Stopping the Sharonan advance

Due to the artillery advantage, they can make sure it is very difficult to pudh s force directly though the portal. The thing is forces could come in at a 90 angle, so less artillery could be deployed safely. So on the other side defences must be there to hold off such an attack, and ensure no one reaches the heavy defences.

The following on Arcanian dragon transport was from Snippet #3 --

Platoon-Captain Rynai chan Hopyr was the Distance Viewer who’d gone forward with the escort sent to shepherd Olvyr Banchu and his engineers back to Fort Salby. His was a powerful Talent, and he’d used it to good effect scouting the Arcanans’ positions and troop strength. He’d tallied in excess of a hundred and fifty of their dragons and at least six thousand men, twice the 3rd Dragoons’ current strength in Traisum. There was no way to tell what might have lain outside his range, but chan Geraith was certain the Arcanan commander had strength chan Hopyr hadn’t Seen. Not that what he had Seen hadn’t been quite bad enough.

For which I noted the following in another multiverse thread --

More than anything else, the new Sharonan Army planning snippets in the Multiverse series remind me of the Soviet Union's armored raid by the 24th Corps on the Luftwaffe Tatinskaya Airfield in the Soviet Christmas 1942 "Little Saturn" offensive during the Stalingrad campaign.

The Soviet 24th Tank Corps not only destroyed most of the Luftwaffe's Ju-52 transports -- and importantly long term -- they over ran the most experienced JU-52 mechanics and destroyed the majority of the Luftwaffe's truck chassis fuel bowsers on the Eastern Front.

The parallel here with the Sharonan Bison raiding force and Arcanian transport dragon situation is very strong.

I went back to my Osprey book on the Christmas 1942 Tatinskaya raid and it turned out there were 130 Ju-52 and 40 Ju-86 transports sitting on that airfield.

I think 190 counts as "... in excess of a hundred and fifty of their dragons...", so I think the military history "acid etch" has bought out the filed off serial numbers here.

One way in which chan Garaith's attack will be different from the Soviet's armored raid is that the transport dragons can move out there own support personnel. There is no way to kill/capture them unless the sharonians manage to surprise the arcanans.

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:1 Back in 2007, several of us suggested that a Portal
Fort might better be put beyond the edge, so that it
could observe both sides, and fire its heavy weapons
along whichever side was attacked

Doesn't really help you unless your artillery can reach halfway across the portal, even then you would need two forts at each end of the portal. If the portal is large (twenty-five miles was mentioned for the advance down the Loop) then even two forts would be insufficient to cover the portal without frequent patrols.

Regards this --

One way in which chan Garaith's attack will be different from the Soviet's armored raid is that the transport dragons can move out there own support personnel. There is no way to kill/capture them unless the sharonians manage to surprise the arcanans.

Go read Snippet #4 and the point made about the levitating spell accumulators for transport pods being exhausted.

Arcanian Transport Dragon lift capability is now 1/2 what it was in the move to Traisum.

If the Arcanians dump all the non-dragon creatures, the infantry/field dragons and pretty much everything else including food, they night be able to get most men out in one lift.

Might.

This requires a level of Go To Hell (GOTH) plan planning the Arcanians -- in all their arrogance about fighting a non-magical opponent without dragons -- seem incapable of.

Which is pretty much where the Germans were during this armored raid visa vi the Soviets.

The relevant passage from Snippet #4

A single transport could carry loads weighing up to about a quarter of its own mass, which on average came to about fifteen tons of cargo. For short hops that could be boosted to as much as twenty or even twenty-five tons, but the cost in endurance and operational range was high. Levitation spells could double normal capacities, but spells with that sort of power requirement was magister-level work, and the military never had enough magister-level Gifts to meet its needs. The Army Air Transport Command belonged to the Air Force, despite its name and despite strenuous efforts by the Army to hang onto it, and Toralk had put in his own time as a junior officer commanding transport strikes and even talons. As a result, he was well aware of the acute limits on the uniformed personnel who could charge levitation accumulators, especially once they got too far forward to tap the power nets established in more heavily inhabited universes. There were very good reasons the AATC operated from nodal bases where it could assemble its most strongly Gifted techs to charge as many accumulators as possible. It kept such valuable personnel safely out of harm’s way, rather than parceling them out in tenth-mark packets, working in isolation too close to the sharp end of the stick, and it was generally simpler and more efficient to ship the charged accumulators — which weighed barely two pounds each, after all —forward to where they were needed.

Except that no one in his worst nightmares had dreamed anyone might ever need to supply such a force this big out at the arse-end of nowhere, and Commander of Two Thousand mul Gurthak had been forced to strip the dozen closest universes of transports to give Toralk what he had. Anything mul Gurthak had left was absolutely essential to maintaining the Expeditionary Force’s rear area transport requirements, not to mention the forts and sparse civilian populations scattered through those universes. That cupboard was bare, and there wouldn’t be any more dragons popping out of it anytime soon.

That was bad enough, but there’d never been enough accumulators, either. Still worse, the nearest real stockpile had been in Ucala, at the end of the slider net from New Arcana, 24,300 miles behind Arcana’s first encounter with the Sharonians, and they’d advanced over four thousand miles since then. That was the next best thing to three hundred hours’ flight time for a transport dragon, and a transport needed periodic breaks in flight and at least several hours rest per day, not to mention downtime for things like eating. All of which meant it was a sixteen-day trip — one way — between Ucala and Toralk’s tent here in the universe Sharona had christened Karys. Even more unhappily, the Ucala stockpile had been completely depleted by the heavy transport demands required to build up the AEF’s main logistic base in Mahritha and keep moving this far forward. Commander of Five Hundred Mantou Lyshair, the acting CO of Toralk’s AATC detachment, was down to an accumulator inventory far below the minimum level specified by The Book, and that was another situation that wasn’t going to get better anytime soon.

And because it isn’t, the transports Lyshair does have are forced to fly without accumulators, which is exhausting the dragons faster and hauling half the tonnage to boot. And then there’s the little problem of fodder and dragon feed, he reminded himself glumly.

Indeed.
A single Edge-Fort suffices for a Gate less than five
miles wide. Forts at both Edges are needed for Gates
five-twelve miles wide. For Gates wider than about
twelve miles (depending on artillery range) forts or
fortified lines along the Faces are needed.
Please don't assume that any of us Oldtimers ever
doubted that.

HTM

Astelon wrote:{snipped what was above, left what A wrote at bottom - h}

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:1 Back in 2007, several of us suggested that a Portal
Fort might better be put beyond the edge, so that it
could observe both sides, and fire its heavy weapons
along whichever side was attacked

Doesn't really help you unless your artillery can reach halfway across the portal, even then you would need two forts at each end of the portal. If the portal is large (twenty-five miles was mentioned for the advance down the Loop) then even two forts would be insufficient to cover the portal without frequent patrols.

Astelon wrote:This information is from snippet 4:

Still worse, the nearest real stockpile had been in Ucala, at the end of the slider net from New Arcana, 24,300 miles behind Arcana’s first encounter with the Sharonians, and they’d advanced over four thousand miles since then.

The rest of the snippet goes on to discuss the problems in arcanan logistics, and the suspected capacity of sharonian trains. Everything points to a large sharonian advantage, even though the trains move slower and can't travel a straight line to their, destination like dragons can.

Arcana appears to follow the practice of placing forts at portals and other strategic locations. As for their forces we don't know where the nearest arcanan forces are at, save for the fact the mul Gurthak has sent forwards everything (officially) at his disposal. This indicates that it will be some time (months when you consider that Arcana just got word of the initial contact) before any significant reinforcements can reach the front. With their slow communications it will take significant time just to send out the necessary orders to gather and direct the reinforcements.

I haven't been reading the snippets, so maybe this has been addressed, but it seems to me that it should be significantly quicker to lay new slidway than to lay new rails.
So for a given workforce Arcana should be able to push their slide system towards the front significantly more quickly than Sharona can with their heavy rail.

Plus IIRC slider cars going in opposite directions can automatically move off-center of the slideway and pass each other. So over much of the terrain you don't need to do extra work to have a "double-tracked" line. (Obviously if you're digging a cut or a tunnel you'd have to make it physically wide enough for the slide cars to pass each other; but otherwise...)


If the slideway gets pushed fast enough it might give the Arcanas a temporary logistical edge (until the higher capacity rail pushes far enough forward)

I've had that thought myself about the slide rails. But two things should be noted.

First, they won't carry the same weight as a regular railroad.

The second thing is that sinse they rely on magic, they will lose their ability to function as the distance from Arcana increases at the same time the rest of the magic stops working.

That is not to say that the slide rails wouldn't be useful...only to take note of the limiting perameters.

Don

Several points regards below --

n7axw wrote:I've had that thought myself about the slide rails. But two things should be noted.

First, they won't carry the same weight as a regular railroad.

The second thing is that sinse they rely on magic, they will lose their ability to function as the distance from Arcana increases at the same time the rest of the magic stops working.

That is not to say that the slide rails wouldn't be useful...only to take note of the limiting perameters.

Don

Point 1 -- 24,000 miles to the nearest slider-head is many more to cover than 4,000 or 7,000 for Sharonan rail roads.

Point 2 -- Arcanian sliderway line building is compromised by the existence of dragons and levitation spells compared to the 25 mile a day rate for Sharonan TTE building crews.

Point 3 -- Arcanian sliderway lines require a lot of magically gifted people and magical infrastructure (magic power grids) to support them vice non-talented transport dragon pilots.

Point 4 -- The ability of Arcania to surge such magical infrastructure has not been shown by the text thus far. In fact, it has pointed the other way.

Point 5 -- Even if all of the above were taken care of, the Arcanian ability to surge economic/magical/military resources after decisions have been made are handicapped by its arthritic 100 mile an hour over long distances communications speed compared to Sharona.

Just one more thought here... Arcana is a lot further away from the front which will make sustaining ops more difficult than for Sharona. The sliderhead at 24,000 miles from Hell's Gate is already at the extreme end of things.

The whole picture does call into question Arcana's ability to sustain more than light forces so far from home.

Don