Alternate history: PRH-Solarian War

So lets say that the SLN sends in 1,000 of their SD's to hit Haven, they bring in 1,000 BC/CA/CL/DD escort. They enter the Haven system where Capital Fleet is expecting them.

Gathered in Haven system in a reinforced Capital Fleet are 275 SD's, 150 DN's, 300 BB's, 50 BC's, 100 CA's, 200 CL's and 300 DD's.

For a Grand total of 725 Capital Ships and 650 Escorts.

-275 SD's can fire off a broadside of 11,000 missiles
-300 BB's can fire off a broadside of 9,000 missiles
-150 DN's can fire off a broadside of 4,950 missiles
----------------
24,950 missiles
+ 6,237 missiles*
----------------
31,187 missiles

*at least 25% redundancy in control links.(So they use pods for the redundancy.)

So Capital Fleet can fire off Salvos of 31,187 missiles every 45 seconds(Im using 45 seconds so its equal for both but the PN fires at a smaller interval) not counting that they could be sitting next to tens of thousands of pods which they can fire along with the 31,000 missiles salvos.


-275 SD's have 11,000 CM’s and 9,350 PDC
-300 BB's have 6,600CM’s and 7,500 PDC
-150 DN's have 3,600 CM’s and 3,600 PDC

-50 BC’s have 2,200 CM’s and 1,800 PDC
-100 CA’s have 3,200 CM’s and 3,200 PDC
-200 CL’s have 2,400 CM’s and 2,000 PDC
-300 DD’s have 3,000 CM’s and 2,400 PDC

Capital Ships:
-CM=21,200
-PDC=20,450

Escorts:
-CM=7,800
-PDC=7,000


Grand Total
-CM=29,000
-PDC=27,450



Now for the SLN:
The Fleet is composed of 1,000 SD’s and to make it fair the escorts are proportionally identical.

-1,000 SD’s can fire off 32,000 missiles from internal tubes and have no access to missile pods.


For point Defence:

Capital Ships:
-CM=16,000
-PDC=32,000

Escorts:
-CM=12,000
-PDC=10,800
What I am doing here is using Havens numbers but for 1,000 escorts rather than 650 escorts, problem is Indefatigable class BC has 8 CM's per Broadside while a Warlord-Class has 20 CM's per broadside. Which means that the SLN could if the lighter CM count hold true for all escort classes actually have ~62% of the CM tubes that Haven would have.

Grand Total
-CM=28,000
-PDC=42,800

So the PN will be throwing salvos of 31,187 missiles that they can control while the SLN with its 1,000 SD’s can fire off 32,000 missiles that they can control.


This does not account for Forts, old style LAC’s or fixed defences for CM/PD or lasers.
This also does not account for the very important experience and training difference between the SLN and the People’s Navy.

PN Loses:
275/450 SD’s
300/300 BB’s
150/150 DN’s

IAN Loses:
0/230 SD’s
0/90 DN’s


SLN loses:
1,000/2000 SD’s

So even if Capital Fleet and the SLN fleet are wiped out completely the proportions stay the same, the Alliance will still have 60-70% of the wallers that the SLN has but the Alliance will have the shipbuilding capacity to replace them a hell of a lot quicker and the surviving ships from the battle and surviving crews from the battle can be put back into service quickly while whatever is left over from the SLN has to surrender or is crushed by the forts and whatever mobile fleet the Alliance can scrounge up to kick them out from Haven if there is even anything to kick out.


So even if the SLN goes in, both fleets are completely destroyed, the PN would have 300-400 ships under construction throughout the republic, the Andermani would have another 50+ SD's under construction and whatever shipyards they captured from Manticore that they will be laying down SD(P)'s, CLAC's, LAC's and a hell of a lot of Warlord BC's and Mars CA's they can for the next visit.

What is more likely to happen, is that the SLN comes in expecting a walk over, sees 275 SD's, 150 DN's and 300 BB's decides it will be a cakewalk, get their asses kicked getting the entire fleet captured or destroyed while only Half of Capital Fleet is destroy and the rest is damaged. By the time that the League hears about the outcome of the battle the RHN might have repaired a lot of their damaged ships and will be putting new construction into service.

kzt wrote:
Particularly if the Peeps will have revolts if they hoard all their fleet units at Haven for long, or get their fleet trashed.

Who is going to revolt? A DD is just as capable to put down a revolt on a planet as a BB.

And I don't see how they can avoid massive casualties.

The PN can replace casualties in ships and men a lot quicker than the SLN in the short term.

Basically, it's a political problem. You have to avoid going to war with the SL. Having failed in this the SL has basically infinitely more industrial capablity then the Peeps do.

But very little of that capacity is warfighting at the moment and it will take several years to really hit their stride.

The Peeps have real problem with industrial base and population that won't have been largely mitigated by the revolutionaries. Given that I really tend to doubt the SKM is going to hand them their factories, their production sucks.

I doubt that if the SKM were to surrender that they will blow their industry to prevent capture, same for Grayson. If on your way out you blow up your industry, now your people are unemployed AND occupied by the People's Republic.

Note that this isn't the SLN conducting a rogue operation, this is the SL going to war with you because you attacked them. So how do you win? Every yard that the SL has can produce modern effective combatants. They have a lot of yards, and the industrial base to build hundreds more if needed.

If as OP has stated the Alliance has access to SD(P)'s,MDM's, CLAC's and LAC's their yards can put those ships and missiles into immediate production and in 3 years the Alliance might have 300 SD(P)'s and 100 CLAC's coming into service while the League is commissioning the first batch of 400 Scientist-Class SD's they put into emergency production.

I also would tend to suspect that the Andies are not going to war with the SLN. Notice they didn't go to war with the SLN when their allies did. So why would you think they would this time? What's their upside? How do the Andies 'win' against the SL?

So if I was the Emperor I'd be really tempted to set my crazy 'allies' free.

Maybe you didn't have a choice, maybe in their greed the mandarins, not realizing that the People's Navy wont be a pushover decide to grab up the Andermani Empire as well. They looked at the map, decided why take over only Haven and Manticore when we can take the entire sector over, after all we have an agreeable assembly plus with no SKM the Andermani Empire will not be prevented from taking over Silesia, so the Mandarins decide to step in and "protect" the innocent Confederacy. So The Empire would have to decide wether they want to fight beside Haven now when they have a much bigger chance of toppling the League together or fight the League once they take down Haven and have their 1,000 SD's next door to the empire.

Theemile wrote:

Sigs wrote:
My point is, if Beowulf hadn't told Manticore about Filareta, someone was bound to spill the beans, notice unexplained ship movement, or make a honorverse version of a tweet about it. Once you know they are trying something, there is only a few potential targets, some more likely then others.

You'd have thought so. In 1921pd, Battlefleet had only left the core 5 times in the last 150 (?) years and 2 of those were happening right then - the previous one was 75 years in the past. And this was followed by a 3rd, even larger movement, 6 months later. One would have thought that the movement of more than 1200 WALLERS*, 1/2 a million marines, and support ships would have been noticed by someone.

*(71 Crandall, 429 Filareta, 100 Tang, 600-650 Raging Justice II - were all deployed, in motion or destroyed at one point, out of ~1800 active, and ~400 ships under maintenance and 50-100 ships working up.)

The SEM had it's hands full in 1919-1921 to bother paying attention where the SLN was conducting exercises. They had to fight a war with Haven, intergrade it's new member systems into the empire, they didn't care where the SLN conducted their exercises up to the time when Crandall went to Spindle, at which point it was an oh shit moment...these idiots are actually going to war with us.

So unless the MA started pushing for the SLN to pre-deploy 1,000 SD's and 1,000 escort. After all when we count Crandal, Filareta and Tsang, they only had about 190-200 escorts(DD/CL/CA/BC) for 600 SD's. This leads me to believe that there might not be all that many light combatants sitting around not doing anything. In the even of war and the SLN needs to send their 1,000 SD's into Haven the rush to gather 600-700 more escorts will definitely alert people even if the mission 50% of combat ready SD's doesn't.

Sigs wrote:

kzt wrote:
Particularly if the Peeps will have revolts if they hoard all their fleet units at Haven for long, or get their fleet trashed.

Who is going to revolt? A DD is just as capable to put down a revolt on a planet as a BB.

So the reason that Haven built 300 BBs dedicated to internal security instead of 10 DDs is?

kzt wrote:
So the reason that Haven built 300 BBs dedicated to internal security instead of 10 DDs is?

How many Battleships does Frontier Fleet have to oppress the verge and protectorates?

And what can a Battleship do that a light cruiser or destroyer not do when oppressing a planet with no heavy weapons on the ground that could harm a ship in orbit and no spaceborne assets?

Besides big part of the reason for the BB's was rear area security so that the RMN's BC's don't have a field day in Haven's space.

You have army units on the planet, you have internal security units on the planet, you have various police forces on the planets and you have a destroyer or two or a light cruiser or 2. I mean in Mobius the SLN didn't really need all that many Battleships and Battlecruisers to bombard the MLF almost out of existence, 4 destroyers and a light cruiser were juuuuuuuust fine.

Like I asked, why did the PRH decide that they needed to assign 300 battleships to internal security? ‘They were stupid and I’m so smart’ isn’t a valid reason. They went to a whole lot of effort and dedicated a lot of their total navy personel to internal security. If you don’t have a explantion beside ‘they were so dumb and I’m so smart’ then you should probably accept that they decided they needed a large force of capital ships to keep control of their involuntary empire acquisitions for good reasons. And hence something undesirable will happen if they go away.

kzt wrote:Like I asked, why did the PRH decide that they needed to assign 300 battleships to internal security? ‘They were stupid and I’m so smart’ isn’t a valid reason. They went to a whole lot of effort and dedicated a lot of their total navy personel to internal security. If you don’t have a explantion beside ‘they were so dumb and I’m so smart’ then you should probably accept that they decided they needed a large force of capital ships to keep control of their involuntary empire acquisitions for good reasons. And hence something undesirable will happen if they go away.

It was a missile heavy platform, when they were commissioned, the PN used them as frontline units. As more and more DN's and SD's became available for frontline use, and BB's became unsuited for fighting against DN's and SD's they were relegated to the rear security. It's easier to have a couple of BB's in a system to keep the natives from getting too restless and have a force that can fight off Alliance BC's and below rather than have light warships that can keep the native population from openly rebelling but at the second BCs come into the system its game over.

They didn't build them for essentially counter insurgency, they just happened to use them for that purpose when they became less than survivable in battle against SD's dam near twice their size. They build a new ship and expanded their fleet, they didn't build a new ship and replace an old one. I guess their position was why retire a Battleship if we are expecting a war with Manticore in the near future, having battleships lets you cover systems of mild importance from minor attack and raiding squadrons without dispersing your SD's.

If they were so vital for controlling the population the People's Navy wouldn't have kept pulling them for various offensives throughout the war.

If the PN didn't have the battleships they would have most systems behind the front protected by a few Cruises and destroyer to help keep order, the second a pair of Reliant-Class BC's showed up, the system picket is screwed. So you either leave your rear systems uncovered for the taking, you disperse some of your valuable SD's and DN's into rear security thereby limiting your available offensive power or you leave ships that are ill-suited to fight against Dreadnaughts and Super Dreadnaughts into rear security. The People's Republic has been expanding since the 1700's, with every conquest their neighbours had build a bigger fleet, a bigger fleet incidentally meant more forces needed for the next conquest but also protection of the captured systems because the more that Haven armed themselves to meet the tougher targets, the more their neighbours armed themselves to become tougher targets, and there was always the chance that they will join together like they eventually did with Manticore and they could have attacked Haven itself, so when BB's were deemed unsuited for frontline combat the decision was made to use them as rear security to free up heavier units. Plus I think the goal was always to get to Manticore, and maybe further out to Silesia and Andermani Empire, Haven would have a lot of territory to protect and its easier to utilize 374 BB's you already have, rather than building dedicated SD's for rear security. Why retire warships that could serve a purpose and build warships from the ground up to do a job that the warships you just retired could have done just the same? Instead use the warships you would have build to replace the BB's, to expand your fleet in anticipation of grabbing the biggest prize...Manticore.

You still haven't answered the question, what can a battleship do to put down a revolt that a DD cannot? Unless shooting a lot of missiles at a planet is good counter insurgency?

The new government started pulling them out, after they shot most of the competent admirals and yet they still kept losing to the MA.

The new government had a different approach to keeping control, involving propaganda and mass executions. There is no new government in this scenario, just the one that deployed hundreds of BBs for security.

But running capital vessels is not cheap. They require lots of expensive support and service. They also have to have something like half of as many people running the BBs as they do running the first line capital ships of the PRN. So obviously they think it’s worth it and they feel they can’t easily be replaced by much cheaper and more economical in manpower light vessels.

Sigs wrote:

kzt wrote:
So the reason that Haven built 300 BBs dedicated to internal security instead of 10 DDs is?

How many Battleships does Frontier Fleet have to oppress the verge and protectorates?

And what can a Battleship do that a light cruiser or destroyer not do when oppressing a planet with no heavy weapons on the ground that could harm a ship in orbit and no spaceborne assets?

Besides big part of the reason for the BB's was rear area security so that the RMN's BC's don't have a field day in Haven's space.

You have army units on the planet, you have internal security units on the planet, you have various police forces on the planets and you have a destroyer or two or a light cruiser or 2. I mean in Mobius the SLN didn't really need all that many Battleships and Battlecruisers to bombard the MLF almost out of existence, 4 destroyers and a light cruiser were juuuuuuuust fine.

When Haven started building up their BBs, RMN BCs were barely on the horizon. The RMN already had their own BBs, slowly replaced by DNs and then SDs joined them.

No, I think the explanation for why Haven decided it needed BBs to hang onto its territory was due to how many battlecruisers have ended up on the black market(Saganami's pirates, Volsung mercs, etc.). Couldn't let some government-in-exile or underground resistance buy a BC and attack the destroyers holding their system.

It's more plausible considering that Haven probably went after targets more prosperous than the average verge system.

kzt wrote:The new government started pulling them out, after they shot most of the competent admirals and yet they still kept losing to the MA.

The new government had a different approach to keeping control, involving propaganda and mass executions. There is no new government in this scenario, just the one that deployed hundreds of BBs for security.

But running capital vessels is not cheap. They require lots of expensive support and service. They also have to have something like half of as many people running the BBs as they do running the first line capital ships of the PRN. So obviously they think it’s worth it and they feel they can’t easily be replaced by much cheaper and more economical in manpower light vessels.

A lot of readers seem to think the PRN BBs were old - in fact the PRN ships were contemporaries of the PRN SD/DN fleet, and (per Jayne's) were still under low volume construction in 1905. The modern design (The Triumphant class) received tech updates before other fleet classes due to their "standard" design, large #s and upgrade availability.

None of the BBs of the PRN were cast offs from another era - they were all custom designed for the current situation - ie rear area defense and internal pacification. Their size allowed them to defeat any remains of any pacified system's navy which might have survived, or any ships a liberation movement might happen to purchase. In addition, their large integrated Marine force gives a ready pacification force separate from any planetary force - which might be inflitrated by local rebellions or "go native" and actively assist any rebellions. In short, they were a constant reminder of the power of the nation which had conquered the plant, and a weapon constantly hanging over their heads that they could never hope to counter.