?

cthia wrote:On that note, are we sure the graser torp didn't self-detruct because that is an intended design element? Wouldn't want that to fall into enemy hands. I think I remember textev saying it is a byproduct, but that doesn't mean the MA didn't accept it as providence. It's secrets are secure, perhaps, because the MA may have accepted its imminent destruction as a fortunate byproduct. After all, no self-destruct mechanism is needed.

The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there'd never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN's designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren't looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The Silver Bullet found the Mycroft stealth stations in Beowulf, but it spent a lot of time looking for it. It wasn't an arrive-and-fire. An LD would have to lurk in the inner system for days on end to find a stealth ship, which unlike a station is highly mobile. I don't see this happening. In fact, an RMN or RHN ship with no wedge and under stealth is probably less detectable from a distance than the spider drive. An LD looking for such a ship is running the risk of being detected first.

Jonathan_S wrote:So a Spider ship trying to sniff out stealthed defenders is unlikely to get the helpful breadcrumbs of detectable FTL transmissions from them.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:So a Spider ship trying to sniff out stealthed defenders is unlikely to get the helpful breadcrumbs of detectable FTL transmissions from them.

Depends. A defense network will have housekeeping traffic, unless you don't care if it works or not.

cthia wrote:LOL

"Oh shit! The last crew to service them left them in maintenance mode!"

On that note. How exactly does a GR drone paint a target?

cthia wrote:Remember the grasers which ignited the Byng incident? Initially, none of the ships even knew what had happened.

tlb wrote:I agree that if the sidewalls and the wedges are down, then the ships will not know what hit them; which was the situation with the destroyers at New Tuscany. However the ignition point was the destruction of the space station. in the way that the Malign would later repeat at Beowulf. From Storm from the Shadows, chapter 41:

That meant there was no one who could possibly have tied Lieutenant Rochefort to Manpower or Mesa before he pressed that function key.
And no one could possibly tie the lieutenant to anyone after that, since the message he transmitted was actually the detonation command for the two-hundred-kiloton device hidden inside a cargo container a Jessyk Combine freighter had transshipped to Giselle a month before . . . and which was now stored in a cargo bay approximately one hundred and twelve meters forward and three hundred meters down from Lieutenant Rochefort's compartment.

cthia wrote:That is not what I meant. Of course a ship won't know what hit them if the victim of one of these attacks. And no, the destroyers at New Tuscany didn't know what hit them.

I'm talking about the warships from both Navy's didn't know what destroyed the space station. The SLN didn't know. The RMN didn't know. IINM, it was speculated to be an energy beam after a missile was ruled out. That tells me energy beams aren't readily detected by the fleet. Am I wrong about that?

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 14 wrote:And, in a way, Yu was just as happy his energy weapons would be out of it. His jamming and other precautions should make it almost impossible for even the Manticorans to localize him if he used only missiles, but energy fire could be back-plotted far too precisely, and hiding his ships had required him to shut down his own drives, which deprived him of any sidewalls. Besides, Principality was one of the new city-class destroyers. She was short on energy weapons . . . but she packed a missile broadside most light cruisers might envy.

Vince wrote:Yes, you are wrong about energy beams not being readily detected by naval ships. When HMS Madrigal and the GSN ships were ambushed by Alfredo Yu and Thomas Theisman in:

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 14 wrote:And, in a way, Yu was just as happy his energy weapons would be out of it. His jamming and other precautions should make it almost impossible for even the Manticorans to localize him if he used only missiles, but energy fire could be back-plotted far too precisely, and hiding his ships had required him to shut down his own drives, which deprived him of any sidewalls. Besides, Principality was one of the new city-class destroyers. She was short on energy weapons . . . but she packed a missile broadside most light cruisers might envy.

Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

The quote suggests that even the Graysons could back-plot energy fire, but that even the Manticorans would be almost unable to localize Thunder of God and Principality if they only used missiles and hid under jamming and stealth.

“I can’t really say, Sir.” The ensign made careful adjustments. “It’s like snow or something along the asteroid belt ahead of us.”
“Put it on my display,” Alvarez decided.
Jackson did better than that and dropped the same data onto Courvosier’s plot, and the admiral frowned. He wasn’t familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the Yeltsin System, but the two clumps of cluttered radar returns certainly looked odd. They were fairly far apart and neither was all that big, yet the returns were so dense Madrigal couldn’t see into them, and his frown deepened. Micrometeor clusters?

Jonathan_S wrote:You've got to wait for a periodic test to happen, and then that will at least let you narrow down their position each test until you've finally located the relay.

Manticore seems to have failed to considered the vulnerability of systems tests to someone with stealth drones capable of devoting many weeks to slowly sniffing out the relays as they broke "radio silence"

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:You've got to wait for a periodic test to happen, and then that will at least let you narrow down their position each test until you've finally located the relay.

Manticore seems to have failed to considered the vulnerability of systems tests to someone with stealth drones capable of devoting many weeks to slowly sniffing out the relays as they broke "radio silence"

Especially since that's exactly what Mistletoe was designed to do against the original Havenite Moriarty. So when the GA designed the improved version of Moriarty as Mycroft, it didn't add in the solution to the weakness that allowed Manticore to target them.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:On that note, are we sure the graser torp didn't self-detruct because that is an intended design element? Wouldn't want that to fall into enemy hands. I think I remember textev saying it is a byproduct, but that doesn't mean the MA didn't accept it as providence. It's secrets are secure, perhaps, because the MA may have accepted its imminent destruction as a fortunate byproduct. After all, no self-destruct mechanism is needed.

You could read it as though that was a design element, but it seems to me that it was unavoidable design limitation that fortuitously precluded the need for a self-destruct device.

Here is the test from Mission of Honor, chapter 28;

The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.
Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there'd never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN's designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren't looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.

...course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability,