Non-CLAC hyper-help for LAC's

Wow. That is remarkably evil.

All ships (even spider drive ships, and drones) will produce waste heat that can be detected from a distance (much greater than 150,000 kilometers). Honorverse stealth systems overcome this by radiating waste heat away from known and suspected contacts, towards empty space.

This means that if you have enough sensors, especially ones the enemy vessel doesn't know about (like stealthy recon drones) then you will be able to detect anything from a distance. Detecting an intruding ship then becomes a game of getting enough detection platforms into an area quickly enough. Take to long and the area to search becomes larger requiring more ships and drones to search it.

Once you arrive on site, hopefully with enough platforms to do the job, then you establish a sphere of recon platforms and ships. this sphere surrounds the area of the suspected hyper footprint plus distance the ship is suspected to have been able to move in the intervening time, plus some amount for possible improved technologies. then you begin to contract the sphere until you find a heat source. All of these platforms (both ships and drones) will eventually find the intruder as long as it is within the area being searched.

The intruding ship can reduce the waste heat by shutting down its reactors and running on batteries, or by storing waste heat in a heat sink. Both are temporary solutions, limited by how long your ship can be run in such conditions, and still restart its fusion reactor and/or continue to store waste heat. And if a ship shuts down its reactors it can't maneuver to avoid a contact it might be drifting into.

The spider drone concept would through all sorts of fits into this detection scheme, making multiple contacts, and keeping ships searching for some time, but in the end even they will all be found. It will just cost a lot of money in fuel for ships, and in used up recon drones.

Astelon wrote:Once you arrive on site, hopefully with enough platforms to do the job, then you establish a sphere of recon platforms and ships. this sphere surrounds the area of the suspected hyper footprint plus distance the ship is suspected to have been able to move in the intervening time, plus some amount for possible improved technologies. then you begin to contract the sphere until you find a heat source. All of these platforms (both ships and drones) will eventually find the intruder as long as it is within the area being searched.

You need to establish a sphere with a radius in excess of a light hour. How many recon drones did you bring?

Oh, and the spider ship is moving 20% of lightspeed away from the center of the search area. So, yeah, how many drones did you bring? I'm pretty sure you need a lot more.

If it is enough, the spider will very quietly hyper out, leaving you chasing your tail as it move a few light months and does it again.

kzt wrote:Wow. That is remarkably evil.

Yeah. That kind of merciless spoofing operation is why I do not think that the current RMN practice is workable, not in response to that sort of thing. Apart from the spider drive detection worries specifically, the CLAC and DD squadron - even the whole DD squadron, really - represents more resources to drop on a single phantom contact than they can afford, when the enemy (or even just a much lower threshold for worrying about a possible contact) will generate too many phantoms, too often, for them to put that much attention on.

But reducing the sensor platform coverage for any given phantom jacks down the chances of the response being effective, and for almost any given phantom, you won't be able to tell til you're out there if it's a sensor glitch (which it almost always will be, after all), a single scout, that stealthy freighter playing silly buggers, or 20 Leonard Detweilers and screen.

Planners have to give up the dream of putting out a response that can be confident of being able to defeat or even defend itself long enough to get the hypergenerators back up against anything they may find out there. You're going out too blind for that, and you haven't the resources.

Any which way, it's going to take a variety of sensor improvements. I'm pretty confident it's going to take some deployment and doctrinal changes too. I take the business of these threads is mostly WAGing about what those may be, after almost certainly just assuming some of those sensor improvements, or nailing down what they may be.

JeffEngel wrote:

kzt wrote:Wow. That is remarkably evil.

Yeah. That kind of merciless spoofing operation is why I do not think that the current RMN practice is workable, not in response to that sort of thing. Apart from the spider drive detection worries specifically, the CLAC and DD squadron - even the whole DD squadron, really - represents more resources to drop on a single phantom contact than they can afford, when the enemy (or even just a much lower threshold for worrying about a possible contact) will generate too many phantoms, too often, for them to put that much attention on.

But reducing the sensor platform coverage for any given phantom jacks down the chances of the response being effective, and for almost any given phantom, you won't be able to tell til you're out there if it's a sensor glitch (which it almost always will be, after all), a single scout, that stealthy freighter playing silly buggers, or 20 Leonard Detweilers and screen.

Planners have to give up the dream of putting out a response that can be confident of being able to defeat or even defend itself long enough to get the hypergenerators back up against anything they may find out there. You're going out too blind for that, and you haven't the resources.

Any which way, it's going to take a variety of sensor improvements. I'm pretty confident it's going to take some deployment and doctrinal changes too. I take the business of these threads is mostly WAGing about what those may be, after almost certainly just assuming some of those sensor improvements, or nailing down what they may be.

What this keeps coming down to is being able to defeat the stealth which at this point has more to do with luck in finding the heat sourse than anything else.

Obviously more than luck is needed. The only time the spiders were actually used was OB. Without more sensor data, it's hard to see how there can be a whole lot of progress on the tech side.

Don

n7axw wrote:What this keeps coming down to is being able to defeat the stealth which at this point has more to do with luck in finding the heat sourse than anything else.

Obviously more than luck is needed. The only time the spiders were actually used was OB. Without more sensor data, it's hard to see how there can be a whole lot of progress on the tech side.

Don

It depends on the approach taken.

Detecting a spider drive like you detect an impeller drive would be an obvious win. More data there would be hugely relevant, and without a spider drive available for testing, you will be working blind that way. It is possible that Herlander Simoes may be able to offer some help there - I wouldn't bet on much, but better than none at all is exactly that.

Otherwise, if you're not trying to detect the spider drive itself, you've got the conventional - albeit horribly difficult - problem of locating an object generating no emissions other than very carefully disposed heat, with a hull coating that faithfully mimics whatever is on the far side of it. That sort of thing isn't beyond the smart nanopaints otherwise in use - it may be an incremental development of what is actually used, just because attempting that level of stealth is pointless when the impeller drive lights you up anyway. It's simply that that is a non-issue for a spider drive unit.

I have no idea how you would counter that, but it's within the wheelhouse of the Honorverse experts at least.

And then there's what you can do to generate luck by brute force approaches, such as saturating an area with sensor platforms, using better platforms, using more computer processing power to see what faint contacts make sense or don't as a possible intruder. You do run into resource issues there, but sometimes you'll be able to get as much as you need within the resource budget you have.

Belial666 wrote:1) Alignment freighter drops in far out system.

2) Alignment freighter drops several hundred very stealthy, very fast grazer torpedoes that aren't actually torpedoes but enhanced endurance surveillance drones, then jumps out.

3) You aren't catching those drones with ships as they're too stealthy and too fast. You might catch them with drones but turns out they got a PDLC cluster to kill drones that get in detection range. Whoops!

4) The spider-drones' job is to hide and move around the system, scouting defenses and occasionally mimicking the signal of a translating spider-ship.


5) You don't know how many spiders were dropped so you can never be certain you got them all. All future signals of your long-range detection arrays will be suspect; you either have to check all of them, all the time (good luck) or miss the genuine invasion that will come in the future.


6) Things are not helped by the genuine spider-scouts that pop in every so often to update the spider-torpedoes' orders and take in their sensor feeds back to the main fleet.

There is no way that a drone could mimic the signal of a ship transiting from hyper.

The transit signal is vastly greater than the signal produced by an impeller wedge. The energy comes from hyperspace itself--I think of it as akin to the transition energy of electrons. I don't think that even a superdreadnought could mimic the energy signal of a transition. It is simply too powerful.

Astelon wrote:All ships (even spider drive ships, and drones) will produce waste heat that can be detected from a distance (much greater than 150,000 kilometers). Honorverse stealth systems overcome this by radiating waste heat away from known and suspected contacts, towards empty space.

This means that if you have enough sensors, especially ones the enemy vessel doesn't know about (like stealthy recon drones) then you will be able to detect anything from a distance. Detecting an intruding ship then becomes a game of getting enough detection platforms into an area quickly enough. Take to long and the area to search becomes larger requiring more ships and drones to search it.

Once you arrive on site, hopefully with enough platforms to do the job, then you establish a sphere of recon platforms and ships. this sphere surrounds the area of the suspected hyper footprint plus distance the ship is suspected to have been able to move in the intervening time, plus some amount for possible improved technologies. then you begin to contract the sphere until you find a heat source. All of these platforms (both ships and drones) will eventually find the intruder as long as it is within the area being searched.

The intruding ship can reduce the waste heat by shutting down its reactors and running on batteries, or by storing waste heat in a heat sink. Both are temporary solutions, limited by how long your ship can be run in such conditions, and still restart its fusion reactor and/or continue to store waste heat. And if a ship shuts down its reactors it can't maneuver to avoid a contact it might be drifting into.

The spider drone concept would through all sorts of fits into this detection scheme, making multiple contacts, and keeping ships searching for some time, but in the end even they will all be found. It will just cost a lot of money in fuel for ships, and in used up recon drones.

We've calculated this out in the past. If the waste-heat beam is narrow, and the volume you need to search is over a light-hour, you need huge numbers of drones to have a reasonable probability of detecting the beam.

SWM wrote:

Belial666 wrote:1) Alignment freighter drops in far out system.

2) Alignment freighter drops several hundred very stealthy, very fast grazer torpedoes that aren't actually torpedoes but enhanced endurance surveillance drones, then jumps out.

3) You aren't catching those drones with ships as they're too stealthy and too fast. You might catch them with drones but turns out they got a PDLC cluster to kill drones that get in detection range. Whoops!

4) The spider-drones' job is to hide and move around the system, scouting defenses and occasionally mimicking the signal of a translating spider-ship.


5) You don't know how many spiders were dropped so you can never be certain you got them all. All future signals of your long-range detection arrays will be suspect; you either have to check all of them, all the time (good luck) or miss the genuine invasion that will come in the future.


6) Things are not helped by the genuine spider-scouts that pop in every so often to update the spider-torpedoes' orders and take in their sensor feeds back to the main fleet.

There is no way that a drone could mimic the signal of a ship transiting from hyper.

The transit signal is vastly greater than the signal produced by an impeller wedge. The energy comes from hyperspace itself--I think of it as akin to the transition energy of electrons. I don't think that even a superdreadnought could mimic the energy signal of a transition. It is simply too powerful.

True. The drones can't pull off his point four. (And I have serious doubts about how large they'd have to be to pull of a PDLC for counter-drone use)


But you can always (as other have pointed out) have real ships pop in and out sporadically anywhere from a light-week to a couple light-months out from the system.

Baring the astronomically bad luck of jumping near a warship lying doggo out in the middle of nowhere they'll be able to cycle their generator and jump out before any response force could get there. So it's not even a very risky ploy, you could do it with a couple of old freighters and still easily keep system security chasing phantoms.

Short periods of activity where you store the waste heat in heat sinks, followed by a day or two of inactivity and cooling at rates too low to effectively detect at extended ranges. Couple that with Honorverse systems being extremely efficient to begin with and good luck finding anything.

Besides, the problem is threefold;

1) If 500 are dropped in the system, with only 5 active every day to make 10 false contacts each daily, you still have to investigate 50 contacts a day, find those 5 drones before they disappear for another 3 months, reach them and kill them - and with 100% kill rate you will be doing that for months. With 25% kill rate per day, you will be doing that for years.


2) You can never tell if you found them all since you have no idea how many there were to begin with. At ANY time in the future, a contact could be a sensor ghost, false contact or real contact. You will have to treat them all as real contacts, every time, or miss the invasion. So years down the line, you will either be checking out your own sensor ghosts and wasting resources, or ignoring them and be effectively without sensors.


3) There might or might not be actual Mesan ships about to invade. In any case though, you will be using up a tremendous amount of manpower and resources to hunt down every last bogus signal and ghost, far more than the original expenditure of the Mesans in this operation. And that's exactly what the Mesans want you to. If you don't do so, you will instead be blind - and that's exactly what the Mesans want you to.








I call this "Operation: Cry Wolf". Ideally, the Mesans would carry it out in all the Junction termini with their insane amount of traffic and high number of sensor ghosts to keep you occupied well after the drones expire. And hey, if a merchant or civilian vessel "strays" too close to a spider drone, the spider-drone can use its spider-drive tractors to tear it apart. Not only is a drone way less expensive than any sort of ship (but especially freighters loaded with megatons of goods) but after a few terrorist strikes, you will be seeing a major decline in everyone's willingness to use your junctions. Even a mere 10% decline in traffic due to such fears is 10% of your entire effective economy. And that kind of hit is going to be a far larger percentage of your military budget.





EDIT:
Grazer torpedoes are substantially bigger than pods. Their grazer is much of their total mass, too, so they save a lot if it's removed. I wonder how big the smallest types of hyper generators are. Honor's yaught is less than half the size of a shrike (if memory serves) and has a hyper generator, doesn't it? Imagine how much worse this would be if the spider-drones not only could spoof spider-translations but actually do real spider-translations to avoid hunting drones and/or missiles (ships being slower than them, if marginally, could not reach them effectively)


EDIT 2:
Not mimic a crash-translation by an uncloaked ship, but the barely-there ghost of a spider-translation.