Non-CLAC hyper-help for LAC's

Effective range of laser warhead is something like 20 thousands of kilometers? So what about placing few freighters full of Mistletoe drones and if arrays will detect any kind of unusual hyper jump we will send freighter will escort, it will lauch some drones. When drone will find its target it would send location of it to Central, if it will be around effective range of warhead it would activate that warhead, if not it would tail it until it will be inside effective range.

n7axw wrote:I still submit that the only real answer to this is to defeat the stealth. But lacking that, JeffEngel's response about trying brute force solutions is valid which is what this conversation has been about.

So far, it seems to me, that what has happened to all our proposed solutions is that they are defeated in one way or another by the immensity of space.

Maybe the answer is to think in terms of limiting the amount of space we need to defend. Could high value targets be en-globed with drones set up with sensors programed to survey an all directions pattern and given crossing patterns so that what you would have would be your target at the center of what might be envisioned as a wire cage so that when its mesh is crossed, a drone picks up the heat pattern from its exhaust. How far out would you have to have your cage to give the defenses of your target time to respond? Or to reframe the question, how big would the cage have to be?

For what it's worth which may not be much,

Don

You still have problems with the immensity of space, though a moving pattern of detectors does help a little.

How big a volume do you need to enclose? A very good question. Let's suppose you only enclose a radius of 10 light-minutes. If the enemy is traveling at 0.5c, it will reach its target in 20 minutes. Let us further suppose that you want a minimum of 10 minutes warning of an incoming stealth ship. I can't imagine that you would want less than that. That means that you have to detect the enemy while it is more than 5 light-minutes from the target, i.e. less than 5 light-minutes from the englobing sphere.

Let us suppose that the exhaust beam has a dispersion of 1 degree, and starts at 5 meters radius. 5 light-minutes away, the beam has a radius of 1,570,000 km. Each drone is moving, and essentially sweeping out a strip 3,000,000 km wide. Let us suppose that the drones are also traveling at 0.5 c. So in the 10 minutes that the enemy takes to get that far in, each drone sweeps out 2.8e13 square kilometers of the sphere. In actuality, we should divide that by 2, because the enemy isn't at 5 light-minutes from the sphere all that time; while it is closer to the sphere, the beam cuts a smaller intersection with the sphere. So, each drone can survey 1.4e13 square kilometers of the sphere in the 10 minutes we have to detect the enemy.

How many drones does it take to detect the enemy, assuming we can manage to lay out a perfect search path with no overlap between drone search strips (which is technically impossible)? The sphere 10 light-minutes in radius has a surface area of 4e17 square kilometers. So you need almost 29,000 drones, operating continuously, every day, at 0.5c.

10 minutes warning is enough to start emergency procedures, but not really enough to evacuate. It is probably not enough time to localize and destroy the target. 10 minutes is probably the minimum you can call useful warning.

If you want more than 10 minutes warning, you will need a larger sphere, with more drones. If you think the enemy might come in at a faster speed, like 0.8c, then you also need a larger sphere and more drones.

What about putting some ships in sheath at the most obvious of approach vectors, if arrays will pick something up, we announce alarm and when unidentified object is close to that ship it will attack it.

Draken wrote:What about putting some ships in sheath at the most obvious of approach vectors, if arrays will pick something up, we announce alarm and when unidentified object is close to that ship it will attack it.

How is your defensive ship going to tell when the unidentified object is close enough to attack? The entire point of this thread has been the difficulty in even locating the enemy ship.

Draken wrote:Effective range of laser warhead is something like 20 thousands of kilometers? So what about placing few freighters full of Mistletoe drones and if arrays will detect any kind of unusual hyper jump we will send freighter will escort, it will lauch some drones. When drone will find its target it would send location of it to Central, if it will be around effective range of warhead it would activate that warhead, if not it would tail it until it will be inside effective range.

Unless there is some breakthrough in detecting a spider drive ship, the drone will have to use active scanners rather than passive. The enemy will know where every drone is and can maneuver away from it. The enemy would also be able to shoot a graser at a drone from a range of 400,000 km or more, long before the drone gets within range of its own laserhead.

SWM wrote:

n7axw wrote:I still submit that the only real answer to this is to defeat the stealth. But lacking that, JeffEngel's response about trying brute force solutions is valid which is what this conversation has been about.

So far, it seems to me, that what has happened to all our proposed solutions is that they are defeated in one way or another by the immensity of space.

Maybe the answer is to think in terms of limiting the amount of space we need to defend. Could high value targets be en-globed with drones set up with sensors programed to survey an all directions pattern and given crossing patterns so that what you would have would be your target at the center of what might be envisioned as a wire cage so that when its mesh is crossed, a drone picks up the heat pattern from its exhaust. How far out would you have to have your cage to give the defenses of your target time to respond? Or to reframe the question, how big would the cage have to be?

For what it's worth which may not be much,

Don

You still have problems with the immensity of space, though a moving pattern of detectors does help a little.

How big a volume do you need to enclose? A very good question. Let's suppose you only enclose a radius of 10 light-minutes. If the enemy is traveling at 0.5c, it will reach its target in 20 minutes. Let us further suppose that you want a minimum of 10 minutes warning of an incoming stealth ship. I can't imagine that you would want less than that. That means that you have to detect the enemy while it is more than 5 light-minutes from the target, i.e. less than 5 light-minutes from the englobing sphere.

Let us suppose that the exhaust beam has a dispersion of 1 degree, and starts at 5 meters radius. 5 light-minutes away, the beam has a radius of 1,570,000 km. Each drone is moving, and essentially sweeping out a strip 3,000,000 km wide. Let us suppose that the drones are also traveling at 0.5 c. So in the 10 minutes that the enemy takes to get that far in, each drone sweeps out 2.8e13 square kilometers of the sphere. In actuality, we should divide that by 2, because the enemy isn't at 5 light-minutes from the sphere all that time; while it is closer to the sphere, the beam cuts a smaller intersection with the sphere. So, each drone can survey 1.4e13 square kilometers of the sphere in the 10 minutes we have to detect the enemy.

How many drones does it take to detect the enemy, assuming we can manage to lay out a perfect search path with no overlap between drone search strips (which is technically impossible)? The sphere 10 light-minutes in radius has a surface area of 4e17 square kilometers. So you need almost 29,000 drones, operating continuously, every day, at 0.5c.

10 minutes warning is enough to start emergency procedures, but not really enough to evacuate. It is probably not enough time to localize and destroy the target. 10 minutes is probably the minimum you can call useful warning.

If you want more than 10 minutes warning, you will need a larger sphere, with more drones. If you think the enemy might come in at a faster speed, like 0.8c, then you also need a larger sphere and more drones.

Thanks for that very helpful post, SWM. 29,000 drones sounds like a lot. But it would probably be doable...although maintaining them could be a real poser.

The other thought I had was focused a bit more on the stealth.
I wonder about a sonar system based on ultra low frequency. The concept here would be that the stealth would be designed to defeat high tech methods but might be vulerable to something a bit more primitive. Manticore could experiment with its own stealth.

Don

n7axw wrote:Thanks for that very helpful post, SWM. 29,000 drones sounds like a lot. But it would probably be doable...although maintaining them could be a real poser.

The other thought I had was focused a bit more on the stealth.
I wonder about a sonar system based on ultra low frequency. The concept here would be that the stealth would be designed to defeat high tech methods but might be vulerable to something a bit more primitive. Manticore could experiment with its own stealth.

Don

In space, no one can hear you scream (no matter how high or low you pitch it).

Vince wrote:

n7axw wrote:Thanks for that very helpful post, SWM. 29,000 drones sounds like a lot. But it would probably be doable...although maintaining them could be a real poser.

The other thought I had was focused a bit more on the stealth.
I wonder about a sonar system based on ultra low frequency. The concept here would be that the stealth would be designed to defeat high tech methods but might be vulerable to something a bit more primitive. Manticore could experiment with its own stealth.

Don

In space, no one can hear you scream (no matter how high or low you pitch it).

That's a fair comment. Sonar really wasn't the word I needed. Maybe radar works better...

Don

Of course, my analysis assumed a 1 degree dispersion for the exhaust beam. We have no textev on how narrow the beam is, so this is all just handwaving.

The degree of dispersion would affect the number of drones linearly--that is, a 5 degree dispersion would reduce the number of necessary drones by a factor of 5. On the other hand, a 10 minute warning is pretty minimal. And we should allow for the fact that it is not possible to arrange the drone motion patterns to avoid overlap. And we probably want to allow for 0.8c approach velocities.

But it's enough to get a feel for the numbers.

n7axw wrote:The other thought I had was focused a bit more on the stealth.
I wonder about a sonar system based on ultra low frequency. The concept here would be that the stealth would be designed to defeat high tech methods but might be vulerable to something a bit more primitive. Manticore could experiment with its own stealth.

Don

Manticore already uses radar and lidar for active detection measures. Testing on their own stealth wouldn't be very useful since the Alignment stealth uses a different technology.

The Alignment tested their stealth, and weren't able to detect it any more than 1 light-second distance, and they supposedly knew what to look for. I don't remember whether that was tested using active or passive detectors; I assume active, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong.