Control Missile for shipboard launched missiles

Weird Harold wrote:Enough of those 35 missile salvo got through to eventually destroy those BCs, though, and that's with the smaller 15MT warhead. There may have been only five missiles get through, but if they were Mod-G they would have done far more damage than the older Mk-16s and killed the BCs with fewer missiles.

That should be your real goal; find a way to make a limited missile supply kill more ships instead of finding a way to fire all available missiles at once.

A Roland can only send 6 salvos of 36 missiles and one of 24 before running out of ammo. Against 3 BCs with their hammerheads pointed at the DD, they might get your 5-6 hits. But since the baseline for that used old solarian BCs crewed by undertrained Monicans, I highly doubt you'll get as many hits. Against a full squadron of BCs, the Roland would probably get 1 or 2 missiles through. Now if you are going to claim that would be enough to mission kill a BC because those missiles have the ultimate Mod G warhead, fine 2 attack missiles can destroy a BC. BUT, consider a salvo of 120 missiles, 12 control missiles, 20 ECM missiles and 88 attack missiles, if you distribute those 88 missiles over the 8 BC ships in the squadron, you destroy the whole squadron EASY PEASY!

Now if it will take anywhere from 10-12 Mark 16 Mod G warheads to kill a BC, your smaller salvo option will mission kill just 1 BC. Looks like the one big salvo helps save missiles after all.

Operation Raging Justice was supposed to provide Adm Filareta with overwhelming force. How did that work out?

Did Filareta's fleet outnumber the defending fleets? Were the defending fleet made up of light combatants? Were the defending fleet's salvo weight incapable of breaking through Filareta's fleet's defenses?

No, No and NO. Looks like we are looking at different scenarios.

Sure the SLN will attempt to apply overwhelming force, but every attampt they've made so far has just demonstrated how outclassed their ships are. Eventually they'll get a situation where they actually do have overwhelming force, but they don't have enough ships to apply it consistently.

Which of their attempts had the same parameters I have listed down? None.

Where are they going to get the ships to consistently gang up with a huge numerical superiority? Bear in mind that Raging Justice required months to assemble and bring to Manticore and that "overwhelming force" lasted mere minutes.

SLN has lots and lots of battlecruisers. BCs can be built very fast. The SL have lots and lots of shipyard capacity. The fact that their economy is going to go down means they need something to prop it up and military construction is one of the surest ways to do that.

Why do you think they'll be able to assemble and deploy forces big enough quickly enough and quietly enough that Manticore won't have an equally overwhelming task force out searching for them?

Just because your enemy has a fleet out there that can smash you anytime it wants does not mean you just lie down and wait for it. You do not let fear paralyze you from executing your own plan.

The only way the SLN can assemble "overwhelming numbers" is to pull every Frontier Fleet ship and every Battle Fleet screen and send them out in search of Grand Alliance shipping. That's going to uncover all of those trouble spots where FF has kept the lid on protectorates and pirates?

They are reactivating ships. Send an old SD per planet to replace the BCs they have running around. Old as those SDs are, they are no use vs the RMN and the best they can do is to deter pirates.

It is also going to keep those same ships from protecting Solarian commerce from Grand Alliance commerce raiders. You do remember that Lacoon II includes plans for commerce raiding? When Solarian Corporations and Transstellars start whining which is going to get more ships -- Commerce raiding or commerce protection?

As to that, do you really think they will be wasting commerce protectors when they know if it gets jumped by an RMN force those ships are toast without even touching the enemy ships? I'd use my useless but numerous SDs to do merchant protection. Maybe if the manty force is light enough those SDs can soak up all the damage they can deal until they run out of missiles and go away.

Bill Woods wrote:

Rakhmamort wrote:The sollies need only to use multi-squadron sized commerce raiding force a couple of times to force the RMN to increase the size/number of the escorts. This tactic is going to stretch the RMN's capabilities since they need to defend everywhere while the solly raiders will only attack where they find weakness.

If the only deterrent to that is to use more/bigger ships, then the sollies' tactics has already succeeded.

If the Sollies are clumping their commerce raiders in multi-squadron task forces, the obvious response is to dispense with convoys. Use SDF craft to escort freighters past the hyper limit and send them off. If the Sollies want to waste a dozen BCs chasing down one freighter, well....

And sending individual merchies with no defenses will mean no merchies killed? Oh wait, no navy ships killed but dead merchie ships all around. Looks like a win for sollies again.

Rakhmamort wrote:

Bill Woods wrote:If the Sollies are clumping their commerce raiders in multi-squadron task forces, the obvious response is to dispense with convoys. Use SDF craft to escort freighters past the hyper limit and send them off. If the Sollies want to waste a dozen BCs chasing down one freighter, well....

And sending individual merchies with no defenses will mean no merchies killed? Oh wait, no navy ships killed but dead merchie ships all around. Looks like a win for sollies again.

If the mighty SLN takes 12, 16, 32 battlecruisers to seize or destroy a single tramp freighter in hyperspace, it's a win of a sort. It's a war. There will be losses. Barring extraordinary measures on both sides, not all of them will be military. The point on one's own side is to maximize gain for minimized loss.

If they are facing a small number of hugely concentrated SLN raider groups, dispensing with hyperspace convoys entirely is a valid response - though of course if you could find those raider groups with sufficient warships, even better.

Rakhmamort wrote:As to that, do you really think they will be wasting commerce protectors when they know if it gets jumped by an RMN force those ships are toast without even touching the enemy ships? I'd use my useless but numerous SDs to do merchant protection. Maybe if the manty force is light enough those SDs can soak up all the damage they can deal until they run out of missiles and go away.

An example of SLN Commerce protection: (their "convoy" was a single freighter, FWIW)

A Rising Thunder
Chapter Three wrote: ...
“No, Sir. I can’t speak to what they might have lying doggo with its impellers down, but judging from the signatures we can see, it’s still just the three cruisers and four of those big-assed destroyers of theirs.”

“Seven-to-six odds, their favor,” Gilmore observed. “In hulls, anyway. Of course, the tonnage ratio’s in our favor.”
Pyun nodded. His six battlecruisers were all Indefatigable-class ships, rather than Battle Fleet’s newer Nevadas, but their combined mass was still over five million tons, whereas the Manty picket couldn’t mass much over two million, despite the fact that the Manticoran “destroyers” were larger than most SLN light cruisers. By any traditional measure, his force advantage ought to be overwhelming.

ibid wrote:. So Volley Alpha used only the cruisers’ internal tubes, and even the Roland-class destroyers attached to his force were mere spectators at the moment. They had barely a quarter of the cruisers’ magazine capacity, and Ivanov had no more intention of wasting their limited ammunition than he did of wasting MDMs.
Which was why “only” two hundred and forty missiles, launch times and drive activations carefully staggered to bring all of them in as a single salvo, went howling towards Rear Admiral Liam Pyun’s battlecruisers.

(That makes it three RMN Saganami-C Heavy Cruisers vs six Indefatigible SLN Battle Cruisers.)

ibid wrote: The Manticoran missiles came flashing in, still at that incredible—impossible—acceleration rate, and just before they entered the counter-missile zone, the electronic warfare platforms seeded among the attack birds spun up. Of the two hundred and forty missiles launched by Hiram Ivanov’s three cruisers, fifty carried nothing but penetration aids, and they’d been carefully saved for this moment. Now “Dazzler” platforms blinded Solarian sensors even as their accompanying “Dragon’s Teeth” suddenly proliferated, producing scores of false targets to confuse and saturate their targets’ defenses. The Solarian battlecruiser crews had never seen, never imagined, anything like it. Ignorant of the energy budgets the RMN’s mini-fusion plants allowed, they simply couldn’t conceive of how such powerful jammers could be crammed into such tiny platforms. The threat totally surpassed the parameters their doctrine and their systems had been designed to cope with.
Pyun’s battlecruisers managed to stop exactly seventeen of the incoming shipkillers in the outer zone. The other hundred and seventy-three streaked past every counter-missile the Solarians could throw with almost contemptuous ease.

190/6=~31 attack missiles per BC.
173/6=~28 survivors attacking
173/190=91% survival rate.

Just how many missile sponges can the SLN spare?

Rakhmamort wrote:They are reactivating ships. Send an old SD per planet to replace the BCs they have running around. Old as those SDs are, they are no use vs the RMN and the best they can do is to deter pirates.

No they aren't:

A Rising Thunder
Chapter Thirty-three wrote: “It’s probably worse than that, frankly, especially with Haven added to the equation,” the acting CNO said unflinchingly. “For all intents and purposes, the Reserve has just become several billion tons of scrap material. The superdreadnoughts we have mothballed are the wrong ships for this war, and I don’t see any way the existing hulls could be refitted to turn them into effective combatants.”

Well, that’s a kick in the head, Kolokoltsov thought dourly. On the other hand, if Omosupe and Agatá are right, we won’t have the cash to reactivate the Reserve, anyway. Of course, that leaves the little problem of where we’re going to find the cash to build new wallers if we can’t even de-mothball the ones we’ve already got!

Rakhmamort wrote:The sollies need only to use multi-squadron sized commerce raiding force a couple of times to force the RMN to increase the size/number of the escorts. This tactic is going to stretch the RMN's capabilities since they need to defend everywhere while the solly raiders will only attack where they find weakness.

If the only deterrent to that is to use more/bigger ships, then the sollies' tactics has already succeeded.

Bill Woods wrote:If the Sollies are clumping their commerce raiders in multi-squadron task forces, the obvious response is to dispense with convoys. Use SDF craft to escort freighters past the hyper limit and send them off. If the Sollies want to waste a dozen BCs chasing down one freighter, well....

Rakhmamort wrote: And sending individual merchies with no defenses will mean no merchies killed? Oh wait, no navy ships killed but dead merchie ships all around. Looks like a win for sollies again.

Suppose the Sollies have about 1000 BCs available for commerce raiding. That gives them only about 40 of your huge task forces, less the ones refitting, or in transit to or from their bases. With so few raider TFs, almost all merchies will arrive at their destinations without ever seeing one. But some ships will be captured, and I suppose a few people will be killed. There's a war on; risks are unavoidable.

Meanwhile, the Manties would be using navy ships to set ambushes at locations those raider TFs might be expected, and taking out their bases.

Rakhmamort wrote:As for having heavy escorts for merchant convoys, do note that the Manticoran merchant marine has carried a huge chunk of the cargo in solly space. Considering there are a lot of solly merchant ships, that means the number of manticoran merchant ships is huge. It probably has more than 10 times the number of hulls as the entire Manticoran navy. I don't know the exact numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if it is higher than that. The RMN cannot supply each and every merch convoy with a lot of navy ships. There will be convoys with little or no escorts. There will be convoys where the number of merchant ships is too low to deploy more than 1 or 2 ships as escorts.

Yes, but most of the places those ships are going are Andermandi territory, Manticoran Silesia, Haven systems, Grayson, etc.

Anybody trying to commerce raid there is likely to get ambushed by super-LACs or eat a facefull of system defense missiles.

(Remember that unlike wet-navy convoys, and despite a couple counter-examples in the books, it's very improbable to detect a convoy in transit. In general you have to hunt for them in n-space at one or another of their ports of call. So you primarily convoy freighters to provide a protected bubble of n-space in systems that lack sufficient system defenses -- or in a war situation where the system might be lost before the convoy gets word. So any system that can chase off SL BC squadrons using it's SDF doesn't really need ships convoyed to it)


I don't expect Manticore to be running hordes of merchantmen into League or ex-League systems anytime soon - so for the traffic they do send they should be able afford to allocate reasonable commerce protection.

Rakhmamort wrote:A Roland can only send 6 salvos of 36 missiles and one of 24 before running out of ammo. Against 3 BCs with their hammerheads pointed at the DD, they might get your 5-6 hits. But since the baseline for that used old solarian BCs crewed by undertrained Monicans, I highly doubt you'll get as many hits. Against a full squadron of BCs, the Roland would probably get 1 or 2 missiles through. Now if you are going to claim that would be enough to mission kill a BC because those missiles have the ultimate Mod G warhead, fine 2 attack missiles can destroy a BC. BUT, consider a salvo of 120 missiles, 12 control missiles, 20 ECM missiles and 88 attack missiles, if you distribute those 88 missiles over the 8 BC ships in the squadron, you destroy the whole squadron EASY PEASY!

The simple solution for a DD skipper forced to fight several BCs is 'do not allow yourself to get into this situation.' On the very rare occasions when it's unavoidable, the skipper may get a medal for being a hero. Otherwise, he probably gets cashiered for being an idiot.

Rakhmamort wrote:They are reactivating ships. Send an old SD per planet to replace the BCs they have running around. Old as those SDs are, they are no use vs the RMN and the best they can do is to deter pirates.

I don't intend to join the lively discussion here, but I want to correct an error here. The Solarian League is not reactivating ships. The text includes a Solarian discussion which shows they have already realized that those ships are useless, and that they will not be reactivating ships from the Reserve. The only ships the League has available are the ones currently active and not already destroyed.

SWM wrote:

Rakhmamort wrote:They are reactivating ships. Send an old SD per planet to replace the BCs they have running around. Old as those SDs are, they are no use vs the RMN and the best they can do is to deter pirates.

I don't intend to join the lively discussion here, but I want to correct an error here. The Solarian League is not reactivating ships. The text includes a Solarian discussion which shows they have already realized that those ships are useless, and that they will not be reactivating ships from the Reserve. The only ships the League has available are the ones currently active and not already destroyed.

To add to SWM's point, as other have snippeted above, the financial situation caused by Manticore means that the SLN is financially unable to reactivate ships enmass from the Reserve and unable to pay for the sailors necessary to man them. It is not merely political will to increase the fleet size, but also financial constraits.

Rakhmamort wrote:Against a full squadron of BCs, the Roland would probably get 1 or 2 missiles through. Now if you are going to claim that would be enough to mission kill a BC because those missiles have the ultimate Mod G warhead, fine 2 attack missiles can destroy a BC. BUT, consider a salvo of 120 missiles, 12 control missiles, 20 ECM missiles and 88 attack missiles, if you distribute those 88 missiles over the 8 BC ships in the squadron, you destroy the whole squadron EASY PEASY!

Now if it will take anywhere from 10-12 Mark 16 Mod G warheads to kill a BC, your smaller salvo option will mission kill just 1 BC. Looks like the one big salvo helps save missiles after all.

Just where are you getting these stats that 10-12 Laserheads will kill an SLN BC? A little text ev to back up please?