Hypothetical Tactical Option Question.

Weird Harold wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Ok, I guess I can understand that. But then either the Battle of Cerberus is either handwavium plot reasons, or an inconsistancy.

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And after Honor came out from the sun, she spent something between 4 and 8 hours drifting, with all wedges down at stand-by readiness.

The Battle of Cerberus is where the observation that lazy scanner techs only watch the gravitics detectors came from. IOW, it is explicitly stated that the only reason the ENS wasn't spotted is that nobody bothered to look for anything smaller than a wedge.

Sensor fusion is something that would be performed by the surveillance system in a more sophisticated force. So it integrates grav sensors, passive RF sensors, active radar, IR, known astronomical objects etc into a single view of the environment.

Back after a hiatus, this looked fun

--snipping--

Theemile wrote:Consider the following:

It's late 1922PD, and your 8 ship Roland division has just been deployed to the "Blah-Blah" sector of the SL to protect several newly liberated Protectorates. The 2 Systems under your care, XYZ and ABC are just ~2 hours apart in hyper. You've taken an abandoned mining habitat in orbit of a Gas giant outside of the hyperlimit in XYZ, as your base, allowing you to quickly get from 1 system to another.
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Given your division is running to danger on it's own, what pod load-out would you take, and why?

I'm goint to add a couple "political realities" to the tactical question and a surmise. First, no way would Michelle Henke leave two neighboring star systems that threadbare, so I'm going to assume that both systems have at least small covering forces of system defense pods and at least enough LACs to give pirates a quick death and anyone else a bloody nose, a la what HAH did at Marsh. The second political bit is that given that these systems likely were part of cushy OFS/transtellar deals a la Mobius, the newly arrived SLN forces aren't really interested in trashing the system's economic infrastructure, they just want to boot whatever Manties are in the area back out. My surmise is that the SLN doesn't know who is minding the store because they were booted out, and they know what Zavala did at Saltash with five Rolands, ergo they're going to be cautious and not dive in system at full accel.

Those affect the tactical reality because it gives my Rolands a chance to respond in force, and perhaps deliver an object lesson to FF in the process. My goal will be to force the surrender. I'll assume that by the time I get back, the SLN forces are headed in system and that the dispatch boat beats me back to the system enough to act as a tiny scout.

All of the Apollo and Mark 23 pods stay home because the Roland's can't use them. We'll assume I'm going to arrive with full pod loadouts that I can use "hot" upon arrival. I'm going to aim for a slight angle off of the least time approach for my hyper to normal space transition, figuring I've got the accel to get to an advantageous attack point that isn't also directly in line of system resources and planets. As soon as I arrive, get the DB mini-take, set my angle, the drone shell goes out, and I get ready to do a Saltash large, warning the SLN ships to abandon or be destroyed.

Let's assume they don't, and are deployed as one force. As soon as we reach my designated attack distance [20MM km], I'm going to launch maximum stacked salvos from the pods in ship attack order a la Saltash, never targeting a ship twice but perhaps targeting two ships at a time because I'm curious to see if a smaller hit total will take out a FF battlecruiser. We'll assume that by the time my ships are "pod dry", we will have likely hit every SLN BC with 40-50 Mark 16-G's. I probably ordered hit the command ship to be hit twice or deliberately mission killed in a single salvo, btw.

If there's anyone left to do so for the force, they've probably surrendered. If not, rinse lather and repeat on the SLN ships still in the fight, retaining a final 30-40 missiles per Roland to hold the system a la Terekhov at Monica. Object lesson delivered.

Thoughts?

sounds about right Sharkhunter

SharkHunter wrote:All of the Apollo and Mark 23 pods stay home because the Roland's can't use them. We'll assume I'm going to arrive with full pod loadouts that I can use "hot" upon arrival.

Why wouldn't the Roland be able to use The Mk23/Apollo pods. Granted the Apollos would have to be used in light-speed mode as they were at Spindle, but the pods are the same size and shape as the Mk 16 pods.

As far as I can tell, any RMN ship can control any RMN missile with light-speed control links, so the only reason to leave the MK23 and Apollo behind would be concern over a force the Mk16G isn't big enough to hurt and/or to give the Chanson class destroyer the reach and punch to defend your supply dump against anything.

Weird Harold wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:All of the Apollo and Mark 23 pods stay home because the Roland's can't use them. We'll assume I'm going to arrive with full pod loadouts that I can use "hot" upon arrival.

Why wouldn't the Roland be able to use The Mk23/Apollo pods. Granted the Apollos would have to be used in light-speed mode as they were at Spindle, but the pods are the same size and shape as the Mk 16 pods.

As far as I can tell, any RMN ship can control any RMN missile with light-speed control links, so the only reason to leave the MK23 and Apollo behind would be concern over a force the Mk16G isn't big enough to hurt and/or to give the Chanson class destroyer the reach and punch to defend your supply dump against anything.

To go off on a tangent, I'm not sure whether older units can carry post-GR recon drones without at least a minor refit and if so, what units were refitted. But it's reasonable enough that everything in RMN service is capable of sharing recon assets.

So for those who advocate leaving the Chanson behind alone, it couldn't hurt to skim a few RDs from the departing Rolands and hand them over to the Chanson. Which may be a necessity if the post-GR drones are significantly larger than the previous types. They'd eat up the allocated volumes pretty quickly.

munroburton wrote:To go off on a tangent, I'm not sure whether older units can carry post-GR recon drones without at least a minor refit and if so, what units were refitted. But it's reasonable enough that everything in RMN service is capable of sharing recon assets.

IIRC, there is textev that any ship with gravitics detectors can read FTL drone feeds, but it requires extensive additions to send information FTL to drones or other ships. I think it would be a pretty old/rare RMN ship that can't at least receive FTL information from GR Drones.

munroburton wrote:So for those who advocate leaving the Chanson behind alone, it couldn't hurt to skim a few RDs from the departing Rolands and hand them over to the Chanson. Which may be a necessity if the post-GR drones are significantly larger than the previous types. They'd eat up the allocated volumes pretty quickly.

I think it would be a pretty safe assumption that our notional Roland squadrons would have a drone shell deployed over at least the more obvious approaches. It would also be fairly safe to guess they didn't waste time picking up the drone shell before rushing off to intercept the intruding BCs in the other system. That would mean the Chanson-class would already have access to the feeds from the GR Drone shell and not have to worry about deploying more.

It also seems like the RMN considers its older ships when deploying new equipment -- like drones and missiles -- and builds in legacy communications ability. Even if the Chanson-class can't transmit FTL, it should be able to reprogram as necessary with light-speed links.

If the base is outside the hyper limit thought, at least to me it means that if this is a trap meant to draw the RMN picket out of position, any FF ship would be able to drop in and start attacking at energy range before any sentry ship can respond. And even if the sentry reacts quickly it might not be enough to prevent the destruction of the sentry, supplies and base.

Sigs wrote:If the base is outside the hyper limit thought, at least to me it means that if this is a trap meant to draw the RMN picket out of position, any FF ship would be able to drop in and start attacking at energy range before any sentry ship can respond. And even if the sentry reacts quickly it might not be enough to prevent the destruction of the sentry, supplies and base.

First there's no reason I can see to put the base totally outside a hyper limit. Near one, maybe, but not out in open space.

But even say that they did; then in theory, yes, you might get pounced from within energy range. In practice though we've seen that super-accurate hyper navigation is very tricky to do right. Hence the Peep's missing the pounce on the Basilisk Terminus in Echoes of Honor, or why naval formations don't usually microjump from a terminus to the hyper limit.

Odds are the FF ship would fail to achieve energy range even if it knew exactly where the base was.

Jonathan_S wrote:Odds are the FF ship would fail to achieve energy range even if it knew exactly where the base was.

SDM range is a lot easier to achieve. Which might be attacking a ship without a wedge.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Odds are the FF ship would fail to achieve energy range even if it knew exactly where the base was.

SDM range is a lot easier to achieve. Which might be attacking a ship without a wedge.

Yep, then you only need to be within roughly 7-8 million km (depending on relative vectors). And if the target's wedge is fully offline it'll take longer than the 3 minutes missile flight to get it up.

So that target should still have time to get off CMs and PDLCs, but it'll lack wedge and sidewalls - making it a far more vulnerable target.