From: mikkelhaaheim@gmail.com   
      
   Le mercredi 13 juillet 2016 03:13:18 UTC+2, Rick Pikul/Chakat Firepaw a   
   écrit :   
      
   > Assuming you can hit them.  Even if the locations and orbits of the    
   > platforms are 100% known, all they have to do is have a solar sail and    
   > tweak their orbit every couple months and you don't know where it's going    
   > to be in a year when your KKV arrives.   
      
   Not quite so easy as that. Useful platforms with considerable range and/or   
   field of view are going to be rather large and heavy. Solar sails have to be   
   incredibly large just to accelerate small masses on the order of a few kg, let   
   alone a few tonnes.    
   Keep in mind that the sails are essentially giant mirrors... they won't   
   reflect a quality optical image, but they WILL reflect a bright one. Your   
   solar sail will make it more likely to track the platform because it will be   
   shining brilliantly sun-side,    
   and occluding a nice patch of sun on its "dark" side (that is, you will see a   
   big dot where sunlight is supposed to be.    
      
      
   >    
   > It also wouldn't be that strange for such platforms to have one or more    
   > "oh shit" rockets that allow them to make a rapid manoeuvre once or twice    
   > during their service life.  (To react to things like, say, something that    
   > appears to be a KKV adjusting course to counter a solar sail 'jink'   
      
   it might... but it is not going to be able to make accurate observations if it   
   is jinking all the time, so sending in a drone to keep it occupied serves the   
   same purpose... until it DOES manage a track and kill. OTOH, the platform is   
   likely to have some    
   of those OTHER "oh shit" rockets... the kind that go boom when attackers get   
   too close.   
   You are right that killing the platforms will not always be easy, and you   
   might not get all of them... but you are going to take out as many as you can.   
      
      
      
   >    
   >    
   > Another problem with a 'kill the sensor net' plan is that making it    
   > useful for hiding your fleet movements means giving up any pretence of    
   > strategic surprise.  The first reaction to large parts of the sensor net    
   > going down is going to be shifting to a state of high alert.   
      
   There is strategic stealth, but there is also tactical stealth. Even when you   
   are at full out war, and very non-stealthy engagements are raging, stealth can   
   be applied at lesser scales to allow a critical mission to succeed. Sometimes,   
   the best stealth    
   method is simply to overwhelm all the counter-stealth tech, until the enemy no   
   longer has the resources to detect one last stealth manoeuvre.   
      
      
   >    
   > --    
      
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