Question about Beowulf tactics

StealthSeeker wrote:I have been reading several of these posts and after thinking on it I believe the solution to the problem is fairly simple. Its just a matter of exchanging time for material.

Beowulf is already in production of missiles for their own defense but they don't have enough time to make enough of them to complete their defense needs before a possible attack.

I am not sure I can agree with you there, Stealthseeker. If you mean SL-style missiles with perhaps a boosted range from better engineering (thanks to Manticore), then yes, it may well be that Beowulf has a missile industry to supply the 36 SD's (and associated ships).

But if you mean the Mark 23's, I can't see that there has been enough time (from Filareta's Folly to the planned attack on Beowulf) to get them into production. 2-3 months just isn't going to cut it. IMHO.

So I see the solution to be that Manticore has the materials available now that they can strip from their own planetary defense and give to Beowulf immediately thus securing that planet. Beowulf missile production would then be going to replenish the defense of Manticore.

Manticore, unlike Beowulf, has time it can "spend" as it would take months for the SLN to ever launch another attack on Manticore. And during that time Beowulf would be able to replenish what Manticore had supplied them for their defense.

Ah, Borrow-Payback. Yeah, I can see that happening. But as for the SLN, remember that fleet out at Tasmania--which is supposed to get the word not to attack, but the dates and timing are a bit tricky.

That would take care of the immediate defensive needs of Beowulf but to truly defend itself it must go on the offence. The best way I can see of doing this with out making an enemy of it's neighbors is to attack a resource not a planet. The resource I have in mind would be the SLN's mothballed fleet. That mothballed fleet represents a perceived strength of the SLN and its destruction would make the whole SL feel vulnerable and hopefully less aggressive.

The mothballed fleet has been a debating point here for some time, some saying ignore them as being obsolete, others (including myself) saying destroy/impound them. Your reasoning is interesting and something I had not considered. Thank you.

n7axw wrote:The difficulty is control links for those pods and how to provided what is needed. Further, the system being installed is Mycroft which means that it involves a ftl component with Apollo. How many pods with the Apollo component are available becomes another question which I am not aware of the answer to. The control centers are being constructed which is the hold up.

A Rising Thunder
Chapter Thirty-three wrote:Essentially, Mycroft was simply a couple of dozen Keyhole-Two platforms parked at various points in a star system. It was a little more complicated than that, since the platforms were designed to operate on beamed power from their motherships, so it was necessary to provide each platform with its own power plant. And it was also necessary to provide the raw fire control and the rest of the supporting hardware and software which was normally parked aboard the platform’s deploying ship-of-the-wall. Those were relatively straightforward problems in engineering, however, especially with an entire planet to work with, and tech crews were working at breakneck pace even as Honor stood with her uncle and her spouses to meet them.

Mycroft’s advantages over Moriarity would be profound. Unlimited by Moriarity’s lightspeed control links, Mycroft would be able to take full advantage of the Mark 23-E and the FTL reconnaissance platforms which were also being thickly seeded throughout the system’s volume. And unlike Moriarity—which had been unarmed and defenseless when Honor used Hemphill’s Baldur to take it out—Keyhole-Two platforms were simply crammed with active antimissile defenses. No doubt they could be taken out, but it would be a difficult task, and enough of them were being deployed as part of Mycroft to ensure survivability through sheer redundancy.

It strikes me as relevant that Beowulf is getting Mycroft before anyone else -- before the design work is even complete. That just screams, "Hey, Murphy! Check this out."

Design and deployment bugs aside, it sounds as if the basic control link problem is handled; why bring in an Invictus when you can just bring in the Invictus' control links (and tactical section?) and an auxiliary power source.

Since the system is based on the Keyhole system, I would expect that the light-speed control links for direct control of Mk-23 missiles is still in place from Keyhole I. (We know the Apollo has secondary light-speed control link capability; it doesn't make sense that the Keyhole II wouldn't be compatible.)

It also sounds like the system will be semi-functional with the first control unit on-line; each additional control unit will simply expand coverage and provide redundancy.

JeffEngel wrote:Many Solarian League systems retain system defense forces - Beowulf's 36 SD's, for instance, are its current known and primary line of defense against League aggression. An SDF is (or has been, anyway) a bit of a luxury for a League member, but still, plenty of them do have them and they don't suffer from the institutional arrogance of the SLN.

For that matter, the SLN is supported by a tiny, tiny portion of the League budget, and the League budget is a tiny, tiny portion of the total League GDP. Luxury or not, it wouldn't be hard for a League member system to maintain an SDF that represents a force all out of proportion to its "share" of the SLN. Suppose Beowulf represents 1/1000th of the wealth of the League. For the SLN to have a wall of battle in proportion to Beowulf's SDF, it'd need 36,000 SD's in commission. I don't have the figure for Battle Fleet's wall in 1922 P.D., but I do know it's vastly smaller than that - even if we were generously to include the Reserve Fleet, full of much older ships totally unavailable anytime soon.

StealthSeeker wrote: I think your going a bit off track here with your idea of 36,000 SD's being available to the SLN. I would bring to your attention the exchange of messages between Honor and Filareta before their battle (such as it was) where Filareta states that the SLN has 1,500 active SD's and 8,000 mothballed SD's. Nor do I believe that it is common for inner world SL planets to have a System-Defense-Fleet (SDF) as it has been a common discussion in the books as to how much even the rich planets dislike supporting even the current level of expense they pay for the SLN. I can't imagine that they would be willing to spend the money for an SDF of their own when the SLN had damn well better be able to do the job they are already paying them to do.

I think the point Jeff was making was that if the ISLN was in proportion to the Beowulf fleet (that is, 1000 of it's systems had the economic capability of building 36 SD's, then the SLN could theoretically be 36,000 ships.

For a real-life example, the United Arab Emirates has 80 F-16E/F fighters for a population of about 6 Million (of which 4M+ are guest workers, not native population. That is about 1/50th of the US Population, so in retrospect, if we were as heavily armed as the UAE, the United States would have 4,000 F-16 fighter jets. In actuality, we have around 1,000,

So Beowulf has a larger-than-normal fleet based on the actual power of the SLN versus what it could possibly be.

Or something like that. Math makes my head hurt.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

stewart wrote:
Ah, but Daud if considered a radical best kept in a dead-end position at Operational Analysis where he can be told what operations to analyze.

No operational flag officers (outside of Maya Sector) that we have seen seem to have much mental or tactical flexibility.

-- Stewart

The SLN seems to have a policy "If any junior officer shows signs of thinking for him/her self, he/she is to be immediately shunted into a dead end position where they can't disturb their betters."

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Actually NavSea08 (or what became NavSea08) was originally supposed to be a "dead-end" cubby-hole to assign a then-Captain (and irrasible and eccentric) named Hyman G. Rickover......

-- Stewart

n7axw wrote:The problem really isn't the availability of pods for Beowulf. The GA has hundreds of thousands of those and it would be no trick at all to have those shipped in.

The difficulty is control links for those pods and how to provided what is needed. Further, the system being installed is Mycroft which means that it involves a ftl component with Apollo. How many pods with the Apollo component are available becomes another question which I am not aware of the answer to. The control centers are being constructed which is the hold up. The alternatives here is that you bring in in the Invictuses with Keyhole 2 to control the pods or you wait on the construction of the control centers to be complete. Bringing in the Invictuses, of course, is contraindicated prior to the vote.

However if you bring in the pre-Apollo Mark 23 pods, you can reprise Spindle with a a squadron of Sag Cs which have the control links to handle them. That would be more than sufficient to deal with the actual threat and avoid the expenditure of the Apollo pods. Whether or not using Sac Cs rather than SDPs avoids the political issue is not something I know.

At any rate, my two cents.

Don

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And that's what Honor did for her Gryphon defense tactics, stealing the plan from Michelle Henke

-- Stewart

Hutch wrote:"JeffEngel"]Many Solarian League systems retain system defense forces - Beowulf's 36 SD's, for instance, are its current known and primary line of defense against League aggression. An SDF is (or has been, anyway) a bit of a luxury for a League member, but still, plenty of them do have them and they don't suffer from the institutional arrogance of the SLN.

For that matter, the SLN is supported by a tiny, tiny portion of the League budget, and the League budget is a tiny, tiny portion of the total League GDP. Luxury or not, it wouldn't be hard for a League member system to maintain an SDF that represents a force all out of proportion to its "share" of the SLN. Suppose Beowulf represents 1/1000th of the wealth of the League. For the SLN to have a wall of battle in proportion to Beowulf's SDF, it'd need 36,000 SD's in commission. I don't have the figure for Battle Fleet's wall in 1922 P.D., but I do know it's vastly smaller than that - even if we were generously to include the Reserve Fleet, full of much older ships totally unavailable anytime soon.

StealthSeeker wrote: I think your going a bit off track here with your idea of 36,000 SD's being available to the SLN. I would bring to your attention the exchange of messages between Honor and Filareta before their battle (such as it was) where Filareta states that the SLN has 1,500 active SD's and 8,000 mothballed SD's. Nor do I believe that it is common for inner world SL planets to have a System-Defense-Fleet (SDF) as it has been a common discussion in the books as to how much even the rich planets dislike supporting even the current level of expense they pay for the SLN. I can't imagine that they would be willing to spend the money for an SDF of their own when the SLN had damn well better be able to do the job they are already paying them to do.

I think the point Jeff was making was that if the ISLN was in proportion to the Beowulf fleet (that is, 1000 of it's systems had the economic capability of building 36 SD's, then the SLN could theoretically be 36,000 ships.

For a real-life example, the United Arab Emirates has 80 F-16E/F fighters for a population of about 6 Million (of which 4M+ are guest workers, not native population. That is about 1/50th of the US Population, so in retrospect, if we were as heavily armed as the UAE, the United States would have 4,000 F-16 fighter jets. In actuality, we have around 1,000,

So Beowulf has a larger-than-normal fleet based on the actual power of the SLN versus what it could possibly be.

Or something like that. Math makes my head hurt.[/quote]


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The fact that Beowulf has 36 (at least) SD's for its fleet places it WAY larger than most single-system entities. Other threads here noted that very few systems had even 1 squadron of SD's, most content to rely on the SLN FF for large-scale security with DD's and CA's for local security.

BTW -- the USA F-16's (and Navy F/A-18's) are primarily because of the overseas security / support / treaty commitments. Many of the foreign F-16 purchases were partially offset by USA foreign Mil-Aid.

If the bad-guys want to fight, it's better if the fight is in THEIR yard, not ours....

-- Stewart

Reading back a little bit, I noticed that we've mostly been commenting on what the SLN has to do to win, and what the GA has made available or might make available, in time or not, or do/not do to stop the initial attack, but not what the Beowulf SDF is going to do. Just for conversation, here's the reverse which may tell us what is left:

What they're not going to do:

1. Defend the terminus. Ergo there are still plenty of RMN SD's in the area to do that, and well within FTL communication range. Which means they're going to have Hermes buoys as needed so that the Beowulfan forces will FTL tactical updates.

2. Get mouse trapped. There's just not enough time for an SLN formation to come across the hyper limit, and get far enough in system to draw the SDF into a position where yet another formaton can get to them before Manticoran assistance arrives.

3. Allow any SLN ships to reach the high orbitals over the planet. That means defensive tactics that force maneuver based "time burn" and high levels of countermissile fire from the invading ships. Once the invading SD's start running through their CM fire and giving the FTL monitoring a chance to get a perfect read on the defensive screen, see #4.

4. Tip their hand about emplaced missile pods in nifty things like freighters, towed arrays, defenses, whether RMN or "advanced Beouwulfan SDF". Once they have the Solarian fleet defenses sufficiently mapped out, some measure of kaboom.

My thought is that they're going to do a Sidemore Station on them; in fact I wouldn't be surprised if Protector Benjamin hasn't lent enough of the Protector's own to the protection of Beowulf for that EXACT purpose, plus the little pod-nuking scenario I posited earlier. Shortly after which the Beowulf SDF owns around 500 more captured Solarian SDs, less whatever they had to thwack to get the unconditional surrender point across.

SharkHunter wrote:Reading back a little bit, I noticed that we've mostly been commenting on what the SLN has to do to win, and what the GA has made available or might make available, in time or not, or do/not do to stop the initial attack, but not what the Beowulf SDF is going to do. Just for conversation, here's the reverse which may tell us what is left:

What they're not going to do:

1. Defend the terminus. Ergo there are still plenty of RMN SD's in the area to do that, and well within FTL communication range. Which means they're going to have Hermes buoys as needed so that the Beowulfan forces will FTL tactical updates.

2. Get mouse trapped. There's just not enough time for an SLN formation to come across the hyper limit, and get far enough in system to draw the SDF into a position where yet another formaton can get to them before Manticoran assistance arrives.

3. Allow any SLN ships to reach the high orbitals over the planet. That means defensive tactics that force maneuver based "time burn" and high levels of countermissile fire from the invading ships. Once the invading SD's start running through their CM fire and giving the FTL monitoring a chance to get a perfect read on the defensive screen, see #4.

4. Tip their hand about emplaced missile pods in nifty things like freighters, towed arrays, defenses, whether RMN or "advanced Beouwulfan SDF". Once they have the Solarian fleet defenses sufficiently mapped out, some measure of kaboom.

My thought is that they're going to do a Sidemore Station on them; in fact I wouldn't be surprised if Protector Benjamin hasn't lent enough of the Protector's own to the protection of Beowulf for that EXACT purpose, plus the little pod-nuking scenario I posited earlier. Shortly after which the Beowulf SDF owns around 500 more captured Solarian SDs, less whatever they had to thwack to get the unconditional surrender point across.

Given how closely Grayson is associated with Manticore, I can't see this happening - the same arguments as against the Manties doing it.

--snipping--

fallsfromtrees wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:My thought is that they're going to do a Sidemore Station on them; in fact I wouldn't be surprised if Protector Benjamin hasn't lent enough of the Protector's own to the protection of Beowulf for that EXACT purpose, plus the little pod-nuking scenario I posited earlier. Shortly after which the Beowulf SDF owns around 500 more captured Solarian SDs, less whatever they had to thwack to get the unconditional surrender point across.

Given how closely Grayson is associated with Manticore, I can't see this happening - the same arguments as against the Manties doing it.

Technically, I agree. But I don't know if Benjamin and the Grayson's would also agree, because they're not attacking the SLN and they're's no way for the Mandarins to intimate that the would be there to intimidate the Beowulf populace. My textev would be the discussion where Protector Benjamin is asking the High Admiral what would happen if the Sollies came after Grayson directly, and the answer was basically "short term, we'd have a lot of wrecked enemy ships to clean up again". So Protector Benjamin doesn't give a rat's patootie about what the SLN is going to think or do in the near term.

For that matter, Honor herself is the commander of the Protector's Own, defending her mother's planet from the SL is sort of a no brainer. The Grayson ships would simply pop across the hyper limit at the opportune moment in the battle, putting the Solarians in a crossfire situation, and then ask Beowulf via FTL for the opportunity to join in the Planet's defense because "we take our defend-all-members of the family obligations seriously".

SharkHunter wrote:Given how closely Grayson is associated with Manticore, I can't see this happening - the same arguments as against the Manties doing it.

Technically, I agree. But I don't know if Benjamin and the Grayson's would also agree, because they're not attacking the SLN and they're's no way for the Mandarins to intimate that the would be there to intimidate the Beowulf populace. My textev would be the discussion where Protector Benjamin is asking the High Admiral what would happen if the Sollies came after Grayson directly, and the answer was basically "short term, we'd have a lot of wrecked enemy ships to clean up again". So Protector Benjamin doesn't give a rat's patootie about what the SLN is going to think or do in the near term.

For that matter, Honor herself is the commander of the Protector's Own, defending her mother's planet from the SL is sort of a no brainer. The Grayson ships would simply pop across the hyper limit at the opportune moment in the battle, putting the Solarians in a crossfire situation, and then ask Beowulf via FTL for the opportunity to join in the Planet's defense because "we take our defend-all-members of the family obligations seriously".[/quote]


It would be a huge brainer because it would be directly interfering in an internal SL matter before said system had voted don secession. It's a political and diplomatic screw up of epic proportions. So far the SEM has played it very hands off in dealing with and meddling in SL systems themselves, aside from the occasional attack on an OFS controlled system. They have taken many of the wormhole termini, but the systems themselves, the SEM has had a strict 'hands off' policy as far as dealing with the SL system governments themselves. The SEM actively and openly interfering in an SLN attack on Beowulf throws -all- of that out the airlock and pretty much ruins the SEM's word of honor when it comes to them respecting the rights of other systems and stellar polities to determine their own fates, even in internal civil incidences. As long as other stellar nations aren't bombarding planets indiscriminately, they would leave planets and planetary/system governments alone. This would have to include Beowulf. Covert aid would be fine, but overt aid? Out of the question unless the SEM wants to undo much of what they are working to do. So Honor will likely have to sit by and do nothing and let Beowulf defend itself as best it can. (the Magic 8-Ball says the SLNs chances of success are 'very unlikely')