Non-CLAC hyper-help for LAC's

Belial666 wrote: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)

Almost half right. The Jamie Candless is just a bit over half the tonnage of a Shrike. But it's definitely not hyper capable.

Ashes of Victory: Chapter 20 wrote:Not with all the interesting things dissolved in Grayson's oceans. So I decided to buy myself a runabout."
"A runabout?"
"Something to let me keep my hand in at the controls," Honor explained. "I laid out what I want over at Silverman's three months ago." Maxwell's eyebrows rose. Samuel Silverman & Sons was the oldest, most prestigious supplier of private space yachts in the Star Kingdom. HMS Queen Adrienne, the current, hyper-capable royal yacht, had come from Silverman's, and so had all three of her predecessors. Honor read his expression and laughed. "Oh, it's nothing quite that big, Mr. Maxwell! Not hyper-capable. I've got Tankersley for that, and it's not likely I'd have the time to go haring off into hyper on my own, anyway. No, this is a little sublight ship, only about eleven thousand tons. Sort of a cross between a pinnace and a LAC, but without the guns and with a lot more creature comforts

The smallest thing that can mount a hypergenerator is a 35+kton dispatch boat. (you could probably shave a couple ktons off if you completely deleted life support and crew quarters; but not enough to get it down to even Shrike sized)

Belial666 wrote: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)

She's got more than one spaceship. The RMS Paul Tankersley is a ~50,000 ton hyper yacht. The ship you're talking about is her 11,000 ton runabout, the Jamie Candless.

Given the differences between LAC and frigate tonnage, the smallest hyper generator plus the extra ancillaries necessary to run it adds around 30,000 tons.

The smallest hyper-capable spider drive ships already exist - it's the Ghost-class, an unarmed frigate sized ship.

Well, consider that it's a drone. It doesn't have to survive the process of generating the signal. That would change the economics somewhat, but might still be fine.

Belial666 wrote: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.

It would take an entire fleet to drop 500 graser-torpedo sized drones. Still, if it were done, the rest of the suggestion is valid.

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)

No, you are mistaken. A dispatch courier is the smallest object that can mount a hyper generator. David has stated this over and over. Honor's runabout is smaller than a LAC but it doesn't have a hyper generator. Honor's yacht does have a hyper generator, and it is larger than a courier.

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

I still don't think a drone (or even a ship) can generate that kind of signal with its own power. Even stealthy transits are several orders of magnitude more powerful than any wedge signal a full-sized ship can generate.

Assume a graser torpedo masses 50,000 tons. Assume a normal 8mt bulk carrier has 7mt of cargo capacity. How many graser torpedos can this bulk carrier haul? So you only get 140 graser torpedos per trip....

kzt wrote:Assume a graser torpedo masses 50,000 tons. Assume a normal 8mt bulk carrier has 7mt of cargo capacity. How many graser torpedos can this bulk carrier haul? So you only get 140 graser torpedos per trip....

Why 50 kilotons for the grazer torpedo? It is only barely large enough to carry a cruiser-sized grazer capable of firing once. So it can't be larger than a fraction of a cruiser's hammerhead. The Shrike is 20 kilotons and carries a battlecruiser grazer plus missiles plus a dozen PDLCs plus crew plus compensator plus sidewalls. I was thinking more along the line of 10 kilotons as an upper limit.


If it were any larger to house a single cruiser-sized grazer, it would be more effective to have 5 kilotons of single-sprint-drive heavy capital missiles (25 of them per torpedo) with the smallest possible spider drive wrapped around them. They'd be more damaging than the grazer and have way more flexible firing options.

Belial666 wrote:

kzt wrote:Assume a graser torpedo masses 50,000 tons. Assume a normal 8mt bulk carrier has 7mt of cargo capacity. How many graser torpedos can this bulk carrier haul? So you only get 140 graser torpedos per trip....

Why 50 kilotons for the grazer torpedo? It is only barely large enough to carry a cruiser-sized grazer capable of firing once. So it can't be larger than a fraction of a cruiser's hammerhead. The Shrike is 20 kilotons and carries a battlecruiser grazer plus missiles plus a dozen PDLCs plus crew plus compensator plus sidewalls. I was thinking more along the line of 10 kilotons as an upper limit.


If it were any larger to house a single cruiser-sized grazer, it would be more effective to have 5 kilotons of single-sprint-drive heavy capital missiles (25 of them per torpedo) with the smallest possible spider drive wrapped around them. They'd be more damaging than the grazer and have way more flexible firing options.

+1

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

Belial666 wrote:

kzt wrote:Assume a graser torpedo masses 50,000 tons. Assume a normal 8mt bulk carrier has 7mt of cargo capacity. How many graser torpedos can this bulk carrier haul? So you only get 140 graser torpedos per trip....

Why 50 kilotons for the grazer torpedo? It is only barely large enough to carry a cruiser-sized grazer capable of firing once. So it can't be larger than a fraction of a cruiser's hammerhead. The Shrike is 20 kilotons and carries a battlecruiser grazer plus missiles plus a dozen PDLCs plus crew plus compensator plus sidewalls. I was thinking more along the line of 10 kilotons as an upper limit.


If it were any larger to house a single cruiser-sized grazer, it would be more effective to have 5 kilotons of single-sprint-drive heavy capital missiles (25 of them per torpedo) with the smallest possible spider drive wrapped around them. They'd be more damaging than the grazer and have way more flexible firing options.

Plus the Shrike also carries all the support equipment for the graser to fire multiple shots and still be capable of firing many more shots (the limit on the number of times the Shrike's graser can fire is energy storage and power to the graser).

Vince wrote:Plus the Shrike also carries all the support equipment for the graser to fire multiple shots and still be capable of firing many more shots (the limit on the number of times the Shrike's graser can fire is energy storage and power to the graser).

Shrike's are essentially magic.

The reactor has impossible energy density. And I'm not kidding about impossible. Literally, in order for a shrike's reactor to generate more power then 14 cubic meters of hydrogen fuel for a fusion reactor, more 100 pure plutonium 239 then the entire 20,000 some ton mass of a shrike needs to inside the shrike's fission reactor to produce the amount of energy that matches the text. (Assuming I haven't blow the math... )

So logically the Graser torp should be smaller, but I suspect based on the text that David has it as 30-50,000 tones.