Alternate history: PRH-Solarian War

Sigs wrote:So basically a missile heavy BB has half the broadside of a warlord class BC… either there is a major mistake or the PN should really fire the guy who designs and designates the classes.

He sits next to his cousin in the Octagon, the staff officer who selects plans for the PN leadership based on how complex and convoluted they are and with the most cut-outs. They're both the product of nepotism of Legislaturalists.

In this timeline, Parnell fired them after Basilisk.

Sigs wrote:So basically a missile heavy BB has half the broadside of a warlord class BC… either there is a major mistake or the PN should really fire the guy who designs and designates the classes.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:He sits next to his cousin in the Octagon, the staff officer who selects plans for the PN leadership based on how complex and convoluted they are and with the most cut-outs. They're both the product of nepotism of Legislaturalists.

In this timeline, Parnell fired them after Basilisk.

Is that because of the size creep of all classes in the Manticore Havenite war period, since the BB's were presumably a prewar design? I do not know, am just asking.

Another possibility is that the BB carries capital missiles, since prewar it was assumed to also be a capital ship. While a BC fires cruiser size missiles instead.

Still another possibility for a prewar design is that it is energy weapon heavy and so lighter on missiles.

Sigs wrote:A military disaster, or losing the war might have forced the hand of the RMN to introduce SD(P)'s earlier hoping for a miracle. If things are not going well the Alliance might pull all the stops for force multipliers even if untested. They will likely not get huge numbers in 1910 but it could be under construction especially if the war lasted 5 years till 1910 and continually went from bad to worse for the MA.

Right, what you said. I was thinking that all along in the OP. Sure I was.

Anyway, Wayfarer didn't just magically appear in 1910 ready to take pods, with a few suggestions from Honor. Honor didn't also magically come up with the concept of towing them during Fourth Yeltsin: as quoted above, the concept was pretty old, just not recently used.

Someone had been studying them concept of a hollow core for pods for a while.

As you said, if the war was going from bad to worse for the MA, they may have rushed untried designs to the front in a Hail Mary. The biggest difference would have come from the MDMs -- as mentioned, an SDM SD(P) isn't much better than a regular SD as it can't stack pods while in range of the opponent's SDMs. So suppose the RMN threw the dice and started producing MDMs early, even if they were to be used by towed pods.

Jonathan_S wrote:Though another issue is whether Haven actually expects to have to go back to a major war soon. The whole reasons for their short victorious war was to gain cash flow and breathing room. They'd hoped to reduce naval spending afterwards. So President Harris might not be all that enthused about immediately obsoleting his whole navy to rebuild it around pod laying SDs - no unless he really sees the storm clouds of conflict with the SLN coming immediately (and yet they take several years so there's time to develop and deploy these new ships and technology).
After the navy he's already got is more than enough for internal security or picking off other minor systems (like Idaho) out beyond Manticore. So if he's thinking it'll be 50 years or so before having to think about coming up against another major opponent there might not be any of these new toys rolled out yet.

It may not be their choice. The capture of the Manticore and Erewhon Junctions may set events into motion that Harris can't control. I'm sure he'd put his diplomats and propaganda team out to smooth things over. The PRH had, after all, good standing with the League public.

But this is where the MAlign comes in. They see the tensions are high between the SL and the PRH and they did notice some tech breakthroughs in the final stages of the war. If they let the Peeps rebuild their fleet at their pace, they'd become too big of a threat. Similarly, if they let the Manticoran exiles in Beowulf give the tech to the SLN, the SLN will just walk over the PN. And letting both update their designs plays in the SL's favour.

So they conclude that this is the best time to start the war that they had planned to have anyway for the last 2 centuries. Throw in a Giancola to tamper with the diplomatic correspondence and Harris' efforts to appease the League actually make it worse. Since neither he nor Parnell are complete idiots, they begin mobilising while they still have the educated tech base in Manticore.

Another reason that Filareta was so thoroughly defeated was that the GA knew exactly when he'd show up (plus or minus a week, given how unprepared he was). They knew his OOB, so they could prepare. And the GA knew this because some intel came from an ultra-secret source.

We think that was Beowulf. And Beowulf in this timeline wouldn't be cooperating with Haven.

But what if it wasn't Beowulf, but the MAlign? They knew exactly when they pushed Filareta to move and that he had waited for the Cataphract-Cs that were sent to him from Mesa. So maybe it was the MAlign then and it definitely can be so in this timeline. The MAlign needs this war to shatter the League, so they leak the SLN op details to the PRH/AE alliance. It's not even too difficult to accept since the SLN moving 40 to 50% of the Battle Fleet would be noticed.

Then Haven isn't defended by just 200 SDs and 100 DNs of Capital Fleet. There's also another 100 SDs and 200 BBs waiting in hyper or in stealth to come at the SLN from whatever angle is most advantageous, alongside an IAN fleet of another 50 SDs.

Then Filareta (or, worse, Crandall!) comes in fat, dumb and happy.

And to make matters worse, at this stage the Scientist-class SDs aren't only death traps. Obsolete, yes, but perfectly usable against other Scientists. The Alliance can put any captured units into service defending secondary systems and free up their main units, especially the new SD(P)s rolling off the shipyards, for the front.

kzt wrote:SDM's have a max range of 10 million KM. So you'd start out at nearly the max range that the communication links are designed to handle. They are also not designed to communicate to ships that are not basically 'behind' them where their antenna points.

For the missiles everyone was throwing around in 1910 more like 7.3 million km (to reach 10 million km the enemy would have to be closing the range at about .05c (16,000 kps) - which would take them about an hour (and 1.8 lightminutes) to build up to.

So that just makes your point about the difficulty of using them even greater.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
As you said, if the war was going from bad to worse for the MA, they may have rushed untried designs to the front in a Hail Mary. The biggest difference would have come from the MDMs -- as mentioned, an SDM SD(P) isn't much better than a regular SD as it can't stack pods while in range of the opponent's SDMs. So suppose the RMN threw the dice and started producing MDMs early, even if they were to be used by towed pods.

Oh I wouldn't say an SDM SD(P) isn't much better than a regular SD. No it can't stack pods as deeply since it's under fire. And it can't snipe from beyond range of any return fire; so it's not as much better as one with MDMs in its pods. But it should be able to fire double salvos of pods indefinitely - 120 missiles every 12 seconds. That definitely exceeds the level of fire regular SDs are designed to put out (or face).

Even if kept under such steady fire that it has to use single salvos that's still 60 missiles every 6 seconds; over 60% more than the broadside of even the largest SD. Plus by freeing up their flanks of tubes they can carry heavier CM/PDLC fits so they can knock down more incoming missiles to boot. (Not to mention they should still be able to accelerate unimpeded until just minutes before combat starts then stack as large an alpha strike of pods as they can control. So their extra sustained firepower still follows a hell of a Sunday punch to start off)

I wouldn't want to take a conventional SD against an SDM equipped SD(P). Not without at least a 3 or 4 to one advantage in hulls.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
It may not be their choice. The capture of the Manticore and Erewhon Junctions may set events into motion that Harris can't control. I'm sure he'd put his diplomats and propaganda team out to smooth things over. The PRH had, after all, good standing with the League public.

But this is where the MAlign comes in. They see the tensions are high between the SL and the PRH and they did notice some tech breakthroughs in the final stages of the war. If they let the Peeps rebuild their fleet at their pace, they'd become too big of a threat. Similarly, if they let the Manticoran exiles in Beowulf give the tech to the SLN, the SLN will just walk over the PN. And letting both update their designs plays in the SL's favour.

So they conclude that this is the best time to start the war that they had planned to have anyway for the last 2 centuries. Throw in a Giancola to tamper with the diplomatic correspondence and Harris' efforts to appease the League actually make it worse. Since neither he nor Parnell are complete idiots, they begin mobilising while they still have the educated tech base in Manticore.

Oh I wasn't saying Harris would be correct about being able to avoid war for a long time. Just trying to point out that even if he erroneously believed Haven wouldn't face combat for a while that'd slow down adoption of any technologies that would require massive naval budgets to get quickly into widespread service.

If he came out of the Manticore war seriously worried about another major conflict in the next 5-10 years Haven would be much more aggressive about trying to round up every last scrap of helpful R&D from surrendered Manticore and working hard to turn that into new weapons and ships with which to improve the Peep fleet. But if they came out thinking the worst was over, they might squander valuable time that would make a difference when this thread's scenario of MAlign meddling instigating a war with the League came to pass.

At best they will pound each other into scrap. As far as I can tell, SD battles with SDMs that came to a decisive conclusion were concluded at energy range.

The whole hop out of hyper trick is worth a whole lot less when your max range is 10M km and your average error is several million KM.

Lets play it out.

1000 SDs and 1000+ support vessels cross the wall, following a week of careful recon. So they don’t drop on top of anyone fleet. They spend a few minutes forming ip and start cruising in at 80% power. Like 400g iirc, 4km/sec delta V. We’ll guess they need 30 minutes to cross the hyperlimit, as SLN navigation isn’t that hot either.

So they are doing 7,200 km/sec when they cross the limit. Nobody is ahead of then for tens of millions of Km. So now 300 SDs jump out of hyper and fire at them? You know, there are 1000 SDs and 1000 lighter ships to shoot back? What will the likely outcome be?

Ok, defeat in detail engagement 1 completed, with a total delay of about 15 minutes, when 300 SDs get hit by a million and a half missiles. That would kill about 100 2nd war RMN SD(P)s. Nobody has even 25% of the point defense of a 2nd war RMN Sd(p).

Onto defeat in detail engagement 2, somewhere between 40 minutes and almost two hours away.

kzt wrote:At best they will pound each other into scrap. As far as I can tell, SD battles with SDMs that came to a decisive conclusion were concluded at energy range.

The whole hop out of hyper trick is worth a whole lot less when your max range is 10M km and your average error is several million KM.

Lets play it out.

1000 SDs and 1000+ support vessels cross the wall, following a week of careful recon.[snip]

Ok, thanks for the scenario. I hadn't thought of what could be done when I wrote, which is why I wrote "in hyper or in stealth to come at the SLN from whatever angle is most advantageous." The time for missile engagement is shorter than the time it takes to cycle the hyper generators to get back out. At best you could have this fleet towing pods and fire a million missiles or two, but it would still get annihilated. Like you said, defat in detail. Not worth it.

Hyper in is out.

I disagree with one thing: there's no way the SLN would perform a careful recon. They'd come in with all guns blazing trying to overawe their opponents and demanding the surrender and extradition of Adm. Parnell and President Harris.

Not unless the SLN has already grown respect for the neobarbs, which can only happen if they've already lost 500 SDs. That means they'd be mobilising two thirds of the remaining active Battle Fleet. Can they afford to uncover that much?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I disagree with one thing: there's no way the SLN would perform a careful recon. They'd come in with all guns blazing trying to overawe their opponents and demanding the surrender and extradition of Adm. Parnell and President Harris.

Not unless the SLN has already grown respect for the neobarbs, which can only happen if they've already lost 500 SDs. That means they'd be mobilising two thirds of the remaining active Battle Fleet. Can they afford to uncover that much?

Well, it would be one of the FF destroyer squadron CO. But even an arrogant 4 star probably won’t hyper in on top of the only fleet in the system when he can just sail majestically up to the capital and demand their surrender.

kzt wrote:Well, it would be one of the FF destroyer squadron CO. But even an arrogant 4 star probably won’t hyper in on top of the only fleet in the system when he can just sail majestically up to the capital and demand their surrender.

Indeed, but since his objective is 200 million km into the hyper limit, he has to get there. That gives time for Adm. Chin's Fifth Fleet and Großadmiral Anderman to get into position.

Now, what would that position be? Here's an initial thought: a weakened "Capital Fleet" of "150 SDs" is caught out of position near the planet, so they race back to defend it. But this isn't actually 150 SDs, it's 50 DNs and 100 BBs pretending to be SDs. The DNs and BBs once they get to Haven orbit can control the system defence pods, which are actually equipped with the first run of MDMs. They fire from beyond the range of the SLN, taking out 30% in successive salvoes (300 ships x 500 missiles per ship = 150,000 missiles). Since the SLN is within 60 million km of Haven, they can't reverse course and get away. At best they can turn perpendicular, though I'm not sure how good that parabolic course would be. Need to check the math.

Before this happens, Capital Fleet, Third Fleet and the IAN fleet reveal themselves. They had moved into an intercept course when the SLN started moving in-system (SLN sensors can't see wedges beyond 10 light-minutes or so, IIRC), thanks to the FTL communication. They lowered their wedges to minimum power to maintain stealth while approaching the point where they know the SLN will be hit. When they are revealed, they fire their one and only MDM salvo and demand the SLN fleet's surrender.

If the SLN surrenders in time, the missiles can be aborted. If they call the bluff and don't surrender, the MDMs will do damage, but even then there'll be something like 400 SDs and the first 20 Medusa-knockoff-class SD(P), plus some 100-150 DNs, against no more than 650 SLN SDs. It would be a bloodbath, since it would be fought with SDM, but as we calculated, the alliance SDs are more than a match for Scientist-class SDs.

The SLN fleet can't win. The only question is how long they fight until they surrender. If they fight to the last, they'll do a lot of damage to the alliance fleet. It will preclude the alliance going on the offensive for some time, while they rebuild. The SLN has a bigger reserve, even if obsolete, but in the time it takes to activate it, the alliance will have produced more MDMs.