Thanks for another history lesson!
Swarm type tactics were used by the Charisian privateers back in BSRA, so its about time the Go4 commerce raisers pick up on the concept.
While pirate fleets could and did overwhelm convoy escorts in our history, Doenitz never managed it in WWII.
From what you've posted the chances of a successful repeat are poor to pitiful, if not outright disastrous.
Given no mention of the steam and sail original KH VII's composite hulls being finished as freighters or colliers etc, I presume they were scrapped and thus unavailable.
Japan's solution to the 'impossible' job of blockading China's coast was the same as the US's in the civil war, to simply occupy all the ports with RR leading inland, something more difficult and costly for the ICN given the potential number of creeks and rivers where schooners could be built.
Once enough Siddarmarkians have rifles etc, it could be done; perhaps in a year or so.
L
runsforcelery wrote:Aethor wrote:Indeed, now when I think about it, it would have been enough for ICN to post a couple squadrons of warships to plug the southern end of the Tarot Channel, and the whole route after that would have been safe.
Am I right? No need to even escort ships, just stop privateers from entering from that side, use the Tarot Channel as a chokepoint.
Then you can have a thousand convoys on the Tellesberg - Siddar City route.
A Desnairian raiding force would have to go past that ICN task force undetected, find a convoy, defeat the escorts, and then return with the prizes, again through the Tarot Channel choke point, undetected.
Considering that Desnairians don't have naval traditions and experience like Charisians, how likely is that?
Or did they come around the globe?
All the way along the south end of Howard, through the Great Western Ocean, then somewhere in between Charis and Chisholm, Zebediah and Chisholm, Emerald and Chisholm, and to the Anvil - then with prizes all the way back?
Without being intercepted by ICN either on the way in or on the way out?
EDIT: Ok, there is still the Tranjyr passage.
But a Desnairian raider task force going intentionally through it?
And the same logic applies - it would take ICN far less ships to block that and the Tarot Channel, than to arrange escorts for every convoy.
And in this way they could have a serious blocking force (indeed, were they not blocking Tarot for something like a couple years? I believe vicar Zhaspar had some... colorful words to describe it) in place, larger than any single convoy escort could be, and likely sufficient to deal with a raider task force.
Okay, the Tarot Channel is 300-plus miles wide at the narrowest point. Assume a visual horizon of 20 miles. That means you'd need fifteen ships abreast to cover its width, assuming they could keep perfect station on one another, it never got dark, and there was never any fog or rain. Oh, and you'd have to have multiple lines of pickets to pick up anything that got past the first one. And your pickets would have to be fast enough to catch each individual raider they intercepted without making holes in the picket line other raider might sneak through. And ---
Start to get the picture here?
The truth is that blockade as a strategy usually uses up more ships than convoy escort does and proves less effective at eliminating raiders, to boot. The beauty of convoy is that the convoys act as bait. They attract the raiders to the warships witho9ut the warships blundering about the vast wastelands of the ocean looking for them. Moreover, a convoy of 100 ships offers about 1% the target offered by 100 ships sailing individually. A given raider will have basically one chance to spot each ship --- or convoy --- passing through its area of operations. That means it has 100 chances to spot the ships sailing solo but only 1 chance to spot the convoy. And if it does spot the convoy, the escort's strength is concentrated in a way that should prevent serious damage and provide an excellent chance of whittling down the raiders unless the bad guys luck out and swarm a single convoy. And, in many ways, even taking heavy damage to the occasional convoy favors the defenders, assuming that it does require the bad guys to mass their forces. Packing enough punch to take out a typical convoy's escorts into a single raiding squadron hugely reduces the amount of water which could be covered by the same number of raiders sailing individually lookin for the unescorted ships.
Second, the convoy sailed from Tellesberg (well, Ithmyn), then to Emerald, where it picked up certain portions of its cargo which are being manufactured around Eraystor Bay (you may or may not find out what those portions were in the fullness of time) and linked up with troop ships coming from Chisholm. The Chisholm contingent joined the convoy and the ships which had escorted the troop ships as far as Emerald picked up a gaggle of ships headed to Chisholm and escorted them back the way they'd come.
From Eraystor to Siddar City is roughly 7,000 miles; from Geyra in Desnair to Siddar City is only 7,100 miles by way of the Tarot Channel. Ergo, it's entirely possible for commerce-raiders to sail from Desnarian coastal waters, penetrate the Tarot Channel (see my above paragraph) and intercept the convoy. Getting the prizes home (since the prize ships are going to be slower and less maneuverable than the raiders) may be rather more difficult, but it certainly isn't impossible. It would obviously be better for the privateers if they could find some "neutral" port in which to dispose of their prizes, as the Charisians were doing in South Harchong before Jihad was formally declared, but beggars can't be choosers.
One thing folks have to bear in mind is that radar and aerial and satellite reconnaissance has rather spoiled us. These people (aside from the inner circle) have none of those advantages. The only sensor they have is the Mark One Eyeball, and that makes interceptions a lot harder to pull off. That's one of the reasons --- as I mentioned earlier --- the inner circle had no way of predicting that the raiders were going to run into a troop convoy when, in fact, the odds were heavily in favor of they're not running into it.
As far as blockading Tarot is concerned, yes, the ICN did just that. However, the blockade --- deliberately --- leaked like a sieve for smuggling purposes. What they were really doing was blockading Gorjah's naval units, and that's a lot easier to do as long as you know where they're ported and you can find a fairly convenient bad weather base/water source to support your blockaders. If the Tarotisian Navy had ever managed to evade the blockade and get to sea, however, finding it again would have been a nontrivial task. I invite your attention to Nelson's pursuit of Villeneuve prior to Trafalgar. Privateers are a lot harder to blockade. They're smaller, faster, harder to spot, and completely capable of sailing in singletons rather than squadrons and still proving strategically effective.
and, Mangy Fur the Smart Alick Spacecat.
