Changes in Battle tactics outside planetary hyper limits

darrell wrote:and why would a defending ship ever leave the junction. When fleet a attacks from a long distance out, wait for it to approach. same for fleet B and C. That way you don't leave the wormhole undefended.

Given the RMN's strength is in FTL communication/control and long-range missile engagements, why would a defending ship stay close to a Wormhole Terminus -- or any other ship in the defending force?

The only serious threat to an RMN picket force near a wormhole is something dropping out of Hyperspace inside energy range. Deploying outside of Single drive missile range (and energy range) of the Terminus and other members of the picket force limits the threat to essentially a single ship. If the deployment pattern overlaps DDM or ERM missile ranges for mutual defense, then picking off one ship by dropping out of hyperspace on top of it is a suicidal tactic for anything less than multiple SDs and hardly worth the effort for multiple SDs since the remaining defenders can scatter if necessary. (With Mk16G or Apollo armed defenders, even multiple SDs are going to be in trouble.)

With FTL recon drones monitoring the Terminus from close-in, defenders can respond before an attacker can localize them to an unauthorized/hostile transit, so standing off from a terminus isn't going to hurt response times adversely.

Add a few hundred Apollo System Defense variants around the Terminus with a Keyhole equipped command ship (or two) and nothing anyone outside the GA or Anderman Empire will be a serious threat.

Weird Harold wrote:

darrell wrote:and why would a defending ship ever leave the junction. When fleet a attacks from a long distance out, wait for it to approach. same for fleet B and C. That way you don't leave the wormhole undefended.

Given the RMN's strength is in FTL communication/control and long-range missile engagements, why would a defending ship stay close to a Wormhole Terminus -- or any other ship in the defending force?

The only serious threat to an RMN picket force near a wormhole is something dropping out of Hyperspace inside energy range. Deploying outside of Single drive missile range (and energy range) of the Terminus and other members of the picket force limits the threat to essentially a single ship. If the deployment pattern overlaps DDM or ERM missile ranges for mutual defense, then picking off one ship by dropping out of hyperspace on top of it is a suicidal tactic for anything less than multiple SDs and hardly worth the effort for multiple SDs since the remaining defenders can scatter if necessary. (With Mk16G or Apollo armed defenders, even multiple SDs are going to be in trouble.)

With FTL recon drones monitoring the Terminus from close-in, defenders can respond before an attacker can localize them to an unauthorized/hostile transit, so standing off from a terminus isn't going to hurt response times adversely.

Add a few hundred Apollo System Defense variants around the Terminus with a Keyhole equipped command ship (or two) and nothing anyone outside the GA or Anderman Empire will be a serious threat.

I disagree. There is safety in numbers. There is a reason that attacking fleets of the wall stay close to each other - mutual defense.

8 saganimi C in a globe that is 8Mkm radius would allow only one to be able to use CM's at at time, which means that there is only 40 CM tubes, and the chance that it can stand up to a single SLN SD is slim to none.

8 saganimi C in a globe that is 300Kkm from the exit lane mean that their is 8 times the point defense against any threat, they can use their energy weapons against single targets arriving throuhg the wormhole and with 200 CM tubes they have a fair to middling chance of surviving against a division SLN of SD's.

Add a few hundred Apollo System Defense variants around the Terminus and even without a keyhole equipped ship nothing anyone outside the GA or Anderman Empire will be a serious threat.

You notice that by bringing the defending ships close in, you no longer need the keyhole equipped ship.

darrell wrote:I disagree. There is safety in numbers. There is a reason that attacking fleets of the wall stay close to each other - mutual defense.

Inside a hyperlimit, you have a point. Outside a hyperlimit, where an attacker can appear withing energy range, staying in close formation just provides more targets.

darrell wrote:8 saganimi C in a globe that is 8Mkm radius would allow only one to be able to use CM's at at time, which means that there is only 40 CM tubes, and the chance that it can stand up to a single SLN SD is slim to none.

CM tubes and PDLCs are of no use against energy beams. The question is, could a single SLN SD take out a single Saganami-C and still survive the incoming salvo from the other seven?

darrell wrote:8 saganimi C in a globe that is 300Kkm from the exit lane mean that their is 8 times the point defense against any threat, they can use their energy weapons against single targets arriving throuhg the wormhole and with 200 CM tubes they have a fair to middling chance of surviving against a division SLN of SD's.

The exact spacing of the defenders depends on numbers and class of the defenders. Anything outside the energy range of probable opponents would work; the idea is to reduce the possible casualties of energy weapons to a single ship while providing mutual offensive support.

darrell wrote:Add a few hundred Apollo System Defense variants around the Terminus and even without a keyhole equipped ship nothing anyone outside the GA or Anderman Empire will be a serious threat.

You notice that by bringing the defending ships close in, you no longer need the keyhole equipped ship.

A keyhole equipped ship is not needed wherever the defenders deploy. It is just a nice addition as long as you're deploying Apollo pods. A Mycroft command module or three would be even better, but they are going to be fairly scarce for the foreseeable future.

Outside of a planetary hyperlimit the main concern for a defending force has to be a hyperfootprint within energy range -- energy range is the one area the SLN has an advantage over Haven Sector navies and dropping out of hyper is the one way the SLN could get into energy range.

The basic problem you have with this scenario as proposed is that you cannot keep your all ships in a ready to fight condition for very long. You certainly can't do it for weeks and months. So unless you have have a bunch of extra ships to rotate off to go hide in hyper or something your readiness is going to be well below that of a typical RMN combat formation.

Note the comment Honor had about the forts readiness way back when?

"Thus the forts' duty watches—in theory, at least—had time to reach full readiness while the weapons accelerated towards them. In practice, Honor suspected, most of them would still be coming on-line when the missiles arrived, which was why their point defense (unlike their offensive weaponry) was designed for emergency computer override even in peacetime."

Note that these were the ready forts, the ones rotated further back were far less ready.

The ships that drop out of hyper are expecting to fight and are completely ready. Unlike the RMN ships, everyone will be in vac suits and at their battle stations, weapons fully charged up and ready to shoot.

So I suspect that this might be very damn bloody for the RMN.

kzt wrote:The basic problem you have with this scenario as proposed is that you cannot keep your all ships in a ready to fight condition for very long. You certainly can't do it for weeks and months. So unless you have have a bunch of extra ships to rotate off to go hide in hyper or something your readiness is going to be well below that of a typical RMN combat formation.

Note the comment Honor had about the forts readiness way back when?

"Thus the forts' duty watches—in theory, at least—had time to reach full readiness while the weapons accelerated towards them. In practice, Honor suspected, most of them would still be coming on-line when the missiles arrived, which was why their point defense (unlike their offensive weaponry) was designed for emergency computer override even in peacetime."

Note that these were the ready forts, the ones rotated further back were far less ready.

The ships that drop out of hyper are expecting to fight and are completely ready. Unlike the RMN ships, everyone will be in vac suits and at their battle stations, weapons fully charged up and ready to shoot.

So I suspect that this might be very damn bloody for the RMN.

You would need enough ships to rotate them through "on watch" and "off watch", but I don't think you'd need to send the off watch ships into hyper to hide. The volume around a wormhole junction is a big place, and ships with their wedges down to station keeping levels are pretty damn stealthy.

Reposition ships randomly, and cycle the off watch units further back (close enough that they can provide ERM or DDM missile fire support once they go to general quarters, but far enough back to open up an even larger volume of space they could be silently lurking in)

The SLN or any other attacker should have a hell of a time getting timely pre-strike intel on the exact locations of their targets. So they jump in, all crews ready to fight, and see not much on passive sensors so they go active and still would only find a ship within energy range by the greatest luck.

It's not like jumping a fort which is probably lighting the area up with active radar and sitting is a pretty well known location. The ships covering the wormhole are ideally close enough to land laserheads, on anybody attempting to come out of the wormhole w/o permission, before they clear the lane. But they don't really need to defend traffic through the wormhole. And they don't need to fight if overwhelming force shows up - they can yield the captured wormhole terminus if necessary.

One (or a couple) ships would have the current duty to fire on an enemy emerging from the wormhole before they clear the lane. But against an enemy dropping out of hyper you're probably a hard enough to locate target you can wait for the ships that were "off watch" to go to general quarters and coordinate your attack before they find you. And if not that sucks, but the entire force is unlikely to be found and eliminated before the more distant off duty ships get back up to full combat status.

Weird Harold wrote:

darrell wrote:I disagree. There is safety in numbers. There is a reason that attacking fleets of the wall stay close to each other - mutual defense.

Inside a hyperlimit, you have a point. Outside a hyperlimit, where an attacker can appear withing energy range, staying in close formation just provides more targets.

darrell wrote:8 saganimi C in a globe that is 8Mkm radius would allow only one to be able to use CM's at at time, which means that there is only 40 CM tubes, and the chance that it can stand up to a single SLN SD is slim to none.

CM tubes and PDLCs are of no use against energy beams. The question is, could a single SLN SD take out a single Saganami-C and still survive the incoming salvo from the other seven?

darrell wrote:8 saganimi C in a globe that is 300Kkm from the exit lane mean that their is 8 times the point defense against any threat, they can use their energy weapons against single targets arriving throuhg the wormhole and with 200 CM tubes they have a fair to middling chance of surviving against a division SLN of SD's.

The exact spacing of the defenders depends on numbers and class of the defenders. Anything outside the energy range of probable opponents would work; the idea is to reduce the possible casualties of energy weapons to a single ship while providing mutual offensive support.

darrell wrote:Add a few hundred Apollo System Defense variants around the Terminus and even without a keyhole equipped ship nothing anyone outside the GA or Anderman Empire will be a serious threat.

You notice that by bringing the defending ships close in, you no longer need the keyhole equipped ship.

A keyhole equipped ship is not needed wherever the defenders deploy. It is just a nice addition as long as you're deploying Apollo pods. A Mycroft command module or three would be even better, but they are going to be fairly scarce for the foreseeable future.

Outside of a planetary hyperlimit the main concern for a defending force has to be a hyperfootprint within energy range -- energy range is the one area the SLN has an advantage over Haven Sector navies and dropping out of hyper is the one way the SLN could get into energy range.

When attacking the basilisk terminus, the peep force did EVERYTHING it could to be as accurate as it could and ...

Echo's of Honor wrote:"We . . . overshot by one-point-three light-minutes, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Huff replied. "Call it twenty-three-point-seven million klicks."

Despite doing everything it could to account for accuracy, the peep force attacking the terminus made a mistake that was 60 times farther away than energy weapons range.

They may ATTEMPT to arrive in energy weapons range, it is far more likely (90% plus) that they will not even be in missile range.

since it is highly unlikely approaching impossible for a force to arrive in energy weapons range, there is no need to spread the defending force out.

since is virtually impossible for an attacking force to arrive from hyper in energy weapons range, than CM tubes and PDLC's do matter a great deal.

Put them in energy weapons range of the junction, with their wedges and sidewalls up. Have two that are ready, put them at 90 degrees to each other, ready to shoot at any ship in the terminus. One ship will always be able to shoot into either the unprotected roof or floor of the ship, the other 6 ships will have their wedge to the terminus and won't be vulnerable to energy weapons in the case of a mass transit.

since it is effectively impossible for a force to hyper in within energy weapons range, when defending a wormhole terminus or junction, the main concern for a defending force has to be a hostile ship transit.

You have a large number of ships. Each of them calculates their own course to drop them in energy range of the target. If you are lucky and your navigators are good one or more of them will end up in energy range. And one is all you need.

darrell wrote:since it is effectively impossible for a force to hyper in within energy weapons range, when defending a wormhole terminus or junction, the main concern for a defending force has to be a hostile ship transit.

Since RMN/GA ships are primarily missile platforms, there is no reason for them to stay within energy range of the terminus they are defending. With FTL reconnaissance of the terminus, they can strike it with ship-launched missiles or launch from pods near the terminus to counter the extremely unlikely chance of a hostile transit; a hostile transit of a defended terminus is suicidal 99.999% of the time.

kzt made the main point:

kzt wrote:... one is all you need.

Dropping out of hyper inside energy range may be difficult, but it is NOT impossible and it is the single biggest threat to a defensive task force.

Steering this thread slightly back to one of the OP's original points, about microjumping in combat I found a lovely snippet from Giscard just prior to the Battle of Solon.


For a quickie review, when Honor attacked, they

"Sir, they're crossing the limit," Bibeau said. "Present velocity two-point-six-one thousand KPS. Range to Arthur ten-point-two light-minutes. Tracking makes their current accel four-point-eight-one

Merlin was discussed about why they had pods (and higher PRF FTL station) around Merlin

Jaruwalski dropped another icon into the display. This one appeared to be in orbit around Merlin, which put it over forty light-minutes outside the system hyper limit on the far side of the primary.

40 Lightminutes out, and on the far-side of Solon from Arthur, the objective Honor was truly after. She smelled a trap and ordered the carriers she'd left behind to hyper out, and after Giscard got an update from a courier...

The dispatch boat one light-minute outside Merlin's orbit received the Durand's FTL transmission, relayed to its light-speed communications arrays by the Tarantula net, seventy-two seconds after it was transmitted. The boat's computers updated, and it translated smoothly across the alpha wall. Javier Giscard's task force was waiting exactly where it had been for the past week and a half, and the dispatch boat quickly relayed the tactical update to his flagship.

"Sir, it looks like the Manties smelled a rat," Commander Thackeray reported. "Their CLACs just translated out."

"Actually catching them that far outside the limit would have been problematical, at best, Marius," he said. "You know how hard it is a to plot a hyper jump this short. And they weren't exactly likely to be sitting there with their hyper generators off-line and their impeller nodes cold. Unless we'd translated down right on top of them, they'd have had time to get into hyper before we could range on them."

--snip to after he comes out hyper--
"CIC reports multiple hyper footprints, Skipper," Imperator 's tactical officer reported harshly. "Three separate clusters—one dead astern of us at three-zero-point-four million clicks, one at polar north, and one at polar south. They've got us boxed, Sir."

Bolded the emphasis, a "microjump" that was considered hard to plot, was going from the exact opposite side of the solar system's unspecified hyper limit + 40 Light-Minutes, and dropping at least one task force behind Honor. Since she'd already crossed the hyper limit, we can safely guess that Giscard dropped out on the hyperlimit himself. The "shorter" microjumps were the detachments that came out at polar north and polar south, but we can't determine exactly how much shorter those jumps were because we don't know what the hyperlimit of Solon is.

The only other time, we've seen tactical usage of microjumps was Admiral Yanakov actually firing warshots of Apollo, for the first time in history. And his microjumps dropped him behind Giscard, then microjump to one of the polar task forces, and then microjumping to the other polar... again, the shortest is going from the elliptical force directly to a polar force, but even those are going to be fairly long, multi lighthour hops.



Only ships that are equipped with Apollo missiles could possibly reach anything with a microjump that measures in multiple lighthours. Basically think the situation Honor played on Tourville during the very end of BoMa... she had the range she could start hitting him, but she even admitted it [later in interviews] that she'd have had to wait for him to close a little more to be firing effectively.

Weird Harold wrote:

darrell wrote:since it is effectively impossible for a force to hyper in within energy weapons range, when defending a wormhole terminus or junction, the main concern for a defending force has to be a hostile ship transit.

Since RMN/GA ships are primarily missile platforms, there is no reason for them to stay within energy range of the terminus they are defending. With FTL reconnaissance of the terminus, they can strike it with ship-launched missiles or launch from pods near the terminus to counter the extremely unlikely chance of a hostile transit; a hostile transit of a defended terminus is suicidal 99.999% of the time.

kzt made the main point:

kzt wrote:... one is all you need.

Dropping out of hyper inside energy range may be difficult, but it is NOT impossible and it is the single biggest threat to a defensive task force.

you make 100 tries to hyper in within energy range. 1-2 succeed and are withing energy weapons range. the rest either arrive within missile range or like Citizen Rear Admiral Gregor Darlington overshot or undershot and am not even within missile range. In both cases, you are 50 tomes more likely to be fighting a missile engagement than a energy weapons engagement.