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Commerce raiding

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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 12:45 am

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Sigs wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:Actually even tertiary systems were usually picketed by ships heavier than cruisers.

Ok they were picketed by BC's... they still cannot stand up to BB's. Adler seemed to be picketed by nothing heavier than CA's and I doubt that would be the only system that would be picketed lightly as the alliance captured ~24 systems in the first 1-2 years of the war and that is far too many systems for them to be picketing with anything heavier than CA's.

Right, because Adler was after Trevor's Star was captured -- when I already pointed out that the books said the picket forces were drawn down.

And it's true that most of the captured systems would have light pickets -- because there's likely nothing left there worth fighting over; you can cripple their militarily useful spaceborne industry on the way out and leave the Peep BB force guarding a system that's a net drain on the Republic's resources. At that point unless they start building a new fleet base there's not even any reason to recapture it -- not unless you think you can force the Peep fleet to fight and die on good attritional terms.

And if the BBs show up in overwhelming numbers then any picket commander who isn't an idiot is just going to leave, not even a single passing salvo for the honor of the flag. (Okay, there were clearly a few idiots in command of RMN pickets; but I have to hope they were rare)

As for sending BBs after convoys - convoys spend as much time as possible in a grav wave; and a BB is about the worst ship to use for combat there. As you yourself pointed out the BBs are a very missile heavy design, and missiles are useless in a grav wave. Further the achillies heels of ships in a grav wave are their alpha nodes, which cannot be protected by armor. Any ship hit on the alpha nodes is, at best, out of the fight and requiring a tow clear or else is immediately lost with all hands. Without sidewalls to burn through you don't need particularly powerful energy mounts to kill other warships -- so you'd be better off with a bunch of lighter units instead of a few BBs. Lighter units that you presumably need to divert to cover whatever the BBs had been doing before you threw them after convoys.

And if the Peeps want to spread a few hundred BBs around trying to find the needle in a haystack that is a convoy I'm sure Manticore would be quite happy about that. It's a lot of time spent with very little return; and about the most harmless thing they could do with those BBs.

They'd be better off with your other idea of massing them to kill pickets. At least then they might also catch a few convoys flying into the recaptured system (though not if the convoy escort commander is being smart about it -- but at least they could whittle down the escorts that scout the system ahead of the convoy)


If the Republic hadn't been thrown into disarray with the Pierre Coup, and removed the constraints on the use for force for regime change -- if the Harris Administration was still running the war then maybe they'd have been able to free up more BBs early on. But I don't know that we can simply declare Pierre and St. Just's concerns about internal stability and their determination that many BBs were needed for internal security to be fantasies and utterly stupid. Could they have freed up more BBs without the wheels coming off? Maybe. Maybe not.
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 1:17 am

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I know the situation was highly unusual, but I was just skimming back through Fourth Yeltsin, and is struck me that Honor's 6 SDs (and supporting lighter units) actually killed 17 of the 24 battleships with missiles (including the towed pod alpha strike); before reaching energy range! (for the loss of only one of the SDs; though somewhere along there 6 BCs joined her)

I guess battleship really can't stand the crush of battle with a proper waller!

(And possibly more to the point Theisman didn't think his twelve battleships and sixteen battlecruisers were likely to survive 26 minutes against 4 healthy SDs + 9 BCs; even knowing they'd already expended their pods. So even knowing what was there and expecting to stay out of energy range he didn't think he could win with 3:1 odds against SDs if the SDs were healthy)

Better bring significantly better than a 4:! numerical advantage if you want to take on an picket of wallers and BCs without significant losses (at least before you have missile pods of your own)


Though Theisman's stand at Sebring, on the approaches to Trevor's Star during that campaign, while he was only facing DNs and had twice as many BBs, managed to damage them enough to cause the RMN force to withdraw -- but at the cost of 10 BBs written off for only 1 DN destroyed in exchange. Still not a good exchange rate -- and further evidence that the BBs weren't all sitting in the Peep rear areas on internal security duty.
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by tlb   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 8:11 am

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tlb wrote: highlighted two important points:

First, the battleships are not all loitering in Haven's back reaches, some are actually included in the defense structure around Trevor's Star.
Second, even battleships in Haven's back reaches can get called into emergency support of political operations.
Sigs wrote:Well before commencement of hostilities the RHN should have concentrated, having 240 BB's in a few major bases means they have a chance to work as divisions, squadrons and task forces. The fact that they were spread around the republic meant that before an offensive they would have to be recalled and concentrated which gives the RMN a chance to get wind of BB's being withdrawn.

The RHN doesn't need to worry about a surprise attack from the SKM and they can press their own people with 60 BB's support by CL's and DD's. The 120 wallers they used in the opening phase of the war supported by 240 BB's and a decent screen would have absolutely crushed the alliance and forces the SKM to abandon the alliance and retreat to the home system.

Many people in the forum have advocated the concentration of force you mention and amplified it be saying that the wallers from home fleet should be included. All these ships should have met at Trevor's Star and with the bulk of the ships from there, they should have attacked Manticore directly; instead of splitting force to attack both Yeltsin and Hancock.

Personally I can not begin to anticipate what the final results of any of the plans would be, including this one. I would not have been able to predict the outcome of the Battle of Midway, even knowing how and why the US forces had positioned themselves.

All I can ask is whether the plan that the RHN followed in the books is consistent with their previous operations. The Short Victorious War shows Haven's leadership discussing options and fallback positions, indicating that they were not of a mindset to pursue one all-or-nothing push.
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Theemile   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 12:12 pm

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This is from the Jayne's PRN book about the ships in the fleet. (page 11)

Warships in the People’s Navy are, as a rule, built tough and dependable. Their design philosophy could easy be summed up with the simple statement “better is the enemy of good enough.”
Whenever possible, complex systems are replaced by simpler systems. A notable example of this is in the passive defenses. A Havenite warship has weaker sidewalls, but comparatively heavier armor than a Manticoran or Solarian. This fits Havenite centralized planning and logistical doctrine - armor plating requires less maintenance man-hours than sidewall generators do.
Weapon mounts are clustered by type to simplify power requirements, control runs and ammunition handling. With neighboring mounts often sharing critical power and control subsystems, chances increase that a single hit can take out multiple weapons of the same type. Havenite warships have fewer, larger magazines shared by multiple launchers, rather than compartmentalizing launchers and magazines into smaller units.
Havenite warships spend long spans between scheduled maintenance runs. Given the lower standards of training and
education that the People’s Navy must accept, their crews are
poorly suited to many routine maintenance tasks. Most of their electronic equipment is built to a profoundly modular standard, where full modules are pulled and replaced without any attempt to repair them in-place. Anything more complex is left for the support ships or forward repair bases. This puts a premium on the shipboard diagnostic systems, and the People’s Navy leads the militaries of known space in this aspect of the electronics field.
Every ship has a sophisticated expert system installed to
diagnose maintenance issues and suggest courses of action to
the engineering department. For simple swap-and-replace level
fixes, the system can quickly find the faulty component, and every system has built-in threshold monitoring to flag faults that must be repaired at a yard. If such a condition exists, the system reports to the Chief Engineer, who reports to the captain, who then informs the squadron CO and departs for the nearest repair base.
When a ship returns from a deployment period, scheduled or
unscheduled, the crew departs and the shipyard technicians take
over. The yard workers are among the most highly trained
Technical staff in the People’s Navy, and there are substantial retention bonuses to keep them in uniform. Where other navies treat yard dogs as “those who couldn’t quite cut it to be senior engineering staff on a mobile command”, the People’s Navy, short on qualified technical personnel, husbands them as a critical, centralized resource. There is almost no contact between the yard workers and the ship’s crew, including the engineering staff. Maintenance reports, both human and ship-generated, are reviewed by the yard workers, who perform the necessary maintenance and repairs.
This system has greatly simplified the logistics tail for a given operation, reduced reliance on variable quality engineering crews and ensured a high percentage of uptime for their warships. The drawbacks include ships that are optimized more for the convenience of the yard workers than damage control teams. Heavy armor around critical combat systems can be bypassed by the yard tech teams, but does not provide easy access during a combat situation.
The start of the Manticore War pointed out a greater flaw in the system. Prior to the war, all conquests were quick single-system affairs. Fleet organization was tightly centralized, and other than convoy escorts, few ships operated far from their bases for extended periods of time. A multi-system war has heavily taxed the ability of the Office of Naval Logistics to keep pace with warship deployments. Even with a higher percentage of forward nodal bases than the Manticoran Alliance, the People’s Navy is seeing widespread declines in efficiency and readiness reports as ships are forced to spend more time on deployment.


I do note that support ships were mentioned, but the stress was on using fleet bases a centralized points for deployments, not lengthy deployments where fleet trains were used to refuel and re-arm units between repeated battled.

Obviously, this changed, but in 1905, this was the PRN operational pattern.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Nyssa   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 2:51 pm

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Several posts have suggested using BBs for commerce raiding, since even an obsolete Waller is better than no Waller. While the circumstances were different, Hitler tried this in WWII. Even using what were arguably the most advanced and best wallers, the results were underwhelming. The Graf Spee was probably the most successful, operating in the South Atlantic. The Tirpits destroyed several convoys,, but spent most of the war in harbors. Where it tied down a lot of ships making sure it stayed there. The Bismark sunk the obsolete HMS Hood, but sunk zero merchant ships.
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 3:34 pm

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Nyssa wrote:Several posts have suggested using BBs for commerce raiding, since even an obsolete Waller is better than no Waller. While the circumstances were different, Hitler tried this in WWII. Even using what were arguably the most advanced and best wallers, the results were underwhelming. The Graf Spee was probably the most successful, operating in the South Atlantic. The Tirpits destroyed several convoys,, but spent most of the war in harbors. Where it tied down a lot of ships making sure it stayed there. The Bismark sunk the obsolete HMS Hood, but sunk zero merchant ships.

To be fair, one major difference is that Hitler had way fewer capital ships than the Royal Navy - so it wasn't a major impact on their war efforts to assign an old R-clas, Nelson, or Rodney (all too slow to keep up with modern battleships) to tag along with convoys in case a heavy surface raider unexpectedly showed up. (And then still be able to assign fast battleships and carriers to hunt down any heavy raiders known to be at sea)

On the other hand the Peeps had way more battleships than the RMN had DNs and SDs; so Manticore wouldn't be able to do the same. (OTOH it's a lot harder to find a Honorverse convoy than an Atlantic one)
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Theemile   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 3:50 pm

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Nyssa wrote:Several posts have suggested using BBs for commerce raiding, since even an obsolete Waller is better than no Waller. While the circumstances were different, Hitler tried this in WWII. Even using what were arguably the most advanced and best wallers, the results were underwhelming. The Graf Spee was probably the most successful, operating in the South Atlantic. The Tirpits destroyed several convoys,, but spent most of the war in harbors. Where it tied down a lot of ships making sure it stayed there. The Bismark sunk the obsolete HMS Hood, but sunk zero merchant ships.


A couple prescient points I have not seen (and excuse me if they have been covered) suggesting against using BBs in Commerce raiding are:

1) Single drive missiles - at this point, Single drive missiles were the norm, and a system's hyper emergence locus (the best place to hit a convoy or freighter) is much larger than single drive missile range - pirates routinely got away from a missile launch by outranging it because the defending ship was too far away to properly range the pirate.
Stalking a system's hyper locus is going to require multiple hulls to properly cover it - and every ship has the same missile range, independent of size, so multiple smaller hulls are more efficient than the same # of larger ones.

2) ECM - to jump a convoy or lone freighter, you want to lie doggo - silently - so no one knows you are there. If people do, they run to another place on the hyper shell, and run for help to throw you out, and don't allow any outgoing freighters to be caught by you. Hiding multiple SD/DN is much more difficult than the same # of DDs, CLs, and CAs.

3) Communications - As we all know - there is no interstellar radio in the Honorverse. Ships are out of touch, until they bump into another ship which carries it's mail, or they return to their base. Sending Capital ships to the middle of where-ever effectively takes them off the board for greater operations, until they return. Dedicating a large # of capital ships to attempt to interdict shipping at a 2nd or 3rd tier systems (because stalking a 1st tier systems would create a response from the local defense forces, which are larger than a handful of BBs) would effectively place them out of place for several months for little gain. (not no gain, but not THAT much for several months of operations.)
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Relax   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 4:56 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:Also, its generally easier for militaries to get funding for the big shiny weapons than it is to convince politicians to properly fund the boring (but utterly necessary) logistics. That's why the US Navy started WWII with a near crippling shortage of fast fleet tankers. They'd known for decades that they'd need them in the pacific, but couldn't convince Congress to fund more than a few.

Jonathan_S wrote:
Relax wrote:
If you think they had a shortage of fleet tankers before WWII then.... Today is beyond pitiful. At least then USA was building fleet oiler tankers for the world at the time and its merchant marine owned most of the oilers of the world. Today it is not building them nor owns many. If you think the USA before WWII kicked off was short of fleet oilers, the UK was far far far SHORTER on fleet logistics ships.

PS: Logistics transfer in space--> Very easy. They have pressers/pullers in the HV

Um, while the number of tankers under US flag is pitiful today, the USN is better off for oilers than they were at the start of WWII. (An oiler is a tanker with additional pumping and hose equipment to allow ship to ship replenishment; ideally while under way - so don't conflate the pitiful position of the US merchant fleet with the position of the USN's logistics fleet)

Today they have 14 Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oilers, and the first 2 of their replacements the John Lewis-class replenishment oilers are already in service. Additionally they can refuel from the 2 remaining Supply-class fast combat support ships. So that makes 18 fast oilers.

In contrast at the start of 1940 the USN had 5 "slow" 14 knot oilers of Kanawha-class and Cuyama-class fleet replenishment oilers (plus one more Kanawha that was in a major refit), 12 even slower 10.5 knot ex-WWI oilers which by this point could really only be used for transporting oil, not proper replenishment, and just 3 of the fast 18 knot Cimarron-class oilers that could keep up with the fleet.

(Though they'd help finance a several more of the fast commercial tankers they were based on and during 1940 and 41 took them up from trade and began quick conversions of them to additional fast tanker; so the situation wasn't as dire by December 7th 1941, with 5 additional Cimarrons in commission)

Still, 8 proper oilers to supply an even larger fleet compares poorly to today's 16-18 oilers for a numerically smaller USN.

The Royal Navy went a different route in the world wars, they had very little fleet train due to their large number of naval bases scattered around the world. Their theory was they'd always be operating from within range of one of them and they could leverage their large merchant marine and presumed control of the seas to use commercial shipping (or at least standard tankers and freighters taken up from trade; or captured from their enemies merchant fleets) to move fuel and supplies to those bases; where it could be stored until the base needed to transfer it to warships -- so they saw little need for specialized logistics or replenishment ships.


The USA was the ONLY nation to have so called "fast" oilers at this time period right? True, most were in the merchant marine, but still. No one else was even building them. We forget the merchant marine truly is part of the USN. USN hasn't forgotten about it and why they are screaming to congress to do something about it. That was my point. Or additional point would be more appropriate.
_________
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Relax   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 5:09 pm

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Additional considerations:

IF the BB's were designed specifically to attack ONLY star systems close to the PRH in the early 1800's and used as such. For all we know they have VERY short legs. Lets not forget ~100 years ago Haven was a single system polity with near ~zero navy who at the time was ONLY interested in conquering their kitty corner neighbors at most. By ~1850 time period their merchant marine was all but sequestered into only Havenite controlled space. Therefore outside ~Haven immediate space really did not matter. They were building forward operating bases and hopping to the next system for the last century at a near continuous rate(we are told they have ~150 star systems from 1 in ~100 years)

Why would their doctrine change? Bureaucrats do not change their spots nor leave. Now add Prolong and bureaucrats(admirals on down) now entrench for LONG lives.

--> We forget this aspect. Prolong is a massive societal upheaval during this period of time.

It wasn't until the decapitation of the entire Legislaturists several years into the war that new ideas were surfacing(1910ish). The entrenched power structures were decapitated(literally) allowing new ideas to flourish and no ones "precious" iron rice bowl was "threatened"
Theemile wrote:This is from the Jayne's PRN book about the ships in the fleet. (page 11)

Warships in the People’s Navy are, as a rule, built tough and dependable. Their design philosophy could easy be summed up with the simple statement “better is the enemy of good enough.”
Whenever possible, complex systems are replaced by simpler systems. A notable example of this is in the passive defenses. A Havenite warship has weaker sidewalls, but comparatively heavier armor than a Manticoran or Solarian. This fits Havenite centralized planning and logistical doctrine - armor plating requires less maintenance man-hours than sidewall generators do.
Weapon mounts are clustered by type to simplify power requirements, control runs and ammunition handling. With neighboring mounts often sharing critical power and control subsystems, chances increase that a single hit can take out multiple weapons of the same type. Havenite warships have fewer, larger magazines shared by multiple launchers, rather than compartmentalizing launchers and magazines into smaller units.
Havenite warships spend long spans between scheduled maintenance runs. Given the lower standards of training and
education that the People’s Navy must accept, their crews are
poorly suited to many routine maintenance tasks. Most of their electronic equipment is built to a profoundly modular standard, where full modules are pulled and replaced without any attempt to repair them in-place. Anything more complex is left for the support ships or forward repair bases. This puts a premium on the shipboard diagnostic systems, and the People’s Navy leads the militaries of known space in this aspect of the electronics field.
Every ship has a sophisticated expert system installed to
diagnose maintenance issues and suggest courses of action to
the engineering department. For simple swap-and-replace level
fixes, the system can quickly find the faulty component, and every system has built-in threshold monitoring to flag faults that must be repaired at a yard. If such a condition exists, the system reports to the Chief Engineer, who reports to the captain, who then informs the squadron CO and departs for the nearest repair base.
When a ship returns from a deployment period, scheduled or
unscheduled, the crew departs and the shipyard technicians take
over. The yard workers are among the most highly trained
Technical staff in the People’s Navy, and there are substantial retention bonuses to keep them in uniform. Where other navies treat yard dogs as “those who couldn’t quite cut it to be senior engineering staff on a mobile command”, the People’s Navy, short on qualified technical personnel, husbands them as a critical, centralized resource. There is almost no contact between the yard workers and the ship’s crew, including the engineering staff. Maintenance reports, both human and ship-generated, are reviewed by the yard workers, who perform the necessary maintenance and repairs.
This system has greatly simplified the logistics tail for a given operation, reduced reliance on variable quality engineering crews and ensured a high percentage of uptime for their warships. The drawbacks include ships that are optimized more for the convenience of the yard workers than damage control teams. Heavy armor around critical combat systems can be bypassed by the yard tech teams, but does not provide easy access during a combat situation.
The start of the Manticore War pointed out a greater flaw in the system. Prior to the war, all conquests were quick single-system affairs. Fleet organization was tightly centralized, and other than convoy escorts, few ships operated far from their bases for extended periods of time. A multi-system war has heavily taxed the ability of the Office of Naval Logistics to keep pace with warship deployments. Even with a higher percentage of forward nodal bases than the Manticoran Alliance, the People’s Navy is seeing widespread declines in efficiency and readiness reports as ships are forced to spend more time on deployment.


I do note that support ships were mentioned, but the stress was on using fleet bases a centralized points for deployments, not lengthy deployments where fleet trains were used to refuel and re-arm units between repeated battled.

Obviously, this changed, but in 1905, this was the PRN operational pattern.
_________
Tally Ho!
Relax
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Re: Commerce raiding
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Oct 16, 2024 5:51 pm

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Relax wrote:The USA was the ONLY nation to have so called "fast" oilers at this time period right? True, most were in the merchant marine, but still. No one else was even building them. We forget the merchant marine truly is part of the USN. USN hasn't forgotten about it and why they are screaming to congress to do something about it. That was my point. Or additional point would be more appropriate.

AFAIK the fast oilers were not in the merchant marine. Some of the fast tankers build on the same hull were, but they weren't equipped with the extra equipment to convert them to oilers until after the USN took them over.

Still the USN was ensuring (to the extent they could get Congress to fund it) that in the runup to WWII there would be fast tankers they could take up and quickly convert to oilers. They basically paid the commercial owners most of the capital and operating costs of the higher speed for pre-war fast tankers built to the same size and speed as their 3 fast oilers.

And during the war the war built T3 fast tankers went to both industry and the USN; with most gong to industry -- but again, AFAIK, only the USN ones got the extra equipment to allow them to act as oilers.

And while I'm having trouble quickly finding speed information on the British Tanker Company ships (as examples of UK tankers) based on the engine power of the few 1930's era ones I've found they certainly seem like they'd be a lot slower than the T3 tankers -- so the US might well be the only nation building fast tankers (or at least significant numbers of fast tankers)


Though you're still right that the large US merchant marine was a big support for the navy. Even though their tankers couldn't act as oilers, the USN never had as many oilers as it wanted and it would use commercial tankers to move oil from the mainland to temporary forward island bases and then its more limited number of oilers just to shuttle it forward from there to fuel up the fleet; instead of wasting the oilers (and their special equipment) making the long trip back to the West Coast to refill. And the same for regular freighters vs the underway replenishment ships -- you'd use the large US merchant marine's regular freighters (many the war-built Liberty and Victory classes) to get the supplies to the forward base and then the replenishment ships would handle just shuttling supplies the much shorter distance out to the fleet.
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