Wormhole Assault: MA Style

You don’t need to be 6 light months out, you just need a DD or even a frigate squadron jumping in and out in a random pattern for a week, from a few light hours out to many light months.

How many ships are you going to send the the 65th suspicious contact this week? How many ships can you send?

So now you have the entire system navy going crazy. The you let the dogs catch the car. And flotilla 37 is never heard from again. How long does it even take for the navy to figure out that they are never coming back? Once they do, what is the plan? Stop investigating? Only investigate with multiple SD swuadrons? How many BatRons do they have?

So I’d argue that the entire OB attack was insane, but once you have gone down that path, not keeping the pressure on Manticore was very dumb. You can essentially force the RMN to curl up in a protective ball, but instead they did what?

kzt wrote:You don’t need to be 6 light months out, you just need a DD or even a frigate squadron jumping in and out in a random pattern for a week, from a few light hours out to many light months.

How many ships are you going to send the the 65th suspicious contact this week? How many ships can you send?

Indeed, I have no counter to this. Once the defending navy is unable to verify all emergences, then they have to give up and simply stand on defence. They know where the emergences happened, so they know what the minimum transit time in n-space from there to any targets is.

But not the maximum. The attacker does not need to come at 0.8c. So how long can the defending navy stand on full action?

So I’d argue that the entire OB attack was insane, but once you have gone down that path, not keeping the pressure on Manticore was very dumb. You can essentially force the RMN to curl up in a protective ball, but instead they did what?

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Hindsight is 20-20...

We understand what they were thinking though. They were still hidden at that point, so they of course didn't want to reveal their capabilities too much. They needed Haven to win the war and capture some of the Manty tech so they could fight the SLN. Destroying Manticore completely would work against their goals, as they understood them, and would alert too clearly that there was a third party at play.

The fact that the RHN could defeat the SLN all on their own, without Manty tech, was not known to the MAlign. With 1000 SD(P)s in service in mid- to late 1922, there was no way the SLN could win. The only thing that could work in their favour would be if the RHN demobilised half of its fleet...

cthia wrote:When a ship is towed thru hyper, does it emerge as two signatures?

Unclear. Based on the description of the MAN emergence I would say no. But it isn’t stated clealry.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:When a ship is towed thru hyper, does it emerge as two signatures?

Unclear. Based on the description of the MAN emergence I would say no. But it isn’t stated clealry.

If no...

then what are the reasons the MA can't develop technology to tow even a massive LD the last couple kilometers out of hyper? It would be a complex maneuver for certain. But impossible?

The Peeps jury-rigged the idea for LACs. What if the MA burned lots of α-neurons on the notion other than as an afterthought? It reminds me of an old F-150 pickup truck with a 3-speed manual tranny and the shifter on the stalk. The truck could barely top 35 mph, but it had insane torque. It could pull a stump out of the ground.

I see visions of an MA F-150 freighter.

cthia wrote:When a ship is towed thru hyper, does it emerge as two signatures?

How can it? The signature from emerging from hyperspace is the bleeding of energy from the hypersails. One set of sails means one point source to detect.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:One question is how many systems have anything remotely close to the Manticore Binary System sensor net and scout response arrangement. We are not even sure Sol could have picked up the Sharks coming over the hyper-wall at the distance out they were.

Even if there was a sensor reading, what would they investigate with? Beowulf, probably. Any of the SL Core Systems.....well, we just don't know..

Plus there are ways around the sensor nets even in most systems that have them. You can do kzt's proposal of swamping the system with a few ships popping in and out at random; the system knows somebody's been screwing with it, but there are so many emergence signals that they don't have the reaction forces to investigate them all in a timely manner so the odds are very good the actual LD insertions won't get investigated until they're clear. Or you can piggy-back on the emergence of an accomplice freighter. The very best sensor might be able to discern that two ships emerged together; but most systems even if they can see the emergence signal can't tell that the freighter brought a friend.
Either of those could cut the insertion time down to days instead of months.
Or you could do a 1-2 punch - have freighters deploy Ghosts and Hansa; use those to smash the multi-km arrays that make up those super long-range sensors; and then insert LDs later for a follow-up strike on the now myopic system.

Hey, I missed this post.

If the MA can clear the technical hurdles of towing an LD, that would eliminate the second emergence signature. And if a freighter can tow an LD, a Shark will be a piece of cake.

@Zvar. Exactly!

.

cthia wrote:

kzt wrote:Unclear. Based on the description of the MAN emergence I would say no. But it isn’t stated clealry.

But the text does make it clear that the hyper footprint is larger.

cthia wrote:
then what are the reasons the MA can't develop technology to tow even a massive LD the last couple kilometers out of hyper? It would be a complex maneuver for certain. But impossible?

The Peeps jury-rigged the idea for LACs. What if the MA burned lots of α-neurons on the notion other than as an afterthought? It reminds me of an old F-150 pickup truck with a 3-speed manual tranny and the shifter on the stalk. The truck could barely top 35 mph, but it had insane torque. It could pull a stump out of the ground.

I see visions of an MA F-150 freighter.

Completely possible. But it will be a huge footprint. What made OB possible was that it was far enough away that the signal was pretty low to begin with. It was also two separate signals, one for each translation, and they bet on the RMN and ACS simply assuming it was a signal echo, something that is known to happen.

But if they try this close to the inner system, the defenders may not be so easily fooled. Moreover, if it's too close, the other ship may be resolved via regular sensors.

cthia wrote:

kzt wrote:Unclear. Based on the description of the MAN emergence I would say no. But it isn’t stated clealry.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But the text does make it clear that the hyper footprint is larger.

cthia wrote:
then what are the reasons the MA can't develop technology to tow even a massive LD the last couple kilometers out of hyper? It would be a complex maneuver for certain. But impossible?

The Peeps jury-rigged the idea for LACs. What if the MA burned lots of α-neurons on the notion other than as an afterthought? It reminds me of an old F-150 pickup truck with a 3-speed manual tranny and the shifter on the stalk. The truck could barely top 35 mph, but it had insane torque. It could pull a stump out of the ground.

I see visions of an MA F-150 freighter.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Completely possible. But it will be a huge footprint. What made OB possible was that it was far enough away that the signal was pretty low to begin with. It was also two separate signals, one for each translation, and they bet on the RMN and ACS simply assuming it was a signal echo, something that is known to happen.

But if they try this close to the inner system, the defenders may not be so easily fooled. Moreover, if it's too close, the other ship may be resolved via regular sensors.

Hmm... You just informed me of something I was missing. The hyper footprint is the mass of the ship, not the brilliance of the energy bleeding from the sails?

Hmm... You just informed me of something I was missing. The hyper footprint is the mass of the ship, not the brilliance of the energy bleeding from the sails?

Sails are only involved if you are in a grav wave. Mantincore is not . The emergence signature is from the downward translation crossing the hyper boundary. You are shedding that extra velocity which was lost as gravitational energy. The slower the translation, the lower the energy. Sail are just energetic (when used) due to the higher speed when downward translating.

If you were translating towing a mass, you have more energy; the extra mass would be seen as a more energetic translation.