Hyperspace Combat and the Solarian Leauge Navy

n7axw wrote:It seems to me that an effective counter to this would be to carry a couple dozen LACs at the entry point of where you were planning to enter in the hyper band where they were going to operate and spread out in a shell formation looking for goblins. Once its established that the coast is clear, enter hyper and plot a course designed to be unpredictable.

Don

There are several counter moves that can be effective counters which, once the GA understands there is a legitimate threat, it can implement.

The first and probably most effective is the counter you just listed. For the SLN to have a chance at intercepting a GA fleet in h-space it needs to develop a good estimate as to where the GA fleet is likely to be or the space it is likely to pass through. Evasive courses can make this difficult. There will of course always be two places where a GA fleet will be able to be picked up by SLN forces, at the likely point where the GA fleet will leave it's grav wave and move into standard hyperspace and as the GA approaches the system itself.

The second is effective scouting by drones, LAC's and light units like DD's and CL's. This, by itself, isn't as effective as the evasive routing because it's reasonably likely that SLN forces sitting with wedges on standby will be able to avoid detection by these resources while in hyperspace. However, even if not detected, these resources can greatly limit the ability of an SLN force to maneuver prior in the early stage of contact. Essentially just because there isn't any GA vessels within detection range of a reaction thruster maneuver doesn't mean that there's not a drone or LAC out there somewhere that you haven't picked up. Something like that could ruin your whole day.

The most effective counter is to employ both and force the SLN forces to be inventive in coming up with methods to both identify your fleet and then move themselves into an intercept position. The more difficult you can make this process, the less likely it is that SLN forces will be able to effect an intercept on the terms they need to.

n7axw wrote:It seems to me that an effective counter to this would be to carry a couple dozen LACs at the entry point of where you were planning to enter in the hyper band where they were going to operate and spread out in a shell formation looking for goblins. Once its established that the coast is clear, enter hyper and plot a course designed to be unpredictable.

You are going to do this how?

Remember that if you enter hyper within a few light minutes of where a ship is hiding in hyper you will be a few LS away, which is in energy range. If you enter hyper within 24 light minutes you are in SDM range. I don't carry how many LACS you have, if I can engage your carrier in the first second to a minute+ after transit they are all going to die when the carrier reactor goes, as you can't exactly fire up their wedges until they get major separation. And you can't exactly use a fusion rocket on a LAC...

However it's likely that you can avoid this once you reach the point where you feel compelled to try it by going polar or way out.

What's worse is that the hyper transition is easily seen by any other ship in the general area. So you cross the wall and send off a huge signal. Then you putter around searching the alpha band for bad guys. So a few obvious questions:
How do you get your results back to real-space? I'd assume you are not planning on leaving the carrier there as it's a sitting duck.
Given that you have just told any lurking ships exactly where you intend to have a convoy leave, how do you plan to handle the issue that they are going to gather on Beta and wait for you?
Detection range against stealthy ships in hyper is a few light minutes at most, and a shell 10 light minutes in radius means you have shell with an area of 1256 light minutes. If we assume each team is 3+ light minutes away from the other at the edge, you need about 65 search teams, and the run to 10LM takes about 3 hours. (less if you don't plan to come back, but I suspect the LACs would like to go home, so I'll assume they stop at 10LM) There is then another 3 hours to get back to the launch point. So it's not like there won't be lots of time to organized a response. Oh, and given that each LAC team is 6 LM away from the nearest help at the edge, how many LACS are you planning in each team?

I'd really suggest using recon drones instead. Or send the LACs through and RAPIDLY follow with the convoy. The problem for the LACS comes with leaving hyper, as a bunch of LACS and a carrier all inside mutual wedge distance are not in an ideal position to fight if someone drops onto them from Beta, and the whole un-dock, maneuver and then re-dock to go back to RS is going to take some time.

Alizon wrote:There is, however, one factor working for the SLN at least early on. Drones are expensive and not easily replaced after OB, Stealth and ECM systems are high tech systems with finite lives, this is why Aegis cruisers don't cruise around with the FC systems on all of the time

Sure drones aren't cheap, but at least ghost rider drones have enough endurance they can routinely be recovered. Now there are times when that's not practical, or when there's a fair likelihood some will be destroyed while pressing in to get intel. But neither of those seems likely to apply to routine sweeps ahead of a convoy's path.

Admittedly even then the recovered drones will need refueling, and at least a maintenance check, if not refurbishing or repair. So there will be some drain on the spares and machine shops of the escorts running the drones - but a level they should be able to support for a significant period of time.

doesn't seem like a short or long term solution. Not only is difficult to locate and attack ships in hyper space both sides vessels are optimised for n-space engagements and the SEM ships probably have the following advantages:
* larger gun decks (i.e. more guns)
* all Grasers load out
* more powerful Grasers (i.e. energy through put)
* more accurate Grasers (better sensors etc.)
* longer range Grasers (there must have been some improvements in this field)
* actively involved in a shooting war for the past several years and very well trained in convey tactics

Though an SEM ship would get hurt in a h-space, energy range engagement its very probable that the attackers would not be going home at all.

I seem to recall that the GA has the more powerful grazers, but searching and typing in textev if I could find it would be a nuisance.

Garth 2 wrote:doesn't seem like a short or long term solution. Not only is difficult to locate and attack ships in hyper space both sides vessels are optimised for n-space engagements and the SEM ships probably have the following advantages:
* larger gun decks (i.e. more guns)
* all Grasers load out
* more powerful Grasers (i.e. energy through put)
* more accurate Grasers (better sensors etc.)
* longer range Grasers (there must have been some improvements in this field)
* actively involved in a shooting war for the past several years and very well trained in convey tactics

Though an SEM ship would get hurt in a h-space, energy range engagement its very probable that the attackers would not be going home at all.

Garth 2 wrote:doesn't seem like a short or long term solution. Not only is difficult to locate and attack ships in hyper space both sides vessels are optimised for n-space engagements and the SEM ships probably have the following advantages:
* larger gun decks (i.e. more guns)
* all Grasers load out
* more powerful Grasers (i.e. energy through put)
* more accurate Grasers (better sensors etc.)
* longer range Grasers (there must have been some improvements in this field)
* actively involved in a shooting war for the past several years and very well trained in convey tactics

Though an SEM ship would get hurt in a h-space, energy range engagement its very probable that the attackers would not be going home at all.

No, the SLN ships are notable much more loaded with energy weapons than the RMN. It's also not unlikely that they are better at using them then a comparable RMN ship, as people tend to practice the things they are good at. It's unclear what the heck a RHN SD looks like other then the pod bay.

kzt wrote:

Garth 2 wrote:doesn't seem like a short or long term solution. Not only is difficult to locate and attack ships in hyper space both sides vessels are optimised for n-space engagements and the SEM ships probably have the following advantages:
* larger gun decks (i.e. more guns)
* all Grasers load out
* more powerful Grasers (i.e. energy through put)
* more accurate Grasers (better sensors etc.)
* longer range Grasers (there must have been some improvements in this field)
* actively involved in a shooting war for the past several years and very well trained in convey tactics

Though an SEM ship would get hurt in a h-space, energy range engagement its very probable that the attackers would not be going home at all.

No, the SLN ships are notable much more loaded with energy weapons than the RMN. It's also not unlikely that they are better at using them then a comparable RMN ship, as people tend to practice the things they are good at. It's unclear what the heck a RHN SD looks like other then the pod bay.

The RMN originally started out following the trail blazed by the Solarian Navy. This meant relatively small ammo storage and heavy emphasis on energy weapons, but the larger ships had a mix of lasers and grasers while the smaller ones just mounted lasers. Pure graser energy armament didn't occur until the Grayson navy decided that with combat growing more vicious, they wanted all their weapons to hit more heavily and threw out the laser portion of the energy broadside.

The SLN knows that its current setup has served it well and as such, they will be highly resistant to change until it finally filters through that they have doomed themselves by refusing to innovate. This is starting to happen at the highest levels, but there is so much political/bureaucratic inertia in the SLN that it's like trying to move a mountain on an ice field. Takes one hell of a whack to start it moving, and whacks almost as big to guide it.

In other words, while the SLN may currently have more energy mounts for a given amount of starship tonnage, they can do less overall damage and since lasers have less range than grasers, they need to close in more to get the same percentage of their broadside into range...

Jonathan_S wrote:

Alizon wrote:There is, however, one factor working for the SLN at least early on. Drones are expensive and not easily replaced after OB, Stealth and ECM systems are high tech systems with finite lives, this is why Aegis cruisers don't cruise around with the FC systems on all of the time

Sure drones aren't cheap, but at least ghost rider drones have enough endurance they can routinely be recovered. Now there are times when that's not practical, or when there's a fair likelihood some will be destroyed while pressing in to get intel. But neither of those seems likely to apply to routine sweeps ahead of a convoy's path.

Admittedly even then the recovered drones will need refueling, and at least a maintenance check, if not refurbishing or repair. So there will be some drain on the spares and machine shops of the escorts running the drones - but a level they should be able to support for a significant period of time.

Sure, they can but I'm also pretty sure that drone recovery in h-space is going to be harder and less likely to be successful than in n-space.

However the point isn't whether drones can be used in hyperspace or whether they can be recovered. The point here is that any effort and resources spent looking for hidden fleets in h-space are going to consume resources which can not then be used for something else. Considering that there are a lot of things to be done on any warship, one of the primary jobs of the command staff is to allocate resource where most needed.

By and large if a threat is not considered credible then little or no resources will be expended to guard against it. A fleet or ship has finite resources so it will tend to focus those resources on tasks that are known that need to be done and to defend against credible threats.

If a threat is not credible, then allocating finite resources to it is largely a waste of time and Commanders don't have a lot of time or resources to waste.

An h-space fleet intercept is probably not going to even occur to most commanders for the simply fact that it doesn't seem to have ever been attempted before and would face any number of challenges to accomplish. Chances are that the normal sensor sweeps of the vessels in the fleet are probably sufficient to guard against this highly unlikely eventuality.

As we talked about before, if the SLN does make a successful large scale intercept or if the GA learns that they are actively trying to do so, then the level of the threat becomes more credible and more likely to warrant additional measures such as the deployment of recon drones to scout in h-space.

kzt wrote:

Garth 2 wrote:doesn't seem like a short or long term solution. Not only is difficult to locate and attack ships in hyper space both sides vessels are optimised for n-space engagements and the SEM ships probably have the following advantages:
* larger gun decks (i.e. more guns)
* all Grasers load out
* more powerful Grasers (i.e. energy through put)
* more accurate Grasers (better sensors etc.)
* longer range Grasers (there must have been some improvements in this field)
* actively involved in a shooting war for the past several years and very well trained in convey tactics

Though an SEM ship would get hurt in a h-space, energy range engagement its very probable that the attackers would not be going home at all.

No, the SLN ships are notable much more loaded with energy weapons than the RMN. It's also not unlikely that they are better at using them then a comparable RMN ship, as people tend to practice the things they are good at. It's unclear what the heck a RHN SD looks like other then the pod bay.

Well I think this depends on the type of SD. Later classes of pre-podlaying SD's of the RMN and RHN almost certainly did have larger more powerful energy weapons batteries than SLN SD's. These vessels were built with years of experience of combat, were housed in larger more advanced vessels and were designed for exactly the same general combat environment as SLN SD's.

Podlaying SD's changed all of that. When SD's became capable of launching hundreds of missiles in a single salvo as compared to dozens, it fundamentally changed the basis of space combat.

SD's, DN's, even BB's are incredibly tough and are capable of shrugging off the kinds of salvo's possible using only internal launch tubes. pre-podlaying SD's also were designed in the days when SDM's were the best missile weaponry available. This allowed Capital ships the ability to cross through an enemy's missile engagement envelope to reach energy weapons range without necessarily incurring crippling damage in the process. SD's or this generation were designed to close to energy weapons range and let their heavy Grasers and Lasers decide the battle.

It is for this kind of combat that SLN SD's and pre-pod GA SD's were designed for.

However pod-laying changes all of that. It probably took some time for it to fully sink in but from this point onward it wasn't the Grasers of the fleet that mattered it was the vessel's ability to launch and control a "wall of missiles". MDM's also vastly extended the engagement range which meant that the distance an SD had to survive to bring it's energy weapons to bear became suicidally vast.

What this suggests is that newer SD's built as pod-layers probably do have energy weapons batteries but they are a secondary weapons system with have little chance of actually every being used against their intended targets, other capital ships.

This will have an impact on design. There are still uses for Gasers in a modern SD but the main target of these grasers will be LAC's, not other capital ships. What's needed against LAC's are not the huge SD killers but a larger number of smaller Grasers to be used for LAC defense.

You also aren't going to need to dedicate as much space and resources to these weapons as everything you use to support a Graser mount could also be used for additional CM or point defense laser clusters which are arguably a far more valuable use of space.

Manticorian Podlayers will probably still boast a reduced battery of very powerful Grasers, just in case, however it needs to be remembered that this is now a secondary weapons system at best. In other words, the energy batteries of podlaying SD's is likely to be far less powerful overall than the batteries mounted in late non-podlaying designs and which will bring them much closer to parity with the energy weapons capabilities of SLN SD's.

In fact I think that it's highly likely that the energy batteries of RHN pod-layers are far more focused on LAC defense than their RMN counterparts. In order to attempt to keep up with the RMN or at least close the gap, RHN SD's are pod-laying specialists which carry very little that is not directly related to their ability to launch and controle MDM's in large quantities or defend against them. Further the primary RMN defense against LAC's are RMN LAC's however RHN LAC's are sufficiently advance to reliably stop RMN LAC incursions so RHN Capital Ships are more likely to have to mount a LAC defense. As such I would estimate that the Graser batteries on a RHN SD are composed of lighter Grasers more geared toward LAC engagments than to taking on other Capital Ships at close range.

What all of this means is that it is in energy weapon combat that SLN vessels have their best chance to take on GA vessels on something resembling equivalent terms.

Alizon wrote:But if you give me an option which has a small chance of success vs. one which is certain obliteration, I don't know about you but I'm choosing the small chance of success option.

Of course.

Alizon wrote:There is, however, one factor working for the SLN at least early on. Drones are expensive and not easily replaced after OB, Stealth and ECM systems are high tech systems with finite lives, this is why Aegis cruisers don't cruise around with the FC systems on all of the time.

Not really comparable, as the Honorverse electronics have been described as extremely much more reliable and lasting.

Alizon wrote:What this means is, at least initially, an approaching GA force will probably not have a deep screen of light vessels probing a good distance ahead of them following a screen of drones and they will probably be taking a least time course from across the rift to their target system and will not in h-space be fully utilizing their stealth and ECM systems.

Bold assumptions. I very much doubt their probability. Most of the GA commanders that WOULD proceed in such a way are already dead, and the others have learned that there are no truly "impossible" in war.

Alizon wrote:When the PRN was facing the RMN during operation Buttercup, they faced a similar situation to the one which now faces the SLN. Yet there is no mention from either the Peep side or the RMN side where the issue of h-space fleet combat was ever mentioned much less discussed. As far as I can tell, no RMN admiral took any particular precautions to defend against it nor any Peep Admiral any attempt to employ it.

That we know of. And importantly, how many quality peep admirals at the time were even completely in charge of their commands?

Alizon wrote:Why is that. Well one reason would be that it's because neither the RMN nor the Peeps regarded it as an option and so failed to either employ it or defend against it.

Probably because it is generally not a realistic option.

Alizon wrote:However the point isn't whether drones can be used in hyperspace or whether they can be recovered. The point here is that any effort and resources spent looking for hidden fleets in h-space are going to consume resources which can not then be used for something else. Considering that there are a lot of things to be done on any warship, one of the primary jobs of the command staff is to allocate resource where most needed.

And one of the obvious things to spend resources on is to make sure you´re not easily ambushed. ANY-where.

Alizon wrote:By and large if a threat is not considered credible then little or no resources will be expended to guard against it. A fleet or ship has finite resources so it will tend to focus those resources on tasks that are known that need to be done and to defend against credible threats.

Pre-war, you may have been right, but after the various shenanigans both sides in the Manty-Haven wars have pulled? No.

Corporate thinking is not for warfare. And All nations part of GA has been more or less forcefully taught that in a very bloody way.