Attacking Darius:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
You're running across the golf course erratically. The sniper will most likely miss.

You'll just die tired.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
You're running across the golf course erratically. The sniper will most likely miss.

You'll just die tired.

The graser torp at long range is like a sniper shooting at someone zig-zagging.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The graser torp at long range is like a sniper shooting at someone zig-zagging.

Said sniper needs a slow-moving but course-correcting bullet.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The graser torp at long range is like a sniper shooting at someone zig-zagging.

Said sniper needs a slow-moving but course-correcting bullet.

Seems to me that the easiest time for graser torps to kill an enemy fleet is after it's taken the orbitals -- then you've got a lot of ships that have moved to a very predictable place and aren't accelerating all over the place.

So if you had a series of fortified systems you could keep using Graser torps as a revenge weapon to savage the attackers after they beat down the conventional defenses and move to seize each successive planet.

But since, as far as we know, the MAlign really only has Darius they can't afford to wait that long - as they'd be far too likely to lose their critical orbital yards and industrial stations (where little things like their graser torps are presumably manufactured) before such an ambush could be successfully pulled off.

Jonathan_S wrote:
But since, as far as we know, the MAlign really only has Darius they can't afford to wait that long - as they'd be far too likely to lose their critical orbital yards and industrial stations (where little things like their graser torps are presumably manufactured) before such an ambush could be successfully pulled off.

Well, then clearly they need to get the GA to attack someone else.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The graser torp at long range is like a sniper shooting at someone zig-zagging.

Said sniper needs a slow-moving but course-correcting bullet.

But that's not what he has in this case. When the graser torp fires at 500Mm the lightspeed lag is more than 3 seconds, that allows quite a bit of wiggling.

Loren Pechtel wrote:
But that's not what he has in this case. When the graser torp fires at 500Mm the lightspeed lag is more than 3 seconds, that allows quite a bit of wiggling.

Graser torp effective firing range is far under that, probably closer to 100,000KM unless you are dealing with a ship without a wedge up or otherwise at a very favorable advantage.

Loren Pechtel wrote:But that's not what he has in this case. When the graser torp fires at 500Mm the lightspeed lag is more than 3 seconds, that allows quite a bit of wiggling.

True but that was not my point. A bullet flies in a mostly straight line (ignoring wind effects and gravity, which makes it a parabola) and is very quick, hitting the target in less than a second. That means the target has very little time to detect and react, and any evasion that the target may be doing (zig-zagging in the golf course) is irrelevant. The biggest contribution to evasion is not the bullet's flight time, it's the sniper's reaction time to seeing the target in position, deciding to shoot, and pulling the trigger. That quarter second is significant.

A spider-driven torpedo on the other hand flies much more slowly and does course-correct. The whole discussion here is that the "sniper" can't predict where the target will be in a handful of minutes, much less in the hour it will take for the launched torpedo to get into firing range of the target.

kzt wrote:... SNIP
You are on a golf course surrounded by a thick pine forest. Somewhere in that forest is a well camouflaged sniper with a suppressed precision rifle. He might be prone on the ground or high up in a tree. You have a machine gun with a million rounds of ammo.

The start signal for the this competition is when the camouflaged sniper starts shooting at you.

How will this likely end?

Well - in this case the correct analogy is several snipers and many 'rifleman' and their caddies
... outcome not nearly so certain!

If you have to lead your target (sniper at great range vs someone walking or running, you have to judge/calculate where your target will be in X time (given it does NOT change speed or direction) and allow for things (in atmosphere on a planet) like wind and ballistics as affects on projectile size/ shape and general gravity.

The GTs have been shown in action essentially twice. One was in Oyster Bay and the other at Beowulf. At Oyster Bay -actual descriptions are only for Manticore- they were essentially slewed around to allow their massively longer firing duration to be used as energy blades to cut across and through stations etc and inflict "slicing" damage cutting through like a sword cut, not a stiletto stab (even if any movement of a target of a target of the stiletto effect of piercing "through" an object may have some "lateral" additional damage as the target moves but the beam really doesn't. At Beowulf the targets were essentialy stationary and relatively small and there was NO mention that the GT beams were slewed. There may not have been any practical purpose on doing anything but shooting at the projected center of mass.

At Manticore, while the Stations (and other things) were moving at least relative to (even if geo-stationary) the planets, the GTs had to come in "close" and clearly manuver to make use of the duration of the beams. Just exactly what are they going to do trying to shoot at maneuvering (or at least accelerating or decelerating) warships with sidewalls up? I suspect it would be "aim where you think the front of the ship is going to be and "hold that for the duration of the burn" to try and let the target drag itself agains the edge of the beam for as long as that lasts. Of course the on-board targeting and maneuvering capability of the GT MIGHT be good enough to let it lead the target such that it held the beam such that it would stay on the target's vector to try and gut it? Interesting to try.

GTs swimming around to get in the way of an attacking fleet or ship? Can you get to an intercept point? If you get ONE GT to an intercept point, is it likely that - knowing that there are "things" out there that you can't pick up maneuvering- that ANY graser fire from unknown source would trigger an almost automated responce to roll ships and wave wedges around to block the graders?

The LDs as submarines is good and discussed earlier. Basically ambush weapons. We, of course, don't know their full range of offensive and defenseive capabilites, but should an individual LD end up doing something overt......like lighting off cataphracts from tubes or from a series of pod dumps.....somebody is going to expend at least a few missiles in Recon by Fire.....and see if they hit something. At that point (the hitting part or even getting missiles destroyed by CMs) you switch over to the typical Start Trek reposnce of " target that explosion" and try to blow the crap out of what could be in the area. Yeah, a WIDE spread of missiles and keep refining your targeting probabilities based on what happens. You might even get some remains of an LD to examine