What happens to all that debris?

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote::idea:

The MA can send a horde of freighters operating under another flag to mass transit at the last minute, by a compromised ACS and flagman, to shut down Trevor's Star for 17 hours.

The author certainly has a few curve balls he can throw at the junction, in this battle with this non-traditional foe.

"Hey, what are you doing! Who gave approval for a mass transit!"

I'd think you'd have to compromise both ACS and all the Junction defenses at that terminus.

One thing we do know about mass transits is they take a bit of time to coordinate, you'd be able to see ships positioning for it for at least a few minutes before they were in position to attempt the transit. (At the very minimum it's be blindingly obvious if a dozen or more freighters all started down the 90 second long approach lane together, even if for some reason they were allowed to get that close all in a clump)

Junction Defense would have very good reason to be suspicious of that no mater what the civilian ACS was telling them. And any single fort at Trevor's Star has access to more than enough firepower to either convince the rogue freighters to stop their nonsense - or simply blow them away for refusing to follow orders from the military to break off. So the chances of successfully triggering a 17 hour lockdown seem quite low.

Perhaps not all of the junction's defenses, inasmuch as the CO of junction defense, the head honcho. And maybe not even him rather than a forged permission slip produced at the last minute. Consider an old exchange between Annachie and I . . .

cthia wrote:I wonder if nanite compulsion can be utilized to accomplish something totally benign, innocuous, nondestructive. Sort of a, "Why did I just sign that document?" Sort of thing.

Annachie wrote:Damn, the subtle uses of that MAlign control tec can be nasty.

Get a mole in to the office somewhere, inplant the target with a "automatically sign when you smell this on something with that colour on it" or similar.
(Ok stretching, but you get the idea)

Perfect for this scenario.

A mass transit normally takes minutes to set up and execute because it is following safety protocols and procedures. One that is practiced for the event can pull it off in a fraction of the time. This is for all of the marbles. The freighters won't be highly concerned with their survival. They're just a well-oiled cog in the plan. If a permission slip is produced, ACS is allowing it, then junction defense is not going to fire on innocent freighters mass transiting. At any rate, the freighters may only give a minute or less to decide. With nanite compulsion, a well rehearsed group of freighters and the human element, it is entirely possible.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Unless, of course, small ships transiting aren't common at all. I get the impression that the vast majority of ships transiting are huge freighters, which means they probably have more than 60 seconds of lockdown time. The few DBs and private yachts that want to transit simply have to pay the same price as a freighter, which probably discourages most unnecessary transit.

That's my impression, also--there simply aren't a lot of small interstellar vessels. Just look at Earth--there aren't a lot of transoceanic voyages by personal craft. Most oceangoing personal craft only go to nearby lands.

cthia wrote:A mass transit normally takes minutes to set up and execute because it is following safety protocols and procedures. One that is practiced for the event can pull it off in a fraction of the time. This is for all of the marbles. The freighters won't be highly concerned with their survival. They're just a well-oiled cog in the plan. If a permission slip is produced, ACS is allowing it, then junction defense is not going to fire on innocent freighters mass transiting. At any rate, the freighters may only give a minute or less to decide. With nanite compulsion, a well rehearsed group of freighters and the human element, it is entirely possible.

It occurs to me that the MAlign could shut things down without a whole fleet: Ships have practical size limits, but that doesn't mean they couldn't send a group of ships and then transfer all the mass to one ship. The ship could go through as easily as a single ship.

(On the other hand, it's basically a suicide mission. Whoever jams the wormhole is under the guns of powerful and quite upset fortresses. While they wouldn't just open fire they would detain the misbehaving ships and when they find out what happened....)

cthia wrote:Perhaps not all of the junction's defenses, inasmuch as the CO of junction defense, the head honcho. And maybe not even him rather than a forged permission slip produced at the last minute. Perfect for this scenario.

A mass transit normally takes minutes to set up and execute because it is following safety protocols and procedures. One that is practiced for the event can pull it off in a fraction of the time. This is for all of the marbles. The freighters won't be highly concerned with their survival. They're just a well-oiled cog in the plan. If a permission slip is produced, ACS is allowing it, then junction defense is not going to fire on innocent freighters mass transiting. At any rate, the freighters may only give a minute or less to decide. With nanite compulsion, a well rehearsed group of freighters and the human element, it is entirely possible.

Maybe. But even if you compromise the commander, letting something north of 25 freighters approach the terminus together with some significant pre-planning is going to be popping red flags all over the chain of command below him. But yeah, maybe he can yell loudly enough to keep fingers off the triggers until the transit happens.


But it doesn't really matter how unsafe the freighters want to be - it's going to be damned obvious something way, way, way, out of the norm is happening several minutes before they reach the terminus just because of the sheer distance between where a mass of freighter can be during normal operations and where they'd have to get to before being able to transit.

Remember that in normal conditions ACS keeps a several minute interval between transits - and their minimum allowed is 60 second separation. This means the ships that are even authorized to move towards the transit spot are normally in single file with something like 40,000 km separation! (And even at minimum are probably about 13,000 km from each other)

Then at Trevor's star you've got a 10,000 km lane where you need to use sails. So we can see that even when pushing the minimum allowed interval between transits there would only be one ship at a time under sails in that zone - because they'd have some velocity already it probably wouldn't take the 90 second to cover that distance that the inbound ship takes; they can probably do it in 45 seconds. (If they totally don't care about safety they could probably exceed the normal speed limit - but accelerating that hard is just another early signal that they aren't behaving as they should)

Most freighters waiting to use the wormhole are holding basically motionless in a staging area. ACS is going to authorize the next ship to start moving 1 transit interval after the previous ship. Closing up that interval, or leaving the staging area in a mass rush, is obviously abnormal behavior and will be causing alarm with any ACS controller or junction defense weapons or sensor officer who hasn't been subverted/controlled.


We're pretty clearly taking about quite a few minutes of 25+ civilian ships acting in unheard of ways in the heart of a massive set of defenses - regardless of how unsafe they're willing to be. (And the less safe they are the more unheard of and inexplicably their actions are and the higher the chance of someone taking action to prevent the transit even against the utterly illogical surprise orders from a subverted person above them in their chain of command)

Loren Pechtel wrote:It occurs to me that the MAlign could shut things down without a whole fleet: Ships have practical size limits, but that doesn't mean they couldn't send a group of ships and then transfer all the mass to one ship. The ship could go through as easily as a single ship.

(On the other hand, it's basically a suicide mission. Whoever jams the wormhole is under the guns of powerful and quite upset fortresses. While they wouldn't just open fire they would detain the misbehaving ships and when they find out what happened....)

Depending on how much the wormhole cares about actual mass vs the moral equivalent of gross register tonnage (actually a volume measurement) that compensators seem to work off of. Though going that far outside the normal mass would presumably render a compensator basically useless.

That might actually work - if you filled the cargo holds of an notionally 8 mton freighter with solid lead you probably could just squeeze in the 17 or so million cubic meters of it that you'd need to get it's mass up to the 220 million ton transit limit. (But it might actually be kind of close )

But like I said that probably means your compensator is useless. The wedge presumably still has the raw power to move the ship, but under normal grav plates a civilian ship is likely going to be limited to 50 g accel. Even for a freighter in a low speed area that's going to be abnormally slow and may raise some questions. (But probably fewer questions that 25+ ships bum rushing the transit point)
And I guess if the MAlign was willing to beef up it's systems to take more experienced gees and retrofit it with the much bulkier and higher power demand super-grav plates they came up with for the spider ships, it might survive maneuvering at 200 - 250 gees which probably is in line for a freighter near a Junction.


However you've got a point about it likely being a suicide mission. I don't know if a locked down wormhole can be detected on sensors or not (hmm - that's an interesting idea I'd overlooked which might affect how much of a mess locking it down might make) but they're likely to want to send a ship back in no more than 6 minutes or so. And since it'll much longer than that for the freighter to get out beyond the Junction's hyper limit where it might escape the failed transit attempt (whatever that looks like) would alert them to a rat even if they can't see whether that leg of the Junction has cleared for use.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:It occurs to me that the MAlign could shut things down without a whole fleet: Ships have practical size limits, but that doesn't mean they couldn't send a group of ships and then transfer all the mass to one ship. The ship could go through as easily as a single ship.

(On the other hand, it's basically a suicide mission. Whoever jams the wormhole is under the guns of powerful and quite upset fortresses. While they wouldn't just open fire they would detain the misbehaving ships and when they find out what happened....)

Depending on how much the wormhole cares about actual mass vs the moral equivalent of gross register tonnage (actually a volume measurement) that compensators seem to work off of. Though going that far outside the normal mass would presumably render a compensator basically useless.

That might actually work - if you filled the cargo holds of an notionally 8 mton freighter with solid lead you probably could just squeeze in the 17 or so million cubic meters of it that you'd need to get it's mass up to the 220 million ton transit limit. (But it might actually be kind of close )

But like I said that probably means your compensator is useless. The wedge presumably still has the raw power to move the ship, but under normal grav plates a civilian ship is likely going to be limited to 50 g accel. Even for a freighter in a low speed area that's going to be abnormally slow and may raise some questions. (But probably fewer questions that 25+ ships bum rushing the transit point)
And I guess if the MAlign was willing to beef up it's systems to take more experienced gees and retrofit it with the much bulkier and higher power demand super-grav plates they came up with for the spider ships, it might survive maneuvering at 200 - 250 gees which probably is in line for a freighter near a Junction.


However you've got a point about it likely being a suicide mission. I don't know if a locked down wormhole can be detected on sensors or not (hmm - that's an interesting idea I'd overlooked which might affect how much of a mess locking it down might make) but they're likely to want to send a ship back in no more than 6 minutes or so. And since it'll much longer than that for the freighter to get out beyond the Junction's hyper limit where it might escape the failed transit attempt (whatever that looks like) would alert them to a rat even if they can't see whether that leg of the Junction has cleared for use.

On the very first page of the "cornering the market" thread TFTSNBN suggested ...

TFTSNBN wrote:Weber's comments about the risk of locking down the MWJ with mass transits suggests that Manticore might regulate ship displacement to avoid lockdowns. If this is true then it is possible that there are some ships operating that are so massive that they have to make their entire journey through hyperspace without ever transiting a wormhole. Possible cargos would be very large fabrication modules that can produce SDs.

An extra large freighter can be built to reflect the changing signs of the times. More goods shipped in larger ships. These ships can instead use Loren's method of shutting down the junction by loading them with mass intensive materials.

In the trucking industry, weigh stations are utilized to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Too bad there is no way to "weigh" freighters. LOL

@Loren Pectel. Thanks for tweaking the plan even better. He's an Alpha y'all!

Funny bone:

It is kind of humorous, but these ships would give a new meaning to Trojan horse - hiding mass instead of ordnance. They would be more like Tro-Jane horses, because we all know how Janes don't like to disclose their real "Mass."

But really, it wouldn't matter if it is a suicide mission. Their mission is simply to shut down the junction at all costs even unto life or limb. Besides, they're going to be sacrificed anyway by the MAlign so that they won't be questioned.

Moments later, the most deadly battle that has ever visited the MBS will soon kick off. And the door to the cavalry has been shut tight.

"Silly Manticoran rabbits. Tricks are for kids and Alphas."

cthia wrote:In the trucking industry, weigh stations are utilized to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Too bad there is no way to "weigh" freighters. LOL

Actually I can think of a couple ways to "weigh" freighters in space. The less directly (and therefore possibly easier to fool - but also easier to implement) one is to monitor their wedge power vs their acceleration. It won't be perfect, but we already know that warship sensors can detect the power level of a wedge and compare it to the ship's accelerations; because that's one of the ways they try to determine target type at long range. At close range and with a declared ship mass they can probably tell within, say, 50% if the wedge power level and acceleration are in alignment or if the wedge is having to work way harder than it should to move a ship of that declared tonnage at the observed acceleration.

The more direct would be to require every freighter wanting to use your wormhole to drop their wedge at a weight station then be weighed by imparting a known force on the freighter (probably using a tractor beam) and observing how much that force accelerates it. Should be pretty easy to make that accurate within 10% of their mass.

And if you're worried about excessively long lockdown it's probably be good enough to verify their mass within 100% - and this notional 17-hour ship would be about 2,000,000,000% heavier than it "should" be .

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:In the trucking industry, weigh stations are utilized to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Too bad there is no way to "weigh" freighters. LOL

Actually I can think of a couple ways to "weigh" freighters in space. The less directly (and therefore possibly easier to fool - but also easier to implement) one is to monitor their wedge power vs their acceleration. It won't be perfect, but we already know that warship sensors can detect the power level of a wedge and compare it to the ship's accelerations; because that's one of the ways they try to determine target type at long range. At close range and with a declared ship mass they can probably tell within, say, 50% if the wedge power level and acceleration are in alignment or if the wedge is having to work way harder than it should to move a ship of that declared tonnage at the observed acceleration.

The more direct would be to require every freighter wanting to use your wormhole to drop their wedge at a weight station then be weighed by imparting a known force on the freighter (probably using a tractor beam) and observing how much that force accelerates it. Should be pretty easy to make that accurate within 10% of their mass.

And if you're worried about excessively long lockdown it's probably be good enough to verify their mass within 100% - and this notional 17-hour ship would be about 2,000,000,000% heavier than it "should" be .

Smartass! So you're an Alpha too. Hrrmph! Brilliant!

Actually after the post I thought about tugs being used as the relative part of the old-fashioned meat and produce scales in grocers. But I seriously doubt any system is being used, not simply because it hasn't been mentioned (the author can retcon it in, and I think he should consider it) but, it would be a process that would result in a back log of ships waiting to transit. I think it could result in a change in the operation that will come after the fact. IOW, someone will get away with it once.

The method using tractor beams seems too easy to defeat. It reminds me of my Midget League Football days of the coach putting the toe of his shoe under the scales to allow a player to just make the weight limit. LOL

Anyways, very interesting!

cthia wrote:Smartass! So you're an Alpha too. Hrrmph! Brilliant!

Well, fooled by Newton and his Second Law again!

Small is a relative thing when talking about Honorverse starships.
We have seen Dispatch Boats in the 30 to 50,000 metric ton range. Not sure we were give the sizes of the yachts used by the Alignment agents at Monica or the ship Cachet used to get to Mesa but lets say 150,000 mt The smallest commercial freighter we see is in the 1 million range but there certainly could be ships in the 250 to 900k range doing specialty things. If not carrying electronic messages and a couple of people in spartan conditions, something in the 250k mt range could funtion like a FedEx or UPS or DHL express boat for high value/time critical physical delivery. Remember, depending on what you need for power, impellers, Alpha and Beta nodes and environmental etc, you could build the equivelent of a 150,000 ton yacht but expand the dimentions to take up to another 100,000 tons of cargo- mostly it's the shell to enclose the space then cargo hatches, etc. Not saying all that is trivial but depending on how much both the size and capability of the power and motive equipment etc would need to be scalled up (and particle shilelding etc) you could get a fairly fast (both in normal space and in hyperspace) IF you could justify the expenc of building it and then make a profit -or meet "other" needs- and put it in service.