Scenario of War with the League

kzt wrote:

munroburton wrote:ONI has treecats available. Wholesale counter-penetration on that scale that isn't going to happen!

Sure. They work so well that Mesa planted an agent as a government minister. As recent events have shown in the real world, anyone at that level has access to enormous piles of secrets only vaguely connected to the conduct of foreign policy.

You mean Ducroix? Back then there weren't many treecats attached to government officials, only a handful could sign and none really cared one way or another if someone was taking money from Mesa.

Relax wrote:Then again, the RMN/GSN can't figure out what a power cord is, so... Maybe Bolts are ultra advanced!

The SLN is known for its innovative and imaginative officers.

But consider what would happen if you tried to bolt a Russian Sunburn onto a USN Little Crappy Ship. You might be able to fire the damn thing, but you are not going to be able to program the guidance module using the ships fire control system, or that if any USN vessel without a bunch of special purpose built for this function dedicated hardware to do the required conversions.

Jonathan_S wrote: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).

They can only proximity-kill the rest if they can find them. When you cast the pods off from your ship the enemy knows approximately where they are but I'm talking about stuff that might be a million or two km away. You never fire from an area of missiles until you can use them all up before they're hit. The enemy will of course realize there are more missiles out there but they can't just saturate space with nukes.

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.

This is assuming the enemy can detect your pods. In that era pods were only detected by what they did to a ship's acceleration.

Weird Harold wrote:

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.

The point is at that point Manticore had a quarter million pods for system defense in the area of the battle--I don't think she revealed pods that covered the other worlds. While they would have had a lot less in 1910 I would figure they had at least tens of thousands. Spread out in space around the planets that will devastate any Sollie fleet that sticks it's nose in the grinder.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The enemy will of course realize there are more missiles out there but they can't just saturate space with nukes.

The enemy can't saturate space with nukes, but you can seed enough pods to take out SDs throughout your system so that it doesn't matter what vector the enemy approaches on?

Space is big and with SDMs, you have to have an enormous number of pods to have any point in your system within range of just a single pod.

Weird Harold wrote:

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?

Anyone with a true understanding of what was at Manticore would know that. That includes few if any Sollies. They seriously underestimate what Manticore can do--even at the point that Filareta surrendered she didn't know what she was truly facing. (She knew she would lose the fight, she didn't realize how one-sided it would be.) The Sollies were also operating under the assumption that Manticore's defenses must have been savaged by Oyster Bay.

Sigs wrote:The bulk of if not the whole Reserve is obsolete even by the SLN's own technology, many of the ships are 100+ years old which means that those ships would have to be heavily upgraded to be considered anything other than a death trap. Many were built before the laser head became a thing, missile combat was not as dominating and thus likely have ineffective PD and worse their EW is centuries out of date.

Yeah, many still have autocannon instead of point defense lasers. Autocannon will do squat against laser heads. I very much doubt the countermissiles on such ships will be effective against an inbound at half the speed of light even if they weren't going to be blasted by the EW. They will have no meaningful defense besides armor.

Also, if the GA realizes the state of their defense they could reset their missiles. Instead of the current standoff range they could go in until wedge fratricide became an issue. While the total energy of the beams won't be any higher they will become much smaller and thus expend much less energy in punching through that armor.

Jonathan_S wrote:

darrell wrote: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.

Not that precisely. All pods towed outside the wedge were apparently rendered inoperable as a side effect of laserheads engaging the ships towing them. That means that the nuke on a laserhead was able to take out a pod from at least 30,000 km away.

You need to guess fairly well where the pod is, relative to it's range. But not that well; nor do you have to actually spot it with your RD. Close counts when you're talking about nuclear weapons

SDMs really changes the calculus about pods compared to the later MDMs.

No. Laser heads use a lensing system to focus the bomb energy--without it the lasers simply wouldn't have the punch to be worthwhile. While they obviously can kill a pod at 30,000km on the right axis that doesn't mean they can kill every pod within 30,000km.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
The problem is you are looking only at shipboard firepower. At the specified time Manticore has pods, the SLN does not. The SLN is going to behave according to doctrine--they're going to go for Manticore. They'll probably meet half of Manticore's fleet (a fight I think they would win) and a whole bunch of pods seeded in space. The SLN eats salvo after salvo from empty space. They might choose to shoot back at best they kill empty pods. By the time the fleets engage the SLN has been ravaged.

Pods are a well understood technology. Notice how everyone had them in ASVW? Notice how the SLN was able to mount them to attack Manticore? Everyone has them everywhere.

Once the Sollies knew about pods they could build their own (inferior) versions. They're basically a novel application of off the shelf technology.

That assumes they have the chance, though. The scenario is war at a point where Manticore has pods and they don't--and Sollie doctrine is to go for the capital. They're going to send a big fleet into Manticore and get their first introduction to pods when said pods ravage their fleet.

When Manticore shows the smashed fleet the Sollies are going to be deafened by the screams of the members for defense. At that point the Sollies have to figure out what happened (think they left an observer ship outside the hyper limit to carry news of failure home???) and figure out how to build a pod.

Meanwhile their shipyards & reserve are turned to scrap, I don't think they'll be in a position to mount a second attack before they fall apart.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Not that precisely. All pods towed outside the wedge were apparently rendered inoperable as a side effect of laserheads engaging the ships towing them. That means that the nuke on a laserhead was able to take out a pod from at least 30,000 km away.

You need to guess fairly well where the pod is, relative to it's range. But not that well; nor do you have to actually spot it with your RD. Close counts when you're talking about nuclear weapons

SDMs really changes the calculus about pods compared to the later MDMs.

No. Laser heads use a lensing system to focus the bomb energy--without it the lasers simply wouldn't have the punch to be worthwhile. While they obviously can kill a pod at 30,000km on the right axis that doesn't mean they can kill every pod within 30,000km.

Um, yeah it does. The lasers weren't what were killing the pods. The lasers were aiming for the ships.

It was the collateral damage from the exploding nukes, that power those lasers, that was killing the pods. From 6 million km away you didn't have the accuracy or sensor reading to hit a towed pod with one of the 6 (?) lasers from a laser head except by pure luck. And yet we're told any towed pods (that weren't fired off before the first salvo of laser heads arrived) were wiped out by proximity kills. (And a laser in a vacuum can't generate a proximity kill; do the damage must be coming from the nuclear explosion 30,000, or so, km away)