LegioCI wrote:I always liked the idea, in-universe, of combining a relativistic bombardment with hyperspace travel.
Velocity is an important component in the success of a hyperspace jump. As with varying jump position, varying jump velocity will affect the exit location in the destination system. Jumping with higher than optimal velocity will bring you out of hyperspace deeper into the system (this is exactly what the new Umiak "deep jump" group is doing in page 129). Too much velocity will push you into the bottom of the destination gravity well, and you will collide with the star. Jumping at a high fraction of lightspeed will result in a star collision pretty much 100% of the time, so relativistic attack and hyperspace travel don't go well together.
Using unmanned starships to try to jump farther than normal could work, but even if you double normal range, that still doesn't reach you any juicy targets. It's quite possible to bull-rush a border system to try to overwhelm the defenders and get to the next interior system; this has been done many times in the past, and so any major population center within 1 or 2 jumps of the front has already been hit or evacuated in the past. Major infrastructure or population centers tend to be at least 4 jumps from any uncontrolled system, and well defended.
Because of the power requirements of the jump field generator and inertial dampers, the smallest possible jump-capable "drone" is still a very substantial vessel (at the tech level of the Loroi or Umiak) in the 75 meter range. This is a fairly expensive piece of hardware to deploy in the thousands that you'd need to reliably reach difficult jump targets. But even for those few that make it, they are still subject to interception by defenders. They might catch the defenses off-guard by arriving at an unexpected location in the system (jump points that are considered impossible won't have nearby defenses), but they will still have to penetrate the local defenses of any planet or other infrastructure that they attack. As reconnaissance, each drone would have to survive two consecutive highly improbably jumps; if I remember my combinatorics correctly, the odds of surviving two 1-in-100 events is 1-in-10,000.
Reconnaissance in Outsider must generally be done in force; if the enemy sees you popping scouts in and out of a jump point, they will station defenses there (if there aren't any already) to attack them.
entity2636 wrote:The idea is not to jump in and out undetected, rather jump in release the unpowered ordnance on the appropriate course, *Hai, just passing through, bye!", and either going for another jump zone or doing a powered turn and jumping out. Of course the ship would be detected and interceptors would be launched, but it will also take them considerable time to catch the ship, and by that time the enemy ship may have jumped back out again.
Any jump point that you expect the enemy might use will have some kind of defenses. Often there is an armed station nearby (as with Leido-Sala Post and Gora Relay in Leido Crossroads), but at the very least there will be a tracking station. Jump travel is not stealthy; the arrival of an object from hyperspace is announced with a bright flash of light that is visible from across the system. Any ship arriving from a known jump point will be observed, as will any weapon launches.
But again, any system that you can reasonably reach with a single jump does not have much in the way of planetary infrastructure for your drone to attack.