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"I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion"Count Casimir wrote:Why do I get the feeling that it's going to come back to bite him in the ass, whatever he says?
It doesn't matter, mining a jump point with enough ball bearings to have a reasonable chance of a collision would take impractical amounts of material. Putting a single 10 gram ball bearing in every 10 km cube in a 1 AU^3 volume would take 33 quadrillion metric tons of ball bearings. Even if you have the material, there's much more effective things you can do with it.Luge wrote:If a ship doesn't have shields, the consequences of even a ball-bearing sized piece of scrap metal in orbit hitting it are huge, assuming either the ship or the scrap is travelling at 10% the speed of light (i.e. 10% of 299792 km/s). Even an item hitting your ship at 1% of the speed of light (2997 km/s) would be... messy.
The original proposal was about exiting hyperspace right on top of/actually around a piece of debris or a mine, which point defence systems wouldn't have time to detect and radar/lidar would have time to detect anyway.Mjolnir wrote:It doesn't matter, mining a jump point with enough ball bearings to have a reasonable chance of a collision would take impractical amounts of material. Putting a single 10 gram ball bearing in every 10 km cube in a 1 AU^3 volume would take 33 quadrillion metric tons of ball bearings. Even if you have the material, there's much more effective things you can do with it.
And that's assuming they don't have a way of detecting such objects and eliminating them. Like radar/lidar and a handful of point defense lasers/particle beams/plasma weapons. Given the levels of performance we're getting out of radar and lidar today, in a dirty planetary environment, I'd expect Outsider Terran ships to have no trouble tracking a few billion ball bearings and picking off the hazardous ones with point defense weapons.
He might be best off using some ancient military-ish quote, preferably not in English.Trantor wrote:Because of the living storage unit next to him?Count Casimir wrote:When he said "I could say anything 'cause they can't understand me" (paraphrased) I got the weirdest chill...
Why do I get the feeling that it's going to come back to bite him in the ass, whatever he says?
Yep, you'd basically have to created a metallic Oort Cloud within your entire jump zone to make it permanently defensible from all directions. However, Pluto's orbital period is roughly 248 years, and that orbit is strewn with other Plutonian objects plus many smaller ones, it's basically a second asteroid belt with some really big, really round examples. Assuming that the Sol jump point is just outside this frozen belt, you could hypothetically saturate at least come of the incoming jump corridors with enough material to make jumping in a threat for a very long time. Though I would guess, with the length of time that the Loroi and Umiak have been at each other's throats, such a measure would prove less viable than for humankind (they would probably see it as something of a very expensive smoke screen, especially the Umiak).captainsmirk wrote:The problem is that those ball bearings have no method of station keeping and thus will orbit the star just like any other object and will move out of position, the jump zones are fixed in relation to other stars and do not move.
You would have to continuously replace your "minefield" as the previous one orbits out of position. Arioch has mentioned this before in relation to similar suggestions.
Just build a quintillion or so flak mines per jump zone consisting of an ion drive and burst charge. When the enemy comes in (through another route or just bulldozing through with point defenses) and sees your economy almost totally devoted to building ball-bearing bombs, they might just decide you're too crazy to conquer.captainsmirk wrote:The problem is that those ball bearings have no method of station keeping and thus will orbit the star just like any other object and will move out of position, the jump zones are fixed in relation to other stars and do not move.
Pluto's a lot further out than the jump zones in Sol system...they're at about the distance of Jupiter. Defenses without any maneuvering capabilities would drift out of the zone in a year or so. Stationkeeping isn't at all hard, though.Cy83r wrote:However, Pluto's orbital period is roughly 248 years, and that orbit is strewn with other Plutonian objects plus many smaller ones, it's basically a second asteroid belt with some really big, really round examples. Assuming that the Sol jump point is just outside this frozen belt, you could hypothetically saturate at least come of the incoming jump corridors with enough material to make jumping in a threat for a very long time.
IIRC, that's a whole system-wide hemisphere of potential inbound vectors.flarecde wrote:Mining your jump zone would prevent you from jumping in too. I imagine would wouldn't need to do the whole orbital lane though, just the wedge where possible arrivals are likely to occur, no?
Spending 10 minutes to determine your location is nothing, it'll take nearly as long for someone an AU away to notice your arrival, and days to weeks to get across the system wherever you ended up. A bigger problem would be your fleet/task group getting spread across a volume that might be tens of light-minutes across.Luge wrote:No warship wants to spend 10 minutes after each jump working out which side of the local sun it ended up in! To that end, I can imagine that there are some "sweet spots" in each system that are easier to jump to. Silent listening posts could be set up near these locations to monitor hyperspace traffic.
Dick jokes.manticore7 wrote:hm, I guess Laughing out loud is not uniqe to Beryl. I've always wonder what kind of humor the Loroi like,
The men and women of the Bellarmine had journeyed more than an hundred light year and were so close to making peaceful contact.. The loss was sudden and terrible, and for their families, the grief is heavy. Our nation shares in your sorrow and in your pride. And today we remember not only one moment of tragedy, but seventy-nine lives of great purpose and achievement.
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