Protecting your shipyards.

[Korzon77]

Okay, if there is anything in Btech with a shorter lifespan than a warship it's a shipyard.   

So, how would you go about protecting your shipyards?  REmembering that they are vital targets, and represent years worth of investment.

[Dragon Cat]

A net of Space Stations, fighter squadrons and DropShips to track down your targets

Unfortunately once your enemy finds the location all they have to do is jump a JumpShip it and games over

[Weirdo]

So glad that suicide tactics are generally frowned upon by just about everyone, and this isn't the Jihad anymore...

[Daryk]

I'd put them as close to a planet in the habitable zone as possible.  Preferably one without a moon.  And then station significant numbers of aerospace fighters on that planet, with plenty of nuclear anti-shipping missiles...

[Dragon Cat]

Hire the best intelligence staff money can buy hide the station at the furthest reaches of a system and keep it secret (all measures acceptable to keep hidden)

[Weirdo]

My condolences to all the workers at that yard station, or any of the myriad supporting stations, or any of the regular series of ships bringing supplies to and from that complex...

[Korzon77]

Problem is, those tactics were tried in teh First war--tried and failed. You have to stop every missile coming in.

So, some possibilities:

1. hiding. Put your center in deep space, remembering that a jump drive can go 30LY.  If you want extra security, remember that station keeping thrusters can change its position radically over even a few days. For extra security, you keep jump ships on station that go out and bring jumpships to the station--nobody else has your current location.
Bad news? "productivity? What productivity?"  You're spending a lot for security.

2. Fort--burrow out structures in a bit nickel iron asteroid. Say: Lutetia--burrow deep and you have a few dozen miles between you and an enemy.

[AlphaMirage]

I am also strongly in the concealment camp for at least some of your shipyards (the ones that make Warships mainly, commercial jumpers I think would have a clear origin and service area).  Thus I prefer clusters I believe most of the Successor States have at least one and it can easily get lost in the jumble. 
Otherwise Asteroid base with Taurus level Zero-G defenders would be your best bet. 
Unfortunately that much heavy industry is difficult to hide so a well-defended "interior" system's moon also works.

[Korzon77]

Dispersion also works. Jump drives means that if you're willing to accept the inconvenience, you can build everything but the KF drive elsewhere, jump it in, and then assemble it at the primary point--if you want to be really sneaky, you can establish a new point for every ship, with some dropship support units to assemble it. So the enemy has to figure out all the possible places you cvan hide in a 30LY sphere.

Which I think says someting about the First Succession War. After the Age of War (with a lot of rules that we'll later see in the Third Succession war), and the long peace of the Star League, nobody really knew what a conflict was going to be like--not really. It was very much WWI, with everyone knowing that the troops would be back by Christmas and their ruler would be back on the throne, but thinking of a conflict in terms of needing to harden and protect infrastructure?  Nobody expected that, and by the time the nukes were flying, it was too late.

[Charistoph]

A net of Space Stations, fighter squadrons and DropShips to track down your targets

Unfortunately once your enemy finds the location all they have to do is jump a JumpShip it and games over

How does that work if the yards are not at a pirate point?

Of course, you'd have to tow new jump ships to jump points, but that's part of the security.

[Kidd]

Have it protected by an Author Fiat Shield...

Seriously though. Put the shipyard outside the hyper limit of an uncharted, uninhabited or at least minor star system. Compartmentalise information so workers do not know where they are. Administratively "disappear" said workers and pay them enough to sequester them and/or their families for years.

Allow only handpicked navigators and bridge crew to perform the jumps of ships carrying raw material/components into the system, and completed ships out of the system - said navigators and bridge crew are not to leave the system alive.

No, it's not foolproof, but that's the best one can do.

[Weirdo]

Step 0: Accept that true absolute security is impossible, but 98% is pretty easy.

Step 1: Place my yard complex somewhere within the jump limit, in its own solar orbit far away from objects likely to create their own pirate points. There will be regular flights to and from the system's inhabited world, as well as various local resource extraction operations.

Step 2: Establish regular patrols throughout the system to keep an eye on known jump points as well as their approaches, supplemented by varying patrols to/around/beyond the jump limit sphere, some of which will be publicly known. After all, deterrence only works if the deteree knows of the deterer's existence.

Step 3: Start building a constellation of passive monitoring satellites, to keep an eye where the patrols aren't. Some will be parked near known points, some will be in orbits near the jump limit(or as close as possible), and some will be on elliptical orbits taking them deep into the system and far out into deep space. A small line at the yard complex all be devoted to producing new sats, to replace old ones as they wear out and to constantly grow the overall constellation.

Step 4: Regular defense forces appropriate to the yard's importance and reasonable expected threats.

Step 5: Instead of large stations, the various functions of the yard will be handled by multiple smaller stations, with a minimum distance from each other so that a nuke strike will kill one station, but not the whole yard. All of these stations will orbit a mutual gravitational barycenter with positions shifting periodically so that the odds of a successful ballistic strike from across the system using asteroids, mass driver shells, or relativistic paperclips are comfortably astronomical.

Step 6: Laser AMS on every station. You don't need many such guns per station, since that many stations will quickly build one hell of an overlapping defense net.

Step 7: Since this spaceborne city has been placed deep in an inhabited system with easy access to resources and a healthy happy workforce, sit back and watch as the yard is far more productive than those isolated secret ones. 8)

 

How does that work if the yards are not at a pirate point?

Of course, you'd have to tow new jump ships to jump points, but that's part of the security.

Or the JumpShips could fly out under their own power. They've got perfectly good sublight drives of their own. So do space stations. Neither class is immobile(an Olympus-class recharge station could probably fly rings around even a fully fueled space shuttle), people just forget that the "mobile" units in the setting are really Really REALLY fast.

[snewsom2997]

How do you protect shipyards.

Uninhabited Systems, in the Void Between Systems, Oort Clouds, Distribute Manufacturing so far and wide that every system, or at least dozens, have the capability, Way out in the Periphery like the RWR Outposts in the Deep Periphery.

The biggest problem is hiding where all the supplies are coming from and going. To that end you would need a command Circuit of Fanatically Loyal Jumpship Crews, and maybe not let them interact with the general population, like as happened with the Hidden Five. By using a command circuit you control access to charts and information, you don't have random jumpships jumping to your shipyards location or you component assembly plants, you have them jumping a dozen jumps from your factory/shipyards location, offloading the droppers to the command circuit, and then moving along. They don't get within few Hundred LYs from the Source or Destination point.

Of course all of this assumes you do not have a giant deficit in Jumpships in your realm, and can dragoon a few hundred for the command circuits to and from component factories and final assembly yards.

[Vition2]

Stuff.

What he said.  Pretty much exactly what I would do, he just beat me (probably by days  :D) and put it more succinctly than I would have.  :thumbsup:

The biggest thing to get out of it is that relying on secrecy as your primary defense is stupid.  Eventually, something is going to slip, and then "POP!" there goes your shipyard.

Defense in depth is going to be the best option.  The downside is that knowledge of the defenses means that the enemy knows, roughly, how many forces he needs to commit to the attack the yard and succeed.  Countering this could include random changes to the defenders with occasional huge booms in defenses, or making sure that an attack is going to have to commit more forces than the enemy can reasonably afford - downside to this is that it means you've already diminished your offensive potential similarly to harden this one system/target.

[Alsadius]

There's no such thing as a perfect defense. There's only defences that make the attack too expensive for the attacker to want to try it. Hesperus II can't repel a hundred regiments, but if it can repel five and no attacker is willing to send six, then it's safe. Similarly, if your KF drive assembly line is surrounded by(or based at) a few fully-armed space stations and you've got a few hundred fighters to defend it, there's unlikely to be an attacking force that can plausibly attack it which wouldn't prefer to just take a few planets instead.

Also, even pirate points aren't instant-attack-from-surprise points. The closest pirate point to Earth, for example, would probably be the earth-moon null point, ~340,000 km from Earth. If your station is in LEO, and the attacker can accelerate at 3g(i.e., 4/6 movement), then even if they only wanted a passing engagement and didn't decelerate, it would take 80 minutes for them to get to you. That's long enough to scramble your defences. You don't really need to go out-system that badly, as long as you have alert forces and good sensor networks.

[Charistoph]

Or the JumpShips could fly out under their own power. They've got perfectly good sublight drives of their own. So do space stations. Neither class is immobile(an Olympus-class recharge station could probably fly rings around even a fully fueled space shuttle), people just forget that the "mobile" units in the setting are really Really REALLY fast.

No, not really.  3.2 f/s² really isn't that fast.  As a comparison, the average van can go from 0-60 in about 10 seconds.  That's about 0.27 g, and a station keeping drive is 0.1g.  The only difference is that the jumpship can keep accelerating and is not limited by atmosphere or surface contact to provide its thrust, which makes its maximum speed much higher.  Even a tug providing half a g of thrust will get your jumpship out to a jump point far more quickly and efficiently then going under power.

[grimlock1]

How do you protect shipyards.

Uninhabited Systems, in the Void Between Systems, Oort Clouds, Distribute Manufacturing so far and wide that every system, or at least dozens, have the capability, Way out in the Periphery like the RWR Outposts in the Deep Periphery.

The biggest problem is hiding where all the supplies are coming from and going. To that end you would need a command Circuit of Fanatically Loyal Jumpship Crews, and maybe not let them interact with the general population, like as happened with the Hidden Five. By using a command circuit you control access to charts and information, you don't have random jumpships jumping to your shipyards location or you component assembly plants, you have them jumping a dozen jumps from your factory/shipyards location, offloading the droppers to the command circuit, and then moving along. They don't get within few Hundred LYs from the Source or Destination point.

Of course all of this assumes you do not have a giant deficit in Jumpships in your realm, and can dragoon a few hundred for the command circuits to and from component factories and final assembly yards.

The command circuit doesn't need to be overly elaborate.  All shipments marshal in one location and are picked up by a small number of trusted Jumpships.  Yes, the enemy has narrowed your shipyard's location down to a mere 10¹⁴ cubic light years.   If you set up in interstellar space, then you are basically undetectable. If you only certain jumpships, then you can encrypt the nav computers so that not even the crews know where they are going.  The navigator either pushes a button labeled "Jump to shipyard," or the push a button labeled "Jump to rally point."

If I recall, Comstar was able to find the Clan Homeworlds because Judith Farber had a dingus that measured the phlebotium after each jump, allowing analysts to determine the distance, but not direction of each jump.  Using that information, and astronomical maps, ROM was able to extrapolate at which stars the ship stopped to recharge.

I bring this up because even this method would be of little use in finding a shipyard in interstellar space, or even the Oort cloud. Say somebody slips this gizmo into a shipment then manages to get the information back, it won't help. Say the other side can determine that you are consistently jumping 22,000 light years from your rally point to your shipyard.  Your enemy has been able to narrow the location down to a surface that is only 6x10⁹ square light years. 

That's a damn big haystack.

[Korzon77]

No, not really.  3.2 f/s² really isn't that fast.  As a comparison, the average van can go from 0-60 in about 10 seconds.  That's about 0.27 g, and a station keeping drive is 0.1g.  The only difference is that the jumpship can keep accelerating and is not limited by atmosphere or surface contact to provide its thrust, which makes its maximum speed much higher.  Even a tug providing half a g of thrust will get your jumpship out to a jump point far more quickly and efficiently then going under power.

but it's very fast in terms of changing your location. if you have a shipyard made up of space stations, they can burn their station keep drives in one direction for five days, then another, and the only people who are going to find them will be those with information on their starting location and vector.

[Charistoph]

but it's very fast in terms of changing your location. if you have a shipyard made up of space stations, they can burn their station keep drives in one direction for five days, then another, and the only people who are going to find them will be those with information on their starting location and vector.

Again, not really that fast.  It might be enough to keep the shipyards occluded from jump points, but it is still rather slow.  Oh, you can get up to a decent clip in 5 days of time because you have nothing slowing you down, but those tugs would have it at that speed in less then half the time, and it sure as heck won't help you get clear of anyone trying to nail the shipyards.

Even if the shipyards were under constant movement, only changing vector every 5 days, they would need a beacon to track it down to deliver work crews and supplies.  That beacon could be just as easily tracked by an assault fleet.  They would also be aware of the pattern, if their intelligence is worth more than a PBI's on Leave in the Red Light District.

[Korzon77]

You wouldn't need a beacon--the shipyard knows where it is, and so it dispatches a messanger jumpship to resupply units with a one-time destination. The only people who know where teh shipyard is are those working on it.


mind you, this leads to drastically reduced productivity, so its entirley possibble that houses did that--and then pulled them into more vulnerable locations because they needed the ships now.

[Charistoph]

You wouldn't need a beacon--the shipyard knows where it is, and so it dispatches a messanger jumpship to resupply units with a one-time destination. The only people who know where teh shipyard is are those working on it.


mind you, this leads to drastically reduced productivity, so its entirley possibble that houses did that--and then pulled them into more vulnerable locations because they needed the ships now.

You do if the shipyard is constantly moving as proposed in what I quoted.  If you don't change your vector often enough, you may as well be staying in one place.  If you are changing your vector often, then those delivering supplies will need to know where to go, and space is vast.  By the time your messenger gets back, you will have already changed vectors, and need to know how to join vectors with the shipyard.

If you're not changing vectors in such a way that you don't need a beacon, then it is predictable and can be discovered by either tracking the supplies or by intelligence gathering methods.  That leads to being in the "might as well be staying in one place".

If you're using messenger jumpships, then the proposed "jumping in to the spot where the shipyard is" is a viable, if kamikaze-style, tactic.

[grimlock1]

Again, not really that fast.  It might be enough to keep the shipyards occluded from jump points, but it is still rather slow.  Oh, you can get up to a decent clip in 5 days of time because you have nothing slowing you down, but those tugs would have it at that speed in less then half the time, and it sure as heck won't help you get clear of anyone trying to nail the shipyards.

Even if the shipyards were under constant movement, only changing vector every 5 days, they would need a beacon to track it down to deliver work crews and supplies.  That beacon could be just as easily tracked by an assault fleet.  They would also be aware of the pattern, if their intelligence is worth more than a PBI's on Leave in the Red Light District.

Some napkin math.
a=3.2 ft/s^2
t=5 days=432,000 seconds

s=v_it+(at²)/2
Assume v_i zeros out.

A 5 day burn will move you about 56.6 million miles.   How does that compare with shipboard sensor ranges?

[Daryk]

Grimlock1 is on to the actual issue here... "Fast" in relation to what?  A constant acceleration of 0.1g is vastly superior to anything we can do now.  It's much less than what any ASF engine can do in the short run.  It all depends on what you mean by "fast"...

[Charistoph]

Grimlock1 is on to the actual issue here... "Fast" in relation to what?  A constant acceleration of 0.1g is vastly superior to anything we can do now.  It's much less than what any ASF engine can do in the short run.  It all depends on what you mean by "fast"...

Not actually true.  The shuttle used to reach 9g on take off.  I just pointed that the average VAN can pull .27g when accelerating to freeway speeds.  The average airliner is a bit stronger than that.  Reaching 0.1g really isn't that difficult for us.

The difference between us and them is the ability for constant acceleration.  We can easily set up a rocket to out-accelerate a jumpship or space station, we just can't do it for as long as a dropship can.  And then you consider the average commercial dropship usually requires 10x that acceleration to be useful, and military dropships are considerably stronger, "fast" isn't really a good qualifier for this situation.

Sure, you could move 56 million miles in 5 days, but then consider how much more efficient using a tug that could push it at 0.5-1g would be.

If you're trying to hide the shipyard by moving it, again, you have to be able to track it so you can get the necessary building and maintenance supplies to it, which means it has to be traceable, thereby defeating the whole point of moving it in the first place.

[Daryk]

*snip*
The difference between us and them is the ability for constant acceleration.
*snip*

That's exactly what I just said.  Interplanetary travel right now is measured in months and years.  A constant acceleration of even only 0.1g gets that down to days and weeks.  "Fast" is a relative term.  I'm not arguing that 0.1g is superior to 0.5 or 1.0g.  Just that it can be legitimately characterized as "fast" compared to what we can do today.

[Wrangler]

Do construction rules allow for large structures inside asteroids like Gabriel or Yakuza's asteroid resort/city from Heir to the Dragon?

[snewsom2997]

Do construction rules allow for large structures inside asteroids like Gabriel or Yakuza's asteroid resort/city from Heir to the Dragon?

Sure, it would be an environmentally sealed building with a large number of basements. I'd use the Castle Brian Rules.

[grimlock1]

Sure, you could move 56 million miles in 5 days, but then consider how much more efficient using a tug that could push it at 0.5-1g would be.

Moving large workpieces around be a lot easier at .1G than at .5G.

If you're trying to hide the shipyard by moving it, again, you have to be able to track it so you can get the necessary building and maintenance supplies to it, which means it has to be traceable, thereby defeating the whole point of moving it in the first place.

I suggested encrypting the destination's coordinates into the computer of the jumpship.  Include the shipyard's movement algorithm in that encryption. So the jump ship knows that every third Saturday, with a date ending in a prime number, the Shipyard will be within a million miles of a point, 101 million miles, galactic South of the systems nadir point.

Or the shipyard cuts thrust before the delivery is scheduled to arrive. Then when the jumpship arrives, they broadcast an authentication challenge.  That challenge is picked up by a relay sat that links to the shipyard via tightbeam transmission.  To prevent someone from guessing the shipyard's distance by doing some speed of light math, procedure is to delay all responses by some random time interval.
 

Okay, lets get even more evil than that.  The relay sat has a directionally¹ blind receiver, and it has 6 separate transmitters, all firing in different directions.  So if a bad guy grabs the relay sat, they know that the target is somewhere in one of six 1^ox1^o cone. If they had the proper challenge code, they could make some guesses at the range but again, we are going back to needle and haystack.

In the meantime, the shipyard can send a tight beam transmission to a jumpship sitting on standby, then go to silent running.  That ship jumps out and comes back with the cavalry.

Strat ops, pg 119 says radar can make a detection check on something up to 100,000 km out.  Is that the hard limit or do mods start stacking up to making finding something further out less likely?

Note 1:  Does anyone but me think its funny that spellcheck doesn't like "directionally" but "bidirectionally" is fine?

[idea weenie]

Adding on to Grimlock's:

Multiple receiver satellites within detection range of the jump point.  One of them (determined ahead of time by the space station's computers) sends the challenge.  The new arrival has hopefully been given the instructions:
"take the challenge code received, plus the coordinates you arrived at in our specific coordinate system, plug in the numbers into these equations, and send that confirmation code along the designated bearing to a second satellite"

This way the arrival can pop in, receive a signal from some bearing, but their response has to go to another direction.  Add in a few million other satellites to throw followers off the trail.

[Hellraiser]

Weirdo pretty much nailed it.

But I wouldn't completely say "secrecy" is out of the question.

It just needs to be "Blakist" levels of secrecy.

I mean, they made entire systems "disappear" and yet, they were always there.

I think Gabriel is a great example of combining what Weirdo has said & also being secret.

Make it a populated system, with other stations/shipyards if possible, preferably in the center of your nation just to add a little difficulty getting there.

But then do what you can to hide that traffic & supplies as going to the other locations in the system.

Using Terra as an example.
The main world is Earth with loads of resources & people & food,
You also have a mining colony on Mars, you also have a Jumpship/Dropship/ASF shipyard out at Titan, but your secret warship yard is hidden in the main asteroid belt.

Hide your traffic in with the rest of the traffic, falsify logs, have the MIIO secretly in charge of Air Traffic Control in this system.

Then, when all else fails, you have a full ASF regiment & a flotilla of dropships hidden at the shipyard for the final surprise defense if someone actually manages to find you.

[Charistoph]

Moving large workpieces around be a lot easier at .1G than at .5G.

The original question was about moving a Jumpship to a jump point under their own power.  In this case, a tug is far more effective.

I suggested encrypting the destination's coordinates into the computer of the jumpship.  Include the shipyard's movement algorithm in that encryption. So the jump ship knows that every third Saturday, with a date ending in a prime number, the Shipyard will be within a million miles of a point, 101 million miles, galactic South of the systems nadir point.

That is obtainable data which can be captured by either intelligence efforts or by the capture of such information before it gets purged.

Or the shipyard cuts thrust before the delivery is scheduled to arrive. Then when the jumpship arrives, they broadcast an authentication challenge.  That challenge is picked up by a relay sat that links to the shipyard via tightbeam transmission.  To prevent someone from guessing the shipyard's distance by doing some speed of light math, procedure is to delay all responses by some random time interval.

Broadcasts can be traced, and if you aren't careful, even a laser-link can be tapped if someone is on the right path.  Again, the problem isn't the jumpship, but leading the dropships to the station.

Okay, lets get even more evil than that.  The relay sat has a directionally¹ blind receiver, and it has 6 separate transmitters, all firing in different directions.  So if a bad guy grabs the relay sat, they know that the target is somewhere in one of six 1^ox1^o cone. If they had the proper challenge code, they could make some guesses at the range but again, we are going back to needle and haystack.

Transmission strength can narrow the distance down so long as you have a direction, if one has the proper equipment.

In the meantime, the shipyard can send a tight beam transmission to a jumpship sitting on standby, then go to silent running.  That ship jumps out and comes back with the cavalry.

They would have to be under complete silent running before that, too, otherwise, they can be traced by their transmissions that were going on before.  If your primary defense is to be a hole in space, then you need to be constantly practicing to be a hole in space.  This situation is no different from ballistic submarines (though for obviously much different reasons).  When they get in to a position to communicate, they are at their most vulnerable and trackable.  They don't just practice silent running when they know someone bad is around, they practice it all the time.

[truetanker]

In my AU, I have just released a third Odyssey QT yardship, she's based on the Odyssey class jumpship, pretty much looks like the same design, except they split open triangularly in the front. Slightly bulkier in the nose and aft due to the larger capacity in engines and shipbuilding facilities.

Now they weight the same, I tend to jump them in with like minded groups, never alone if I can't help it.

I station them as close to a Solar event as possible, one to provide a quick-charge and two to hide " in plain sight ". Who'd think of moving towards a sun? I'd also slow Tug any product away from the area providing I have another Odyssey around to take it. I also station a smaller group of other Odyssey near the Jump points to, one: ensure safety of the operation ( I can just jump away leading them out ), two: provide raw material transportation and three: security for said operations. Fourthly is to aid in quick charging my others when needed.

Can't find me if you can't tell which one is who either! So far my players haven't found any of my three yardships! Came close to discover where once or twice, but not have as of yet lately! ( I still haven't moved two of them.... Only the third one is moving to a  ;)! )

TT