The SLN commerce raiding strategy WILL work.

Theemile wrote:I'd start the attack with an MDM launch and time my strike to hit maybe 60 seconds after the MDM strike. all the survivors will be focused forward, and any wounded birds will be easier pickings - and damaged sensors will help mask the attack.

This of course assumes your command received its supply of MDM pods before they dried up & that they haven’t already been expended in previous attacks – considering the SLN’s previous attitude toward losses, a particularly cunning SLN navy officer may commandeer a squadron of FF BCs to attack the system first to see if it is equipped with missile defenses & to get the local commander to expend them on “missile fodder” first before charging in with his SD’s.

thinkstoomuch wrote:And the Monitor was designed to stand up to 11 inch shells it fired. Wonder how it would have done against a WW1 10 inch armor piercing.

or 8” for that matter.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Again not saying this is a tactic to plan for. It is not. Nor is it a complete death sentence either. "Death Ride" damn skippy. But if it is all you got not like the LACs can leave the system anyway. well unless there are CLACs around which there won't be if we are talking system defense very much doubtful for convoy protection.

The E wrote:...snip...

It's still SD armor though. It's still built to withstand enormous punishment on scales only other Wallers can hand out. There's no doubt that an LAC wing can kill a waller if it concentrates on it. But in the meantime, said waller and its consorts and escorts will kill a lot of LACs in return.

Yes you would loose some LAC & maybe a lot but if you loose 30 LACs & take out just 2 or 3 6 mil ton SDs, with their crew, your still on the high end of the attrition curve. Still SDs NEVER go into battle alone. If I were commanding 20-40 Shrikes in a defense screen against a large SD squadron (assuming no MDM pod support available) I would steer in under stealth & engage in a high speed run with target priorities reversed – the smaller the target the higher the priority. This serves 3 things 1) the smaller ships are always put out as a screen making them more vulnerable – I don’t have to penetrate the fleet to hit the tin cans on the edge! 2) once the initial pass is made & surprise is lost it’s the tin cans that will be detached to hunt me down in the outer systems – the fewer escorts left the fewer (if any) that can be sent after me without leaving the SDs unescorted & exposed. And 3) while it’s cheaper & easier for the escorts to be replaced, any loss is still a loss. You may be able to call for more hulls but, no matter what anyone says, you can’t replace a dead crewman. Kill as much of what you can while you can. Also 3B) if your lucky & kill enough of the escorts you may have an enemy commander that decides he can’t continue the invasion right now because he doesn’t have proper escorts, turns around and leaves to get more reinforcements. This could give you the time needed to get help in (maybe).

kzt wrote:At energy range you can optically see the target. All the jammers and such are pretty much completely useless when you can visually aim at the target. It's having an attack helicopter battalion land and everyone charge the Zulu hordes on foot with their survival knives drawn.

No not really. This is space – even at 1 light second that’s 186,000 miles! Not knife range, & in the darkness of space. The Earth is only 25,000 miles in circumference. So imaging the Earth split at the Red Sea & rolled out flat. A sniper on top of the Great Pyramid aiming WEST threw a scope & trying to hit a 74 meter long target streaking over Jordan at a fraction of C, at night with a new moon, then multiply that range times 7.4. That’s what hitting a LAC @ 1 LS, using only visual sighting would be like.

MAD-4A wrote:[. If I were commanding 20-40 Shrikes in a defense screen against a large SD squadron (assuming no MDM pod support available) I would steer in under stealth & engage in a high speed run with target priorities reversed – the smaller the target the higher the priority. This serves 3 things 1) the smaller ships are always put out as a screen making them more vulnerable – I don’t have to penetrate the fleet to hit the tin cans on the edge! 2) once the initial pass is made & surprise is lost it’s the tin cans that will be detached to hunt me down in the outer systems – the fewer escorts left the fewer (if any) that can be sent after me without leaving the SDs unescorted & exposed. And 3) while it’s cheaper & easier for the escorts to be replaced, any loss is still a loss. You may be able to call for more hulls but, no matter what anyone says, you can’t replace a dead crewman. Kill as much of what you can while you can. Also 3B) if your lucky & kill enough of the escorts you may have an enemy commander that decides he can’t continue the invasion right now because he doesn’t have proper escorts, turns around and leaves to get more reinforcements. This could give you the time needed to get help in (maybe).

You know why big battles were indecisive? It's because if you roll your ship energy weapons can't hit you. The odds are you are not going to get really close without being detected. And if you are moving fast you are not coming back for a while, during which period you get to test your missile defenses. Oh, and lastly, remember what happened at BoM when shrikes made a high speed pass through a SD fleet? If not I'll remind you. They took 95% casualties and did no damage to the SDs.

Brigade XO wrote:The Cataphract missiles "from Technodyne"...are primary pod based for the SLN…carry any out commerce raiding unless they are dragging pods along tractored to the hulls or in freighters traveling along with the raiders and passing them out to the warships just short of arriving at targets….

these are actually irrelevant the real secret to Ghost Rider was not the MDMs (though they were what made it available) it was the FTL FC links. Without the FTL links the MDMs are basically useless at anything past single drive range anyway. The FC update loop is too long. So even if a SL raider group carried MDMs along in pods, they would be able to shoot at Manty/GA escorts at range, but with little effect & take it up the snout in return.

kzt wrote: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.

ummm...cant fire missies in hyper (except in limited gav neutral areas). Missies can’t handle grav waives.

kzt wrote:You know why big battles were indecisive? It's because if you roll your ship energy weapons can't hit you. The odds are you are not going to get really close without being detected. And if you are moving fast you are not coming back for a while, during which period you get to test your missile defenses. Oh, and lastly, remember what happened at BoM when shrikes made a high speed pass through a SD fleet? If not I'll remind you. They took 95% casualties and did no damage to the SDs.

Actually with Manty ECM Vs SL sensors I could & as I said I wouldn’t go threw the BF & target the heavily defended & armored SDs. I would hit the perimeter & kill as many escorts as I could. Also I wouldn’t be trying to turn around. I would race away (after turning around, in place & giving a reverse parting shot followed bay a brief bow-wall drift out of return fire range) and (hopefully) live to harass another day.

MAD-4A wrote:ummm...cant fire missies in hyper (except in limited gav neutral areas). Missies can’t handle grav waives.

Well, grav waves are uncommon. Missiles work elsewhere. But fighting in a grav wave is not something that the RMN should be looking forward to. BC vs Roland in a grav wave means a dead Roland about 95% of the time, if the Roland can't avoid action. SLN ships are optimized for energy combat, modern RMN are not.

As far as SL raiding: any early attempt at full scale raiding would likely be a disaster. The Talbot cluster is the only likely place such activity could take place & the Manties know this. Which means this is where there guard is highest against such activity. Later (if the SL can bring their tech up to counter the Manties) then an overwhelming campaign could be possible. Considering the vastly superior numbers of hulls the SL could send out (mothballed DD & cruiser hulls refurbed with enough of the new tech to make them serviceable or outright new hulls mass-produced for the job). But in the short term the best raiding strategy for the SL would be a FiB strategy. Take a couple of old mothballed fleet coilers or DNs. Refurb them with the best sensors available to put on them. Do the same with some mothballed cruisers & DDs (I wouldn’t send anything out like that without at least full upgrades on their eyes & ears). Equip each ship with full load out of missiles & supplies & each DN with minimum crew requirements (not skeleton but as little as needed for full functions to minimize supply consumption) each DN would receive a group of the smaller ships 4-6 maybe & be sent to some backwater (Talbot or Silesia). Once there the DN would set up in some uninhabited system outside the hyper limit (just incase it has to make a quick getaway). There it would act as a CiC/Tender for the smaller ships who would raid the surrounding systems, avoid any major system & avoid entering the hyper limit & avoid engaging warships. Try to catch a few rompers alone & blow them away then run. If you don’t even manage to get a kill but your presence is noted & you get away clean then your good. The true purpose of commerce raiding is not to destroy & capture the enemy’s cargo but to deny him assets. This can be done in a variety of ways. In this case it involves posing a threat to there commerce. This forces the enemy to react, send escorts to an essentially secure area instead of a threatened front, form convoys (which delays shipping – ships have to wait around with loaded holds for the escorts and other transports to form up then faster ships have to lumber along at the speed of the slowest ship instead of racing along to there next load – this is the true cost of raiding – if ships are sitting around waiting for the convoy to sail then that’s effectively available hull space destroyed as those hulls could be getting where their going & loading up somewhere else). To make this work the raiders have to remain intact – no putting them at risk – as long as they are seen bouncing around the convoys patrols have to remain in place. In 1914 the light cruiser SMS Karlsruhe was in the Atlantic when war broke out. She started raiding British shipping. On 4,11,14 she suffered an accident and sank. The British didn’t know & were unable to find her. They spent the rest of the war having ships searching the Atlantic and Caribbean for her. She did her job tying up allied assets even on the bottom.

kzt wrote:Well, grav waves are uncommon. Missiles work elsewhere. But fighting in a grav wave is not something that the RMN should be looking forward to. BC vs Roland in a grav wave means a dead Roland about 95% of the time, if the Roland can't avoid action. SLN ships are optimized for energy combat, modern RMN are not.

I remember reading the opposite – gav. neutral areas in hyper, where missiles are usable, are uncommon. Most ships “ride” the grav waives that’s why ships can’t just use wedges to run around in hyper – they have to use the sails. In fact in the early books it mentioned that missiles couldn’t be used at all in hyper but someone (I think one of the anthologies) wrote of an engagement in hyper where they fired missiles & the “grav neutral” area came to be.