Attacking Darius:

Jonathan_S wrote:Now the RMN really does mostly build warships for mirror image fights -- though you might be able to quibble a little about the LACs.

RMN has the fastest ships in space--a RMN ship can run from anything heavier than itself. Thus in general it should never find itself taking fire from something heavier than it is. (If it's part of a fleet the fire from heavier ships will most likely be directed against the heavier ships of the fleet it's part of.)

Loren Pechtel wrote:

cthia wrote:If you cannot detect it, it is pretty much graser proof. Unless you get lucky. If you are going to need luck to defeat your enemy, bring along your own body bags.

I don't think the LD can hide from a bunch of recon drones and I don't think it can shoot them down without exposing itself. A fast flyby would no doubt allow it to get the first shot but I don't think it can get that shot without the energy spillage being spotted.

I am none too sure about that. Space is very big. Plus, recon drones have the ability to detect conventional ships with glaring impellers and wedges. They do not have the ability to detect a Spider. As far as the recon drone's sensors, "There is nothing there."

Also, a recon drone's speed will probably be a handicap when searching for cloaked Spiders.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Another thing. The RMN (and any other navy at the very least, I suppose) designs its warships and doctrines around its own weapons. If the LDs are designed to withstand its own weapons, wouldn't that nullify the charge of the glass cannon?

Only when they expect those warships to slug it out with their direct counterparts.

Now the RMN really does mostly build warships for mirror image fights -- though you might be able to quibble a little about the LACs.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Because that's the type of war that the RMN expected to fight and the best specimens it could design to fight against were their own ships. The Havenites designed their ships not to fight their mirror images, but the RMN/GSN ships, which were qualitatively better than their own on a unit-by-unit basis.

But that doesn't mean the LDs are designed to fight their equal because that may not be the doctrine they are designed for. If they are designed as long-range stand-off weapon platforms, then they may not be designed to fight directly at all. We even have an example of that in the GA fleet: the CLACS.

So that brings back to their maybe having a single point of failure, that of remaining undetected.

But all of this just brings us back to Maddock's statement which I think is being taken with too many grains of salt. Salt induced high blood pressure can kill.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

cthia wrote:If you cannot detect it, it is pretty much graser proof. Unless you get lucky. If you are going to need luck to defeat your enemy, bring along your own body bags.

I don't think the LD can hide from a bunch of recon drones and I don't think it can shoot them down without exposing itself. A fast flyby would no doubt allow it to get the first shot but I don't think it can get that shot without the energy spillage being spotted.

If your ships are on energy range you won’t have to worry about trying to detect the gamma rays. The series of really bright flashes where you ships were will probably be sufficent.

cthia wrote:I am none too sure about that. Space is very big. Plus, recon drones have the ability to detect conventional ships with glaring impellers and wedges. They do not have the ability to detect a Spider. As far as the recon drone's sensors, "There is nothing there."

Also, a recon drone's speed will probably be a handicap when searching for cloaked Spiders.

Why? An RD is faster than anything in space except a missile. There's nothing that can run from it. How would that be an hindrance?

Yes, space is very big, so if drones were stationary and needed to detect something within a light-second of radius, you'd need quite a lot of them. But they aren't stationary: they are performing a search pattern and clearing sections of space behind them. So the task goes from nearly impossible to somewhere between improbable to statistically likely. It'll depend on just what volume needs to be searched.

Especially if you don't need to search a volume, but only interdict an area (surface). If you need to ensure that no spider ship comes within 1 million km of a target, you can place the drones (say) 1.2 million km from that target. If you estimate that each drone has a near 100% chance of detecting at 100,000 km and given the fact that the detection sphere has a radius 12x bigger, it means it has a surface 288x bigger than the circle that each drone can cover of that sphere. So it's only a matter of numbers.

Now, you're right we don't know that a drone can detect a spider drive. But they are designed to see things that are trying to hide, not just bright wedges. They are meant to try and find stealthed things. Just how effective they'll be, we don't know.

cthia wrote:But all of this just brings us back to Maddock's statement which I think is being taken with too many grains of salt. Salt induced high blood pressure can kill.

We definitely can't take it at a face value. We must use a grain of salt.

However, we must also allow for the possibility he did know what he was talking about and we are the ones who are ignorant. I've said time and again that there must be more to the LD's, their doctrine or everyone else's weaknesses that has yet to be revealed. Because, right now, they can't be effective against a prepared system, not unless they are on expensive suicide missions.

Recon drones simply cannot be the answer. If that were the case, there would really be no need for a great big hulking spider drive system detector. Except maybe for an early warning system.

At any rate, it is not only like expecting an oxygen sensor to detect dirt, it is like expecting the oxygen sensor to detect that dirt while jetsetting around the system like bats out of hell.

I am not certain that even a Geiger counter which is purpose-built to detect rads can detect a single rad at those speeds.

They are recon drones, not magic wands.

cthia wrote:Recon drones simply cannot be the answer. If that were the case, there would really be no need for a great big hulking spider drive system detector. Except maybe for an early warning system.

At any rate, it is not only like expecting an oxygen sensor to detect dirt, it is like expecting the oxygen sensor to detect that dirt while jetsetting around the system like bats out of hell.

I am not certain that even a Geiger counter which is purpose-built to detect rads can detect a single rad at those speeds.

They are recon drones, not magic wands.

Let's review the text that we already have to see why recon drones actually can find a spider drive ship; Mission of Honor, chapter 9:

Unlike the starships of most navies, the MAN's scouts hadn't settled for simple smart paint. Other ships could control and reconfigure their "paint" at will, transforming their hulls—or portions of those hulls—into whatever they needed at any given moment, from nearly perfectly reflective surfaces to black bodies. The Ghosts' capabilities, however, went much further than that. Instead of the relatively simpleminded nanotech of most ships' "paint," the surface of Apparition's hull was capable of mimicking effectively any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Her passive sensors detected any incoming radiation, from infrared through cosmic rays, and her computers mapped the data onto her hull, where her extraordinarily capable nannies reproduced it. In effect, anyone looking at Apparition when her stealth was fully engaged would "see" whatever the sensors exactly opposite his viewpoint "saw," as if the entire ship were a single sheet of crystoplast.
That was the theory, at least, and in this case, what theory predicted and reality achieved were remarkably close together.
It wasn't perfect, of course. The system's greatest weakness was that it couldn't give complete coverage. Like any stealth system, it still had to deal with things like waste heat, for example. Current technology could recapture and use an enormous percentage of that heat, but not all of it, and what they couldn't capture still had to go somewhere. And, like other navies' stealth systems, the MAN's dealt with that by radiating that heat away from known enemy sensors. Modern stealth fields could do a lot to minimize even heat signatures, but nothing could completely eliminate them, and stealth fields themselves were detectable at extremely short ranges, so any ship remained vulnerable to detection by a sufficiently sensitive sensor on exactly the right (or wrong) bearing.
In this instance, though, they knew right where the Graysons were. That meant they could adjust for maximum stealthiness against that particular threat bearing, and as part of his training, Sung had personally tried to detect a Ghost with the MAN's very best passive sensors. Even knowing exactly where the ship was, it had been all but impossible to pick her out of the background radiation of space, so he wasn't unduly concerned that Bogey Two would detect Apparition with shipboard systems as long as she remained completely covert. He was less confident that the spider drive would pass unnoticed at such an absurdly short range, however. Chernevsky's people assured him it was exceedingly unlikely—that it had taken them the better part of two T-years to develop their own detectors, even knowing what they were looking for, and that those detectors were still far from anything anyone would ever call reliable—but Sung had no desire to be the one who proved their optimism had been misplaced. Even the Spider had a footprint, after all, even if it wasn't something anyone else would have associated with a drive system. All it would take was for someone to notice an anomalous reading and be conscientious enough—or, for that matter, bored enough—to spend a little time trying to figure out what it was.
And the fact that the Spider's signature flares as it comes up only makes that more likely, he reflected. The odds against anyone spotting it would still be enormous, but even so, they'd be a hell of a lot worse than the chance of anyone aboard Bogey Two noticing us if we just keep quietly coasting along.
At the same time, he knew exactly why Tsau had asked his question. However difficult a sensor target they might be for Bogey Two's shipboard systems, the rules would change abruptly if the Grayson cruiser decided to deploy her own recon platforms. If she were to do that, and if the platforms got a good, close-range look at the aspect Apparition was keeping turned away from their mothership, the chance of detection went from abysmally low to terrifyingly high in very short order. Which meant what Sung was really doing was betting that the odds of the Grayson's choosing to deploy recon platforms were lower than the odds of her shipboard systems detecting the Spider's activation flare if he maneuvered to avoid her.

LDs appear to be Spider Drive ambush hunters. All weapons attributed to them -so far- are things that are highly stealthy and have been launched from significant distance to attack static or orbital targets which have predictable speed and so can be intercepted by the weapons coming in on ballistic trajectory or slink in to where the target should be like a g-torp with it' own spider drive.
Do the LDs have defensive weaponry? Probably. If nothing else, they would try to make a final attempt to damage an attacker and still get away.

There has been a lot of discussion about parking a Spider by a wormhole and killing ships going into our out of transit. Fine, but why put the Spider inside graser range when that just opens them up to potential discovery.

The Alignment does not appear to have much in the way of conventional warships. Actualy they don't see to have much in the way of conventional starships at all beyond the Streak Drive ones. What they do have is a lot of conventional shipping though holding companies such as Jessyk and more or less cats-paw conventional military ships like Mannheim SDF.

Oyster Bay was a very rushed attack against two pressing problems (SEM and Grayson) who were changing the parameters of the way The Plan was supposed to go. It was launched with test-bed prototypes (the Sharks) and the Ghosts- which may have been already fully operational spider-scouts- and they all did what? We were only given more detail on the Manticore part of the operation, we were told of the results of the one at Blackbird against Grayson. The Ghosts went into the MBS, spent a long time developing targeting information and relaying it out to the Sharks. The Sharks launched time-on-target coordinated attacks using mostly ballistic delivery systems (the pods etc) and the g-torps which used spider drives to get next to the larger (stations) targets and chop them up.
What keeps you from thinking that this type of attack is exactly what the original attack/mission profile is what the LDs are designed to do?
The Alignment does everything from the shadows and with misdirection. Everything. Even Houdini is misdirection in at least 2 axis- blame the deaths of as many of the evacuees as possible on the Ballroom (the messier the better) and then the "final flourish" on the GA.

The Plan had Haven fighting the crippled (and heavily suborned) SL which would leave both broken, much of hunanity in a bad way and the RF was supposed to be gathering up pieces as an alliance of defense againts the chaos supposed to arise from the demise of the SL. No massive fleets of Alignment warships, others would do the work under Alignment management.

And then you have Ghosts and LDs......scout resilient systems and then unload a highly stealthed (Oyster Bay) strike on said systems, destroying most if not all of the orbital infrastructure and any ships in holding orbits and certainly any attached to stations. Just wipe it all away. Does a system have a SDF? The ships that couldn't be targeted just lost their logistical support. Who comes to help the system? Who is able to come, heck who even knows to come except some part of the RF that might be told by a freighter that was just leaving the system when it was devastated. Or some warlord comes by and loots what they can from the planet.
You are crushing whole planetary systems -and the Alignment doesn't care about the people either in the orbitals or on the ground. They are Normals who's various value and moral systems are only an impediment to Alignment plans and going to be swept away- eventualy- so who cares what happens to the systems's inhabitants?

This starts looking like Hand of God stuff, which actually fits fairly well with the way the Alignment sees itself and it's mission. Devistate a culture and system and then send in- after they have suffered "sufficiently" your( missionary) aid puppets to start restricting the planet population thinking to meet your goals.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Recon drones simply cannot be the answer. If that were the case, there would really be no need for a great big hulking spider drive system detector. Except maybe for an early warning system.

At any rate, it is not only like expecting an oxygen sensor to detect dirt, it is like expecting the oxygen sensor to detect that dirt while jetsetting around the system like bats out of hell.

I am not certain that even a Geiger counter which is purpose-built to detect rads can detect a single rad at those speeds.

They are recon drones, not magic wands.

Let's review the text that we already have to see why recon drones actually can find a spider drive ship; Mission of Honor, chapter 9:

Unlike the starships of most navies, the MAN's scouts hadn't settled for simple smart paint. Other ships could control and reconfigure their "paint" at will, transforming their hulls—or portions of those hulls—into whatever they needed at any given moment, from nearly perfectly reflective surfaces to black bodies. The Ghosts' capabilities, however, went much further than that. Instead of the relatively simpleminded nanotech of most ships' "paint," the surface of Apparition's hull was capable of mimicking effectively any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Her passive sensors detected any incoming radiation, from infrared through cosmic rays, and her computers mapped the data onto her hull, where her extraordinarily capable nannies reproduced it. In effect, anyone looking at Apparition when her stealth was fully engaged would "see" whatever the sensors exactly opposite his viewpoint "saw," as if the entire ship were a single sheet of crystoplast.
That was the theory, at least, and in this case, what theory predicted and reality achieved were remarkably close together.
It wasn't perfect, of course. The system's greatest weakness was that it couldn't give complete coverage. Like any stealth system, it still had to deal with things like waste heat, for example. Current technology could recapture and use an enormous percentage of that heat, but not all of it, and what they couldn't capture still had to go somewhere. And, like other navies' stealth systems, the MAN's dealt with that by radiating that heat away from known enemy sensors. Modern stealth fields could do a lot to minimize even heat signatures, but nothing could completely eliminate them, and stealth fields themselves were detectable at extremely short ranges, so any ship remained vulnerable to detection by a sufficiently sensitive sensor on exactly the right (or wrong) bearing.
In this instance, though, they knew right where the Graysons were. That meant they could adjust for maximum stealthiness against that particular threat bearing, and as part of his training, Sung had personally tried to detect a Ghost with the MAN's very best passive sensors. Even knowing exactly where the ship was, it had been all but impossible to pick her out of the background radiation of space, so he wasn't unduly concerned that Bogey Two would detect Apparition with shipboard systems as long as she remained completely covert. He was less confident that the spider drive would pass unnoticed at such an absurdly short range, however. Chernevsky's people assured him it was exceedingly unlikely—that it had taken them the better part of two T-years to develop their own detectors, even knowing what they were looking for, and that those detectors were still far from anything anyone would ever call reliable—but Sung had no desire to be the one who proved their optimism had been misplaced. Even the Spider had a footprint, after all, even if it wasn't something anyone else would have associated with a drive system. All it would take was for someone to notice an anomalous reading and be conscientious enough—or, for that matter, bored enough—to spend a little time trying to figure out what it was.
And the fact that the Spider's signature flares as it comes up only makes that more likely, he reflected. The odds against anyone spotting it would still be enormous, but even so, they'd be a hell of a lot worse than the chance of anyone aboard Bogey Two noticing us if we just keep quietly coasting along.
At the same time, he knew exactly why Tsau had asked his question. However difficult a sensor target they might be for Bogey Two's shipboard systems, the rules would change abruptly if the Grayson cruiser decided to deploy her own recon platforms. If she were to do that, and if the platforms got a good, close-range look at the aspect Apparition was keeping turned away from their mothership, the chance of detection went from abysmally low to terrifyingly high in very short order. Which meant what Sung was really doing was betting that the odds of the Grayson's choosing to deploy recon platforms were lower than the odds of her shipboard systems detecting the Spider's activation flare if he maneuvered to avoid her.

Thanks for producing that very important textev again. It is elsewhere on the forum, iinm. I almost included that vagueness of "absurdly short ranges" as a disclaimer. Like, maybe, if an RD hits the hull.

But I imagine inside energy range would be considered as absurdly short. But there does appear to be a chance for detection by RDs. I was wrong about that. Unless the Spider can keep its most stealthy face forward of the RD while inside those absurdly short ranges; which may be possible for a Spider that can move in eerie ways. Maybe not move quickly, but well enough.

Also consider that the GA will not have the MA's specially designed sensors.