Hyperspace Combat and the Solarian Leauge Navy

Roguevictory wrote:...Finally some people seem to think the SLN will score a decisive victory in energy range, ...

It's not so much that the SLN will score a decisive victory as that Energy Range is the only kind of fight the SLN has any chance of any kind of victory.

Roguevictory wrote:Ok having just read the whole topic I want to say a few things. First forcing a fleet action in hyperspace might be possible but the odds are very low, and the odds on the SLN managing to force enough such actions to turn the tide of the war are almost nil IMO. They might be able to hit a few convoys in hyper but odds are that if such raids start becoming more than an annoyance the GA can dig their Q-ships out or build more, and their weapons match or exceed the weaponry of any ship the SLN is likely to send convoy raiding. Finally some people seem to think the SLN will score a decisive victory in energy range, when based on the energy range fights we've seen its more likely IMO that both sides will be shredded, and if uch a fight happens in a gravwave and ships start losing sails they are dead, which means a fight inside a gravwave is very, very likely to turn into a disaster for both sides.

None of us are suggesting that the SLN will be able to win a decisive victory in hyperspace combat that allows them to win the war. However; hyperspace,especially a gravity wave, isthe venue that negates the GA's advantae in long range missile combat. It could result in battles that are interesting to the reader and may be buy the SLN time.

namelessfly wrote:

Roguevictory wrote:Ok having just read the whole topic I want to say a few things. First forcing a fleet action in hyperspace might be possible but the odds are very low, and the odds on the SLN managing to force enough such actions to turn the tide of the war are almost nil IMO. They might be able to hit a few convoys in hyper but odds are that if such raids start becoming more than an annoyance the GA can dig their Q-ships out or build more, and their weapons match or exceed the weaponry of any ship the SLN is likely to send convoy raiding. Finally some people seem to think the SLN will score a decisive victory in energy range, when based on the energy range fights we've seen its more likely IMO that both sides will be shredded, and if uch a fight happens in a gravwave and ships start losing sails they are dead, which means a fight inside a gravwave is very, very likely to turn into a disaster for both sides.

None of us are suggesting that the SLN will be able to win a decisive victory in hyperspace combat that allows them to win the war. However; hyperspace,especially a gravity wave, isthe venue that negates the GA's advantae in long range missile combat. It could result in battles that are interesting to the reader and may be buy the SLN time.

Perhaps but would slowing the GA down really help? I mean if I understand correctly the GA will be producing Ships of the Wall faster than the SLN and have a massive tech advantage. Unless the defeat slows them down enough for the SLN to catch up techwise which I believe will take over a decade it might actually hurt more than help.

It buys time and is something they can do while other people try to convince.the SL to go to war. But ultimately it's not a war winning strategy.

Roguevictory wrote:

namelessfly wrote:
None of us are suggesting that the SLN will be able to win a decisive victory in hyperspace combat that allows them to win the war. However; hyperspace,especially a gravity wave, isthe venue that negates the GA's advantae in long range missile combat. It could result in battles that are interesting to the reader and may be buy the SLN time.

Perhaps but would slowing the GA down really help? I mean if I understand correctly the GA will be producing Ships of the Wall faster than the SLN and have a massive tech advantage. Unless the defeat slows them down enough for the SLN to catch up techwise which I believe will take over a decade it might actually hurt more than help.

Well, fighting in Hyperspace is, unfortunately, practically the only place where SLN heavy units (i.e. SD's) can engage Alliance heavy units with an hope of success. Even there it's a tricky proposition but hyperspace gives the SLN options both for success and survival that n-space doesn't offer.

No, I don't think you do understand correctly when estimating construction rates. With the yards and supporting industrial infrastructures gutted both at Manticore and Greyson, only the Andermani and Haven yards remain active and operational. While these yards can still produce a number of vessels, their production would pale beside the capabilities of the League. Whether they continue to build current designs is a question, but there's really not much of a debate that the League could, if it mobilized, swamp Alliance production. Even only partially mobilized as it is now, it shouldn't have much trouble keeping up with current Alliance production rates if they had anything worth producing.

And actually, yes, I do think that it would be possible for an SLN fleet in hyperspace could win important victories. It would depend on a number of things going the SLN's way and some solid SLN planning but yes, it could happen. Of course one has to define what SLN victory means at this point.

What the SLN needs to do is seriously blood the Alliance if only to show the League that it can be done. So even in defeat the SLN can accomplish a great deal if they can manage to take enough GA units with them.

A higher level of victory would be one where the SLN units to actually make a Alliance force turn aside from their objective.

Remember, anything remembling a bloody draw is going to represent a stunning victory for the SLN.

While you can't win the way in this way, you can, if successful, force the Alliance to proceed more cautiously and provide heavy unit support for any task forces penetrating into League space.

And yes, what the League most needs right now is time. It has the population, it has the industry and it has the wealth. What it desperately needs is the time to begin to pull all of this together. If the SLN can buy some of that with the equipment it currently has, then that helps give the League a chance in an outright conflict with the Alliance. I really don't see a scenario in which giving the League more time to sort itself out as being a bad thing for the League.

Alizon wrote:No, I don't think you do understand correctly when estimating construction rates. With the yards and supporting industrial infrastructures gutted both at Manticore and Greyson, only the Andermani and Haven yards remain active and operational. While these yards can still produce a number of vessels, their production would pale beside the capabilities of the League. Whether they continue to build current designs is a question, but there's really not much of a debate that the League could, if it mobilized, swamp Alliance production. Even only partially mobilized as it is now, it shouldn't have much trouble keeping up with current Alliance production rates if they had anything worth producing.

Haven (alone) almost certainly has far more existing warship construction capacity than the League. They were, last time we checked in on them, building hundreds of wallers in parallel at Bolthole and their other yards, which, needless to say, the SLN is not doing. In fact, they would need to build new yards if they wanted to do that.

Now, it's true the League's economy is far larger than the Grand Alliance's. But their war economy is far smaller, and if they don't want the Grand Alliance to capture or destroy their new yards before anything gets built at them, they need to be built in complete secrecy (and no, they can't shotgun enough 'boltholes' that one will have to survive long enough; the League can't afford it). Which seems extremely unlikely given the nature of the League.

drothgery wrote:Haven (alone) almost certainly has far more existing warship construction capacity than the League. They were, last time we checked in on them, building hundreds of wallers in parallel at Bolthole and their other yards, which, needless to say, the SLN is not doing. In fact, they would need to build new yards if they wanted to do that.

Now, it's true the League's economy is far larger than the Grand Alliance's. But their war economy is far smaller, and if they don't want the Grand Alliance to capture or destroy their new yards before anything gets built at them, they need to be built in complete secrecy (and no, they can't shotgun enough 'boltholes' that one will have to survive long enough; the League can't afford it). Which seems extremely unlikely given the nature of the League.

I agree. Now give the SL a decade, or even five years to build the shipyards (specifically the factories to feed the shipyards), and another 2-3 years to crank out the first batch of new wallers from those yards and it'll be able to out build the entire Haven Sector.

But as of now we've been led to believe that they don't have anywhere near as many building slips as Haven has (or Manticore / Grayson had) and their yards are designed around an anemic build tempo to it'll take them even longer than Haven to build a given ship.

That's part of what gives the GA their window, that not only doesn't the League currently have designs that can stand up to GA forces but they can't out build them either; not in the short term.

drothgery wrote:

Alizon wrote:No, I don't think you do understand correctly when estimating construction rates. With the yards and supporting industrial infrastructures gutted both at Manticore and Greyson, only the Andermani and Haven yards remain active and operational. While these yards can still produce a number of vessels, their production would pale beside the capabilities of the League. Whether they continue to build current designs is a question, but there's really not much of a debate that the League could, if it mobilized, swamp Alliance production. Even only partially mobilized as it is now, it shouldn't have much trouble keeping up with current Alliance production rates if they had anything worth producing.

Haven (alone) almost certainly has far more existing warship construction capacity than the League. They were, last time we checked in on them, building hundreds of wallers in parallel at Bolthole and their other yards, which, needless to say, the SLN is not doing. In fact, they would need to build new yards if they wanted to do that.

Now, it's true the League's economy is far larger than the Grand Alliance's. But their war economy is far smaller, and if they don't want the Grand Alliance to capture or destroy their new yards before anything gets built at them, they need to be built in complete secrecy (and no, they can't shotgun enough 'boltholes' that one will have to survive long enough; the League can't afford it). Which seems extremely unlikely given the nature of the League.

I'm not so sure. I understand the argument but we're talking about shipyards working at full capacity and comparing them to other shipyards working at a peace time pace which very probably have a good deal of excess capacity available to them. We're also discounting a number of civilian yards which might be turned over to military production fairly rapidly not to mention yards used by various SDF's within the League. I'm sure that the League doesn't have anything comparable to the capacity that a place like Bolthole has or that Manticore or Greyson once had, but I have a feeling the League has a LOT more of them spread throughout the 1,200+ primary worlds that they possess.

It's also interesting to think about to what degree the reconstruction of Manticore's and Greyson's infrastructure and even just the production of basic essential good which Manticore and Greyson can no longer produce, is going to have on the amount of resources which can be pumped into the wartime construction in Anderman and Haven. Even under the pre-Battle of Manticore estimates it wasn't know if Haven could continue it's pace of military construction without collapsing their economy. How much burden can it take if it tries to do the "Pritchard Plan" to rebuild Manticore and Greyson that those worlds will desperately need.

Of course, here I'm talking about theory assuming no GA task force is going to be showing up to blow my shipyards away but the question was essentially about capacity of the League under a first step conversion to war time economy vs that existing in Haven and Anderman and I think given a few of months, the League could, if they wanted to, exceed the combined production of Haven and the Andermani.

Alizon wrote:I'm not so sure. I understand the argument but we're talking about shipyards working at full capacity and comparing them to other shipyards working at a peace time pace which very probably have a good deal of excess capacity available to them. We're also discounting a number of civilian yards which might be turned over to military production fairly rapidly not to mention yards used by various SDF's within the League. I'm sure that the League doesn't have anything comparable to the capacity that a place like Bolthole has or that Manticore or Greyson once had, but I have a feeling the League has a LOT more of them spread throughout the 1,200+ primary worlds that they possess.

Given what we've been told about the size of the SDFs (only a 3 or 4 with SDs; most with only LACs) and the glacial rate new ships are added to Battlefleet I think you're overestimating the number of current naval yards within the League.

As for converting civilian yards, you can, but you've still got to teach them how to handle the differences between civilian and military construction (armor, cofferdaming, redundancy, weapons mounts). Plus it's not like there should be a huge surplus capacity to build the military specific items that go into warships (mil grade hyper generators, mid grade particle shielding, sidewalls, armor, superior sensors suits, mil grade nodes and compensators, tactical computers, damage resilient fusion plants, etc, etc, etc).

So you need to drastically ramp up production of all the warship specific components that are fed into the shipyards (now the factories may be collocated, as they were in the Manticoran stations, or elsewhere - but without the components available building slips are useless. And civilian yards won't been geared up to produce that military equipment any more than they're trained to build warships.


All that is solvable, given time. But that seems more like it'd take years than months.

I, for one, do not doubt that the League can outbuild its opposition, BUT... there are two major qualifications that must be observed that usually are left out when League v GA capabilities are compared.

The first is political. Can the League hold itself together long enough to exploit its resourse advantages? They probably need a minimum of five years that they may well not have. Golng along with this, will the wealthier core worlds agree to some form of taxation to support the war effort? The League government has been largely financed by ripping off OFS protectorates in the shell worlds and the verge that to a major extent is cut off by lacoon 2. If the League cannot muster its resourses, it doesn't matter how much greater they are than the G A.

The second consideration has to do with R&D. Projects like Gram took decades of persistent work to bear fruit in the breakthroughs that gave Manticore its current edge. By way of contrast, the Leagues R&D is currently politicized and moribund as far as coming up with fresh results are concerned. That means that they would have to start from scratch to build the institutional support for serious R&D. Then after they have managed that to gather the minds needed for the job and get started. Even then results will not be instantaneos. Meanwhile GA R&D keeps crankimg out new results.

Does the League have the time to deal with all of this? Probably not.

Don