Author Topic: Need some help--detecting a jumpshipo that is trying to stay hidden.  (Read 2945 times)

Korzon77

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Okay, running a setting where there's a mass bio attack during the succession wars.

How hard is it to detect a ship jumping in at the 10.2 limit for say, Sol, sticking around long enough to deploy some stealthed pods full of biobaddies, and then quietly jumping out. From my look at the difficulty numbers, picking up the incoming jump, unless you're literally on top of the stations, is going to be very unlikely, so a jumpship looking for a place where there aren't any ships should be safe from detection.

worktroll

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Well, at one level, pretty easy.

Emergence waves can be detected out to 50,000km - so 10.2 AU is good. And you don't need to jump in at the (probably monitored) nadir & zenith points - jumping in at a very safe "pirate point" in the plane of the ecliptic is easy, and you can plot to emerge on the other side of the local star to block planet-based observation.

The thing is, from 10.2+ AU, your pods are going to take a long time getting there. Any major fusion burn is much more visible, and slow accelleration means a long trip. So you're not talking pods, you're talking small craft at the least, to provide the required  life support.

Of course, going a little non-canon - suspension pods dating back to the Magellan era - could be considered.

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glitterboy2098

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what kind of bio-attack? if it is a viral or bacterial agent you could probably get by with a slow attack.. planets are big predictable targets, and you could fit a lot of virus into a fairly small package. the attack taking time wouldn't be an issue, and you could drop a lot of small reentry vehicles to scattershot an entire hemisphere, disguising your attack as a normal meteor swarm.

if you are talking some kind of invasive species though, you'd have to deal with the same limitations as delivering an invading mech/vee/infantry force.

VhenRa

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Emergence waves can be detected out to 50,000km -

No. That's the IR pre-arrival signature.

Emergence waves are 15AU.

[Strategic Operations, page 247].

Okay, running a setting where there's a mass bio attack during the succession wars.

How hard is it to detect a ship jumping in at the 10.2 limit for say, Sol, sticking around long enough to deploy some stealthed pods full of biobaddies, and then quietly jumping out. From my look at the difficulty numbers, picking up the incoming jump, unless you're literally on top of the stations, is going to be very unlikely, so a jumpship looking for a place where there aren't any ships should be safe from detection.


Well... what have we here... this sounds familiar.

The_Caveman

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Wouldn't it make vastly more sense to disguise the delivery system as an innocent merchant vessel? It's difficult to hide a JumpShip and if someone does notice you behaving fishy, they're going to give the area a closer look. Fly an uneventful cargo mission using a civilian DropShip carrying a token payload of trade goods (which don't even need a buyer, you just offload them to a warehouse and leave) and a crapload of suborbital bioweapon dispensers.
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snewsom2997

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Jump one more Light Day out than your Jumpships Recharge time, even if they detect the wave you will be long gone, and your Bio Weapons pods just need to be shoved in the right direction, and then course corrected nearer to target. Do some creative orbital mechanics and you can probably get them started in a direction that is not a direct path to the target world and thus more easily detected.

If you have LFB, just jump, drop your load and jump again, unless you jump on top of someone you will be gone before anyone notices.

idea weenie

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what kind of bio-attack? if it is a viral or bacterial agent you could probably get by with a slow attack.. planets are big predictable targets, and you could fit a lot of virus into a fairly small package. the attack taking time wouldn't be an issue, and you could drop a lot of small reentry vehicles to scattershot an entire hemisphere, disguising your attack as a normal meteor swarm.

Small pieces of ice with the bio weapon contained inside?  Keep them in cryo trays for the trip, fire them at the target planet, and as they pass through the atmosphere the ice is melted off, letting the bio agent disperse.  Perform it over a long enough period of time (i.e. so it hits both sides of the planet), with a decent latency (a week or two), and suddenly you have a planet-wide plague, with no obvious Patient Zero.

if you are talking some kind of invasive species though, you'd have to deal with the same limitations as delivering an invading mech/vee/infantry force.

That reminds me, time to read the War against the Chtorr books again.

(War against the Chtorr is an ecological invasion of Earth, where the first obvious attack was 5-6 plagues that together took humanity from ~8 billion down to ~1 billion.  After that it got worse.)

Korzon77

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(War against the Chtorr is an ecological invasion of Earth, where the first obvious attack was 5-6 plagues that together took humanity from ~8 billion down to ~1 billion.  After that it got worse.)

Not least due to the fact that I don't think the Author will ever finish the series.

cray

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How hard is it to detect a ship jumping in at the 10.2 limit

Not too hard, that's well within emergence wave detection range. If you want a stealthed bomber rather than sneaking the weapon into some common interstellar shipment (presumably from another House), 30 or 40AU would be safer. You could monitor an entire solar system with a handful of satellites at the proximity limit.

Quote
for say, Sol,

Sol is a special case with a well-developed solar system, unlike most Inner Sphere systems. I'd aim for further from the star and above the ecliptic.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer

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Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.

 

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