Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

kzt wrote:No, you try that at manticore you’ll scrub the planet clean. And lots of people will be very unhappy.

Not if the missiles have some discrimination, in particular to avoid planets. But it is true that attacking a system with both civilian and military targets will invite equal or greater reprisals. Is that why only the Malign made use of that tactic?

Loren Pechtel wrote:
Handing off fire control is certainly possible, we see ships controlling missiles that came from other sources so there must be some handoff protocol.

And what fire distribution can they do that will catch the controllers lying doggo far from the main fleet? Especially if the controllers are some specialized ships built only for the purpose--little offensive capability but a lot of control capability and a lot of stealth. As small a hull as possible to minimize the jump time.

The problem is the distance, you aren't talking about ships in formation, you are discussing handing missiles off to ships multiple light seconds behind the firing formation. ships whose firecontrol loops are seconds longer than the firing ships.

tlb wrote:

kzt wrote:No, you try that at manticore you’ll scrub the planet clean. And lots of people will be very unhappy.

Not if the missiles have some discrimination, in particular to avoid planets. But it is true that attacking a system with both civilian and military targets will invite equal or greater reprisals. Is that why only the Malign made use of that tactic?

No, David has flat out stated that MdM guidance cannot discriminate planets from ships. You’ll have to ask him about that. .

kzt wrote:No, you try that at manticore you’ll scrub the planet clean. And lots of people will be very unhappy.

tlb wrote:Not if the missiles have some discrimination, in particular to avoid planets. But it is true that attacking a system with both civilian and military targets will invite equal or greater reprisals. Is that why only the Malign made use of that tactic?

kzt wrote:No, David has flat out stated that MdM guidance cannot discriminate planets from ships. You’ll have to ask him about that.

That can be true of a regular missile (although it is very strange), but it should not be true of an Apollo control missile. It definitely ought not be true of Mistletoe and cannot be true of the Silver Bullets when you examine what both were able to do.

kzt wrote:

tlb wrote:Not if the missiles have some discrimination, in particular to avoid planets. But it is true that attacking a system with both civilian and military targets will invite equal or greater reprisals. Is that why only the Malign made use of that tactic?

No, David has flat out stated that MdM guidance cannot discriminate planets from ships. You’ll have to ask him about that. .

But he was talking about Mistletoe or Silver Bullet, and both of those are built around recon drones - not MDMs. Recon drones (especially if they're holding their accel down to something stealthy - so they get nice long looks) have no trouble distinguishing planets from ships and orbitals; even when maneuvering autonomously.

(Plus their lower speed given them a better chance to avoid running into anything that unexpectedly appears in their path)

kzt wrote:Sure. You could just move the star too.

That's doable. Just build a Shkadov Thruster[1]. It's just not very fast and it's hardly inconspicuous. Everyone in the opposite direction of movement is going to a brightening of the star and everyone else will see it dimming into the infrared. The jet exhaust itself is probably visible too from light-years away.

Also note that a Shkadov Thruster can be used to make a weapon from your star. Just direct the stellar jet to where your enemy will be in a couple of centuries. Would it be an EE violation if you give them hundreds of years to evacuate?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shkadov_thruster

tlb wrote:You want the missiles to be similar to Mistletoe or Silver Bullets, so they have endurance and enter under stealth and have some discrimination to recognize higher value targets. But that type of attack could also be used against the orbitals in the home system; that is what the attacks on Mycroft at Beowulf and Oyster Bay were after all.

What orbitals? I thought we were talking about industry in deep space, hyperspace, or at worst around a star with no planets or asteroids. If it's in orbit of a planet, however useless it is, then you don't haul material in, you just mine the planet you're orbiting or any moons attached to it.

Unless you meant orbiting the star?

In any case, it is possible to mine the star itself. It is the largest abundance of any material in any solar system by far. We know how to do it today, even if our materials science and technology can't build it. We haven't seen this in the Honorverse probably because it is far more expensive to build than mining asteroids lying around, but once you've got the initial investment in, the results are far greater.

(The expense doesn't have to be money. You can go cheap, but it'll take longer for the first seed industry to replicate itself in enough volume)

Such an industry may also be harder to attack. If we're talking about tens of thousands of solar collectors inside of a volume 10 light-seconds in radius, there's a lot of redundancy. And if missiles have trouble telling a planet apart from a ship, can they home on anything with the star glaring at them?

tlb wrote:You want the missiles to be similar to Mistletoe or Silver Bullets, so they have endurance and enter under stealth and have some discrimination to recognize higher value targets. But that type of attack could also be used against the orbitals in the home system; that is what the attacks on Mycroft at Beowulf and Oyster Bay were after all.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:What orbitals? I thought we were talking about industry in deep space, hyperspace, or at worst around a star with no planets or asteroids. If it's in orbit of a planet, however useless it is, then you don't haul material in, you just mine the planet you're orbiting or any moons attached to it.

Unless you meant orbiting the star?

Orbiting anything.

We had been talking about a deep space shipyard and KZT said that that it could be attacked by a distant freighter dropping a boat load of missiles. I tried to point out that they could not be regular missiles which lack stealth, as the targets would immediately raise defensive walls on seeing all of the missile wedges. Therefore the missiles would need to be stealthy and have endurance like a recon drone. We have already seen examples of such missiles in use attacking targets in planetary systems: Mistletoe, the Silver Bullets at Beowulf and the missiles used in the Yawata Strike.

KZT said when attacking a purely military target alone in space, that everything was a target so the missiles did not need to be smart. I added that in a star system the missiles needed discrimination, so they did not waste themselves on planets, asteroids or barren moons.

kzt wrote:I can follow a fleet a lot easier than a single freighter. Particularly on a regular cycle. And the best thing about that kind of site is its purely military. You can just deliver a few hundred thousand missiles by freighter and send them off to kill something on a given vector at about x range. Every thing you might hit is a valid target.

But can you follow them without getting detected and shot to pieces?

tlb wrote:

kzt wrote:And the best thing about that kind of site is its purely military. You can just deliver a few hundred thousand missiles by freighter and send them off to kill something on a given vector at about x range. Every thing you might hit is a valid target.

You want the missiles to be similar to Mistletoe or Silver Bullets, so they have endurance and enter under stealth and have some discrimination to recognize higher value targets. But that type of attack could also be used against the orbitals in the home system; that is what the attacks on Mycroft at Beowulf and Oyster Bay were after all.

Yes, I think this will be the next big improvement in missiles--recon drone type firing platforms that have an endurance of months or even more. Put Apollo control nodes on them to cut down on the number of control channels needed as the range will be way beyond normal Apollo range.

The defenders will have an awful time keeping space clear and if they don't they will not have any warning until a missile drive lights off.