The SLN commerce raiding strategy WILL work.

Whitecold wrote:

kzt wrote:Commerce raiding has nothing to do with getting in fights with warships. The effective missile range of Manticoran or Haven freighters is zero meters.

It has an awful lot to do with getting in fights with warships. Manticore knows of the value of its commerce, and how to protect it. Freighters will travel in convoys with warships accompanying them, as well as in-system LACs and system defense pods covering them in normal space.
Of course the attacker wants to find uncovered singlets, but I doubt the SL will find many.

Whitecold does have a vilid point. Manticore and Haven WERE at war with each other until just recently and then abruptly switched their targets. We havn't seen Commerce raiding much in the 2nd war, but that doesn't mean both sides wern't defending against it (they probably were or else it would be an obvious weakness the other side could take advantage of), nor does it mean that it wasn't happening frequently off-screen. Obviously it wasn't happening in the TQ - distance itself protected the TQ from the war.

Both Manticore and Haven have Commerce raiding and anti-raiding doctrines that are as bullet-proof and realistic as possible - they both have had the most experience in the subject in the current Honorverse.

That being said, if the SLN finds and attacks an unprotected backwater, it will have INITIAL successes doing Commerce raiding. As soon as the GA sees it's weakness, it will quickly react (on a local level first, then on an broad level) and bring those experienced protective doctrines into play and the tide will turn against the raiders.

The SLN will soon have to bring vastly disproportional forces to be succcessful without taking extreme damage and have to venture further and further from it's supply bases to find vulnerable targets.

kzt wrote:Commerce raiding has nothing to do with getting in fights with warships. The effective missile range of Manticoran or Haven freighters is zero meters.

10th Fleet deployed some of it's own assets and Mike ordered some of the units attached to the Talbott Sector into defensive posture at SEM Systems plus at least Meyers of the recently liberated systems. Talbott is the closest SEM/GA area that the SLN can reach and where (after Lacoon I) SEM shipping is going to be without starting what amounts to a war with independent systems such as Terra Haute and Erewhon.

This is commerce raiding, not piracy. The intent is to deny SEM (and the GA in general) the cargos and capacity to move them. That essentualy means destroying the merchant shipping, not capturing it and using and/or selling off the ships and materials they carry. While the SL now has a major need to add merchant shipping, what Kingsford is talking about is not yet including a phase of capturing the shipping to return it to SL space.

This ultimatly means that you are going to have two major approches to the mission. One is to sneek SLN units just outside the hyper-limit of systems and destroy any ship entering or leaving the system you can target. Primarily this means catching them in a position where they can't go into hyper. This is ambush hunting and is going to take a while for it to have serious effect on SEM/GA
A second approch is to go into the target systems and destroy any merchant (or other) ship in that system. That does mean that the raiders are going to have to deal with any defensive ships or capabilies of those systems but you are going to get a lot more ships this way. Especially if you have a multi-ship raiding force, you can blow though a system at speed and over run any merchant which would try and flee out the other side. This has the advantage and the problem of essentialy forcing any defending ships to engage your raiders. The SLN needs victories and even destroying a number of single or pairs of light SEM units are "victories" no matter how lopsided the fight. This has a much greater potential to force SEM/GA to shift assets to defend said systems and to provide escorts etc. That problem part comes when you end up having to engage SEM warships which can effectivly engage your raiders from beyond your own weapons range. You may still push defending hyper-capable ships out of system or just out of the way but you are going to get at least damaged in the process.
If you are going to go into the systems instead of ambush hunting, then you will want to destroy local capacity to support trade such as space stations for shipping and any defensive capasity you can reach.
Kingsford needs to demonstrate that SLN can strike at SEM/GA and needs to make them shift assets to protect both existing SEM/GA systems and anyone they are helping.

This is very much like sending WW II cruisers not only out into the shipping lanes or to hang off ports (that part would be dangerous to the cruisers as it allows defending ships to be called in to engage from other areas) but add running into those ports and sinking all the local shipping plus shooting up as much of the port facilites as you can reach. Destroy the local capsisty to handl trade and proceed to the next target.

Brigade XO wrote:

kzt wrote:Commerce raiding has nothing to do with getting in fights with warships. The effective missile range of Manticoran or Haven freighters is zero meters.

10th Fleet deployed some of it's own assets and Mike ordered some of the units attached to the Talbott Sector into defensive posture at SEM Systems plus at least Meyers of the recently liberated systems. Talbott is the closest SEM/GA area that the SLN can reach and where (after Lacoon I) SEM shipping is going to be without starting what amounts to a war with independent systems such as Terra Haute and Erewhon.

This is commerce raiding, not piracy. The intent is to deny SEM (and the GA in general) the cargos and capacity to move them. That essentualy means destroying the merchant shipping, not capturing it and using and/or selling off the ships and materials they carry. While the SL now has a major need to add merchant shipping, what Kingsford is talking about is not yet including a phase of capturing the shipping to return it to SL space.

This ultimatly means that you are going to have two major approches to the mission. One is to sneek SLN units just outside the hyper-limit of systems and destroy any ship entering or leaving the system you can target. Primarily this means catching them in a position where they can't go into hyper. This is ambush hunting and is going to take a while for it to have serious effect on SEM/GA
A second approch is to go into the target systems and destroy any merchant (or other) ship in that system. That does mean that the raiders are going to have to deal with any defensive ships or capabilies of those systems but you are going to get a lot more ships this way. Especially if you have a multi-ship raiding force, you can blow though a system at speed and over run any merchant which would try and flee out the other side. This has the advantage and the problem of essentialy forcing any defending ships to engage your raiders. The SLN needs victories and even destroying a number of single or pairs of light SEM units are "victories" no matter how lopsided the fight. This has a much greater potential to force SEM/GA to shift assets to defend said systems and to provide escorts etc. That problem part comes when you end up having to engage SEM warships which can effectivly engage your raiders from beyond your own weapons range. You may still push defending hyper-capable ships out of system or just out of the way but you are going to get at least damaged in the process.
If you are going to go into the systems instead of ambush hunting, then you will want to destroy local capacity to support trade such as space stations for shipping and any defensive capasity you can reach.
Kingsford needs to demonstrate that SLN can strike at SEM/GA and needs to make them shift assets to protect both existing SEM/GA systems and anyone they are helping.

This is very much like sending WW II cruisers not only out into the shipping lanes or to hang off ports (that part would be dangerous to the cruisers as it allows defending ships to be called in to engage from other areas) but add running into those ports and sinking all the local shipping plus shooting up as much of the port facilites as you can reach. Destroy the local capsisty to handl trade and proceed to the next target.

At this moment in time this seems to me to be a losing strategy. The trouble is that you would be attacking sustems defended by opponents more capable than you are. Your only hope is surprise. How do you surprise a a system covered with a net of ghost rider drones?

Don

n7axw wrote:At this moment in time this seems to me to be a losing strategy. The trouble is that you would be attacking sustems defended by opponents more capable than you are. Your only hope is surprise. How do you surprise a a system covered with a net of ghost rider drones?

Don

The other solution after suprise is overwhelming strength - but the SLN just don't have a good meter stick at the moment for what overwhelming strength would be.

For example: intuitively, 4 SLN BCs should be be overkill for attacking 5 Manticorian DDs, but that was proved wrong at Saltash.

So how many BCs were needed to reliably kill (or drive off) 5 Rolands? Currently, using internal missiles, 5 Rolands can kill or Mission Kill 12 BCs. Each Roland can carry 15 missile pods, giving them the ability to kill/ MK 10 more BCs. So 24 BCs should suffice to kill or drive off 5 Rolands (with heavy losses).

Now, we know a Wolfhound/Avalon is easier Prey, but we know even they are still punching out of their weight class. Even a LAC wing and Missile Pods can make mince meat out of multiple squadrons of BCs.

The problem is the SLN hasn't really absorbed this knowledge yet. If they were to hit a third tier system with 5+ squadrons of BCs and rolled over it, they probably could achieve a victory - but at heavy losses.

The problem is still you need to support commerce raiding squadrons logistically. How long is it going to take the SLN to set up the supply lines to keep dozens and dozens of squadrons of BCs (which is what they'll need to threaten systems defended by LACs and pods, or convoys with escorts) operating far outside their normal operational range? How is the SLN going to protect those logistics lines?

For instance, now that Henke has knocked out Meyers and the Madras Sector, can the SLN even mount a commerce raiding operation in Talbot at all? Do they have the legs for it?

By the time the SLN figures out how to do commerce raiding properly, there isn't going to be a Solarian League.

Also, how long will it take for Kingsford and the SLN Admiralty to get messages out to the BC squadrons, get them concentrated, coordinated (remember the problems Honor had with squadron workups at Hancock under Admiral Sarnow), target selection, deployment to that target, and actually attacking it.

And that doesn't count coming up with new tactics to take into account the new technology they still don't know they don't know about. Even now, we're only aware of five SLN analysts that suspect how deeply in the dark they are. Until someone high enough with enough horsepower to clear out the deadwood who are still preventing the discovery of enough information to create effective doctrine (in an effort to CYA) there is no way for the SLN to implement a successful raiding operation to begin with.

And an unsuccessful raid will likely involve complete destruction of the raiding force, so without feedback on what did and didn't work, the evolution of those tactics takes even longer. Even if a brilliant SLN commander does manage to be effective, how long would it take to get his report back to his superiors, new doctrine developed, and that information released back out into the fleet in general?

The whole concept sounds good, but I expect implementation could not possibly be done in weeks. It would take months if not years just to get started, let alone become effective. And that is time the SLN just doesn't have...

Theemile wrote:So how many BCs were needed to reliably kill (or drive off) 5 Rolands? Currently, using internal missiles, 5 Rolands can kill or Mission Kill 12 BCs. Each Roland can carry 15 missile pods, giving them the ability to kill/ MK 10 more BCs. So 24 BCs should suffice to kill or drive off 5 Rolands (with heavy losses).

Now, we know a Wolfhound/Avalon is easier Prey, but we know even they are still punching out of their weight class. Even a LAC wing and Missile Pods can make mince meat out of multiple squadrons of BCs.

Whether an Avalon is easier prey than a Roland, and if so by how much, is something I don't think we've got a good feel for.

On the one hand their LERMs pretty much have to have smaller warheads, lower terminal velocity, and lower power budgets (compared to the Mk16G).

And of course LERMs have lower max range; but whether that really matters depends on whether the BCs have Cataphracts in their magazines. Without those, the LERMs still nicely outrange any fire from the BCs.

Offsetting those disadvantages the Avalon should be able to fire faster (having to initialize each missile's fusion reactor noticeably slowed the firing rates of DDM units compared to SDM/ERM ships) and fire for longer (bigger magazines and smaller missiles leads to a lot more rounds carried)

How those tradeoffs balance against each other is unknown. If, for example, the LERM was half as effective but an Avalon carried three times as many it might well be able to do more damage than a Roland... But that's just an example; as far as I know we don't have the relative effectiveness nor the number of missiles a Wolfhound or Avalon carries.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:So how many BCs were needed to reliably kill (or drive off) 5 Rolands? Currently, using internal missiles, 5 Rolands can kill or Mission Kill 12 BCs. Each Roland can carry 15 missile pods, giving them the ability to kill/ MK 10 more BCs. So 24 BCs should suffice to kill or drive off 5 Rolands (with heavy losses).

Now, we know a Wolfhound/Avalon is easier Prey, but we know even they are still punching out of their weight class. Even a LAC wing and Missile Pods can make mince meat out of multiple squadrons of BCs.

Whether an Avalon is easier prey than a Roland, and if so by how much, is something I don't think we've got a good feel for.

On the one hand their LERMs pretty much have to have smaller warheads, lower terminal velocity, and lower power budgets (compared to the Mk16G).

And of course LERMs have lower max range; but whether that really matters depends on whether the BCs have Cataphracts in their magazines. Without those, the LERMs still nicely outrange any fire from the BCs.

Offsetting those disadvantages the Avalon should be able to fire faster (having to initialize each missile's fusion reactor noticeably slowed the firing rates of DDM units compared to SDM/ERM ships) and fire for longer (bigger magazines and smaller missiles leads to a lot more rounds carried)

How those tradeoffs balance against each other is unknown. If, for example, the LERM was half as effective but an Avalon carried three times as many it might well be able to do more damage than a Roland... But that's just an example; as far as I know we don't have the relative effectiveness nor the number of missiles a Wolfhound or Avalon carries.

I think it's a safe bet that an Avalon can knock off a Nevada, the question is whether the reverse is true.

Crown Loyalist wrote:I think it's a safe bet that an Avalon can knock off a Nevada, the question is whether the reverse is true.

It depends. In hyper it's another issue. If the ships are far enough away that you have to use a MDM to reach them they will probably change bands to avoid your missiles. If they are close enough that they can't do that then YOU are likely in single drive missile range of THEM. And they have a LOT of SDMs.

Commerce raiding is what we are being shown as being talked about in the books in the current time frame as "the most effective" way of hurting primaily SEM.

What the SLN doesn't really know yet is what is truly going to happen when it sends warships, even up to BC size, into RMN controlled areas. IF they are lucky or the commander of one of these raiding forces holds back a DD as an overwatch ship in engagements, the raiders will be able to get reports back to the SLN. That would be back to the local basing for the raids and probably all the way back to Kingsford.

Problem in, for SLN, they are so far away in actual distance from anything but Talbot Quadrant that the communication cycle is going to be brutal. They are not going to know anything for probably months or more when ships are finally sent out and it is a very open question how many ships are going to actually make it back to provide those reports.
Do they send multiple waves of raids out as they can gather and form separate raid forces? How long is too long for reports to come back so you know what is happening. At what point does it dawn on the local SLN (FF OR BF) commander that all of the raids sent out from their departure point are overdue---and quite probably lost one way or the other.

Then there is that whole question of who's warships are going to be providing patrol and system defence? RMN sure. Grayson, well perhaps. Haven is the one with lots of ships and all of it's systems are "beyond" the Manticore controlled areas relative to where the SL is.

The Mandarins are not going to understand until it is way late in the game that their best option -for the League at any rate though not for themselves- is NOT to start sending more SLN ships to hit SEM/GA targets.