Originally posted by MADDog:
But remember that there is only a small amout of Delta-V you can generate at fractional C speeds to adjust trajectory before you miss my ships moving around in the far system. Add in the time delay of sensor readings and I could be millions of KM before your strike gets to where I was.
Navy installations on other bodies besides the main population center presents VERY easy targets for destruction. I could get really lazy and launch bodies from the Oort cloud into any target. Planetary bodies are the easiest targeting solution - you always know where they are going to be at a certain time, so just tug up some large (10 km?) size iceballs and set them up to slam into those pesky fleet bases...
Static defenses are death...remember the Maginot Line...(something the Germans didn't with their equal Atlantic Wall...)
-MADDog
I would not target ships in the far system, launch platforms, escorts, or otherwise, they would be impossible to hit with counter Fractional-C weaponry (and at that distance, might be nearly impossible to hit with conventional weaponry). Ships far outside the star system, if not moving around with Thrusters, would be quite difficult to detect; although it is strictly my personal belief that Thruster activity will show up to gravity detectors (densitometers, et al), fusion activity will definitely show to neutrino sensors. Even a very large fleet, though, thousands of warships, would not, on a cost-per basis, be able to fire sufficient conventional missiles to overcome local anti-missile missile and point-defense weapons. The Fractional-C weapons they would launch toward the target star system would have to be a long, long way off to begin with, giving the defenders plenty of time to detect and launch counter-fire. I really think any Factional-C weaponry duel would be ineffective against the counter Fractional-C weaponry fire I’ve already outlined.
As for launching bodies from the Oort Cloud, the sensor net in the Oort Cloud would pick that up and make that a site for targeting from a couple of hundred thousand nuclear warheads (some of them quite large, no need to avoid using planet-buster nukes out there in the Oort; and the local planetary defenses need not worry about starship dTonnage and volume constraints when deciding what sort of missiles to keep on hand to attack with). No detectable activity there would survive. This missile fire would begin, potentially, before the first landings on the first Oort bodies. Further, it would involve importing maneuver drives and power plants and installing them, generally an activity reserved for a shipyard. The cost of doing so would be so high that if the defenders were left to themselves with a similar amount of money (they will always have more time) they could have all the Kuiper Belt objects of whatever sizes they needed ready and waiting (with their own maneuver drives and power plants) to act as counter Oort Body objects; and the defenders would have more of them, too.
Even if landing with great stealth to avoid detection, construction without fusion digging (or nano) or radio transmission to aid communication coordination, is going to take a while.
Then, this crew now faces a new problem. As soon as it commences operations, it will be detected (Thrusters or fusion power plants going online). As soon as it is detected, it will face a gigantic volley of nuclear missiles, in echelon, possibly numbering in the millions; and among them would be a few key 1000+ mTon warheads mounted on very large missiles capable of slagging even the largest battleship regardless of its armor. Even a fleet of thousands of warships couldn't hope to ward it off. Any Fraction-C weaponry this Oort Base chose to launch would be subject to the same counter Fractional-C weaponry mentioned before. Even a hundred such Oort Bases would be hard pressed to launch a successful attack; and building that many in deep space would be hard to keep a secret, either from the defender's Oort-Net or from counter-intelligence ops running on other worlds. Depot/Corridor, for instance, is deep inside Imperial Space, trying to run this sort of op against it would be a task so difficult it would be bound to run into failure. The Vargr could certainly never muster the organization to mount such a lengthy task. Other Depots are in a similar position. Jewel/Spinward Marches would be far more vulnerable to such sneakiness, which is why I would have sensor drones and SDBs patrolling the Oort cloud to add to the effectiveness of the Oort-Net.
Yes, I’m aware of the Oort cloud’s potential volume of 33 cu ly (and that’s only for an Oort Cloud around a Sol-size system); but I wouldn’t be relying on any _individual_ vessel or base to provide a sensor contact, but rather the combined value of all the sensors involved (primarily neutrino sensors and densitometers, but conventional gravity detectors and infrared would do, too). I think whole fleets could drift around the outer Oort without going noticed, as long as they didn’t use their Thrusters of have their fusion power plants running. But as long as these things aren’t used, launching a Fractional-C attack against the target star system is going to be quite difficult (what will drive the weapons forward in space?). Against lightly defended systems, this would present so great a threat as to be overwhelming, but then again, against lightly defended systems, standard fleets are going to overwhelm them. But against a star system that a defender had been building up defenses on for _centuries_? The wealth spent across the centuries at a heavily defended site (a “cannot be lost” site like Depot/Corridor; which, I believe, has been there for five or six centuries at the least), is going to far outweigh the wealth any fleet is going to bring along with them (wealth equaling destructive capability in this sense).
Sincerely,
Chris O.
