GA response to SL attempts to prevent seccessions

kzt wrote:It's like the chinese navy sending a warship to every island in Indonesia that is thinking about seceding.

There are 17,000 islands in Indonesia, and the PLAN combat fleet consists of:
1 aircraft carrier
4 amphibious transport docks
32 landing ship tanks
31 landing ship medium
29 destroyers
49 frigates
34 corvettes
109 missile boats
94 submarine chasers
17 gunboats
29 mine countermeasure vessels
68 submarines

Refining KZT's point, let's define the players. The League has just under 1800 members, and an unknown number of protectorates (probably somewhere between 200 and 500). With wormholes, double planet systems, military bases, etc, we could easily say that there are 2500 major "targets" in the League.

Assuming the RMN has retired or sold off most of the light and legacy fleet units seen in the 1920 fleet list and extrapolating from HOS's build numbers ( as well as figuring in known losses) we can figure that the active Manty fleet is probably smaller than 2000 units, with ~25% being capital ships. Grayson's fleet is insanely top heavy, with capital ships being over half of it's ~500 ships.

We don't know Haven's build numbers yet, but the 1920 fleet list shows Haven's small fraction of light units. The massive losses at Manticore really hurt their light forces ( 100 CA and BCs were destroyed) in addition to the losses from Honor's raids. Unless they kicked up their light construction, we can extrapolate their 1923 fleet to be ~2000-2500 ships, with a capital fraction over 50%.

So the GA has ~4500-5000 warships from it's 3 major players to defend itself, it's convoys AND take the fight to the opposition.

And then there comes the problem of how the GA will know what anyone in the SL is doing. The major information gathering arm, the MMM, has been pulled from SL space, and some planets are still a month or more from a wormhole via DB; unless you send a ship to every target, you don't know what they are doing. And doing so will stretch the GA fleets too far.

Hi Loren Pechtel,

Great idea , I like it!

I suspect using pods with longer ranged missiles than the Mk-16 would be preferred for such a mission, and the pre-Apollo Mk-23's etc have to be used up somewhere.

While we don't know if something the mass of a cruiser such as a Saganami-C could be as stealthy as a Roland in scouting a star system from 12+ light hours out, which would take 3.5-4 days to reach the system coasting at ~0.144 C, which probably took at least a few hours to reach without becoming too noticeable.

Granted the GA now has over a couple hundred FF ships [the ones on the 108 BF SD's aren't as good],so they know the limits of FF sensors and detectors, if they choose to do this.

A Sag-C with 40 pods could wreck or destroy 3 SD's or 20-24 BC's or the same as a couple of Roland's, since its always a good idea to send pairs for redundancy.

I've suggested using some of the captured FF ships as Trojan horses to openly collect the local news and search the system nets for indications of rebellious groups while staying beyond the hyper limit, even offering the locals to act as an armed messenger back to Sol, since those nasty manties aren't letting the newsie and messenger db's through like they promised , though it will be a much longer trip, complete with signed orders from Kingsford and the Mandarins that the messenger can't be commandeered from this vital reconnaissance mission.

Back in 2006, I suggested Apollo equipped Agamemnon's could be built much faster than SDP's, to make up the fire control capability needed against the RHN, that paired with older SDP's (which couldn't be modified to carry Keyhole 2 etc) carrying more pods could wreck or ruin 48-50 RHN SDP's per such pair before they needed to reload or adding their tractored pods. What such a pair could do on this mission would definitely impress the locals.

Old BC's with 72-78 pods each might undertake this job with other older cruisers and destroyers, again keeping it to around 8 ships or so, then imagine what the survivors of a LAC strike from stealth might report.

Interesting times indeed.

L

Loren Pechtel wrote:It occurs to me another strategy the GA could use:

When it looks like a system is going to break away, send out a warship. At first it would be at least a cruiser, later it could be any warship, with as many pods attached to the hull as it can carry. It leaves hyper far out and slips in in stealth, well away from the travel lanes.

If the Sollies show up it announces it's presence, but not it's class, by Hermes bouy--they don't even know where it's hiding.

"Attention targets: This is a warship of the Grand Alliance, we do not wish interference with this system's right of self determination. You are currently within the range of my missiles, you do not even know where I am. As we do not enjoy killing the defenseless you are being given the option to surrender your forces to the government of this system. In case your superiors have failed to inform you of our capabilities beware that our missiles have a powered range of 30mkm, arrive at half the speed of light, hit harder than your capital ship missiles and you have a minimal chance of intercepting them. The only way you can 'win' a battle is if I run out of missiles. <Flagship> will be target #1."

After a Sollie fleet or two gets savaged this way think they'll be interested in trying it any more? And even if the Mandarins want to, will captains commit suicide that way?

Hello Jonathan_S,

Thanks for the excellent response!

These are all truly good points.

I see Terekhov's speculation regarding bow and stern walls as something he may have picked up from the ONI people he spent so much time with before receiving his command as they wondered about new RHN classes below the wall showing up, given the years since the Edward Saganami first displayed such; back in 1914 not 1908 {AoV vs HoS], though we have no evidence the peep's were in a position to notice or appreciate its capabilities then or since.

The Mars class CA's were 600,000 tons with 1300 man crews before SoS [EoH etc]; why they had to be downgraded was a puzzle, except to evidently emphasize how bad the Saganami-C is; obviously the biggest, baddest, heavy cruiser anyone has anywhere, period...

The RHN [and Bu9] may have something to say about that, ie a 600+ Kt CA with 24-32 tubes etc, though how soon they have internal DDM's is a very good question since its been only three years since Erewhon gave them so much of the technology, and less than two since learning about DDM's, even though that was almost 12 years ago for us.

Please keep the good posts coming.

L

Jonathan_S wrote:Thanks for the kind words lyonheart. I'm going split up parts of your post to reply directly to each, but it was interesting to consider your points. And I do look forward to what BuNine has in store for us in House of Lies.

lyonheart wrote:The cruiser bow and stern walls were only suspected by the RMN in SoS, expected only because the RHN had copied so much else, it being a fairly simple improvement.

Hmm, interesting. I'd always interpreted the quote as Mantie Intel knowing that some Havenite ships had been upgraded with bow walls, but rereading it I guess it could be taken as a hypothetical.
Here's the text:

Shadows of Saganami: Ch. 22 wrote:True, but if we're headed toward them, we've got our bow wall, and a ship as old as Bogey One doesn't. There's no way they could've refitted a bow wall without completely gutting her forward impeller rooms, and that brings us back to those fusion rooms of hers. If they were going to invest the time and money to refit bow wall technology, they'd've refitted those power plants at the same time, so without the one, they don't have the other

Terekhov didn't actually say any Havenite ships were known to have bow walls; he could have been saying that whether or not they had the tech it clearly wasn't present on this old Mars-class CA.

lyonheart wrote:We don't know the performance of RHN counter-missiles, but the lack of any discussion of a 'counter-missile gap' [ ] has yet occurred in all the textev inclines me to believe this may be relatively moot, that one way or another Shannon Foraker has come up with another 'good enough' solution.

I though I recalled the PSN CMs were still ~1.5 million km birds; and then remembered I'd made a cheat sheet of text-ev on various missile performance. The quote was from War of Honor "Shannon Foraker's best efforts, even with reverse-engineered Solarian technology, had a maximum intercept range of little more than one and a half million"

And that's surprisingly low as the CM's the Starknight-class had before the 1st war were 60 seconds @ 900 KPS^2 = 1.6 million km range. But either is far short of the just over 2 million km Honor's fleet had at Sidemore during Thunderbolt or the 3.6 million km range the Mk31/Viper had a half year (or so) later.

So unless things changed significantly between Thunderbolt and now Haven does have a CM range gap.

lyonheart wrote:A dual drive missile at the RHN's known velocity capabilities would have a powered range of just over 27 million kilometers, almost 92.5% of the Mk-16; generally close enough I think given RHN numerical superiority, until the RMN discovered that fact.

They certainly could build a DDM. But remember that, last we heard, their MDMs were so large they only pod launched them - they didn't build broadside tubes for them. These are big capacitor powered beasts; and Haven's capacitors seem less energy dense than Manticores so they need more volume to store the same power.

Even a DDM built on that tech might be too big for anything but maybe a BC (or a Roland style spinal launch on, say, a CA) to lug around. But yes, it's certainly possible that Bolthole did develop and build at least a few DDM BCs even with the size penalties you'd pay for their missile tech.

Hi KZT,

Excellent point, of course.

Or the Philippines, which has 'almost' 45% as many islands, yet essentially the same problem.

FF and OFS have relied on the threat of BF and its gross reserve to enable even one FF ship to intimidate everyone, which is why the GA needs to remove that ace from the SL's hand as soon as possible.

I think we're all waiting for the GA fleets to be unleashed after the EE violation on Beowulf, and eliminating the 7 BF reserve anchorages would be one of my top priorities, along with any local defensive fleets, TF's or TG's, in a fashion so overwhelming, from such far smaller TF's that everyone [the target system and their nearest neighbors] begins to recognize just how outmatched the SL/SLN is; that HA-H wasn't lying to Filaretta, that the GA had no need to trick him into scuttling his pods, because he was indeed so outclassed, that as Kingsford put it, the GA has only to reload before blowing everything the SLN or anyone's SDF has.

This would probably include broadcasting tapes of interviews of all the surviving bridge crews who saw what actually happened, up to 3000 or so [possibly having some aboard to respond to questions in real time], who feel its critical to warn the SLN before more of their friends get slaughtered, as well as the sensor data from New Tuscany, Spindle, Zunker, Saltash, Beowulf and Manticore etc, untouched by Abruzzi's minions, that the Mandarins have lied about everything and are indeed still lying, to stop the madness before more people are killed by their incompetence.

Given how cynical the solarian public is supposed to be, it shouldn't take that much to make them realize that, but of course they'd have to engage their brains, which E&I has been very busy to keep them from doing.

Granted, thanks to the 5 days to Sol from Beowulf, the GA has a ten day lead over the Mandarin response to everything beyond Beowulf from Sol [almost half the SL?], besides all the hyper bridges that enable the GA to spread its message so much faster than the SL can respond, emphasizing how inept and dinosaur like the SL has become.

How RFC handles this will be fascinating.

L

kzt wrote:It's like the chinese navy sending a warship to every island in Indonesia that is thinking about seceding.

There are 17,000 islands in Indonesia, and the PLAN combat fleet consists of:
1 aircraft carrier
4 amphibious transport docks
32 landing ship tanks
31 landing ship medium
29 destroyers
49 frigates
34 corvettes
109 missile boats
94 submarine chasers
17 gunboats
29 mine countermeasure vessels
68 submarines

Hello PeterZ,

So we're both grateful that John Dickinson had rather less to do with the writing the constitution than the articles of confederation?

Granted the 1776 musical grossly misrepresents him, along with so many others of course.

L

PeterZ wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Hi PeterZ,

"Fascinating."

I'm not sure the US would have lasted long enough under the articles of Confederation for any such collusion between companies and what passed for the federal government, especially given the several decades for such large companies and corporations to expand into such international monsters.

I'd expect more from some of the already large corporations of the British empire, which might use some American or local companies in Latin America or Canada as fronts, while preventing any mid 19th century reform movements that attempted to limit them from succeeding.

"Very interesting" indeed.

L

That's why I thought of the Articles of Confederation. It too was unworkable from the outset. If the Founders decided to force it through with whatever practical traditions were required to keep the federal government functioning, it may well have ended up like the SL. The States retained sovereignty within their borders and the Federal government exercised its authority and collected taxes elsewhere.

Hello Jonathan_S,

Yup, I like 40-45 million km; until it's critical to prove the Mk-23E's extended range, ie 5+ LM initially, apparently now out rather further, while the SEM has already started up its own missile lines again, much sooner than the 10 monthes initially thought necessary.

Letting the SLN figure out there are three separate drives may convince some to surrender before its too late, as we've seen in SoV, SoF etc; but so far no one's escaped to report back just how outclassed they are.

I've wondered about RFC having certain POW's discuss just how bad it is, including whatever they've learned since they began their new status while reflecting the Solarian mindset.

I suspect we all have our own favorites, if anyone wishes to list them, mine start with Hago Shavarshyan and Ou-yang Zhing-wei, to include speculating who or what killed Crandall; Thurgood and his staff on re-analyzing Monica, what they should have realised much earlier , besides those in SoV, especially Winslet Tamaguchi and his staff.

Fascinating times.

L

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:It occurs to me another strategy the GA could use:

When it looks like a system is going to break away, send out a warship. At first it would be at least a cruiser, later it could be any warship, with as many pods attached to the hull as it can carry. It leaves hyper far out and slips in in stealth, well away from the travel lanes.

If the Sollies show up it announces it's presence, but not it's class, by Hermes bouy--they don't even know where it's hiding.

"Attention targets: This is a warship of the Grand Alliance, we do not wish interference with this system's right of self determination. You are currently within the range of my missiles, you do not even know where I am. As we do not enjoy killing the defenseless you are being given the option to surrender your forces to the government of this system. In case your superiors have failed to inform you of our capabilities beware that our missiles have a powered range of 30mkm, arrive at half the speed of light, hit harder than your capital ship missiles and you have a minimal chance of intercepting them. The only way you can 'win' a battle is if I run out of missiles. <Flagship> will be target #1."

After a Sollie fleet or two gets savaged this way think they'll be interested in trying it any more? And even if the Mandarins want to, will captains commit suicide that way?

I like understating the missile capabilities (I'm assuming those pods are full of MDMs: 65 million km and 0.8c) but I'd claim a bit more performance - 30 million km is close enough for someone carrying Cataphracts to think they've got a fighting chance with a ballistic coast phase thrown in.

I don't think it's a real secret anymore than GA MDMs had that 3rd drive - but you could claim 44 million km and (if you kept to that) you might make SL Intel think your final drive was, like their Cataphract 2nd stage, a fixed accel CM derived 75 second burn)

This is where I believe a significant portion of BF survives. If the GA goes after the anchorages and eliminates them all, the active BF scurries to Core world havens. Between the Verge and the Protectorates, the GA will have their hands full securing systems that truly need them. Many Core worlds will be neutral to the GA, so long as the GA leaves them alone. Should they form defensive groups and use BF SDs absorbed into the SDF to secure their defense, will the GA move to destroy those ships? No, they won't.

Just how many SDs will survive by finding Core world havens? No idea, but some significant number will.

lyonheart wrote:Hi KZT,

Excellent point, of course.

Or the Philippines, which has 'almost' 45% as many islands, yet essentially the same problem.

FF and OFS have relied on the threat of BF and its gross reserve to enable even one FF ship to intimidate everyone, which is why the GA needs to remove that ace from the SL's hand as soon as possible.

I think we're all waiting for the GA fleets to be unleashed after the EE violation on Beowulf, and eliminating the 7 BF reserve anchorages would be one of my top priorities, along with any local defensive fleets, TF's or TG's, in a fashion so overwhelming, from such far smaller TF's that everyone [the target system and their nearest neighbors] begins to recognize just how outmatched the SL/SLN is; that HA-H wasn't lying to Filaretta, that the GA had no need to trick him into scuttling his pods, because he was indeed so outclassed, that as Kingsford put it, the GA has only to reload before blowing everything the SLN or anyone's SDF has.

This would probably include broadcasting tapes of interviews of all the surviving bridge crews who saw what actually happened, up to 3000 or so [possibly having some aboard to respond to questions in real time], who feel its critical to warn the SLN before more of their friends get slaughtered, as well as the sensor data from New Tuscany, Spindle, Zunker, Saltash, Beowulf and Manticore etc, untouched by Abruzzi's minions, that the Mandarins have lied about everything and are indeed still lying, to stop the madness before more people are killed by their incompetence.

Given how cynical the solarian public is supposed to be, it shouldn't take that much to make them realize that, but of course they'd have to engage their brains, which E&I has been very busy to keep them from doing.

Granted, thanks to the 5 days to Sol from Beowulf, the GA has a ten day lead over the Mandarin response to everything beyond Beowulf from Sol [almost half the SL?], besides all the hyper bridges that enable the GA to spread its message so much faster than the SL can respond, emphasizing how inept and dinosaur like the SL has become.

How RFC handles this will be fascinating.

L

lyonheart wrote:FF and OFS have relied on the threat of BF and its gross reserve to enable even one FF ship to intimidate everyone, which is why the GA needs to remove that ace from the SL's hand as soon as possible.

I think we're all waiting for the GA fleets to be unleashed after the EE violation on Beowulf, and eliminating the 7 BF reserve anchorages would be one of my top priorities, along with any local defensive fleets, TF's or TG's, in a fashion so overwhelming, from such far smaller TF's that everyone [the target system and their nearest neighbors] begins to recognize just how outmatched the SL/SLN is; ...

Destroying the "Albatross around the SLN's neck" -- aka the BF Reserve Fleet -- would be a waste of resources and counter-productive. As long as the Reserve exists, there will be pressure to reactivate those ships rather than build the smaller ships Adm Kingsford needs for his commerce raiding strategy.

Also, leaving the Reserve untouched serves to demonstrate how much of a paper tiger the SLN is. Destroying the Reserve would give the SLN an excuse for being out-classed; leaving it untouched exposes the SLN's obsolescence.

But most importantly, the Reserve is no threat the GA because it can't be reactivated before the SLN is decimated and Adm Kingsford has already decided not the waste scarce funding even trying to reactivate even part of the Reserve.

The systems which the Alignment was using Firebrand and other to forment revolt and blacken the reputation of Manticore were part of a multi-part strategy.

The one about screwing with Manticor's reputation is clear.

The part about formenting revolt is a bit more compliated. More pieces to that. One is to damage but perhaps not destroy the current governemtns of those systems. That would be tied up with also damaging the various Transtellars which have control or at least partnerships with the leaders of said systems. This plays hell with the economies (not to mention the populations) of the systems and helps cripple the Transtellars- which in turn damages the SL as it has a large stake and dependence in the trade and supply web they depend on and maintain.
If a given revolt succeeds and the planet changes governments (without FF/OFS managing to step in directly and imposing an OFS Governor) then it is -in theory- able to make it's own decisions and deals and treaties with whom they wish to instead of the typical OFS deal to drain money & resources.

With the wave of successes with "Manticorian" supported revolts, its just going to get worse for SL. OFS/FF doesn't have the cover it did to rescue systems, they can't just step in as the local factions (the Dictators etc) are not there to welcome them and make the deals.

All of this is going to hurt both the trade with the SL and, more specifically, cut deeply into the revenue steams of both the SL bureaucracy and OFS/FF. OFS/FF get supported by the SL budget but they also are supported by the fees they charge to "help and protect" the clients & protectorates in the Verg along with all that graft to line their own pockets. That is now going away in system sized chunks.

Of course, it isn't helping OFS/FF that they are both loosing ships, warships and people at a monumental rate because they keep getting put right into the confrontations with RMN and are being devistated. At best, OFS/FF personel that survive the encounters of trying to beat down revolution/revolt in these system are going to be spending a lot of time is some version of jail/displaced person/refugee camps if not outright POW camps.
Do you really see SL (the SLN might do it) getting messages deliverd via commercial shipping or RMN/GA communictions conduits to the SL saying " Y has has a successful revolution and regime change in which your personal were supporting as military combatants the loosing side. If you would like to collect your citizens and miiltary personel, send a commercial-unarmed- ship capable of transporting XXXXX persons to the Y system to pick them up and provide Y with zzzzzz credits worth of materials from the following categories (see attached list) plus ZZZ/day per person for current costs of feeding, housing and other serivces of your personel. Have a nice day"

It's just one more way to shatter the SL by wrecking the economy while bleeding it's military.

I'd love to see a scene where a GA task force hypers in to a secessionist planet, apologizes for trampling on their front lawn, but says the opportunity to bag an SLN task force in isolation is too good to pass up. The GA will be out of their hair as soon as the battle is over and tidied up. Unless, of course, they are invited to stay.

They would have to know which systems are being picketed and in more or less what strength, but it's doable. You can even sweeten the deal by paroling any crew of the captured ships who happen to be from the system being picketed.