How do spider drive SD(P)'s fight?

Louis R wrote:It wouldn't surprise me at all if the response of an LD to being shot at would be to raise its wedge and side walls

There's no reason to assume that ships this big aren't big enough to be dual drive, particularly if the conclusion that Warshawski sails are essential to safe navigation in hyper is correct. While a sail-only node probably would be smaller than a standard alpha node, the difference may not be great, and building in the configuration mechanism anyway is a good idea. For that matter, the Sharks could well have alpha nodes - they can clearly move independently in hyper - which suggests the possibility that the Ghosts _are_ too small to have the space for them, since it seems that they can't.

We aren't assuming that the Detweilers aren't dual drive--we know that they aren't. David has said that the tri-lateral shape required by the spider drive ships is incompatible with the tapered cylindrical shape required by an impeller wedge.

However, Warshawski sails do not require the cylindrical shape. It is entirely possible for a spider ship to have alpha nodes and generate Warshawski sails. Since Warshawski sails are required for control entering a wormhole, and David has said that spider ships can enter wormholes, we assume that spider ships do in fact have Warshawski sails (though there is the possibility that the Alignment has discovered some alternative method of control while entering a wormhole).

But we know that Detweilers cannot have both a spider drive and impeller drive.

JeffEngel wrote:So - they almost can't be built to have wedges, but without wedges, it's almost impossible to suppose they can have sails, and it's almost impossible to suppose they don't have sails. Something's got to give.

You can have Warshawski sails without having impeller wedges. Warshawski sails do not require the tapered cylindrical shape that impeller wedges do.

my reading of the description was that the hull is still a spindle, but with a roughly triangular cross section rather than the standard flattened oval - if it were me, i'd use Poul Anderson's Three-Cornered Wheel, a Reuleaux triangle, for more efficient deck layout.

it would be entirely possible to maintain the Warshawski geometry in this hull form, although you might have to get a little finicky about the position of the vertices wrt the plane of the [putative] wedge. i can't see any of the spider drive, impeller or grav plates actually giving a damn about the orientation of the hull. it's the human eye that gets offended by a triangle rotated 28.67 degrees to the right, not physics.

JeffEngel wrote:

Louis R wrote:It wouldn't surprise me at all if the response of an LD to being shot at would be to raise its wedge and side walls

There's no reason to assume that ships this big aren't big enough to be dual drive, particularly if the conclusion that Warshawski sails are essential to safe navigation in hyper is correct. While a sail-only node probably would be smaller than a standard alpha node, the difference may not be great, and building in the configuration mechanism anyway is a good idea. For that matter, the Sharks could well have alpha nodes - they can clearly move independently in hyper - which suggests the possibility that the Ghosts _are_ too small to have the space for them, since it seems that they can't.

On the one hand, if they are to be independently capable of hyperspace travel, the LD's have to be able to operate the spider drive in hyper at a minimum, and while you could theoretically deploy them most places without sails enabling you to use grav waves and wormholes (they did it before Warshawski, after all), it'd be awfully clunky, even with streak drives. (And someone has posted some recollection of them stated as being able to transit wormholes. It'd be potentially terribly hard to deploy out of Darius otherwise.)

On the other, sails are generated as a modification of an impeller wedge, and the spider drive doesn't suggest some modification of its wall-grabbing tractor beams as a way to produce a sail or a sail-equivalent.

Impeller drive ships (and LAC's, pinnaces and missiles) are built as long cylinders for the sake of the best use of the impeller drive. Spider drive ships are trilateral, like smooshed caltrops. And the armoring scheme described does not suggest at all that they've got a wedge they can can turn on in case things get bad.

So - they almost can't be built to have wedges, but without wedges, it's almost impossible to suppose they can have sails, and it's almost impossible to suppose they don't have sails. Something's got to give.

the last i checked, the taper was dictated by the requirements of the alpha nodes, and the wide variation in the angle of the taper suggests that it's there as much for simplicity of construction as it is for drive physics. in fact, if you look at the published drawing of the Agamemnon, you'll notice that the minimum hull section is well forward of the aft ring, which actually sits in a bit of a trench. if that drawing is wrong, i'm afraid i missed the memo

SWM wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:So - they almost can't be built to have wedges, but without wedges, it's almost impossible to suppose they can have sails, and it's almost impossible to suppose they don't have sails. Something's got to give.

You can have Warshawski sails without having impeller wedges. Warshawski sails do not require the tapered cylindrical shape that impeller wedges do.

Tried to read some of the LennyDet threads, but they seemed to be variations on a theme, so let me take my previous question in a slightly different direction.

I don't think that the 600 year plan PLUS the time to begin design and laying down the LennyDets anticipated what the GRAM project(s) under Admiral Adcock's watch [including Hemphill's genius] have accomplished in the last few years.

Against stealthy ships armed with graser missiles that have a stand-off range of 500K KM, any standard set of ships would have been TOAST, but once discovered, a slow moving Lenny Det SD that didn't anticipate extended range DDM's and full range FTL drones linking to the missiles is likely to be toast, butter side down even against a single Sag-C or Roland squadron. Tactically I think that limits the LDs to "outside the hyper limit sneak attacks like Oyster Bay, sufficient to bring down the buffalo, but not a pack of wolves that were originally supposed to take down the buffalo and destroy each other first, not band together to hunt the hunters.

I agree with Jonathan that Jeff might be onto something.

HTM

Jonathan_S wrote:below.

JeffEngel wrote:
The MAN may not have all the advantages the GA has when it comes to spider drive detection. They do certainly have going the fact that they built it, know how it works, and have been in a position to consider how to look for it and try for a lot longer. On the other hand, it works by an interaction with the alpha wall. FTL communications work by an interaction with the alpha wall. The GA has been making leaps and bounds listening for and generating twangs on the alpha wall with increasing speed and delicacy for the last couple decades. I wonder if that may not give them an avenue on spider drive detection the MAN did not count on.

Jonathan replied:
You might be on to something. Certainly there's been plenty of speculation that the ability to transmit highly modulated ripples along the alpha wall, and detect faint versions of same (inherent in high bandwidth FTL comms) might translate into some kind of active-sonar like detection system.

Speculation that while the spider leg is "grabbing" the alpha wall that it might do something that could cause those comm ripples to distort or reflect.
[snip - htm

ISTR we have hints from DW that Hamish might be overly
optimistic here.
Someday it will get into a novel, and then we'll see.

HTM

n7axw wrote:
[snip - htm]

Then there is Hamish's after action report to Elizabeth in which he states that he believes they have identified the hyper footprint of the attackers, that they would be able to flood the area with Ghost rider and that it should be sufficient to interdict intruders and that he felt confident within reason that the Yawata Strike couldn't be repeated.

[snip]

Don

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:ISTR we have hints from DW that Hamish might be overly
optimistic here.
Someday it will get into a novel, and then we'll see.

HTM

n7axw wrote:
[snip - htm]

Then there is Hamish's after action report to Elizabeth in which he states that he believes they have identified the hyper footprint of the attackers, that they would be able to flood the area with Ghost rider and that it should be sufficient to interdict intruders and that he felt confident within reason that the Yawata Strike couldn't be repeated.

[snip]

Don

If he's assuming (reasonably) that they moved away from the point of emergence under thrusters or sufficiently low-power-to-be-hidden impeller wedges, he's appropriately optimistic. If he had to factor in gravitically invisible drives combined with a smart chameleon hull coating - well, then it's going to be harder than he counted on.

SWM wrote:

Louis R wrote:It wouldn't surprise me at all if the response of an LD to being shot at would be to raise its wedge and side walls

There's no reason to assume that ships this big aren't big enough to be dual drive, particularly if the conclusion that Warshawski sails are essential to safe navigation in hyper is correct. While a sail-only node probably would be smaller than a standard alpha node, the difference may not be great, and building in the configuration mechanism anyway is a good idea. For that matter, the Sharks could well have alpha nodes - they can clearly move independently in hyper - which suggests the possibility that the Ghosts _are_ too small to have the space for them, since it seems that they can't.

We aren't assuming that the Detweilers aren't dual drive--we know that they aren't. David has said that the tri-lateral shape required by the spider drive ships is incompatible with the tapered cylindrical shape required by an impeller wedge.

However, Warshawski sails do not require the cylindrical shape. It is entirely possible for a spider ship to have alpha nodes and generate Warshawski sails. Since Warshawski sails are required for control entering a wormhole, and David has said that spider ships can enter wormholes, we assume that spider ships do in fact have Warshawski sails (though there is the possibility that the Alignment has discovered some alternative method of control while entering a wormhole).

But we know that Detweilers cannot have both a spider drive and impeller drive.

Thanks. Hmmm. Warshawski sails can be put up in normal space; you do that just before going through a wormhole. They're also used much as wedges are in (rare) grav wave battles as invulnerable plates.

Sooo... could spider drive ships be counting on using Warshawski sails in normal space as part of their defenses? It's odd that they wouldn't have an armor scheme to take advantage of that - and I'm curious where the sails appear relative to the ship - but it sounds like something they could possibly have available to account for a readiness to use them against other capital ships.

Weird Harold wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:But do you think the stealth is a nice extra for the LD's - enjoy it while you can, with Oyster Bay just making the most of a new technology before anyone can counter it - with plans for them that do not revolve around it once it does get countered, or is the entire class something that the MAN expects to retire in a few years once the counter is available?

I dont expect the Lenny Dets to be retired as soon as their stealth advantage is whittled away any more than the Shrike LAC was retired when the RHN developed a counter for them.

I do expect the Lenny Dets to be able to stand toe-to-toe with an equivalent number of conventional pod-layers for about as long as Manticore held a monopoly on the pod-layer concept.

For Manticore, that was four years, including about six months of very successful warfare and the rest of ceasefire. Counting Oyster Bay as one campaign, that parallel would mean spider drive ambushes have had their sole great success already. If it's counted by years, they've got about three and a half left.

Shrikes have aged more gracefully, but they plunged from being the unspeakable terror of the PRN to being rear-area security, a screening element, and a counter to enemy LAC's - and in the latter two roles at least, the more missile-oriented Ferrets and Katanas seem to do so much better. You just aren't going to get a Shrike graser strike in on enemies who know about Shrikes and aren't already grievously messed up.

That's quite all right for one LAC class among several, when the LAC's taken together represent more a major convenience for a fleet than the queen of battle. It's not going to be all right for a capital ship class, when the entire build of the thing is mandated by the system the chief advantage of which is the stealth and denies you so many advantages relative to a conventional wall of battle as the price.

One thing that may allow them to decline gracefully is that, as stealth attackers, they can do plenty of work without being one of many in a mutually defending wall of battle. If the spider drive detector - and spider drive tracking missiles to go with it - takes a lot of trouble or expense, then LD's can remain solo ninja assassins in space anywhere those systems and weapons aren't in use, or as a kind of assassination lotto ticket where you have greater or lesser odds of coming up against a spider-drive-countering opposition.

Alternatively - the Alignment may plan, or have planned, to use the LD's in their brief glory days a lot more decisively than the RMN managed to use LAC's and MDM's in Buttercup or the MAN itself managed with Oyster Bay. I suspect their chance of doing so is already shot by now, but if it's not, it may take something like (e.g.) outright Eridani Edict violations on Manticore, Sphinx, Grayson, Haven, Bolthole, and maybe New Potsdam after the Solarian League is definitely and irrevocably coming apart at the seams.