namelessfly wrote:I still say that the battle ofCerbus was predicated onthepeeps sufferringfrom a severe cranial-rectal insertion. How else can you not see a fusion rocket accelerating a one million ton BC at over 100,000 gees.
The Peeps could not see a rocket exhaust that was 200 times brighter than a planet.
It was less they couldn't see it coming as they weren't paying attention to what they were seeing. Honor explains it thus in EoH:
With no impeller signature, a ship might as well be invisible at any sort of extended range.
On the scale to which God built star systems, active sensors had a limited range at the best of times. Officially, most navies normally monitored a million-kilometer bubble with their search radar. In fact, most sensor techs—even in the RMN—didn't bother with active sensors at all at ranges much above a half-million kilometers. There was no real point, since getting a useful return off anything much smaller than a superdreadnought was exceedingly difficult at greater ranges. Worse, virtually all warships incorporated stealth materials into their basic hull matrices. That made them far smaller radar targets than, say, some big, fat merchantman when their drives were down . . . and when their drives were up, there was no reason to look for them on active, anyway, since passive sensors—and especially gravitic sensors—had enormously greater range and resolution. Of course, they couldn't pick up anything that wasn't emitting, but that was seldom a problem. After all, any ship coming in under power would have to have its wedge up, wouldn't it?
But Honor's ships didn't have impeller signatures.
And Mike offers her two-cents on the sensor question in AoV:
"The next weakness was that her plan counted on the Peeps' sensor techs to be effectively blind. By using thrusters, she avoided the sensors which most tactical officers tend to rely upon—the Peeps' gravitics—but she was mother naked to everything else in their sensor suites. In fairness—" Henke's tone turned judicious, her expression serious, though her eyes twinkled at Honor "—it was reasonable enough to at least hope the Peeps, who don't usually maintain as close a sensor watch as we do, wouldn't think to look for her in the first place, but if they had looked, they would have found her.
"In line with the second weakness," the captain continued, "was the fact that even though a reaction thruster approach allowed her to avoid the enemy's gravitics, the plume of ejecta it produced must have been quite spectacular . . . and energetic, and Peep stealth fields, which were what Her Grace had to work with herself, you will recall, aren't as good as ours. Again, Her Grace had taken the precaution of placing herself with the local star at her back. Had she not possessed 'inside information' on Peep movement patterns at Cerberus, she would have been unable to do that, of course. In this case, as she mentioned, she knew her enemy's probable approach vector well in advance, which let her give herself the advantage of attacking 'out of the sun,' as it were. If the enemy had failed to appear where she anticipated him, the entire maneuver would have been out of the question, and I'm certain she had a more, ah, conventional fallback plan for that situation. As it was, however, Cerberus-A's emissions were sufficiently powerful to greatly reduce the effectiveness of any sensor looking directly at it, and by the time Her Grace's vector had moved her clear of the star, she'd shut down her thrusters and other active emissions. Nonetheless, the circumstances only made it difficult for the Peeps to have picked up her approach; they didn't make it impossible, and an alert sensor crew could have given the enemy warning in plenty of time.
Sorry for the giant blocks of quotes but I think both were needed to adequately answer your question. As Honor says, "Surprise is usually what happens when someone misinterprets something he's seen all along."
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