ThinksMarkedly wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:Regular warships wouldn't have been able to clear their emergence area undetected before DesDiv 265.2 "The Silver Cepheids" showed up to investigate the possible sensor ghost that was the Shark's sneaking in. Only the spider drive let them accelerate hard enough, and stealthily enough, to get outside the search pattern while still staying off Manticore's hypersensitive long range grav sensors.
BTW, this only makes sense if the gravitic arrays that detected the emergence from hyper could also detect active wedges. The Silver Cepheids took 12 hours to reach the emergence location because that's how long the signal would take to arrive at 62c. A non-GA warship pulling 400 gravities would cover 3.4 light-hours before having to shut down to hide, which is way beyond what a ship-borne sensor could hope to detect and any fleet could hope to search in reasonable time.
So they'd send someone back and get a new reading from the array, which confirms, "yes, there's a wedge and it's moving towards the inner system." That would give them a vector to search. But if whoever this was is intent on staying hidden, they'd use thrusters to move laterally. With the 12-hour delay in getting any information from the array, it's highly unlikely the Desron could catch up with the invader before the invader shut down the wedge anyway at around 17 hours, when they'd reached 0.8c.
However, this still means the defenders know someone is coming and roughly when they'll arrive.
And don't forget the other end of this attack: deceleration. If the gravitic arrays could see a wedge a light-month out, then they definitely can see one a light-day or so when the attacker decelerates to make a firing pass.
This is unlikely to be possible with thrusters. You'd need a 1.6c delta-v in thrusters to do that. And without wedges, this is rocket science and Einstein & Tsiolkovsky would like to have a word.
The problem is that this capability has never been hinted at. I suppose it's never been needed in discussion, but it still sounds like a big omission.
RFC may have decided to retcon this by dividing it by 4, as TEiF talks about light-weeks instead of light-months. With a mere 4-hour headstart (3 plus the Desron travel time), a 400-gravity ship would have travelled less than 23 light-minutes, which is far more reasonable to search. The target would be coasting at only 0.19c, trying to outrun a search of recon drones capable of over 0.5 c/hour of acceleration. In fact, inserting only a light-week out would be a better misdirection, because the defenders would far more likely conclude that there was no ship there to be found because it just translated back up to hyperspace.
And yet, if the gravitic arrays could track emergence only but not an active wedge, then penny is right that anyone could have perpetrated those attacks with wedge-drive ships, without the need for a spider.
Even without your expert analysis, kudos btw. There is still the phrase 'out of sight out of mind.' Then there is 'knowing in your head' is not synonymous with 'knowing in your heart'. We know the GA does not know in its heart what its head is telling it, or the MBS' status would be at DEFCON 2. And its rear areas would be bolstered.
At any rate and at the end of the day, when nothing was found by the Desron, just as always with humans, it is highly unlikely that the unexplained phenomena will ever be chalked up to ghosts.