Solly Fleet Advancements

Imaginos1892 wrote:Since this has turned into a what-should-Manticore-do-to-the-Sollies thread, here's my proposal:

I'm sure the ONI has a good idea which Solly systems are capable of building ships for the ISLN. Dispatch a bunch of destroyers and light cruisers to scout each system using a variant of what the Peeps did with Argus. Do a low-signature hyper translation far enough out that your ship is unlikely to be noticed. Accelerate, buzz past the hyper limit on a ballistic course, deploy a spread of Ghost Rider drones, let them spy out the system, recover drones and move on. Or, leave a few drones to sneak around after you're gone. Do NOT use grav-pulse communication; it might be noticed.

If the system is not building ISLN units, fine. Scout it again in a T-year or so. Check some of the less likely candidates in the meantime.

If there are ships under construction, schedule it for a visit by a modest task force a month or two before the first ones are finished. Give a few hours' evacuation warning, blow the ships to tiny bits, and leave. Make no special effort to destroy the system's infrastructure beyond collateral damage from taking out the ships and anybody that tries to stop you.

Since it takes over a T-year to build even a light cruiser, there will be plenty of opportunity to prevent the League from building anything, much less a fleet that could present a threat. Only systems that are actually attempting to contribute to the ISLN's war effort will be hit. After a while they're going to find it very hard to get anybody to accept a contract!
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It takes two to make peace. It only takes one to make war.

SWM wrote:

Imaginos1892 wrote:Since this has turned into a what-should-Manticore-do-to-the-Sollies thread, here's my proposal:

I'm sure the ONI has a good idea which Solly systems are capable of building ships for the ISLN. Dispatch a bunch of destroyers and light cruisers to scout each system using a variant of what the Peeps did with Argus. Do a low-signature hyper translation far enough out that your ship is unlikely to be noticed. Accelerate, buzz past the hyper limit on a ballistic course, deploy a spread of Ghost Rider drones, let them spy out the system, recover drones and move on. Or, leave a few drones to sneak around after you're gone. Do NOT use grav-pulse communication; it might be noticed.

If the system is not building ISLN units, fine. Scout it again in a T-year or so. Check some of the less likely candidates in the meantime.

If there are ships under construction, schedule it for a visit by a modest task force a month or two before the first ones are finished. Give a few hours' evacuation warning, blow the ships to tiny bits, and leave. Make no special effort to destroy the system's infrastructure beyond collateral damage from taking out the ships and anybody that tries to stop you.

Since it takes over a T-year to build even a light cruiser, there will be plenty of opportunity to prevent the League from building anything, much less a fleet that could present a threat. Only systems that are actually attempting to contribute to the ISLN's war effort will be hit. After a while they're going to find it very hard to get anybody to accept a contract!
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It takes two to make peace. It only takes one to make war.

One potential glitch to this plan: how far out can the system detect a hyper translation?

If they have a detector array as powerful as Manticore's, you have to translate a couple light-months out to avoid detection. I expect that many of the Core worlds and other systems which are most likely to have shipyards capable of building large naval ships would have such systems.

But it is not a bad idea to set up that kind of surveillance in general. Ship construction is not the only intelligence that could be gained.

kzt wrote:No, I'd have most of the force in hyper with ready hyperdrive. You leave only a limited number of widely dispersed ships, all with ready hyper drives and continually moving. When the party starts you drop in on the GA force. In the meantime you run drills to ensure they can hit pretty precisely the target planned.

Castenea wrote:

Relax wrote:Unlike the RMN, the SLN has yards to repair their ships in.

Keep those nodes and hyper drives hot. Take the wormholes or all is lost. Without taking the wormholes, the SL loses much of its defensive depth. Why, attacking, Mancitore infra

Ummmm...... According to the Malign original plans there was not supposed to be any GA to compete with their puppets for the loyalty of ex-SL worlds. Haven was supposed to conquer Manticore then implode, then the SL would collapse.

Alizon wrote:Lyonheart,

Thanks for the response. It was a bit hard to read but you obviously took a great deal of time to put into it which I greatly appreciate.

I've read a number of infodumps and such but I don't claim to have read them all. What I'm basing my points on are what appears to make sense given the basic information we have from the books and the sources I've seen. Now, if RFC says the GA is going to send it's fleet out to wipe the SLN off the face of the cosmos, we'll he's the author so he can make whatever he wants to have happen happen.

On the other hand, I'm not trying to read RFC's mind or attempt to determine what he is going to write. In this thread and others I'm exploring various situations which could reasonably arise and in this thread and the Hyperspace thread I've decided to step out of the fairly common aspect of looking at the situation through the eyes of the Manticorians and others in the Haven sector and attempt to look at the situation as if I were a member of the SLN attempting to deal with the situation I find myself in and determining how I might be able to work to salvage the situation.

If you're goal is to do this, you need to have a plan that gives you an reasonable chance to do this.


*You're thinking far more methodically than any HQ admiral we've seen so far, but again I don't think they have the time to implement any plan like yours with all its phases.*


Some of what I have presented isn't from the mouth of RFC. For example, you asked what piece of text or post from RFC or others do I have that makes me think that the GA worlds are deeply concerned about how to defend their worlds against a attack on their worlds similar to the one that just gutted Manticore and Greyson ...

I don't have one. On the other hand, do I really need one. Someone has penetrated possibly the two most heavily guarded systems in the entire Haven sector, destroyed practically all of their shipbuilding and heavy industrial infrastructure not to mention a few million people. Better yet, you really don't know who launched the attack and you didn't even see it coming until it was well inside your defenses.

I'm sorry, I don't have to have RFC post a data dump about this to tell me that this represents a huge problem for the GA powers and I can make that evaluation because I have a working brain.

Now one of the responses could be to fling your forces against whoever perpetuated the attack, except you don't know who it is or where they come from. It should be obvious that whoever it was, they aren't the SLN. It makes zero sense to put your main efforts against the League under these circumstances. Now this is just a conjecture but it's one based on pretty valid information.


*Given I don't know where to begin looking for the MAlg and placating the worries of the man/woman in the street on Manticore/Sphinx/Grayson etc, the fleets I will send when I do can also do double duty by protecting the home turf, meaning the fleets sent to eliminate the other problem the SLN can be far larger than you think.

Aside: since no one else has posted it yet, why not consider what kind of new DD's, CL's, CA's and BC's the RHN under Theisman might have come up with, then began modifying as a result of HH's Cutworm raids 18+month's ago {permitting new build construction to complete some improved prototypes by now], such as learning about the Mk-16, NTM changes now due to the alliance.*


Now, honestly, I don't know what RFC has planned. If I did, there would be no need for this thread or pretty much any of the other threads on this site.

I think you are right however, we're probably going to disagree because we are approaching this subject from very different starting points. I do however appreciate your input, if everyone agreed on everything well, where's the fun in that?

Weird Harold wrote:

lyonheart wrote:*Do you recall what Terekhov said to Yucel in SoF, chapter 31?

Basically:

'If 2 GA SD[P]'s could kill 70 BF SD's, and the GA has only 500 they could kill all of BF including the reserve 3 times over'; which is inaccurate in significant important details [such as 2 for 70 actually being less than double BF's current size] but the gist is quite correct.

For precision's sake, the actual quote:

Shadow Of Freedom
Chapter 31
Commodore Terekhov wrote:“You obviously haven’t paid any attention to reality in some time,” Terekhov said. “And you’re just a bit behind the news, too. For example, on the basis of what you’ve just said, I don’t suppose you’ve heard about what happened to Vice Admiral Dubroskaya at Saltash, when five of our destroyers destroyed all four of her battlecruisers. Or about the fact that the Star Empire is now allied to the Republic of Haven. Or that between us, we now have somewhere around five hundred ships of the wall, any two of which could have controlled every missile we fired at Crandall in Spindle. Let’s do some math here, Brigadier. If two of our ships can kill seventy of yours, and we’ve got five hundred of them, that means we can kill every superdreadnought in Battle Fleet, including the Reserve, about three times each.”

He is indulging in a bit of hyperbole, because they didn't destroy, or even target, all 70 of Crandall's ships. Not that any amount of rational argument was going to get through to Brig. Yucel.

Potato wrote:We do not talk about frigates because that horse has been long dead and buried by RFC. There is no job a frigate does that a destroyer or (more often than not) a LAC can do more efficiently and/or more cost effectively.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/289/1

Roguevictory wrote:Frigates are my personal favorite type of warship in both history and fiction ...

Roguevictory wrote:If I were in charge of the SLN though I would be commissioning two new types of Frigate ASAP for design and production. One would be an escort type like you are suggesting. The other would be a more heavily armed raiding ship to be sent into the Alliance's rear areas.

Brigade XO wrote:Much earlier in the thread, someone suggested that the SLN might find it usefull to attack and take back one of the wormhole ends closest to them.

With enough wallers and willingness to take casulaties, that is certainly possible. However, consider the potential GA/SEM response. Manticore and the GA would not attempt to retake it through the wormhole but they could send a force the long way through hyper-space.

The original RMN holding force doesn't have to fight to the death holding the SL end of a wormhole. It would be ever so much better to bleed the attacking force white (if not destroy most of it) until the RMN was running low on weapons and then run for it. Either through the wormhole or just hyper-out. Unless it is a compleat screw up on the part of the RMN, that kind of option will do significant damage to the SLN attcking force and suffer "relatively" low casualties since the RMN has the range advantage.

When they get to the newly aquired SLN end, they will find a large concentration of SLN ships. Many of those will be tucked in close to the terminus for defending it. Lots of of SLN "targets". The GA would be comming out of hyper with NO constraints of hyper-limits. They can come in as close to the terminus as is deemed safe. Most of the SLN ships will NOT have their hyper-drives on-line and it will take time for them to spin them up.

It would be best if a couple of RMN BC's dropped in WAY outside of the terminus (take a page from oyster bay)and then snuck in to run Ghost Rider RDs through the area.

Remember what the SLN's capabilities are NOT in the area of counter-missile engagement!

The GA force- with that massive missle range advantage- could drop in, confirm targets, fire MDMs and then "just" maneuver to avoid getting into the engagement envelopes of the SLN ships. You could adjust missle fire to saturate anything relatively close to the GA ships. For the rest of the SLN warships, you don't actually have to fire enough missiles at any one ship to guarantee its destruction but you need enough to get a mission kill. The difference in mission-kill vs destruction may not be great enough not to go for full killes each target. The implication of lightening the fire on any one ship would be to get signifcant damage and effectively take it out of combat for up to years. The SLN would have to recover any cripples they thought could be repaired and take them away for Yard work.

It depends on what you plan on doing once you clear the SL off the terminus again. Rinse and repeat might be a good stratagem. You are destroying SLN ships and killing a lot of their crews, but doing it well away from any of the SL planets and not hitting any civilian/commercial infrastructure.

Just a thought