cthia wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:If the wedges are always on then the sneak attack could plot ballistic courses through the unavoidable gaps between them.
You very well may be right about that. But my brain is still having reservations about accepting the ability face value. G-torps don't have wedges, so I suppose that would make them more maneverable since the g-torps don't have to overcome the acceleration of a wedge, but it seems like thrusters should be detectable. Also, the MA has very limited FTL ability and real-time contol of g-torps to be able to thread the needle don't seem written in stone. Unless it can get certain objects positioned deeply inside the hyper limit. Ahem!
As far as we know nothing about the Spider drive allows it to ignore base velocity -- so it still needs time for its acceleration to overcome its velocity. If it accelerated forward for 20 minutes then, as far as we know, it'd have to accelerate the other way for another 20 minutes to cancel that out and be back to its original velocity. (A ship or torpedo with it is likely to be at a lower velocity that a wedge powered one, due to its lower acceleration. But that same lower acceleration should mean it still needs just as long to
Now the one thing it may be able to do that a wedge can't is accelerate straight sideways without first having to point the nose in that direction -- OTOH doing that would seem to means it can't bring all its spider emitters into play and so while it could start crabbing sideways several seconds sooner than a wedge powered ship which has to turn first doing so probably means it's cutting its acceleration rate by about 2/3rds.
As for having "certain objects positioned deeply inside the hyper limit" that's what they did with the Ghosts, and "the communications platforms the Ghost-class scout ships had emplaced" [MoH] for OB - my understanding is those platforms are how the Cataphract pods and graser torps got their final targeting info. Those Ghosts loaded them with the very latest info and then slipped clear (because once those platforms started broadcasting they might be found and the MAlign definitely didn't want the Ghosts found -- better to use a disposable platform for that)
So if there's a static barricade of wedges around a target the scouting Ghost ships would have time to plot it out and pass that info back to the Sharks (or later Lenny Dets) launching the attack so they can adjust the ballistic course of their cataphract pods and/or progra their graser torps to avoid them.
Start far enough back and you'd only have to adjust by fractions of a degree to line up with the gaps between those block wedges.
Now the attackers problem could be complicated if the block ships were arranged in concentric shells, offset enough that there was no easy path straight through. Or if they were moving around such that the opening positions were hard to predict over time (though leaving room for them to maneuver relative their adjacent neighbors would likely require keeping a far loser formation)