Hey! No fair, putting a wormhole junction there!

Jonathan_S wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:If the MAlignment wants to use the Torch Wormhole now, they have to make a couple of decisions.
The 1st is, how many warships (fast tough ones) will they have to send through along with any other ships to deal with anything that is showing a impeller signature within range of the wormhole to pick up the transit and subsiquent movement away from said wormhole. The 1st time ANYBODY gets hard data that an impeller signature came out of that wormhole and went somewhere, things are going to get intresting.
Sneaking a Streak Drive ship though it is fraught with exposure for the Malignemt. Who knows what might be parked out there taking readings but otherwise just making like a hole in space and gathering data. Not saying Manticore would then throw an SD through the wormhole (on the off chance it would survive what is then probably an ambush on the other side, but they are going to want to stick some sort of picket on top of the wormhole.

The alternative for the Malignment is- at an appropirate time- more than one taskforce thought the wormhole taking a shortcut in an assault at Manticore or some other high value target and send a smaller force to devistate Torch plus wipe out anything hypercapable in system. That would be preemptive against anything from Torch that happened to be operating withing sensor range of the wormhole from running back to Torch to pass the word and have it spread from there. That they could "clean up" the Torch mess of homeworld for escaped Genetic Slaves would be considered a bonus.

All it really does is give Manticore and Haven another place they have to post ships and work harder at sorting out what the MAlignment has been up to.

If they want to use that wormhole they pretty much need to send a force to Torch through conventional hyperspace to seize the terminus -- then they can begin using the wormhole.

They've got plenty of time and no reason to risk the very high losses a wormhole assault would entail. (You could use Sharks again to ambush the defenders - Torch shouldn't have the kind of deep space arrays Manticore does so you don't need to sneak in from so many light weeks out; and you could dispatch the assault force while your Lenny Detd are still getting fitted out or working up.

But I don't think it's necessarily worth it.- after word reached the Grand Alliance that Torch's wormhole has been seized they've got plenty of power to take it back and seal it off. (Though I guess the MAlign could try to do that just for the one time tactical advantage of forcing the GA to enter a prepare ambush (and then retreat after bloodying them)

I'm not so sure, until/unless the GA figures out the Torch wormhole isn't automatic death, anything the MAlign does nearby that wormhole draws more attention. It's very unlikely Torch will fortify one end of a rogue killer wormhole heavily, if at all.

Which means all the arguments against a wormhole assault are moot, and that's ignoring minor facts that even Manticore couldn't afford to fortify the Junction so the PRH couldn't use the Trevor's Star wormhole and send multiple suicide waves of battleships. And so far as we know, the MWJ is the most fortified wormhole in known space.

A surprise strike of Lenny Det's is almost guaranteed to secure the Torch wormhole, and even the Sharks have better than even odds to do so. And when it boils down to it, the MAlign only needs to use it once to get those Lenny Dets deep into GA territory, behind the lines so to speak. After orbital bombardment on Torch, including Eridani Strikes (since the MAlign doesn't care about violating it), the Lenny Dets leave the system and be impossible to intercept.

The Sharks started their infiltrating what, two light-months out of Manticore binary? If the Lenny Dets did it from six plus, the first warning would be the Graser torps and Cataphract's launching from near-orbit, and already demanding the RMN/GA stand down, or just jumping right to demonstration strikes.

Somtaaw wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:If they want to use that wormhole they pretty much need to send a force to Torch through conventional hyperspace to seize the terminus -- then they can begin using the wormhole.

They've got plenty of time and no reason to risk the very high losses a wormhole assault would entail. (You could use Sharks again to ambush the defenders - Torch shouldn't have the kind of deep space arrays Manticore does so you don't need to sneak in from so many light weeks out; and you could dispatch the assault force while your Lenny Detd are still getting fitted out or working up.

But I don't think it's necessarily worth it.- after word reached the Grand Alliance that Torch's wormhole has been seized they've got plenty of power to take it back and seal it off. (Though I guess the MAlign could try to do that just for the one time tactical advantage of forcing the GA to enter a prepare ambush (and then retreat after bloodying them)

I'm not so sure, until/unless the GA figures out the Torch wormhole isn't automatic death, anything the MAlign does nearby that wormhole draws more attention. It's very unlikely Torch will fortify one end of a rogue killer wormhole heavily, if at all.

Which means all the arguments against a wormhole assault are moot, and that's ignoring minor facts that even Manticore couldn't afford to fortify the Junction so the PRH couldn't use the Trevor's Star wormhole and send multiple suicide waves of battleships. And so far as we know, the MWJ is the most fortified wormhole in known space.

A surprise strike of Lenny Det's is almost guaranteed to secure the Torch wormhole, and even the Sharks have better than even odds to do so. And when it boils down to it, the MAlign only needs to use it once to get those Lenny Dets deep into GA territory, behind the lines so to speak. After orbital bombardment on Torch, including Eridani Strikes (since the MAlign doesn't care about violating it), the Lenny Dets leave the system and be impossible to intercept.

The Sharks started their infiltrating what, two light-months out of Manticore binary? If the Lenny Dets did it from six plus, the first warning would be the Graser torps and Cataphract's launching from near-orbit, and already demanding the RMN/GA stand down, or just jumping right to demonstration strikes.

Enough defenses to make an assault through the wormhole itself is cheap insurance. Even just one frigate with a few dozen pods of laserheads (don't even need to be MDMs) floating nearby is plenty to destroy at least a dozen SDs in the minutes they're vulnerable moving down the grav eddy of the exit 'lane'.

I agree that Torch wouldn't spend the resources to defend that Junction like Manticore does - strong enough to hold off a major n-space attack from a major navy. But I can't see them leaving it undefended either.

They have to have considered that one explanation for the wormhole being 'killer' is a hostile navy on the other side. Spending the minor, even for them, resources necessary to put a reasonable stopper on that bottle - on the off chance there's a hostile genie inside - is just common sense.


(That level of defense would make it easy for an attacker who slipped in through hyper to clear the defenses - but still make it affordable to assault through the wormhole)


Oh, and the Manticoran wormhole defense planners were, as David stated later, overly pessimistic. They hadn't factored in just how much of a difference laserhead missile would make to the defenders. Plus that was a pre-war, pre-pod, study and was worried about suicide mass assaults down 2 separate termini - each with the highest tonnage capacity known to man. The torch wormhole, not that they can be 100% sure of that, only has a since termini so half as many ships as Manticore had to worry about - plus almost certainly a lower max tonnage so again fewer ships.
And you don't need to defenses to be sufficient to stop any physically possible attack - just making it at least as expensive militarily to seize the system through it's wormhole as through hyperspace is a reasonable planning target (especially since that level of attrition is so much cheaper in the case of the wormhole terminus)



All that said, I've no illusions that the MAlign could take Torch any time they cared to expend the effort. Slapping a guard on the terminus means it takes longer - or costs a hell of a lot more - but that's about the best Torch can reasonable hope to achieve. Well that and discouraging the MAlign from bothering in the first place by being a visible enough victim that the GA would assume that the wormhole was useful to the attackers; and they could then move to block it themselves in sufficient force that even the MAlign would find it hard to reopen that route.