The SLN commerce raiding strategy WILL work.

After 2nd BO Manticore, the GA is going to treat all captured SLN people as POW and handle under the Deneb Accords. That includes any taken with Byng and Crandall plus (probably) those taken around Meyers and any of the other systems near Talbott. Just not worth splitting hairs about time of capture vs the state of war when Fillerta entered the Manticore system limits and opened fire.

The prisoner, killed & missing lists are going to make a very big impact on the SL and the Protectorate Systems along with any Independents (or "nonaligned") as the numbers keep growing.

Duckk,
On the forum, I had taken that to refer to the captured SLN units being used by the SEM, not the ones still available to the SLN.
It underlines the lack of workable options facing the League.

Theemile,
Logistics is the reason I think no option will work well enough for the League to continue long enough to modernize in any strength.

That's the best I can come up with for the League. Non-tenable plans.

Pretty much. You can hurt Haven and Manticore, but it's hard to see how you can win.

Essentially you need a significant breakthrough in tech. Ideally you need to greatly improve your anti-missile capabilities, and upgrade to much longer ranged missiles. And you need to do this without replace your actual weapon platforms, as you have no time to design and build them.

I suspect you could get rather significant improvements in missile defense in that time, along with recon drones and a few other system. The fact that people really have working multi-drive missiles should encourage R&D and it isn't impossible that they could have something in production in year, but that seems questionable.

Brigade XO wrote:After 2nd BO Manticore, the GA is going to treat all captured SLN people as POW and handle under the Deneb Accords. That includes any taken with Byng and Crandall plus (probably) those taken around Meyers and any of the other systems near Talbott. Just not worth splitting hairs about time of capture vs the state of war when Fillerta entered the Manticore system limits and opened fire.

The prisoner, killed & missing lists are going to make a very big impact on the SL and the Protectorate Systems along with any Independents (or "nonaligned") as the numbers keep growing.

Byng's surviving spacers were last seen dropping onto New Tuscany, so they weren't captured (by the Manties). For all we know, they're still there.
(Though maybe the guy on Meyers had time to charter transportation for them before being captured himself -- they could come sailing into Meyers System any day now....)

A question for those who follow the numbers more closely than I. How do the 1922 Shrike BC weight grasers with the improved grav lensing system stack up against the 1850s era SLN SD grasers? Are they approaching parity yet or are the SLN SDs still superior?

KNick wrote:A question for those who follow the numbers more closely than I. How do the 1922 Shrike BC weight grasers with the improved grav lensing system stack up against the 1850s era SLN SD grasers? Are they approaching parity yet or are the SLN SDs still superior?

They're probably near parity, but the question is moot, because Shrikes don't have anything close to SD armor for the SLN to have to cut through. Unless the SD is severely crippled already, a LAC has no business getting even close to energy range of it.

The initial value of the Shrike came from the fact that no one knew what it was, and its stealth was good enough that a squadron of them could get in energy range of the throat or kilt of a waller and engage before they even knew what was out there. But that was a very short-lived time, and the Havenite "Triple Ripple" showed how badly a prepared enemy could hurt them.

However, for anything below the wall, the better stealth and maneuverability of Manty/Grayson LACs probably mean they can win. The combination of Mycroft controlling Apollo system-defense pods with those LACs means the LACs don't have to do battle with healthy capital ships anyway. They just have to clean up what the missiles don't kill outright.

TheMonster wrote:

KNick wrote:A question for those who follow the numbers more closely than I. How do the 1922 Shrike BC weight grasers with the improved grav lensing system stack up against the 1850s era SLN SD grasers? Are they approaching parity yet or are the SLN SDs still superior?

They're probably near parity, but the question is moot, because Shrikes don't have anything close to SD armor for the SLN to have to cut through. Unless the SD is severely crippled already, a LAC has no business getting even close to energy range of it.

That's definitely true for any modern waller, but for Scientists/Vegas, as used in Battlefleet? There is textev in MoH which seems to indicate otherwise:

MoH, Chapter 20 wrote:But, Levinsky [that is Captain Alice Levinsky, commanding officer of LAC Group 711 - my addition] reminded herself coldly, these weren't Havenite superdreadnoughts. They were Sollies, and that was an entirely different kettle of fish. Like the rest of Tenth Fleet's officers, Levinsky had studied the technical data from the captured Solarian battlecruisers attentively, and unless that data was grossly inaccurate, the Sollies' anti-LAC capabilities were even more primitive--a lot more primitive--than the Havenites' had been during Operation Buttercup.

Which suggested all sorts of interesting tactical possibilities to one Alice Levinsky.

Eagleeye wrote:That's definitely true for any modern waller, but for Scientists/Vegas, as used in Battlefleet? There is textev in MoH which seems to indicate otherwise:

Point is, getting into energy range of any SD is supremely dangerous for LACs. For one, while Shrikes carry a lot more punch than any previous LAC class in an energy duel, an SD can take that damage and laugh about it. Remember, the old SDs were built and optimized for energy-range combat, with missiles only an afterthought; as such, I would expect even a comparatively obsolete class like the Scientist to be able to fight off an LAC swarm quite handily. All the advantages modern LACs have, all the stealth and maneuverability they can bring to bear, won't matter all that much against a waller in energy range.

LACs are best used against Battlecruisers and smaller targets. They're not meant to kill SDs, and trying to use them in that role will mean that you're going to lose a lot of LACs in exchange for every single Waller you kill.

The E wrote:

Eagleeye wrote:That's definitely true for any modern waller, but for Scientists/Vegas, as used in Battlefleet? There is textev in MoH which seems to indicate otherwise:

Point is, getting into energy range of any SD is supremely dangerous for LACs. For one, while Shrikes carry a lot more punch than any previous LAC class in an energy duel, an SD can take that damage and laugh about it. Remember, the old SDs were built and optimized for energy-range combat, with missiles only an afterthought; as such, I would expect even a comparatively obsolete class like the Scientist to be able to fight off an LAC swarm quite handily. All the advantages modern LACs have, all the stealth and maneuverability they can bring to bear, won't matter all that much against a waller in energy range.

LACs are best used against Battlecruisers and smaller targets. They're not meant to kill SDs, and trying to use them in that role will mean that you're going to lose a lot of LACs in exchange for every single Waller you kill.

To kill someone/something, you have to know (at least approximately), where he/she/it is ... Yeah, old-style Solly-SDs are built for energy-range-fighting. But even if you built a SD with so much Grasers/Lasers that he looks like a hedgehog - if you don't know where your target is, your energy weapons are useless.

And the 2nd point is - Scientists and Vegas are not build for the kind of battle, that LACs are fighting. Because, for a long time, LACs were regarded as totally useless for any 1st-class-navy (and that was true enough, until Sonja Hemphill and Shannon Foraker and her respective teams came around the corner with some brilliant ideas), so the energy weapons (and the software and doctrine to using them) are designed to fight against other SDs - not against so agile and evasive targets as modern LACs with superior stealth and a graser nearly as powerful as the grasers of the Sollie-SDs themselves.

Yes, if a Solly-SD-Graser hits a LAC, that LAC is toast. But I think, the chance of hits is very small (1 hit in 30 trials, or maybe - if you have a SD with a very good crew - 1 hit in 20 trials). And the grasers of modern LACs are nearly as good as the Solly-SD-grasers ... it should be a slug feast for the LACs.

By the way, and now, that I think of it - the armor of the SLN isn't as good as the armor of the RMN, too ...

Duckk,
On the forum, I had taken that to refer to the captured SLN units being used by the SEM, not the ones still available to the SLN.
It underlines the lack of workable options facing the League.

...Huh? I haven't posted in this topic until this post.