?

Your assumptions about the effectiveness of RMN sensors seems based on very little data. Particularly given that the developers can only detect it at about a light second.

kzt wrote:Your assumptions about the effectiveness of RMN sensors seems based on very little data. Particularly given that the developers can only detect it at about a light second.

40,000 km is just over a tenth of a light-second. We don't know for sure, but my money is that you can detect a graser torpedo at that range.

Let's say the LACs form a shell 50,000 km in radius around the wall. That's 314,159 km in circumference in any great circle. With 10 LACs in the equator, they're each spaced 30,900 km from each other (side of a decagon inscribed in a circle of radius 00,000), or 36°. Each additional great circle spaced 36° adds 8 LACs (you don't need two more at the poles) and you need only 5 more great circles to complete coverage. So you can form a shell with merely 50 LACs and be almost sure you can catch the torpedoes before they can come into attack range.

The relief force is going to come with hundreds of LACs, so they'll do concentric shells, further and further out.

And they're also slow-moving, so need a time measured in seconds to reach that range. Plenty of time for a CM or another LAC further back to hit it, once painted. Not that the RMN knows this, though.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't think a graser torpedo at that range is undetectable. From 40,000 km, the range at which it can penetrate an SD sidewall and armour, it must be detectable. Not even Ghost Riders can get much closer than this. The graser torp is most deadly if fired way in advance so it can achieve a high velocity and come in ballistically, before firing. If it's repositioning, it's going to be found by the Ghost Riders and LACs.

A graser torp should be noticeably harder to detect than a Ghost Rider recon drone. The Ghost Rider has a conventional wedge active (admittedly under stealth) and doesn't have the super fancy optical camouflage that the MAlign applied to their spider ships and drones.

Jonathan_S wrote:A graser torp should be noticeably harder to detect than a Ghost Rider recon drone. The Ghost Rider has a conventional wedge active (admittedly under stealth) and doesn't have the super fancy optical camouflage that the MAlign applied to their spider ships and drones.

We don't know the range the RMN can detect their own RDs. This little tidbit has never come up. We only know that they can get pretty close to the myopic SLN sensors (I don't remember the number, though). And sufficiently close for them to act as improvised Mistletoes on TUFT freighters in Hypatia.

I'm guessing that sufficiently close, anything can be detected. It's still generating heat, so it has an infrared signature. It is generating power, so it must be emitting neutrinos and produces an EM field. And if you bathe it in active, close-range scans, something may come back.

How close is the question.

Plus, there's the problem of the spider drive turning on, which generates a detectable power spike. I suppose the LDs could be flying around in circles just so their spiders are up, but the power-limited GTs couldn't have theirs up, if they had even been launched.

At 1 million km away at launch, the torpedoes would take 23.8 minutes to reach the targets at 100 gravities and 7.5 minutes at 1000 gravities. In the former case, they'd be moving at a snail pace of 1400 km/s or, in the latter, 4428 km/s. That's an awfully long time under active scans, including a crucial time within the defensive basket of anywhere between 45 and 145 seconds. The PDLCs can just shoot at any speck of dust and sensor ghost that the sensors turn up.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The PDLCs can just shoot at any speck of dust and sensor ghost that the sensors turn up.

They could also keep their wedges and sidewalls up all the time. But they don't.

It's only due to the kindness of the MAN that they didn't slaughter the entire RMN fleet parked with their wedges down at Beowulf.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

drothgery wrote:I could be wrong, but I think ramming an impeller-drive ship with its wedge and sidewalls up with another impeller-drive ship with its wedge and sidewalls up is pretty much impossible. Your own wedge won't fit through the gaps in the other ship's, and in a wedge fratricide situation, it's the smaller ship that's always going to lose (well, the less powerful wedge, but barring tugs, that's the smaller ship).

The goal is wedge fratricide, not a hull-to-hull contact. And the fact is we don't know what level of wedge disparity is survivable. We know very small wedges do no damage, as in missile wedges hitting a ship's wedge. But the only instance we have of a larger ship running down a smaller ship resulted in both being destroyed. That would be the freighter running down the Peep BC in With One Stone.

You are forgetting about the time the "Fearless" (a 90K light cruiser) did a close flyby of a PN courier (45K?) in _On Basilisk Station_. True the courier's nodes were not yet on line, but the interaction destroyed the courier's nodes, but the "Fearless" suffered no damage.

kzt wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:We also have to question exactly how effective a grazer torpedo would be against an SD with its wedge and sidewalls up. Odds are that they're only a minimal threat unless in vast numbers.

GTs have a cruiser-grade grazer. Not the capital-ship grade grazers on a Sag-C either; think more like the ones aboard a Star Knight. Or better yet, a Shrike. Yes, they're a threat but it's going to take scores if not hundreds of hits to take out an SD. It's in large part what SD armor is designed to resist. That sort of weapon is most effective when you can get dorsal or ventral hits on areas usually covered by the wedge.

No it won't. Close range a cruser graser will go through the sidewall of an SD. And through the armor and out the other side. 'But nobody could get that close!'

SD(P)s are eggshells.

kzt wrote:They could also keep their wedges and sidewalls up all the time. But they don't.

It's only due to the kindness of the MAN that they didn't slaughter the entire RMN fleet parked with their wedges down at Beowulf.

How the MAlign managed to find out where the Mycroft were is still a very important mystery. If they can get to it, can they get to a fleet?

I would like to think that whatever OpSec failure led to the loss of the Mycrofts wouldn't extend to finding the parked fleets, with wedges on stand-by.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:You are forgetting about the time the "Fearless" (a 90K light cruiser) did a close flyby of a PN courier (45K?) in _On Basilisk Station_. True the courier's nodes were not yet on line, but the interaction destroyed the courier's nodes, but the "Fearless" suffered no damage.

It's well-established that a close flyby of an active wedge to nodes powering up will disrupt and wreck the tuning, if not destroy the nodes, of the nodes being powered up. Best case scenario they crash down and need to be powered up again.

This is the same strategy that Travis used in A Call to Duty, when he used a training missile (10 tonnes?) to crash the nodes being powered up of a Havenite battlecruiser (250,000 tonnes).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I would like to think that whatever OpSec failure led to the loss of the Mycrofts wouldn't extend to finding the parked fleets, with wedges on stand-by.

They were not on standby. They were down. It took hours to mobilize them, other than the alert squadron iirc.