[NGTM-1R]

Your whole scenario is silly. If you're evading lasers you know exactly where the enemy is because he's shooting lasers at you, so you don't need the drone at all!

But since you cannot possibly evade them once fired, if you suspect there is an enemy ship in the area you would be conducting evasive manuvers as a matter of course. It's not silly; it's intelligent.

[General Battuta]

Your whole scenario is silly. If you're evading lasers you know exactly where the enemy is because he's shooting lasers at you, so you don't need the drone at all!

But since you cannot possibly evade them once fired, if you suspect there is an enemy ship in the area you would be conducting evasive manuvers as a matter of course. It's not silly; it's intelligent.

But now you're ignoring one of the tenets of your scenario and one of the tenets of how lasers work, those being

1) you postulated light lag was a factor and ergo sufficiently enthusiastic evasives could slip a laser, because

2) lasers must remain on the target in order to achieve burnthrough in all but the most energetic configurations, and therefore rapid maneuvering and rotation are important even when light lag isn't a factor but especially when it is.

[NGTM-1R]

And that ignores...how?

Recall we're discussing drones that other people are saying are stealthy/blahblah.

Also recall that your posist was they could mount more sensative instruments than the weapons truck. And I said why the weapons truck wouldn't want one.

[General Battuta]

Well if you CAN possibly evade them when fired then saying that you can't possibly evade them when firing (as a way to

wait

I already said that the best course would be to have your remote sensors use lasers to transmit to repeaters aaaanyway.

[Aardwolf]

Here's a thought: unless we're talking about an unmanned drone,

My drone is unmanned. Your argument is invalid.

I already said that the best course would be to have your remote sensors use lasers to transmit to repeaters aaaanyway.

Or you could make the sensors dirt cheap, so cheap that they don't need to worry about being shot down because of how many of 'em you've got... and then use omnidirectional transmission... But then I guess the guys monitoring the drone chatter might have a hard time sorting out what's important.

[NGTM-1R]

Well if you CAN possibly evade them when fired then saying that you can't possibly evade them when firing (as a way to

And I said that you can't evade a blinding laser because they can fire a hell of a lot more of them then a weapons level laser because they take very little power, thus making staturation of your possible courses simple.

I already said that the best course would be to have your remote sensors use lasers to transmit to repeaters aaaanyway.

Which then themselves would be destroyed first.

Your only real option is saturation of drones. Not even drones, really, fixed emplacements in fixed orbits in large numbers. Make it impractical to destroy them all. Of course, that's true of everything.

[StarSlayer]

Space combat is totally going to be lame...

[General Battuta]

Well if you CAN possibly evade them when fired then saying that you can't possibly evade them when firing (as a way to

And I said that you can't evade a blinding laser because they can fire a hell of a lot more of them then a weapons level laser because they take very little power, thus making staturation of your possible courses simple.

Yeah but what's that going to do except tell you exactly where they are anyway?

I already said that the best course would be to have your remote sensors use lasers to transmit to repeaters aaaanyway.

Which then themselves would be destroyed first.

what is this

how

Your only real option is saturation of drones. Not even drones, really, fixed emplacements in fixed orbits in large numbers. Make it impractical to destroy them all. Of course, that's true of everything.

Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man!

[Aardwolf]

I already said that the best course would be to have your remote sensors use lasers to transmit to repeaters aaaanyway.

Which then themselves would be destroyed first.

what is this

how

More specifically, how can they destroy the guns anyway if they cannot tell where they are?

The laser transmission ensures that both the sender and recipient are difficult to detect, unless you're within a narrow cone around the laser. Granted, you could get lucky, or your detection network might be huge enough to detect their detection network's transmissions every time...

Space combat is totally going to be lame...

Inorite? 

[NGTM-1R]

Yeah but what's that going to do except tell you exactly where they are anyway?

Make you go blind so you can't detect them. The laser flash destroying your ability to detect at long ranges doesn't occur to you? Isn't that what this whole discussion has been about?

what is this

Your logic failing.

how

They'd squawk to transmit where the target is and make themselves obvious targets in the process, since they're the clear weak link in the system.

Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man!

what is this

And how is it relevant when they're not even fortifications? They're target saturation same as any other relevant tactic, and effectively the only useful tactic in this is target saturation anyways.

Or we could just put the system on the weapons platform itself and cut out all these middlemen who aren't really going to help.

More specifically, how can they destroy the guns anyway if they cannot tell where they are?

Because as I keep telling you and you keep failing to listen to, at some point somebody has to squawk omnidirectional to make the system work, and they in so doing will give their posistion away and become the natural targets. Someone has to be unsealthy to make this system of sensor drones and repeaters work.

The laser transmission ensures that both the sender and recipient are difficult to detect,

But won't get it to the guy with the weapons who is evasive, at random, and hence can't be transmitted to with a laser. Someone has to tell him, and that someone has to do so with an omnidirectional system to protect the weapons platform from being an easy target by having to stand still or hold a course.

[Aardwolf]

People, people... less quote warfare, please. You're antagonizing each other more than you're changing each other's minds!


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Jamming (as suggested by NGTM-1R) seems like a good idea, and hasn't been discussed much, despite my mentioning it in the first post (albeit in spoiler tags).

NGTM-1R, in response to your point about them squawking to transmit... I believe if the drones are using laser transmission, this could avoid the drones being detected. As you have pointed out, in order for the laser transmission to be received properly (without widening the cone and making it easier to spot), the recipient can't be jinking. So I ask, who is the recipient, and do they have to be jinking? Could a system be devised wherein the recipient does not need to be jinking?

[NGTM-1R]

Depends. Can you devise a situation where the recipent won't be subjected to enemy weapons if detected? Manuver is your basic defense against being attacked by enemy weapons capable of relativisitic speeds like lasers, and to be safe you have to be manuvering when they arrive. And you're not going to see them coming, so you might as well just manuver constantly.

Jamming has dangers of its own in that missiles could be programmed to home in on the source, but deceptive jammers and trackbreakers should still be effective. However with no real reason to use radar for terminal homing (unless you can put your ship in front of a star or the sun side of a planet and it can no longer distingush an infrared target) the chances for it are few.

[Mongoose]

Space combat is totally going to be lame...

Inorite? 

Seriously.  Give me the FS-verse over this whole mess any day of the week.

[Aardwolf]

As far as keeping the recipient alive... the recipient could have a preset flight pattern, known only to it and the sensor drones (obviously the sensor drones then need a failsafe to keep that information from being captured). Still, a recipient which has to maintain a flight pattern is going to be thrusting, which can be spotted even if the lasers can't.

Redundancy is probably a better approach. Have multiple stations/platforms/whatever listening to the sensor drones' data, and have the drones only ever transmit to one of them. The drones could additionally have a passive sensor to watch and verify that the monitoring station hasn't been incapacitated somehow. If it determines the monitoring station is out of action, it'd find the next available recipient (maybe randomly, or maybe by some "smart" algorithm).

One more thing: the sensor drones probably shouldn't be transmitting constantly. I reckon they should be on "quiet" mode until they detect something of interest, and only then should they begin transmitting (and then they should only transmit in short bursts, at irregular intervals). They might also monitor other sensor drones nearby, and coordinate which one should do the squawking somehow, so that they don't all go into "noisy" mode at once and thus don't all get shot down at once. This coordination would optimally be done with as little detectable transmission as possible; if the drones are in close enough proximity to each other, they might even be able to do some sort of "hand gestures" (I don't know of a technical term for this... basically something that you could see if you were watching through a small telescope, but which nobody else would see if they weren't already looking in the right place. And the data it conveys would be as useless as possible to anyone watching it that shouldn't be watching it)

[General Battuta]

Because as I keep telling you and you keep failing to listen to, at some point somebody has to squawk omnidirectional to make the system work

why? why why

makes no sense

You have drones. They shoot lasers at each other. Eventually one of them shoots a laser at your home ship. It could be a few thousand kilometers from your home ship at that point, though it doesn't need to be; you cannot alter your velocity with any sort of speed in any way that will make a laser miss even at a vast range. Your whole scenario is contingent on the notion that some kind of unpredictable evasion is possible; it's not particularly. The best defense against lasers is, ironically, spinning.

If you are somehow maneuvering hard then you have enough drones that the later links are sufficiently close to your home ship to laser you. Not hard. Not at all. No omnidirectional squawking involved.

That said all this is basically irrelevant. You don't need the daisy chain at all. You need one drone and it needs to get one contact report and transmit it. It doesn't matter if it's destroyed after that. No realistic ship has enough smash to alter its velocity after that to make any meaningful difference to the subsequent engagement in any near-future setting.

[Aardwolf]

Battuta, although your laser transmission scheme makes sense, I do not believe it is necessary. If the sensor drones are sufficiently cheap and sufficiently numerous, an omnidirectional 'squawk' would at worst lose you a single drone, unless prior to this the enemy was completely oblivious to your observation.

Furthermore, I am not sure how wide of a cone the laser beam would be detectable within, although I imagine there would be some 'leakage', maybe a degree (angle measure) or so around the beam. In that sense, an omnidirectional squawk might have the benefit of not revealing the recipient. That said, narrow cone or not, the volume is still immense (although perhaps not infinite)... finding the target of the laser might not be feasible, either.

[General Battuta]

Battuta, although your laser transmission scheme makes sense, I do not believe it is necessary. If the sensor drones are sufficiently cheap and sufficiently numerous, an omnidirectional 'squawk' would at worst lose you a single drone, unless prior to this the enemy was completely oblivious to your observation.

That's what I said in my last post.

[Aardwolf]

Yes, I was "running with it"

[NGTM-1R]

You have drones. They shoot lasers at each other. Eventually one of them shoots a laser at your home ship. It could be a few thousand kilometers from your home ship at that point, though it doesn't need to be; you cannot alter your velocity with any sort of speed in any way that will make a laser miss even at a vast range.

Because they know where your home ship is. All of them. Without being told. So they know where to transmit to to pass it on. And they know where to do everything else without being told! Because it's magic!

Since you've already rejected the concept of placing them in fixed orbits earlier in the thread the weapons platform itself is going to be confused as to where they are and in order to "hook in" will have to talk to them somehow.

I'm sure this has occurred to you somewhere...oh wait it hasn't.

Your whole scenario is contingent on the notion that some kind of unpredictable evasion is possible; it's not particularly. The best defense against lasers is, ironically, spinning.

Then your scenario is equally useless as all that retransmission time works against it.  While someone is heating your hull.

If you are somehow maneuvering hard then you have enough drones that the later links are sufficiently close to your home ship to laser you. Not hard. Not at all. No omnidirectional squawking involved.

Except for the connection phase. Also the ship would over time have to periodically update them and the drones themselves are in motion.

That said all this is basically irrelevant. You don't need the daisy chain at all. You need one drone and it needs to get one contact report and transmit it.

I've been saying that all along dammit. However if you can have one why not have more than one? There are other reasons your first salvo could fail.

[General Battuta]

You have drones. They shoot lasers at each other. Eventually one of them shoots a laser at your home ship. It could be a few thousand kilometers from your home ship at that point, though it doesn't need to be; you cannot alter your velocity with any sort of speed in any way that will make a laser miss even at a vast range.

Because they know where your home ship is. All of them. Without being told. So they know where to transmit to to pass it on. And they know where to do everything else without being told! Because it's magic!

Magic would be helpful but unnecessary. The daisychain can stay in contact pretty easily.

Since you've already rejected the concept of placing them in fixed orbits earlier in the thread the weapons platform itself is going to be confused as to where they are and in order to "hook in" will have to talk to them somehow.

I'm sure this has occurred to you somewhere...oh wait it hasn't.

Uh yes it has, the whole point of them being able to pass reports is that they talk to each other.

Except for the connection phase. Also the ship would over time have to periodically update them and the drones themselves are in motion.

Mostly ballistic motion, not exactly hard to figure out. Believe it or not but real satellites do this!

That said all this is basically irrelevant. You don't need the daisy chain at all. You need one drone and it needs to get one contact report and transmit it.

I've been saying that all along dammit. However if you can have one why not have more than one? There are other reasons your first salvo could fail.

Sir, I dispute the fact that that's what you've been saying all along.

anyway stealth doesn't work in space