TrashMan wrote:Well, granted, I didn't check the distance. But it's not supposed to be practical. It's supposed to be damaging.A gaint act of defince.
Aside from mass drivers being an incredibly poor way to perform STL interstellar bombardment (even today we Terrans would do...
have done far better with self-propelled projectiles)...how is it supposed to
accomplish anything? Your target civilization and possibly several successor civilizations are likely to have come and gone before your projectiles reach their system.
TrashMan wrote:Nah. Their range isn't that great, especially depending on the location (looks at loroi sensor range in the polyphioid). You dont' even have to place them in Sol..Regardless, systems are big. They're no going to detect several gun platfroms that are hidden well enough. It might take hours for the rounds to hit. It doesn't matter. It will take the Loroi/Umiak far longer than that to reach Earth. You're not dodging a bullet you don't know is coming. I'm talking about vriant 2 here.
Uh...no. First, they
will be visible across the system. Systems are big, but almost all of them are also very empty, extremely cold and quiet. Something with a powerplant capable of running a large, long-range mass driver weapon will be visible. Even if you managed to thoroughly disguise one as a random asteroid or non-military installation, it would become obvious as soon as it fired...it would also be obvious it had just fired a shot, and it's quite plausible that the shot itself will be visible on active or passive sensors, especially since they'll have a decent idea where to look. And your mass driver platforms need sensors too...ones capable of not only detecting the enemy, but of tracking their trajectory with enough accuracy that you can hit them with a ballistic projectile...you want Terran sensors to do this from beyond
detection range of Loroi or Umiak sensors?
Second, it's going to take 13 hours for a Terran mass driver projectile to cross even just the Loroi/Umiak maximum weapon range. An hourly evasive maneuver isn't going to substantially cut into either side's delta-v budgets. Even if their sensors were damaged or impaired by an unusual environment like the proplyd and you had unimpaired sensors and a mass driver with sufficient accuracy in aim and launch velocity, you couldn't hit them.
Third, even that assumes they'll even be going slow enough for your projectile to overtake them. Terran mass drivers don't even have enough velocity to escape solar orbit from 30 AU out. Even Terran vessels transiting a system will do so at such high velocities that a mass driver round fired at their backs from a fixed defense would only fall behind. A defense station would have to be positioned close to the target's planned trajectory to have any chance at all of doing anything. Randomizing trajectories to prevent such an ambush is straightforward.
TrashMan wrote:Frankly, varriant 1, sticking mass driver platforms 10000km from eachother in a box-like pattern all over the jump point, sounds like a better approach.
Sure you're gonna need a LOT of them, but since they are just rudimentary and automated, their cost and construction time will be just a fraction of any warship.
Sure, the Loroi (or especially Umiak) will swat them down like flies. But each platfrom is one gun and you got hunderds, thousands of them. The overall loss of firepower for losing them individually is tiny.
You're wildly underestimating the cost of such an endeavor. Filling a 1 AU^3 volume with such defenses would take 15000^3 = 3
trillion platforms.