Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I'm not arguing it isn't worth defending, quite the opposite. Nor am I arguing that they depended on the announcement. I'm saying that the announcement did happen and therefore they knew the timetable for the transit.

We don't know what happened prior to the announcement. They may have been scrambling to get someone there (and Theemile says RFC said they had sent a streak boat), only to recall once the timeline became clear.

They had 2 years between the fall of Congo and the survey expedition, that's a big gap to leave hoping that no one would go there before the schedule. That's what doesn't make sense. If it's important it should have been protected from 1919 and if it is worth the risk of alerting the RMN that something big is in the region by destroying their ship in 1921 it is worth the picket past 1921.

Jonathan_S wrote:It seems they needed something like 100% availability and better than expected performance to hit all the targets that they did.

While it's possible that the target set they actually hit represented their best case of minimum desired + all bonus targets I don't think it did.

It doesn’t matter what they hit, my point is that since the SEM does not know what the MA was trying to accomplish they cant guage the MA’s capabilities.

They ran the attack so minimalist that a single ship becoming unservicable; losing the forward fire control provided by even one Ghost and its fire control relay platforms; having non-trivial numbers of failures of the missile pods they coasted in at relatively high speed would have led to failure take out all the OB targets that they actually managed. So if the targets they hit were the minimum targets they wanted to be quite likely of killing they really needed to bring along 15-25% more forces across the board. And that's if they still assumed they'd remain undetected until it was too late for defensive measures to come online. If they allowed for the possibility of detection even at little as 5-10 minutes earlier they did need to bring at least twice as much firepower to be likely to get the results they managed on the day.

My point was that the RMN senior leadership advised the government that the MA probably doesn’t have too many ships because it conducted the strike on a tight budget. They have no idea what the MA was trying to accomplish with the attack so they cant determine the success or failure or if it was on a tight budget or they send redundancy. If the government doesn’t know what the MA wanted to accomplish they cannot assume the strength of the enemy and they should not be building their strategy and force requirements based on those assessments.

That additional force would give them redundancy to still hit all those targets even if a more realistic level of things went wrong with these new and never combat tested systems.

As far as the SEM knows, the MA needed to destroy 2 of the stations the accomplish their mission and everything else was a target of opportunity. In that case the MA send enough ships to destroy a lot of the dispersed yards and all 3 stations. Or they meant to destroy all of the industry and warships in the Manticore HS and miserably failed when they didn’t send enough ships to take on Home Fleet.

So in order for the Admiralty to assume that the MAlign probably had lots of unused forces they'd have to assume the MAlign weren't interested in capturing the system AND were only expecting to hit no more than 75-80% of the targets they actually managed to hit (and were willing to accept getting maybe as little as 20-30% of those targets if any warning brought defenses online). But since getting that little of the "arms and legs" of Manticoran industry and shipbuilding makes little sense the Admiralty can be reasonable sure than the MAlign was having to stretch to get the targets that they did and that they didn't have a significant amount of identical capability that they could have committed to the attack.

If they wanted the SEM defeated they would go about the attack one way with one set of objectives, if on the other hand they want the SEM weakened so that they can fight the SLN destroy the SLN but weaken themselves to lose against Haven it’s a whole different plan of attack with different set of objectives, if the MA was planning to entice Haven to attack and defeat the RMN ignoring the SLN that would require a third strategy and third set of objectives. The different end goals would require different strength for the attacking force, whats more if I were indenting to capture a system like the Manticore HS I would work really hard to capture the R&D as well as the industry rather than destroy it, a heavily industrialized system with a wealth of research and superb technology?

Jonathan_S wrote:Wasn't much of a battle. The BCs fired a few missiles into a basically defenseless ship (still caught within the grav eddies of the terminus and therefore unable to deploy wedge, sidewall, decoys, missiles or CMs) and destroyed it.

Doesn’t have to be an actual battle, people exaggerate, as long as there is some mystery and a grain of truth the GA might bite.

If they wanted to they could probably easily convince the majority of the crews that it was an unscheduled live fire drill. Do a couple of those before you expect Harvest Joy to pop through, then after you kill her keep the BCs there another several months holding a few more unscheduled live fire drills and it all become nothing worth talking about.

When you have 24,000 people confined to 8 ships, at some point someone will hear something they shouldn’t and spread it around.

The number of crew who actually saw that there was a real target on their sensors is going to be pretty small - and as ThinksMarkedly said in a later post the MAlign was able to basically hand pick the crews for reliability anyway.

Jack McBryde was reliable as well… Just because someone is trusted doesn’t mean they wont have a change of heart and talk, or sleep with someone and inadvertently spill the beans, leave their computer or tablet open etc…

It would be fairly obvious to even casual observation of the Torch terminus area whether or not someone was surveying the wormhole. And remember it's much closer in that most wormholes so it should be easier for agents in the Torch system to surreptitiously monitor (and that's assuming you don't get the info via agents working on infiltrating the Torch government).

And then what? It will still take time for them to get the information to an MA location with a streak Drive to utilize its speed. It all takes time, we don’t know if it takes 1 day to do a survey or 1 year to do a survey all we know is that if your agent is not at the right place and the right time you are screwed.

A ship surveying is going to be deploying lots of drones and running back and forth across the terminus area. That looks very different than a picket defending the terminus as those would be staying well out of energy weapons range of the potential terminus area - they should be back at least a couple million km englobing the area ready to launch laserheads at any hostile transit.

And how many MA spies do you think are in Torch? More importantly how much traffic goes through Torch on a given month or even year? Are we talking about a nation with a population in the millions, tens of millions or billions? Don’t you think it would take constant surveillance of the WH for the MA to feel secure? And if there is not enough traffic to explain always keeping someone to observe for that then it seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

Galactic Sapper wrote:For multiple reasons. Wormholes have to be surveyed extensively to find the correct entry vector and such for a successful transit to be made. Any RDs making that transit are not going to come back even if there isn't any opposition at all. Unlike in Starfire, you can't just accidentally run into a wormhole and survive.

When the Lynx terminus was first transited, it took the Harvest Joy days (weeks?) to nail down the return vector and that was with a specialized survey ship.

Or you determine where the system is located and haul ass back home especially if something suspicious happens during the survey.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:snip
Indeed, but that's absurd. The MAN must have smaller ships than the Sharks and Ghosts in Darius. It's simply inconceivable that they would have started their navy with such huge ships so late in the game. That would be a level of incompetency incompatible with the intelligence observed from the Detweilers.

*snip*

What Intelligence? Out of a sense of pique they committed an act of terrorism so horrific that it will be centuries if not millennia before Beowulf and/or Manticore stopping looking for the perps, and it is possible that that act will also convince the rump of the SL that there is a serious enemy out there that needs to be watched for.

In short, by that one act of pique, they have sabotaged their entire long-term plan - hardly the act of an hyper-intelligent being.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Missiles can't work in the terminus - but laser heads, and graser torps, have enough standoff range than missiles/torps fired towards the terminus can engage ships transiting from beyond the range the terminus's gravity effects would destructively interact with the missile/torp's drive.

One more reason that a forced transit in the age of laserheads is a suicide move. The defenders don't even have to get within the attacker's weapon range in order to crush the attack.

Especially in the age of pod-launched laser heads. The defender can saturate even a maximum transit of SDs. The only reason they wouldn't get them all would be if somehow some blocked direct line of sight to others.

So how do you storm such a defended position? My guess is that you have to go the long way around and attack from hyper, which means finding the location of the terminus. The answer may come from the Starfire series: a wormhole capable reconnaissance drone. In that series, they have a second generation RD (RD2) that is warp-capable and can transit through a warp-point and come back. In the Honorverse, RDs have beta notes already, so why not give them alpha nodes too so they can create a sail?

Would you put nodes on a pod too, so the pods can transit and launch missiles after transit at the defenders? That's another technology from Starfire, the warp-capable strategic bombardment missiles. Maybe not, given RFC's dislike for automated, un-supervised weapons.

Can you transit with just one sail? Or do you need two, fore and aft? That would place a minimum length in the RD2, but not necessarily increase the mass too much.

And what do you call an RD2 with beta-squared nodes? R²D2.

I see some problems with those ideas.
An Honoverse RD2 would be basically the size of a dispatch boat (10k tons or so) because you need alpha nodes and a hyper generator to transit a wormhole. So it's going to be a LOT more visible than the super stealthy RD2's of Starfire were. And it's going to have to hang around for 15+ minutes before it's hyper generator could jump it back out. (Oh, and unlike Starfire you have a 0% chance of successfully navigating an uncharted wormhole - so you're not poking your head through and popping back even if there's nobody on the other side to attack you)

As for popping pods through, again you've got that fairly massive minimum size. But worse you enter in that destructive grav eddy. Any missiles you launched would be immediately destroyed by the gravity forces of the terminus. A pod would have to survive a multi-minute run to get clear of the terminus grav effects before it could launch.
And of course Honorverse missiles are far less capable of autonomously homing all the way than Starfire ones (especially since, see above, you wouldn't have RD2 data to tell them what to target)


So basically RFC specifically set up the Honorverse wormholes so the Starfire approach wasn't workable. You just don't assault a defended wormhole in the Honorverse.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:By the way, aren't Washawski sails effectively vertical shields? Wouldn't RDs in front shield those behind from missile and graser attacks? If so, those behind can leisurely take snapshots of the hemisphere behind them, then turn around and return. Should take 5 or 10 seconds.

They are. But they cover quite limited aspects. The hammerheads stick out past them - being vulnerable from ahead or astern; and slamming laserhead fire into those is reasonable likely to take out the alpha nodes (or at least the power runs to them) which would drop the sail.

Plus you've got around 2/3rds the hull length separating the forward sail from the aft one. That's a narrow but very tall vulnerable angle. It requires more accuracy to hit that gap than it does to fire between the wedges when attack a ship that's rolled behind it's wedge - but it's hardly an impossible target. Especially since you can maneuver into line with it before you reach warhead standoff range - the ship stuck in it's grav eddy can't really change its orientation.

Jonathan_S wrote:I see some problems with those ideas.
An Honoverse RD2 would be basically the size of a dispatch boat (10k tons or so) because you need alpha nodes and a hyper generator to transit a wormhole. So it's going to be a LOT more visible than the super stealthy RD2's of Starfire were. And it's going to have to hang around for 15+ minutes before it's hyper generator could jump it back out. (Oh, and unlike Starfire you have a 0% chance of successfully navigating an uncharted wormhole - so you're not poking your head through and popping back even if there's nobody on the other side to attack you)

The only Courier we have hard #s on is the 37Kton Fracture. Assuming you could take out all the personel space and consumables - we could probably get it down to ~30-35Ktons. But without massive changes to the Honorverse basic tech (which would change EVERYTHING), this would probably be the smallest you could get a Wormhole RD.

Sigs wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:It seems they needed something like 100% availability and better than expected performance to hit all the targets that they did.

While it's possible that the target set they actually hit represented their best case of minimum desired + all bonus targets I don't think it did.

It doesn’t matter what they hit, my point is that since the SEM does not know what the MA was trying to accomplish they cant guage the MA’s capabilities.

You can make some fairly reasonable assumptions. Most people don't have attack aims where their ideal outcome is to damage or destroy 40%, or even 60%, of the shipbuilding in a system. So if they hit less than 100% of the yards you can start looking at why that might be and what that implies about their capabilities.

You'd look at whether the limiting factor might have been ability to get into attack range. (would a larger attack have been detected and thus thwarted?) Was it s limit is access - were the targets they did hit substantially easier to get at than the ones they didn't?

You'd look at how much overkill they used on the targets that they did hit - 100+% overkill implies that either they didn't trust their weapons effectiveness or they expected substantially better defenses than they actually encountered. Conversely 0% overkill hints that they might be resource stretched because any failure or anything stopped by defenses would have cut into their effectiveness. Militaries try for a reasonable level of overkill.

From looking at what they did hit verses what they could have potentially hit - given their demonstrated capabilities - and looking at the level of overkill employed you can make some pretty reasonable assumptions about how they viewed their tactical goals and capabilities on the day.

Obviously like much intelligence work you've got the risk that something totally outside your knowledge caused them to pick a goal you'd dismissed as irrational or caused them to employ less force than they actually had available (including deliberately holding back to screw with your threat assessment). But its a far better starting point than simply assuming your enemy had vast resources that they simply arbitrarily decided not to use this time.

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I see some problems with those ideas.
An Honoverse RD2 would be basically the size of a dispatch boat (10k tons or so) because you need alpha nodes and a hyper generator to transit a wormhole. So it's going to be a LOT more visible than the super stealthy RD2's of Starfire were. And it's going to have to hang around for 15+ minutes before it's hyper generator could jump it back out. (Oh, and unlike Starfire you have a 0% chance of successfully navigating an uncharted wormhole - so you're not poking your head through and popping back even if there's nobody on the other side to attack you)

The only Courier we have hard #s on is the 37Kton Fracture. Assuming you could take out all the personel space and consumables - we could probably get it down to ~30-35Ktons. But without massive changes to the Honorverse basic tech (which would change EVERYTHING), this would probably be the smallest you could get a Wormhole RD.

Oops, you're right. I misremembed the dispatch boat size and didn't take the time to look it up.