GA-League War lessons learned

cthia wrote:As a matter of fact, if the SL foregoes the adoption of LACs in favor of escorts, and they manage to produce enormous numbers of them, then Manty doctrine which utilizes LACs will begin to show its weakness. Little wonder they are considering a CLAC that can stay with the fray.

Though if they don't also work out an effective anti-LAC doctrine then those escort warships are at risk of being cleared away by a surprise Shrike attack.

(Of course if they take the LAC route without also working out an effective anti-LAC doctrine then their screening LACs are vulnerable to being cleared away by a surprise Katana attack. And the SLN is likely quite ignorant of the GA's highly evolved anti-LAC tactics, or the existence of the Viper anti-LAC missile)

After all the SLN hasn't been great at piercing stealth, and until they improve their fleet acceleration and their ability to pick up stealthed ships, it shouldn't be too hard to sneak LACs as capable as RMN/GSN ones in to range to attack the screen without giving much (if any) warning.
And if you time the attack right you blow away much of the anti-missile screen just before they'd have begun engaging an inbound missile strike. Those missiles then giving the LACs cover to break away as the remaining SLN fleet would be too busy trying to survive the missile swarm to waste much time on LACs that have shot their bolt and are running clear.

cthia wrote:You are looking at it incompletely. LACs prevented the RMN from putting too many eggs in one basket. Lose one LAC and you lose a lot less personnel than you do with a traditional screening element. Finding the bodies to man them is just one aspect of it.

A polity the size of the SL naturally inherits and adopts vastly different doctrines than the rest of the Galaxy. And rightly so. Not only can it afford to do so, it makes good sense for them to use the overabundant resources they have been given as a weapon. They simply do not have the same limitations as other combatants. I simply cannot see how it makes sense for the SL to build LACs when it does not need to. Traditional screening elements custom-built to meet the needs of the current battlefield will do just fine... in enormous numbers.

See above on affordability. That is not a given.

As to why it how it could make sense, I can see it. It might still be more cost/effective to build LACs like they grew in trees than destroyers.

Or... shudder... frigates.

As a matter of fact, if the SL foregoes the adoption of LACs in favor of escorts, and they manage to produce enormous numbers of them, then Manty doctrine which utilizes LACs will begin to show its weakness. Little wonder they are considering a CLAC that can stay with the fray.

The SL is a huge entity, and it knows it is a huge entity. It knows full-well how much it greatly outweighs and dwarfs its opponents. Their size has always fueled and explained their arrogance.

We don't know the size of the SL 2.0 after all is said and done. They'll still be the largest polity in the Galaxy by a wide margin, but how wide that is will have considerably narrowed. The SL was 1700 systems or thereabouts, while the Republic of Haven, the second biggest, was about a tenth of that. So an order of magnitude of difference.

But SL 2.0 may drop to 500 to 1000. Meanwhile, the Haven-Manticore Union will be 250 or more, depending on who else joins. So that may be as low as 2x bigger, only.

Whether they change their mentality after this change in paradigm is a whole other story, though.

Besides, I think trying to parrot the GA and build LACs will slow them down, because of the many technological advances they would have to overcome first. Quantity is its own quality. That has been at the center of their doctrine for centuries. It also prevents them from having to spread themselves thin protecting their huge periphery. Overwhelming size makes a very effective deterrent. I like the idea of huge numbers of traditional escorts, that is more in keeping with the SLN's speed. And current capability.

Agreed. Building old-style or even moderately improved LACs is worse than doing nothing. It subtracts from available building capacity, diverts funds and mindshare, and adds incredibly to the bureaucracy. They mustn't build a LAC model in quantity unless it's got something for it.

Assuming that they manage to get something close to pre-GA Haven LACs, like the Cimeterre class, they can begin ramping up production. That's a proven ship type and they can make up for the deficiencies in quality with quantity.

Coming up with a missile-defence escort will require more R&D than coming up with their LAC knock-offs. I think the SLN should invest in trying to find different paths that better match their advantages, than simply assuming a copy of what worked for Haven and Manticore is the best way. But until they have proven the new roles with prototypes, they have to do something and copying is an easy way to get started.

And yes, it may take five years for the SL to roll out the first designs from concept to contrails. But that includes R&D and ironing out the kinks. But once they hit their stride, they'll be shitting them out like they got diarrhea.

That's exactly my point: they can't wait 5 years to get started on building a modern Navy.

Plus, consider the GA's LACs. They got three different designs to accomplish three different tactics, something an escort can do naturally. And there is no need to build transports for escorts. You also have to expect that SL ECM will get significantly better, augmenting that enormous missile defense, afforded by huge numbers of escorts supported by new technologies, and newly adopted supporting doctrine and tactics. At any rate, I would imagine that even the RMN would have elected to seed the Galaxy like flies with an enormous number of escorts instead of LACs if it had the choice.

If all else were equal, yes, better to have a hyper-capable and better-armoured ship.

It isn't and will never be. A destroyer will always cost more than a LAC, both initially and in operating costs. It will always require more personnel.

How many are equivalent is difficult to say. A destroyer as an escort for the wall has a very different ratio to LACs compared to when they're used as in-system scouts.

And let us not forget the most obvious advantage the SL has that neither Manticore or Haven rarely ever had. They are not at war with enemy forces chewing up their arms and legs with threats of imminent invasion. They have all the time in the galaxy.

No they don't.

There are multiple reasons why they have to act quickly and not take their sweet time.

The first and most obvious is that neither their population nor their politicians will let them. They want results NOW. Yesterday, if possible. They've been humiliated and reduced to second-rate navy. They must restore their proeminence.

Second, the SLN itself knows it can't continue with a snail pace, otherwise it'll never catch up. It can't make long-term plans assuming the GA/Union will always be nice to them (it can't make short terms with that assumption either). They need to ramp up quickly.

Third, there will be some warlords and other navies trying to take advantage of the chaos. Right now, the only people with better hardware than the SL is the GA/Union and the GA has no intention of conquering systems from the League. But it won't be long before knock-offs start coming off the line somewhere. The SLN will need to develop something to defend its remaining systems with, lest the SL continue shedding members like dandruff.

And a special case of that is the MAlign, known to the SLN as "The Other Guys." Even if the SL and SLN leadership does not believe the GA's explanation of the MAlign's objective to destroy the SL, they know someone is out there. And they know this someone has technology in advance of theirs and none of their best interests in mind.

Fourth and finally, even if all of the above weren't true, they will be at war soon with the MAlign. We know that, even if they don't.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Assuming that they manage to get something close to pre-GA Haven LACs, like the Cimeterre class, they can begin ramping up production. That's a proven ship type and they can make up for the deficiencies in quality with quantity.

Coming up with a missile-defence escort will require more R&D than coming up with their LAC knock-offs. I think the SLN should invest in trying to find different paths that better match their advantages, than simply assuming a copy of what worked for Haven and Manticore is the best way. But until they have proven the new roles with prototypes, they have to do something and copying is an easy way to get started.

Can you elaborate on why a missile-defense escort would take more R&D than bringing their LACs up to Cimeterre levels?
While not up to Shrike/Ferret levels the Cimeterre had greatly improved acceleration, tougher sidewalls, and missiles designed specifically for anti-LAC anti-missile usage via the "Triple Ripple". (And that was before the Alpha and Beta variants which IIRC picked up fission plants and bow walls; with the Alpha trading away many of it's missiles for a big spinal laser)

That's a couple of significant research breakthroughs before the League can produce a LAC in that class.

Yet I'd think your basic anti-missile escort would be as simple as taking, say, a current CL design like their Morrigan-class and deleting more or all broadside missile tubes and energy mounts and replacing them with as many CM tubes and PDLC mounts as possible (and pasting on more CM fire control links as needed). Then put in more CM magazines in place of the no longer necessary offensive missile magazines.

There's a bit of development - but all the parts are existing off the shelf, so there wouldn't seem to be any research of new technology or improved hardware to be done.


Okay, still sticking with off the shelf parts you could probably improve that further by making the design with at least BC grade PDLCs instead of just more of the CL mounts the current Morrigan class carries.

And of course improved hardware would help. It'd be great if the CM launcher cycle time could be improved to anywhere close to GA times (IIRC the GA launchers are capable of over 5 times as many rounds per minute). And while you're at it it'd be a good upgrade to support a larger CM, one built around a Cataphract 2nd stage extended range CM drive.

But those aren't strictly necessary for a first gen anti-missile escort.

So what am I missing?
What extra research does such an escort require that a Cimeterre level LAC wouldn't?

Jonathan_S wrote:Can you elaborate on why a missile-defense escort would take more R&D than bringing their LACs up to Cimeterre levels?

Sure. If you want to copy a Cimiterre, you have a template: the Cimiterre. You can probably obtain sufficient scans and you've seen them in action. There may be a lot of R&D to make the reactors work inside that small hull, but Haven managed to do it, I have no doubt the League could in some time.

But if you want a missile-defence escort, you have no template. What can they copy? What is the best displacement-to-missile throw weight ratio? How many tubes are sufficient? Where's the inflection point for when it's good enough but cheap enough?

I'm not saying making a Cimiterre knock-off is easy. I'm saying it's much easier than coming up with something radically new and not proven by anyone else before.

While not up to Shrike/Ferret levels the Cimeterre had greatly improved acceleration, tougher sidewalls, and missiles designed specifically for anti-LAC anti-missile usage via the "Triple Ripple". (And that was before the Alpha and Beta variants which IIRC picked up fission plants and bow walls; with the Alpha trading away many of it's missiles for a big spinal laser)

That's a couple of significant research breakthroughs before the League can produce a LAC in that class.

Not necessarily. The SLN can make their own acceleration-limited LACs until they crack that secret. It's also only a matter of time until civilian designs of new-generation compensators start showing up, if they haven't. They won't be as good as military-grade GA hardware, but they'll be better than what the rest of the Galaxy has. Sidewalls may be a simple matter of pushing more power through the generators. Bow or stern walls are not a difficult thing either, once you realise they are a good idea. Bucklers may not be either, once you get scans off them.

In all, it doesn't have to be as good as a Cimiterre. It's just a knock-off. But it's a light warship that they can use to train crews on, develop their CLAC strategies, and also deploy in large quantities to defend their systems against any wannabe warlords seeking to profit from the confusion. They're also cheap, so if they come up with something better later, it's not a huge investment lost.

Yet I'd think your basic anti-missile escort would be as simple as taking, say, a current CL design like their Morrigan-class and deleting more or all broadside missile tubes and energy mounts and replacing them with as many CM tubes and PDLC mounts as possible (and pasting on more CM fire control links as needed). Then put in more CM magazines in place of the no longer necessary offensive missile magazines.

There's a bit of development - but all the parts are existing off the shelf, so there wouldn't seem to be any research of new technology or improved hardware to be done.

Maybe. Or maybe not and that's the issue. There is no proven design for missile-defence escort to copy and learn from. Nothing whose mistakes and successes will point the right way.

They should explore this venue, no doubt. I'm simply saying it'll require far more simulation and a few prototypes. And then they have to run all this past the accountants: how much does it cost to make one and build? Is it cheaper, tonne-for-tonne or in level of defence, than a LAC? Or lots of crappy LACs?

Especially if they come up with CVEs to carry those crappy LACs to the battle. There is no new expertise needed to get CVEs made from civilian freighter designs. Upgrade them with military-grade compensators so they can pull maybe 250 gravities, then build lots of them and lots of LACs.

Quantity is a quality of its own, after all.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Especially if they come up with CVEs to carry those crappy LACs to the battle. There is no new expertise needed to get CVEs made from civilian freighter designs. Upgrade them with military-grade compensators so they can pull maybe 250 gravities, then build lots of them and lots of LACs.

Quantity is a quality of its own, after all.

And basically end up with a Wayfarer minus the broadside and pod armament. With more LACs stuffed into the cargo space freed up by deleting the missile and energy weapons.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Can you elaborate on why a missile-defense escort would take more R&D than bringing their LACs up to Cimeterre levels?

Sure. If you want to copy a Cimiterre, you have a template: the Cimiterre. You can probably obtain sufficient scans and you've seen them in action. There may be a lot of R&D to make the reactors work inside that small hull, but Haven managed to do it, I have no doubt the League could in some time.

Would they? When would SLN forces have gotten close enough to Cimiterres in action (much less then survived to bring their scans back to the League)?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But if you want a missile-defence escort, you have no template. What can they copy? What is the best displacement-to-missile throw weight ratio? How many tubes are sufficient? Where's the inflection point for when it's good enough but cheap enough?

I'm not saying making a Cimiterre knock-off is easy. I'm saying it's much easier than coming up with something radically new and not proven by anyone else before.

While not up to Shrike/Ferret levels the Cimeterre had greatly improved acceleration, tougher sidewalls, and missiles designed specifically for anti-LAC anti-missile usage via the "Triple Ripple". (And that was before the Alpha and Beta variants which IIRC picked up fission plants and bow walls; with the Alpha trading away many of it's missiles for a big spinal laser)

That's a couple of significant research breakthroughs before the League can produce a LAC in that class.

Not necessarily. The SLN can make their own acceleration-limited LACs until they crack that secret. It's also only a matter of time until civilian designs of new-generation compensators start showing up, if they haven't. They won't be as good as military-grade GA hardware, but they'll be better than what the rest of the Galaxy has. Sidewalls may be a simple matter of pushing more power through the generators. Bow or stern walls are not a difficult thing either, once you realise they are a good idea. Bucklers may not be either, once you get scans off them.

LACs acceleration wasn't held back by their compensators; otherwise they'd have still been the quickest accelerating pre-Grayson warships (due to being the smallest and lowest mass); whereas they were actually the slowest.

The problem was, until Manticore cracked the improved impeller nodes/Beta squared nodes (and Haven cracked whatever their counterpart was), nobody had figured out how to squeeze full power impeller rings into something as small as a LAC and still leave any worthwhile combat capability.
(And if you made it large enough to get a pair of full power beta rings plus useful combat capability you'd edged up into corvette territory; larger and more expensive than a LAC)
So even if civilian versions of improved compensators leak out (which I tend to think the GA will be able to prevent for a while yet) that won't help with LAC acceleration until the League figures out some way to shoehorn more powerful nodes into something that small without cutting into its combat capability.

If LACs had had the wedge power to accelerate up to what their size and mass says a pre-Grayson compensator should hit they'd be about 33% quicker than any were. To put it another way, classic LACs could accelerate around 409 gees, while the LACs Honor to to Silesia could pull 573.2 gees. But crunching the numbers sow that those Project 282 LACs got almost 95% of the improvement in acceleration due to the impellers; not the improved compensator.


IIRC that weak wedge power (the only ship that runs out of acceleration before maxing out its compensator) is also a large part of its weak sidewall. One thing that let the improved LACs Honor took to Silesia have tougher sidewalls was that they were tied into a far stronger wedge.


Research into miniaturizing more powerful impellers; that's a level of effort seems like it'd take a lot longer (and breakthroughs have unpredictable timing; so there's more uncertainty in your development schedule) than the development effort of simply deciding on an adequate balance of existing weapons systems in an escort.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:In all, it doesn't have to be as good as a Cimiterre. It's just a knock-off. But it's a light warship that they can use to train crews on, develop their CLAC strategies, and also deploy in large quantities to defend their systems against any wannabe warlords seeking to profit from the confusion. They're also cheap, so if they come up with something better later, it's not a huge investment lost.

Yet I'd think your basic anti-missile escort would be as simple as taking, say, a current CL design like their Morrigan-class and deleting more or all broadside missile tubes and energy mounts and replacing them with as many CM tubes and PDLC mounts as possible (and pasting on more CM fire control links as needed). Then put in more CM magazines in place of the no longer necessary offensive missile magazines.

There's a bit of development - but all the parts are existing off the shelf, so there wouldn't seem to be any research of new technology or improved hardware to be done.

Maybe. Or maybe not and that's the issue. There is no proven design for missile-defence escort to copy and learn from. Nothing whose mistakes and successes will point the right way.

They should explore this venue, no doubt. I'm simply saying it'll require far more simulation and a few prototypes. And then they have to run all this past the accountants: how much does it cost to make one and build? Is it cheaper, tonne-for-tonne or in level of defence, than a LAC? Or lots of crappy LACs?

Especially if they come up with CVEs to carry those crappy LACs to the battle. There is no new expertise needed to get CVEs made from civilian freighter designs. Upgrade them with military-grade compensators so they can pull maybe 250 gravities, then build lots of them and lots of LACs.

Quantity is a quality of its own, after all.

Thanks for explaining.
I'm still unconvinced that a significantly improved LAC is an easy bit of research for them. Possible to do eventually; sure. But it might take a months or even a few years to get the necessary tech ready to be deployed into a useful new design.


Now if all you want is a LAC with the offensive weapons ripped out and more CMs and PDLC mounted; well that seems straightforward - as you're not waiting for research on improvements in compensators, sidewalls, etc. (But then, I also think it's straightforward to make that same kind of swap out on an actual hyper capable warship design . Though I do admit that you've got lower sunk costs if you build what turns out to be a batch of suboptimal LACs than if you do the same on a class of suboptimal CL(E)s ["E" for escort])

Jonathan_S wrote:Would they? When would SLN forces have gotten close enough to Cimiterres in action (much less then survived to bring their scans back to the League)?

Espionage. Now that they know it exists, they can put the effort into getting more info about LAC designs. They were used in a lot of systems during the wars and are now in use in many backwater systems in the GA. It's completely feasible to bribe some people to get scans or parts of one, or even make one disappear.

The reason I talked about the Cimiterre instead of Shrike, Ferret or Katana is that the Havenite technology of 1918 is much closer to what the SL has now than whatever made the Manticoran/Grayson LACs of 1912. Other than that, they should get scans of those too.

LACs acceleration wasn't held back by their compensators; otherwise they'd have still been the quickest accelerating pre-Grayson warships (due to being the smallest and lowest mass); whereas they were actually the slowest.

The problem was, until Manticore cracked the improved impeller nodes/Beta squared nodes (and Haven cracked whatever their counterpart was), nobody had figured out how to squeeze full power impeller rings into something as small as a LAC and still leave any worthwhile combat capability.

Thanks, I stand corrected.

But right now the SLN ships are also slow. They don't need their LACs to pull more than 300 gravities if their SDs and the CVEs that brought them can't get much higher above that. As they improve the compensators and impellers on the bigger ships, they should be able to scale down too.

And what I meant is that 1000 snail-pace LACs may be better than nothing.

On the other hand, it might be true that this design is not feasible for the SLN at all, until they crack the more powerful nodes. If their LACs can't pull 200 gravities, they're useless as escorts and as missile defence. In that case, the SLN would need to make the smallest ship that can keep pace with the wall and if it can't be carried as a parasite, it needs to be hyper-capable.

I'm still unconvinced that a significantly improved LAC is an easy bit of research for them. Possible to do eventually; sure. But it might take a months or even a few years to get the necessary tech ready to be deployed into a useful new design.


Now if all you want is a LAC with the offensive weapons ripped out and more CMs and PDLC mounted; well that seems straightforward - as you're not waiting for research on improvements in compensators, sidewalls, etc. (But then, I also think it's straightforward to make that same kind of swap out on an actual hyper capable warship design . Though I do admit that you've got lower sunk costs if you build what turns out to be a batch of suboptimal LACs than if you do the same on a class of suboptimal CL(E)s ["E" for escort])

Significantly improved may be a long time off, indeed. The question would be how quickly they can get to good enough to get started, for iterative improvements.

There are a lot of questions here we can't answer; only David can.

The original question in this thread was what the SLN could do to catch up or leapfrog the GA. I don't think there's any way for us to answer the latter. At best, we can say "copy what they did" and then the SLN will always be behind, though with lower costs.

So far, the only people who have decided to get out of the box has been the MAN. Everyone else is basically using the same doctrine with different variations, tech and skill levels.

There are other ways to do stuff that might be considered. For example, build a missile without a compensator. Now you have essentially unlimited run-time at fully variable acceleration, not a multi-stage missile. Though you might well hide that for a while...

You could, if you have a huge number of SD scale SDMs laying around (like the SL), turn them onto a boost platform for CMs to provide an outer layer of missile defense. IF you can force people to expend their fancy penaids at 10 million KM out it can't help their chance of hitting.

If your dominating reason for running LACs is to provide missile defense you can probably do that with unmanned platforms running micro-fusion reactors to provide additional sensors, CMs and PDLCs. These will be smaller, cheaper and not require crew. You could probably attach a good number to regular ships.

Or the idea mentioned previously that you build lots and lots of highly capable DDs instead of LACs. These are much more useful outside of a war given the several thousand planets they need to support.

There are certainly lots more that I haven't mentioned or thought of.

Sigs wrote:I don't see how the LAC's help with the warm bodies limitations. There is a carrier with a crew of at least 1,000 people and 120 LAC's with a crew of 10 each. That right there is 2,200 people. Building a destroyer that is exclusively anti missile unit with maximum automation can save a lot on the manpower.

Well, the way Sollies would build one it probably would. But the Minotaur class carriers had a core crew of 650, plus a thousand in the LAC crews (probably with a few additional warm bodies attached to the wing rather than the carrier's core crew). The Hydra variant would probably have an even smaller core crew (no energy weapons to man) but make up for it in the 1200 (+ attachments) in the LAC wing.

very interesting thread.

after reading it all I'm inclined to agree that a DD(E) seems more easily done then an LAC that is as good as even a cimetere let alone a shrike.

of course costs are something else and that may make LACs and cheap light carriers more appealing.

Though I have doubts about the Sollies stealing any data. ONI was a joke and do we think the MAlign left the other intel agencies alone?

sure the Malign focused on getting idiots to high level positions who would ignore things when competent subordinates brought them things that disagreed with their view of the galaxy. even after a house cleaning it will take a while, probably a couple of years to get intel and intel black ops up to a decent level. assuming furry lie detectors in manticore etc don't make it even harder.

time the Svery likely LN doesn't have. at the very least some warlords/ independence fights even if the Malign are too busy with what trouble Zilwick, Cachat and Firebarnd are going to cause them, to openly attack the SL.

Jonathan's quick and dirty DD(E) or CL(E) while not as good as a platform designed from scratch, it will be a useful stopgap until the proper design can be designed and built.

The idea of a keyhole type platform full or CM and PD might be the best of both worlds but have they seen it in action? most the data they have is data the GA gave them so will likely have been sanitised of things like Keyhole, assuming it was even spotted given only the ships that hit the MBS are about the only ones to have fired on ships equipped with Keyhole and THEY didn't send any data back and I don't believe the GA gave them the data from that encounter.

Things will change now that they've been hit in the face with a wet fish but the SLN has been change averse for so long that finding people (who aren't Malign) to kick start new ideas might be hard, though I suppose Honor probably released the geeks from R&D @ Jupiter after copying and wiping the databanks. even then they were still focusing on a better missile and only slightly on surviving to fire missiles.