GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets

Weird Harold wrote:The reference I'm looking for apparently doesn't use the codename when referring to Haven's hidden R&D facility.

Storm From The Shadows
Chapter 19
wrote:"I'd say that follows logically, Father," Daniel [Detweiler] agreed. "Haven comes closest to matching the Manties' capabilities already. Their education system sucks, but they're fixing that. In fact, let's be fair, the main thing that was wrong with it to begin with wasn't that they didn't have at least a core cadre of competent teachers and scientists. It was that the Legislaturalists had managed to hobble the general system with so much political indoctrination and water it down with so much 'feel-good' insistence on passing students regardless of their actual academic achievements, that the ratio of competent researchers to useless drones was so far lower than Manticore's. Research priorities tended to be assigned on the basis of who the researchers' patrons were, rather than any impartial analysis of potential benefits, too. And the fact that they'd made so little investment in basic infrastructure improvement meant even the competent researchers they had didn't have the resources or the sophisticated industrial platform Manticore had, either, regardless of who their patrons might've been. But they always had a bigger talent pool than most people would have thought looking at what they managed to accomplish, and whoever's running their R and D now is obviously making the best possible use of the pool they have.

Ibid wrote: "I think I would, in their place," Benjamin said before Daniel could answer. "On the other hand, let's say they do make that demand. Do you really think even Manticore could ultimately keep Haven from managing a secret rearmament program somewhere? I'm not talking about the short term. But as time passed, I'm sure someone who's already figured out how to build a completely secret shipyard complex and R and D center once could figure out how to do it again. It would still be the best-case scenario from our perspective, though, since I don't think it's very likely Haven could manage to pull it off before we were ready. And I imagine Manticore would probably accept at least a modest build-down in its own active wallers once it had disarmed Haven."

lyonheart wrote:Regarding the loss of the SEM and Grayson's infrastructure, we have the substitute of Beowulf and Haven making up much of that gap faster than anyone in Manticore thought possible before the GA, with Invictus type SDP's being built at Bolthole then sent to Beowulf to install the Keyhole platforms and Apollo MDM's and gear etc within a couple of years, while Beowulf will produce Apollo's several month's [sic] earlier [mid-summer] than the pessimistic year-end projection QE III made in her HD broadcast in MoH,

TheMonster wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Regarding the loss of the SEM and Grayson's infrastructure, we have the substitute of Beowulf and Haven making up much of that gap faster than anyone in Manticore thought possible before the GA, with Invictus type SDP's being built at Bolthole then sent to Beowulf to install the Keyhole platforms and Apollo MDM's and gear etc within a couple of years, while Beowulf will produce Apollo's several month's [sic] earlier [mid-summer] than the pessimistic year-end projection QE III made in her HD broadcast in MoH,

Not quite. The new Bolthole production will be sent to Manticore to be mated with the Keyhole and Apollo production from Beowulf and shipped through the wormhole. There is probably some systems-integration expertise the RMN and GSN have that the BSDF doesn't have. Besides, the astrographic position of the MWJ makes it the most logical place for the GA to have its main base of operations.

n7axw wrote:I'm in agreement with Alizon about MAlign being the major threat. The difficulty is finding the Alignment. What that means is that the war against the Alignment will be a war of intelligence rather than a primarily a naval one until that is solved.

Freezing large numbers of SDPs around Alliance systems will not increase the security of those systems. As Mike Henke pointed out, a pair of Nikes could have caused the damage suffered in the Yawatta Strike. The issue is detecting and identifying the enemy in time to engage.

That being the case, I think that leaving behind smaller defensive forces at home while sending out enough ships to deal with the League plus a reserve ready force uncommitted but available to be used at need would make the most sense.

Finally, I wonder what will be the bottom line intel haul from COG. I know that conventional wisdom is pessemistic on this, but I wonder. Houdini was far too complicated not to suffer the consequences of Murphy's law. Zilwicki and Cachat already understand that people are being evacuated or eliminated. You have McBride now rid of his Gaul. Mark my words, something else is going to turn up, perhaps someone who was supposed to be evacuated, perhaps something as simple as a missed computer, but something will turn up for Cachat/Zilwicke to get their teeth into. We just don't know what yet.

Don

namelessfly wrote:I think the opposite istrue.

In SFtS, Adm Henke conductedan exercise to employ Apollo as a rapid response recon system to ID ships for an attack. Using this technique to very rapidly investigate beforetheycanengage the spider drive is probably the best hope that the GA has to defend itself.

n7axw wrote:I'm in agreement with Alizon about MAlign being the major threat. The difficulty is finding the Alignment. What that means is that the war against the Alignment will be a war of intelligence rather than a primarily a naval one until that is solved.

Freezing large numbers of SDPs around Alliance systems will not increase the security of those systems. As Mike Henke pointed out, a pair of Nikes could have caused the damage suffered in the Yawatta Strike. The issue is detecting and identifying the enemy in time to engage.

That being the case, I think that leaving behind smaller defensive forces at home while sending out enough ships to deal with the League plus a reserve ready force uncommitted but available to be used at need would make the most sense.

Finally, I wonder what will be the bottom line intel haul from COG. I know that conventional wisdom is pessemistic on this, but I wonder. Houdini was far too complicated not to suffer the consequences of Murphy's law. Zilwicki and Cachat already understand that people are being evacuated or eliminated. You have McBride now rid of his Gaul. Mark my words, something else is going to turn up, perhaps someone who was supposed to be evacuated, perhaps something as simple as a missed computer, but something will turn up for Cachat/Zilwicke to get their teeth into. We just don't know what yet.

Don

namelessfly wrote:Detecting a hyper footprint establishes a location.

Pinpointing the spiderdrive ships with enough precision to target them then requires either:

a ship which has to hyper in at the approximate location then maneuver under impeller drive at a few hundred gees to get within sensor range to search.

Recon drones to maneuver under impeller drive at a few thousand gees to get within sensor range to search.

Both of these options require a rather prolonged response time.

Since the locus of the spider drive ship is 1/2aT^2, the difficulty of finding the spider drive ship increases with the square of the response time. The time lag of a recon drone or hyper capable combatant might make localizing to attack impossible.

In contrast, a pod full of Apollo missiles can close with the hyper footprint location at about 100,000 gees. Response time is only a few minutes, call it 500 seconds. Maximum evasion volume of spider drive ship is then somewhere around:

1/2 x 1,000 m/s^2 x (500s)^2 = 125,000 km.

At this close a range, the linked sensors of an Apollo cluster (with specialized recon version of the attack missiles?) can localize the location for a followup attack.

namelessfly wrote:Pinpointing the spiderdrive ships with enough precision to target them then requires either:

Jonathan_S wrote:I think you're going to have to wait for the signal to come in and then saturate the zone the ship could have moved to within the hours it'll take to get reaction forces out to where a remote hyper footprint was detected. That's still a vast area; but orders of magnitude smaller the entire light month+ around the star system.