SLN, and MAlign playing catch up with Manticoran superiority

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:If that something also has a spider drive, and is hyper capable, then all of the top brass, Captain, Admiral, tactical etc., can survive. The MA will not allow its crew to be taken prisoner. But I don't see why a contingency plan wouldn't be available to an LD.

That would mean the GAULs would need to start turning on the crew to clear the way out from the inner core. Otherwise, you have 7500 people who are not getting off the ship who would be in the way and any dozen of them might get weapons to oppose the leadership leaving. The mental control of navy personnel can't be that good (we know they don't have suicide nanites) especially when they realise their life is forfeit. Quite a lot of them would try to get off the ship aboard those evacuation shuttles.

Another problem is that once the brass leaves, what's to stop the "workers" from surrendering the ship with all its classified systems intact? They'd have a lot of time to disable the scuttling charges without the top brass around to stop them. The GAULs may barricade themselves inside engineering and the flag bridge with a large nuke, but the rest of the crew will try to get to them and the bombs.

No, you don't want to give the crew time to realise their life is forfeit, so you don't have time to mount an evacuation of the top brass. Said top brass must activate the self-destruct as early as possible.

Besides, aside from the GAULs, the senior officers are the most likely to have drunk the kool-aid, because they are aware of the atrocities being committed. Therefore, they're more likely to die for the cause than regular crewmembers.

I never considered mutiny aboard an MA warship. These people are too indoctrinated. They imbibed indoctrination while listening to charismatic motivational speeches that would make Hitler's seem tame by comparison from the moment they were a spec in a test tube unable to understand language.

GA officers sacrifice their lives without a thought. King Roger’s tradition lives on. I just don't anticipate those kinds of problems aboard a MAN warship. And I can't agree that the suicide protocol wouldn't be required. The Russians and Germans used it. Even the US distributed poison pills to its spies to avoid capture at one point. Some factions of America are calling for another era of distributing a pill to allow prisoners of the Jihad to avoid the brutal televised deaths. And for a regime like the MAlign, I'd be shocked if the suicide protocol isn't widely distributed.

But you might have a point. There is always the possibility of a Randy Steilman lurking aboard every ship I suppose. But the problem is easily solved. NEED TO KNOW. The only people that even know about the escape chute that leads to the secret boat boat is limited. The number of people that need evacuating aboard an LD is probably less than 100. And if you have a problem with defectors, they would try to escape in the only boat anyway. So why tell them. Incorporating a single chute built inside the walls of a warship as large as an LD would be a piece of cake.

penny wrote:Yes! That is a much better solution. It also allows a tactic I posited in another thread. If a Ghost ship is operating nearby and the GA has somewhat of some good luck with a spider drive detector, or simply something goes awry and the LD's location is somewhat compromised, then the Ghost can be the sacrificial lamb.

If there's a working spider drive detector, it will probably detect both Ghost, Shark and LD.

If anything, the bigger ships are more likely to be detected - more mass to accelerate means bigger forces / more tractors.

So how can a Ghost successfully sacrifice for an LD then?

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:That begs a question. Will the spider drive detector, if developed, be able to distinguish spider drive signatures? Much like each impeller-drive has its own unique signature. It isn't possible to pass off the wedge of a CL for that of an SD.

Actually I'd say rather that (unless people are playing ECM games) it isn't possible to mistake the wedge of a CL for that of an SD.

But when the CL is playing ECM games... well I'm pretty sure it can be possible, in the right circumstance, for it to pass its wedge off as that of a far larger SD. Certainly we've seen decoys (which are way smaller than CLs) generate the signature of an SD's drive. And I'm pretty sure a ship cna play game with ECM and engineering to augment its wedge's signature, like a decoy can, to look bigger than it is. (And we've seen Honor's SDs are 4th Yeltsin do the opposite; simulating having the wedges of BCs -- though they couldn't mimic quite how close BCs could have gotten)

But those kinds of games with wedge signature are easier to pull off when the ships involved (both those faking the signature and the ones they're pretending to be) are accelerating at well below their normal military accel. The extra signal produced at 80% of max thrust (or more) is just way harder to play signal modification games with than if it's meandering along at, say, 30% accel.

AFAIR, Travis Long played some kind of tricks with Impellers to simulate bigger ships, when Manticore was attacked by the mercenaries. At the cost of vastly increased node wear, and only on long distance (and with the not so good sensors they had back then.)

penny wrote:I never considered mutiny aboard an MA warship. These people are too indoctrinated. They imbibed indoctrination while listening to charismatic motivational speeches that would make Hitler's seem tame by comparison from the moment they were a spec in a test tube unable to understand language.

Indoctrination only goes so far when it's about your own life, especially when you see your leaders trying to get away.

penny wrote:GA officers sacrifice their lives without a thought. King Roger’s tradition lives on. I just don't anticipate those kinds of problems aboard a MAN warship. And I can't agree that the suicide protocol wouldn't be required. The Russians and Germans used it. Even the US distributed poison pills to its spies to avoid capture at one point. Some factions of America are calling for another era of distributing a pill to allow prisoners of the Jihad to avoid the brutal televised deaths. And for a regime like the MAlign, I'd be shocked if the suicide protocol isn't widely distributed.

We know of two MAlign-Nave officers (Jessikal Miliken(?) and her superior) who don't have the nanite suicide protocol. Cachat and Zilwicky were musing about it. They figured that the suicide nanites are probably triggered by some kind of stress level (stress caused by getting caught or interrogated), and soldiers in a fight regularly reach high stress levels, so their crews would fall dead while fighting.

penny wrote:I never considered mutiny aboard an MA warship. These people are too indoctrinated. They imbibed indoctrination while listening to charismatic motivational speeches that would make Hitler's seem tame by comparison from the moment they were a spec in a test tube unable to understand language.

As markus said, I think that breaks down when we're talking about their own mortality, especially if you give them time to think about it. The majority of the MAlign operatives who did have suicide nanites didn't even know about them: people like Caswell Gweon, who dropped dead at the mention of the Alignment or some other trigger words. We know that Firebrand would have been implanted with them without being told what they were. We also know that Lisa Charteris had them and didn't know about them either.

We do know a few who knew how to trigger their nanites, but those were agents who knew who they may get captured. The only examples of voluntary nanite suicide were those operatives that the Mayans captured who had been pretending to be from Manticore.

What this tells me is that the majority isn't indoctrinated to give their life for the cause, because they are given nanites without their knowing. If they could be trusted to suicide like the GAULs and those agents, they would have been told about the nanites and given control over them. Note also you'd need a virtually 100% compliance: if you only had 99% compliance rate, then you'd be left with 75 people aboard a capital ship who could stop the self-destruct. And desperate people at that.

GA officers sacrifice their lives without a thought. King Roger’s tradition lives on. I just don't anticipate those kinds of problems aboard a MAN warship. And I can't agree that the suicide protocol wouldn't be required. The Russians and Germans used it. Even the US distributed poison pills to its spies to avoid capture at one point. Some factions of America are calling for another era of distributing a pill to allow prisoners of the Jihad to avoid the brutal televised deaths. And for a regime like the MAlign, I'd be shocked if the suicide protocol isn't widely distributed.

I wouldn't call it "without a thought." They do think about it and they do think it's worth their lives. The MAN crew may think the same and it might suffice to tell them that "we're self-destructing to prevent the technology from falling into the wrong hands, for the safety of your families back home."

But the moment the top brass tries to steal away and not share on the same fate, eyebrows may rise.

But you might have a point. There is always the possibility of a Randy Steilman lurking aboard every ship I suppose. But the problem is easily solved. NEED TO KNOW. The only people that even know about the escape chute that leads to the secret boat boat is limited. The number of people that need evacuating aboard an LD is probably less than 100. And if you have a problem with defectors, they would try to escape in the only boat anyway. So why tell them. Incorporating a single chute built inside the walls of a warship as large as an LD would be a piece of cake.

Someone will notice a shuttle going away. And the junior officers will notice the senior ones aren't responding to commands, with the chiefs next to them paying close attention. At that point, we have the only other effect that is known to travel faster than light: gossip. The entire crew will know the senior officers are out of the control loop before they even reach the shuttle. And then the E-3 Mafia takes matters into their own hands.

There's no way there's a full secret boat bay aboard a ship. They're too big, because by definition they have to fit a boat inside. And said boat must be maintained and kept in ready condition, so you have a lot of people who would still need to know it's there. Even if they could hide it, unless all sensors are completely shot, some crew will notice the shuttle getting away.

And if all sensors are completely shot, then it's highly likely the boat bays are all compromised too. Though if the ship is going to explode anyway, it wouldn't hurt to try and get away. Unless that act triggers the crew into stopping the self-destruct.

penny wrote:Anyway, it is weird that the warship can accelerate as fast as its missiles err torps??? I simply have to be wrong about that!!!

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Agreed that it is weird that the weapon is so sluggish -- but that's what the text says.

Though, in practice, the g torp is going to generally be a fair bit quicker than the warship that launched it; but only because the crew can't take the strain so the ship's structure wasn't designed to either.
Spider ships have a routine accel of 150g (1g experienced), a combat accel of 210g (4g experienced - and the design strain for the ship's structure), and a limited duration emergency accel of 350g (9g experienced -- overstressing the structure and the crew).

The graser torp has "a few hundred gravities’ acceleration" [MoH] - so it might be able to match, or even slightly exceed, the emergency accel of a spider ship. But the torp is designed to keep that up, rather than use it for just a brief emergency.

markusschaber wrote:

penny wrote:Yes! That is a much better solution. It also allows a tactic I posited in another thread. If a Ghost ship is operating nearby and the GA has somewhat of some good luck with a spider drive detector, or simply something goes awry and the LD's location is somewhat compromised, then the Ghost can be the sacrificial lamb.

If there's a working spider drive detector, it will probably detect both Ghost, Shark and LD.

If anything, the bigger ships are more likely to be detected - more mass to accelerate means bigger forces / more tractors.

So how can a Ghost successfully sacrifice for an LD then?

Well, to my dismay, text says that the very powerful gravity created by the tractors do not create any visible distortion in local space. That might possibly imply that the size of the spider ship will not matter as far as the anamolous disturbance it creates. So I am thinking that a spider-drive detector might be able to detect, only, that a spider drive is operating in the area, and not what the anomaly belongs to. If I am correct, then a smaller ship can be sacrificed. The MAN might even be able to deploy a tactic called 'the sacrificial lamb,' by momentarily varying the effectiveness of the Ghost's stealth. Sort of like what the GA does with its buoys. 'Now you see us, now you don't.' A distraction that allows an LD, the much bigger prize to get away.

But you might be right that the detector might be able to eventually discern between the size of the ship creating the anomaly. Eventually. However, do consider that if successful, a spider drive detector has to have limitations or the g-torps themselves will be detected, and together with their paltry acceleration will be rendered pretty much useless.

To be clear, I'm thinking a detector will only be able to detect that a spider drive is operating somewhere in the system, and not where or what size ship that the drive belongs to. It could turn out to be that only specific disturbances created in local space-time -- the piercing of the local universe exposing hyperspace -- will be detected. That way, only the crumbs that an LD leaves behind will be detected. Much like a tracker can detect, after the fact, the pattern a diamondback rattler made in the sand. Or the tracks of a cheetah.

Now, I admit to baggage bleed from Star Trek whereby the warships are normally kept below a certain warp factor because the higher warp factors damage local spacetime. Likewise, the Spiders are punching holes in local space. Will those holes close immediately?

So, I am betting that a spider drive detector will only be able to give warning that the local waters have become infested, but not with what and where.

Perhaps it will be prudent to name that great big huge honking hulking monstrosity of a spider-drive detector, the Paul Revere. We know they are coming. That's all we know.


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Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Anyway, it is weird that the warship can accelerate as fast as its missiles err torps??? I simply have to be wrong about that!!!

.

Agreed that it is weird that the weapon is so sluggish -- but that's what the text says.

Though, in practice, the g torp is going to generally be a fair bit quicker than the warship that launched it; but only because the crew can't take the strain so the ship's structure wasn't designed to either.
Spider ships have a routine accel of 150g (1g experienced), a combat accel of 210g (4g experienced - and the design strain for the ship's structure), and a limited duration emergency accel of 350g (9g experienced -- overstressing the structure and the crew).

The graser torp has "a few hundred gravities’ acceleration" [MoH] - so it might be able to match, or even slightly exceed, the emergency accel of a spider ship. But the torp is designed to keep that up, rather than use it for just a brief emergency.

Thanks Jonathan. So I am correct that the performance of the LD and the g-torp is way too uncannily close to each other. It appears that the LD has to be careful not to be spooked at the moment of launch and execute its emergency acceleration at the exact same time on the exact same bearing. The LD can shoot itself in the face. Reminds me of my mom not wanting me to have a Daisy BB gun when I was a kid, fearing I'd put my eyes out.

BTW, we know that wedges interfere with each other. And we know that missiles swim out and away from the ship before they light off. I was hoping the g-torp's drives can be activated inside the stealth field of an LD before launch. If not, a simultaneous activation of all of the spider-drives in an alpha launch might be, very well should be, detected.

Beware double post

penny wrote:Thanks Jonathan. So I am correct that the performance of the LD and the g-torp is way too uncannily close to each other. It appears that the LD has to be careful not to be spooked at the moment of launch and execute its emergency acceleration at the exact same time on the exact same bearing. The LD can shoot itself in the face. Reminds me of my mom not wanting me to have a Daisy BB gun when I was a kid, fearing I'd put my eyes out.

Reminds me of Tom Attridge's F11F Tiger -- which in 1956 became the first plane to shoot itself down. (Lesson learned, in a supersonic dive a plane can overtake its own bullets -- and pulling up and letting them catch you is something best avoided)

penny wrote:Now, I admit to baggage bleed from Star Trek whereby the warships are normally kept below a certain warp factor because the higher warp factors damage local spacetime..

That lasted about two episodes before the rule was dumped because it was such a silly notion that constrained writers.

"Force of Nature" (TNG 7th Season), near the bottom of the list of episodes, alongside "Threshold" (Voyager 2nd) [the one where they break the other Warp barrier...], and "Move Along Home" (DS9 1st).