Re: Blacker than Black

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That's still a pretty difficult battle to arrange.
 
An invading fleet coming in system at .2c would take a couple of months
to reach earth from a realspace entry at the edge of the system. 
 
A defending fleet based on an in system base would need to take off to
intercept and they want to intercept the enemy as far away as possible.
If they want some kind of sustained engagement then they need to match
vector with the attacking fleet, that is a pretty big delta.
 
If the attacking fleet wants to engage the target planet with anything
other than a brief flyby, then they need to spend a lot of energy to
slow down to the target planet velocity vector.
 
It also means that for a fleet to operate together they need the same
thrust capability. This is quite different from how GZG fleets are
designed.

From: Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com>
To: gzg@firedrake.org
Sent: Tuesday, 15 November 2011 3:41 AM
Subject: Re: Blacker than Black

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On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 11:05 PM, John Tailby
<john_tailby@xtra.co.nz>wrote:

> [...]
>
> Unless ships can jump relatively close to their destination it will
take
> them month's	or years to get to an inner planet in a way that matches
> velocity with the target planet. Vast amounts of reaction mass would
be
> needed to accelerate a ship and then deccelerate it at the other end
of the
> journey.
>

John G Hemry (of the Lost Fleet series that some on here know) shows
this
quite well in his novels. To overcome the vast distances in a solar
system,
he has all his combat happening at relativistic speeds of 0.1 to 0.2c.
Still, it takes hours and days to get into engagement range, and
everyone
can see everybody sooner or later (he also deals with light travel time
of
how long it takes before a defending unit will see an intruding fleet,
just
due to the time it takes for the photons to get from the intruding ships
to
the defending detectors).

Mk