?

?

I was gathering wool about the Palace’s defenses. I think there are energy weapons involved?

On Darius, could there be a huge 3-second firing orbital platform? That is another way that the MAN may disrespect the ideals of the Edict by putting a weapons platform in orbit; so close to the planet. If such a destructive platform is taking out ships, can the GA target with missiles, possibly hitting the planet? Legally? … probably. Morally?

Do consider the standalone 3-second firing platform. Even if they self-destruct, if these stealthy platforms are seeded inside the limit, they can do a lot of damage to a fleet headed in system. Without damaging an attached ship.


Note:
3-second firing stealthy graser platforms.
The idea of mobile minefields is frightening.

penny wrote:On Darius, could there be a huge 3-second firing orbital platform? That is another way that the MAN may disrespect the ideals of the Edict by putting a weapons platform in orbit; so close to the planet. If such a destructive platform is taking out ships, can the GA target with missiles, possibly hitting the planet? Legally? … probably. Morally?

Do consider the standalone 3-second firing platform. Even if they self-destruct, if these stealthy platforms are seeded inside the limit, they can do a lot of damage to a fleet headed in system. Without damaging an attached ship.

They can be targeted by energy weapons that are not aimed at the planet, when the line of the beam is nearly perpendicular to the line from the planet to the platform.

You say stealthy, but they not as stealthy as you think; because active stealth measures require that the enemy be at a known single direction from them (remember the Ghost at Grayson that was afraid of detection if a drone got to its side).

PS: If they are too close to the planet, then there will be effects due to the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

PPS: A recon drone might be able sweep many of them up using its wedge. Put itself in an orbit around the planet and arrange the wedge so that is not imparting acceleration; then change its orientation so the wedge is presented to the front where it will destroy anything encountered.

tlb wrote:They can be targeted by energy weapons that are not aimed at the planet, when the line of the beam is perpendicular to the line from the planet to the platform.

You say stealthy, but they not as stealthy as you think; because active stealth measures require that the enemy be at a known single direction from them (remember the Ghost at Grayson that was afraid of detection if a drone got to its side).

PS: If they are too close to the planet, then there will be effects due to the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Except that the energy platforms are shorter ranged (so you can get much closer before they threaten you) this isn't any different from the dilema of any other orbital defense -- be it a fort, a fleet tucked into a low orbit, shoals of low orbit missile pods, etc.

The attacking fleet always has the same decision to make. What is more risky; taking the fire without responding until you're close enough to ensure you can kill them without risking the planet; or taking a longer ranged shot which has some low but non-zero chance of accidently hitting the planet and causing megadeath collateral damage.

The good things about energy platforms, from the attacker's point of view, is that a) ships can close to within about a million km and still be perfectly safe behind their sidewalls; and b) they can't shoot around corners so interposing your wedge is a perfect defense even within 500,000 km. At even a million km an Honorverse missile will have no chance of wandering off and hitting the planet. So this actually seems much less of a dilemma than the planet's orbits hosting shoals of MDMs -- where you'd need to make the fire/no-fire decision from over 50 millino km out (from which distance missiles are less accurate and the risk to the planet does go up)

Jonathan_S wrote:So this actually seems much less of a dilemma than the planet's orbits hosting shoals of MDMs -- where you'd need to make the fire/no-fire decision from over 50 millino km out (from which distance missiles are less accurate and the risk to the planet does go up)

A coasting recon drone that is presenting its wedge to the front would be able to plow through missile pods also.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:So this actually seems much less of a dilemma than the planet's orbits hosting shoals of MDMs -- where you'd need to make the fire/no-fire decision from over 50 millino km out (from which distance missiles are less accurate and the risk to the planet does go up)

A coasting recon drone that is presenting its wedge to the front would be able to plow through missile pods also.

Potentially - but if they're MDM pods they've likely fired before the drone gets there; unless you can afford to stooge around outside the hyper limit until your long ranged unmanned assets have swept through.

(And hiding behind your wedge all the way to impact has two issues. 1) Missiles, at least laserheads, can essentially shoot "around corners"; so they might spend a few missiles to swat your drone despite its interposed wedge. 2) There are likely at some some bomb pumped laser mines or energy buoys (if not full up forts, or even LACs) helping protect to orbitals and if you get too close one is likely to end up with a clean shot from an angle your wedge isn't currently covering; and then you also go poof before making it all the way to the pods.

Still, if you can afford to spend the time, and brought enough of them, Mistletoe-like drone attacks can find and erode most orbital defenses in ways that are vanishingly unlikely to accidently slam anything into the planet.

(They don't necessarily help if you do something evil and sneaky and put last ditch suicide attack concealed anti-ship weapons on civilian stations; though more effort will almost certainly go into looking for the possibility of those after that nasty surprise at Galton. But if you don't mind blowing off significant parts of your station to expose them you can likely bury them too deeply and well for even the closest drone inspection to spot)

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:So this actually seems much less of a dilemma than the planet's orbits hosting shoals of MDMs -- where you'd need to make the fire/no-fire decision from over 50 millino km out (from which distance missiles are less accurate and the risk to the planet does go up)

A coasting recon drone that is presenting its wedge to the front would be able to plow through missile pods also.

Jonathan_S wrote:Potentially - but if they're MDM pods they've likely fired before the drone gets there; unless you can afford to stooge around outside the hyper limit until your long ranged unmanned assets have swept through.

(And hiding behind your wedge all the way to impact has two issues. 1) Missiles, at least laserheads, can essentially shoot "around corners"; so they might spend a few missiles to swat your drone despite its interposed wedge. 2) There are likely at some some bomb pumped laser mines or energy buoys (if not full up forts, or even LACs) helping protect to orbitals and if you get too close one is likely to end up with a clean shot from an angle your wedge isn't currently covering; and then you also go poof before making it all the way to the pods.

Still, if you can afford to spend the time, and brought enough of them, Mistletoe-like drone attacks can find and erode most orbital defenses in ways that are vanishingly unlikely to accidently slam anything into the planet.

(They don't necessarily help if you do something evil and sneaky and put last ditch suicide attack concealed anti-ship weapons on civilian stations; though more effort will almost certainly go into looking for the possibility of those after that nasty surprise at Galton. But if you don't mind blowing off significant parts of your station to expose them you can likely bury them too deeply and well for even the closest drone inspection to spot)

If the platforms are built with the same stealthy technology as the g-torp, how would recon drones detect them? And such a stealthy mobile platform does not a sitting duck make. In fact, in response to a fleet attempting a zero/zero intercept with the planet, these platforms can be tasked to maneuver accordingly.

I question the survivability of sidewalls against 3-second firing capital ship powered grasers. Missiles cannot target what can’t be localized or seen. And if the platforms are in range of the GA’s energy weapons then the GA is in range of these platforms. MAN targeting will be perfect. GA targeting will not, if the GA can manage to target at alL

penny wrote:If the platforms are built with the same stealthy technology as the g-torp, how would recon drones detect them? And such a stealthy mobile platform does not a sitting duck make. In fact, in response to a fleet attempting a zero/zero intercept with the planet, these platforms can be tasked to maneuver accordingly.

I question the survivability of sidewalls against 3-second firing capital ship powered grasers. Missiles cannot target what can’t be localized or seen. And if the platforms are in range of the GA’s energy weapons then the GA is in range of these platforms. MAN targeting will be perfect. GA targeting will not, if the GA can manage to target at all.

The only stealth possessed by the graser torpedo was the spider drive. Admittedly that is very good against against passive detectors (which are trying to detect a wedge), but not good at all against active detectors (such as radar).

I like the idea of killing these platforms with drones, because the platforms cannot survive a collision with a wedge and cannot shoot through the wedge to stop the drone. The drone does not even need to look for them if they are at a uniform height from the planet, just an orbit at that height will slowly sweep them away.

But the wedge of a regular missile or a counter missile would also kill them, however that is limited by the lack of endurance compared to a drone.

PS: You talk about the perfect targeting of the platforms, but how is that achieved without turning on their own targeting radars?

penny wrote:I question the survivability of sidewalls against 3-second firing capital ship powered grasers. Missiles cannot target what can’t be localized or seen. And if the platforms are in range of the GA’s energy weapons then the GA is in range of these platforms. MAN targeting will be perfect. GA targeting will not, if the GA can manage to target at alL

It'll be a question of range.

We don't actually have a solid benchmark for how much more powerful a graser becomes when you burn it out over 3-seconds because we only have two incomplete data-points. All we know is that canonically one small enough to fit onto the (not small) graser torp is much weaker than the BC-grade ones mounted on the original Shrikes (though more powerful than a missile's laserhead); and the even smaller one you can mount on a missile is weaker yet.

But, yes, they can presumably scale it up to something based off a capital ship graser. But all that's going to do is push the effective range against sidewalls by some unknown amount. An SD graser against an SD sidewall only starts to become effected at 500,000 km. Even if you somehow doubled that effective range (which should require more than doubling the weapon's power) that'd only make it start to threaten sidewalls at 1,000,000 km (or the range of a normal graser against a target that lacks sidewalls) That's still very short range compared to a missile or torpedo.

Also, if it needs that time to burn through a sidewall -- if the 3 seconds is going to be the key factor -- then you have to hope the ship's crew is too shocked to react and pitch or roll to interpose a wedge (or just cause the beam to slip to an area covered by a fresh sidewall generator) and that's already after you have to hope you've cracked the algorithms behind the target's automatic random 'zig-zag' position shifting around its base course so you even know where it'll be when the graser's initial photons finally get there. That seems a slim hope.

I say that because at even the half million km a normal graser can start to punch through a sidewall light-speed lag is too large to allow the 3-second graser to observe and correct for target reaction[1]. So if the target reacts the graser won't know how it reacted until it's too late.


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[1] 500,000 km is 1.67 lightseconds; so it takes 3.34 seconds to observe the initial impact meaning the graser already burned out before it can see anything of it's effect)

Even the RMN, with FTL com equipped Ghost Rider drones wouldn't be able to hold a 3-second graser on a fixed point of a maneuvering target at that range because their observation/correction loop is still 1.69 seconds so over half the entire graser show is already on the way before the first photon hits (and at just 600g a ship can chance its position by 8km in the 1.67 seconds it takes the graser shot to cover that half million km

And of course if the 3-second graser can be effective against sidewalls even further away that just makes the control loop even longer

penny wrote:If the platforms are built with the same stealthy technology as the g-torp, how would recon drones detect them? And such a stealthy mobile platform does not a sitting duck make. In fact, in response to a fleet attempting a zero/zero intercept with the planet, these platforms can be tasked to maneuver accordingly.

As others have said: range.

As a beam weapon, as per the HV rules, the firing must happen within a million km of the target, probably must less to be effective. So if the OWP wants to defend the planet, it must be within 500,000 km of said planet. That is, a known location, where every sensor in the oncoming fleet and its recon drones will be focused.

There is no stealth that is going to last under such scrutiny. There will be too many angles viewing the planet that at least one platform will transit front of the planet and give the game up. As others have said, at this range, active sensors are also effective, and there's no point in hiding your LACs and destroyers. And since those would be the vanguard, they'd see the OWP first and would would have those in range before the platforms had the capital ships in range.

And remember there must be a lot of these to be effective against a fleet the size of the GF. It would need to kill every single ship, not just the capital ones, because remaining battlecruisers and cruisers can still effectively blockade the planet and demand surrender.

I don't see how orbital beam weapons can be effective or stealthy.