?

tlb wrote:Doesn't the Malign have to find Bolthole first? The Solar System's asteroid belt is within Jupiter's orbit, is that really outside the hyper-limit?

penny wrote:

penny wrote:And if the MA successfully attacks freighters in hyper delivering crucial materials for the war effort, the GA could become seriously hamstrung.

A current discussion in another thread got me to thinking. Asteroid belts and mining facilities in each system can be targeted by spider-drive ships. Aren't these facilities located beyond the hyper limit? The facility, and freighters approaching and leaving can easily be destroyed.

Result, war effort crippled.

penny wrote:

penny wrote:And if the MA successfully attacks freighters in hyper delivering crucial materials for the war effort, the GA could become seriously hamstrung.

A current discussion in another thread got me to thinking. Asteroid belts and mining facilities in each system can be targeted by spider-drive ships. Aren't these facilities located beyond the hyper limit? The facility, and freighters approaching and leaving can easily be destroyed.

Result, war effort crippled.

Jonathan_S wrote:If you can sneak in that far you can probably sneak in close enough to attack the industrial stations which use the output of the miners and refineries.

Killing the ships and the refineries seems a slow way to hurt a system's industry -- and requiring hitting lots of little targets scattered over a light-hours of volume. You're unlikely to be able to hit it all simultaneously (it's harder to guess where a mining craft is going to be than an orbital station; and the former is moving around from rock to rock while the later is following a predictable orbit) and once they start dying the defenders are going to react and the survivors are going to start running for safety.

But yeah, if you can get a stealth ship in you could certainly shoot at them. I'm just not convinced that they're the most effective target for such a stealth ship

penny wrote:Perhaps. Though accumulatively, the many little stitches mentioned previously along with this one taken over that light hour is sewn together to make a pattern. That pattern is only part of a quilt that includes the final phase of commerce raiding that is attacking major infrastructure; the coup de grace before the real attack begins.

All of the little stitches are accomplished completely unbeknownst to the enemy.

Beowulf is still the advanced missile capital of the HV right?

If sneaking in-system requires a very long insertion, then that insertion should be huge.

And the result has to pass right by those mining facilities and refineries if it is headed in-system to take out the infrastructure as the opening phase of the main attack anyway.

A few ships left there to have some fun won't make a difference in the insertion. You won't begrudge them their fun will you?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:"A few ships" wouldn't make a dent in the Bolthole or MBS resource extraction industry even if they had 10 years during which to attack. Manticore likely has well over 10,000 intra-system ships. If you ignore the replacements coming off yards, assuming one ship destroyed per week, you need at least 20 attacking ships to accomplish the task in 10 years. Even if I'm off by an order of magnitude, 20 attacking ships would need 5 weeks to destroy one tenth of the civilian fleet.

Brigade XO wrote:If you want to play mind games with things like G-torps and you want to screw with interstellar shipping you don't have to play tag with anybody's DDs.
Part of the beauty of the LD's is that they are effectively invisible and are going to translate from hyper beyond the normal range of a less than Manticore or Erwhon or Grayson. You want to destroy hyper capable transports and freighters but- based upon what was done in Oyster Bay- the higher goal is to destroy orbital infrastructure and fabrication. The Alignment still has the Sharks, it still has the original Ghost scouts and we should probably presume that Ghosts are still in production to provide the detailed targeting information that the LD's would need to deploy the payloads against any given systems.
So, depending on how many G-torps a Shark can carry on external hard points and how many they might be able to carry in cargo spaces (to reload the exterior hard points between mission segments) you can send out Shark / Ghost pairs for scouting systems and then wait till a freighter arrives to make deliveriy and pickups of goods to the main station of an insutrialized system. Station orbits are simple to calculate with enough observations. There should be plenty of time- given the Shark is in the right position--to put a G-torp where it can destroy the freighter and the station. You can get the readings of where the fusion reactor(s) are on the station and on the freighter. What is the likelihood that there is an Astro-control type tug that can handle the debris of the freighter and station fragments that will be dropping into the gravity well of the planet they are orbiting. Might even be made to look like the freighter was the cause of the catastrophe and got caught in it.
Same idea but go for the Astro Control and one or more warehousing/servicng station & /or military facility at a wormhole bridge terminus. You are killing experienced & specialized crew (and probably more than one team on the Control station) and destroying that (with all that historic traffic and wormhole information) and destroying the cargo o along with support/warehouse station.
Who's to blame? These are things that can cripple a system and certainly disrupt trade. Create havoc, kill experienced spacers with critical jobs then slip away to do again elsewhere as long as your have f g-torps to use from stealth.
Very in keeping with the Alignment's preferred methods of operations.

penny wrote:The reason I asked how many g-torps a freighter can hold was for a far more sinister reason. I was remembering the Trojan horse tactic used by the Greeks to take Troy. A freighter can access the MBS through the junction. It can proceed on and eject hordes of g-torps that immediately initiate their spider-drives. Result, an infested MBS. These idle g-torps can even restock LDs when the time comes; taking a page out of the SLN's book with the forward replenishing of missiles. It would be like having your Collier in-system with you.

Question: When a freighter enters a system, where is its destination? Huge warehouses with loading docks and stevedores? Where are those warehouses located in the system? How far from the junction? Can g-torps be kicked out without them being seen? At any rate, instead of using a dispatch boat to kick off the battle, a Trojan horse of a freighter can do so as well.

tlb wrote:More relevant, you might have remembered that was the way that the Silver Bullets were delivered to Beowulf.

Before Oyster Bay, Space Station Hephaestus was the main passenger and freight terminal nearest Manticore. I do not know if they changed things afterwards, particularly the way freight handling was done after Beowulf's orbitals were destroyed.

penny wrote:Question: When a freighter enters a system, where is its destination? Huge warehouses with loading docks and stevedores? Where are those warehouses located in the system? How far from the junction? Can g-torps be kicked out without them being seen? At any rate, instead of using a dispatch boat to kick off the battle, a Trojan horse of a freighter can do so as well.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Question: When a freighter enters a system, where is its destination? Huge warehouses with loading docks and stevedores? Where are those warehouses located in the system? How far from the junction? Can g-torps be kicked out without them being seen? At any rate, instead of using a dispatch boat to kick off the battle, a Trojan horse of a freighter can do so as well.

Many freighters passing through the Junction don't proceed into the Manticoran system, they might simply contact astro control and move to the (quite busy) waiting area to re-enter the Junction heading towards a different termini.

But others will be picking up or dropping off cargo. But the freight yards and warehouses for that are AFAIK, all out by the junction under the watchful eye of its defensive forts. (Because it'd be really inefficient for a freighter headed from, say, Berlin to Smoking Frog, with some cargo to be dropped off for some other ship to carry to Silesia, to waste over a day making the round trip past Manticore or Sphynx to leave the cargo, then force the ship picking it up to do the same.

So only a tiny fraction of freighters arriving via wormhole have any excuse to move away from it. And most of those will still not be heading towards Manticore or Spinx, but instead heading out just beyond the Junction's own hyper limit and heading off towards surrounding stars. It'd only be ships actually delivering goods to Manticore or Sphynx that's have reason to move far enough from the Junction that it'd be safe from likely observation to kick a bunch of g-torps over the side. And ships delivering to Manticore or Sphynx are far less likely to be foreign flagged and will be getting detailed customs inspections. (And it'd be kind of hard to hide all the empty space where the g-torps were just launched from -- but freighters don't normally fly lightly loaded; so that'd be suspicious)

You'd be better off being a freighter that was arriving through hyper planning to use the Junction to leave. That's closer to how the Silver Bullets were snuck into Beowolf; and it's far more believable for a freighter to "miscalculate" and drop out of hyper far from their destination (so no prying eyes around to see them drop some g-torps). And if they're only paying to use the Junction, and aren't picking up or dropping off cargo at its warehouses/freight yard, they're unlikely to get inspected once they make their way over there.