The SLN commerce raiding strategy WILL work.

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.

That's true - but the enemy in question - the Havenites - enjoyed some advantages the SLN lacks. 1st and foremost: The Havenites knew about the Shrikes and Ferrets and what they are able to do - The Sollies don't. They know, there are new LACs, but (aside from the more or less limited experience they made in the 2nd BoM) they don't know what they can and cannot do.

2nd - Because of reason 1, the Sollies don't have a doctrine of how to fight against modern LACs. Their energy weapons are designed to fight against hypercapable warships - big vessels with (compared to LACs) slow acceleration and even slower velocities. And their PDLC (so far as they have laserclusters at all) don't have the range for a succesfull fight against LACs (afaik, the PDLCs of a Sag-C CA like Hexapuma have a range of about 30.000 km (1) - and somehow I doubt that the PDLCs even of a Manty SD(P), much less a Sollie SD, have so much more range)

3rd) Even after all the losses, the SLN has suffered - it is still not on a warfooting mindset. Not really. They just begin to accept (kicking and screeming all the way) that "something has to be done now", but the mountain of things that "have to be done now" is so huge, that the development of a new doctrine (and the accompanying hard- and software to set it in effect) against LAC-attacks is definitely not one of the highest urgency. That may change, after some SDs are critically damaged or even lost against LACs ... but not for the forseeable future.



(1) - cf Shadow of Saganami, the Chapter with Ragnhild Pavletics death.

MAD-4A wrote:

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.

Why don't you just postulate that the defensive command is out of LAC ammo and hasn't refueled their LACs in 20 months so the piles are too weak to power the main Graser?

Of course it assumes the misisle pods are available. Why would you execute a plan to use missile pods if you don't have them?

Your entire retort isn't the intitial stages of Commerce raiding, it's the end phases with a well bloodied SLN force. WE KNOW the SLN has ZERO idea of what the RMN defenses are and what the individual RMN units are, let alone what their capabilities are. The beginning phases of Commerce raiding will be the SLN bundering in blind, feeling their way for what their enemy is capable of and what will work against them. The SLN commander has to know there are missiles and LACS in the system - by losing taskforces to them in the first place - in order to take an attrition policy. No matter how cunning, He also has to have hard intel that the RMN is having supply chain problems or else he has to assume that the system is still flush with pods and the handful of LACs his last ships swatted have been replaced or repaired and are back in service.

The SLN has a record of Honor stating she has millions of pods available just a few minutes before she smashed Filareta - If they were found elsewhere, why would one assume they were not plentiful without hard knowledge that they were limited?

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.

These Shrikes weren't targeting the SDs. They were ordered in to strip off the remaining Havenite screen - which they did, despite having to face a greater number of enemy LACs at the same time, as well as Havenite defensive fire.

I believe the SEM is working on the idea that the SLN will not last long enough to develope a consistant and effective strategy. Standard SLN doctrine is to show up (unannounced) with massivly overwhelming force and crush the problem. That has been shown not to work against SEM. They can guess that it probably isn't going to work against Haven either.

The commerce raiding idea appears- from the story line- to be more of an attempt to cover the butts of a lot of people rather than actually do more than make the GA bleed a bit. This, of course, will matter mostly to the people on both sides that are killed but have little effect on what ultimately happens to the SL other than keep showing that the leadership is a grasping bunch of corrupt and self centered & power hungry despots.

The GA and friends (like the Aldermani) are comming to understand that the thing they need to do- break up the SL to keep it from developing the tech and strategy to destroy the GA members- is exactly what the Alignment wants to happen. This is your classic double-edged sword situation and dammed if you do/dammed if you don't.

What I wonder is when people we are hearing from or about in the GA and friends are going to start wondering HOW the Alignment are planning to implement whatever it is they ultimatly want after they get the SL to break up.

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 suspect that (for one reason or another) buckler walls, as currently implemented, won't work in grav waves.

But if I'm wrong, then a buckler wall might well let a Roland survive a one on one encounter with a BC mid-wave. (Because if it could keep the buckler interposed then there's a pretty wide immune zone where the Roland's chase weapons can hurt the (unshielded) BC but the BC's weapons can't penetrate the buckler wall.

But if you go more than one on one it's vastly harder to keep the geometry such that no opponent has and angle to slip a shot past the buckler; it's small enough to only protect from a few degrees out from dead ahead (or astern).

MAD-4A wrote:

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.

Grav waves are not the norm in hyper. You see ships especially merchants in them so much because a ship going out of its way to a hyper wave in the right band which is deep enough for a very high effective speed is still going to arrive faster than a ship that has the same departure and arrival point taking the straight line journey thanks to the bonus speed of the wave. And also for merchants in a grav wave, siphoning energy from it while sailing it allows them to get all the energy they need from it, they have to burn much less of their bunker and have nearly free unlimited energy. So for penny counting lines (nearly of not all of the ones still in business) a slightly longer trip for much cheaper transit makes for a more profitable one.

Before the sail was developed grav waves were the death of any hyper ship. There has to be enough non grav space in hyper for the original survey ships of Manticore and other places to not meet one and die. Grav waves were common enough that the crews of such a ship did get great hazard pay but not so great they couldn’t get to where they were tying to go. And a lot of this is before they new what grav waves were and how to detect them.

Warships travelling without merchants take waves a lot less. Often this is because the grav waves headed in their direction are in lower bands that would slow them down to get to them. And the cost saving component isn’t one a warship is usually concerned with. Also if a ship have lost a single alpha node out of its ring due to combat damage it wont be able to form a sail and will thus be avoiding waves like the plague.

Ships are often more near and in grav waves than the distribution of grav waves would make you suspect. Because of how useful they are for travel, ships do head to them thus the data for how prevalent they are is skewed by the sample of ships preferentially using them. That said grav waves are as pervasive as you seem to be thinking.

Wolf

Letteredwolf wrote:Grav waves are not the norm in hyper. You see ships especially merchants in them so much because a ship going out of its way to a hyper wave in the right band which is deep enough for a very high effective speed is still going to arrive faster than a ship that has the same departure and arrival point taking the straight line journey thanks to the bonus speed of the wave. And also for merchants in a grav wave, siphoning energy from it while sailing it allows them to get all the energy they need from it, they have to burn much less of their bunker and have nearly free unlimited energy. So for penny counting lines (nearly of not all of the ones still in business) a slightly longer trip for much cheaper transit makes for a more profitable one.

Before the sail was developed grav waves were the death of any hyper ship. There has to be enough non grav space in hyper for the original survey ships of Manticore and other places to not meet one and die. Grav waves were common enough that the crews of such a ship did get great hazard pay but not so great they couldn’t get to where they were tying to go. And a lot of this is before they new what grav waves were and how to detect them.

Warships travelling without merchants take waves a lot less. Often this is because the grav waves headed in their direction are in lower bands that would slow them down to get to them. And the cost saving component isn’t one a warship is usually concerned with. Also if a ship have lost a single alpha node out of its ring due to combat damage it wont be able to form a sail and will thus be avoiding waves like the plague.

Ships are often more near and in grav waves than the distribution of grav waves would make you suspect. Because of how useful they are for travel, ships do head to them thus the data for how prevalent they are is skewed by the sample of ships preferentially using them. That said grav waves are as pervasive as you seem to be thinking.

Wolf

The Grav waves are analogous to our Expressways of today. they are not on every point of the map, but it is often more economic and timesaving (for merchies) to use the ones closest to you, even if there is a direct route between the 2 points.

Letteredwolf wrote:Grav waves are not the norm in hyper. You see ships especially merchants in them so much because a ship going out of its way to a hyper wave in the right band which is deep enough for a very high effective speed is still going to arrive faster than a ship that has the same departure and arrival point taking the straight line journey thanks to the bonus speed of the wave. And also for merchants in a grav wave, siphoning energy from it while sailing it allows them to get all the energy they need from it, they have to burn much less of their bunker and have nearly free unlimited energy. So for penny counting lines (nearly of not all of the ones still in business) a slightly longer trip for much cheaper transit makes for a more profitable one.

One nitpick; grav wave give an acceleration bonus, not a speed bonus. Ships in hyper still max out at around 0.6c (varies somewhat with particle densities).

The grav wave's acceleration bonus is roughly 10x; which does cut the time getting to top speed. But the max time savings from that, for most trips, is equal to the difference in time it takes to reach 0.6c at, say, 400g vs 4000g. That's roughly a day, day and a quarter. (And since you scrub speed automatically when doing downward transitions through the hyper bands you don't need to spend that same time decelerating at the end of your trip)


Some trips do require detours or slowdowns to avoid rouge waves, so the acceleration bonus would save time every time the ship had to get back up to full speed. That could add up, depending on the route.


Even so, a few days isn't enough for a long detour just to stay in the grav wave. And the quicker the ship the less time they save through the accel bonus; a warship pulling 700g normally only saves roughly 16 hours getting to 0.6c at 7000g.

But the fuel savings probably are enough incentive for most merchants to stay in the waves even if it takes a few extra days transit time compared to cutting straight 'cross country'.

Brigade XO wrote:
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.

Yes, though I think the Mandarins will understand quickly. Because the issue they are facing is maintaining the existence of the League itself. They see that their fleet is not going to protect them, and some are starting to think the fifth column claims Manticore is making about Mesa may have some validity after all. I would guess they will be pulling their resources inward to hold what they have, for as long as they can. I could almost see the GA preferring to prop up the League so they can concentrate on the Alignment. Not likely, but maybe not insane.

Brigade XO wrote:
The GA and friends (like the Aldermani) are comming to understand that the thing they need to do- break up the SL to keep it from developing the tech and strategy to destroy the GA members- is exactly what the Alignment wants to happen. This is your classic double-edged sword situation and dammed if you do/dammed if you don't.

What I wonder is when people we are hearing from or about in the GA and friends are going to start wondering HOW the Alignment are planning to implement whatever it is they ultimatly want after they get the SL to break up.

Sorry, didn't realize you had already gone there.