in lockdown while the ships are at Bolthole. There is also trivial to have software running that fudges stellar readings etc.

They could easily get the location, or at east the approximate location, from looking up at the stars. They're probably told to not do that, but...

Won't work unless you happen to be familiar with the sky no more than a couple of dozen ly from Bolthole. The reason is simply that most of the bright stars are bright because they're close, not because they're intrinsically super-bright.

Anywhere else, you can identify the Milky Way and the two Magellanic Clouds, and that's it.

Now, you can locate yourself from just that using an extremely accurate method of measuring angular distance on the sky and the Galactic Atlas (Don't Leave Orbit Without It!). The eyeball Mark I is insufficient.

JohnRoth wrote:As of the end of SoV, he's on Darius, so it doesn't matter at all.

Yeah, I know where he is, but I'm not sure what you mean by "it doesn't matter". It matters to me out of curiosity; of course it probably won't matter in the sense of helping Manticore defeat the Alignment.

Peregrinator wrote:I think it's pretty obvious that spider drive ships can use wormholes, though for practical purposes they would be limited to using the wormholes controlled by the Mesan Alignment. The Leonard Detweiler-class ships are, if I remember correctly, warships; and you can't bring the war to your enemies if you're wasting a lot of time getting to where the battle is. Either they have impellers (and sails) which can't be used at the same time as their spider drives or they have something else entirely that RFC isn't ready to show us just yet. Personally I'm betting on the latter.

Anyway, just try to imagine the conversation between the Detweilers and the hyperphysicists responsible for the spider drive. "Whaddya mean, you can't go through wormholes?? What's the point in having a secret planet hidden by bizarro wormholes if we can only deploy through hyper? Go back to the drawing board!"

Speaking of which, what's the chance that Zachariah McBryde works on the spider drive? There has to be a reason he's deep in the onion, and he is a physicist.

I believe that going through a wormhole is just a special case of the ability to go through hyperspace,; so if you can do one then you can do the other.