Operation Jackroot

Operation Jackroot was a top-secret program started by the Gudersnipe Foundation during the Kamian Succession Wars. The program involved building freightors and cargo-haulers that could deceive Kamian sensors and appear as capitol-class starships. While officially "classified", the scope of the program was so large that it really could not be kept much of a secret. It did not make much difference, however, because it was so effective in it's primary goal that the Kamian's knowledge of it could not underride the program.

Premise

Early in the war, during the Battleship Crisis, the Foundation pressed into service many retrofit cargo ships augmented with weapons systems left over from obsolete warships. Called "scrappers", these ships had extremely questionable value as warships, and were largely relegated to escort duties. Against all odds, the scrappers proved highly successful. Any conflict usually went poorly for the ad-hoc vessels, yet in every convoy they were assigned to the odds of a Kamian attack dropped by half, and this percentage only increased the more scrappers were sent along.

At this point, the Foundation discovered two things about the Kamians: they had no inteligence network to speak of, and their long range sensors were not very good. The Kamians did not know about the scrappers, and when they scanned the supply convoys at long range, the shape and arrangement of the ships led the Kamians to conclude that they were full-armed warships.

With this in mind, the Foundation spun up a program to capitolize on these defficiencies by building supply ships and troop transports that were specifically designed to look like(and appear on sensors as) warships.

Jackroot

Code-named Jackroots, these ships fell into two categories, called "mockups" and "semis".

Jackroot Mockup

A mockup was literally just an empty shell placed over a fairly standard freightor, and equipped with systems that mimicked weapons arrays. The Foundation had ways of creating uranium shadows and shorting power contuits to make the "hat" appear on sensors as a heavily armed warship. They were cheaply made and should not have been very effective; in fact the idea had occured to the Foundation before the war, but never been implimented because the could not fool Foundation sensors. Kamian sensors, it turned out, were much cruder than anticipated, and the ruse worked.

Early mockups went over existing transports, but later in the war they began building customized ships that could do the job more effectively while still remaining inexpensive. Some of the more elaborate mockups even split in half, to make loading and unloading of standardized shipping containers easier.

Jackroot Semis

Semis were much more dangerous to Kamians and entered a little later in the war. These ships looked like large dreadnaughts externally, and employed the same kind of shawoing technology that made the massive gun turrets appear functional, while inside they were packed with supplies. The Semis, however, held a surprise for any Kamians foolhardy enough to assault them: while the guns were fake, the ships carried full on missile and torpedo systems on par with the ships they mimicked. While they lacked armor and the rigid structures of actual battleships(to make room inside for more supplies), the wapon systems gave them serious teeth, and many small Kamian raiding parties were fooled into attacks.

Jackroot Success

By the early mid-war, the Foundation had fielded enough mockups and semis to cause Kamians serious problems. Since Kamian tactics relied heavily on disrupting supply lines, their efforts were completely disrupted. A kamian task-force, relying on long-range sensors, could not tell if they were facing a lightly-armed supply convoy or a heavily armed fleet. To make matters even worse, the Foundation frequently mixed actual battleships in with the jackroots, sometimes sending out entire task forces just to bait the Kamians.

This rather effectively stalled out the war, and kept the Kamians rooted for some time.

In at least one instance late in the war, the Foundation sent a massive fleet of Jackroots along with a single task force(roughly 10 jackroots for each actual warship) to route a Kamian offensive. The gambit was successful, without a single shot being fired.