Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

When the book came out, we asked David this question. The Twins force was only sent out in reflex to the news of the Harvest Joy's deployment, sent via Steak Boat. It was not a permanent deployment - The ships returned several weeks later once it was determined that the wormhole team was in monitoring mode, and would not send another ship for some time.

The Felix force was an official secret. The wormhole is an open secret in the government, with the (correct) cover that Mannerheim is attempting to negotiate all the rights through 3rd parties in order to get the rights cheaply.

The minefield question came up, but no official comment. Someone mentioned that a minefield requires tending, and seeing a minefield in a random system (which are hard to find, since they are extremely stealthy), might raise more questions. however, it is possible that a minefield replaced the BCs longterm.

Theemile wrote:When the book came out, we asked David this question. The Twins force was only sent out in reflex to the news of the Harvest Joy's deployment, sent via Steak Boat. It was not a permanent deployment - The ships returned several weeks later once it was determined that the wormhole team was in monitoring mode, and would not send another ship for some time.

The Felix force was an official secret. The wormhole is an open secret in the government, with the (correct) cover that Mannerheim is attempting to negotiate all the rights through 3rd parties in order to get the rights cheaply.

The minefield question came up, but no official comment. Someone mentioned that a minefield requires tending, and seeing a minefield in a random system (which are hard to find, since they are extremely stealthy), might raise more questions. however, it is possible that a minefield replaced the BCs longterm.

To detect the minefield you'd have to be basically on top of the wormhole anyway. You'd probably detect the wormhole before the mines, for that matter. Especially since one of the few reasons for a ship to be in a known-uninhabited system is to be looking for undiscovered wormholes (although we don't know where the Twins are in real space, they could be far outside explored territory).

Theemile wrote:When the book came out, we asked David this question. The Twins force was only sent out in reflex to the news of the Harvest Joy's deployment, sent via Steak Boat. It was not a permanent deployment - The ships returned several weeks later once it was determined that the wormhole team was in monitoring mode, and would not send another ship for some time.

The Felix force was an official secret. The wormhole is an open secret in the government, with the (correct) cover that Mannerheim is attempting to negotiate all the rights through 3rd parties in order to get the rights cheaply.

The minefield question came up, but no official comment. Someone mentioned that a minefield requires tending, and seeing a minefield in a random system (which are hard to find, since they are extremely stealthy), might raise more questions. however, it is possible that a minefield replaced the BCs longterm.

A minefield would be a lot less conspicuous than a squadron of BCs with sidewalls up sitting there for no identifiable reason.

Anyway, what replaced the BC squadron from Mannerheim is not the question. The question is why it was there in the first place, instead of one from Darius or a CA squadron from Darius. And what we can conclude from that?

Theemile wrote:
When the book came out, we asked David this question. The Twins force was only sent out in reflex to the news of the Harvest Joy's deployment, sent via Steak Boat. It was not a permanent deployment - The ships returned several weeks later once it was determined that the wormhole team was in monitoring mode, and would not send another ship for some time.

The Felix force was an official secret. The wormhole is an open secret in the government, with the (correct) cover that Mannerheim is attempting to negotiate all the rights through 3rd parties in order to get the rights cheaply.

The minefield question came up, but no official comment. Someone mentioned that a minefield requires tending, and seeing a minefield in a random system (which are hard to find, since they are extremely stealthy), might raise more questions. however, it is possible that a minefield replaced the BCs longterm.


A minefield would be a lot less conspicuous than a squadron of BCs with sidewalls up sitting there for no identifiable reason.

Anyway, what replaced the BC squadron from Mannerheim is not the question. The question is why it was there in the first place, instead of one from Darius or a CA squadron from Darius. And what we can conclude from that?

Like I wrote earlier: We are guessing that the Alingnment have "normal" warships, but we have ne proof. What if they haven´t and they call Mannerheim because they don´t have ships to send?

Maldorian wrote:Like I wrote earlier: We are guessing that the Alingnment have "normal" warships, but we have ne proof. What if they haven´t and they call Mannerheim because they don´t have ships to send?

That's exactly the inference we would take: they didn't have ships to send. A picket from Darius would have different risks than one from Mannerheim: if someone stumbled upon them, it would be difficult to explain away the existence of a navy that no one knew about. Even if it happens a couple of times a century with rogue governments and hidden shipyards, the usual reaction every time would be to locate such system and keep an eye on it, at the very least. But if no one stumbles upon them, then the chance of information leak inside the Mannerheim navy would be the biggest risk.

Whether the ships had spider drive or conventional wedges probably doesn't matter. The spider drive offers no protection, so if a ship from Darius is on-station and needs to defend against a forced transit with guns blazing, it will need to bring up sidewalls or bubble-walls anyway. Those would be seen from light-minutes away. For that reason, I'd expect that any force deployed be conventional.

We expect Darius to have built smaller ships. Before getting to a BB-sized ship, the MAlign must have built smaller ships. They needed the expertise to do so and they probably need a defence fleet anyway. And even if the shipbuilding activities are too recent, they probably have skimmed a few ships off the SLN via Technodyne.

What does that leave us with?

1. Darius did not have the ships to send from their local defence forces, however small they may be
2. The risk of discovery of the MAN was higher or with bigger impact than the risk of discovery of Mannerheim

I think concluding that Darius has no defence fleet at all, however small, is ludicrous. The Ghosts already existed in 1921 (some were en route to Manticore and Grayson!). A single one of them would take care of Harvest Joy, especially since they knew that it wouldn't transit with guns blazing.

That leaves option (b), which implies The Twins must be somewhere where someone could have reasonably stumbled upon.

What do you think?

kzt wrote:

Sigs wrote: This means that even if they had only a dozen of them they can go through pretty much any one of the GA's defences save for Manticore, Haven, Beowulf and Grayson and even then it wont be a guarantee. But if they are that powerful all the MA has to do is wait out the GA for a decade, finish off a couple of dozen of them and swoop into the Manticore Home System, crush Home Fleet and split the GA into 3 pieces after the Manticore WH is taken out of the equation. Beowulf/Hypatia cannot give or receive support from anyone else, Haven and Grayson are separated from Beowulf and the Andermani, Erewhon and Maya are separate from everyone else and its game over for the GA.

Well, David did promise they would be combat effective...

Going back a bit to this: I think I may have come up with how they could be expected to stand up to massed MDM fire, and it doesn't involve a bubble wall. Bear with me, as I don't have electronic text to call on. If anyone who does could post the relevant bits, that would be nice.

From what we've seen of the spider drive, it operates with hundreds (perhaps thousands, on a LD) of overpowered tractor projectors lined up on the triple keel of the ship. These propel the ship by generating a tractor focus so powerful it can exert a force on the dimensional interface between normal space and the alpha band of hyperspace (which begs the question of how/if it works in hyper, but that's another topic entirely). By pulling on the "grip points" thus generated in concert in millisecond (microsecond?) pulses, this accelerates the ship. The text also says that at close enough range it's a pretty effective energy weapon (again, someone spot me a quote here).

We also know that sufficiently powerful tractors can shred matter. This follows if the tractor can shred matter, and it also implies it is at least somewhat effective against matter protected behind a sidewall (whereas energy torpedoes are not).

So we have hundreds of emitters, each capable of wrecking matter, possibly even capable of destructively interfering with sidewalls or even wedges!, and capable of operating repeatedly at millisecond intervals? Does that not sound like the point defense array from Hell?

To throw some WAG numbers at the problem: assume the emitters are at least marginally effective out to 300k kilometers of typical energy range and shortish PD cluster range - and can be targeted accurately to that range. That gives roughly one second for a terminal velocity MDM to cross their range to get to laser head standoff range and detonate.

Assume 600-800 emitter heads per "keel" on a LD. Could be fewer, could be a LOT more; as far as I know we don't know yet. Depending on the geometry of the ship, how far the keels stick out from it, and the design tolerances of the emitter heads themselves, the ship could get one, two, or all three keels to bear on the incoming missiles

Assume each head needs 10-20 milliseconds to pulse and recalibrate to a new target locus before pulsing again. This means each emitter head can get 5-10 shots off while the missiles cross the engagement zone.

Under the lowest estimate, that means a LD could get off 3000 point defense shots in the time it takes the missiles to reach detonation range. Using the upper estimates it could be 24,000 shots from a single ship.

Even if they use redundant targeting (two emitters taking separate shots at each missile) to minimize miss percentages, under the worst case scenario you could launch an entire podnaught's missile load at a single LD only to watch it fizzle out rather than damage the enemy!

Obviously Dragon's Teeth and Dazzlers would play a role in getting at least some hits, but a squadron of LD's has at least the potential for a missile defense that would render all of the GA's missile advantages effectively useless. The Shark class dreadnoughts could put up a pretty credible defense themselves, and even the unarmed Ghost class scouts could defend themselves fairly well against light opponents.

All of this assumes the spider ships are lacking more conventional laser clusters and countermissile launchers, which is probably not true. Although they may have needed to be sacrificed to provide targeting sensors to support the spider missile defense.

Galactic Sapper wrote:From what we've seen of the spider drive, it operates with hundreds (perhaps thousands, on a LD) of overpowered tractor projectors lined up on the triple keel of the ship.[snip]
To throw some WAG numbers at the problem: assume the emitters are at least marginally effective out to 300k kilometers of typical energy range and shortish PD cluster range - and can be targeted accurately to that range. That gives roughly one second for a terminal velocity MDM to cross their range to get to laser head standoff range and detonate.

Assume 600-800 emitter heads per "keel" on a LD. Could be fewer, could be a LOT more; as far as I know we don't know yet. Depending on the geometry of the ship, how far the keels stick out from it, and the design tolerances of the emitter heads themselves, the ship could get one, two, or all three keels to bear on the incoming missiles

Assume each head needs 10-20 milliseconds to pulse and recalibrate to a new target locus before pulsing again. This means each emitter head can get 5-10 shots off while the missiles cross the engagement zone.

Thanks for the brainstorming. The idea is intriguing.

Allow me to try and poke some holes in it. Let me start with the one we have absolutely no clue about: range. You threw 1 light-second out there, but we have no idea if this is reasonable or not. It's a long way off to tractor something, nearly the distance from the Earth to the Moon. If you're right, this is a good asset meaning that you can destructively interfere with the incoming missiles as they're coming into engagement range. But if you're wrong, if the range of the tractor emitters is 300 km instead of 300,000, then they're of no use.

For the sake of the argument, let's say it has useful range.

The second problem is the number of emitter heads per keel. We don't know if it's physically possible to have 600-800. If the dimensions of the ship are such that it allows mounting that many, then it has surface area to mount laser clusters, which are a known and proven technology. For no particular reason, I'd guess that a drive system emitter would be larger, more massive and more complex than a laser cluster.

Third, coupled with that, it's the it's the complexity of mounting the emitters on gimbals and tracking system that can be used as point defence. You want your drive system to be robust, able to take damage and still reasonably function, so the ship can extricate itself from a pickle. That usually goes counter to making it nimble and fast enough to track incoming missiles.

Fourth, it's the tracking. We know that laser clusters have trouble tracking incoming missiles that are still dodging. And that's just the sensor equipment. The clusters themselves have a maximum fire rate and focusing on the right direction takes time. I see no reason why a drive system would be more efficient in focusing on a particular spot one light-second away than a point-defence system designed to do just that.

Now, you may say that they required this tracking breakthrough in order to make the drive system effective in the first place. That is, if the drive system hadn't panned out, they'd still have far more capable laser clusters. That may be.

You may also say (I don't know if you meant it) that the tractor emitter has a volume effect, as opposed to a laser that basically a thin line (at any given distance, it's an area effect instead of pin-point precision). That would reduce the need for tracking, since a gross tracking would be sufficient and there's only so much dodging that the missile can do. But again, at any appreciable distance, I think it's unlikely.

Maybe the tractor interferes with the wedges themselves, and being more powerful, it causes the missile's impeller ring to explode, killing the missile. Wedges are, after all, much bigger than the ring that creates them. But also unlikely, for two reasons: a) a spider drive requiring hundreds of emitters to move a 5 MT Ghost at only 120 gravities doesn't seem to be more powerful than a missile wedge capable of moving a 5 thousand tons at 92000 gravities. But more importantly, b) if a tractor, however powerful, could destructively interfere with a wedge, we'd have seen it applied to weapons before now. Killing a wedge would be the ultimate weapon, even if the ship that generated that wedge wasn't destroyed in the process. Just ask the Peeps.

Instead, I'd go for a far simpler solution: without the wedge restricting what's above and below you, the LD has an all-sky firing arc. Each keel has 180° visibility, with 30° overlap with the other two keels on either side. And we know the LDs are massive. So just mount a lot of point defence on it and use a lot of armour. If the drive system is distributed and robust, there's no impeller ring as a critical point of failure. It may lose 50% of the emitters and still be manoeuvrable (though it'll be slower than molasses).

Galactic Sapper wrote:From what we've seen of the spider drive, it operates with hundreds (perhaps thousands, on a LD) of overpowered tractor projectors lined up on the triple keel of the ship. These propel the ship by generating a tractor focus so powerful it can exert a force on the dimensional interface between normal space and the alpha band of hyperspace (which begs the question of how/if it works in hyper, but that's another topic entirely). By pulling on the "grip points" thus generated in concert in millisecond (microsecond?) pulses, this accelerates the ship. The text also says that at close enough range it's a pretty effective energy weapon (again, someone spot me a quote here).

We also know that sufficiently powerful tractors can shred matter. This follows if the tractor can shred matter, and it also implies it is at least somewhat effective against matter protected behind a sidewall (whereas energy torpedoes are not).

So we have hundreds of emitters, each capable of wrecking matter, possibly even capable of destructively interfering with sidewalls or even wedges!, and capable of operating repeatedly at millisecond intervals? Does that not sound like the point defense array from Hell?

To throw some WAG numbers at the problem: assume the emitters are at least marginally effective out to 300k kilometers of typical energy range and shortish PD cluster range - and can be targeted accurately to that range. That gives roughly one second for a terminal velocity MDM to cross their range to get to laser head standoff range and detonate.

This from Mission of Honor, chapter 28:

The ships which had mounted Oyster Bay, however, represented a radical departure from anything the galaxy had previously seen which was just as impressive, in its own way, as anything Manticore had accomplished. They weren't a particularly graceful departure, of course. In fact, compared to any impeller-drive ship, they were squat, stumpy, and downright peculiar looking because, unlike the gravitic drives everyone else used, the spider generated no impeller wedge. Instead of using two inclined planes of focused gravity to create bands of stressed space around the pocket of normal-space which surrounded a ship, the spider used literally dozens of nodes to project spurs or spikes of intensely focused gravity. For all intents and purposes, each of those spurs was almost like generating a tractor or a presser beam, except that no one in his right mind had ever imagined tractors or pressers that powerful. In fact, at a sufficiently short range, they would have made quite serviceable energy weapons, because these focused, directional beams were powerful enough to create their own tiny foci—effectively, holes in the "real" universe—in which space itself was so highly stressed that the beams punched clear through to the alpha wall, the interface between normal-space and hyper-space.

No single beam would have been of any particular use. Powerful as it might be, it was less than a shadow compared to the output of even a single one of any starship's beta nodes, far less an alpha node. It wasn't even enough to produce the "ripple" along the hyper-space wall which Manticore used for its FTL communications technology.

I am guessing this for the Shark-class, because the text goes on to talk about maximum survivable acceleration and combat efficiency of the crew.

So we have to figure out what distance is meant by "at a sufficiently short range, they would have made quite serviceable energy weapons". Also whether a gravity spike that is insignificant compared to the output of a ship's alpha or beta node can affect a missile without damage to itself. For all we know they might have a fixed alignment on a Shark, since they are primarily intended to pull the ship forward.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Thanks for the brainstorming. The idea is intriguing.

Thanks. I've been stewing on this one for a while. Let me see if I can answer or at least explain some of the assumptions.

For the sake of the argument, let's say it has useful range.

I'm basing this assumption on the fact that RFC said they were useful energy weapons at close enough range. I'm assuming he meant approximately the useful range of shipboard lasers and grasers against sidewalls, not grav lance range or less. Even energy torpedoes have a useful range out about that far, and even point defense lasers have a useful range well beyond 300 km (assuming a bare hull).

The second problem is the number of emitter heads per keel. We don't know if it's physically possible to have 600-800. If the dimensions of the ship are such that it allows mounting that many, then it has surface area to mount laser clusters, which are a known and proven technology. For no particular reason, I'd guess that a drive system emitter would be larger, more massive and more complex than a laser cluster.

You're correct here. I managed to locate the text description of the spider drive in MoH and the drives are described as "literally dozens" of nodes acting in "micro-spaced bursts". So at a guess this cuts the number of emitters to 50-100ish, with the timing I assumed to be approximately correct. Sort of. That cuts the high end of missile defense down to 3000 or fewer shots per ship - still a massively useful addition to conventional missile defenses but not the salvo-shredding defensive wall I'd imagined.

Third, coupled with that, it's the it's the complexity of mounting the emitters on gimbals and tracking system that can be used as point defence. You want your drive system to be robust, able to take damage and still reasonably function, so the ship can extricate itself from a pickle. That usually goes counter to making it nimble and fast enough to track incoming missiles.

I am actually assuming tractor emitters are constructed similar to a solid-state phased array emitter we have today for some radars. Switching between targets wouldn't necessarily require physically steering the emitter at all.

Even if I'm wrong on that, the angular distance between the missiles in an Apollo pod grouping when they're 300k km out is a small fraction of a degree. Assuming the emitter has time to track onto the first missile before it enters range, hitting the others is only a miniscule adjustment.

(summary for brevity)
Fourth, it's the tracking.

tracking breakthrough

volume effect

Tracking shouldn't be much different in either case - you're still trying to line up a very short-term effect to intersect with a point object moving at nearly the same speed as the effect being aimed. I am assuming a small volume effect, although we don't know how accurate that assumption might be. Killing a missile with a laser involves getting that 15-20 meter long, 2 meter diameter (guestimates) solid object to intersect with a ~0.5 meter wide, 300 km line which represents the volume of space the laser pulse is occupying in the millisecond when the collision must occur. I'm assuming a spider drive has an effective volume where it will disrupt the missile enough to prevent an accurate detonation (mission kill if not cato kill) of a 5 meter sphere. Ten meters, tops. So it needs to be less accurate but not by a huge margin. This is assuming the effect has to hit the missile itself and not just the wedge.

Maybe the tractor interferes with the wedges themselves, and being more powerful, it causes the missile's impeller ring to explode, killing the missile. Wedges are, after all, much bigger than the ring that creates them. But also unlikely, for two reasons: a) a spider drive requiring hundreds of emitters to move a 5 MT Ghost at only 120 gravities doesn't seem to be more powerful than a missile wedge capable of moving a 5 thousand tons at 92000 gravities. But more importantly, b) if a tractor, however powerful, could destructively interfere with a wedge, we'd have seen it applied to weapons before now. Killing a wedge would be the ultimate weapon, even if the ship that generated that wedge wasn't destroyed in the process. Just ask the Peeps.

I AM assuming this to a degree. First, a missile wedge is far weaker than even a small ship's wedge, so what damage even these tractor emitters might do to a missile would probably not translate to a ship-sized wedge. Second, the effect does not have to cato-kill the missile or its wedge, just induce enough instability/wedge torque/etc. that the warhead cannot compensate in the few milliseconds it has left to successfully aim its rods and detonate. A warhead forced to miss is as good as a kill.

Instead, I'd go for a far simpler solution: without the wedge restricting what's above and below you, the LD has an all-sky firing arc. Each keel has 180° visibility, with 30° overlap with the other two keels on either side. And we know the LDs are massive. So just mount a lot of point defence on it and use a lot of armour. If the drive system is distributed and robust, there's no impeller ring as a critical point of failure. It may lose 50% of the emitters and still be manoeuvrable (though it'll be slower than molasses).

Having found the text I did earlier, I'm assuming a combination of the two. Massed point defense batteries along with defensive use of the spider, although now I'm thinking one keel aimed directly at the threat with one broadside full of PD "above" that keel and one "below", getting a full two broadsides worth of point defense into the fight (and all three could be launching CMs, assuming they've developed or stole that sort of off-bore targeting).

tlb wrote:I am guessing this for the Shark-class, because the text goes on to talk about maximum survivable acceleration and combat efficiency of the crew.

So we have to figure out what distance is meant by "at a sufficiently short range, they would have made quite serviceable energy weapons". Also whether a gravity spike that is insignificant compared to the output of a ship's alpha or beta node can affect a missile without damage to itself. For all we know they might have a fixed alignment on a Shark, since they are primarily intended to pull the ship forward.

You posted while I was writing the above novella. I found the same passage and revised my estimates downward.