Late 1921 PD SLN Raid Planning - Zunker

Sully wrote:Am I the only one who finds SLN stupidity like this so outlandish to be implausible? That it breaks my suspension-of-disbelief?

kzt wrote:The key to making anything like this work is getting the fight to where you have a positive correlation of forces (to steal an old Soviet phrase). So you need to somehow surprise them, as a long range closing battle just won't work. The obvious approach is to hyper jump on top of them, but there are others. It's really hard to stay highly alert for weeks on end when nothing interesting happens.

Jonathan_S wrote:And I think ive said before that a likely counter-tactic to pounces from hyper are to keep most of your force dispersed at over 16 million km from the junction; in randomly assigned low power/stealth patrol arcs. It increases that chances that a large suicidal thrust through the wormhole will succeed (or at least have survivors) but it makes a fully successful pounce much harder.

Daryl wrote:Theemile, your comment
"Personally, I believe the SLN would try massed transit assaults, under the mistaken assumption that the first wave should weaken the defenses, so the 2nd wave may have a larger chance of success, or the 3rd, or the 4th, or...."

assumes that the SLN naval personnel were prepared to do mass kamikaze attacks, with millions dying in each wave until they overwhelmed the defenders. Would you volunteer for the first wave?

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And I think ive said before that a likely counter-tactic to pounces from hyper are to keep most of your force dispersed at over 16 million km from the junction; in randomly assigned low power/stealth patrol arcs. It increases that chances that a large suicidal thrust through the wormhole will succeed (or at least have survivors) but it makes a fully successful pounce much harder.

You can deal with that too. It's been shown that they keep ships in the open posted near the WH. And if you have all your other ships 16 million KMs away, they are clearly not doing much in the way of providing mutual support for their exposed ship.

The SLN doesn't need to kill every ship around a given the WH without cost, though that would be nice. They just need to be able to kill individual ships at a favorable rate. And as vessels lighter than 8 million ton SDs have a fairly rapid hypergenerator cycle time compared to the 4 minutes of a 8MT SD, I suspect it's doable.

Brigade XO wrote:As it stands now, we don't really know where the SL/SLN knows where the military situation stands out there with the Lacoon II wormholes. Sure, the local systems and probably the close OFS/FF commanders know, but how long did it take for the reports to get back to the Mandarins and SLN command? Every wormhole they loose access to is one more place where they are not going to be able to use to deploy any of the commerce raiders or use to position assaults against targets closer to Manticore and Haven.

MuonNeutrino wrote:(I haven't read the rest of the posts in this thread in order to avoid picking up any ideas from anyone else, so if I repeat someone else's suggestions it was coincidence. I also do not have my copy of ART here, so I can't go back and re-read the account of the skirmish at Zunker. Also, I'm assuming Theemile meant 'late 1922', not 1921, as Zunker and the battle of Spindle didn't happen until 1922)

As far as I see it, if I do have full access to O'Cleary's after action report, an officer with an actual brain (which I am assuming I have) can fairly easily see that the Manties' main advantages lie in the extended range of their missiles, the extremely high closing speeds those ranges permit, their strong penetration and defensive EW, and their investments in fire control to throw very large salvos. I can't do very much about the last two of those (though at least they won't come as complete surprises this time), but I can do a lot to minimize the advantages of the first two.

The crux of my battle plan (at least for the assault on the Zunker end of the terminus) is that I know where the terminus is, and we're assuming the resonance zone is only 3 million KM wide. That means that I can drop out of hyper very close to it, which completely changes the balance of the battle. Let's say we bring along a decent wall of battle with screen (let's say 48 SDs - 6 squadrons - plus a roughly equivalent number of lighter units). I'd drop out of hyper 1 million KM outside of the resonance zone (i.e. allowance for shitty solarian astrogation), heading towards it with the maximum velocity (~14,000 km/s) I can bring along in a crash translation and accelerating at max. My goal is simply to charge straight forward and start shooting as quickly as I can from the shortest range possible, in an attempt to 'get under the guns' of the manties and negate the advantages of their extended range capabilities. I am also assuming that I have access to the same Cataphract-Bs for my SDs' internal tubes and pods of Cataphract-Cs as Filareta's force had for the attack on Manticore.

On the defensive side, at spindle Crandall's force of 71 SDs and 77 escorts stopped ~1000 shipkillers out of a salvo of ~9000 attack birds (plus presumably a proportionate amount of the ~3000 EW birds) traveling at a closing velocity of 0.73c. If I am assuming that the 3 'large CA' (Sag-Cs) can fire proportionally as large of salvos, I'm looking at ~3000 missile salvos, and perhaps I'll guess at another thousand from the 'CLs' (Rolands). Just with raw numbers, that'd suggest I need a force four times as large as Crandall's to have adequate missile defense, but that's ignoring the differences in the tactical situation here.

Namely, the short range limits the closing velocity that the manty missiles can generate. Even in sprint mode, a MK-23 that travels (say) 4 million KM only has a final velocity of 0.29c, which is about the same as the final velocity of a standard single-drive missile in endurance mode (AKA a velocity my missile defense is already designed to cope with). So, my missile defense won't be nearly as overstrained - I'll have more than twice as much time to shoot at them as they cross my defense envelope, and my defensive fire-control software will be much more capable of handling the situation. Even ignoring the tracking difference, just having twice as much time to shoot at them argues for being able to stop twice as many missiles.

Let's also say that I will push my screen out farther in front of my wall than usual. At spindle, the launch went straight for the superdreadnaughts. So, pushing out the screen forces a bad choice on the manties - either having their missiles running a much longer gauntlet of defensive fire (and activating their EW earlier) than usual, or wasting precious time shooting the screen out of the way before going after the SDs. (And they don't have very much of that time.)

Between the additional time for defensive fire, the better ability of defensive fire control to cope, more effective screening dispositions, and the manties' capabilities not coming as a surprise, I'm guessing that my missile defense will be at least three or four times as effective, meaning that even a force slightly smaller than Crandall's will be able to come close to handling the salvos the manties can throw. (This is partly the rationale for my chosen force size - it's roughly the minimum number of ships that I think would be necessary to defend itself.)

On the offensive side, this time I can actually shoot back. The range of a Cataphract is ~8.5 million KM in sprint mode, and single-drive missiles can reach 1.7 million KM in sprint mode and ~7.5 million KM in endurance mode. If I drop out of hyper 1 million KM outside the resonance zone heading towards it with the maximum velocity I can bring in a crash translation, with Cataphracts I've got missile flight times of ~80 seconds (or ~110 seconds with standard missiles) on anything within 4 million KM. Even RMN ships on alert will need at least a little bit of time to react and begin firing, while I will be at battle stations and have RD launch commands locked in on translation to find my targets. I can have a variety of fire plans pre-calculated for different target locations and arrangements, so I can probably begin firing at least as quickly as the defenders, if not moreso, and the Manties will almost certainly be within Cataphract range of the terminus (if not single-drive missile range).

At that point, while the RMN missiles, fire control (and so salvo size per ship), point defense, and penetration and defensive EW are better, my wall has a hell of a lot more missiles and raw point defense firepower. In this situation the manties are in deep trouble - even from internal tubes alone my SDs are firing almost 1500 shipkillers per salvo, plus maybe half as many missiles from my screen, plus my pod alpha strike. Manty missile defense is good, but I highly doubt it's good enough for 3 Sag-Cs and 4 Rolands to stand off that kind of firepower. It's essentially a shootout at point blank range, and even the manties will only have time for a few salvos before my missiles start arriving. I'll take hits and probably lose a few ships, but the manties are toast.

The second half, the assault on Idaho through the terminus, is a much trickier prospect, mostly because of the low ceiling on a mass transit. Basically I can put about 12.5 SDs through in one go (or, more likely, 10 SDs plus a couple squadrons of BCs and CLs), which isn't a lot of metal to confront RMN ships, especially because I'll have to maneuver clear of the terminus before I can raise my wedges and sidewalls, launch RDs, or fire CMs or shipkillers (which RFC has said can take up to a couple minutes depending on the terminus). If any RMN ships are within single-drive missile range of the terminus when I transit and are quick enough firing (or if the terminus is covered by mines), then any assault is doomed.

If I have explicit orders to try anyway, honestly I can't see any other option than to just throw the heaviest possible mass transit through and hope for the best. If the manties are stupid enough to not have mined the terminus, and if their mobile forces are far enough away from it that I can maneuver clear before their missiles arrive, and if they're not so far away that they're out of Cataphract range, then I can probably take them out with a maximum strength Cataphract-C pod salvo, but likely at the cost of most of my assault force since it will no longer have the critical mass of missile defense to let it stand off the manties return fire. If all of that somehow goes to plan, then one of the surviving transiting units can come back through after the 4 hour destabilization and let me know to send through more SDs to actually hold the other side. If nothing comes back, well, I can at least blockade this side and prevent the manties from using the bridge.