Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Then ask yourself what would happen IF Mannerheim finally acquires legal title to the Felix System- and takes possession of the wormhole and opens it for transits to ....well, Torch? That would be an economic benefit and they could say that they didn't approach 1st Manpower -bad slaver people- or later Torch till they had the legal rights to the Felix systems (and built up their SDF to defend the wormhole at each end plus a force and at least a pair of Astro Control locations at The Twins) but there is still a problem. The use of the Felix wormhole to Torch or either of the other two "unknown" destination termini makes it practically impossible to continue using Felix Junction as a conduit to Darius.....commercial shipping is going to notice that there are TWO active transit lane pairs for Felix because anybody using the bridge to a different place is going to approach -or depart from -the wormhole on differnt vectors than the Felix -"Torch" route.

The other termini could be great revenue streams but the increased traffic just makes the problem of people observing and passing on the information that there seems to be a "private" bridge not available for commercial traffic. Whoops.....where does it go and why is the use restricted.

That probably means they are dragging their feet and also sabotaging their own acquisition attempts just to keep it in that stage: acquisition. If they suddenly did acquire Felix, a lot of non-Alignment people in Mannerheim would wonder why they're not using it for the reasons the cover story said they'd use. Heck, someone will definitely say "we should invite Manticore to send a research ship here, they're the Galaxy's prominent wormhole experts!" (in a roundabout way that Manticore invited Axelrod to the conference on wormholes).

I don't think so. The acquisition process has to be very secret and probably would take years, even decades. When finished, then they would have to decide whether Darius will be communicating the long way (130 light years) or that those 2 wormholes won't be exploited for some strange reason.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
There seems to be a correlation between a wormhole's strength and the distance it covers. Junctions, being stronger than warp bridges, appear to have longer spans. I consulted the map of the Honorverse and looked at the MWHJ and the Erewhon junctions for guidance, whereby I concluded a likely 300-350 light-years for Darius.

By no means this is set in stone. It's just a very big guess.

tlb wrote:Why are you estimating when we have the length from UH?

I was estimating the other two termini, for which we have no information, to conclude they likely end up nowhere useful.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I don't think so. The acquisition process has to be very secret and probably would take years, even decades. When finished, then they would have to decide whether Darius will be communicating the long way (130 light years) or that those 2 wormholes won't be exploited for some strange reason.

And I'm positing that they're making the process take even longer than those decades so they don't have to make this decision in the first place. The Republic of Mannerheim and the MSDF were and the RF and RFN now are controlled by MAlign agents, but the majority of the navies and politicians are not. If Mannerheim did manage to acquire the system and made it known to the political class and Navy admiralty, then they'd have to deal with people claiming it no longer needs to be a secret.

Of course, there's a simpler solution I overlooked: do succeed at acquiring, but don't tell the non-Alignment leadership. Keep them in the dark and keep telling them the negotiation is still on-going. This gets the best of both worlds (systems?): no one in Mannerheim is going to be clamoring to start using the Junction and also no one elsewhere is going to acquire Felix from the defunct owners and suddenly send a survey ship.

I need to revisit a few points and mention a few things I had not gotten to. I don't think I accurately explained my notion about the possibility of a spider drive being able to function in the emergence lane without a sail.

If that is the case, its advantages are not obvious. When a conventional ship exits the junction, it must continue down the lane. In an orderly fashion. A conventional ship is still dependent upon the sails to survive in the lane. The DMV handbook plainly states that an emerging warship has to ride the emergence lane all the way out.

If a spider drive does not need sails in the emergence lane, then it can immediately exit off of the emergence lane ramp. For anyone else it would be an unsafe maneuver. But an LD can immediately maneuver on a vector perpendidular to the lane.

Z minus 10,000 km should be sufficient.

All targeting has been concentrated along the lane. The LD would be in a completely different plane, away from the engagement. Simply a measly 10,000 km along the z-axis should be sufficient. Ships target all of their fire into the emergence lane. Why would missiles or energy weapons be fired below or above the emergence lane instead of the lane itself? Sailboats exit lanes only at the end of the lane. LDs can drop down through a manhole cover. Completely different vector. And it would be the most optimum evasive maneuver at hand. At the indulgence of Spock, Kirk used it against Khan -- also an Alpha -- with deadly precision.

https://youtu.be/I8O_C7T5H_s?si=ecLZ4Q3BsX8xg5Pe


An aside: A spider drive ship grabs at the hyper wall as its regular mode of travel. What are the possible effects if the spider’s tractor tried to “grab thru” the WH?

penny wrote:I need to revisit a few points and mention a few things I had not gotten to. I don't think I accurately explained my notion about the possibility of a spider drive being able to function in the emergence lane without a sail.

If that is the case, its advantages are not obvious. When a conventional ship exits the junction, it must continue down the lane. In an orderly fashion. A conventional ship is still dependent upon the sails to survive in the lane. The DMV handbook plainly states that an emerging warship has to ride the emergence lane all the way out.

If a spider drive does not need sails in the emergence lane, then it can immediately exit off of the emergence lane ramp. For anyone else it would be an unsafe maneuver. But an LD can immediately maneuver on a vector perpendidular to the lane.

I don't recall that. The fact they always do when in a non-emergency situation does not mean it's the only way to do it. We do know sails have variable grab factors, including negative ones, so they can tack on the grav "wind" and change their trajectory. So it should be possible to exit the lane much more quickly by going sideways.

That would mean this capability is not exclusive to a spider ship. And if so, defenders must already be aware of the possibility and plan accordingly.

Even if it isn't the case, it's irrelevant aside from the surprise factor. An emergence lane is at least a thousand km in radius (I don't recall the exact number) so even if the spider ship started immediately accelerating perpendicular to the lane's axis upon arrival, it would take 28 seconds to cross 1000 km. Remember the missiles can cover 100,000 in 14.6 seconds, so the spider ship is still a sitting duck.

And I don't see how it changes anything. Either it has been detected because it emerged with a burst of energy or there are sensitive enough sensors within detection range, or it hasn't. If it has been detected, how it exits the lane matters absolutely not at all: it will be targeted and destroyed. At best, if it could clear the lane before it got destroyed, it could launch a massive spread of missiles that, presumably, it had pre-deployed and made ready to launch. But those are still sitting ducks for PDLCs and CMs that will be around every defensive installation, so the best they could do is massacre the civilian ships closer by.

And if it wasn't detected, exiting in a different vector does not matter at all.

All targeting has been concentrated along the lane. The LD would be in a completely different plane, away from the engagement.

The defensive installations will likely be targeting the axis of the cylinder, so if something starts flying off perpendicular to that, the standard targeting solutions and practice would need revising, I agree. But not to the extent that saves the ship: it would be no harder to shoot at it than a ship that was stuck moving along the axis at a piddling 50 gravities.

Simply a measly 10,000 km along the z-axis should be sufficient.

Conventionally, when using cylindrical coordinates, one visualises the cylinder standing upright and the Z axis is the one going from top to bottom. That would be the regular path ships take in an emergence lane. You meant along a radial axis.

10,000 km is 90 seconds for a spider ship on emergency acceleration. It's more than enough for a missile fired from 1 million km away to arrive, including a 45 second delay in which the defenders decide whether to shoot or not.

My 28 second number above was assuming that the emergence lane is only 1000 km in radius. That's still within the time of a 15-second decision plus 100,000 km dash of the missile at 96,000 gravities.

And in that it doesn't matter if the ship is travelling 1000 straight towards the oncoming missiles or 1000 km straight away from them: the ±2,000 km difference is less than 0.2 seconds of flight time of a missile at the end of this run.

Moving away from the missiles presents a smaller aspect of the ship for the missiles to shoot at, but it also reduces the number of PDLCs the ship can deploy to shoot at them. Given that I don't think the ships can mount sufficient PDLCs to survive the tsunami that the MWHJ defenders would launch, presenting a smaller aspect is probably a better idea. Not that it would do them much good.

Ships target all of their fire into the emergence lane. Why would missiles or energy weapons be fired below or above the emergence lane instead of the lane itself?

Actually, ALL of them should be doing that. You seem to be misunderstanding the geometry of how the emergence lane works. The emergence lane is a cylinder with a radius less than its height. That means the path to travel for an energy beam is shorter through the sides, meaning the warhead can get much closer to the target from the sides than from the top/bottom end. Not that the missile would want to get any closer than it needs to, because that opens up for it being fired at by PDLCs.

More importantly, since they have no wedge running, there is no need for an up-the-kilt or down-the-throat shot. Those only are only better than a shot at the broadside when there are wedges and sidewalls protecting the ship. If they are not there, there's no reason to shoot at the smallest projection of the ship, instead of the largest. Even more than that, if you launch missiles from two 90° angles, one of them will be aiming at the less-armoured top and bottom sides of a regular impeller ship, practically guaranteeing a kill.

So the standard wormhole defensive installation will be firing at the sides of the emergence lane. That's supported by the fact that this is more or less what happened at Ajay-Prime: in order to shoot at the impeller rings and damage/cripple the SLN battlecruisers, the LAC had to be on a radial vector from the emergence lane, so it had visibility of those rings. If it were shooting at the armoured stern or bow of the ship, the LAC's BC-grade graser isn't likely to have been enough.

Sailboats exit lanes only at the end of the lane. LDs can drop down through a manhole cover. Completely different vector. And it would be the most optimum evasive maneuver at hand. At the indulgence of Spock, Kirk used it against Khan -- also an Alpha -- with deadly precision.

I agree it's the most optimum manoeuvre.

But I disagree it's enough. Dead is dead and a spider ship that was detected is dead. Its only chance of survival is not being detected, and that's gambling on luck.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:[
My 28 second number above was assuming that the emergence lane is only 1000 km in radius. That's still within the time of a 15-second decision plus 100,000 km dash of the missile at 96,000 gravities.

I don't think it can be as small as 1,000 km radius -- otherwise missiles would have been effective against transiting ships much sooner in the timeline.

In Fire Forged wrote:By 1826, a state of the art RMN impeller drive nuclear armed missile could boast a standoff range of 8,000 to 10,000 kilometers in sidewall burning mode.

Now a ship in the transit lane, under sail, won't have any sidewalls. But a "burn" mode is using grav lenses and careful shaping of the fuel implosions to direct a relatively concentrated cone of plasma and x-rays at a target -- and without a sidewall to give protection those energetic particles slamming into the side (or top) of a ship should take out anything surface mounted -- like sensors, antenna, and PDLC -- crippling the ship even if they aren't capable of burning through its physical armor and destroying it)

So a 1,000 km lane would have left ship vulnerable to "contact" nukes using their standoff "burn" mode to engage from outside the lane - and those significantly predate laserheads.


My assumption is the lanes are more or less somewhere between 10,000 to 25,000 km radius. With missiles warheads having to engage from outside the lane that'd be too wide for "burn" mode to be cover, but narrow enough for the 1905-era laserheads (with their 30,000 km standoff range) to reach out and hit transiting ships from outside the lane.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:I need to revisit a few points and mention a few things I had not gotten to. I don't think I accurately explained my notion about the possibility of a spider drive being able to function in the emergence lane without a sail.

If that is the case, its advantages are not obvious. When a conventional ship exits the junction, it must continue down the lane. In an orderly fashion. A conventional ship is still dependent upon the sails to survive in the lane. The DMV handbook plainly states that an emerging warship has to ride the emergence lane all the way out.

If a spider drive does not need sails in the emergence lane, then it can immediately exit off of the emergence lane ramp. For anyone else it would be an unsafe maneuver. But an LD can immediately maneuver on a vector perpendidular to the lane.

I don't recall that. The fact they always do when in a non-emergency situation does not mean it's the only way to do it. We do know sails have variable grab factors, including negative ones, so they can tack on the grav "wind" and change their trajectory. So it should be possible to exit the lane much more quickly by going sideways.

That would mean this capability is not exclusive to a spider ship. And if so, defenders must already be aware of the possibility and plan accordingly.

Even if it isn't the case, it's irrelevant aside from the surprise factor. An emergence lane is at least a thousand km in radius (I don't recall the exact number) so even if the spider ship started immediately accelerating perpendicular to the lane's axis upon arrival, it would take 28 seconds to cross 1000 km. Remember the missiles can cover 100,000 in 14.6 seconds, so the spider ship is still a sitting duck.

And I don't see how it changes anything. Either it has been detected because it emerged with a burst of energy or there are sensitive enough sensors within detection range, or it hasn't. If it has been detected, how it exits the lane matters absolutely not at all: it will be targeted and destroyed. At best, if it could clear the lane before it got destroyed, it could launch a massive spread of missiles that, presumably, it had pre-deployed and made ready to launch. But those are still sitting ducks for PDLCs and CMs that will be around every defensive installation, so the best they could do is massacre the civilian ships closer by.

And if it wasn't detected, exiting in a different vector does not matter at all.

All targeting has been concentrated along the lane. The LD would be in a completely different plane, away from the engagement.

The defensive installations will likely be targeting the axis of the cylinder, so if something starts flying off perpendicular to that, the standard targeting solutions and practice would need revising, I agree. But not to the extent that saves the ship: it would be no harder to shoot at it than a ship that was stuck moving along the axis at a piddling 50 gravities.

Simply a measly 10,000 km along the z-axis should be sufficient.

Conventionally, when using cylindrical coordinates, one visualises the cylinder standing upright and the Z axis is the one going from top to bottom. That would be the regular path ships take in an emergence lane. You meant along a radial axis.

10,000 km is 90 seconds for a spider ship on emergency acceleration. It's more than enough for a missile fired from 1 million km away to arrive, including a 45 second delay in which the defenders decide whether to shoot or not.

My 28 second number above was assuming that the emergence lane is only 1000 km in radius. That's still within the time of a 15-second decision plus 100,000 km dash of the missile at 96,000 gravities.

And in that it doesn't matter if the ship is travelling 1000 straight towards the oncoming missiles or 1000 km straight away from them: the ±2,000 km difference is less than 0.2 seconds of flight time of a missile at the end of this run.

Moving away from the missiles presents a smaller aspect of the ship for the missiles to shoot at, but it also reduces the number of PDLCs the ship can deploy to shoot at them. Given that I don't think the ships can mount sufficient PDLCs to survive the tsunami that the MWHJ defenders would launch, presenting a smaller aspect is probably a better idea. Not that it would do them much good.

Ships target all of their fire into the emergence lane. Why would missiles or energy weapons be fired below or above the emergence lane instead of the lane itself?

Actually, ALL of them should be doing that. You seem to be misunderstanding the geometry of how the emergence lane works. The emergence lane is a cylinder with a radius less than its height. That means the path to travel for an energy beam is shorter through the sides, meaning the warhead can get much closer to the target from the sides than from the top/bottom end. Not that the missile would want to get any closer than it needs to, because that opens up for it being fired at by PDLCs.

More importantly, since they have no wedge running, there is no need for an up-the-kilt or down-the-throat shot. Those only are only better than a shot at the broadside when there are wedges and sidewalls protecting the ship. If they are not there, there's no reason to shoot at the smallest projection of the ship, instead of the largest. Even more than that, if you launch missiles from two 90° angles, one of them will be aiming at the less-armoured top and bottom sides of a regular impeller ship, practically guaranteeing a kill.

So the standard wormhole defensive installation will be firing at the sides of the emergence lane. That's supported by the fact that this is more or less what happened at Ajay-Prime: in order to shoot at the impeller rings and damage/cripple the SLN battlecruisers, the LAC had to be on a radial vector from the emergence lane, so it had visibility of those rings. If it were shooting at the armoured stern or bow of the ship, the LAC's BC-grade graser isn't likely to have been enough.

Sailboats exit lanes only at the end of the lane. LDs can drop down through a manhole cover. Completely different vector. And it would be the most optimum evasive maneuver at hand. At the indulgence of Spock, Kirk used it against Khan -- also an Alpha -- with deadly precision.

I agree it's the most optimum manoeuvre.

But I disagree it's enough. Dead is dead and a spider ship that was detected is dead. Its only chance of survival is not being detected, and that's gambling on luck.

Even if a spider drive ship can maneuver, wormhole defenses are designed to police ships in the junction zone, guard the emergence lanes and guard against external threats from hyperspace. So they are looking everywhere. A spyder ship maneuvering would get a "huh, look at that weird behavior" not "OH no, what are we going to do?" Besides, the ship is driving into fixed defenses, not maneuvering away from them - at best it might get in range to do some damage while absorbing massive amounts in return.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:There seems to be a correlation between a wormhole's strength and the distance it covers. Junctions, being stronger than warp bridges, appear to have longer spans. I consulted the map of the Honorverse and looked at the MWHJ and the Erewhon junctions for guidance, whereby I concluded a likely 300-350 light-years for Darius.

By no means this is set in stone. It's just a very big guess.

tlb wrote:Why are you estimating when we have the length from UH?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I was estimating the other two termini, for which we have no information, to conclude they likely end up nowhere useful.

Ok, I did not understand (but why bigger than the known distance). However whether they are useful or not is still to be determined by the author.

penny wrote:If that is the case, its advantages are not obvious. When a conventional ship exits the junction, it must continue down the lane. In an orderly fashion. A conventional ship is still dependent upon the sails to survive in the lane.

Part of the "must continue down the lane" has to do with traffic safety; there are both incoming and outgoing lanes, which need to be kept separate. In OBS, Honor's ship was in the outgoing lane when it dropped the wedge and activated the foresail:

Chapter 5 wrote:"Rig foresail for transit."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Rigging foresail—now."
No observer would have noted any visible change in the cruiser, but Honor's instrumentation told the tale as Fearless's impeller wedge dropped abruptly to half-strength. Her forward nodes no longer generated their portion of the normal-space stress bands; instead, they had reconfigured to produce a circular disk of focused gravitation that extended for over three hundred kilometers in every direction from the cruiser's hull.

So there is a threshold in the lane where the transition from wedge to sail must be made.

Note that a junction like at Manticore has multiple incoming and outgoing lanes.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:If that is the case, its advantages are not obvious. When a conventional ship exits the junction, it must continue down the lane. In an orderly fashion. A conventional ship is still dependent upon the sails to survive in the lane.

Part of the "must continue down the lane" has to do with traffic safety; there are both incoming and outgoing lanes, which need to be kept separate. In OBS, Honor's ship was in the outgoing lane when it dropped the wedge and activated the foresail:

Chapter 5 wrote:"Rig foresail for transit."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Rigging foresail—now."
No observer would have noted any visible change in the cruiser, but Honor's instrumentation told the tale as Fearless's impeller wedge dropped abruptly to half-strength. Her forward nodes no longer generated their portion of the normal-space stress bands; instead, they had reconfigured to produce a circular disk of focused gravitation that extended for over three hundred kilometers in every direction from the cruiser's hull.

So there is a threshold in the lane where the transition from wedge to sail must be made.

Note that a junction like at Manticore has multiple incoming and outgoing lanes.

As we saw in War of Honor, each wormhole has it's own termini, emergence lane, and ingress vector in a junction. So manticore has 7 different termini, 7 ingress vectors, with 7 inbound lanes, and 7 emergence lanes.