Wormhole Assault: MA Style

ZVar wrote:

cthia wrote:It is accepted in this thread that the initial tactic of using a nest could get half of Eight Fleet. That is half of the most powerful fleet in the galaxy.

You are the only one in this thread that accepts there can even be a nest, much less it could take out half of Eight Fleet.

So you're saying I'm a lone-wolf, again. As in many other threads where I turned out to be correct. But, I agree that my notions may be a wash here. There are just too many unknowns.

But it appears to be a given that ships cannot be targeted thru the WH. Whether that can be exploited by an invisible enemy? Perhaps not. But in absence of any other tactic to assault a WH - that might actually work - and there aren't any others ...

I’m not at all sure that the assumption that the graser capacitor is exhausted with every shot. David has said that the plasma capacitor that wraps around the mount is capable of running that mount for some time. Not clear how long it is, but in context is was certainly not just one shot.

However, given how rapidly the Bellerophon was able to shoot it’s grasers from the moment it first detected a threat while fat dumb and happy, it doesn’t take very long to power them up

kzt wrote:I’m not at all sure that the assumption that the graser capacitor is exhausted with every shot. David has said that the plasma capacitor that wraps around the mount is capable of running that mount for some time. Not clear how long it is, but in context is was certainly not just one shot.

However, given how rapidly the Bellerophon was able to shoot it’s grasers from the moment it first detected a threat while fat dumb and happy, it doesn’t take very long to power them up

I didn't think so either, but it gets exhausting fighting against the collective.

Logically it can't be so. Or it would imply that the grasers are as much as an energy hog as starting the wedge. And we know that isn't the case.

I think ThinksMarkedly was positing two different types of capacitors. The graser capacitors being able to deliver power faster.

cthia wrote:So you're saying I'm a lone-wolf, again. As in many other threads where I turned out to be correct. But, I agree that my notions may be a wash here. There are just too many unknowns.

But it appears to be a given that ships cannot be targeted thru the WH. Whether that can be exploited by an invisible enemy? Perhaps not. But in absence of any other tactic to assault a WH - that might actually work - and there aren't any others ...

The problem is that this strategy of yours relies on unproven assumptions and an ideal condition. It is not balanced at all, because there's very good probability that the exchange is actually one LD for a couple of LACs.

First of all, it rests on two unproven assumptions. First, that such "nest" exists. There's nothing in the books to prove that they do or don't, so it's a complete unknown. As others have explained time and again, any place inside the Junction volume is within graser range of any of the dozens of forts. So even if a nest that impedes Ghost Rider recons and missiles can exist, we know for a fact it does not stop energy weapons.

The second assumption is that the LD can get into position undetected. This is a weak assumption. All we know is that the MAN's own efforts couldn't detect a spider ship (presumably a Shark, not an LD) at one-light second range. That doesn't tell us how such a ship would fare against RMN sensors. It doesn't tell us how a bigger ship would fare against RMN sensors. And most importantly, it doesn't tell us how that would fare against multiple overlapping sensor nets, since any point inside the Junction is going to be within 1 light-second of a dozen forts or more, plus whatever other ships and scanning platforms there may be. This region is a nightmare of traffic, so both the RMN and ACS will have a lot of sensing platforms. And note that this is both insertion and the wait: the ship must find a path to get into position without being detected, then lie in wait for at least multiple hours. I find that insertion is actually the biggest problem: since there are concentric shells of forts, this ship would by necessity pass much closer than one light-second to a few of them.

And whether the MAN thinks their stealth tech is good enough, they'd be lunatics to try without proving that it is so. That means there ought to have been at least one engagement prior to this (hopefully with the RMN ship never returning home to tell the story).

The other half of the problem is "getting half of Eight Fleet." Even if Eighth hasn't been reinforced, that's 64 ships and the most a mass transit can accommodate is 25. That's less than half.

But rounding aside, your strategy implies triggering a mass transit. That will only happen in a Case Zulu, which means ALL of the defenders on the hither side of the Junction will be on high alert. So that makes the detection even more difficult. Not only will there be dozens of overlapping sensor nets of the forts and their fields of fire, by design of the operation 60% of Eighth Fleet will have transited and will actually very close by this LD.

This strategy also depends on the RMN cooperating. Like counting cards in Blackjack, you may be able to predict when a mass transit is likely (when 60% of Eighth has transited). But what if they don't mass-transit, but instead keep coming one by one? There's no mass attack. Worse, what happens if there's another fleet that happened to be closer by in Gregor or Basilisk or Lynx and begins transiting too? Now not only do you not have a mass transit, you have an massive increase of ships scanning around the Junction.

I find it doubtful that even the Inner Onion would throw away 12 million tonnes of metal and 8 to 10 thousand spacers for a single person. Even if they were that obsessed, that again depends on Honor cooperating. What if she is not aboard her flagship at the time? What if she or her flagship were in Manticore for consultation with the Admiralty? In fact, she's not going to be a fleet CO any more, she's too senior for that. So who's important enough besides Honor to be worth one LD and 10k MAN spacers? And finally, how do you know which ship this person is in?

The final nail in the coffin for this is that there are better techniques. Instead of leaving a massive ship behind, a Silver Bullet could do the trick as easily. It can fall overboard from a nearly-legitimate freighter, without requiring a 3-month long insertion, and take up position. It's much smaller, so it has less of a chance of being detected. It's also much cheaper.

So, summary: this plan rests on unprovable assumptions by us, quite likely impossible insertion, with a high risk and low reward ratio, and with better alternatives. I admire you for dreaming it up and defending it, but it's not going to happen. Other Sci-Fi authors may be careless enough to toss out the rationality of their characters, but David is usually careful enough to catch this kind of stuff and think it through (yes, he makes mistakes, but usually not with this shot full of holes).

That said, I have to reiterate that I currently don't see how the LDs can achieve superiority over a battlefield. They may be good stealth platforms, but not fighting ones. It's like training a battalion of snipers and bringing them to the battlefield: the concentration is lopsided. At best, I see them like submarines deploying mines and SEAL teams forward, but never themselves engaging the enemy. With that I mean to say that I'm equally sure that RFC is holding details of their operation back and will only reveal to us in a book or two, because right now those ships make no sense.

cthia wrote:I think ThinksMarkedly was positing two different types of capacitors. The graser capacitors being able to deliver power faster.

We don't know how wedges are brought up or whether they need capacitors of some kind. We do know it takes time to bring them up from cold impellers. That's all.

We speculate that the ship must charge a large bank of capacitors to initiate the wedge, which would explain why it takes a lot of time to bring them up. But RFC (or any of the co-authors, with his permission) might explain this in a different way. For example, they could say that there is no capacitor, the energy is simply going into the alpha wall to deform it, Like building a house of cards or a sand castle (or just about anything), if you knock that down, you have to start over. Another one would be that tapping the alpha wall is a delicate process and if you were to dump too much power into it, it would feed back onto you and explode your ship.

Even for the grasers, we're speculating that there's a capacitor. For all we know, it's simply the limitation of the thermal dissipation and it's otherwise directly powered from the reactors. Though I'd still build in a capacitor even in that case, especially if as kzt says the capacitor can hold charge for more than one shot, as that would allow the mounts to fire a few more times even if power delivery is interrupted.

cthia wrote:You must not be a cook at all. After the initial prep is done, each successive pizza goes very quickly. With 6 people tossing dough and forming an assembly line, 6 pizzas can be baked simultaneously.

Ok, I am not. I admit I am a very poor cook.

But the metaphor was supposed to stand for the fact that there's still a limitation due to bottlenecks. A pizza oven has the room for so many pizzas inside, so if you can only bake 3 at a time, it doesn't matter how many cooks you have upstream and downstream of the oven: they won't be able to bake any faster than this bottlenecks. In fact, you'll end up with a pileup of work-in-progress materials upstream of the oven and a bunch of idle cooks downstream, waiting for the next batch.

The same applies to building ships. The most obvious limit would be the number of build slips. If you have only 10, you can't build more than 10 ships at a time. If each one takes 2 years from entry to exit in the slip, then you will average 5 ships per year, no matter what.

You can build more slips, but that usually means diverting resources to build the slip that would otherwise go into building a ship. So they may move to making 100 build slips instead of 10, but even if they can add 20 a year, that would be 5 years to hit stride. Meanwhile, they're not building many ships.

Now, maybe they've been building slips for some time, but I don't see that having happened for more than 5 years. The problem is that they hadn't known what ship they would build in those slips until the Shark had proven that the spider-drive warship concept was viable. Who in their right mind would have created a slip for a ship 50% bigger than the biggest RMN SD(P) (or more) without having seen some proof that it can work. Maybe they'd have started a couple of slips for the prototype, but to commission 100 for an unproven design?

And then there's the issue of unproven design. I still find it questionable that they'd order 100 ships without first finding out if they actually can deliver. They will run into teething issues with the first few, will find out that they have to redesign something. Some of those will be yard issues, requiring changes to how a build is done. That's just life and Murphy. Even seen on text that even the arrogant Inner Onion does iterate designs, quod vide Cataphract-A, Cataphract-B, Cataphract-C.

A saying about eggs and a basket come to mind.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually if the LD didn't pop sidewalls than (at that range) it'd have bigger worries than the anti-ship missiles. A Mk31 CM's wedge contacting it would be instantly fatal to any ship not protected by sidewalls. Forts carry those CM in stupefying numbers, and they'd be able to reach the LD (at 1.5 million km) about 10 seconds sooner than the ship killers.

Forts likely also carry some Vipers for anti-LAC defense, the warheads on those are weak to be attacking something as big as an LD - but they'll reach laserhead range about half a second before a Mk31's wedge could make contact. In sufficient numbers even the weak lasers on Vipers would seriously degrade the LD's active defenses, sensors, and drive (all items exposed on or projection from it's hull, and thus not protectable by armor)

I'm not sure CMs can endure all the way to 1.5 million km. Maybe they can, but no one uses them that way because it's way too far out for what they're designed to do: counter missiles.

Vipers may make sense. In any case, you don't need any fort surviving for a counter-launch of missiles. There are hundreds of LACs in the Junction and at least a couple dozen warships ranging from destroyers to cruisers, maybe some BCs too.

Even the old CM's Fearless had at Basilisk could (barely) reach 1.5 million km [60s @ 90,500g]. The Mk30's Honor had at Sidemore when the 2nd war started could reach 2.2 million km [60s @ 130,000g]. But the Mk31 (and Vipers which share their drives) can reach all the way out to 3.5 million km from rest! [75s @ 130,000g]

And, in fact, in the most recent combats the Mk31s are used to intercept out beyond 2 million km (with follow-up launches to intercept leakers. See this text from AAC, where thanks to significant base velocity the CM range was extended far beyond the the range from rest

At All Costs Ch. 36 wrote:The powered range from rest for the Mark 31 counter-missile was 3,585,556 kilometers, with a flight time of seventy-five seconds. Given the geometry of the engagement, effective range at launch was over 12.5 million kilometers, and the defensive missiles started to go out ninety seconds before the Havenite MDMs reached standoff attack range of their targets. The Mod-2-XR counter-missile launcher had a cycle time of eight seconds, which meant there was time for eleven launches per tube.
In the old days—all of four T-years ago—that wouldn't have mattered all that much, since the interference of the counter-missiles' own wedges would have blinded follow-up launches. Even now, that would have been true of a Havenite ship, although with the changes Shannon Foraker had made, any ship in a Havenite formation could now "manage" any other ship's counter-missiles, as long as both units had arranged the handoff prior to launch. That meant a Republican formation with the same degree of separation between units as Task Force 82 could have managed perhaps three times the number of counter-missiles it once could have.
But the Royal Manticoran Navy had added the Keyhole platforms to its bag of tricks."

And that's not the only mention of launching them for intercept points of quite extended range. (But the final launches again an incoming salvo of missiles probably are aiming to intercept them at less than 1.5 million km from your ship - it's the previous 10 or so waves of CMs sent against that leading salvo of missiles that were going for the (presumably lower probability) intercept attempts at extreme ranges.

cthia wrote:A Plea.
Can we please spell cthia without the extra letters? So many people do it. Even the author once. It isn't cithia or chia. One reason I chose it is because of its brevity. Only 5 letters. I take time to spell some impossibly long names.

It is cthia. c-t-h-i-a. It isn't a name, but a notion.

Sorry, I'll try to do better. That 3 consonant run at the start just seems to keep throwing me off.

(But it's short enough I'll erroneously think I remembered it correctly, and so don't always double-check)

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:A Plea.
Can we please spell cthia without the extra letters? So many people do it. Even the author once. It isn't cithia or chia. One reason I chose it is because of its brevity. Only 5 letters. I take time to spell some impossibly long names.

It is cthia. c-t-h-i-a. It isn't a name, but a notion.

Sorry, I'll try to do better. That 3 consonant run at the start just seems to keep throwing me off.

(But it's short enough I'll erroneously think I remembered it correctly, and so don't always double-check)

Thanks for the apology. But you are not the only one, as I said. Even the author is guilty of it at least once. I knew you would understand because when I first joined the forum my brain always wanted to spell your name with an added "h" before you corrected me.

It is difficult to believe so many Sci-Fi buffs have not read Spock's World in the Star Trek Universe by Diane Diane. One of the better Star Trek authors. Spock's World is where cthia originates. It is Vulcan and it isn't pronounced as people want to spell it. It translates into "logic" or better yet reality-truth. I don't always succeed, but I consult with logic before I post. I also try to embrace my human side, unlike Spock, and respect the human element.

Anyway, thanks.


P.S.
I even included a link in my tagline explaining cthia. There is also a link in my tagline explaining my tagline.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:On one size fits all: do you know any navy that has a single type of ship? I'm not constraining to single class, but to single type.

That doesn't exist. One size does not fit all. Different ship types will have different roles; some will be defenders, some will be scouts, some will be sluggers, and this is just the fighting platforms.

Which actually makes me think that the MAN does have more ship types, but RFC hasn't seen fit to tell us about them yet. It's entirely possible that it is not a well-rounded fighting navy, with glaring holes in the ability of one ship type to support another, because after all the MAN has no experience and it's being led by maniacs inside an echo chamber. Even the totally corrupt SLN wasn't in that bad a condition.

To make matters worse, there's the problem of using spiders: we know that they have more acceleration the more surface area they have. So the bigger ships have more acceleration. That means we'd see cruiser-type ships accelerating at 100 gravities and destroyer-type ones pulling no more than 75. I have no idea how such a thing is practical. So those ships may actually be conventially-driven by impellers.

But even in those circumstances, I don't see any admiral worth his/her salt not saying they need more ships and vehemently arguing for different ship types with the Inner Onion. The Detweilers are logical and rational enough to see reason when it hits them in the head.

So... predictions:

1) the MAN will have more ship types than just the monitors

2) the MAN will not fight very well; those ship types will not be designed to support each other and this will become a major weakness when the feces hit the rotating blades

3) we will not see such ships in this year's book.

I believe the issue might be the size of the spider generating equipment. Remember, the Frigate Sized Ghost (50-60 Ktons) carries no offensive weapons. The RMN analysis of the Station attacks was that each attack, if carried out by the RMN, could have been accomplished by a single SD(p), but actually took 9 Sharks (or ~5x the tonnage) for each attack.

If so, a competitive Shark CA might mass as much as an Agamemnon or Nike Class BC - The Shark (measured in offensive capabilities) might be a classed a BC.

We've already seen multiple classes in the fleet - namely the Ghost class of scouts. I don't know if intermediate ship classes of Spider drive ships necessarily make sense. The MAN will need to define roles and design ships to fill them. If so, given it's known deficiencies, a spider patrol ship (for example) might not make sense, in the same reason that wet navy Cruisers never received true successful submarine versions of themselves (using the argument that a WWII submarine is a tactical fork of the Torpedo Boat Destroyer line)- the concept did not provide a feasible replacement for the big gun cruiser, and not followed.