lyonheart wrote: Hi Jonathan_S,
Excellent points!
The PRHN intercept of Helen Zilwicki was largely due to rather exceptional intelligence, the specific kind that's not going to be easily had right after the SLN raiders show up.
It's going to take a while, weeks if not month's, to monitor the system, find ways to get to the planet without attracting lethally dangerous attention, unless the raiders brought slow tramp freighters or db's to pretend to be media ships [oh, wait the GA knows all about that trick] etc with them to act as spies which would delay things ever further, all the while intercepting HD broadcasts etc regarding all the other SLN failures and disasters that occurred during their transit and scouting periods that might affect their willingness to commit suicide.
Actually I don't believe that's going to be the case. There are shippers within the League that are going what the shipping routes our, in general what kind of ships are going to be carrying what general type of cargo to where. The known location of the grav waves and the least time transit course from them to any given system give you the basic information you need. Essentially 90% of the ships you are looking for are probably going to traverse a known area of space.
What you aren't necessarily going to know are some details like what the hyperspace conditions are typically in the area, what kind of defenses the systems have that might convince you that a hyperspace intercept is your best option. That information you're going to have to figure out when you arrive and you can scout out the general situation. But from that point on, you have the basic information you need to figure out how to approach the problem.
Certainly intelligence can make all of this easier and exact information on ship movements would be highly useful but you don't need that information to begin causing trouble.
lyonheart wrote:
It may be the FF BC's that are sent out for commerce raiding become the last remnants of the SLN, if they don't attack, because almost everybody back in the SL is destroyed or surrenders in 6 month's to a year.
That probably isn't going to happen, at least not that quickly.
There's a lot of factors that come into play.
1) The most critical of these is the complete shutdown of Manti and Greyson missile production means you simply don't have enough missiles to do as you suggest.
2) The GA has something that's a greater threat than the SLN and they know it. A lot of Manty resources are going to go into determining where that threat is and how to counter it. Because of the uncertainty factor and the way the attacks were carried out, the GA can't afford to commit the number of ships that such a sweeping attack would entail. Major elements of all fleets are going to need to stay in close proximity to major population and industrial centers until the threat can be better quantified.
3) The League is vast. If you're looking just at shipyards you can't just go after those which have military contracts, you need to go after any shipyard which could be used for military production which should pretty much be all of them. You're going to have to go into hundreds of worlds and basically do to them what the Mesan's did in Oyster Bay.
3) Like the Solly reserve, a lot of the thousand Wallers you have are not operational and you probably need a well equipped shipyard and a few months to bring them back into service. This presupposes you have the personnel to man them considering that the reserve forces are going to be those with heavy crew requirements. You've also just lost a LOT of the shipyards and trained personnel you need to activate them so even with your best efforts, you probably won't see many of these vessels available before the end of the 6 month period you specified.
4) The Manties and Greysons have also just lost a LOT of their ability to construct the spare parts and components needed to keep the ships they do have operational. A large portion of what was available for this purpose probably was on the orbital infrastructure when Oyster Bay arrived. There are some resources to help with this but not only do they have to replace the ready supplies that have been lost, they also have to keep ahead of ongoing failure and destruction of existing parts while attempting to build new infrastructure, missles, actually just about everything. You're most capable fleet units have just become ones that you're going to want to protect since you can't replace them, it's hard to maintain them and even harder to fix them if they get damaged.
All of these problems are going to impact the Republic and the Andy's as a good portion of their production shifts to help rebuild Manticore and Greyson. Their fleets won't be operating under the same problems but there will be some tightening of the belt and we're talking about the least capable units in the GA.
In other words, a grand tour through the League by a grand armada of ships laying to waste the industry of hundreds even thousands of worlds just isn't going to happen. As superior as the GA fleets are, they just don't have those kind of resources at this time.
lyonheart wrote:Guys, the basic premises of trying to fix the SLN founder in the face of what we do know, so this thread is again pointless.
That sort of depends on what we know.
lyonheart wrote:
Even including SDF shipyards, from my previous post, there are probably less than 150-300 SLN targets worth attacking in the first place, including all the military shipyards in the SL; very easy meat for approximately a dozen TF's for the old league core and another 12-20 TG's going after the FF in the shells, verge and protectorates.
The GA has over a thousand SDP's (1200+ by fall), well over a hundred CLAC's (2-300?) besides 2000 plus other warships.
Already discussed this above. But I bet that there are probably a good 100+ worthwhile targets in the Republic of Haven for an enemy if you want to think about it and Haven is less than a drop in the bucket compared to the League.
It's actually a bit doubtful that 6 months would even be enough time if you tried to sprint to the furthest reaches of the League provided you didn't stop to shoot at stuff or resupply or refuel or do anything other than just move.
Missiles are great, really, but they are also expendable munitions without which you really aren't going to romping anywhere. Penetrating deep into League space is going to require logistics with a capital L. Not only are you going to need those logistics, you're going to have to protect it from SLN medium and light forces which grossly outnumber your own. Even if GA vessels are individually better, they can only be in one place at one time.
The further you penetrate into League Space, the more effort you're going to have to place into keeping those essential supplies moving forward. If you could actually fully call on the forces you've listed to do nothing but launch this assault, which you really can't do, you might be able to pull what you're describing off in a year or two, unless you just want to translate to Earth and end matters that way.
lyonheart wrote:
Given MDM's, has anyone figured out an exchange rate that somehow permits the SLN to close with the GA, let alone occasionally win one?
There is none. Unless you just run out of missiles or are just Byng like active stupid, there is no likely set of circumstances where a SLN Battle Fleet can deal with MDM's in a normal n-space engagement.
Until SLN mobile units can find a system which matches the range of GA MDM's SLN forces in n-space are only good for target practice.
Of course this presumes that the SLN admirals are going to play the game the way the Manties want to play it and you aren't going to win much doing that.
So, if you're dead meat at range in n-space, you figure out a way of giving yourself a chance at not fighting under those conditions. One of the options that has been discussed in for SLN forces to attempt to intercept GA forces while they are still in hyperspace. In hyperspace sensor range is severely degraded which means that engagement ranges will tend to shorten. The same things which make hyper intercepts difficult could also effectively reduce engagement ranges to those which give SLN fleet units a fighting chance.
Other strategies could be to attempt to estimate the location of a GA's fleets hyper translation to n-space and place your fleet in that location in the hopes that the GA vessels will enter n-space in close proximity to your own. Not likely but better than just sitting around waiting to become scrap.
lyonheart wrote:If an old DD with 100 MDM's (in 10 tractored pods) can easily destroy a BC of ten times its tonnage, or 5-6 DD's at 40 M km or beyond, at what point does the SLN begin to think its going to win?
Right now the casualty exchange rate is well in excess of a thousand to one in favor of the GA, and no suggestion I've seen seriously challenges that.
Doesn't really matter. I mean it does but if your the SLN it's not coming up with all the reasons why you can't win, it's about figuring out how you can.
You have the very short term. What do you do right now.
For SLN heavy units facing GA heavy units, you have one overriding fact. If you fight at range within the hyperlimit you are dead. As such, you don't allow that to happen. If you're going to fight GA heavy units you need to be up close and personal where the range of their MDM's doesn't count for anything. If you can't achieve that, you need to run.
Either way, hyperspace is your friend. Whatever you do, you don't park your fleets deep inside a gravity well, until you have a long range missile response in place, it's suicide.
lyonheart wrote:Keep in mind, the GA has with its old SD's about as many SD's as BF has left in commission; then after Beowulf, I'm sure its SDP's alone will outnumber what's left of BF's before they're all destroyed rather soon after.
As I said, I tend to question those numbers somewhat and how many of those GA SD's really are currently in active commission. I'm betting the actual number of serviceable deployable GA SD's is somewhat less.
I'm also fairly confident that a lot of the SD's which are available are going to have other things to do. After all, the Manticore bianary system has just been devastated by a strike from an unknown force with little understood capabilities. I'm betting that until the threat can be adequately quantified and understood, there are going to be so many warships with sensors peeled at every major center that someone in a skin suit will be able to do interplanetary travel just by jumping from hull to hull.
You've just had this happen to Manticore and Greyson, what you can't afford to do is let this happen to Capital or San Martin or any number of other vital systems. You can't afford to have any more major population centers suffer millions of casualties. And it
will happen again if you let it. Whoever launched this attack, you're not going to stop them by beating up on the SLN.
What you're going to do is you're going to send out forces you can afford to detach with the primary purpose of keeping the League off balance. They will be powerful and their attacks will be painful for the League, but they won't be the unstoppable avalanche of Wallers that you're portraying.
Hence, the League will have time. Not time in huge big chunks but certainly a lot more time that youre estimate allows for.
lyonheart wrote:
Before the SLN can start making plans to refit with the wonderful new tech it doesn't know it needs, it needs a base safe from the GA, ie at least one, but no one has bothered to point where it might be located and why the Ga can't destroy it.
Well, that's not entirely true. The League does know it and if they didn't know it before, when news gets back to the League that Filareta's entire fleet surrendered without so much as scratching the paint of a Manty revenue cutter, they'll figure it out then.
And who's going to tell them? Well there are any number of sources but the most likely is the Star Empire of Manticore. They're going to go to great lengths to tell everyone with enough factual data to make them believe that what has happened has actually happened.
It's going to take someone who it way far gone to try to explain that away to sunspots or a few big missile pods.
No at that point, it's not going to take a huge amount of work to figure out that all those wild reports that have been coming out of the Haven sector aren't all that wild after all. And beyond technical hard data that you'd like to have, there's going to be tons of public domain information available right at the League's fingertips to give them a FAR better appreciation of what they face than they have had to date.
It's not as if the Manties have been a secret closed society. They have a free press, they have all sorts of civilian technical journals and talking heads, and they've had High Ridge and years of peace trumpeting the superiority of ... wait for it ... Manty pod laying missile ships with MDM's and killer LAC's which are going to keep us safe forever and evers as we scrap the rest of the fleet for profit.
The SLN and the League government might have ignore all of this, but I'm betting that you could walk down to what passes for a library on Old Earth and get all of this information in a handful of seconds. All that's necessary to have one of those "oh shit" moments is to realize that those wild claims are all mostly true. If Jane Doe can get that info, I'm betting SLN intel can too.
lyonheart wrote:If BSDF intelligence is still operating, the GA will know about the commerce raiding strategy long before the raiders reach GA territory.
Ok, and that is a huge problem why? If the people at ONI haven't figured out that something along these lines isn't likely to happen then they need to find new jobs. This isn't going to be a surprise strike like Oyster Bay or Tourville's arrival at Manticore.
It's like saying you're going to war and then being surprised that people are shooting at you. Of all the elements of the SEM, it's most vulnerable is it's merchant marine. The SLN has LOTS of light vessels that are going to do precious little good in a MDM environment so it makes sense to send them off to do something useful in what is probably a pretty light MDM environment. Even with the GA forwarned, raiders are probably going to be facing older vessels with SDM's that SLN forces can actually deal with. If the GA is forced to redeploy MDM armed vessels to counter the raiders, that's a SLN victory and one of their probably goals.
lyonheart wrote:Given how long it will take to recall and assemble them, then arm them with Cataphracts besides assembling their supporting supply TF's, and sending them all off, there could be plenty of time to alert and prepare all the GA systems.
Ok, systems will be altered. Beyond the resources already deployed to them and making them aware that "we're in a conflict with the League and they may be sending ships her to prey on our commerce" what else is going to change. The GA will attempt to protect their commerce using the fewest resources possible and still be effective. The SLN will try to force them to commit more resources than the GA wants to while disrupting and damaging commercial trade.
Now, knowing exactly what ships are coming and where extacly they are going, now that would be useful but just knowing that they are coming, not so much.
lyonheart wrote:Remember too that the MAlg expects them to fail, having probably war-gamed this scenario repeatedly.
Well one of the great things about simulations, they're always wrong, the only question is by what margin. Oh, don't get me wrong, the Alignment has done a masterful job so far, but you can already see their design tattering around the edges somewhat and one thing about really complicated plans, if one thing goes wrong, it tends to take other things with it.
The question is whether enough of the Alignment plan survives long enough to achieve the Alignment's ends. The Haven/Manty alliance has just made that much less likely as has the Manty's resilience.
lyonheart wrote:Because they want the FF BC's and CA's away from the SL to give the RF its shot; the opening offer of protection after the foolish mandarins have sent off the best most modern powerful part of the SLN at the worst possible time.
Yes, you have that right except for the "most powerful" part. But that will be a useful tool for the RF. Of course, someone is going to recognize that you can't send all of FF off so there's going to be something left, just not enough. That's another challenge that SLN will have to face, but it's going to take longer than your 6 months to fully develop.
lyonheart wrote:Outside of Omosupe Quartermain, I don't expect the mandarins to last much longer; within 6-12 month's or possibly less, ie when the public realizes what fools they've been after the SLN is destroyed and there's no one to protect them any more; what's likely to happen won't be pretty.
The GA general assault on SLN bases may even happen before the commerce raiders or at least some of them leave in the first place.
Like I said, I seriously don't think that there will be something like a "general assualt" anywhere in the SLN's immediate future. There will undoubtedly be some "not so grand" ones that will hurt and rock the League, but they will be survivable in the short term.
I mean look at how long Robert Pierre kept control of the People's Republic using nothing but lies and not a lot of naval victories.
lyonheart wrote:Between Moriarty's, Mycroft's, lots of system defense pods and LAC's, NTM almost 20 years experience and training involving far tougher commerce raiding; the SLN FF raiders will be so far behind the learning curve, their casualties will be militarily prohibitive by any rational measure, though they won't know that, since communication even with db's with other TF's or TG's will take too long and the MAlg intends for them to be as isolated and ignorant as possible so they are wiped out easily.
Well, I guess it all depends upon how inventive SLN commanders are likely to be. If they just wade in excepting everyone to surrender because they are the Solarian League then yes, it will work out exactly the way you've described.
Apply some common sense, which a number of SLN personnel have (to bad they haven't been in charge so far) and a little bit of ingenuity, the idea that the SLN raiders are just walking into a meat grinder might be overstating the case. They'll have to learn and a number of those lessons are going to be expensive no doubt. But people who are getting shredded have a tendency to stop doing the things that are shredding them and find new ways to approach problems.
And once again, if you're the SLN you can't fight by the GA's rules, you have to find ways to change the game or you're going to die. Since people with a brain don't want to die, they're going to start figuring things out.
lyonheart wrote:]
Think about it; the BF will be effectively destroyed, including the reserve and shipyards (~7?) within a couple of weeks to a month on the outside when the GA attacks, probably not long after Beowulf.
FF bases and shipyards in the old league will also be hit in that time plus hostile SDF's and their shipyards etc within 6 month's, while smaller TG's hit FF bases in the shells, verge, and protectorates.
So what will be left of the SLN in a year?
Not much at all.
The SLN is still grossly ignorant of all the GA weapons, which the MAlg has been trying to replicate for a decade with poor or slow success, so the idea the SL can in a year or two come up with something new, then make millions is just bizarre.
All it appears to know at the moment is that it needs longer ranged missiles, ie DDM's with around a 30 M km range; which is so pathetic compared to the multi armed juggernaut they face including the LAC's which despite all of HH's testimony regarding them, hasn't apparently moved the SLN HQ at all.
No, the SLN will not be able to replicate Manty technology for some time, but while that would be nice they don't need to.
What the SLN needs to do is make inventive use of what they already have. The SLN doesn't have MDM's so building an MDM with range is a long range goal not a short term one. So the question then becomes, how do you build a missile with adequate range without using MDM technology that you don't have, and how to you do it using stuff that's already largely available.
It's questions like that you have to start answering.
And why can the League do something which the Alignment hasn't been able to.
That one's easy. Because the Alignment have the resources or a couple of worlds to draw on, the League has thousands and an industrial and research capacity that dwarfs the rest of known space combined. They don't have all of the nifty toys that Manticore has because they feel they haven't needed them. They've just discovered that they were wrong about that.
It might take the League a few years to catch and overtake the SEM but there should be no doubt about whether they can do precisely that. In the end, it's just a numbers game that the GA can't win in the long term.
The idea here is the League doesn't need THE ANSWER today, it needs part of the answer today and another part tomorrow. It doesn't need Manty tech to fight, it just needs tech good enough so that they can make their numbers tell.
Now, your 6 months isn't enough of any of that to happen. If things will work as you claim they will, there's nothing the League can do about it. But I believe that the Alignment and Oyster Bay have given the League that brief measure of breathing space they need by forcing the GA to focus most of it's attention and efforts elsewhere.
lyonheart wrote: We've all seen the cartoon of the man falling off the 100 story building saying "so far so good" or "Ignorance is bliss" etc, yet that's pretty much the attitude we've seen so far of the SLN senior staff compared to what it should be.
Its too late for the SLN to make such suggested ridiculous phased improvements when it will never have the time for such nonsense because 4 or 5 years is simply far too late.
Sure they can, mostly because 4 to 5 years is when you begin to reach technological parity. But the actual place where SLN units can erase enough of the GA advantage to actually fight them in defense of their systems is a lot closer to a year out.
lyonheart wrote:Do you seriously think all our GA admiral heroes are going sit back and let the SLN try to close the gap?
No, they aren't going to
want to wait, but I'm betting they want to deal with the people behind Oyster Bay and protect their people from them even more.
Strange as it sounds, I'm pretty sure that the SLN is
not #1 on their priority list. Defending and then going after the people who wiped out Manticore and Greyson probably is.
I mean, you said it yourself, the SLN at the moment is hardly in any shape to defend itself much less pose a credible threat to any of the GA partners. As an offensive force, even with the Leagues best efforts, that's probably years in the future.
So, honestly, what are you going to do? Go after the people who at the moment are zero threat to you but may become one in the future or concentrate on the people who penetrated probably the two most well defended systems in known space and destroyed 90% of their infrastructure and millions of lives?
lyonheart wrote:
One reason HH mentioned the LAC's, demonstrated the FTL.com, etc is because she knows the SLN doesn't have time to do anything about the GA's tech edge.
Again RFC has made this point repeatedly, so the idea of the SLN somehow recovering and eventually overcoming the GA boggles the mind.
L
Well actually this entire scenario was generally mapped out by Admiral White Haven in his analysis of the military situation should war develop between the League and the SEM. This was before the devastation of Oyster Bay by the way, when the SEM and Greyson still had all of their massive construction infrastructure solidly behind them rather than having it largely consist of orbital debris.
Somehow I can't imagine that losing the two dominant industrial infrastructures in known space where all of these amazing weapons are made, maintained and created will have changed White Havens analysis in a positive way.
