?

Given that we know at least some of the technical deficiencies of the LD's and Sharks and it is clear that the Alignment also does. What we don't know is the real question. They seem to be not inteneded to enter a direct threat enviornment so they are probably designed to stand off, possibly outside the hyper limit of a system, and deploy weapons systems.

It seems to appear that the LD's are the new variation of massive wet navy submarines which are designed to stand-off and send in weapons systems. Probably a better comparison is Stealth Bombers that launch just as stealthy Cruise Missiles (which we don't yet have because the launch platforms are going to show up on various types of radar etc when they open thier bay doors to launch). On the other hand, for Systems that don't have the capabilites of Manticore, now Beowulf and a few others, one massive LD packed with GTs and other things would be devastating as it could take out the spaceborn infrastructure without exposing itself.

If you consider that the rushed Oyster Bay originaly was supposed to be a coordinated attack on multiple systems using Ghost's as the targeting scouts and LDs instead of Shark's doing the weapons deployment, then the Alignment will be in the positon to do that eventualy and there isn't much any of the Systems can do about it.

That can still be done and in support of the RF but not directly. Heck, you could have a few ships wandring around blowing up bits of all sorts of systems infrastructure- from vast distances- and force systems to commit resources to a probably futile effort to maintain anything in their systems that wasn't constantly -and probably randomly- changing vectors, orbital distances and speeds. Makes for really really messy operating orbital fabrication and habitat stations.

But we don't know.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The chances of that happening are, literally, astronomically small. Even Honor hypering in to Sol and being "on top" of a cruiser squadron was still tens of millions of km from it, and it was a fluke chance.

Even if you just want to cover the ecliptic because your enemy would hyper in there, a 22-light minute hyper limit has a 138 light-minute perimeter. If you want to catch an unwary enemy who hypered in before they can cycle their hypergenerators back and hyper out, the forts need to be within 2 minutes' missile flight time, which for a 130,000 G Cataphract is about half a light-minute. So to cover the hole perimeter, you need 140 forts.

And that's only if the enemy hypers on the hyper limit. If they come out of it 6 million km out, there's a 50-50 chance it's got sufficient time to hyper back out from the closest fort's missiles. If they hyper in 9 million km out (half a light minute), then they are sure to hyper out if needed. And if they don't hyper in on the ecliptic, they'll be out of range too.

To catch any enemy, you need a 3D deployment, not a linear one on the perimeter of the hyperlimit on the ecliptic. Just to cover the surface of the sphere of the hyperlimit we're talking about 10000 forts. A 3D deployment is impractical in the Honorverse. That's a Type 2 Civilisation engineering feat.

And as you pointed out above even if you somehow had the ships to cover the surface of the sphere of the hyper limit that's still not enough because the enemy might drop out of hyper short of the hyper limit (either deliberately or through navigational error). So you not only need the thousands of spider drive ships, no more than 1 light minute apart, to cover the surface area of the hyper limit; but you also need multiple even larger concentric shells of them.

At 1 light minute between the shells, the inner shell is (with some roundingl and assuming I didn't stuff up my assumptions) 6,100 ships, then 6,700, 7,300, 7,900, 8,500, and 9,200 more for each additional shell. So to cover an volume of up to 5.5 light minutes from the hyper limit takes a mere 45,700 ships!

Space is vast. Even constrained space, like near a hyper limit.

Now if the enemy is flying fat dumb and happy, and tends to use the same emergence zones, then you can cover those +/- likely navigational error with far fewer ships. Maybe only a few hundred to have 1 almost certainly close enough to land missiles before they can hyper out.


Or far more practically don't bother trying to fight beyond the hyper limit. You can just hang around out there until the enemy ships emerge and start heading in system; then send a flight of graser torps to follow down their vector. The ship's will outrun the torps - but they've got endurance and will catch up sometime after the ships make turnover; well positioned for a clean down the throat shot.

Brigade XO wrote:That can still be done and in support of the RF but not directly. Heck, you could have a few ships wandring around blowing up bits of all sorts of systems infrastructure- from vast distances- and force systems to commit resources to a probably futile effort to maintain anything in their systems that wasn't constantly -and probably randomly- changing vectors, orbital distances and speeds. Makes for really really messy operating orbital fabrication and habitat stations.

But we don't know.

Indeed.

Because from what we know, any system with a QRF means a very far insertion of the LD. That means "wandering fleets blowing up bits of all sorts of systems" would mean a 2 to 9-month mission, per system, not including the travel between them.

And each LD can only fire once. If they fire twice and don't immediately hyper out, the average velocity vector can be calculated. If that point is within a powered missile envelope, the LD is practically doomed. In the 9 minutes it takes the missiles to arrive, the LD can only change its position along the baseline course by 215,000 km, or 360,000 km at emergency acceleration of 250 gravities. All the defenders need to do is bracket the possible locations and they'll likely hit or see a missile taken out by point defence. Either way, that's a third point for the vector calculation and the next missile salvo will be upon them.

Assuming, of course, that the system in question has missile pods left over and a C&C network to fire them.

[/quote]

Indeed.

Because from what we know, any system with a QRF means a very far insertion of the LD. That means "wandering fleets blowing up bits of all sorts of systems" would mean a 2 to 9-month mission, per system, not including the travel between them.

And each LD can only fire once. If they fire twice and don't immediately hyper out, the average velocity vector can be calculated. If that point is within a powered missile envelope, the LD is practically doomed. In the 9 minutes it takes the missiles to arrive, the LD can only change its position along the baseline course by 215,000 km, or 360,000 km at emergency acceleration of 250 gravities. All the defenders need to do is bracket the possible locations and they'll likely hit or see a missile taken out by point defence. Either way, that's a third point for the vector calculation and the next missile salvo will be upon them.

Assuming, of course, that the system in question has missile pods left over and a C&C network to fire them.[/quote]

You missed the point of the strengths of the LD's and weapons systems. They don't "fire" things like the Graser Torpedos, they expel them like using a mass driver (no energy flare). Ghosts to gather and compile tracking data at targets that the GTs will eventualy reach under powered flight using spider drives and - if you look back at Oyster Bay- the Sharks launched (don't remember mechanism) the various ballistic packages of weapons to take long trajectories in-system NO IMPELLER WEDGES. So, unless you have something tracking occlusion of stars (etc) or picking up reflected light (from what are probably matt black masked objects) or your weapons run too close to some ship with sensors running that will notice UNPOWERD blocks of metal hurtling in-system, nobody is going to see anything till the explosions start. And, at that point, all the Alighmente ships are probably already exiting the system under spider drive and so won't be noticed.

If you don't know the LD is there, you can't shoot at it and if you don't know the weapons are inbound you can't bring up your defences. One of the problems that Manticore faced even before starting to rebuild was that they were going to have to put anything orbital up there with SHIELDS IN PLACE ALL THE TIME. That is a massive amount of power use and if you are going to use a wedge to do part of that you have to put everything where you can let each discreat orbital object be way far enough from everything elce to probably randomly shift the directdion of where their wedges are oriented. That doesn't begin to deal with the routing of anything moving to or from your stations though some sort of shield maze to eliminate close direct fire.

Messy, expensive, complicated.

The LDs are very much standoff weapons platforms. If they have anything like cataphracts as part of the weapons suites, that is probably a last ditch "go-to-hell" weapon load you can flush to kill as many of your attacker as possible, not something that will give you any kind of cover to sneak away. Or RFC has been being very creativly devious again and things go sideways.

LDs may not be snails but they are not expected to be leopards. We have no idea what their counter measures capabilites are. They are stealthy. Ambush stalker/hunters but they don't stick around to observe the effects of what they deliver, they are creeping away to escape and once they get to the hyperlimit (if they are already there) they are just going to "go away" and quite possily long gone in hyperspace before the first of there weapons strike targets.

Jonathan_S wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The chances of that happening are, literally, astronomically small. Even Honor hypering in to Sol and being "on top" of a cruiser squadron was still tens of millions of km from it, and it was a fluke chance.

Even if you just want to cover the ecliptic because your enemy would hyper in there, a 22-light minute hyper limit has a 138 light-minute perimeter. If you want to catch an unwary enemy who hypered in before they can cycle their hypergenerators back and hyper out, the forts need to be within 2 minutes' missile flight time, which for a 130,000 G Cataphract is about half a light-minute. So to cover the hole perimeter, you need 140 forts.

And that's only if the enemy hypers on the hyper limit. If they come out of it 6 million km out, there's a 50-50 chance it's got sufficient time to hyper back out from the closest fort's missiles. If they hyper in 9 million km out (half a light minute), then they are sure to hyper out if needed. And if they don't hyper in on the ecliptic, they'll be out of range too.

To catch any enemy, you need a 3D deployment, not a linear one on the perimeter of the hyperlimit on the ecliptic. Just to cover the surface of the sphere of the hyperlimit we're talking about 10000 forts. A 3D deployment is impractical in the Honorverse. That's a Type 2 Civilisation engineering feat.

And as you pointed out above even if you somehow had the ships to cover the surface of the sphere of the hyper limit that's still not enough because the enemy might drop out of hyper short of the hyper limit (either deliberately or through navigational error). So you not only need the thousands of spider drive ships, no more than 1 light minute apart, to cover the surface area of the hyper limit; but you also need multiple even larger concentric shells of them.

At 1 light minute between the shells, the inner shell is (with some roundingl and assuming I didn't stuff up my assumptions) 6,100 ships, then 6,700, 7,300, 7,900, 8,500, and 9,200 more for each additional shell. So to cover an volume of up to 5.5 light minutes from the hyper limit takes a mere 45,700 ships!

Space is vast. Even constrained space, like near a hyper limit.

Now if the enemy is flying fat dumb and happy, and tends to use the same emergence zones, then you can cover those +/- likely navigational error with far fewer ships. Maybe only a few hundred to have 1 almost certainly close enough to land missiles before they can hyper out.


Or far more practically don't bother trying to fight beyond the hyper limit. You can just hang around out there until the enemy ships emerge and start heading in system; then send a flight of graser torps to follow down their vector. The ship's will outrun the torps - but they've got endurance and will catch up sometime after the ships make turnover; well positioned for a clean down the throat shot.

You're overthinking it guys; by leaps and bounds. You're looking at forts as if they are warships. They are not. They are forts. Forts have a different modus operandi than warships. Duty on a fort is a lonely proposition. Remember? It's like fishing. Most of the time you catch nothing. But when you do, you got a whale of a tale to tell. These things are like snipers. Methodical. Patient. Opportunistic. Deadly.

I also wonder if a MALign fort can at least double the accel of an RMN fort. The tactic of jumping in and out around the periphery of a system just to annoy, can get you eaten alive in this part of town. These forts are called Venus Fly Traps.

Also, if an enemy fleet crosses the hyper limit, the forts will begin their invisible interception, like a secret, but deadly game of Fox & Geese.

Also, just a few of these babies can cover lots of territory by launching a shell of stealthed pods across the path of ships, like GR probes and spike strips. LOL


Something else. What is this time factor that's claimed to be needed before the enemy hypers out? The enemy isn't going to hyper out. The enemy isn't even aware he's been targeted and launched on. If he happens to get lucky and hypers out in time because he, well, got lucky. Oh well. What's a 100 or so missiles. We'll get 'em next time. Sometimes the fish jumps off the hook. The Lion will tell you that sometimes the prey just gets away. But, just that bit of adrenaline and excitement is plenty for a fort.

Consider this. LDs and Forts may be a lot closer to their missiles than the RMN can consistently hope for. So, they may not need FTL control, if they hone their tactics like a well oiled Alpha machine.

Everyone has been drilled with the same WOLFPACK tactic as the LDs.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: In the 9 minutes it takes the missiles to arrive, the LD can only change its position along the baseline course by 215,000 km, or 360,000 km at emergency acceleration of 250 gravities. All the defenders need to do is bracket the possible locations and they'll likely hit or see a missile taken out by point defence. Either way, that's a third point for the vector calculation and the next missile salvo will be upon them.

You need to get a missile within single digit km to do serious damage. At 50 km it's just a bright light.

So it takes rather a lot of missiles. Like 1,849,000,000 missiles. I might be confused, but I doubt they have that many. And the way you will normally know that there is spider present is when a flaming datum appears.

Brigade XO wrote:The LDs are very much standoff weapons platforms. If they have anything like cataphracts as part of the weapons suites, that is probably a last ditch "go-to-hell" weapon load you can flush to kill as many of your attacker as possible, not something that will give you any kind of cover to sneak away. Or RFC has been being very creativly devious again and things go sideways.

LDs may not be snails but they are not expected to be leopards. We have no idea what their counter measures capabilites are. They are stealthy. Ambush stalker/hunters but they don't stick around to observe the effects of what they deliver, they are creeping away to escape and once they get to the hyperlimit (if they are already there) they are just going to "go away" and quite possily long gone in hyperspace before the first of there weapons strike targets.

Ah, I see what you're proposing: basically, keep repeating Oyster Bay. Sorry, I was thinking of attacks like the one originally in this thread, which was to decloak close to orbit and shoot everything down. That's not going to happen.

I agree that Oyster Bay-like will work and I've said it before: a high speed attack. Insert two to six months before D-day, then accelerate to 0.8c. 1 to 2 days before arrival, deploy stealth Graser Torpedoes, then change course. By the time the GTs fire, the LD is far enough away to evade detection, but close enough to control them in near real-time.

kzt wrote:You need to get a missile within single digit km to do serious damage. At 50 km it's just a bright light.

Are missiles that myopic? Won't they find the LD if they pass within (say) 10,000 km? To cover a circular section of 360,000 in radius with weapons that can each cover 10,000 km requires roughly 36^2 = 1296 missiles.

The shot doesn't need to be perfect. Even a glancing blow suffices, since that will compromise the stealth painting and cause debris to be ejected. And even if the stealth isn't compromised sufficiently to allow tracking, the simple fact that the missile fired is tracking information.

Further, the LD crew cannot take the chance and they will need to engage missiles coming close. To do otherwise, they'd have to be lucky every time, whereas the defenders only need to be lucky once. Against a ship without wedge and sidewall, a decent laserhead shot will do crippling damage. So the defenders will get tracking by seeing the point defence engaging the missiles that are close by.

Anyway, all this rested on the assumption that the LD would fire something that itself could be tracked. See my post just above for a scenario where that isn't the case and therefore the LD could get away unscathed and undetected.

cthia wrote:You're overthinking it guys; by leaps and bounds. You're looking at forts as if they are warships. They are not. They are forts. Forts have a different modus operandi than warships. Duty on a fort is a lonely proposition. Remember? It's like fishing. Most of the time you catch nothing. But when you do, you got a whale of a tale to tell. These things are like snipers. Methodical. Patient. Opportunistic. Deadly.

Not forgetting any of that. I just don't see how that's relevant in the scenario that you posited of of having forts ambush an incoming force before it crosses the hyper limit.

Below, you changed the scenario.

I also wonder if a MALign fort can at least double the accel of an RMN fort. The tactic of jumping in and out around the periphery of a system just to annoy, can get you eaten alive in this part of town. These forts are called Venus Fly Traps.

Nothing wrong with having a spider-driven fort. There's no upper limit in size that way. So the MAlign could build something bigger than an LD, or the same size of one without a hyper generator. The problem in this case is that of resources: every fort produced is one LD that wasn't. We discussed this earlier in the thread about Manticoran forts: for the same price of a spider-driven fort, the MAlign could make an LD, which has simlar or better stealth and is hyper-capable.

But I still don't see how that makes them traps, since there's no way the MAlign can have enough of them to catch an incoming force before it begins to converge on the planet-objective. That's a tactic no different than any other defender would adopt.

Also, if an enemy fleet crosses the hyper limit, the forts will begin their invisible interception, like a secret, but deadly game of Fox & Geese.

The only way for a slow-moving object to intercept a faster-moving one is if it is closer to the objective than the fast-moving force or be on the trajectory that force will take. Since you don't know what that trajectory will be, there's no way to pre-position forts (or LDs) along it and far from the objective. They have to be close.

Also, just a few of these babies can cover lots of territory by launching a shell of stealthed pods across the path of ships, like GR probes and spike strips. LOL

Ghost Rider RDs have impeller wedges and GA forces can probably detect them under half a million km, from their own RDs. That puts the attacking object too far for energy weapons and too close for missiles. Instead, if it's a spider drive, it will move even slower than the LD or fort, so they'll be left behind instead of increasing the volume the fort/LD controls.

If you meant non-moving pods of conventional, system-defence missiles, then that's a threat, but you don't need a stealthed fort to control them, much less one that is itself trying to generate an intercept vector with the force.

Something else. What is this time factor that's claimed to be needed before the enemy hypers out? The enemy isn't going to hyper out. The enemy isn't even aware he's been targeted and launched on. If he happens to get lucky and hypers out in time because he, well, got lucky. Oh well. What's a 100 or so missiles. We'll get 'em next time. Sometimes the fish jumps off the hook. The Lion will tell you that sometimes the prey just gets away. But, just that bit of adrenaline and excitement is plenty for a fort.

Because that was the parameter you provided. You said that you wanted the forts to engage a force outside the hyper limit before it could hyper out. That only makes sense if it also engages the force before it crosses the hyper limit. Frankly, I don't see why any defender would want to do that: let the attackers cross the hyper limit, then they can't hyper out even if they want to.

As for engaging with stealth weapons using spider drive, those are horribly slow. The attackers do not have to follow a least-time (straight line) course and probably won't since that's way too predictable. So the chance that a stealthed weapon can get in range of the force before it crosses the hyper limit is too low.

The other problem is that it's not "100 missiles, so what". In order to even fire those 100 missiles, you need to have something like 100 million missiles around the system. And by "missiles", I imagine you mean "stealth torpedoes".

Consider this. LDs and Forts may be a lot closer to their missiles than the RMN can consistently hope for. So, they may not need FTL control, if they hone their tactics like a well oiled Alpha machine.

Everyone has been drilled with the same WOLFPACK tactic as the LDs.

That makes no sense. If the launching control centre is close to their weapons, then those weapons are on average much further away from target.

Anti-ship missiles in the honorverse have major problems distinguishing between warships and planets that are thousands of km in diameter. So no, i don’t think they will be able to target something that is extremely difficult to detect by the MAN. Any more than SLN missiles can be fired off in the general direction of RMN ghost rider drones and expect to home in on them. Which has apparently happened never.