?

Theemile wrote:Also, GHOSTS were already dropped off via freigher in system - I don't remember if it was inside the hyperlimit, or on route to the wormhole, but they used strap on cold gas thrusters to exit standard freighter holds.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:PS: graser torpedoes are complete overkill for freighters. In fact, regular grasers are overkill.

Jonathan_S wrote:However - to hide the hyper emergence the Shark wouldn't need to be physically carried by the freighter. They just need to do a linked emergence (kind of like the shoal of Sharks did approaching Manticore). That will look pretty similar to a single ship emergence and can be done with a perfectly stock tramp freighter. Just do it far enough out that the Shark has time to slip away before any patrol ship might swing by close enough to get a visual.

Also if we're talking about a build up of commerce raiders some years off, Sharks are less that ideal. They were built as sub-scale simulators for the Lenny-Det capital ships; training up the crews and letting the MAlign do physical war games to work out tactics. (Also they'll have the issues of any first ever prototype - as they were the first armed spider ships ever built). You should be able to design a somewhat smaller spider design optimized for commerce raiding before putting anything into mass production. Still I suspect physically carrying the raiders isn't the ideal tactic; even if they mass well under 4 million tons.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
That was a light-month out. True, it was to avoid the sensitive sensors around Manticore, which other systems aren't likely to have. But any freighter that is detected dropping way too short of the hyperlimit is going to be inspected. That's not good for the carrier.

It has to pretend to be a regular freighter, emerging from hyperspace where freighters emerge: on the hyperlimit, to the accuracy of their civilian sensors and crew. It also has to arrive alone (or in a completely controlled convoy), so it can deploy the parasite ship without being seen by other third-party freighters.

And what should it do if there is a warship in the least-time course? It can't deploy too close to the ship, it can't deploy too close to the planet and the warship might be controlling RDs close to the hyper limit. Failing to deploy could mean a random inspection finds the parasite ship.

Is it worth the risk?

We're coming up on the deployment point now, Commodore."
"Thank you, Captain Jacobi," Commodore Karol Østby replied, nodding to the woman on his com display.
Captain Rachel Jacobi looked like any other merchant service officer, although she might have been just a little young for her current rank. Appearances could be deceiving, however, and not just because of prolong. Rachel Jacobi was even younger for her actual rank than she seemed, not to mention an officer in a navy the rest of the galaxy didn't even know existed . . . yet.
"Bay doors are opening, Sir," another voice said, and Østby turned from his com to look across the cramped bridge at Captain Eric Masters. If Jacobi looked young for her rank, then Masters looked far too senior to be commanding a ship little larger than an old-fashioned frigate, but, again, appearances could be deceiving. Despite her tiny size (she had no flag bridge, and Østby couldn't even fit all of his abbreviated staff onto her command deck) MANS Chameleon, Østby's flagship, was something entirely new in the history of galactic warfare. Whether or not she was going to live up to her name and the expectations invested in her remained to be seen . . . and was going to depend very heavily on the actions of Østby and Masters and the rest of Chameleon's small crew.
"My panel shows doors fully open, Commodore," Jacobi said. "Do you confirm?"
"Confirm, Sir," Masters said, and Østby nodded, then looked back at Jacobi.
"We confirm doors fully open, Captain," he said formally.
"In that case, Sir, good hunting."
"Thank you, Captain Jacobi."
Østby nodded to her once more, then turned his command chair to face Masters.
"Anytime you're ready, Captain Masters."
"Yes, Sir." Masters looked at his astrogator and helmsman. "Take us out," he said simply, and Chameleon twitched ever so gently as the web of tractor and pressor beams which had held her exactly centered in the freighter Wallaby's cavernous Number Two hold were switched off at last.
A gentle puff of compressed air from the specially modified thruster packs strapped to her bow sent her drifting backward, without the pyrotechnics of her normal fusion-powered thrusters. That would have been . . . contraindicated inside a ship, Østby thought dryly while he watched the visual display as the hold's bulkheads went sliding by.
It was the first time they'd made an actual combat deployment, but Østby's captains and crews had practiced this same maneuver dozens of times before ever leaving the Mesa System. He had no concern at all about this part of the mission, and his mind strayed ahead to the rest of the mission.
No point worrying about any of that yet, he told himself firmly. Not even if you and Topolev did draw the harder target. But at least you didn't have quite as far to go as Colenso and Sung just to get to your objective. Sung won't even be deploying for another week!
The deployment maneuver took quite a while, but no one was in a tearing hurry, and no one wanted to risk a last-minute, potentially catastrophic accident. Wallaby had made her alpha translation thirty minutes ago, and she was still several hours away from the wormhole junction she'd ostensibly come here to transit. At this range, even a fully conventional ship Chameleon's size would almost certainly have been invisible even to Manticoran sensor arrays (assuming its skipper was smart enough not to bring up his wedge, at any rate). Not that anyone intended to take any chances.
Chameleon slid completely free of Wallaby, like an Old Earth shark sliding tail-first from its mother's womb, and the modified packs fell away as the jettisoning charges blew. They disappeared quickly into the Stygian gloom—this far out from the system primary, even the star gleam on Chameleon's own flanks was scarcely visible—and Østby continued to watch the visual display as the running light constellations bejeweling the clifflike immensity of the freighter's mammoth hull drew steadily away from them.
"Confirm clean separation, Sir," Masters' astrogator announced.
"Very good. Communications, do we have contact with the rest of the squadron?"
"Yes, Sir. Ghost just plugged into the net. Telemetry is up and nominal."
"Very good," Masters repeated, and looked at his executive officer. "Take us into stealth and bring up the spider, Chris," he said.
"Aye, aye, Sir." Commander Christopher Delvecchio punched in a string of commands, then nodded to the astrogator. "Stealth is up and operating. The ship is yours, Astro."
"Aye, aye, Sir. I have the ship," the astrogator responded, and MANS Chameleon and her consorts reoriented themselves and began to slowly accelerate, invisible within the concealing cocoon of their stealth fields, towards the primary component of the star system known as Manticore.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:However - to hide the hyper emergence the Shark wouldn't need to be physically carried by the freighter. They just need to do a linked emergence (kind of like the shoal of Sharks did approaching Manticore). That will look pretty similar to a single ship emergence and can be done with a perfectly stock tramp freighter. Just do it far enough out that the Shark has time to slip away before any patrol ship might swing by close enough to get a visual.

And how do they know there's no patrol ship nearby? The most likely place for a patrol ship to be is near the least-time course hyperspace emergency point. If it's a mere 3 million km away, it can shoot the invader out of the sky before it can cycle its hypergenerators, with sprint single-stage missiles. It can sit at anywhere between 3.7 and 14.6 million km and shoot with dual-drive missiles in sprint mode. That's too far for weapons range and the GTs are too slow to close on the defender. And in those 180 seconds, a spider drive ship can move no more than 25000 km. And remember the attacker has no wedge.

This is not the same as previous discussions on catching a scout ship that isn't trying to hide its hyper-emergency. That scout ship can emerge anywhere, so it doesn't have to be anywhere close to where defenders are likely to be and space is too vast for proper coverage of all possible spots. The spider-driven ships need to hide the fact that they're even present, which means their translation must not raise any alerts. That means emerging exactly where freighters emerge.

Jonathan_S wrote:But you're right that it's overkill. You don't need the self-destructive overpowered graser to kill a freighter. (Actually you'd need pretty good targeting to kill one with a single graser; it's be like hitting an unarmored ship with an armor piercing shell - likely to punch a shell sized hole straight though but unless something critical happened to be in the way unlikely to kill the ship. And merchant ships are mostly cargo bays which aren't critical to its survival / operation.

Theemile wrote:No the SHARKS did the month out thing to hide from the sensors- the GHOSTS emerged from a freighter closer in to the wormhole junction and did months of scouting while their carrier freighters trundled on their way with a "normal" cargo.

Jonathan_S wrote:But maybe you can fix that. Rather than using expendable large GTs you could build an anti-commerce weapon that was a bit larger than a GT but mostly reusable. Offhand, I'm thinking a spider powered minelaying drone. Direct itout into the path of a freighter of convoy, drop a few laserhead mines and trundle back to the commerce raider. The large stealthy bit is reusable so you don't need to carry many and the expendable bits are far smaller so the ship can carry a bunch of them. (And use a drone because, slow as the GTs are, at "a few hundred gravities" they're faster than a manned spider ship; so have a better chance of achieving an intercept vector than the commerce raiding ship. And for a reusable one you might be willing to make it a bit larget letting you cram some more spider emitters on - allowing a higher accel. Plus you don't risk the ship getting so close)

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:But you're right that it's overkill. You don't need the self-destructive overpowered graser to kill a freighter. (Actually you'd need pretty good targeting to kill one with a single graser; it's be like hitting an unarmored ship with an armor piercing shell - likely to punch a shell sized hole straight though but unless something critical happened to be in the way unlikely to kill the ship. And merchant ships are mostly cargo bays which aren't critical to its survival / operation.

It isn’t like a solid AP round. It turns the hull into superheated plasma, and the things not directly vaporized start moving at several km/sec into the rest of the ship. Plus the diffraction caused means everyone gets a massively fatal dose of gamma radiation as this howling tornado of destruction sweeps through the ship, destroying anything in it’s path.

And it goes on for three seconds. Basically you slash the ship in half, aiming where the fusion reactor is likely to be. Typically along the spine on the top. Then you do it again, and again. Them the freighter hits a 5-10,000 ton object at several thousand km/sec. Whose fusion reactor fails.