Fortress Command

cthia wrote:I've been scratching my head on this one and apologize for being unfashionably late. (The exigencies of the holidays.)

The historical use of forts is in the protection of tactical and strategic objectives that themselves are immobile. Forts are strongholds. Strongholds are NOT meant to move because you don't want opportunity to be caught with your pants down -- and pulled out of position. (npi)

I haven't read the entire thread, but I didn't see mention of a comparative cost analysis of the absolute operating costs of the forts vs the equal tonnage in SDs. As humans, we often make that mistake. We want a brand new Ferrari, but we fail to take into account the yearly operating costs.

Assuming that crew sizes are a fair measure of operating costs - mostly because we haven't got one better than that, and the hints from RFC at least do not contradict that assumption - the fortresses are mighty cheap compared to SD's that way. The latest fortresses have crews comparable to a Nike BC(L), which would be much less than one SD(P).

It's vastly larger, of course. Assuming hypergenerator parts and node wear represent a fair portion of operating costs, there's that much reason to suppose fortresses are cheaper that way. Supplying them represents a trivial investment in freighter capacity, since they're kept near industrial nodes.

Hypercapable warships do have going for them that they're far easier to keep or to get where you need than fortresses. Moving the fortress in-system takes a bit of time with the low accel wedge; moving it to another takes taking it apart, stowing it, moving it, and putting it back together again. (They're building fortresses to be less awkward that way, but it's never going to be fast.)

Perhaps a better analogy is that private owners of business jets cannot fail to overlook the significant yearly operating costs of a Boeing Business Jet in addition to the already significant initial purchase price of $100M. The yearly operating cost is somewhere around $2M.

Over decades, would it be significantly cheaper to operate forts than the comparable tonnage in SDs?

Costs would include: top of head.
1. Manpower. Total crews of an SD are replaced often.
2. Man hours. (Not necessarily the same as above. In fact, certainly different.)
3. Maintenance.
=> A. Would there be less total major systems on forts to replace because of wear vs. comparable SD tonnage?
4. Foodstuffs
5. Reaction Mass
6. Medical
7. Repairs
8. Upgrades. Cost to upgarade the forts vs comparable SD tonnage?
9. Miscellaneous

It would be nice to see the tally sheet of the Exchequer's projected operating cost analysis of the forts vs SDs over a half century or more.

It would, but we're not going to get more than hints from RFC that way.

My 15 % tip in addition to my two cents. Whatever the forts are there to protect doesn't move. It's the history of forts to protect tactical and strategic objectives that don't move. Therefore, if your area of responsibility don't move, then why buy a mobile home -- if it ain't never going to move -- more importantly, if you don't want it to move. Or, in the forts' case, move significantly? Save on the wheels and rims. lol

The strategic and tactical objectives of forts may represent an incredible investment in time, cost and limited technical resources to protect a time-sensitive-replaceable objective attached to irreplaceable lives able to perform very specialized tasks.

Forts have an implied order to STAY PUT! Hence... FORTIFIED positions... FORTS.

Commanding Officers really don't want to have to divert ships to protect very important strategic and tactical objectives that were mistakenly uncovered

Well, the wedge serves a role in defense - both being an impenetrable shield and allowing wiggling versus attack - along with allowing the fortress to relocate. It doesn't represent a terrible burden in fortress design that is assumed purely to be able to maneuver about a star system - that latter capability is essentially a convenience that is a by-product of getting the wedge for tactical purposes consistent with remaining on station. That said, that fortresses can relocate can be considered when you contemplate how to operate them, and if you had weeks of warning that gave you a strong, specific need to have fortresses in another part of the Manticore-A/B/Junction system, it may be worth exercising that capability.

That these are labelled 'fortresses' does indicate that mobility isn't really a prized part of their function. If it were, they'd be SD's instead - smaller, much faster, and hyper-capable too. They're instead built for roles where those are not important: places where you darn well are sure you want an armed presences to stay.

Taking it to the chess board, again, for an analogy. I know, y'all hate it when I do this. But for the sake of getting a point across.

What pieces on a chess board are akin to forts? Yep, the rooks. What do you not want to do with your rooks -- a common mistake with beginners? Yep, getting caught with your rooks away from home. Check mate! Rooks are mobile, yes. Highly mobile. Yet, the better players only use the reaction thrusters of the rooks to reposition them around their area of responsibility, such as when 'castling', and also when repositioning the rook toward prong of attack, occupying empty rows - threat vectors. Except for imminent moves of checkmate.

As soon as you move your forts, or even a single fort, (rooks) prematurely off of the 8th row, BAM! Pants down, peepee dangling, walnuts on the ground - roasted and toasted.

Forts are emplaced to protect irreplaceable and cost prohibitive reimplementation, currency, time, time to rebuild and biological resources. If a fort is considerably mobile tactically, then they preempt their own intended effectiveness. You don't want a fort caught out of place! You don't want incompetent area commanders (Youngs and Santinos) ordering (by force) the redeployment of forts. Or fort COs redeploying on their own initiative to morally protect certain civilian lives when their overall task is more important.

Young already thought that he could implement a better traffic pattern for inner system vehicles. Can't you just see him in some unfortunate system trying to redeploy the forts?

And don't tell me it would be out of his area of command - tell that idiot!

If the admiralty builds them essentially without the support mobility then they're more apt to stay and be where they intended them to.

A long long time ago in an age of wooden forts, muskets and bow and arrows an officer could have been court martialed or severely reprimanded for leaving his post at a fort. It was a no no to be drawn outside of the fort.

Forts are essentially localized home fleets, local to their area of command. Can you imagine civilians looking out and seeing the forts leaving them, especially during a battle?

Your talking tactical vs stratigic needs.

Forts protect things that don't move or restrict access to or through something. How far they can provide that protection depends on a lot of things but usually boils down to A) how far they can physically project offensive force (anything you can use outside your "walls" to damage or destroy an enemy is a weapon.) B) how long can they keep providing effective defence of what they are supposed to defend and C) how long can they retain their own integraty of self and survive while providing defence.

Forts in the Honververse sence have to have some limited mobility if for nothing more than station-keeping relative to the moving objects they are protecting or guarding. Planets move. Wormholes -relative stars and such- move.

You don't want forts there to move though hyperspace nor chase ships around inside a system but you do want them to maintain tactical positioing relative to the thing(s) they are intended to protect and now that would include covering approach vectors of other damaged forts (and so have to shift a bit rather than just leave some wide open hole in an at least 3 dimentional chess game)

Hyper-capable warships do several things well. They can project force outside the home system. They can provide mobile defence and deterrent (convoy protection etc) outside the home system. They can provide diplomatic (and show of force) covering display. They can provide roving guard and patrol work to cover vast areas that are important and investigate (and or deal with) stuff that turns up.
You can even hold them in your home system as higly mobile reaction and fighting force against possible or anticipated threats.

Non-hypercapable warships give you the mobility for dealing with threats that get into your system but the forts give you the toughness that the non-hyper warships are going to be lacking. Forts are (supposed to be) designed to be TOUGH, as in absorb a lot of damage and still keep fighting to defend both themselves and what they are defending. They are also supposed to have both MORE and probably heavier weapons than ship since they are (should) be built to carry them and the ammo need for them in vaster quantities than ships. Ships have to move all those weapon systems and ammor around a good high speed.

If you don't think that a "defensive" weapon system isn't also an "offensive" system, think about anti-aircraft systems (guns or missiles) and how they are used:
defending fixed sites like cities, industries, political/control locations AND shooting down things trying to stop your military forces advancing or just holding in somebody else's territory.

You need both when you need any of it.

Brigade XO wrote:Your talking tactical vs stratigic needs.

Forts protect things that don't move or restrict access to or through something. How far they can provide that protection depends on a lot of things but usually boils down to A) how far they can physically project offensive force (anything you can use outside your "walls" to damage or destroy an enemy is a weapon.) B) how long can they keep providing effective defence of what they are supposed to defend and C) how long can they retain their own integraty of self and survive while providing defence.

Forts in the Honververse sence have to have some limited mobility if for nothing more than station-keeping relative to the moving objects they are protecting or guarding. Planets move. Wormholes -relative stars and such- move.

You don't want forts there to move though hyperspace nor chase ships around inside a system but you do want them to maintain tactical positioing relative to the thing(s) they are intended to protect and now that would include covering approach vectors of other damaged forts (and so have to shift a bit rather than just leave some wide open hole in an at least 3 dimentional chess game)

Hyper-capable warships do several things well. They can project force outside the home system. They can provide mobile defence and deterrent (convoy protection etc) outside the home system. They can provide diplomatic (and show of force) covering display. They can provide roving guard and patrol work to cover vast areas that are important and investigate (and or deal with) stuff that turns up.
You can even hold them in your home system as higly mobile reaction and fighting force against possible or anticipated threats.

Non-hypercapable warships give you the mobility for dealing with threats that get into your system but the forts give you the toughness that the non-hyper warships are going to be lacking. Forts are (supposed to be) designed to be TOUGH, as in absorb a lot of damage and still keep fighting to defend both themselves and what they are defending. They are also supposed to have both MORE and probably heavier weapons than ship since they are (should) be built to carry them and the ammo need for them in vaster quantities than ships. Ships have to move all those weapon systems and ammor around a good high speed.

If you don't think that a "defensive" weapon system isn't also an "offensive" system, think about anti-aircraft systems (guns or missiles) and how they are used:
defending fixed sites like cities, industries, political/control locations AND shooting down things trying to stop your military forces advancing or just holding in somebody else's territory.

You need both when you need any of it.

Exactly! Forts are a strategic deployment. Ships are a tactical deployment that can deploy strategic weapons and can also tactically achieve a strategic procurement of an objective.

Your post indeed highlights the definition of a modern fortified position. Modern day SAM sites are mobile forts.


An Aside:
I can imagine that Honor would be highly irritated, to put it lightly, if someone suddenly informed her that the current threat on her already impossibly full plate -- that had begun running over onto her clothes with peas and red beet juice (or is that organs and blood), because of some overzealous fort COs uncovering of an important strategic objective -- had just increased fourfold.

Also, thinking about it, it violates the KISS principle. Fort commanders would have to closely integrate with all other fleets.

And consider the example of a Navy Seal rescuing you. Gives you formidable weapons to defend yourself and places you at a strategic location and tells you to STAY PUT! Where they can better assimilate the threat environment and make plans to secure the area while simultaneously protecting their charge, you -- with constants that don't vary. Moving when a Commander is thinking that you are one place when you are not can shoot an operation in the foot quickly.
.

Forts should never leave their localized home sphere of influence, within reason.

I would imagine that's the etymology of the phrase...

Stay at home and mind the fort.

Brigade XO wrote:Your talking tactical vs stratigic needs.

Forts protect things that don't move or restrict access to or through something. How far they can provide that protection depends on a lot of things but usually boils down to A) how far they can physically project offensive force (anything you can use outside your "walls" to damage or destroy an enemy is a weapon.) B) how long can they keep providing effective defence of what they are supposed to defend and C) how long can they retain their own integraty of self and survive while providing defence.

Forts in the Honververse sence have to have some limited mobility if for nothing more than station-keeping relative to the moving objects they are protecting or guarding. Planets move. Wormholes -relative stars and such- move.

You don't want forts there to move though hyperspace nor chase ships around inside a system but you do want them to maintain tactical positioing relative to the thing(s) they are intended to protect and now that would include covering approach vectors of other damaged forts (and so have to shift a bit rather than just leave some wide open hole in an at least 3 dimentional chess game)

Hyper-capable warships do several things well. They can project force outside the home system. They can provide mobile defence and deterrent (convoy protection etc) outside the home system. They can provide diplomatic (and show of force) covering display. They can provide roving guard and patrol work to cover vast areas that are important and investigate (and or deal with) stuff that turns up.
You can even hold them in your home system as higly mobile reaction and fighting force against possible or anticipated threats.

Non-hypercapable warships give you the mobility for dealing with threats that get into your system but the forts give you the toughness that the non-hyper warships are going to be lacking. Forts are (supposed to be) designed to be TOUGH, as in absorb a lot of damage and still keep fighting to defend both themselves and what they are defending. They are also supposed to have both MORE and probably heavier weapons than ship since they are (should) be built to carry them and the ammo need for them in vaster quantities than ships. Ships have to move all those weapon systems and ammor around a good high speed.

If you don't think that a "defensive" weapon system isn't also an "offensive" system, think about anti-aircraft systems (guns or missiles) and how they are used:
defending fixed sites like cities, industries, political/control locations AND shooting down things trying to stop your military forces advancing or just holding in somebody else's territory.

You need both when you need any of it.

Of course. Just ask the NFL teams that went up against the 'Steel Curtain' of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1976. There were games when you couldn't tell the defense from the offense.

I don't know if this was covered somewhere in the 9 or so pages on this thread alone, if so I apologize. There was a point made early on about the rings of fortresses defending the junction leading to Trevor's Star. There is also evidence that once it was taken, those forts were decommissioned while new ship types came online and new forts were assembled in Trevor's Star presumably to extend the trenches as it were. Fine. I got no issues with this whatsoever. Hell, I don't even have a problem with the new forts coming online covering the Lynx Terminus to do virtually the same things. I am having a problem with the Beowulf terminus defenses or lack thereof.

Interstellar law recognizes the immediate space around the terminus as the territory of the star nation which controls the Junction. This is the case practically everywhere except the Visigoth Junction where Mesa sniped the survey ship. With Manticore building all those forts at all those other Termini, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't build some in the Sigma Draconis/Beowulf Terminus. That would not have really impacted the agreement that the two nations shared where the Junction Control would be manned by Beowulfan personnel. The burden of defense still falls on Manticore and the RMN.

Still, we've never really seen anyone launch actually execute a Junction assault. Textev shows that White Haven launched the Battle of Trevor's Star by attacking through the Junction and that "it was very costly." It doesn't really go into the battle itself.

Also, who commands a star fort? I can't see it being below a Captain (SG), but I'm wondering if we have textev anywhere.

ChronicRder wrote:I don't know if this was covered somewhere in the 9 or so pages on this thread alone, if so I apologize. There was a point made early on about the rings of fortresses defending the junction leading to Trevor's Star. There is also evidence that once it was taken, those forts were decommissioned while new ship types came online and new forts were assembled in Trevor's Star presumably to extend the trenches as it were. Fine. I got no issues with this whatsoever. Hell, I don't even have a problem with the new forts coming online covering the Lynx Terminus to do virtually the same things. I am having a problem with the Beowulf terminus defenses or lack thereof.

Interstellar law recognizes the immediate space around the terminus as the territory of the star nation which controls the Junction. This is the case practically everywhere except the Visigoth Junction where Mesa sniped the survey ship. With Manticore building all those forts at all those other Termini, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't build some in the Sigma Draconis/Beowulf Terminus. That would not have really impacted the agreement that the two nations shared where the Junction Control would be manned by Beowulfan personnel. The burden of defense still falls on Manticore and the RMN.

I think that Manticore may well have judged that as being more antagonistic toward the League than it was worth being, particularly when Beowulf itself could defend Beowulf Astro Control - consisting of Beowulf's citizens on Beowulf's doorstep - without making relations with the League even touchier.

Manticore's not shy about giving the League the finger when it has to. When it can get away well enough without doing so - without compromising sovereignty or safety - it would. Someone shooting up the Beowulf terminus' infrastructure is making an enemy of Beowulf and the League and can be left to them to handle, or at least, left to them to deter.

Still, we've never really seen anyone launch actually execute a Junction assault. Textev shows that White Haven launched the Battle of Trevor's Star by attacking through the Junction and that "it was very costly." It doesn't really go into the battle itself.

And that was with coordination such that Trevor's Star defenders were drawn off by the other pincer. I doubt what remained there were full-up fortresses, as opposed to small and/or old fortresses, few in number, or just warships with mines/pods.

Also, who commands a star fort? I can't see it being below a Captain (SG), but I'm wondering if we have textev anywhere.

I don't recall any textev either but I'm confident of the same conjecture.

Manticore's not shy about giving the League the finger when it has to. When it can get away well enough without doing so - without compromising sovereignty or safety - it would. Someone shooting up the Beowulf terminus' infrastructure is making an enemy of Beowulf and the League and can be left to them to handle, or at least, left to them to deter.

Still, we've never really seen anyone launch actually execute a Junction assault. Textev shows that White Haven launched the Battle of Trevor's Star by attacking through the Junction and that "it was very costly." It doesn't really go into the battle itself.

And that was with coordination such that Trevor's Star defenders were drawn off by the other pincer. I doubt what remained there were full-up fortresses, as opposed to small and/or old fortresses, few in number, or just warships with mines/pods.[quote]

Manticore seems to have to give them the finger a lot.

Back to the Battle of TS, he leaves it to the reader to assume which force took the most casualties. Then, that was a nice literally device to leave his options open. Now, it's becoming more and more important to see what sort of tactics the RMN has in that regard, other than the deus ex machina that they've used twice--both at Basilisk. To you Starcraft players on this forum, Mass Recall for the win!