Wormhole Assault: MA Style

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:Let's say that an LD somehow lands up in quicksand, imminently having to defend itself against a Fort. The LD has a terrifying energy weapon plus gtorps. What should its tactic be? To engage the enemy with coordinated weapons? Which should land first, the gtorps or the energy weapon? Or should both have a simultaneous time on target? And if the LD can fire several mains at once?

What should the LD's tactic be, if battle with the Fort is imminent?

For all we know, there's no way to survive. The LD is toast. It must avoid the quicksand in the first place: don't pass an enemy at low relative velocities.

This glaring weakness only tells me that there's more to the LD design that we know.

Maybe, maybe not.

All we really know is that Oyster Bay was supposed to be carried out by LDs and they just about managed it with a number of Sharks. The LD could be nothing more than a scaled-up Shark with defensive systems installed as a precaution.

They wouldn't be alone in that. The first CLACs had energy mounts, but they were only ever there "in case" and subsequent flights omitted those after digesting operational realities.

Like the CLAC, a LD is far more likely to use its missiles to try to kill anything that comes near it before energy range is reached. It can roll its pods and scoot away before lighting off the missiles - this does not give its exact location away the way a shipboard energy shot would.

To do anything more essentially requires another Malign deus ex machina. Until and unless it appears, we can't know what else the LDs may be supposed to do.

If they send 100 of them out to successfully repeat Oyster Bay in every known human system, well, isn't that enough? The GA's precautions might save a few of their systems from total ruin, but everyone else will be smashed down to the pre-space age. No easy hydrogen or beamed solar power. Everything made possible by that abundance undone overnight.

Playing catch-up from several days off line

The majority of the Darius population is represented (in at least one place) as being what the Seccie population on Mesa was originally intended to be....not (exactly) slaves. Just also Not Alphas or any of the star lines. Mesa didn't develop exactly as planned so you ended up with genetic slaves for export, for local "specialized" labor and then you would have that Seccie population which initialy came from the essentially the same types of tanks as the slaves but while they could be continually augment from that source also were clearly capable of producing children.....so Mesa ended up with "citizens, slaves and Seccies. Clearly 2nd class citizens, but not slaves though treated as really cheap labor.
In the Darius population you have the Alphas, some intermediate Star Lines (Beta etc) and then ....everybody else. And remember that the people comming in from Houdini are essentialy segregated from the Darius worker population. That population probably can have children and does but think of it more like a Cast System with each in it's ordained place.


The other thing is building seriously large AND long fireing grasers. The GTs are build that way with a significantly large and powerful graser and each torpedo has enough power to run the beam in terms of multiple seconds length of a single shot which can be sort of hosed around on a target by swerving the alignment of the torp. The problem.......to get that power and actual "long" burn time of the weapon, it is essentialy going to literally burn it self up and be destroyed when you fire it.
So, do you really want to build something like that into the hull of a capital ship and have the entire equipment area (and probably power lead trunks and related systems burn out with spectacular self destructive results? I think not.

If the Sharks were proof-of-conscept and were kept OUT OF THE SYSTEM to both protect them and remain stealthy, why are the LD's meant to be used the same way. Ambush weapons, sneak attack weapons, pick your description. You send in the Ghost scouts to gather the detail and keep the tactical picture updated and then you deploy your strike packages from internal magazines and holds. Tubes and pods.
How is that not a reasonable take on the LD proposed method of operation, particularly since given the massive approch for stealthy attack.
If you want a comparative model, think of using ballistic missile submarines (and or using tube launched cruise missiles with that) to get within a delivery range too close to provide an effective responce time frame from your opponent? Is your opponent going to shoot back at the LOCATON that weapons appear to have been launched from in the case of either a sub launched ICBM or particularly a tube launched cruise missile? Remember, the ICBMs are going to trip search radar etc once they get to the level of the horizon of the defending sensors. The cruise missiles may be going slower but unless your opponent has look-down (ariel or satellite capasity) /shoot down (from a land or airborne weapons systems the cruise will get closer faster. Are you, in fact, going to have your launch platforms shoot & scoot to try and survive any retaliation fire on the launch site.......so many questions.
So one LD with a couple of Ghosts could end up delivering twice the number of weapons packages as the Oyster Bay attack and still be out of harms way with at least the ghosts lingering outside the hyperlimit post launch to collect damage assessments before slipping away.

We also don't know what else they have in the weapons pipeline

Playing catch-up from several days off line

The majority of the Darius population is represented (in at least one place) as being what the Seccie population on Mesa was originally intended to be....not (exactly) slaves. Just also Not Alphas or any of the star lines. Mesa didn't develop exactly as planned so you ended up with genetic slaves for export, for local "specialized" labor and then you would have that Seccie population which initialy came from the essentially the same types of tanks as the slaves but while they could be continually augment from that source also were clearly capable of producing children.....so Mesa ended up with "citizens, slaves and Seccies. Clearly 2nd class citizens, but not slaves though treated as really cheap labor.
In the Darius population you have the Alphas, some intermediate Star Lines (Beta etc) and then ....everybody else. And remember that the people comming in from Houdini are essentialy segregated from the Darius worker population. That population probably can have children and does but think of it more like a Cast System with each in it's ordained place.


The other thing is building seriously large AND long fireing grasers. The GTs are build that way with a significantly large and powerful graser and each torpedo has enough power to run the beam in terms of multiple seconds length of a single shot which can be sort of hosed around on a target by swerving the alignment of the torp. The problem.......to get that power and actual "long" burn time of the weapon, it is essentialy going to literally burn it self up and be destroyed when you fire it.
So, do you really want to build something like that into the hull of a capital ship and have the entire equipment area (and probably power lead trunks and related systems burn out with spectacular self destructive results? I think not.

If the Sharks were proof-of-conscept and were kept OUT OF THE SYSTEM to both protect them and remain stealthy, why are the LD's meant to be used the same way. Ambush weapons, sneak attack weapons, pick your description. You send in the Ghost scouts to gather the detail and keep the tactical picture updated and then you deploy your strike packages from internal magazines and holds. Tubes and pods.
How is that not a reasonable take on the LD proposed method of operation, particularly since given the massive approch for stealthy attack.
If you want a comparative model, think of using ballistic missile submarines (and or using tube launched cruise missiles with that) to get within a delivery range too close to provide an effective responce time frame from your opponent? Is your opponent going to shoot back at the LOCATON that weapons appear to have been launched from in the case of either a sub launched ICBM or particularly a tube launched cruise missile? Remember, the ICBMs are going to trip search radar etc once they get to the level of the horizon of the defending sensors. The cruise missiles may be going slower but unless your opponent has look-down (ariel or satellite capasity) /shoot down (from a land or airborne weapons systems the cruise will get closer faster. Are you, in fact, going to have your launch platforms shoot & scoot to try and survive any retaliation fire on the launch site.......so many questions.
So one LD with a couple of Ghosts could end up delivering twice the number of weapons packages as the Oyster Bay attack and still be out of harms way with at least the ghosts lingering outside the hyperlimit post launch to collect damage assessments before slipping away.

We also don't know what else they have in the weapons pipeline

cthia wrote:Mano a mano - with or without missile pods.

An LD vs a fort? The fort has more internal missiles, a bigger reactor, more mass which it can devote to armour, and a bigger surface area which it can mount energy weapons on. So it wins.

Except that in this case the LD has an acceleration advantage, albeit a very poor one. So if the fort has somehow run out of missiles, the LD can extend the range to outside the fort's energy range, then withdraw (if it survives that long).

But I don't see a fort running out of missiles, even if you consider tertiary system without any missile pods. Just the internal magazines should be plenty.

Brigade XO wrote:So one LD with a couple of Ghosts could end up delivering twice the number of weapons packages as the Oyster Bay attack and still be out of harms way with at least the ghosts lingering outside the hyperlimit post launch to collect damage assessments before slipping away.

We also don't know what else they have in the weapons pipeline

Well, that's what I've been saying; use the LD for long-range stealth attacks, with a high-speed pass at the closest point to the target, but still very far away. Possibly not even crossing into the hyperlimit. The LDs are good for that.

The problem is that now the cat is out of the bag and you need a 2- to 6-month long insertion, because your hyper translation footprint cannot be hidden. So they work... but demand an enormous investment in time, personnel, and materials.

The LDs are not good for up-and-close attacks.

One question is how many systems have anything remotely close to the Manticore Binary System sensor net and scout response arrangement. We are not even sure Sol could have picked up the Sharks coming over the hyper-wall at the distance out they were.

Even if there was a sensor reading, what would they investigate with? Beowulf, probably. Any of the SL Core Systems.....well, we just don't know..

Brigade XO wrote:One question is how many systems have anything remotely close to the Manticore Binary System sensor net and scout response arrangement. We are not even sure Sol could have picked up the Sharks coming over the hyper-wall at the distance out they were.

Even if there was a sensor reading, what would they investigate with? Beowulf, probably. Any of the SL Core Systems.....well, we just don't know..

Plus there are ways around the sensor nets even in most systems that have them. You can do kzt's proposal of swamping the system with a few ships popping in and out at random; the system knows somebody's been screwing with it, but there are so many emergence signals that they don't have the reaction forces to investigate them all in a timely manner so the odds are very good the actual LD insertions won't get investigated until they're clear. Or you can piggy-back on the emergence of an accomplice freighter. The very best sensor might be able to discern that two ships emerged together; but most systems even if they can see the emergence signal can't tell that the freighter brought a friend.
Either of those could cut the insertion time down to days instead of months.
Or you could do a 1-2 punch - have freighters deploy Ghosts and Hansa; use those to smash the multi-km arrays that make up those super long-range sensors; and then insert LDs later for a follow-up strike on the now myopic system.

The detection arrays are physical objects, but are not a single physical object. It's a cloud of many many sensors in a close formation per the Bu9 guys at Honorcon.

So it's not easy to destroy. Particularly with stand off weapons. Not impossible,, I suspect you could do it with some rather large number of missile pods sweeping their wedges through it.

But I also suspect you;d need to be in energy weapons range to do it in a reasonable way.

Brigade XO wrote:One question is how many systems have anything remotely close to the Manticore Binary System sensor net and scout response arrangement. We are not even sure Sol could have picked up the Sharks coming over the hyper-wall at the distance out they were.

Even if there was a sensor reading, what would they investigate with? Beowulf, probably. Any of the SL Core Systems.....well, we just don't know..

Even if they don't have Manticore's top flight multiple Light month arrays, I expect most 1st tier systems have systems with multiple light day or light week ranges.

Of course you can argue that 3rd, 4th and verge tier systems don't have anything like those arrays, but why would someone waste the resources of something like an LD in places like that - a modern DD or CL has the resources to overpower most verge navies, and a pair of normal BCs most 4rd tier systems.

Brigade XO wrote:One question is how many systems have anything remotely close to the Manticore Binary System sensor net and scout response arrangement. We are not even sure Sol could have picked up the Sharks coming over the hyper-wall at the distance out they were.

Even if there was a sensor reading, what would they investigate with? Beowulf, probably. Any of the SL Core Systems.....well, we just don't know..

That's a good question and I think the answer changed after Oyster Bay. Before that, I think almost any primary and secondary system had some detection, if nothing else to help traffic or an early warning of a few light-hours. Remember that hyper emergences can be picked up quite easily, via FTL.

After Oyster Bay, all primary systems upgraded their detection arrays to multi light-month, with the anti-MAlign capitals upgrading to the most sensitive. That's why I keep saying that inserting into Manticore is a 6-month job. If the emergence is detected, it'll be investigated, so a prospective LD (or Ghost or Shark for that matter) needs to drop out 4 or 5 light-months out to avoid detection in the first place.

The secondary systems will in turn have added light-week to light-month arrays. Whether they can investigate or not is a different question. It will depend highly on whether their picket ships are in sufficient force to allow a split: you don't want to send the half of a DD division away and then leave the system undefended from conventional attacks. Maybe they can send a scout, but if it arrives 6 to 12 hours after the emergence was detected, what good could it do?

Another aspect to think about is that Shannon and Sonja will have most definitely spent time thinking about this. For example, a focused scan on the region of the hyper emergence locus, to determine whether it is a threat or not.