Somtaaw wrote:Weird Harold wrote:Appropriate for Manticore in 1844 PD, not necessarily Manticore's practice in 1922 PD. The Mk-25/Apollo system defense MDM wasn't available, nor were Shrike-class LACs.
SDMDMs and LACs are available in 1922 PD and Manticore is using (and sharing) them for System Defense with far less reliance on a Wall of Battle in a defensive role. Manticore hasn't completely abandoned Capital Ships, because they still need counter-strike capability to take the war to their enemies.
My New Star Nation has brought together twenty systems that followed Manticore's 1922 strategy for System Defense -- e.g. SDMDMs and LACs in sufficient quantity to make a system more costly than all but the most determined attacker would be willing to spend.
Zanzibar called, and would like to remind you what happened to them in the post-Thunderbolt era, when Manticore (and her allies) were moving into the heavy SDMDM's and LAC mentality.... didn't work out so well for them. And IIRC, Republican forces only committed about 2 squadrons of wallers, and a CLAC squadron worth of LACs. Hardly a "more costly than all but the most determined" attacker would send, compared to their total fleet size.
Edit: Correction, it was 3 squadrons of SDP's, and only 6 CLACs, with only 16 BC's for a screen. Still very very light, compared to the size of fleets that were hammering around pre-Buttercup, and at Thunderbolt.
To address another point, about spider-LACs being better armed than conventional LACs (Katana's, Shrikes and Cimettere's) only applies to their first punch. If you don't achieve catastrophic kill ratios with that sucker punch (assuming nobody learns to detect spider drives prior to attacks anyways), spider-LACs are essentially the Empire of Man's "one-shot" anti-armor holdout weapons. You know, the ones that nearly killed Prince Roger, did kill his Marine Captain, and nearly killed him again facing his father.
Spider-LACs approach in stealth, blow their wad of pods, and then pray they can kill the LACs, because otherwise they cannot run away, they can't fight at long range (pods are one-shot, non-reloadable after all), can't fight at short range (no wedge to take hits with, or speed to stay behind Shrikes), and middle-range buys them the worst of everything.
And lastly.... saw some mention of a single-system entity being able to build large amounts of SD's. We only know of one system that managed to do that, being Manticore, and that's purely due to the "astrographic accident" known as the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. And that's also due to it being more than just one or two wormholes, otherwise it'd be just like any of the other hick systems that OFS casually backhanded around. No other star system, that we've ever seen managed to keep even one or two SD's functioning, and usually have difficulties just keeping cruisers working.
Haven had hundreds of systems prior to the First Haven War, and they could just barely "maintain" 412 SD's, 48 DN's, 374 BB's with 81 BC's. Another 200 CA's, 350 CLs and 600+ destroyers.
Manticore, even with it's galactic accident junction, barely had 188 SD's, 121 DN's, and no BBs, with 200 BCs. Then had their 300+ CA's, 300 CL's, and 500 DD's. Again, the only way they could afford this at all, was the multi-wormhole Junction, otherwise Manticore probably would have had very little (no need for their massive cruiser fleet, no merchant marine shipping for the Sollies, and no ability to pay for the waller)
Technically, there are 2 other single star examples of Waller fleets in the "verge"
1) Erewhon - another lucky wormhole recipient, Erewhon had built up a fleet of several dozen foreign built wallers for self defense, but no native ability to produce them (until recently) This is partly due to Erewhon's leadership and their shrewd nature - playing off one ally against another and getting the most for their money- They never had the need to develop such infrastructure locally.
2) Grayson - Technically a backward world in 1902, Massive financial and technical infusions from Manticore and 11 damaged Havenite SDs, allowed them to jump start their economy and build an advanced navy - their enormous space based workforce was able to be shifted to advanced technologies easily, allowing a large up-serge in orbital building capability as "new" technologies were introduced.
Their navy consumes a disproportionately large portion of their economy, but Grayson's standard of living increased along with the navy, so the individual never noticed the oversized cost of the navy. However, once individual economic parity is met with the rest of the universe, the size of their navy may be unaffordable.
