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GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets

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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by Alizon   » Thu May 15, 2014 7:18 pm

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Well, the likely targest of the Alliance depend in most cases on far more political situations than strictly military ones.

It also has a lot to do with the resources you have an what you are trying to achieve.

So here's a couple of questions that you really have to answer before you start picking out targets.

1) What resources do you actually have? This one isn't as obvious as most people might think. I mean, all you have to do is look at one of the more recent infodumps, count hulls, make a few extrapolations and presto, you have the Alliance fleet or a fair approximation of it. There's you're resources, what else do you need to know. Just fill them up with missiles and send them off through the wormwhole.

But wait, how many of those ships can you really afford to send? Someone just destroyed virtually the entire heavy industrial structure of the Manticore and Yeltsin systems and really, nobody really knows how they did it or even if they could stop them from doing it again.

How many strikes like that can the Alliance actually afford before their systems are in serious trouble. Worse, you don't even know who did it or where they are so you can't just point your SD's noses at the enemy and tell them to destroy.

How many heavily populated and industrial cities are in the Alliance? What do you need to actually defend them. I mean we know this force has limitations, we know that they're probably not on their way to Haven even as we speak. But how much to the Alliance members really know and how much are they willing to risk to go beat up on the Solly's?

2) What is your goal with the Solarians. Are you seeking utter distruction or would you just prefer that they left you alone, or is it something in between. Do you really want to destabilize the League to the extent it disintegrates or are you looking for some other form of end game.

3) What is your goal for yourself? If you manage to actually cause the League to fall apart, what does that mean for the mighty Manty Merchant Marine. Most of their trade is with the League. How badly do you want all of that to fall into chaos. Are you ready to start providing armed escorts ala Silesia but on a super steroid League wide scale? Are you looking to extend your empire and become one of the post break up squabbling League successor states?

Maybe you do hold the fate of the League in your hands. What are you going to do with it?

Once you determine what you really have to work with, and what you want the result to be, then the targets will become apparent a lot more apparent.

For example, a lot of discussion has been had here about destroying shipyards and missile manufactures. If you're looking at nothing but achieving a military victory and destroying the League's ability to wage war, these become reasonably high priority targets. If, on the other hand you want to win the way via economic collapse then maybe civilian yards and significant economic infrastructure are the highest priority targets. Let's say you want to preserve the League but want to keep it off your back while you search for the people who really are a threat. In that case the target list will be one designed to keep the League disrupted rather than smashed to flinders.

What I'm saying is that there is no one single target list because that list is created to achieve a specific goal, not the other way around. What might be a high priority target for one purpose might actually hurt you if you have another.

and depending on what those goals are, it may very well mean that you don't really care al
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by kzt   » Thu May 15, 2014 8:18 pm

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Yup, I can figure out ways to use up hundreds of hyper-capable hulls protecting just Manticore against a repetition, and I'm not sure it will work. It sure would suck to have everything almost rebuilt and then they blow up real good right before the defenses go live....

So if I was running the Haven/Grayson/Manticore government I'd not be really excited about sending most of my fleet out to go push chicks into the pond while someone who really seems to hate me is out there awaiting a chance to do something spectacular.

As a reader don't forget the MAN spider SDs are being built and they were planned to be able to take out Haven as well as Manticore/Grayson. It's pretty likely that they really do know what they are doing and can pull it off again via some sort of different tactic if given a chance.
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by Imaginos1892   » Thu May 15, 2014 11:42 pm

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First, I suspect that Technodyne and Yildun are pretty high up on one Aivars Terekhov's own personal Shit List, and that he'd really, really like to show them just how...prominent they are.

Second, as I pointed out in the other topic, Manticore's best target is not shipyards or infrastructure, but ships. The ISLN's existing ships pose no significant threat, so they must be prevented from obtaining better ones.

Send out a lot of destroyers and light cruisers to scout every system that might be building those ships. When found, wait until they are almost finished, then shoot 'em up a lot. This will waste as much of the League's resources as possible.

Third, Technodyne is one of the most likely outfits to be building those ships, so Terekhov will probably get his wish.

Without ships that can effectively threaten Manticore, the details of the League's decline are relatively unimportant.
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Last edited by Imaginos1892 on Thu May 15, 2014 11:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by boballab   » Thu May 15, 2014 11:46 pm

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JohnRoth wrote:There's a Technodyne of Yildun and a Technodyne of Mesa. Are they the same company? I don't know of any textev that says they are; in fact I wouldn't be suprised if "Technodyne of Mesa" was a copyedit error and it should be Technodyne of Yildun.


Could be as you surmised as an error or Technodyne of Mesa is just like Cocoa Cola France of today, a subsidiary of a large multinational corporation.

I personally lean to the second option.
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"I'd like to think that someone in the Navy somewhere has at least the IQ of a gerbil!" Rear Admiral Rozsak on the officers in the SLN
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by Crown Loyalist   » Fri May 16, 2014 10:06 am

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Alizon wrote:
2) What is your goal with the Solarians. Are you seeking utter distruction or would you just prefer that they left you alone, or is it something in between. Do you really want to destabilize the League to the extent it disintegrates or are you looking for some other form of end game.


The goal with the Solarians has to be the death of the Solarian League as a unified polity with a single military and single foreign policy. Full stop.

The Solarian League, if allowed to modernize its military, is at least as big a threat to the Grand Alliance's future independence and survival as Mesa is. The Solarian League is a nation that if it modernizes will without question have the ability to destroy Manticore. It doesn't even need to modernize that much to have that ability with its massive, massive size advantage.

For that reason alone, Manticore cannot now allow it to survive. Manticore survived through the Solarian League's unwillingness to use force to compel it to join before (which was probably a product of the protection it had within the league from Beowulf's ability to veto a declaration of war, its contacts with the Solarian league media through the wormhole, it's control over the financial system, etc).

Now that shots have been fired, Beowulf's withdrawn from the league, and the League's economy is already in shambles, the League has every incentive to crush Manticore to ensure that it cannot use its wormhole to dominate interstellar trade again. If the League manages to recover from this, it must destroy Manticore's independence. And if the League has managed to recover from this, it will have the ability to do so.

Manticore doesn't have a choice. It has a brief window of opportunity here to eliminate an enemy that has the intention to destroy it, and will (if left unchecked) have the capability to destroy it. The League must be smashed and broken and left for dead, Manticore has no other option.

But, that doesn't mean shooting up the League, it means the Harrington plan of breaking the League up into smaller units with their own militaries and foreign policies that individually Manticore can compete with and make deals with. You can't kill the League by blowing it up. That'll just make it more stubborn.
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by namelessfly   » Fri May 16, 2014 10:36 am

namelessfly

Amen!


Remember; Detweiller was motivated to order the Oyster Bay attacks to occur ahead of schedule that targeted Manticore and Yelstin but not Haven after he learned of Harrington's first use of the Apollo system. He was able to deduce that the RMN had developed FTL control links.

The implication is that Detweiller was confident that his spider drive SDs could defeat MDM armed SD(P)s that did not have Apollo.

Another implication of the original plan to include Haven in the OB attacks is that Detweiller knows where Bolthole is.

Manticore, Grayson and especially Haven which has over 100 systems have to reserve the majority of their fleets to guard their home systems.

kzt wrote:Yup, I can figure out ways to use up hundreds of hyper-capable hulls protecting just Manticore against a repetition, and I'm not sure it will work. It sure would suck to have everything almost rebuilt and then they blow up real good right before the defenses go live....

So if I was running the Haven/Grayson/Manticore government I'd not be really excited about sending most of my fleet out to go push chicks into the pond while someone who really seems to hate me is out there awaiting a chance to do something spectacular.

As a reader don't forget the MAN spider SDs are being built and they were planned to be able to take out Haven as well as Manticore/Grayson. It's pretty likely that they really do know what they are doing and can pull it off again via some sort of different tactic if given a chance.
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by Hutch   » Fri May 16, 2014 11:39 am

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namelessfly wrote:Amen!


Remember; Detweiller was motivated to order the Oyster Bay attacks to occur ahead of schedule that targeted Manticore and Yelstin but not Haven after he learned of Harrington's first use of the Apollo system. He was able to deduce that the RMN had developed FTL control links.

The implication is that Detweiller was confident that his spider drive SDs could defeat MDM armed SD(P)s that did not have Apollo.

Another implication of the original plan to include Haven in the OB attacks is that Detweiller knows where Bolthole is.

Manticore, Grayson and especially Haven which has over 100 systems have to reserve the majority of their fleets to guard their home systems.

kzt wrote:Yup, I can figure out ways to use up hundreds of hyper-capable hulls protecting just Manticore against a repetition, and I'm not sure it will work. It sure would suck to have everything almost rebuilt and then they blow up real good right before the defenses go live....

So if I was running the Haven/Grayson/Manticore government I'd not be really excited about sending most of my fleet out to go push chicks into the pond while someone who really seems to hate me is out there awaiting a chance to do something spectacular.

As a reader don't forget the MAN spider SDs are being built and they were planned to be able to take out Haven as well as Manticore/Grayson. It's pretty likely that they really do know what they are doing and can pull it off again via some sort of different tactic if given a chance.



I dissent, along with Crown Loyalist.

You may want...even need...to leave the majority of their ships at home to protect against the MAlignment...but if they do not press their advantage against the SL now, then 10 years from now 11,000 SLN SD(P)'s show up and you are well and totally screwed.

War is always a matter of taking risks--and in this case, the GA is going to have to risk, for at least a couple of years, MAlign attacks on (possibly) under-defended systems while pressing the attack (and dismemberment) of the SL.

IMHO as always. YMMV.
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What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here! Boom. Sooner or later. BOOM! -LT. Cmdr. Susan Ivanova, Babylon 5
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by Weird Harold   » Fri May 16, 2014 11:42 am

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namelessfly wrote:Another implication of the original plan to include Haven in the OB attacks is that Detweiller knows where Bolthole is.


Textev? The only link between Bolthole and the Malign is:

A Rising Thunder
Chapter 28
QE3 thoughts
wrote:
But crazy as it sounds, it actually makes sense—a lot of sense, she thought. We’re pretty sure that if we couldn’t figure out where Bolthole was, the Sollies—and probably the Alignment—don’t know, either. God knows we had a lot more incentive to find it than either of them did! So tucking our R&D projects away where no one with any invisible starships is likely to drop by to clean up what she missed the first time around strikes me as a very good idea. And from what Theisman and Eloise have shown us, Bolthole’s going to be a damned good place to start putting all that new hardware into production on a really large scale quickly, once we’ve made a few upgrades.


That isn't proof the MAlign doesn't know where Bolthole is, but I can't find ANY textev that they do/
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

(Now if I could just find the right questions.)
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by Crown Loyalist   » Fri May 16, 2014 12:06 pm

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Hutch wrote:I dissent, along with Crown Loyalist.

You may want...even need...to leave the majority of their ships at home to protect against the MAlignment...but if they do not press their advantage against the SL now, then 10 years from now 11,000 SLN SD(P)'s show up and you are well and totally screwed.

War is always a matter of taking risks--and in this case, the GA is going to have to risk, for at least a couple of years, MAlign attacks on (possibly) under-defended systems while pressing the attack (and dismemberment) of the SL.

IMHO as always. YMMV.


I'm not convinced that "pushing the advantage" involves deep strikes on the League, though. At this point, winning the war with the League involves diplomatic initiatives - not with the League government, but with all the League systems that are currently contemplating secession.
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Re: GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets
Post by kzt   » Fri May 16, 2014 12:13 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:That isn't proof the MAlign doesn't know where Bolthole is, but I can't find ANY textev that they do/

Oh, they didn't back then. That was then, this is now, and they have been working on this project. Unlike the RMN, the MA has at least one very skilled agent on Haven, with serious security clearances and considerable hacking skill.

In addition I understand they intend to ship a whole bunch of new people to Bolthole. Every time you expand the number of people to whom you expose secrets you increase your attack surface by at least that much.
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