tlb wrote:This may be what you meant from
Shadow of Saganami, chapter 22:
"Guns."
"How likely would you say our bogeys would be to detect a directional grav pulse transmitted directly away from them by one of the stealthed arrays thirteen light-minutes astern of them?"
"That would depend on how good their sensor suites are, and how good the people using them are," Bagwell replied. "BuWeaps' R and D people evaluated and tested as much of their hardware as we could recover from the ships Duchess Harrington knocked out at Sidemore Station. On the basis of their tests, and assuming these people have well-trained, alert sensor crews," he was punching information into his console as he spoke, cross-indexing against the recorded test data, "I'd have to say they'd have somewhere around a . . . one-in-ten chance. That might be a little pessimistic, but I'd rather err on the side of overestimating their chances, rather than underestimating."
ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Two things here. First, where I added emphasis: a directional grav pulse. That means FTL transmission is not omnidirectional but instead is focused. It may not be as focused as a laser, but probably focused enough that if you're not in the roughly direct line of sight, you'd never notice it.
Second, what Solly hardware did Honor capture at Sidemore? The First Battle of Marsh was against André Warnecke and he flew CAs of Silesian build. During Second Marsh, she fought Lester Tourville when he had brand, new Havenite hardware. That hardware did have FTL capability; Warnecke wouldn't have known or dreamt about it and wouldn't know an FTL drone if one landed on his lap.
What am I missing?
Or was "Guns" expecting SLN Indefatigable-class BCs crewed by Monicans to have performance like that of the RHN? It wouldn't be a bad idea to make the estimate against your worst, known enemy until you knew better, because until this point they had yet to capture any Solly hardware to analyse. The Battle of Tiberian had happened 2 and a half years before, but Oversteegen didn't leave much of the CAs to be analysed.
First, tlb, yes that probably was the passage I was thinking of. Nice find.
Second, ThinksMarkedly the bit you're missing is well outside the quoted bit of text. The ship that "Captain Einarsson's little force" of LACs are approaching is Bogey Three "a four-million-ton, Solarian-built Dromedary class" freighter. But that's not who Hexapuma is trying to keep from detecting the FTL signals.
Shadow of Saganami wrote:The bad news was that even people who couldn't read grav-pulses could detect them, and it was general knowledge by now that the RMN had that technology. So Captain Terekhov couldn't risk transmitting the release to attack until—or if—he'd sucked his own intended victims in close enough to be sure of engaging them.
Hexapuma is laying a trap for Bogeys One and Two; which they've already identified as ex-Peep designs -- a Desforge-class destroyer and a Mars-class heavy cruiser.
So knowledge of what Haven's latest sensors could detect, based on ships captures at Sidemore, should provide a definite upper bound to what the older Peep ships sensors might be able to catch. But by using drones as FTL relays to route the signal well away from the ex-Peep ships means they're not alerted to their risk - yet the LACs still get the message that they're cleared to disable the freighter so it can't hyper out (now that they know the battle in-system will be over before any light-speed signal from the freighter can reach the warships).
