Alternate history: PRH-Solarian War

Aint got no MDMs.

kzt wrote:Aint got no MDMs.

Ok, if they didn't have MDMs, what would be the best organisation for 450 SDs, 100 DNs and 100 BBs to win a fight against 800-1000 Scientist-class SDs on the most favourable terms? The defenders know the Solarian OOB and rough arrival timeframe, thanks to the MAlign.

Parnell fired the strategists coming up with convoluted plans (Rabenstrage would not suffer them anyway) and is listening to Adm. Chin and her staff Capt. Giscard and Capt. Theisman.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:Aint got no MDMs.

Ok, if they didn't have MDMs, what would be the best organisation for 450 SDs, 100 DNs and 100 BBs to win a fight against 800-1000 Scientist-class SDs on the most favourable terms? The defenders know the Solarian OOB and rough arrival timeframe, thanks to the MAlign.

Parnell fired the strategists coming up with convoluted plans (Rabenstrage would not suffer them anyway) and is listening to Adm. Chin and her staff Capt. Giscard and Capt. Theisman.

It's really, really hard.

Particularly if the Peeps will have revolts if they hoard all their fleet units at Haven for long, or get their fleet trashed. And I don't see how they can avoid massive casualties.

Basically, it's a political problem. You have to avoid going to war with the SL. Having failed in this the SL has basically infinitely more industrial capablity then the Peeps do.

The Peeps have real problem with industrial base and population that won't have been largely mitigated by the revolutionaries. Given that I really tend to doubt the SKM is going to hand them their factories, their production sucks.

Note that this isn't the SLN conducting a rogue operation, this is the SL going to war with you because you attacked them. So how do you win? Every yard that the SL has can produce modern effective combatants. They have a lot of yards, and the industrial base to build hundreds more if needed.

The SL assembly is going to be funding the SLN, and and they have essentially an infinite budget and manpower pool.

I also would tend to suspect that the Andies are not going to war with the SLN. Notice they didn't go to war with the SLN when their allies did. So why would you think they would this time? What's their upside? How do the Andies 'win' against the SL?

So if I was the Emperor I'd be really tempted to set my crazy 'allies' free.

kzt wrote:SDM's have a max range of 10 million KM. So you'd start out at nearly the max range that the communication links are designed to handle. They are also not designed to communicate to ships that are not basically 'behind' them where their antenna points.

Maybe I am misunderstanding how missiles work but I was under the assumption that missiles have their own targeting computers within the missile itself...nowhere near as good as being under the control of a ship but still something. Sending 100,000 missiles at a fleet that at 1,000 SD's can only send ~30,000 missiles/wave if their life depended on it is going to shock their system and more importantly is going to saturate their defences.

tlb wrote:Is that because of the size creep of all classes in the Manticore Havenite war period, since the BB's were presumably a prewar design? I do not know, am just asking.

Another possibility is that the BB carries capital missiles, since prewar it was assumed to also be a capital ship. While a BC fires cruiser size missiles instead.

Still another possibility for a prewar design is that it is energy weapon heavy and so lighter on missiles.

A Triumphant-Class BB is 4.5 times the size of a Warlord-Class BC and also it is about 66% of the size of a Scientist class SD.

The Triumphant-Class BB is supposed to be missile heavy, energy weapon light.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Another reason that Filareta was so thoroughly defeated was that the GA knew exactly when he'd show up (plus or minus a week, given how unprepared he was). They knew his OOB, so they could prepare. And the GA knew this because some intel came from an ultra-secret source.

We think that was Beowulf. And Beowulf in this timeline wouldn't be cooperating with Haven.

But what if it wasn't Beowulf, but the MAlign? They knew exactly when they pushed Filareta to move and that he had waited for the Cataphract-Cs that were sent to him from Mesa. So maybe it was the MAlign then and it definitely can be so in this timeline. The MAlign needs this war to shatter the League, so they leak the SLN op details to the PRH/AE alliance. It's not even too difficult to accept since the SLN moving 40 to 50% of the Battle Fleet would be noticed.

Then Haven isn't defended by just 200 SDs and 100 DNs of Capital Fleet. There's also another 100 SDs and 200 BBs waiting in hyper or in stealth to come at the SLN from whatever angle is most advantageous, alongside an IAN fleet of another 50 SDs.

Then Filareta (or, worse, Crandall!) comes in fat, dumb and happy.

And to make matters worse, at this stage the Scientist-class SDs aren't only death traps. Obsolete, yes, but perfectly usable against other Scientists. The Alliance can put any captured units into service defending secondary systems and free up their main units, especially the new SD(P)s rolling off the shipyards, for the front.

Thing is, with the League the way its portrayed, whether Beowulf passed on the news or not it is bound to come out especially if 40-50% of the SLN suddenly managed to disappear. Think about it this way, the SLN has major bases in populated systems, they have probably had those bases for centuries, if you have 2,000 SD's in 10 very busy core systems and suddenly all the ships disappear from some of those systems or half of the ships disappear from all of those systems someone will notice, and if Haven has an actual intelligence agency worth being called intelligence agency they would have means to monitor the movement of ships in those systems. Plus there is also the good old fashioned "senior SLN officer that likes to visit his favourite escort and then tells her something" or the good old off the record comment to a journalist who happens to work for Haven. The SLN is so corrupt that Haven and Manticore might have SLN officers in their payroll and those officers wont even know about it.

My point is, if Beowulf hadn't told Manticore about Filareta, someone was bound to spill the beans, notice unexplained ship movement, or make a honorverse version of a tweet about it. Once you know they are trying something, there is only a few potential targets, some more likely then others.

Sigs wrote:
My point is, if Beowulf hadn't told Manticore about Filareta, someone was bound to spill the beans, notice unexplained ship movement, or make a honorverse version of a tweet about it. Once you know they are trying something, there is only a few potential targets, some more likely then others.

You'd have thought so. In 1921pd, Battlefleet had only left the core 5 times in the last 150 (?) years and 2 of those were happening right then - the previous one was 75 years in the past. And this was followed by a 3rd, even larger movement, 6 months later. One would have thought that the movement of more than 1200 WALLERS*, 1/2 a million marines, and support ships would have been noticed by someone.

*(71 Crandall, 429 Filareta, 100 Tang, 600-650 Raging Justice II - were all deployed, in motion or destroyed at one point, out of ~1800 active, and ~400 ships under maintenance and 50-100 ships working up.)

kzt wrote:
So they are doing 7,200 km/sec when they cross the limit. Nobody is ahead of then for tens of millions of Km. So now 300 SDs jump out of hyper and fire at them? You know, there are 1000 SDs and 1000 lighter ships to shoot back? What will the likely outcome be?

Ok, defeat in detail engagement 1 completed, with a total delay of about 15 minutes, when 300 SDs get hit by a million and a half missiles. That would kill about 100 2nd war RMN SD(P)s. Nobody has even 25% of the point defense of a 2nd war RMN Sd(p).

Onto defeat in detail engagement 2, somewhere between 40 minutes and almost two hours away.

I'm confused, would the SLN's 30 tube/broadside SD's fire off 1.5 million missiles? they would have to react immediately and fire off 3 broadsides a minute for 15 minutes to get 1,5 million missiles at the enemy formation. And if that formation was to hyper in, wouldn't it be just as capable of hyperring out within 5-6 minutes?


So the SLN will be sailing into the inner system, gets a surprise behind them, they will then turn to fire at that force Immediately and continue firing until the force is destroyed and that force will be polite enough to remain to be pounded?

A force of 300 BB's and 150 DN's sliding behind the SLN force can fire off 14,400 missiles from internal tubes and another 36,000 from pods they carry, they control 14,000 missiles and use the others as decoys, keep firing, in 6 minutes @ 45seconds a broadside they can fire 112,000 missiles at the SLN plus the 36,000 missiles in pods they brought with them, As soon as they have fire off everything they can they hyper out.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Ok, thanks for the scenario. I hadn't thought of what could be done when I wrote, which is why I wrote "in hyper or in stealth to come at the SLN from whatever angle is most advantageous." The time for missile engagement is shorter than the time it takes to cycle the hyper generators to get back out. At best you could have this fleet towing pods and fire a million missiles or two, but it would still get annihilated. Like you said, defat in detail. Not worth it.

Hyper in is out.

I disagree with one thing: there's no way the SLN would perform a careful recon. They'd come in with all guns blazing trying to overawe their opponents and demanding the surrender and extradition of Adm. Parnell and President Harris.

Not unless the SLN has already grown respect for the neobarbs, which can only happen if they've already lost 500 SDs. That means they'd be mobilising two thirds of the remaining active Battle Fleet. Can they afford to uncover that much?

You are expecting the SLN to immediately react to a situation that they have probably never imagined in their worst nightmares, target and fire at an enemy behind them, especially when they realize that the majority of the ships behind them are BB's?

Sigs wrote:I'm confused, would the SLN's 30 tube/broadside SD's fire off 1.5 million missiles? they would have to react immediately and fire off 3 broadsides a minute for 15 minutes to get 1,5 million missiles at the enemy formation. And if that formation was to hyper in, wouldn't it be just as capable of hyperring out within 5-6 minutes?


So the SLN will be sailing into the inner system, gets a surprise behind them, they will then turn to fire at that force Immediately and continue firing until the force is destroyed and that force will be polite enough to remain to be pounded?

A force of 300 BB's and 150 DN's sliding behind the SLN force can fire off 14,400 missiles from internal tubes and another 36,000 from pods they carry, they control 14,000 missiles and use the others as decoys, keep firing, in 6 minutes @ 45seconds a broadside they can fire 112,000 missiles at the SLN plus the 36,000 missiles in pods they brought with them, As soon as they have fire off everything they can they hyper out.

A Peep BC takes about 8 minutes from emergence to reentry, judging from the highly unfortunate encounter of the Selim and the Bellerophon. A SD takes rather longer. In this case, probably a lifetime.

It takes an SD about 4 minutes to go from real space to hyper from the moment you engage the hyperdrive if you are just waiting to go into hyper. But when you just got out of hyper you have to go through a couple of steps to get to the point where you can engage the hyperdrive. Like charging the capacitors. So it takes a while. Not the 32 minutes from fully powered down, but it is probably closer to that than 4 minutes.

So basically, if you are close enough to to the enemy to hyper in on them and range them with missiles, they are close enough to hit you a lot of times before you can leave.

Max run time on a SDM is 3 minutes, so even a BC would be hanging there for at least 5 minutes getting pounded into scrap. Maybe you can hyper out then, or maybe something bad has happened to your hyperdrive while laser heads were punching holes in your hull.

So I'm guessing after 15 minutes everyone who still has a working hyperdrive has hypered out or is sufficiently pounded that it's not longer worth shooting at. In any case the fleet trying to mousetrap the SLN is now combat ineffective and the SLN CO can go back to his real job, detaching those unfortunate enough to have taken serious damage through the rather absurd amount of PDLCs and CMs that the fleet has compared to the number of incoming missiles.