Defending a wormhole junction/terminus.

darrell wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:

fester wrote:
I'm aware of the crapload of MDM pods in orbit around Sphinx --- (side note, why in orbit and not a couple million kilometers closer to the RZ/normal space boundary and off to the side a little bit???)

Gravity. Anything close to a major body is going to be in orbit around it unless you've got some kind of active propulsion to keep it in a fixed relationship.

That's going to be expensive, and if you're talking things like shoals of pods having an active propulsion system is going to give away where they're located.

You can use gravity to help you. There is a spot known as the L2 Larange point. (further away from the Sun.)

Technically, the L1 - L3 points are dynamically unstable. While there are solutions with relatively modest station-keeping drives, there are two reasons why you wouldn't want to use them for system-defense pods.

First, those points are going to be in use for other purposes. There's one L2 point, and nine and sixty different uses for it. All of which are competing for that rather valuable piece of system volume.

Second, it's a rather obvious place to put anything you want stable with respect to the planet, so it's a rather obvious place for an attacker to look first. Only a tactical moron puts stealthed defenses where the attacker is going to look first.

JohnRoth wrote:Second, it's a rather obvious place to put anything you want stable with respect to the planet, so it's a rather obvious place for an attacker to look first. Only a tactical moron puts stealthed defenses where the attacker is going to look first.

I'd bet that missile pod mockups are pretty cheap. ...

kzt wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Second, it's a rather obvious place to put anything you want stable with respect to the planet, so it's a rather obvious place for an attacker to look first. Only a tactical moron puts stealthed defenses where the attacker is going to look first.

I'd bet that missile pod mockups are pretty cheap. ...

[G] now there's an appropriately sneaky though.

(Otherwise known as "what didn't I think of that")

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Second, it's a rather obvious place to put anything you want stable with respect to the planet, so it's a rather obvious place for an attacker to look first. Only a tactical moron puts stealthed defenses where the attacker is going to look first.

I'd bet that missile pod mockups are pretty cheap. ...

[G] now there's an appropriately sneaky though.

(Otherwise known as "what didn't I think of that")

It's already been done in War of Honor.

A pair of RMN ships were confronted by a quartet of IAN ships, the latter having semi-pods attached to their hulls. The RMN ships responded by deploying decoys configured to look like missile pods and moved as if to engage the Andermani. The Andermani promptly decided not to engage and the end result was a no-score-draw.

I am not sure about the geometry of the entry and egress from a worm hole junction.

A regular terminus seems to be like passing through one side of a mirror- you go into and come out of the same side and thus the travel lanes described.

On a Junction however, is there more than one plane of entry/egress? if there are 7 wormholes leading to the Manticore Junction, are there seven pairs of lanes, each pair moving through a different axis of the Junction or are there seven pairs of lanes all leading through one plane of the Manticore terminus?

If there is only one plane, you could position Forts and or pods "behind" and outward from the terminus and it would be possible to shoot missils (particularly MDMs) at the back end of anthing comming through. Not through the Junstion, but in from the edge. That means shooting at targets that are going away (or quatering away or are compleatly screened from some of those behind-the-terminus- units, but you get to thicken your fire and your targets have even more things to defend against.
Since you are shooting into a basket with your own forces on the other side (forts or pods) you have to be sure the IFF gear is working but that is normal.

Brigade XO wrote:I am not sure about the geometry of the entry and egress from a worm hole junction.

A regular terminus seems to be like passing through one side of a mirror- you go into and come out of the same side and thus the travel lanes described.

On a Junction however, is there more than one plane of entry/egress? if there are 7 wormholes leading to the Manticore Junction, are there seven pairs of lanes, each pair moving through a different axis of the Junction or are there seven pairs of lanes all leading through one plane of the Manticore terminus?

If there is only one plane, you could position Forts and or pods "behind" and outward from the terminus and it would be possible to shoot missils (particularly MDMs) at the back end of anthing comming through. Not through the Junstion, but in from the edge. That means shooting at targets that are going away (or quatering away or are compleatly screened from some of those behind-the-terminus- units, but you get to thicken your fire and your targets have even more things to defend against.
Since you are shooting into a basket with your own forces on the other side (forts or pods) you have to be sure the IFF gear is working but that is normal.

For each wormhole terminus, there is one way to sucessfully enter a wormhole. Possibly you can enter from any direction, but your ship would be destroyed in transit on any other entry berring. I am guessing this from textov that a mass transit is very difficult, unlikely to be successfull without astro control. Possibly if you try to enter from another direction, you just won't enter the wormhole at all.

For each exit from a wormhole, you have just one exit direction. Possibly the exit direction is the receptircal of the entry, (go in one side, out the other) possibly in some totaly different direction. The use of the junctions required the evolution of a new six-dimensional math, so it could be either.

It is the same for a junction. Each bridge you have one entry direction, and one different exit direction. Where things get complicated is manticore, which has 7 entry directions, each for a different wormhole, and 7 different exit directions, again each for a different wormhole. That is 14 different traffic lanes (7 in, 7 out) which if not carefuly managed, could cause traffic jams and accidents to spare.

Brigade XO wrote:I am not sure about the geometry of the entry and egress from a worm hole junction.

A regular terminus seems to be like passing through one side of a mirror- you go into and come out of the same side and thus the travel lanes described.

On a Junction however, is there more than one plane of entry/egress? if there are 7 wormholes leading to the Manticore Junction, are there seven pairs of lanes, each pair moving through a different axis of the Junction or are there seven pairs of lanes all leading through one plane of the Manticore terminus?

If there is only one plane, you could position Forts and or pods "behind" and outward from the terminus and it would be possible to shoot missils (particularly MDMs) at the back end of anthing comming through. Not through the Junstion, but in from the edge. That means shooting at targets that are going away (or quatering away or are compleatly screened from some of those behind-the-terminus- units, but you get to thicken your fire and your targets have even more things to defend against.
Since you are shooting into a basket with your own forces on the other side (forts or pods) you have to be sure the IFF gear is working but that is normal.

Textev seems to indicate that each terminus entry point has a different orientation. When they were looking for the seventh terminus, they had to find both the coordinates of the entry point and the angle of approach, which indicates that it was not determined by the angle of approach to all the other termini.

Textev also shows that areas outside the permitted entry and exit lanes are heavily mined.

Michael Everett wrote:

kzt wrote:I'd bet that missile pod mockups are pretty cheap. ...

It's already been done in War of Honor.

A pair of RMN ships were confronted by a quartet of IAN ships, the latter having semi-pods attached to their hulls. The RMN ships responded by deploying decoys configured to look like missile pods and moved as if to engage the Andermani. The Andermani promptly decided not to engage and the end result was a no-score-draw.

That was using (expensive) Ghost Rider decoys to temporarily appear to be missile pods.

I assumed kzt was suggesting something more like a physical mockup (basically the shell of a pod without any missiles, fusion reactor, or other guts). Something that would pass optical inspection, and might attract mistletoe attention better sent against real pods. (Or better yet keep an enemy from looking farther and ever seeing the real pods stuck in some out of the way corner of the system)

Pretty much. With whatever cheap stuff you need to make it look to a long-range sensor like a missile pod.

kzt wrote:Pretty much. With whatever cheap stuff you need to make it look to a long-range sensor like a missile pod.

Going to make them inflatable while you are at it?
I would be surprised if decoys were not already in standard use.
Very old idea - like proping up bodies on the fort's wall to give the impression it is still defended...