cthia wrote:I may as well get on ThinksMarkedly's nerve again and suggest another MA breakthrough. "In for a penny, in for a pound." ...
The way I envision the spider being used defensively, after you loosely described what you're thinking, is to use them as a broom. Like using the capital missiles as Barricade, whereby the wedges collided with the SLN missiles during unpowered flight and thus eliminated them all. What the spider ship would do is de-focus its overpowered tractors, so they're still putting out a lot of energy, but instead of tearing a hole in the alpha wall with which to pull or push, it's sufficiently wide to cause gravity stresses on the incoming missiles and destroy them.
But I see a lot of problems with this.
First is that Barricade already had an impossible geometry. I really don't know how that worked. It really depended on the SLN being stupid and clustering their missiles together sufficiently for the opposing missiles' wedges to cover them. The RMN is not likely to be that stupid. Moreover, the SLN wouldn't be that stupid twice either: it's something that would only work once (provided that there were survivors to tell the tale, of course). But unlike an offensive tactic, using this as a defensive strategy does not cause the opposing side to die. Their follow-up salvos will not fall for the same trick.
Second, there's a problem with the geometry of the spider ship, though this is a minor problem. The way this may work is if all the tractors on one side are joined together to form a shovel. That means the ship only has one third of its tractors facing the incoming salvo. Maybe the ship can spin like a top around its longitudinal axis, so the three planes perpendicular to the ship's surface and to the direction of travel sweep continuously.
Third, the problem of geometry of the missiles. They are spreading in the volume of a cone as they come, so they may have multiple angles of attack. That's how they are able to attack turtled ships that have interposed their wedges. That means they are not all conveniently packed in any direction. The spider shovel I envisioned would be weakest at the edges. Plus, the missiles themselves still have time in their wedge clocks and can still change their velocity vectors by hundreds of km/s every second, so they can "dodge" the shovel by cutting acceleration or even reversing, if possible. All of this under Dazzlers' effect, so pinpointing where those warheads are is very difficult.
Fourth, until the missiles shed their wedge to deploy the focusing lens to fire, they are inside their wedge. The only thing that is capable of destroying a wedge is another, bigger wedge. For a spider tractor to be able to destroy a missile under those conditions, we'd have to have found something other than a wedge that can interfere with one. While no one else may have had the leap of using a tractor to move (what are you going to pull again, after all), overpowering tractors will have occurred to people. Just thing of in-system tugs that may be called upon to move a stricken 7-million-tonne freighter. So I think it's entirely likely for someone to have done experiments to see if a tractor could interfere with a wedge and destroy the emitters, meaning that if it were possible for tractors to be used offensively or defensively, we'd have seen. And especially since we
have seen something along those lines, The Crippler: that may not have been the same thing, but it would have spurred a lot of "what if" questions to be investigated.
Fifth and possibly the nail in the coffin, range. Missiles fire from tens of thousands of km out and RFC was quite explicit that the spider is VERY short-ranged, shorter-ranged than the grav lance. We may speculate on what he's left unsaid, but going against what he explicitly said is not a recipe for success. Especially when he compared to the grav lance, which is a most definitely dead topic.
Even if you could extend the range, it's highly likely that doing so would compromise the stealth. Maybe at that point stealth is no longer a problem -- if you have missiles bearing down on you, it's probably already compromised. But if you use your propulsion system in a way other than propulsion, you're probably going ballistic and that makes the missiles' aim even easier. This is already a ship that doesn't have a wedge, so all its aspects are open to incoming fire. If it stops evading and lights up a big gravitational beacon "here I am," it has to guarantee 100% interception rate.
