Beating up Frontier Fleet, mercilessly

If the GA is going to go after FF Logistic bases, it might be a good idea to bring along extra sets of crew for captured ships.

The idea of destroying the Logistic chains for FF/BF is a good one but it has already been noted that it isn't so much killing SLN personel as eliminating the ships that could cause trouble. RMN and RHN would be picking up survivors or surrendered crews of SLN ships and then you have to decide what to do with them. If you go after a OFS sector governemnt center and engage the warships there, you are going to probably destroy at least some but may get a lot of surrenders. If you are in a system (as the OFS control points tend to be on planets) you can probably dump most of the FF crews on the planet. You may not want the FF warships and just scuttle them if a plan does not include turning them over to future "liberated" systems that sign treaties with the GA

The non-warships are another matter. What are you likely to find?
Fleet Train ships with supplies and materials. You can just destroy them (and the goods) or you could send them back to the GA. Sending them back (with your own crews) puts usefull transports that are built to at least SLN military spec for speed etc. If nothing else (like using them in the variouis GA navies) you could sell them to private companies as transports. Either way, it takes them out of use by the SLN and any SL/OFS associated planitary government control

Repair ships. The tech will not be up to Haven or Manticore standard but they will be outfitted (and partially supplied) to at least perform repair and general construction on starships and probably stations. You don't have to staff them up to take a capture done home, just have a crew to run the engings, navigate and generals life support for a trip back to somewhere that the capailites of the ship can be used. As above, you could just destroy them but taking them away and using them to both rebuild and as at least temporary Fleet Aux ships will deny thier use to the SLN- and any system that would inherit them with the crumbling of the SL.

Merchant Freightes/transports. Same thing. Take the ships, leave the crews (or take them under heavy guard) back to GA space and use either as Fleet Aux or sell to people who want to use them as merchant transports.

There would be the question of spare and replacement parts for such captured ships. Not actually a big problem. Except for the SLN military specific pieces (weapons, sensors, etc), the majority of equipment and replacement parts are going to be things routinely available in the area of the SL and beyond. There is (and likely will continue to be) places that manufacture what are essentialy generic or OEM equipment for starships and related vessels. Just because it isn't the latest Manticore, Haven, Alderman other GA warfighting material doesn't mean that the supplies of spairs or the production of parts within the majority of Human occupied space is going to end and this stuff and ships are manufactured with expected useable life in terms of 50 to 150+ years.

Sure, you might want to pull back to the GA area the officers, Sr. tech people and various political types, but you can beach most of the rest and put the local OFS/FF operation on the hook for them. Destroying OFS/FF orbital facilities is also going to put a major crimp in their ability to support operations against the GA.

Brigade XO wrote:If the GA is going to go after FF Logistic bases, it might be a good idea to bring along extra sets of crew for captured ships.

The idea of destroying the Logistic chains for FF/BF is a good one but it has already been noted that it isn't so much killing SLN personel as eliminating the ships that could cause trouble. RMN and RHN would be picking up survivors or surrendered crews of SLN ships and then you have to decide what to do with them. If you go after a OFS sector governemnt center and engage the warships there, you are going to probably destroy at least some but may get a lot of surrenders. If you are in a system (as the OFS control points tend to be on planets) you can probably dump most of the FF crews on the planet. You may not want the FF warships and just scuttle them if a plan does not include turning them over to future "liberated" systems that sign treaties with the GA.

I may be a little more inclined to the scuttle plan than you are, though I do think you have good points. The prize crew crunch is notorious for RMN ships at least. With the RHN, that's a lot easier, so if the RHN is doing the neutralization of FF bases, it may be able to bring home more obsolete death traps. (Yay?)

Getting Frontier Fleet personnel safely out of the war and in prison camps may bear more appeal than leaving them on OFS-run worlds. It may be hard for the SLN or warlord successors to find ships to put them back in, but why give them a chance? Particularly with that age of warlords beckoning, being able to repatriate SLN captives back to successor states selectively will keep those crews out of the hands of states that would do mischief with them. (And keep the SLN crews from initiating or supporting the mischief - a would-be warlord on an island on Manticore is going to stay would-be.) Trying to count on parole in a war like this with SLN officers is a sick joke.

The non-warships are another matter. What are you likely to find?
Fleet Train ships with supplies and materials. You can just destroy them (and the goods) or you could send them back to the GA. Sending them back (with your own crews) puts usefull transports that are built to at least SLN military spec for speed etc. If nothing else (like using them in the variouis GA navies) you could sell them to private companies as transports. Either way, it takes them out of use by the SLN and any SL/OFS associated planitary government control.

And you can be sure they won't go back to supporting SLN/warlord logistics if you bring them back. Or scuttle them. Certainly if they are not much meant for combat, being obsolete for combat isn't a strong point against them. And if you want (kittens help you) to use or sell SLN prizes, grabbing off repair parts and supplies for them would be handy.

Repair ships. The tech will not be up to Haven or Manticore standard but they will be outfitted (and partially supplied) to at least perform repair and general construction on starships and probably stations. You don't have to staff them up to take a capture done home, just have a crew to run the engings, navigate and generals life support for a trip back to somewhere that the capailites of the ship can be used. As above, you could just destroy them but taking them away and using them to both rebuild and as at least temporary Fleet Aux ships will deny thier use to the SLN- and any system that would inherit them with the crumbling of the SL.

Merchant Freightes/transports. Same thing. Take the ships, leave the crews (or take them under heavy guard) back to GA space and use either as Fleet Aux or sell to people who want to use them as merchant transports.

Seizing merchant crews is not that necessary and rather nasty. Now, offering them jobs and bringing them back, that has points in its favor. Politically, it keeps your white hat firmly on. Economically, you'll want all the hulls and crews you can get, and you certainly would like to deny them to the League.

Heck, as things go on, the GA may want to start accepting resignations from the SLN to employ people in civilian shipping. Make surrender even more appealing and beef up your economically critical resources. Security would discourage you from wanting them in your military. That, and their habits and training suck for it. But the merchant marine will need people who can run ships, and if you can trust former SLN personnel there well enough, you can draw off more reserve and future RMN personnel that you can fully trust from the merchant marine.

Heck, as things go on, the GA may want to start accepting resignations from the SLN to employ people in civilian shipping.

Shipping? how about shipyard-building. I.E. if I knew how to "fix it" in space, I'd likely have a pretty good knowledge base to help "build something to build somethings" in space. AKA presumably a huge chunk of the enlisted crews captured in Spindle and Maticore from any and all SLN ships in the appropriate job descriptions that were helping do things like "manning the repair crews", etc. are going to have pretty good instincts for "geez, if they'd only built the "impeller puller and installer Crane XYZ thusly, we could install and service those things at three times the speed"...

Granted, picking which ones without also getting a bunch of saboteurs wouldn't be all that easy, unless you had convenient access to a bunch of telempaths. Oh, wait...

SharkHunter wrote:Granted, picking which ones without also getting a bunch of saboteurs wouldn't be all that easy, unless you had convenient access to a bunch of telempaths. Oh, wait...

There is a limit to how fast you could run SLN crews through a treecat interview. We've worked out the numbers in previous threads--it's pretty grim. You could get some. But not in the numbers you need in any useful timeframe.

Somtaaw wrote:For having LACs limpeted to a BC hull, we have the textev from HotQ that a Sultan-class Peep BC can reasonably haul 2 Masadan LAC's.

...Snip...

In The Honor of the Queen, BC Thunder of God (ex People's Navy Saladin), towed the LAC's astern of the ship, outside the wedge and the inertial compensator field.

For an example of having ships (frigates, which are both larger than LACs and hyper-capable) being carried limpeted to the hull, see the Hali Sowle in Cauldron of Ghosts, a one million ton tramp freighter.

SWM wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Granted, picking which ones without also getting a bunch of saboteurs wouldn't be all that easy, unless you had convenient access to a bunch of telempaths. Oh, wait...

There is a limit to how fast you could run SLN crews through a treecat interview. We've worked out the numbers in previous threads--it's pretty grim. You could get some. But not in the numbers you need in any useful timeframe.

One on one, yes. But march 50-100 through a room, a la Torch migration, and the 'cat just needs to pick out the bad apples. Do that with 3-4 cats, one day at a time, one SD crew a week, perhaps, and you'd likely get the cream of the trustable crop pretty quickly (aka an honest man isn't going to choose crooks for co-workers and bunkmates), and it would't be too long (less than a T-year) before that quarter million group on Spindle has been thinned and the true troublemakers more isolated.

SharkHunter wrote:

SWM wrote:There is a limit to how fast you could run SLN crews through a treecat interview. We've worked out the numbers in previous threads--it's pretty grim. You could get some. But not in the numbers you need in any useful timeframe.

One on one, yes. But march 50-100 through a room, a la Torch migration, and the 'cat just needs to pick out the bad apples. Do that with 3-4 cats, one day at a time, one SD crew a week, perhaps, and you'd likely get the cream of the trustable crop pretty quickly (aka an honest man isn't going to choose crooks for co-workers and bunkmates), and it would't be too long (less than a T-year) before that quarter million group on Spindle has been thinned and the true troublemakers more isolated.

At those numbers, a treecat probably not be able to pick out any single bad apple. The only way it would work is one on one, or perhaps two or three at a time. Torch did not try to run all their immigrants past treecats; they only had two treecats on the whole planet, and most of the interviewers did not have treecats. Nor did they do interviews with 50-100 at a time--they did one-on-one interviews.

SWM wrote:There is a limit to how fast you could run SLN crews through a treecat interview. We've worked out the numbers in previous threads--it's pretty grim. You could get some. But not in the numbers you need in any useful timeframe.
--self snipping--
...
Torch did not try to run all their immigrants past treecats; they only had two treecats on the whole planet, and most of the interviewers did not have treecats. Nor did they do interviews with 50-100 at a time--they did one-on-one interviews.

My impression is otherwise, but we're looking at the same bit of textev, I think:

Torch of Freedom wrote:...
It wasn't as if the arriving shuttles were steeped solely in gloom, despair, and bloodthirsty hatred. In fact, there was an incredible joyousness to most of the arrivals, a sense of having finally set foot on the soil of a planet which was actually theirs.

Of being home at last.

But there were scars, and all too often still-bleeding psychic wounds, on even the most joyous, and they beat on Genghis' focused sensitivity like hammers. The fact that the 'cat was deliberately looking for dangerous fault lines, pockets of particularly brooding darkness, forced him to open himself to all the rest of the pain, as well. Judson hated to ask it of his companion, but he knew Genghis too well not to ask. Treecats were direct souls, with only limited patience for some of humanity's sillier social notions.
...
<That one.> Genghis' fingers flickered suddenly.

"What?"

Judson twitched. So far, despite the inevitable emotional fatigue, today's transport load of new immigrants had contained few "problem children," and he'd settled into a sort of cruise control as he watched them filtering through the arrival interview process.

<That one,> Genghis' fingers repeated. <The tall one in the brown shipsuit, by the right lift bank. With dark hair.>"

That's where I sorta thought Judson and Genghis were pretty much just "waiting room observers" that are "tagging" possible "problem children" to follow up with later. I'd imagine that an arrival shuttle would probably have 300-500 people on it, and they'd put them through the room in small enough sets to let the 'cat/human team do the "quick-pick".

Thoughts?

Somtaaw wrote:For having LACs limpeted to a BC hull, we have the textev from HotQ that a Sultan-class Peep BC can reasonably haul 2 Masadan LAC's.

Manticoran Shrikes & Ferrets, and Peep Cimeterre's I believe are slightly larger than the earlier generations. And the main issue with the Sultan was lack of tractor space, since nobody used pods. Size creep also comes into play, a Sultan is about half the size of post-Second Havenite war battlecruisers, and had limited tractors to "zone" the LACs.

So we can put any BC "LAC carrier" concept at a maximum of approximately 4, maybe 5. If it was a dedicated design, that skimped on broadside weaponry in favour of even more tractors, it might be possible to push it to 6 LACs, but then you'd run into the crew issue.

The big issue would be pulling the crews inside the BC's hull, until they arrive back in normal space, which is what the Sultan had to do with the Masadan LAC's. This gives us the general impression that the compensator field cannot be stretched far enough out, because 2 of the Masadan LAC's had heavy objects break free and smash the innards.

Additionally, it puts a hard limit on how fast you could deploy those LAC's, because crews would have to exit the BC in skinsuits, and drift to hatches on the LAC's. Since the BC wouldn't be able to use her wedge from the second the decision to board LACs happens, there'd need to be a way to get the crews anchored to the LAC's, and getting the LACs out of the BC's wedge as fast as possible.

The BC/LAC that I have in mind would be a cross between a Agamemnon-class pod BC and a Nike-class BC. It would carry it's 8 LACs racked internally which it would launch sequentially out a single hatch in the aft hammerhead just like the Agamemnon would launch missile pods. It would limpet 8 to 12 Mk16 missile pods to the outside of the hull. It would most likely have a reduced missile tube count from the Nike, say only 40 tubes rather than 50. But each tube would be the same double launch off-bore tubes firing Mk16s that the Roland-class destroyers have. If it could launch 4 pods of Mk16s with a full double launch broadside, it would send 136 missiles down range at a time. That would be enough to at least mission kill 2 SLN BC's on each of it's first 3 broadside launches. It could then use just it's internal tubes to send 80 missile broadsides at remaining ships. Defensively it would be an incredibly tough target as it would maintain the armor of the Nike and be able to fire it's broadsides while maintaining a wedge to target aspect just like the Nike-class BC and that would be supported by it's 8 LACs anti-missile capabilities.

A full squadron of 8 of these ships could be sent into just about any situation with confidence it would win. Even half squadrons of 4 of these would be tough. And can you see sending individual ships of this class into commerce raiding? It could take out the embedded cruisers or destroyers and then send off the LACs to intercept the scattering cargo ships. If I captured 6 cargo ships I could offload the crews of 5 ships onto the sixth. Then take the 5 and let the sixth go.

A LAC is 72 meters long and 20 meters by 20 meters wide and high and weighs 20,000 tons. This a lot more then a missile pod. I'm not at all sure you can fit that through the engineering spaces.

8 of them end to end would be 576 meters long, which is over 1/2 of the length of a Nike. If you go to a 4 x 2 cell you need a space probably 80 meters x 30 meters x 25 meter per to do maint and reload them, so you need a compartment 120 meters wide by 50 high meters by 80 meters long. Considering the armor system is multiple meters deep, you'd pretty much need to remove the magazines and most of the broadside weapons to fit this.