Scenario of War with the League

Weird Harold wrote:

The E wrote:And, well. In every single one of those cases, even the SLN knows that an assault through a fortified wormhole is about the least survivable attack strategy imaginable.

The SLN certainly didn't act like they knew that when they tried to send 100 SDs through from Beowulf in "support" of "Raging Justice."

I do wonder why they tried that tactic, because you should be right.

I think the intent was that those would be reinforcements.

(And the real intent was that they would be destroyed.)

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Except of course Manticore has never done that with SDM pods. And for good reasons, they're so short ranged that you 'd have to use a truly ludicrous number to cover an inner system; and trying to retreat down a line of then relies too much on forcing the enemy to go where you want them to.

With SDMs you don't cover a system, you cover the planets. Put them in space a few million km out from the planet and put your ships outside and behind them. Don't come out to meet the invaders.

I agree you use the pods near planets, or forts, or stations. But given their missiles only have a roughly 6 million km range; and your ships have limited fire control, you can't fire off all that many before proximity kills take out the rest. Basically you get as many missiles as you can control for 3 minutes and then you've lost any that aren't towed inside a wedge (or still in a podbay; and in this scenario nobody had podbays).

At that point yes you've hammered the attacking fleet with close to 3 times the missiles you should have been able to; but after that it settles down to a normal slugging match between the onboard tubes of each side.


At the risk of reducing your fire control's effectiveness you could stick your fleet a million KM or so behind the pods; so nothing powered could reach them. So at least they wouldn't have to deal with defending themselves during the pod swarm. But doing that reduces, noticeably, the number of hits you get from the pods; so you have to figure whether the trade-off is worth it.

And even then that tactic relies on your enemy coming in fat dumb and happy; because you're far enough back that you can't provide and defensive coverage for the pods. You've got no ability to stop even single missiles coming in ballistic from getting close enough for the nukes to trash your pods. So any suspicion that they're there and you'd lose them.

Duckk wrote:[quote="Loren PechtelWith SDMs you don't cover a system, you cover the planets. Put them in space a few million km out from the planet and put your ships outside and behind them. Don't come out to meet the invaders.

You've got to keep your fleet intact, to provide fire control for the pods, but have to stay nearly in range to lure the enemy into a series of ambushes. However the free floating pods are very vulnerable to proximity kills, even from weapons on ballistic after their drives have burned out.

Group the pods, fire every pod in the group when you use them. The other pods are far enough away not to be killed by attacks aimed at the ones that fired.

Then as the attacker, I simply launch my missiles on a ballistic course at your pod clusters and destroy them with proximity fused warheads. Pods can't engage if I'm a half a light minute outside of their range.[/quote]

That assumes that you can even find the pods. Pods are stelthed, solly recon drones are C**P, the pods can be offset up to 5MKM of the straight line, and they don't have to evenly spaced, some can be 3 minutes travel time apart, others can be 5. That gives a BIG volume to search for a stealthed pod in. Sure, if they knew what they were looking for and they had good recon drones and manticore didn't eliminate their drones they could find the majority of the.

Add to the fact that a balistic missle has to be aimed precicely to be able to kill a pod. Remember that honor was able to hide over 250,000 pods from filerta, I doubt that an attacking SL force would be able to find more than a small percentage of the pods on the way in.

Alternate method. Spread the pods out individually, that way a proximity nuke would at best be able to take out one pod.

3rd method. HOE took place before 1910. adopt some fast freighters with pod rails and 2-3 ships can dump all the pods needed.

Loren Pechtel wrote:If you have to bring the pods to the battle I agree with you. What if they're already in space, though? Remember Honor showing Filareta (sp?) pods galore?

Honor showed Filareta System Defense Apollo "pods galore" aka MK-24 MDMs. That's a huge difference from SDM pods around high-value targets.

Since the premise of THIS thread is "no MDMs" Honor would have been limited to towed pods and had to go to the edge of Filareta's range before she fired.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I think the intent was that those would be reinforcements.

(And the real intent was that they would be destroyed.)

Anyone in the SLN should have known that Tsang's ships were on a suicide mission -- Especially Adm Tsang. I wonder how she felt about being sent on a Kamikaze mission?

Part of me still balks at the notion that hardcore, passionate, splintering League factions won't become bands of terrorists hellbent to make the GA pay in the worst conceivable way.

What's stopping new bands of Warnicke-like entities from deciding to splinter from the League with anti-GA ulterior motives in hand, in order to commit Eridani acts of violence as splinter cells that have no nation to attack in vengeance?

darrell wrote:One thing that you are forgetting, in a 1910 PD world, the GA dosen't have as big a missile advantage as it does in 1922. Therefore all the objections about the SL replacing SD's has a fatal flaw, the reserve.

The SL looses half it's active SD's? it should be able to activate each reserve SD in a matter of weeks instead of the years that building a new SD would take.

Therefore, in a 1910 SL war, the GA has to do deep penetration raids to destroy the reserve ships.

Actually this is where many of us see the SLN Plans falling apart. While in this scenario the GA likely does not survive to see the SL fall apart, the SLN would be forced to leave most of the League naked. While the cat's away the mice will play.

The SL has no realistic plan for activating their reserve, possibly no plan for this at all. Thus while the first 10 to 100 SDs might be activated in under a year, they will then run into the twin problems of training the spacers to man them, and shortages of key parts due to them being missing from the stored ships due to graft.

No one is passionate about the League. At most, they're passionate about the personal power its bureaucracy provides, but by no stretch of the imagination is it a something that engenders the kind of fanaticism needed to fuel an Edict violation. What does generate the most passion in League citizens is their home system.

As I have said many times, people aren't interested in Edict violations. Everyone knows exactly what kind of genie this unleashes. And no, I'm not talking about the SLN showing up. Edict violations will immediately lead to scorched earth retaliations and counter reprisals. Everybody loses in that case, which is why no one wants to be the first to cross that line even when the League disappears.

I saw no indication that Adm Tsang thought that bulling her way thought the Sigma Draconis wormhole to support Filerta was a suicide mission. The SLN expected Fillerta to win and Tsang was there to help him mop up and consolidate....there were all those wormhole termini to take control of in the name of the SL and what better way than send a DB though with copy of the surrender of the Manticorian government followed by a dozen SDs to each one and send off a couple more in the direction of each actual "former" SEM base, like by Hancock?


Then the RMN fleet came out of stealth and Adm Tsang nearly soiled her pants. Oooops.


We were shown a couple of scenarios of Lacoon II with SEM siezing and securing a couple of potential wormhole bridge routes in the direction of Manticore from various areas near the SL. I can't imagine that RMN ONI would have ignored the next three or four potential routes if there were that many. Basilisk and Lynx would have ships on call through the Junction and Lynx is already getting massivly fortified. It is -since the troubles in Talbott- the 2nd most glaring option for SL----which the Alignment sought to throw SLN at. Basilisk would also be a tough nut. We have seen NOTHING about what is at Hennessy but, again, its a rout in.

We also have seen no (absoluitly NONE) planning or discussion to have SLN hop over via Joshua and try to pass through Erwhon to get at Hennessy. We haven't even seen out little clandesting group of SLN ONI officers mention anything about SLN sending anybody to see what Erwhon might know about Manticorian or Haven weapons and tactics. Possibly just a couple too many threads to weave into the tapestry along with the Alignment

Duckk wrote:No one is passionate about the League. At most, they're passionate about the personal power its bureaucracy provides, but by no stretch of the imagination is it a something that engenders the kind of fanaticism needed to fuel an Edict violation. What does generate the most passion in League citizens is their home system.

As I have said many times, people aren't interested in Edict violations. Everyone knows exactly what kind of genie this unleashes. And no, I'm not talking about the SLN showing up. Edict violations will immediately lead to scorched earth retaliations and counter reprisals. Everybody loses in that case, which is why no one wants to be the first to cross that line even when the League disappears.

Let's consider cause&effect passion toward the League born as a byproduct of vehement dispassion towards everything Manticoran - a dangerous virus that flows in the blood of many Solarians even now in power.

Sorry Duckk, but I just can't buy into that. Yes, I've argued it before, yet I'm a pragmatist. It always sounds like an unnatural force imbalance of placing too much sanity on mankind, and worst - individuals. I'm certain that no "polity" would formally wish to open that can of worms. But opportunities abound for displaced "passionates," who hate what is the GA, to form privately - with no nation affiliation to be attacked or earth to be scorched. Your sentiments seem to sound off about there being no League worlds housing insane Warnicke's that detest Manticore with a passion. Heck, hasn't what the MAlign already committed just a thin line between hate and edict?

It's like saying that there are no private entities that wouldn't hesitate to fry America if they have the means, if they are painted in a corner, free from nation affiliation which would relegate the GA to searching system by system, planet by planet, house by house, cave by cave in classic Bin Laden type fashion.

Wanna bet how long that Bin Laden search will take with the hugeness of space?

.