Detecting a spider drive ship

munroburton wrote:

Mycall4me wrote:I think there's a problem with stationing drones, their power needs are going to be a finite resource. Even the mini fusion plant is going to need it's reactor mass renewed sooner or later.

No problem. Use fission power - if it was practical for LACs, then it's probably practical for those drones. Or use plain old solar panels!

A semi-decent design would allow these satellites to be launched from their manufacturing or storage site with enough fuel to reach their final orbits. They do not need to do much maneuvering afterwards.

Puidwen wrote:I'm not sure that's a practical solution. Besides the fusion mass that's been mention, the main problem is that you need to cover the edge inside the entire hyper limit. That's is a lot of satellites even for honorverse technology and industry. Even if your willing to tolerate a extremely wide range between the satellites and risk some of your coverage. And honorverse tech isn't perfect. A lot of those satellites might maintenance a programing glitch, etc, and need maintenance. And far enough out that any maintenance, that was hands on, would be a pita.

Honorverse technology is capable of producing tens of thousands of LACs, millions of missile pods and tens of millions of missiles. This can be done and yes, all of those satellites will need to be replaced eventually. So what? All hardware has a shelf life. It doesn't stop Starlink from doing their thing with an operational lifespan of five to seven years in low planetary orbit.

With such economy of scale, they don't need to fiddle around with defective satellites. Just tap the reserve and send another one out. Retrieve the broken one whenever convenient.

Good point, I hadn't considered a fission pile. Still, it's going to take an awful LOT of drones to provide the coverage needed to protect an entire solar system. And it's going to have to be complete 360 degree coverage bc they probably aren't going to be stealthy so any gaps could be exploited by those nasty spider drive ships.

The number of radar sentries is determined by how powerful the radar pulses are and the desired size of a protected zone. Taking the ~20 million km radius seen in SVW, gives an overall sphere of 40 million km per sentry platform. Making it a cube for simpler calculation, you therefore need 64 per cubic AU.

Manticore-A's hyper limit is ~22 light minutes or around 2.5 AU from the star. 5 AU cubed is 125. Times 64, that's 8,000 sentries for full blanket coverage of the entire hyper limit, not just the perimeter. Including below and above the ecliptic plane.

Granted, 40 million kilometres between sentries might allow gaps for spider drive assets. However, this number is based on a destroyer's radar equipment which is among the smallest in use by most navies. Obviously those sentries should use more powerful radar arrays - closer to the ones used by superdreadnoughts.

munroburton wrote:The number of radar sentries is determined by how powerful the radar pulses are and the desired size of a protected zone. Taking the ~20 million km radius seen in SVW, gives an overall sphere of 40 million km per sentry platform. Making it a cube for simpler calculation, you therefore need 64 per cubic AU.

Manticore-A's hyper limit is ~22 light minutes or around 2.5 AU from the star. 5 AU cubed is 125. Times 64, that's 8,000 sentries for full blanket coverage of the entire hyper limit, not just the perimeter. Including below and above the ecliptic plane.

Granted, 40 million kilometres between sentries might allow gaps for spider drive assets. However, this number is based on a destroyer's radar equipment which is among the smallest in use by most navies. Obviously those sentries should use more powerful radar arrays - closer to the ones used by superdreadnoughts.

Well, that's encouraging, I lack the mathmatics to have figured out the numbers as you have. It's kind of ironic (not quite the word I'm looking for though) that system defense might boil down to simply building a wall around the system. I had thoughts that a more proactive answer might be considered. Although there is still a possibility that the spider detector might still be developed. It would seem to be a lot more economic and less expensive and time consuming to find them actively.

You're not wrong. The numbers can get pretty crazy if someone asks for a wider sphere: 10 AU cubed is 1,000. So for this they'd need to step up to 64,000 sentries. 20 AU, 8,000 cubed, 512,000 sentries.

By the same extension, if you want to cheap out on the fences, 2AU requires only 512 sentries. The Manticore system could set up four of those around each planet and the Junction for 2048 total.

The irony is none of those radar walls should ever catch a spider ship - unless they happen to deploy the first such network while spider ships are already inside. Once they are deployed, word's going to get around eventually and then no spider ship will ever visit.

To do that, they'll need a forward-deploying version which a task force can throw up. They sort of do this already, but the recon drones they use in this role weren't designed for active scanning. They were made to be as stealthy as possible.

Two questions:
(1) What effects does the spider drive have on the alpha wall?

(2a) Can any of these effects be detected?

(2b) If so, how far away can the effect be detected?

Before these questions can be answered, we need to know in detail how the spider drive works. I wonder if that could be the next exploit for Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki?

Peter2 wrote:Two questions:
(1) What effects does the spider drive have on the alpha wall?

(2a) Can any of these effects be detected?

(2b) If so, how far away can the effect be detected?

Before these questions can be answered, we need to know in detail how the spider drive works. I wonder if that could be the next exploit for Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki?

They can't be answered right now. We do not know the answer to any of them.

We know that not even the MAlign has a working detector for a light-second away. IF there's any effect on the alpha wall, either they aren't aware of it and can´t detect with their sensors at all, or the effect is so miniscule that it doesn't allow for detection before the ship enters knife-fighting range (hence all the discussion with cthia/penny on the new tactics).

So there's hope that the GA can detect it, because they have more knowledge about the alpha wall than anyone else. Something like a directed FTL pulse may be able to, for example. But this can't happen until the GA gets more data on the drives themselves. And unless someone smuggles a working one out, there's only one way to get data on them.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Peter2 wrote:Two questions:
(1) What effects does the spider drive have on the alpha wall?

(2a) Can any of these effects be detected?

(2b) If so, how far away can the effect be detected?

Before these questions can be answered, we need to know in detail how the spider drive works. I wonder if that could be the next exploit for Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki?

They can't be answered right now. We do not know the answer to any of them.

We know that not even the MAlign has a working detector for a light-second away. IF there's any effect on the alpha wall, either they aren't aware of it and can´t detect with their sensors at all, or the effect is so miniscule that it doesn't allow for detection before the ship enters knife-fighting range (hence all the discussion with cthia/penny on the new tactics).

So there's hope that the GA can detect it, because they have more knowledge about the alpha wall than anyone else. Something like a directed FTL pulse may be able to, for example. But this can't happen until the GA gets more data on the drives themselves. And unless someone smuggles a working one out, there's only one way to get data on them.

David does discuss the fine points of how the spider drive works in (I believe) Mission of Honor. It has something to do with multiple drivers grasping the edge of the alpha wall (not sure if that's exactly right, but it's probably close) I believe that the effect upon the wall is very minute, and undetectable. He also mentioned that the Alignment's scientists did develop a detector but I think that it wasn't very sensitive or long ranged.

As far as directing a grav pulse is concerned it was pointed out to me earlier in this thread that a grav pulse is not like a radar pulse, but is actually a ripple along the alpha wall, so there is no possibility of a return "echo"

I also think that you're correct about Manticore's superior knowledge regarding gravity, and alpha wall effects by grav pulses, so there might be possibilities that they might come up with something from that.

And you're also correct that not having an actual working spider drive, we're going to be shooting in the dark regarding what to actually look for.

But I have high hopes that our two "out of the box" deep thinker's Shannon and Sonja, just may surprise those no good sneaky Alignment thinkers.

Mycall4me wrote:As far as directing a grav pulse is concerned it was pointed out to me earlier in this thread that a grav pulse is not like a radar pulse, but is actually a ripple along the alpha wall, so there is no possibility of a return "echo"

I also think that you're correct about Manticore's superior knowledge regarding gravity, and alpha wall effects by grav pulses, so there might be possibilities that they might come up with something from that.

A grav pulse has no possibility of echoing off of a solid object. But given that the pulse and the spider drive both interact with the Alpha wall it doesn't seem impossible that the pulse's ripple might be able to reflect an echo off of the spots where the spider drive interacts with the Alpha wall. (But we know so little about how RFC wants those physics to work it might actually also be impossible -- we just don't know enough to judge)

Jonathan_S wrote:

Mycall4me wrote:As far as directing a grav pulse is concerned it was pointed out to me earlier in this thread that a grav pulse is not like a radar pulse, but is actually a ripple along the alpha wall, so there is no possibility of a return "echo"

I also think that you're correct about Manticore's superior knowledge regarding gravity, and alpha wall effects by grav pulses, so there might be possibilities that they might come up with something from that.

A grav pulse has no possibility of echoing off of a solid object. But given that the pulse and the spider drive both interact with the Alpha wall it doesn't seem impossible that the pulse's ripple might be able to reflect an echo off of the spots where the spider drive interacts with the Alpha wall. (But we know so little about how RFC wants those physics to work it might actually also be impossible -- we just don't know enough to judge)

Sad, but true Johnathan. But it's definetely fun to theorize in the absenth of (RFC's) data

Jonathan_S wrote:

Mycall4me wrote:As far as directing a grav pulse is concerned it was pointed out to me earlier in this thread that a grav pulse is not like a radar pulse, but is actually a ripple along the alpha wall, so there is no possibility of a return "echo"

I also think that you're correct about Manticore's superior knowledge regarding gravity, and alpha wall effects by grav pulses, so there might be possibilities that they might come up with something from that.

A grav pulse has no possibility of echoing off of a solid object. But given that the pulse and the spider drive both interact with the Alpha wall it doesn't seem impossible that the pulse's ripple might be able to reflect an echo off of the spots where the spider drive interacts with the Alpha wall. (But we know so little about how RFC wants those physics to work it might actually also be impossible -- we just don't know enough to judge)

Sad, but true Johnathan. But it's definetely fun to theorize in the absence of (RFC's) data