pappilon wrote:Somtaaw wrote:I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree here.
Whether it was White Haven's crash defense against Icarus, Honor and her Armed Merchies, or Laocoon II, every occasion of multi-ship transits, the first ship to go through has always switched from sails to wedge and is maneuvering clear well before the next ship in line comes through.
All of those cases, and whichever ones I'm forgetting indicate the grace period from sail to wedge is mere seconds. Yes some story compression may be happening, but even if the normal delay is 1 minute between ships, the cases of White Haven's defense and Laocoon prove that naval ships are easily able to do it considerably faster when they want/need to.
-Manticoran, Havenite, Grayson, Andermani and probably even Beowulfan ships, are all going to be capable of rapid transiting.
-Solarian, Silesian, and similar navies are not capable, they've never had to do rapid redeployments, whether through wormholes or not. The Solarian Navy especially has spent so long with gimme sims they've never had to practice 'hard maneuvering', even Frontier Fleet helmsmen I believe unlikely to be capable of even First War Havenite capability [Such as when Hamish was attacking Nightgale, and was run off by a Peep task group that was already maneuvering like a Manticoran one, mere months after the war start]
-Mesan Alignment helmsmen may, or may not, currently be skilled enough for rapid wormhole transiting. The only time we've ever seen them do something that required some skill was when the dozen or so Sharks performed their Alpha translation, tractored together, outside Manticore... the various some MAlign navies such as Mannerheim are completely unable to be assessed yet. [Have not yet read Uncompromising, so I may have missed some newer datums, but if I have I don't think its going to be enough to change the assessments]
How much time from bringing up the wedge until you can bring up the sidewalls? Plus you still don't know you are losing ships to enemy action. Textev is, well, textev. And all I can find is that transiting into the defended side of a WHJ is suicide. And if you are transiting into a natural ship killer, you still don't live long enough to get a message back through.
If you can get your wedge up, Sidewalls are usable probably within seconds. Although it likely depends whether you transited ready for battle such as Laocoon, or if you transited between say Manticore-Beowulf or Manticore-Gregor which should be cold.
As for the Junction, yes assaulting defended junctions (against Forts) is a quick form of assisted suicide. It has been mentioned that the original Legislaturalist People's Republic of Haven could use suicide waves of Battleships and kill more tonnage in forts than they lost in ships, which makes it a repeatable tactic. Against ships defending a wormhole, it's more a case of "how many missiles do they have, and how many does it take to kill your ship(s)?" question. You'll lose several ships in the attack, but considerably less than you would against trying to take out fort defenses, since forts are basically just over-gunned & up-armored superdreadnougts with less mobility
And I think this thread is mostly a "what happens if the Grand Alliance ever figures out the Torch wormhole IS transitable and is not in fact a killer wormhole?" So just theories of how/what the GA will do to break through the 2-3 Mannerheim battlecruiser squadrons covering the other side of the Torch wormhole.
If memory serves, despite having 2-3 squadrons of battlecruisers covering the wormhole, when HMS Harvest Joy transited and was destroyed 'only' 2 or 3 individual ships actually had the range or heading to fire on her... and Harvest Joy is a specially refit Star Knight heavy cruiser, which means her design is already obsolete. She didn't transit at battlestations, so her computers weren't even ready to take over what PDLC's she had which might have changed her survival from seconds to maybe even a minute.
I thought Then wormhole at torch being blockaded by Mannerheim was the obvious choice. 