950 replies to this topic

[Beazle]

Ya, um. $.02 here.

You can't put mines (or inactive missles, or what ever you want) on a jump point because of a few pretty simple reasons.

2 objects that try to be in the same place at the same time tend to have a bad day. So, unless you want to cut off all civilian and military transport into your system, placing any type of defense sizeable enough to be of use within the area of a jump point is a bad idea.

Jump points aren't really "points". Any location far enough away from the stars gravity well is valid. So, if you spend your entire industrial output of a planet building mines, or even static space station defenses, the enemy just jumps in a bit farther out and flies around. You just bankrupted a planet building mines, and he has to spend another day in his dropship before his troops kill you.

I aslo don't think you grasp the concept of pirate points. Nobody would use them to jump from one point in system to another point in the same system. (beats me if it's even possible or not, i'll take your word that it's not) However, their existance means that there is, in theory, another spot, inside the system, for each gravitational force in the system (including moons). Now, many of these would be useless because their size would be smaller than the margin of error of jump drives (making them near suicide to use), but this means there will still me a few more points to watch in addition to the 2 IMPOSSIBLY HUGE standard points. (seriously, they're that big) Worst of all, in addition to being moving points, (thus harder to cover with static defenses, considering how complicated the interplay of gravitational forces in a solar system are) these points lay within the same plane as the major orbing bodies, which would provide them some protection from detection.

As a side note, i understand the concept of torpedo mines, but i don't think you really do. You describe a torpedo going active when it detects a possible target (see more on this below), then closing in, doing an IFF check, and going active or back to passive after that.

Soo... How are you planning to maintain these mines in place? Every time one goes active (meaing every time a jumpship arrives in system) your going to have your massive minefield go active, (using energy to do so, solar sails would make them a bit easy to spot) burn fuel to close range enough to make a positive ID (got to be sure your not killing your own troops), and then more fuel and energy to go back to its stand by point (see previous point about deployment on top of jump points.).

As far as mines having a range of "several million kilometes EASILY" , well, i don't think you know much about astronomy.

Sure, in theory i can throw a rock that has a range of literally near infinite range in space.

But...

At the kind of ranges your talking about (several million KM) detection, even of something the size of a warship, is a pretty major deal. At those kind of ranges any sort of detection is pretty difficult. Picking out any sort of infrared of radio emissions from a man-made source against the background static of the entire universe is not a simple thing.

Space is big.

I know, you know that right? But you don't seem to grasp what it really means. Just scanning our own system (for objects that are very often much larger than a warship would be) has been a goal of astornomers on earth for decades, and isn't anywhere near complete. So, i highly doubt that you will be able to deploy any sort of torpedo-mine into space that will have the detection equipment needed to scan enough of the universe to have a reasonalbe chance of spotting a ship that doesn't want to be seen.

I'm not going to try to give a lecture on radiation (of all types, light, electromagnetic ect) over those kind of ranges. If you want to understand why it's pretty impossible, read a book. It's been too long since i went to college for me to quote numbers and i really don't care to google/copy/paste. Take my word for it, it take something significantly larger than anything man will ever think of building to be easily detected at several million km in space.

One of the big reasons why, is that they're most likely pointed at your sensors. Seriously, it seems simple, but in deep space there is nothing (or close enough to nothing to call it that) to reflect energy (of any type). So you have the fairly expediant method of "hiding" your energy emissions by placing the bulk of the ship in front of them (Pretty smart of the engineers to put the engines in the back eh?). This mean that, unless your enemy sends you a convenient radio signal to use, tracking his ship(s) will mostly be the work of optical scanners.

As far as them making "zero effort" to build a warship fleet after losing theirs in the wars.

I think your assuming that since they had no measurable success, that they put no effort into it. I'm not going to pretend to know much about manufacturing in deep space, but warships are fairly large, so i'm gonna guess that it would be a fairly large undertaking to build a dock capable of producing them.

How many times would you spend the resources building a dock, only to have it blown up by your enemies before completion before you stopped building them? It doesn't take a warship to take out a dock, they could do it with just aerospace fighters.

In the end though, I think the pointlessness of warships is summed up best by a quote that i'm too lazy to find right now. In one of the current books (in a side bar) they propose a "realistic" method of simulating warship combat in space. They propose that you print out your record sheets, and then proceed to feed them into a paper shredder. The side who's sheets get shredded last is the winner, but both sides die.

I really think your too caught up in your own rhetoric to listen to logic at this point though. Which means i just wasted a bunch of time typing all that.

[StealthSlicer]

Beazle, on 09 August 2012 - 05:38 AM, said:

Ya, um. $.02 here.

You can't put mines (or inactive missles, or what ever you want) on a jump point because of a few pretty simple reasons.

2 objects that try to be in the same place at the same time tend to have a bad day. So, unless you want to cut off all civilian and military transport into your system, placing any type of defense sizeable enough to be of use within the area of a jump point is a bad idea.

Jump points aren't really "points". Any location far enough away from the stars gravity well is valid. So, if you spend your entire industrial output of a planet building mines, or even static space station defenses, the enemy just jumps in a bit farther out and flies around. You just bankrupted a planet building mines, and he has to spend another day in his dropship before his troops kill you.

I aslo don't think you grasp the concept of pirate points. Nobody would use them to jump from one point in system to another point in the same system. (beats me if it's even possible or not, i'll take your word that it's not) However, their existance means that there is, in theory, another spot, inside the system, for each gravitational force in the system (including moons). Now, many of these would be useless because their size would be smaller than the margin of error of jump drives (making them near suicide to use), but this means there will still me a few more points to watch in addition to the 2 IMPOSSIBLY HUGE standard points. (seriously, they're that big) Worst of all, in addition to being moving points, (thus harder to cover with static defenses, considering how complicated the interplay of gravitational forces in a solar system are) these points lay within the same plane as the major orbing bodies, which would provide them some protection from detection.

As a side note, i understand the concept of torpedo mines, but i don't think you really do. You describe a torpedo going active when it detects a possible target (see more on this below), then closing in, doing an IFF check, and going active or back to passive after that.

Soo... How are you planning to maintain these mines in place? Every time one goes active (meaing every time a jumpship arrives in system) your going to have your massive minefield go active, (using energy to do so, solar sails would make them a bit easy to spot) burn fuel to close range enough to make a positive ID (got to be sure your not killing your own troops), and then more fuel and energy to go back to its stand by point (see previous point about deployment on top of jump points.).

As far as mines having a range of "several million kilometes EASILY" , well, i don't think you know much about astronomy.

Sure, in theory i can throw a rock that has a range of literally near infinite range in space.

But...

At the kind of ranges your talking about (several million KM) detection, even of something the size of a warship, is a pretty major deal. At those kind of ranges any sort of detection is pretty difficult. Picking out any sort of infrared of radio emissions from a man-made source against the background static of the entire universe is not a simple thing.

Space is big.

I know, you know that right? But you don't seem to grasp what it really means. Just scanning our own system (for objects that are very often much larger than a warship would be) has been a goal of astornomers on earth for decades, and isn't anywhere near complete. So, i highly doubt that you will be able to deploy any sort of torpedo-mine into space that will have the detection equipment needed to scan enough of the universe to have a reasonalbe chance of spotting a ship that doesn't want to be seen.

I'm not going to try to give a lecture on radiation (of all types, light, electromagnetic ect) over those kind of ranges. If you want to understand why it's pretty impossible, read a book. It's been too long since i went to college for me to quote numbers and i really don't care to google/copy/paste. Take my word for it, it take something significantly larger than anything man will ever think of building to be easily detected at several million km in space.

One of the big reasons why, is that they're most likely pointed at your sensors. Seriously, it seems simple, but in deep space there is nothing (or close enough to nothing to call it that) to reflect energy (of any type). So you have the fairly expediant method of "hiding" your energy emissions by placing the bulk of the ship in front of them (Pretty smart of the engineers to put the engines in the back eh?). This mean that, unless your enemy sends you a convenient radio signal to use, tracking his ship(s) will mostly be the work of optical scanners.

As far as them making "zero effort" to build a warship fleet after losing theirs in the wars.

I think your assuming that since they had no measurable success, that they put no effort into it. I'm not going to pretend to know much about manufacturing in deep space, but warships are fairly large, so i'm gonna guess that it would be a fairly large undertaking to build a dock capable of producing them.

How many times would you spend the resources building a dock, only to have it blown up by your enemies before completion before you stopped building them? It doesn't take a warship to take out a dock, they could do it with just aerospace fighters.

In the end though, I think the pointlessness of warships is summed up best by a quote that i'm too lazy to find right now. In one of the current books (in a side bar) they propose a "realistic" method of simulating warship combat in space. They propose that you print out your record sheets, and then proceed to feed them into a paper shredder. The side who's sheets get shredded last is the winner, but both sides die.

I really think your too caught up in your own rhetoric to listen to logic at this point though. Which means i just wasted a bunch of time typing all that.

Tl;dr .

[Melcyna]

Elessar, on 09 August 2012 - 05:22 AM, said:

Well, there is something that is not forbidden and that is capturing a jump ship via boarding. Even the largest jump ships only have a few batteries Lasers or PPCs, to fend off meteorites (after all they are not Jump-Warships, which are a fair target, but only will be able to produced again in a few years from now on)... also, they are a sitting duck, as reloading their jump drive takes days
(and drop ships they carry, due to the limited number of docking points, rather take part in the invasion of the planet, than stay with the jump ship)



You make one mistake:
You obviously equalize these jump points with fixed wormholes, like in ST DS9 (or with jump points in several 4X games, like Space Empire V or MoO 3).

But that´s not correct.
Basically a ship can jump everywhere outside of a certain distance from ist star, which is determined by its gravitation well.

If we say Zenith and Nadir Jump Point, that is a huge area, especially as you aren´t forced to, jump at a location dirctly above the star and directly at the minimum distance, but also can, for example, jump to a point 100.000 km further away.

Same goes for non standard jump points. The important determinant is here, just with Zenith and Nadir Jump points, the distance from the star, that means, you theoretically could jump everywhere, if you have the same minimum distance from the star that you need for jumps to zenith and nadir jump points.
BUT as we are talking about the orbital plane, the gravitational effects of the planet have to be taken into account. As they aren´t fixed within time and space, but each planet revolves with its own speed around the star, the gravitational effects create a constantly changing patterns of points where you can jump and points were you shouldnm´t jump, unless you want to risk damaging or even destroying your jump ship. This also makes it rather difficult to calculate non standard jump points, as you have to calculate the positions and gravitational effects of all major bodies within the systems (for the time of your arrival, as well as for the duration of your stay).

This also makes it rather impossible to "put a buoy at the non standard jump point/s" ... they always change ... at one time there might be a non standard jump point at location x, at other times there isn, instead there are some at locations w, y and z (and due to the size of space we don´t talk about a few jump points, but, due to the vastness of space, from hundreds of them).

Indeed they are an area or rather several areas really,... but that is perfectly fine, let's pretend for simplifications sake that we have a short flat cylinder (like a fat pizza) representing the areas in which they cannot jump in safely, with the cylinder radius representing the orbit of the outermost planet of the system, so the area at the top of the cylinder represents the boundary in which they can jump safely, and similarly the bottom of the cylinder is another such area, and the sides of the cylinder another area.

Seems like 2 massive areas right with 1 very long area around right?

That would be true indeed, but we have 1 massive advantage here... we know where they are heading, OUR PLANET.

Regardless of where they drop out within the areas above or below or even on the side of the cylinder, the shortest path from each of these sides (top, bottom, side) to our planet (which is a point somewhere inside the cylinder volume) will trace a POINT on the respective cylinder surface... each of these represent the CLOSEST possible point that someone can jump into the system, under standard jump point at least to reach the shortest distance possible from the target planet.

And THESE are exactly where we will focus the mines, because we have to assume that they would want to emerge at the shortest possible distance out of the jump point to our planet.

we can spread less mines further out of the point afterwards.

Now if they choose to drop as close as possible to the planet? BAM, they head face first into the range of the mines.

If they choose to emerge away from these points where we concentrate the mines, then they are basically emerging FURTHER AWAY from the shortest distance to our planet... in essence, BUYING US TIME... which means the mines have achieved it's purpose anyway ie: to buy time for our fleet to intercept them by forcing them to take less time efficient route. It doesn't matter then if the mines can't reach them from where we put them because where they emerge will take longer distance to reach our planet, the mines mission is achieved already... less explosive and less interesting perhaps than if they run right into the mine, but as long as the primary objective of delaying them is done... the job is accomplished.

As for non standard jump point, yep sure they changes as the orbiting celestial body move.. but the fact that we can calculate them as a Jump Point at all means they CAN BE CALCULATED, and since a star system the movement of all the bodies follows a pattern, we would know where they are or at least where they are LIKELY to be subject to deviation on the estimate that would have to be completed using real time measurement, and as the side with the local advantage, we would be the one who knows more intimately as well on what the local measurement that is necessary to calculate the non standard jump points will be at any point in time.

Elessar, on 09 August 2012 - 05:22 AM, said:

As for mines you also should take into account, that the jump ship itself is no danger...
it is the drop ships, but these, immediately upon arrival, undock from the jump ship and then accelerate towards the planet ...
considering the distances we´re talking about (in which the arrival points of jump ships might vary) the chance that a missile fired by a mine as you envision it, may hit the jumpship, but not the more important targets, their dropships.

Not quite... the answer to that is hinted by your own statement later

Elessar, on 09 August 2012 - 05:22 AM, said:

Yep, the accelerations in "Drophships and Jumpships" give figures from 0.5G to 3G, with the acceleration/deceleration affecting well being, travel time as well as the amount of fuel burned.
The shortest travel time from standard jump point to a point within the orbital plane for a G2-Star (like our sun) is 5 days (for 3G).

You see both the Jumpship and the dropship at the fastest can only accelerates as fast as safe human tolerance can possibly allow them to.

But an unmanned mine/missile does not have such limitation... they are only restricted down to the acceleration limit of the structure (which is almost certainly much more massive than human tolerance) and how much fuel and engine power you pack into it.

And furthermore from the 1st point above, we placed our mine at the closest distance to our planet from the boundary of the jump point area, ensuring that if they move outside the range of the mines or otherwise that they are certainly taking a long detour around the shortest path to our planet.

Elessar, on 09 August 2012 - 05:22 AM, said:

Actually all standard and non standard jump points are outside of the gravity well (as explained above)

Which incidentally makes sure that if they use standard jump point, that the defender will have plenty of time since the star's gravity well is MASSIVE, to be more accurate here the jump points are still within the gravity well really but just weak enough that it won't affect the jump drive.

A star can still exert a gravity force up to ENORMOUS range, so if we state outside gravity well as the point in which the gravity effect from the star essentially drops to negligible, ie: the Hill's sphere of the star then then we're talking about emerging LIGHTYEARS away from the system which obviously is not the case here so it's a bit erroneous to say it's outside the gravity well.

Beazle, on 09 August 2012 - 05:38 AM, said:

Ya, um. $.02 here.

You can't put mines (or inactive missles, or what ever you want) on a jump point because of a few pretty simple reasons.

2 objects that try to be in the same place at the same time tend to have a bad day. So, unless you want to cut off all civilian and military transport into your system, placing any type of defense sizeable enough to be of use within the area of a jump point is a bad idea.

Jump points aren't really "points". Any location far enough away from the stars gravity well is valid. So, if you spend your entire industrial output of a planet building mines, or even static space station defenses, the enemy just jumps in a bit farther out and flies around. You just bankrupted a planet building mines, and he has to spend another day in his dropship before his troops kill you.

I aslo don't think you grasp the concept of pirate points. Nobody would use them to jump from one point in system to another point in the same system. (beats me if it's even possible or not, i'll take your word that it's not) However, their existance means that there is, in theory, another spot, inside the system, for each gravitational force in the system (including moons). Now, many of these would be useless because their size would be smaller than the margin of error of jump drives (making them near suicide to use), but this means there will still me a few more points to watch in addition to the 2 IMPOSSIBLY HUGE standard points. (seriously, they're that big) Worst of all, in addition to being moving points, (thus harder to cover with static defenses, considering how complicated the interplay of gravitational forces in a solar system are) these points lay within the same plane as the major orbing bodies, which would provide them some protection from detection.

As a side note, i understand the concept of torpedo mines, but i don't think you really do. You describe a torpedo going active when it detects a possible target (see more on this below), then closing in, doing an IFF check, and going active or back to passive after that.

Soo... How are you planning to maintain these mines in place? Every time one goes active (meaing every time a jumpship arrives in system) your going to have your massive minefield go active, (using energy to do so, solar sails would make them a bit easy to spot) burn fuel to close range enough to make a positive ID (got to be sure your not killing your own troops), and then more fuel and energy to go back to its stand by point (see previous point about deployment on top of jump points.).

As far as mines having a range of "several million kilometes EASILY" , well, i don't think you know much about astronomy.

Sure, in theory i can throw a rock that has a range of literally near infinite range in space.

But...

At the kind of ranges your talking about (several million KM) detection, even of something the size of a warship, is a pretty major deal. At those kind of ranges any sort of detection is pretty difficult. Picking out any sort of infrared of radio emissions from a man-made source against the background static of the entire universe is not a simple thing.

Space is big.

I know, you know that right? But you don't seem to grasp what it really means. Just scanning our own system (for objects that are very often much larger than a warship would be) has been a goal of astornomers on earth for decades, and isn't anywhere near complete. So, i highly doubt that you will be able to deploy any sort of torpedo-mine into space that will have the detection equipment needed to scan enough of the universe to have a reasonalbe chance of spotting a ship that doesn't want to be seen.

I'm not going to try to give a lecture on radiation (of all types, light, electromagnetic ect) over those kind of ranges. If you want to understand why it's pretty impossible, read a book. It's been too long since i went to college for me to quote numbers and i really don't care to google/copy/paste. Take my word for it, it take something significantly larger than anything man will ever think of building to be easily detected at several million km in space.

One of the big reasons why, is that they're most likely pointed at your sensors. Seriously, it seems simple, but in deep space there is nothing (or close enough to nothing to call it that) to reflect energy (of any type). So you have the fairly expediant method of "hiding" your energy emissions by placing the bulk of the ship in front of them (Pretty smart of the engineers to put the engines in the back eh?). This mean that, unless your enemy sends you a convenient radio signal to use, tracking his ship(s) will mostly be the work of optical scanners.

As far as them making "zero effort" to build a warship fleet after losing theirs in the wars.

I think your assuming that since they had no measurable success, that they put no effort into it. I'm not going to pretend to know much about manufacturing in deep space, but warships are fairly large, so i'm gonna guess that it would be a fairly large undertaking to build a dock capable of producing them.

How many times would you spend the resources building a dock, only to have it blown up by your enemies before completion before you stopped building them? It doesn't take a warship to take out a dock, they could do it with just aerospace fighters.

In the end though, I think the pointlessness of warships is summed up best by a quote that i'm too lazy to find right now. In one of the current books (in a side bar) they propose a "realistic" method of simulating warship combat in space. They propose that you print out your record sheets, and then proceed to feed them into a paper shredder. The side who's sheets get shredded last is the winner, but both sides die.

I really think your too caught up in your own rhetoric to listen to logic at this point though. Which means i just wasted a bunch of time typing all that.

Half of it is basically sharing explanation with the previous comment so i won't reiterate them here, so let me just snipe the rest that i haven't commented yet...

on the subject of dock, if we assume that NO ONE is left with the capability of making another warship but they still have civilian ships and transport... what does that imply? yep... that they must have some sort of capacity to maintain or service them to an extent unless if they are slowly decaying the entire civilian vessel pool as well.

which means they have a dock, except it's for a civilian ship not a warship.

If we intend to arm them (essentially turning them into a Qship) then we use the same dock really since the dock obviously were designed for their dimension and maintenance.

Until the ship's dimension drastically outgrow it's original design, it's somewhat difficult to believe the ship can't be handled by the dock.

On the subject of detection, we've had difficulty indeed tracking objects within our system that are not emitting energy... which is the point, they WILL be emitting energy, artificial one at that... masking that is the equivalent of trying to hide your aircraft radar signature by pretending to be birds... nice try, except they kinda can see clearly that you are not moving like one.

Let's assume worst case scenario there then, aside of that we have 2 facts assisting us thanks to BT's own lore...

1. when the jumpship arrives they emit massive signature that's almost certainly going to be detected by the system's defender, i do not recall of any ship in their lore that managed to cover this, they tried to reduce it with small warships but hey there are no warships around left right?

2. the shortest path the dropship can possibly take from the jumpship (which we will detect and see) to our planet is rather obvious, if they intend to cruise the dropship to the planet without energy emission then they are essentially running on momentum alone...

aside of that being slow (they start from practically no speed after all when they arrive, so if they don't spend time to accelerate they are not exactly gonna be that fast), our own fleet that doesn't have to follow similar restriction to avoid detection naturally can accelerate to the maximum and achieve faster velocity plus we would know EXACTLY where the dropship is or at least along what axis can we expect to find the dropship if they run on momentum alone since we know the start point, and we know the end point.

Unless of course if they wanna be adventurous and catapult the dropship from the jumpship towards the target planet... which would be a brave attempt, but since they can't launch it with G force exceeding human tolerance, they still can't go that fast either.

Edited by Melcyna, 09 August 2012 - 08:04 AM.

[Congzilla]

My ridiculous Battletech fact is: FASA Corporation never went bankrupt and never went out of business, it still exists as an IP holding corporation. Also Microsoft never bought FASA Corporation, they bought Virtual World Entertainment Group (VWEG) in 1995 which owned FASA Interatcive Technologies and Spectrum HoloByte.

[Pht]

Melcyna, on 07 August 2012 - 03:00 PM, said:

Actually ... it does...

it's an illogical physical sense otherwise...

to see why there is a logical failure here, think about it

You're making the presumption that the tank armor is 3x the thickness... you do realize this? I'll have to go look and see if the tanks defy the one point internal structure supports only 2 points of armor rule, to see if they're really carrying "thicker" armor. Should be interesting.

Quote

Battletech armor system never made sense really... because an armor thick enough to withstand direct hit from the highest kinetic impact like say a gauss rifle for example would be COMPLETELY immune to machine gun rounds (technically they are autocannon rounds but for some reason they call it machine guns despite them having autocannon caliber).

It's basically the equivalent of saying that you can eventually penetrate a tank with an assault rifle if you fired enough rounds into the armor.

With the MG's is not the armor being shot through. it's the MG round finding a gap or a thin section; it's the "lucky shot" effect. They simply summed both into one rule.

Quote

In Battletech, essentially all armor works like ablative armor for some reason regardless of what hit them... be it kinetic projectile, or direct heat from laser.

... no. If it did, there would be no through-armor criticals, ever.

Quote

The probability of being hit IN THE REAL WORLD

Heh ... battletech and "the real world" ... never shall the twain meet.

You've left out the major factor - mechs can stop from top speed in a few strides; and can go back up to top speed in a few strides, and they can also twist, bend, squat, and otherwise get out of the way - tanks can't.

Quote

incidentally 1 inch of armor is LUDICROUSLY THIN, so thin that our armored jeep carry about as much as that, our tank carry about 10 times the thickness frontally if not more.

Yep, 1 inch is considered thin by our standards... but by BT standards, that's insanely thick. Most of the armor panels are a few mm to a few cm thick. Yes, BT armor is that awesome...

Quote

Which they then contradict themselves

There is no contradiction. Said simply doesn't exist... you either are logically contradicting yourself ... or you are not... and there is no such logical contradiction in that source.

Quote

in their techmanual by saying that they are not very efficient at converting electricity into useful work,

They are 75% efficient at converting the energy from electric to kinetic. That's roughly the same as internal combustion or human muscle... and yes, this is actually stated in the source.

Quote

(standard motor for example is nearly 90% efficient, high efficiency motor currently goes as high as 95% efficient)

If you're referring to internal combustion engines ... um, no. They would have to be getting better than 200 MPG. There is a TON of energy being wasted in ICE engines currently.

If you're referring to electric motors? Yeah, they're efficient at conversion. Their power to weight, ratio... I'm not sure on, but the bigger electric engines I've seen are obscenely heavy. It's their Achilles heel.

Edited by Pht, 09 August 2012 - 08:43 AM.

[Theodor Kling]

Quote

Step 2: ensure it's internals can survive long period of no maintenance
Step 3: give it a sensitive passive sensor and IFF transponder

Those are the poitns were I have serious doubts within BT

About that jump energy signature ( which is somewhere in ifnrared I think): If you youse a non ecliptical point this is hard to hide. but any ( probably short temr stable) jump point within the planetery plane is likeley to have any number of celestial bodies between you and the target planet, so detection becomes unlikeley.

But all technical and physical considerrations aside: Since space is so god damm huge, any effort of controllign it, by fleet, by stations, by mines... whatever, is likeley to be WAY more expensive then simply issuing more ground troops to the planet.

Furthermore: your "delay them" argument is not bad, but useless if the are undetected. A patient (and rather daring) enemy could jump in outside your detection range, and let the dropships travel in the planetary plane. This makes detection unlikely if doen correctly.
And although it takes time, a suprise attack is a suprise attack no mater how long prepartions took.
On the downside you would be fr away from the star andsoalr sails woudl be of no much use, so you would need to risk directly feeding the drive from the reactors.

Btw: the mere fact that the so called pirate points ae not in permanent use is strange as well. Again the computer systems problem: they can controll a fighting mechs reactors, FTL jumps, the life support of large space vessels ( not so easy after all) etc... but only in a few cases , wiht a good navigator at the keyboard, points of minimal gravitainional pull in a star system?
I mean seroiusly... I could do that in a few days on my computer. Using Mathematica those 30 linked differenatial equations are not that bad. For univsersity I actualy had to calculate the movenent of our solar system once. And that was on a back PC pool machine, with 256MB RAM.

[Elsydeon]

I had always thought that jump points were simply LaGrange points, where the gravity of a planetary body cancels out the star's gravity (we use them in real life for satellites since they require less stationkeeping them).

Armor on a Mech would have be incredibly dense to weigh 19.5t on a Steiner scout Mech and be only mm thick. Also, Ferro-Fibrous armor should not take up any internal spaces because the extra thickness would be on the outside, not the inside.

[Sidney]

Elsydeon, on 09 August 2012 - 09:53 AM, said:

I had always thought that jump points were simply LaGrange points, where the gravity of a planetary body cancels out the star's gravity (we use them in real life for satellites since they require less stationkeeping them).

Armor on a Mech would have be incredibly dense to weigh 19.5t on a Steiner scout Mech and be only mm thick. Also, Ferro-Fibrous armor should not take up any internal spaces because the extra thickness would be on the outside, not the inside.

FF armour criticals aren't really criticals on the inside. It's 'bulkier' and so mounting things are more difficult to mount. Any actual criticals to FF Armour is rerolled because it's just a representation of 'lost space'. That's why you can cram the FF armour anywhere you want on the sheet. You're not literally filling the legs with armour- just that overall you've lost some areas to mount items all over the 'mech so you 'lose' some criticals.

[Vanir]

Lol, BT level armor being a few mm thin.

I keep imagining it coming in giant duct-tape style rolls that they just paste on to the mech...

[SakuranoSenshi]

IIRC, the so-called jump points are indeed basically LaGrange points.

[Melcyna]

Theodor Kling, on 09 August 2012 - 09:11 AM, said:

Those are the poitns were I have serious doubts within BT

About that jump energy signature ( which is somewhere in ifnrared I think): If you youse a non ecliptical point this is hard to hide. but any ( probably short temr stable) jump point within the planetery plane is likeley to have any number of celestial bodies between you and the target planet, so detection becomes unlikeley.

But all technical and physical considerrations aside: Since space is so god damm huge, any effort of controllign it, by fleet, by stations, by mines... whatever, is likeley to be WAY more expensive then simply issuing more ground troops to the planet.

Furthermore: your "delay them" argument is not bad, but useless if the are undetected. A patient (and rather daring) enemy could jump in outside your detection range, and let the dropships travel in the planetary plane. This makes detection unlikely if doen correctly.
And although it takes time, a suprise attack is a suprise attack no mater how long prepartions took.
On the downside you would be fr away from the star andsoalr sails woudl be of no much use, so you would need to risk directly feeding the drive from the reactors.

Btw: the mere fact that the so called pirate points ae not in permanent use is strange as well. Again the computer systems problem: they can controll a fighting mechs reactors, FTL jumps, the life support of large space vessels ( not so easy after all) etc... but only in a few cases , wiht a good navigator at the keyboard, points of minimal gravitainional pull in a star system?
I mean seroiusly... I could do that in a few days on my computer. Using Mathematica those 30 linked differenatial equations are not that bad. For univsersity I actualy had to calculate the movenent of our solar system once. And that was on a back PC pool machine, with 256MB RAM.

That's true, but the probability of that basically goes hand in hand with... HOW likely is this non standard jump point to be utilized for that purpose.

As a defender, naturally any time spent within the star system should be used to find these jump points or calculate where they are likely to appear within the system essentially doing what any defender does in a war, ie: trying to get as much information of their backyard and local advantage they can get.

The second of course is that since these points naturally are similar Lagrangian or L points that elsydeon mentioned their area is far more focused and smaller in size. Combined with the fact that any area restricted to the orbit plane is already very small in comparison to the standard jump point area, the only question of course is how many of them can form within the system over the time spent holding it, unless there are various external celestial body entering the system the pattern should be entirely calculable and predictable just like L points.

Ironically, their own lore of explanation on their jump drive operation describes the emergence as one with 2 signatures upon arriving, the second being the infa red signature you already mentioned, the 1st being EM signature even stronger than the IR signature.. that are certain to be detected.

Now if we consider the economy cost...

we're down to several things:
1 how much does it cost to manufacture the associated assets required
2 how much does it cost to maintain them
3 how effective are they for the given cost associated with the 2 above
4 how does that compare with the cost of a larger army instead

Which goes to:
1. Each mine essentially are munitions cost, at worst case we can assume they are the cost of a capital missile in BT.
2. Depends on their design but effectively they are much cheaper here than any active force since they are expected to be dormant until needed and they have no crew especially or maintenance cost, though they will incur manufacturing cost if they need to be replaced.
3. NOW this will be highly dependent on how reliable (or how unreliable) their sensor suite and engines plus warhead technology are since that determines how many mines are needed per given area to cover.
4. This part depends entirely on how early we intend to stop them versus how cheap we want to spend in expenditure.

For the last 2 part we have 2 options essentially:
A. intercepting them as early as possible taking advantage of the jump ship's emergence signature (of which it's EM signature is massive)
B. simply wait in orbit of the planet

either of the two offers the lowest possible number of mines required though at the expense of less safety and fallback area should they fail.

we can also assume that:
A. any further signature emanating from the area of emergence signature is either the jumpship or the dropship accelerating itself
B. that in the absence of further signature the dropship will follow it's last known direction and still attempting to approach the planet.

in the absolute minimum expenditure cost, with the tiniest coverage range... we abandon the attempt to intercept them on emergence (which is wasteful since the signature is massive and present a strong opportunity but let's say we want to reduce it to absolute bare bone)
and deploy the assets absolutely no where but the planet's orbit and the surrounding area, regardless of what path they take they HAVE to come through towards the planet after all, plus even under silent running (ie: let's say the Dropship runs under no power and momentum alone when within detection range which will slow them down significantly and technically already achieves our objective) there is still at least one phase in which they have no choice but to engage their thrusters... ie: once they enter the gravity well of the planet itself.

If for some reason we couldn't detect them AT ALL till it get that close, we most certainly will detect them the moment they are forced to engage their thrusters to slow down and adjust their course on the final approach phase, the mines can be set in LEO or other orbit on the planet and simply wait until this happens... worst case scenario we will have a dropship wreck falling to the planet.

[Elessar]

Elsydeon, on 09 August 2012 - 09:53 AM, said:

I had always thought that jump points were simply LaGrange points, where the gravity of a planetary body cancels out the star's gravity (we use them in real life for satellites since they require less stationkeeping them).
...

Dropships&Jumpships doesn´t mention Lagrange points in their chapter about non standard jump points at all and the diagram there to illustrate non standard jump points has the jump point at the same distance from the star as the zenith and Nadir jump points, just at the ecliptic plane, near the current position of the planet.
Therefore I assume Lagrange points are only a subset of the non standard jump points.

Melcyna, on 09 August 2012 - 03:12 PM, said:

....

in the absolute minimum expenditure cost, with the tiniest coverage range... we abandon the attempt to intercept them on emergence (which is wasteful since the signature is massive and present a strong opportunity but let's say we want to reduce it to absolute bare bone)
and deploy the assets absolutely no where but the planet's orbit and the surrounding area, regardless of what path they take they HAVE to come through towards the planet after all, plus even under silent running (ie: let's say the Dropship runs under no power and momentum alone when within detection range which will slow them down significantly and technically already achieves our objective) there is still at least one phase in which they have no choice but to engage their thrusters... ie: once they enter the gravity well of the planet itself.

...

That´s exactly the thing that makes the most sense.
And the scenario you´l usually find in Aerotech ... it is, battles around the target planet (often, with the dropships trying to force combat drops of their mechs upon the planetary surface, while the defender is trying to prevent this)

Edited by Elessar, 09 August 2012 - 03:30 PM.

[Melcyna]

Pht, on 09 August 2012 - 08:42 AM, said:

You're making the presumption that the tank armor is 3x the thickness... you do realize this? I'll have to go look and see if the tanks defy the one point internal structure supports only 2 points of armor rule, to see if they're really carrying "thicker" armor. Should be interesting. With the MG's is not the armor being shot through. it's the MG round finding a gap or a thin section; it's the "lucky shot" effect. They simply summed both into one rule. ... no. If it did, there would be no through-armor criticals, ever. Heh ... battletech and "the real world" ... never shall the twain meet. You've left out the major factor - mechs can stop from top speed in a few strides; and can go back up to top speed in a few strides, and they can also twist, bend, squat, and otherwise get out of the way - tanks can't. Yep, 1 inch is considered thin by our standards... but by BT standards, that's insanely thick. Most of the armor panels are a few mm to a few cm thick. Yes, BT armor is that awesome... There is no contradiction. Said simply doesn't exist... you either are logically contradicting yourself ... or you are not... and there is no such logical contradiction in that source. They are 75% efficient at converting the energy from electric to kinetic. That's roughly the same as internal combustion or human muscle... and yes, this is actually stated in the source. If you're referring to internal combustion engines ... um, no. They would have to be getting better than 200 MPG. There is a TON of energy being wasted in ICE engines currently. If you're referring to electric motors? Yeah, they're efficient at conversion. Their power to weight, ratio... I'm not sure on, but the bigger electric engines I've seen are obscenely heavy. It's their Achilles heel.

The armor part? that's entirely an arbitrary rule essentially to RESTRICT vehicle.. because let's face it, if they employ actual realistic estimation then the mech goes fubar and less appealing than the vehicles. I mean seriously, their armor is a FEW mm thick? Our current vehicles carry armor in multi hundred mm thick and they suddenly went backward in capacity...which as you noted yourself 'don't mix BT and real world' indeed.

But hey where's the fun in that, the fun in playing around with their lore is EXACTLY that... to bash it around with known principle and see how well it stands up to it. Sometimes you get some of the most amusing observation while doing this.

With regard to MG if this is the case then the most natural outcome is that there should be NO ARMOR DAMAGE whatsoever caused by it.. it either damage the internal (when it struck weak spots and thin sections) or it does no damage for each shell fired (yes they are actually large enough that some are autocannons by real definition).

As for the mech mobility, i assume you are referring to this with comparison to the tank in terms of hit probability...

Unfortunately BT shot themselves here...

the mechwarrior isn't gonna evade lasers once fired, the only difficulty is in getting a firing solution in the first place so unless the mech dances on the spot constantly till the shot is taken his agility here counts for little, nor will he dodge the projectiles because BT describes them as an INCREDIBLY fast (but when you calculate it, their projectile speed is actually not that fast) hyper velocity projectiles.

The two combined essentially GUARANTEES that the mechwarrior isn't going to be able to realistically dodge anything through reactive action, in the same way that human does not expect to dodge bullets (no you are not Neo thank you), we MINIMIZE the chance of being hit in the first place, we don't ACTIVELY try to dodge them... that's basically impossible especially for a human reaction speed attached to massive mass against super fast projectiles.

So... it's a catch 22

Either the projectile is actually MUCH SLOWER than they advertise it as (in the video game THEY ARE INDEED SLOWER but we can pretend that's for balance and tech limitation) which allows human to actually react and dodge it even with such ludicrous humanoid form, which then invalidates their destructive capacity then to an extent.

Or it actually is that fast which means they can't realistically dodge it in the first place and the goal would be to minimize the chance of being seen and if seen to minimize the chance that such shot hit you (this is how the real world armored ground combat vehicles generally are designed)

As for electric motor? Oh they are viable they always were.. since while they are individually heavier one might imagine, we also happen to only need either 1 or few of them to move the vehicle in the first place.
This is how electric cars are viable to begin with.

The only challenge is in getting the POWER to actually supply to the motor in the first place, and this is what stopping us from utilizing them in larger role (especially for the military), we simply do not have something that can hold enough energy density in some form (our battery is not that good enough yet) or produce it in sufficiently compact form.

BUT, BT have a fusion engine which supply significant power... well then... how convenient.

Elessar, on 09 August 2012 - 03:21 PM, said:

That´s exactly the thing that makes the most sense. And the scenario you´l usually find in Aerotech ... it is, battles around the target planet (often, with the dropships trying to force combat drops of their mechs upon the planetary surface, while the defender is trying to prevent this)

If that's the extent of their capability, then all the more reason that they would saturate the orbit on the likely entry path with mines and orbital defensive satellite.

But probably the most ironic thing here is that they lack mines but have an alarming tendency to RAM THE DROPSHIP with their aerospace fighter.

I mean of course it's most likely chalked up to rule of cool and dramatization for novel, but for someone who won't build simple mines... they sure as hell don't seems to mind to resort to slamming their even larger and expensive aerospace fighter at the dropship.

and of course as according to the rule of cool, when they actually successfully ram the dropship, the effect is usually super effective (ramming is always effective after all in entertainment).

Edited by Melcyna, 09 August 2012 - 04:05 PM.

[Osski]

Elessar, on 04 August 2012 - 06:45 AM, said:

Here you see a mechwarrior doing standard maintenance on his targeting computer

ROFL!!!

[SakuranoSenshi]

Aye, the old ENIAC picture is pretty priceless. The first general-purpose electronic machine, IIRC.

[Beazle]

@Melcyna

I have never seen somebody put so much effort into fundamentally flawed logic.

I honestly don't know if your trolling at this point, or if you really think you've got it all figured out. I take that back, I think I was right the first time.

Quote

I really think your too caught up in your own rhetoric to listen to logic at this point though. Which means i just wasted a bunch of time typing all that.

Try reading all those posts telling you you're wrong again. This time try to play the devils advocate. If you put half as much effort into disproving your own opinion as you have into defending it, I think you'll begin to see the flaws.

Seriously, there are many things about the BT univers that don't make sense.

The loss of the ability to produce the most complicated and immense projects ever created by man to the ravages of war isn't one of them.

[Nebfer]

Melcyna, on 08 August 2012 - 10:19 PM, said:

The problem when they start chucking these massive energy number however is that they then run SMACK HEAD ON to other physical inconsistency.

for example....

if we assume a small laser has an energy output of 120MJ for example, that gives a gauss rifle slug somewhere around what 600MJ? assuming the slug does 5 times the damage as based on the weapon chart simplified damage.

You do know that A laser and a Gauss rifle even if they have the same amount of Joules are doing their damage via diffrent mechanics right? So if a small laser has a yield of 120 megajoules, it dose not mean a Gauss rifle will have a yeild of 600 megajoules. Mosy hypersonic based numbers put a Gauss rifle at around half these numbers.

Quote

Then if this armor is capable of withstanding such impact force with just a few mm... that begs the question, how does their melee weapon ever damage these armor at all?

via a different vulnerability, The armor is at best an inch thick, it's also stated to be some what brittle... The Armor seems to have reduced effectiveness on dealing with objects high in mass and low in velocity. Their are "armor" systems that can stop a high velocity projectile and would crumple under your own body weight, one such example is the Whipple shield.

Quote

The more we dig deeper into it with their number, the more inconsistency we get...

incidentally on this
we run into yet another oddity.

Well lets put it simply, your mad if you think you can easily solve the issues around B-tech armor with it's known capability's...
Cray simply says B-tech armor is Magic, Painrack (another guy I know who deals with "B-tech info" but is not involved with Catalyst) would agree with the fact that it's impossible to find a good one all theory on how B-tech armor works. One could find a half decent one that works to a degree but fails at some points, but that's about it. The Herb (line developer of Catalyst) would likely also agree with Cray that the armor is Magic...

Some things we know about B-tech armor
It can stop hypersonic 250kg impactors (Heavy Gauss), at the same time it can take a 200kg multi round burst form a AC-20 (which fire rounds faster than current real world guns of smiler caliber)
it has reasonably impressive thermal property's
It seems to be some what ablative and at the same time it also seems to behave like regular armor should... (I.e. if it can not stop the round cold then it ablates)
It seems to be weak when dealing with "melee" based weapons...

Also note B-tech rules while canon, are also said to be not a perfect simulation of reality...
Heck I can point out per the rules that an ASF crashing into the ground would likely be disintegrated at a velocity of say 300m/s, but the same fighter would likely survive a crash in space at like 3km/s...


B-tech while having a base on real life physics bends and brakes them where needed (like most Sci-fi). Here's a few areas where they are bent and or broken

Mechs are viable weapons of war and in fact some what superior to regular "Tanks" (in reality mechs would have issues due to their surface area being much greater than a tanks would be due to their design (I.e. less armor thickness per unit of mass), not to mention mechanical complexity being higher than a tank...)

B-tech fusion reactors, these reactors running on hydrogen reactions (nothing fancy just regular diatomic hydrogen), however if you have done the math on say ASF fighters or even dropships you will quickly find out that they have very high energy outputs for the amount of fuel they use, and in the case of the larger ships they seem to produce more energy than what should be possible (note any warship above 200,000 tons only uses 39.5 tons of fuel per day at 1G)... Though I do not know how efficient ground unit reactors are but it's likely their not to far off...

As noted the Armor behaves in a very different manor than it should and what we know of the materials that go into behave... By the way if you think mech scale armor is "impressive" wait to you see warship armor... It can shrug off near contact kiloton level nukes (5 kilotons deals 10 capital scale damage) as well as high velocity impacts and yet is about as thick as a sheet of paper...

======================================
In regards to B-tech targeting computers keep in mind the description of the system, mentions that it's not just a computer but also includes recoil compensators and enhanced actuators and the likes.

SakuranoSenshi, on 09 August 2012 - 02:43 PM, said:

IIRC, the so-called jump points are indeed basically LaGrange points.

Only the L2 point is a valid jump point (due to it being a direct cancellation of gravity between the two bodies, with the other 4 points being centripetal), the other jump locations are technically not LaGrange points. Though in the earth solar system any L2 point is a valid one but also almost any place out past Saturn is one (but for convenience typically they jump near the zenith and nadir points of the sun, at Saturn's orbit...)

Edited by Nebfer, 09 August 2012 - 08:44 PM.

[Skylarr]

I do not think you understand the cost of having Aerospace patrolling all the Pirate Points that may be along your 200 planet border.

The Tech for the Minefield you stated above does not exist. You want each mine to have stabilizer to keep it in a geocentric orbit. Have a targeting computer that scans a very large area of space. Then it will engage its thrusters to attack what IT thinks is a hostile target at ranges outside Capital Missile range, So it needs a bigger fuel tank. And have a payload large enough to Kill an Aerospace and to damage a Dropship.

All Capital Missiles (Not is production right now) use a vehicle to target for them, Then they lock on in flight. In the early 50's they are produce again. In late 50"s the DCMS produce Teleoperated versions. Capital Missiles are meant to kill aerospace and small craft.

You said they do not need maintenance. Are you really serious??? If you do not maintain them they will start failing and maybe even attack each other, or, the Drop that is meant to replace the Mines in the Mine field.

So what will they cost a 1/4 Mil? 1/2 a Mil? Is that 100 mines per planet? 500? 1,000? They are not that cheap. How many can you produce per year?

Now you are moving resources from from you current productions to the Mine production line and the militarization of Dropships.

Also the enemy Dropships can deploy an aerospace screen to counter your Torpedo Mines. An enemy Invasion force knows you have 2 regiments on planet. but, by the time it goes around the Minefield to get to your planet you might be able to bring in reinforcement (which is not a simple task). So now they have to calculate how much you will have on the ground when they hit and bring enough to counter it.

And now you want to seize the civilian Dry Docks. Now all the Dropships deep in your realm have no place to go to to perform standard maintenance. Now you have stalled your Economy. and have more disgruntle civilians. More front line troops being moved to deep in your realm.

This whole Dropship idea works if your realm is half the galaxy. Not in the BT universe.

Quote

Third Succession War

Lasting from 2866 to 3025, the Third Succession War was a prolonged low-level conflict characterised by a steady loss of technology and the rise of neo-feudalistic traditions in all of the Successor States.

Started due to Operation Holy Shroud, the Third Succession War was fought with technology that was considered mystical. Technological regression had allowed the survival of scant hightech factories, and the developing noble Mechwarrior families were forced to repair their machines with the gutted remains of their enemies'.

-----------------------------------

The detection of Jumships that enter you system is not automatic. Some of the components of your sensors are Lost Tech. So they are very old. There have many time in the History of BT were the planet did not detect an inbound enemy force until it was a 1/4 to 1/2 to your planet. I am sure someone could tell us which source book and page.

[Melcyna]

Nebfer, on 09 August 2012 - 08:37 PM, said:

You do know that A laser and a Gauss rifle even if they have the same amount of Joules are doing their damage via diffrent mechanics right? So if a small laser has a yield of 120 megajoules, it dose not mean a Gauss rifle will have a yeild of 600 megajoules. Mosy hypersonic based numbers put a Gauss rifle at around half these numbers.

THAT unfortunately trips itself up...

at 600MJ, with 125kg gauss rifle slug (8 slugs per ton of ammo, discounting the weight of the ammo container)... the slug basically flies at Mach 6.5,

at 300MJ, with 125kg gauss rifle slug it flies at Mach 4.5

THIS mind you is about the same speed as a tank shell.... if we are to take that figure, all of a sudden that very fast gauss rifle slug turns out to be not that fast at all compared to our standard gun, granted with a significantly more mass of course...

Nebfer, on 09 August 2012 - 08:37 PM, said:

via a different vulnerability, The armor is at best an inch thick, it's also stated to be some what brittle... The Armor seems to have reduced effectiveness on dealing with objects high in mass and low in velocity. Their are "armor" systems that can stop a high velocity projectile and would crumple under your own body weight, one such example is the Whipple shield.

The first part? that correlates with the part above to an extent, that the gauss rifle slug isn't ACTUALLY that fast, though it then begs the question why are they describing them as an extremely high velocity when it's about as fast as our standard gun, and that also makes it even harder to comprehend why they lose so much energy so quickly in atmosphere when they are of a significant mass.

The second part is a paradox as well with the armor.

armor like whipple shield, which is essentially a spaced armor works by trading off VOLUME, for weight... giving the protective quality at lighter weight at the cost of significant volume, the increased volume is part of the reason why it would collapse under it's own weight, per specific volume density it is INCREDIBLY weak, but that's fine since the shield is only intended to shatter the hostile fragment and not actually stopping it completely.

But BT armor works on an odd idea, it's lore attempts to explain it's function against physical projectile in a similar manner with whipple shield, shattering and fragmenting projectile upon contact with outer layer and catching it with the inner layer should it go through... except their armor property is the EXACT OPPOSITE, with incredible volume density measuring just mm thick, but significant weight at several ton for that mere mm thick armor.

I am perfectly aware of course that the design of the mechanic including the armor is most likely gameplay design based, in essence pretty much as you describe it in the later part... 'Magic' indeed.

But this is exactly why using numbers around is highly dangerous though in sci fi, when they start throwing numbers around like X can do Y MJ of energy and other data like it's weight etc... then anyone with basic physics can start plugging the number and scratching their head when the numbers come up with ridiculous implications.

It's easier to just NOT SAY the specific like that... and let the audience fill in the blank themselves, then you can deny anything you want or come up with a vague description that can be amended at later period.

Skylarr, on 09 August 2012 - 08:39 PM, said:

I do not think you understand the cost of having Aerospace patrolling all the Pirate Points that may be along your 200 planet border.

The Tech for the Minefield you stated above does not exist. You want each mine to have stabilizer to keep it in a geocentric orbit. Have a targeting computer that scans a very large area of space. Then it will engage its thrusters to attack what IT thinks is a hostile target at ranges outside Capital Missile range, So it needs a bigger fuel tank. And have a payload large enough to Kill an Aerospace and to damage a Dropship.

All Capital Missiles (Not is production right now) use a vehicle to target for them, Then they lock on in flight. In the early 50's they are produce again. In late 50"s the DCMS produce Teleoperated versions. Capital Missiles are meant to kill aerospace and small craft.

You said they do not need maintenance. Are you really serious??? If you do not maintain them they will start failing and maybe even attack each other, or, the Drop that is meant to replace the Mines in the Mine field.

So what will they cost a 1/4 Mil? 1/2 a Mil? Is that 100 mines per planet? 500? 1,000? They are not that cheap. How many can you produce per year?

Now you are moving resources from from you current productions to the Mine production line and the militarization of Dropships.

Also the enemy Dropships can deploy an aerospace screen to counter your Torpedo Mines. An enemy Invasion force knows you have 2 regiments on planet. but, by the time it goes around the Minefield to get to your planet you might be able to bring in reinforcement (which is not a simple task). So now they have to calculate how much you will have on the ground when they hit and bring enough to counter it.

And now you want to seize the civilian Dry Docks. Now all the Dropships deep in your realm have no place to go to to perform standard maintenance. Now you have stalled your Economy. and have more disgruntle civilians. More front line troops being moved to deep in your realm.

This whole Dropship idea works if your realm is half the galaxy. Not in the BT universe.

-----------------------------------

The detection of Jumships that enter you system is not automatic. Some of the components of your sensors are Lost Tech. So they are very old. There have many time in the History of BT were the planet did not detect an inbound enemy force until it was a 1/4 to 1/2 to your planet. I am sure someone could tell us which source book and page.

Let's start with the mine, they can't come up with autonomous mine? that's fine, semi autonomous then... ie: the mines are nothing more than a missile, with it's telemetry guidance feed coming from external source, what the external source is: go wild.. an aerospace scout? an observation craft? All you need is something out there to tell them when to go and where to go.

In essence, if you really have to put each mine cost to absolute bare minimum, then you can just strip the sensor out of each mine, and have nothing but the telemetry link.

Have another unit carry the sensor instead, and slave the mines to it, each mine is therefore an (massively) oversized LRM really. And we know THEY CAN manufacture that. As an added bonus you get to keep the sensor part, assuming it wasn't destroyed when it's over.

They want to start sweeping the mine? GREAT!, for each time they spent sweeping it with their aerospace or otherwise, they:
A. advertise themselves with their weapon discharge if they decide to shoot them
B. actually SEEK the mine (which do you think will be the first to see the other? the cold dormant mine and possibly it's perimeter recon alarm if it's a separate unit, or the dropship with it's aerospace escort seeking the mine?) and burn their resource at it, they either run through them giving the escort little time to intercept each as they come alive and taking attrition, or they go slow and careful and burn their time, either choice still favorable for us.

Mines decaying? Oh that will happen alright, they always do after some time, so what do they do with the real mines in the world? (which incidentally can last decades and remain functional because mines inherently do not perform any mechanical action until triggered and thus preserve it's state FAR LONGER than other machines that are used regularly) simple, they estimate how much time the mines components can last under the intended condition (the fact that the mine does not need to act or move until needed helps here since it means it SITS and do nothing until told otherwise), and set a disarming fuse built straight into it's detonator. This mind you they did with JUST MECHANICAL PARTS back in WW2, they didn't even use electronics for these (human ingenuity when it comes to weapon design is quite amazing when pushed to the limit), the detonator simply fails to function beyond certain period that is built into the mine design (the detonator for some mines essentially will disintegrate or buckle under internal force after set amount of time).

This part though is VERY interesting to ponder:

Skylarr, on 09 August 2012 - 08:39 PM, said:

The detection of Jumships that enter you system is not automatic. Some of the components of your sensors are Lost Tech. So they are very old. There have many time in the History of BT were the planet did not detect an inbound enemy force until it was a 1/4 to 1/2 to your planet.

Because that suggest that they have detection capability to pick them up for the most part, though why it takes several days for them to recognize it is up for debate of course, logically when the emergence signature shows up, the propagation of the signature would reach the planet or whatever sensor they used to detect them at all long before the force since the signature would be propagating in lightspeed.

If we assume the shortest time known for dropship to reach a planet from the jump point, that's 5 days so if they acquire a warning of inbound force 1/2 way through even that's still over 2 days of preparation for the defender assuming the enemy took the shortest possible course.

That's technically PLENTY of time still to maneuver asset in orbit and prepare them.

Let's pretend that our Mines are VERY basic and had to be signaled for arming and are only set in the planet orbit, 2 days is still enough time to send the signal or telemetry to arm them and prepare for the incoming force.

A normal reaction would be to send a scout in the direction of the area with the shortest path to the planet then, but that's just a bonus at this stage.

Beazle, on 09 August 2012 - 07:54 PM, said:

@Melcyna

I have never seen somebody put so much effort into fundamentally flawed logic.

I honestly don't know if your trolling at this point, or if you really think you've got it all figured out. I take that back, I think I was right the first time.

You are free to think of what you will, i am far more interested with the answers ppl come up with that can be digested and pondered... which is part of the reason why i keep responding to the ones around so far, because they are INTERESTING to think about as far as i am concerned and reason out.

so if you think it hurts your head just ignore them, i am only expecting answers from ppl who responded with something that can be thought about and put through the logic process anyhow.

Edited by Melcyna, 10 August 2012 - 12:20 AM.

[Beazle]

Quote

You are free to think of what you will, i am far more interested with the answers ppl come up with that can be digested and pondered... which is part of the reason why i keep responding to the ones around so far, because they are INTERESTING to think about as far as i am concerned and reason out.

so if you think it hurts your head just ignore them, i am only expecting answers from ppl who responded with something that can be thought about and put through the logic process anyhow

Who said anythign about my head hurting? It's just a mystery to me.

Are you being stupid on purpose? Or is it an act? Or do you really think your smart?

I DID respond with things that can be thought about.

You didn't bother to think. Instead you managed to dodge every important statement in my post (just like you do others, nice to know i'm not special atleast) and respond with crap that's got just enough "logic" in it so sound like logic while being utter crap.

I'm not going to go back over every little thing you've said to point out all the idiocy. I'll just go with one point on the mines.

First you state that they should be able to build seeker mines (aka mine-torpedos) with long ranges. You seem to think they can be kept in "sleep" mode for ages, require no maintenance, and will be difficult for an enemy to detect. Then you want them to be in constant communication with each other, and be able to close in on an enemy and make a positive ID before attacking.

You present all these as being possible in THE SAME MINE.

Somehow you fail to see how the constant energy use will require minatenance, that any mine that moves will require refueling, and that constant communication will broadcast their postition to the enemy.

Then to top it all off you say it must be doable because modern WET WATER NAVIES do it. Exactly WHAT does a flaoting sea mine have to do with a SEEKING space mine? Here is another big tip.

NOBODY MINES THEIR HARBORS IN TIMES OF PEACE. Seriously, you seem to think that every wet-water navy out there has mass quantities of mines floating around to defend their horbors. They don't. That's just dumb. Mines are deployed only when an attack is viewed likely in the forseable future, because the maintenance and hazard to civilian navigation are too great for constant use.

BUT THAT DOESN'T MATTER, because sea mines and space mines have about as much in common as my left hand and a super model.

But this whole response is pointless because the entire concept of mines as a defense ruled out by the very VASTNESS OF SPACE. A point that has been made several times already, but you seem to either willfully ignore, or over simplifiy. You seem to think that putting mines is space is like putting them at your front and back door. Like you can predict that your enemy will approach through a limited number of areas, when, infact, this won't happen because YOUR NOT IN A HOUSE. Not only do you not have walls that limit your enemies approaches, YOU DON"T HAVE A FLOOR OR ROOF EITHER.

Really, you keep talking about being able to put the mines in a good spot, because you can calculate the path that they would have to take to get to your planet, and put them in the middle. You completely ignore where we point out that there is LITERALLY a nearly INFINITE number of places the enemy could arive at, AND HE'S UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO COME IN A STRAIGHT LINE.

The best way i can think of to describe it, is to bring out some Death Star analogies.

You seem to think that if you just layed some mines down in that trench, then everything would be fine, but what you don't understand in BT, the "weak point" is everywhere BUT the trench.

In summary, pretty much every person who has posted a response to anything you have said in this thread has had valid points, which you have either failed to grasp completely, or completely ignored.

So, as i said before, go back and read the thread again. Everything you need to know to prove your theories wrong has already been posted. Work harder on understanding their points, and less hard on clinging to your own.

I will not be responding to this post.

If anything i've said seems to imply that i think you might be a little bit slow, then i apologize. I ment to say it outright.