Could the SLN do this?

1) Shipkiller warhead + recon drone, total mass ~300 tons.

2) Modified Nevada-class. Replaces its 32 grazers and 30 of its 68 missile launchers with a missile and countermissile control link each. Replaces half of its magazines with 100 kilotons worth of fire-control computer.

3) Send 200 freighters with 20.000 of the long-range shipkillers each.

4) Send 2.000 modified Nevadas with them.

5) Drop in on the Manticore system. Freighters unload the 4 million long-range missiles. Nevadas remain to provide control/targeting priority for the swarm.

6) You don't care if the Manty fleet got 90% kill probability vs your missiles. 10% hits of 4 million is still unit-kill for several hundred SDs.

7) Kill infrastructure by retargeting any missiles that miss or go off-course on them.

Belial666 wrote:1) Shipkiller warhead + recon drone, total mass ~300 tons.

2) Modified Nevada-class. Replaces its 32 grazers and 30 of its 68 missile launchers with a missile and countermissile control link each. Replaces half of its magazines with 100 kilotons worth of fire-control computer.

3) Send 200 freighters with 20.000 of the long-range shipkillers each.

4) Send 2.000 modified Nevadas with them.

5) Drop in on the Manticore system. Freighters unload the 4 million long-range missiles. Nevadas remain to provide control/targeting priority for the swarm.

6) You don't care if the Manty fleet got 90% kill probability vs your missiles. 10% hits of 4 million is still unit-kill for several hundred SDs.

7) Kill infrastructure by retargeting any missiles that miss or go off-course on them.

I do not think the League government has the time at least and maybe not the funds to refit that thoroughly 2,000 battlecruisers. And for that matter, the recon drones may be an issue even.

Firing at ridiculously long range - they have to, in order to survive - will mean the recon drones will have practically no help from the launching units at the end. It'd be tempting to just let the freighters dump them and let them find targets on their own - the effective fire control wouldn't be much worse.

I suspect, between decoys and other electronic warfare, and how easily SLN recon drones are tracked and swatted by the RMN, 10% hit probabilities are a pipe dream. .1% hit probabilities are more likely. 20 shipkillers - SLN ones, at that - aren't going to hurt Grand Alliance capital ships badly. They would, however, have a fine chance of doing a lot of damage to planets, merchant shipping, and orbital infrastructure - in part because they will be targeting whatever catches the attention of the idiot AI's inside the drones ("Shiney!!"). The result is quite possibly an Eridani Edict violation, constitutionally compelling the Solarian League to destroy its own government and senior officer corps....

There may be something to it as a pure terror strategy, but it's still going to eat up a vast amount of critical resources the League's running out of.

RMN targeting should be able do many orders of magnitude better than 90% hit probability against drones. They get better percentages than that against missiles. With drones, they can fire a dozen waves of counter missiles, and point defense clusters will be able to fire for several minutes. And targeting for such slow objects is much easier.

In addition, Manticore can pick off the Nevadas with MDMs a long long time before the drones get into striking range. Kill the Nevadas, the drones no longer have guidance control. Under their internal systems, they will be pretty harmless.

Yeah, I don't see how they ever get within range of Manticore; maybe Sphinx or Gryphon. And given that the ISLN is preparing to deploy those 2,000 BC's to attack GA shipping and system raiding, I doubt that they will be around to put into the building slips...which will be going bye-bye as soon as the GA can manage it.

That said, even if you have no control, 4 million missiles....even with SEM fire control and Home fleet and 5,000 modern LACs, that is still one hell of a lot of targets to hit. A lot more than we think might get through, not because the SEM can't shoot them down, but because they simply can't fire that many shots to shoot them down.

And, without any guidance, the chances for an Erandi violation would be rather high, IMHO.

So interesting thought, belial666, but I can't see it happening.

Hutch wrote:And, without any guidance, the chances for an Erandi violation would be rather high, IMHO.

I do wonder though, if the SLN officers and crews would be willing to court an Eridani violation.

There are three (counting broadly) reasons anyone in the Honorverse's 20th century PD does not. First, the threat of the SLN coming down on you. Second, that it tends to scrag the real estate and populations you'd want to convert into your real estate and population. Third, the ethos of most people in the 20th century PD makes genocide out as, well, really, really wrong, in ways that children of the 20th century A.D. don't share so much. We've come to look at mutually assured destruction as a bit ugly but the price of living on a small planet with big weapons and limited cooperation across borders. In a huge universe, that's been avoidable and has grown to be anathema - with the Solarian League's might backing up moral sentiments with pragmatic ones. (That the inside of the Mesan Alignment's onion has nothing or nearly nothing but a pragmatic resistance to it is an indication of just how far outside the norm for human civilization they are.)

But for the League, reason (1) doesn't apply - not exactly, anyway. Arguably, any officer told to court an Eridani violation would be within their rights, even duty, to refuse the order, and any flag officer giving it might have a mutiny on her hands. If someone wanted to shatter the SLN, proposing that may be a good way to do it.

Reason (2) may not quite apply either, for multi-system states and wormhole junction owning enemies. If you can decapitate a star empire, the rest of it may be easy pickings and almost as worthwhile having as the whole thing with the capital mostly intact. And a wormhole junction a few light-minutes from a smoking graveyard is only a little less lucrative than one a few light-minutes from a populous occupied world.

So when it comes to attacking Manticore with weapons that may mess up a planet the orbitals of which you don't control... the chief thing holding the SLN back is conscience. That's not a strong reed in the SLN officer corps. I wouldn't write it off entirely, not with just how much EE violations are frowned upon. Some very bad people would still stop before (e.g.) ordering and participating in the rape of millions of small children for political purposes. But it still means that the SLN is a whole lot less unlikely to consider the strategic use of genocide against Manticore than almost any other combination of hostile powers and targets.

Even if it weren't a matter of conscience, consider how the officers and crew of those battlecruisers would assess their survival chances after they have unleashed an unguided missile barrage against the inhabited home planets of Manticore.

They are being sent on a suicide mission in unsurvivable platforms to commit genocide right under the noses of the most deadly fleet in space. I think self interest would vote no as well.

Belial666 wrote:1) Shipkiller warhead + recon drone, total mass ~300 tons.

2) Modified Nevada-class. Replaces its 32 grazers and 30 of its 68 missile launchers with a missile and countermissile control link each. Replaces half of its magazines with 100 kilotons worth of fire-control computer.

3) Send 200 freighters with 20.000 of the long-range shipkillers each.

4) Send 2.000 modified Nevadas with them.

Let's see what the SL would need to accomplish this.

200,000,000 tons of fire control hardware
4,000,000 missile warheads
4,000,000 drone bodies
2,000 BCs(assuming they even have that many in service)
2,000 yard slips capable of performing refit work(also assuming they want this project done quickly)
200 freighters(no problem)

Even if they did have all that in place, recalling the BCs would take some time as most of them are deployed beyond the Shell and all are cut off from the wormhole network. I think it'd take at least three months before more than a few scores of the ships arrived at a yard, probably another three to six months for the refit. By now some of those BCs could theoretically be raiding the rear areas of Silesia and Haven.

If the SL intends to use any new or refitted construction, the engineering works must be completed within two months of the Beowulf secession vote. They also need to maintain better information security, because if the slightest hint of a possible League super-weapon being rushed into deployment reaches the GA, they'll launch a pre-emptive attack.

Well, it was an idea for a relatively cheap way they could have a chance at some damage. it might be more damage than initial estimates for a few reasons, but you're right: the Eridani Edict violation would be a no-no.


BTW, reasons for higher damage:

1) Even at only 5.000 gs, an hour of acceleration would make for really high final speeds.

2) Drones are smarter and their sensors are far better than missile sensors. ECCM would be far less effective vs them than it is vs missiles.

3) Stealthed sollie drones have proven hard to target with long-range point defense in the past - though things might have changed since then.

Belial666 wrote:Well, it was an idea for a relatively cheap way they could have a chance at some damage. it might be more damage than initial estimates for a few reasons, but you're right: the Eridani Edict violation would be a no-no.


BTW, reasons for higher damage:

1) Even at only 5.000 gs, an hour of acceleration would make for really high final speeds.

2) Drones are smarter and their sensors are far better than missile sensors. ECCM would be far less effective vs them than it is vs missiles.

3) Stealthed sollie drones have proven hard to target with long-range point defense in the past - though things might have changed since then.

Will SLN drones accelerating at 5,000g for an hour really be all that stealthy? I am under the impression that effective stealth is partly predicated on keeping wedge emissions below a detectable threshold

BobfromSydney wrote:

Belial666 wrote:Well, it was an idea for a relatively cheap way they could have a chance at some damage. it might be more damage than initial estimates for a few reasons, but you're right: the Eridani Edict violation would be a no-no.


BTW, reasons for higher damage:

1) Even at only 5.000 gs, an hour of acceleration would make for really high final speeds.

2) Drones are smarter and their sensors are far better than missile sensors. ECCM would be far less effective vs them than it is vs missiles.

3) Stealthed sollie drones have proven hard to target with long-range point defense in the past - though things might have changed since then.

Will SLN drones accelerating at 5,000g for an hour really be all that stealthy? I am under the impression that effective stealth is partly predicated on keeping wedge emissions below a detectable threshold

That's a good question. But beyond that, SLN drones are definitely not effectively stealthy against current Grand Alliance sensors. Witness the way they were casually wiped out as desired at Second Manticore, at least. (And the Manticore system has just about the best sensor net anywhere, with the most motivation to use it carefully after Oyster Bay, so if you were to try this anywhere, it is the worst place for success.)

I do think Mistletoe-style attack drones have a wider role to play - not as regular weapons, by any means, but as a niche tool for destroying or mission-killing missile pod concentrations, some sensor arrays, occasionally infrastructure, etc. But I don't think SLN stealth will do it against GA sensors or that trying to swamp defenses instead of evade them will be cost-effective on the whole with them. If it would, then they'd've replaced the capital missile long since.