Congratulations! The war is over! Now what?

Has textev given hard numbers on the remaining numerical strength of the SLN and what's reasonably possible for them to activate of their Reserve? It seems that ONI would have hard numbers about those, at least speculation. As they always did with Haven - at least speculation. It seems that it'd be a sour bag of grapes to have to formulate a strategy against an enemy when you don't know its strength. Study the weaknesses of your enemy yes, but you must also know its strengths. In some cases, when an enemy's strengths are known, you can effectively exploit it - thus transforming it into his weakness.



I don't understand how a commerce raiding strategy could work for the League. Let me rephrase that. I don't understand how a commerce raiding strategy would be allowed to succeed.

We've all stated it before, Manticore can't afford to act like a bull in a china shop no, but they also can't be worried about messing up the carpet either. If you're a prize fighter and a much weaker opponent keeps firing looping right hands at you, sooner or later he's going to administer enough accumulative damage to seriously hurt you. And sooner or later, you're going to have to retaliate. And when you do, you can't just slap him like either of you are little girls, lest the message you're trying to send, falls flat.

What you do do, initially just to CYA in both instances, is adequately warn him after each blow that there will be serious consequences. You scream it out so that the entire world will witness you giving him fair warning. They are assurance against your vilification. But then, when you do strike, ensure its a decisive strike - though, which may be metered, is decisive!

So my point is this, how is it plausible that the League's commerce raiding strategy will ultimately work? How can the League expect that strategy to accomplish anything but anger the hungry Manticore?

IOW, to what end? UNLESS, it is the same as the RMN's strategy to cause Haven to redeploy, thinning and weakening Haven's front and knocking them off balance to prevent them from attacking in force while seizing the initiative. Hopefully allowing themselves more time to regroup and counterattack. If that is the case, then the League expects that it can attack in a reasonable amount of time. If not to attack, then again, to what end implement a commerce raiding strategy? And if indeed the League is buying time to attack, then surely Manticore can see that as well. Especially after Haven pulled the same ploy and got away with it.

A commerce raiding strategy isn't a means to an end. If that strategy isn't formulated to buy you time to strengthen your forces, immobilize and attack yourself, what is the point?

Which suggests, that Manticore can't afford this game of cat and mouse, because what it really means is that the RMN is watching the SLN load their shotgun, while they've already got the drop on them.

I don't get that.

P.S.

Came to the party late. My apology.

I am certain that the hard numbers of SLN strength have at least been speculated on by forumites. I was tardy.

Assuming the wars are all over, just remember that internal strife in the Kingdom was never pleasant, If the Empire is now 1000's of systems it is only going to be time before Manty Tech is used against Manty Tech in a civil war.

Before Crandall bumbled into Spindle, they had 2,000 active SDs and 8,000 reserve wallers. No hard numbers on smaller vessels. Since then, they have lost 498 of their active wall. ~300 of the active fleet are supposed to be undergoing maintenance at any given time.

They do not have the money, manpower or plans to reactivate more than a few dozen reserve vessels. In any case, those ships are worse than useless, as admitted by the SLN's CNO to the League's senior bureaucrat. The best of them is no better than what Filareta and Crandall had and the worst are considerably more obsolete - autocannon point defense instead of laser clusters, for example.

Imagine if every single ship the Royal Navy had ever built was kept in a Reserve. Hundreds of sailing ships with cannons(varying from the 1600s galleons to the 1800s' specialisations), scores of ironclads, battleships, dreadnoughts, submarines, carriers and so on.

How much use would that titanic armada be against the current USN?

munroburton wrote:Before Crandall bumbled into Spindle, they had 2,000 active SDs and 8,000 reserve wallers. No hard numbers on smaller vessels. Since then, they have lost 498 of their active wall. ~300 of the active fleet are supposed to be undergoing maintenance at any given time.

They do not have the money, manpower or plans to reactivate more than a few dozen reserve vessels. In any case, those ships are worse than useless, as admitted by the SLN's CNO to the League's senior bureaucrat. The best of them is no better than what Filareta and Crandall had and the worst are considerably more obsolete - autocannon point defense instead of laser clusters, for example.

Imagine if every single ship the Royal Navy had ever built was kept in a Reserve. Hundreds of sailing ships with cannons(varying from the 1600s galleons to the 1800s' specialisations), scores of ironclads, battleships, dreadnoughts, submarines, carriers and so on.

How much use would that titanic armada be against the current USN?

So why the commerce raiding strategy if they obviously can't be planning an attack with that junk?

cthia wrote:

munroburton wrote:Before Crandall bumbled into Spindle, they had 2,000 active SDs and 8,000 reserve wallers. No hard numbers on smaller vessels. Since then, they have lost 498 of their active wall. ~300 of the active fleet are supposed to be undergoing maintenance at any given time.

They do not have the money, manpower or plans to reactivate more than a few dozen reserve vessels. In any case, those ships are worse than useless, as admitted by the SLN's CNO to the League's senior bureaucrat. The best of them is no better than what Filareta and Crandall had and the worst are considerably more obsolete - autocannon point defense instead of laser clusters, for example.

Imagine if every single ship the Royal Navy had ever built was kept in a Reserve. Hundreds of sailing ships with cannons(varying from the 1600s galleons to the 1800s' specialisations), scores of ironclads, battleships, dreadnoughts, submarines, carriers and so on.

How much use would that titanic armada be against the current USN?

So why the commerce raiding strategy if they obviously can't be planning an attack with that junk?

They're not planning to use the Reserve for the commerce raiding strategy - they were going to use battlecruisers from Frontier Fleet. They're not planning to use the Reserve, period.

cthia wrote:

munroburton wrote:Before Crandall bumbled into Spindle, they had 2,000 active SDs and 8,000 reserve wallers. No hard numbers on smaller vessels. Since then, they have lost 498 of their active wall. ~300 of the active fleet are supposed to be undergoing maintenance at any given time.

They do not have the money, manpower or plans to reactivate more than a few dozen reserve vessels. In any case, those ships are worse than useless, as admitted by the SLN's CNO to the League's senior bureaucrat. The best of them is no better than what Filareta and Crandall had and the worst are considerably more obsolete - autocannon point defense instead of laser clusters, for example.

Imagine if every single ship the Royal Navy had ever built was kept in a Reserve. Hundreds of sailing ships with cannons(varying from the 1600s galleons to the 1800s' specialisations), scores of ironclads, battleships, dreadnoughts, submarines, carriers and so on.

How much use would that titanic armada be against the current USN?

So why the commerce raiding strategy if they obviously can't be planning an attack with that junk?

several things. first the SL is not proposing to use ONLY BC's in the commerce raiding strategy, but BC's CA's, CL's, & DD's. Per ART "I believe our best option at this time is to go with a commerce and infrastructure-raiding strategy, carried out by battlecruisers and lighter units equipped with missile pods,

Second, the goal of the commerce raiding stratagy is political. They have had a bunch of encounters where they have seemingly overwelming forces and have been destrooyed by manticor. They need to be able to say that the SL won against manticore. Through careful editing they won't say that the SL CA won against a manty unarmed merchant ship.

Third, they acknoledge that this is not a good idea, but the best of a bunch of bad ideas. Per ART: “And how good do you think that chance really is?” Quartermain asked softly.
“Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does.” Kolokoltsov leaned back once more, raising his hands as he admitted his uncertainty. “I only know every other option looks even less likely to succeed

It's likely to be fairly effective, at least at first. Commerce raiding doesn't require you close on the target, you can dump a pod of DDMs at it from 30 million km out and be pretty confident that the freighter is toast. It certainly is if you are willing to hang around until coast phase is done, but even a very dumb missile against a single target with no countermeasures or defenses is probably perfectly adequate.

There are certainly countermeasures you can take, but they take time to organize and have costs.

kzt wrote:It's likely to be fairly effective, at least at first. Commerce raiding doesn't require you close on the target, you can dump a pod of DDMs at it from 30 million km out and be pretty confident that the freighter is toast. It certainly is if you are willing to hang around until coast phase is done, but even a very dumb missile against a single target with no countermeasures or defenses is probably perfectly adequate.

There are certainly countermeasures you can take, but they take time to organize and have costs.

Given the specs on a Cataphract that's roughly 5-1/2 minutes until coast phase is over, or almost 7 until detonation.

On the one hand that's a long time to be hanging around, an system defense Mk23 pod within 33 million km could strike in only 5 minutes (49 million if you give it the full 7ish minutes). On the other even a couple minutes coast phase probably isn't enough time for a freighter to move out of either the target lock or the engagement basket.
So if you were able to get to within 30 million km undetected, and were still outside the hyper limit (or at least very close to it) you'd have a chance to smash a freighter and escape...

pnakasone wrote:The Mandarins feel they need something they can spin as a great victory before they are going to negotiate with the GA as not to bee seen as the weaker party. The problem is they are assuming that the GA is willing to negotiate after all that has happened.

Or that they can secure the great victory in the first place.

kzt wrote:

Sigs wrote:How do they avoid military collapse or at least postpone it by abandoning the protectorates? Most systems that the GA has are either impregnable or not really worth the effort because a victory will be much worse than defeat.

The protectorates are militarily worthless. They don't even have any psychological impact, losing one has the impact of someone in NYC hearing about a bloody riot in Fagatogo (Go ahead, look it up, I'll wait) - a place they have never heard of and which produces nothing of any significance to them. They suck up military force and have essentially no potential to generate force.

Abandoning them is like choosing to abandon Mogadishu and moving those forces to defend Rotterdam instead. Long term something bad might happen, but if you face defeat in the near term who can or will worry about the long term impact of not getting defeated?

Ok, but my point is that withdrawing from the protectorates the League looses 30-50% of their remaining income. Their finances are so weak and the prospect of getting more income is so slim that anything they can hang onto is a (1)victory and (2)gives them money for supporting the SLN and maybe investing in research. Now I doubt it will help them much since they are not going to survive long enough but the mandarins don't know that nor do they seem to care.


Also, keeping the protectorates forces the GA to attack those systems and liberate them if they choose, any protectorate system they free becomes their responsibility. Withdrawing the warships and pulling out of the protectorates will not change the balance of power in any significant way other than cut into the remaining source of funds of the SLN central government.