We know there's some degree of trickery involved, because we know that Yu Jing used captured Nomad ships as part of a ruse to breach PanOceanian defenses during the NeoColonial Wars.
Not the same thing... They just needed to "switch the plates" just in case PanO knew those ships were in YJ's hands, and used those cargo ships to deliver extra troops dirtside. Another thing entirely is to move a YJ military cargo hauler that looks to be able to carry X tons of stuff and no more than Y troops (because Life Support), then suddenly it was X*5 tons and Y*2 troops. Or Dio all along!
Well, I'm not sure that's what happened during The Battle of the Dividing Line, but it's not given in any detail (yet) so I guess we'll see in the future.
Look at it this way: one thing is to use third party's captured ships to move stuff, another entirely is to try to pass your ships as something else (or someone else's), since then you have to disguise the profile and the like. Kinda like trying to get into enemy lines dressed as a soldier of the enemy's, or just with the radio and your own uniform (leaving aside the war convetions about spies, that is).
Dividing Line is key because apparently the advantage of having those actual Nomad ships outweighs the disadvantage of committing an act of war against a currently-neutral power while you’re already in the middle of a massive war. We don’t have many facts, but to me that tells us a lot about the effectiveness of ship ‘disguise’, in that whatever it can do it isn’t good enough to get through heavy wartime defences, and also tells us those defenses are set up to ‘trust’ neutral vessels without stopping them for inspection. There are a lot of different ways to explain that, but to me, that indicates some sort of incredibly-hard-to-spoof transponder system. PanO saw Nomad ships and had no reason to suspect they might be otherwise even in a time of war where attacks were expected. Yu Jing needed Nomad ships because faking the look of them with foam or custom-replicated hulls or fake IFF modules wasn’t going to be enough.
Or YJ needed hulls and had none at hand, thus deciding to use the captured ones. It was somewhat common with captured ships during the age of sail...
They didn’t just grab hulls, though, in a setting where private spacecraft are cheap enough to be commonplace. They committed an act of war against the Nomad Nation by capturing, specifically, Nomad vessels, while trying to win a war vs PanO. Nomads have not-insignificant presence across space theatres, have a great power vote at O-12... That is a pretty excessive price if it’s just need for hulls.
It depends. More data is needed, since YJ getting away with it might mean any number of things. Like impounded hulls because smuggling within YJ's home system. And "private spacecraft are cheap enough to be commonplace" does not mean automatically that you can stop your shipyard production, churn out something in a few days, and resume whatever you were doing. It just means that it's not hard to have your own Serenity... as a group of PCs. In my 4x experience, it is uncommon to be able to replenish your fleet at the rate you accumulate losses, regardless of how much worlds or resources you have... Well, you can spam "fraction of a turn" little stuff... but those tend to not hold a candle to the ships that take 4+ turns to craft. Or even 1 turn if you have a fully populated and developed Dyson Sphere...
Referencing the availability of private ships, I’m referring less to production capacity and more to the fact there are a lot of hulls out there to impound if you need them. Commandeering the ship of an independent captain or convoy of a private shipping corp would seem far wiser than taking the ships of a neutral great power with political influence, military forces, and presence across the Sphere.
As I said, not enough data. But there are some limiting factors on what YJ would *want* to impound: namely those that can carry what they need in the time they require, in enough of a good condition to get there for sure (or nearly), and the most important part of all, belonging to a group PanO would not insist (much) on board & search. Frankly, considering what "realpolitik" is and how it works, it would not surprise me in the least if there was some sort of backroom deal in which the Nomads approached a YJese contact and offered the ships, as long as they got paid (maybe even at a later date) as "reparations" for "trumped charges of smuggling" that led to the impounding of the ships... You know, since Nomads used to be in the habit, like Haqquislam and later Ariadna, to help YJ stay as a close threat to PanO's nº1 potence status...
I certainly can't present definitive proof against that possibility, but the RPG gives us at least a little detail on the event, and unlike the in-setting voices used to present material in the Infinity wargame books it comes in a much more 3rd-person objective account format: "Yu Jing mounted an assault on the Nomad Orbital Commercial Delegation at Aparecida and secretly seized Nomad intra-system vessels. These were used as Trojan horses to penetrate the defences of the Neoterra system, bringing the war to the doorstep of the Hyperpower." Above and beyond those facts, there is also a lot of context to let us interpret how things played out. In the Infinity setting books themselves, this event is presented alongside the PanO seizure of Haqqislam territory (an orbital elevator on Paradiso?) and I'd always thought those two violations were linked by the fact the violated powers realized responding by warring on the aggressor wouldn't solve the issue, the violations were the first, but whether Hyperpower or StateEmpire had done it the other would eventually and inevitably follow suit. That realization cements the Haqq-Nomad alliance in O-12 which works to force an end to the conflict. Thats veering a bit off-topic in content, but all together it makes a good argument for taking the account of Yu Jing seizing Nomad vessels at face value, rather than it being some sort of secret means for the Nomads to assist Yu Jing.
As Shiwen posted (quoted below for completeness), I doubt it. The Russians allowed Americans to use Russian navigation beacons for ships and aircraft during the Cold War. Same reason the US allowed everyone access to full-resolution GPS (after 1991). Helps keep other people from running into trouble, which makes you look good. Safety-of-Navigation items are shared by everyone, even when they're nominally an enemy. So are rescue items. I mean, all the major submarine-operating nations have a SUBSUNK hotline set up, and everyone brings whatever specialized gear they have the moment they get that message. The American DSRVs have been carried by Russian ships before. During the Cold War, IIRC. The USN was downright fucking pissed about the Kursk, since that crew died because the Russians didn't want the US to get any potentially-classified secrets. Very much this. It's actually a matter of international law that Safety-of-Navigation items are made available to everyone, they're called Notices to Airmen and Notices to Mariners. A nation that should have issued a Notice and didn't is legally responsible for any damages or loss of life. Yeah, making a false-flag op by stealing a third party's ship is ... risky, unless there were some backroom deals made.
Maneuverability in space is purely a function of power-to-weight ratio, though lighter craft have less inertia and will therefore start to change direction more quickly. Most 'vehicle ranges' should be described in terms of delta-vee, usually measured in meters per second, but picturing it in terms of fuel isn't too wrong. The downside of space is that the typical manned-fighter mission, go to the target and come back, takes not 2x the 'fuel' that it would in atmosphere, but roughly 4x. Because you need to accelerate to get to the target. You then need to come to a stop relative to your carrier to turn around, which takes just as much 'fuel' as you spent getting to the target. Then you need to accelerate to get back to your home carrier, and come to a stop in order to be able to land. So there's very little chance of a crew on the spaceship carrying missiles and jammer units, unless said spaceship is very close to the size of an actual warship itself. Depends on where you are fighting. There's basically no fighting in deep space, the various transit paths work out that the only way someone will meet you halfway is when they are doing so deliberately (as in, act of war deliberately!). And if they are coming from the place you are going to, they're going to have so much speed that any hit, even kitty litter, will be catastrophic. Not to mention that you're only getting that one pass. Much more likely would be combat relatively close to a planet, call it inside the orbit of the Moon if we were fighting around Earth. Inside the stationary orbits. So there's a lot more stuff to hide behind and more stuff to have to avoid hitting with weapons fire. In game terms, Dropfleet Commander is much more likely than battles in the Klingon Neutral Zone. Engines capable of even 1 gee are pretty damn magical. At least if we're talking extended periods. Aircraft get to use the atmosphere as an inertial sump and can turn so hard that pilots are endangered. Not as much of a threat to spaceships. I mean, our favorite 'shitty Martian ship,' the Rocinante, can only burn for about 0.25 gee for extended periods. Burning for more gees is possible, but it's at the expense of burn duration (Epstein Drives are amazingly throttlable, most real rockets aren't anywhere near that adjustable. To the point that any given engine basically has one 'gear' that it runs in.)
There are a lot of assumptions in the Infinity universe which suggest that things aren't as "sharing-caring" as we are today and have been in the past. But to be blunt we don't actually have any info on system wide sensor networks (and potential use of them) so I'm going to continue to run my games on the basis that they don't exist. Detecting enemy ships has a system, using the ratings of the ship, and I'll be using that. *shrugs* There's a point past which I don't care about the "real world" and would rather talk about the actual setting and what's described in it. This conversation has strayed well past that so I will tap out 'till it comes back around. Good discussion 'though, it's been interesting.
Yeah, we are talking about adding 9.8 meters each second to the speed of the ship... Then again, since there is nothing braking, the actual speed keeps going up, so even an "a" of 2m/s2 adds to a lot fast. Epstein drives... there is a loophole here: the guy died because he was unable to turn the engine off... because the g generated was too much for him to reach the disable button. Leaving aside all the bad engineering involved (no timer placed, the off button out of reach, etc...) and regardless of how conscious the books were (the throttle stick went to the armrest in the designs after that), I found hard to believe that the Epstein Drive was only able to generate 0.25g of acceleration, since that is 3.77m/s2... and 0.25g is about 2.45m/s2. Incidentally, Circulars demand some explanations to work... Those are, after all, humongous ships (little more, in fact, that docking clamps, an engine, a Minotaur engine to go through the black holes, and installations for the crew... at a minimum), so the question is how do those turn around? I assume that passenger ships just undock and use the speed the Circular was travelling at as a start, and if the Circular has to turn around, most ships will dock when it's moving at its slowest (to save fuel).
I haven't read everything, so I don't know if the Circulars are explained somewhere. I know the rpg briefly describe the Circulars using Villa booster to decelerate. However if I was designing it, I would use some nearby planetary gravity well to slingshot the Circulars around to point them back at the wormhole. I believe the first wormhole in the setting was found not to far from Saturn, but I don't remember where the others are. Using a planet to circle around and change direction would be very energy efficient. It would make for extended time in-system, (days, weeks or more, depending how far the wormholes are from a planet.) That extended time, as long as it was not too long, would just be extra time for out-going ships to rendezvous and hook up with the Circular.
Yeah I'd say that if I were writing it? Circulars would never intentionally decelerate, and would instead run continuously at relatively high speeds, requiring vessels to dock and undock from them. Deceleration is very fuel expensive for something that big!
If you decelerate, you then need to accelerate... as Section9 mentioned, double the doubled fuel consumption! If they slingshot... Then they go inside a System. Which means tons of time coasting without making money, and tons of extra maintenance required since they will go through the denser parts of space (planetary systems). Plus Piracy becomes kinda impossible. Problem: How do you return to the black hole used to FTL between those two star systems?
The big booster rings, most likely. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a set which only the circulars used to turn around, in a circle route back to the worm hole. Also, there are always gonna be a lot of assumptions about space combat, and also worth noting, if you have artificial gravity, you can use that as an 'anchor' of sorts to decelerate - so ships could be much more fuel efficient about slowing down. Hell, if you are in a setting with a 'warp drive' system, you could use that on approach to drag yourself into engagement range... point being there are a lot of hypothetical items which muddy any 'realistic' water because so much depends on the discovery of new materials to enable technologies we currently only have theories on, rather than working models.
That would require enough engineering to compete with Star Wars' scale... Circulars are already massive, you would need something that can grab it, send it back, and SOMEHOW compensate all that momentum the Circular just transferred to it. There is a reason a screwdriver in space is an engineering marvel that rotates in two ways at once! Assuming you can project gravity, instead of just making something that increases mass or projects an attraction field or... The Outrage manga, incidentally, suggest artificial gravity's existence because I doubt the Caravansaries the Druze had were massive enough to generate their own natural gravity XD. In which case, why bother speaking about it? Why bother thinking? Why bother at all? In other words, if you are not interested in the thread, don't participate. Please, do not ruin the fun.
