When you're a hammer: MAlign blind spots

munroburton wrote:LDs aren't going to be that eggshelly. If they resemble forts, they are definitely not eggshells but something that has to be pounded into wreckage with large gobs of firepower. Since SVW, we know multiple battlecruisers don't perform that well against single dreadnoughts - and a LD is likely to be exponentially tougher than that single dreadnought, if less maneuverable.

Though SVW that was pretty much the worst possible scenario for the peep BCs - dropping out of hyper, tightly grouped, already within energy weapons range of the DN, and only 4 of them.

That's about 1.2 million tons of BC vs 6 or so million tons of DN. But it hardly mattered because they were in energy range and due to surprise lacked the time to even roll behind their wedges and make it a missile fight.


But a full squadron of BCs - in free space - could have given a single DN a very hard time. But they'd have to do it smart -- keep it a missile duel and split up so it was having to deal with missiles coming in from all angles, so it couldn't interpose its wedge or sidewalls against all of them.

And at Hancock we saw BCs (admittedly with traps set and a tech edge) quite roughly handle a large force of DNs with escorts.


An LD is probably tough - but against massed strikes of Apollo from entire SD(P) squadrons? I doubt it's that tough. At that point it's on the wrong end of the mass imbalance and its likely to get battered to pieces before it can drive off or destroy all its attackers.
(Which doesn't mater if it picks its fights intelligently as, short of the final assault on Darius, its stealth should mean it has the option to not engage if that might mean picking a fight with that much firepower)

Jonathan_S wrote:
An LD is probably tough - but against massed strikes of Apollo from entire SD(P) squadrons? I doubt it's that tough. At that point it's on the wrong end of the mass imbalance and its likely to get battered to pieces before it can drive off or destroy all its attackers.
(Which doesn't mater if it picks its fights intelligently as, short of the final assault on Darius, its stealth should mean it has the option to not engage if that might mean picking a fight with that much firepower)

LD's give smaller ships like BC's even more of a maneuver advantage than other warships of its' size. The Spider drive makes them even slower than the slowest SD or DN.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Spider Drive and their stealth systems are good. Blah, blah, blah.

That 'invisibility' only works until they fire and give their opponents a means of back-tracing the incoming fire and getting a vector to flood with Ghost Riders so they can get a final targeting solution.

Heck, several pod's worth of Mk23's sent down range on that vector to 'recon by fire' would work, too. Apollos have FTL links that work both ways, right? That's a threat that must be honored (nobody just takes a hit from a Mk23 that isn't necessary), and, if they get close enough to be a threat, then the LD's defenses are going to have to engage. When they fire, the Apollo will update the mother ship and that fixes them on a course at a given speed. That's when they get swamped a serious volley.

What I can't wrap my head around is that using the LD's to go around and wreck different starsystems will make EVERYONE sit up and take notice.

In short, anyone who goes around using graser-torps launched from a platform that is virtually undetectable are essentially saying "You know, the Manties where right, the MAlign is still around".

From a strategic viewpoint it doesn't make any sense unless the MAlign think they can power through any resistance that will pop up. They will need total victory against any military threat so they can go ahead with their plan and essentially rule the galaxy as supermen.

Jonathan_S wrote:An LD is probably tough - but against massed strikes of Apollo from entire SD(P) squadrons? I doubt it's that tough. At that point it's on the wrong end of the mass imbalance and its likely to get battered to pieces before it can drive off or destroy all its attackers.
(Which doesn't mater if it picks its fights intelligently as, short of the final assault on Darius, its stealth should mean it has the option to not engage if that might mean picking a fight with that much firepower)

Agreed, but that's the point I'm trying to make. To deal with a LD, you'll need those SD(P) squadrons probably supported by a CLAC squadron stuffed with recon assets. They're only going to be present at first-tier targets(which is one reason why those targets may require as much time to prepare as Oyster Bay), but anyone else doesn't have these.

And as you point out, the LD is not supposed to tangle with entire battle fleets. They steer away from those.

Though SVW that was pretty much the worst possible scenario for the peep BCs - dropping out of hyper, tightly grouped, already within energy weapons range of the DN, and only 4 of them.

That's about 1.2 million tons of BC vs 6 or so million tons of DN. But it hardly mattered because they were in energy range and due to surprise lacked the time to even roll behind their wedges and make it a missile fight.


But a full squadron of BCs - in free space - could have given a single DN a very hard time. But they'd have to do it smart -- keep it a missile duel and split up so it was having to deal with missiles coming in from all angles, so it couldn't interpose its wedge or sidewalls against all of them.

And at Hancock we saw BCs (admittedly with traps set and a tech edge) quite roughly handle a large force of DNs with escorts.

Hancock kind of demonstrates my point too, though. Its defending Task Group knew they were never going to stop an entire DN squadron, was planning to retreat and only dealt with two out of seven dreadnoughts before Danislav arrived to level the playing field.

That's the best some second-tier system with a bunch of battlecruisers can hope to do against an invader of forty to fifty million tons. And that's if they know it's coming.

munroburton wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:An LD is probably tough - but against massed strikes of Apollo from entire SD(P) squadrons? I doubt it's that tough. At that point it's on the wrong end of the mass imbalance and its likely to get battered to pieces before it can drive off or destroy all its attackers.
(Which doesn't mater if it picks its fights intelligently as, short of the final assault on Darius, its stealth should mean it has the option to not engage if that might mean picking a fight with that much firepower)

Agreed, but that's the point I'm trying to make. To deal with a LD, you'll need those SD(P) squadrons probably supported by a CLAC squadron stuffed with recon assets. They're only going to be present at first-tier targets(which is one reason why those targets may require as much time to prepare as Oyster Bay), but anyone else doesn't have these.

And as you point out, the LD is not supposed to tangle with entire battle fleets. They steer away from those.

Though SVW that was pretty much the worst possible scenario for the peep BCs - dropping out of hyper, tightly grouped, already within energy weapons range of the DN, and only 4 of them.

That's about 1.2 million tons of BC vs 6 or so million tons of DN. But it hardly mattered because they were in energy range and due to surprise lacked the time to even roll behind their wedges and make it a missile fight.


But a full squadron of BCs - in free space - could have given a single DN a very hard time. But they'd have to do it smart -- keep it a missile duel and split up so it was having to deal with missiles coming in from all angles, so it couldn't interpose its wedge or sidewalls against all of them.

And at Hancock we saw BCs (admittedly with traps set and a tech edge) quite roughly handle a large force of DNs with escorts.

Hancock kind of demonstrates my point too, though. Its defending Task Group knew they were never going to stop an entire DN squadron, was planning to retreat and only dealt with two out of seven dreadnoughts before Danislav arrived to level the playing field.

That's the best some second-tier system with a bunch of battlecruisers can hope to do against an invader of forty to fifty million tons. And that's if they know it's coming.

But the 100 Million credit question has always been why do you need 4 x 15Mton stealth capital ships to wack a 2nd tier system? there are plenty of easier and cheaper ways to do so (like the old 7 DN squadron in the example above). If they aren't supposed to go against a battle fleet, you could attack the orbitals another way for far cheaper, and they are total over-kill with far cheaper solutions for the 2nd tier on down, What are they for? Why even build them?

Theemile wrote:But the 100 Million credit question has always been why do you need 4 x 15Mton stealth capital ships to wack a 2nd tier system? there are plenty of easier and cheaper ways to do so (like the old 7 DN squadron in the example above). If they aren't supposed to go against a battle fleet, you could attack the orbitals another way for far cheaper, and they are total over-kill with far cheaper solutions for the 2nd tier on down, What are they for? Why even build them?

Well, you don't. Haven did just fine using battleships after all and OFS didn't even need that much. Both were ultimately derailed by first-rate star nations who became stubborn roadblocks, though.

The LDs are made for Oyster Bay operations against those first-tier targets. They're extremely cost-efficient compared to the quantities of wallers needed to break into something like the Manticore Binary System conventionally - we've seen how hard that is. Thomas Theisman sent two and a half billion tons of waller and failed. The Sollies sent three billion and that failed too.

The Detweilers sent a mere hundred and twenty million tons of spiderships and accomplished far more than almost six billion tons of waller. They don't want to fight those first-raters, they want to tug a metaphorical rug out from under them while engineering mutual conflict.

Being able to use them against secondary targets is more of an optional bonus. They could even decide to not use them against such, retaining the spider fleet for use against anyone that manages to become a major target again.

munroburton wrote:

Theemile wrote:But the 100 Million credit question has always been why do you need 4 x 15Mton stealth capital ships to wack a 2nd tier system? there are plenty of easier and cheaper ways to do so (like the old 7 DN squadron in the example above). If they aren't supposed to go against a battle fleet, you could attack the orbitals another way for far cheaper, and they are total over-kill with far cheaper solutions for the 2nd tier on down, What are they for? Why even build them?

Well, you don't. Haven did just fine using battleships after all and OFS didn't even need that much. Both were ultimately derailed by first-rate star nations who became stubborn roadblocks, though.

The LDs are made for Oyster Bay operations against those first-tier targets. They're extremely cost-efficient compared to the quantities of wallers needed to break into something like the Manticore Binary System conventionally - we've seen how hard that is. Thomas Theisman sent two and a half billion tons of waller and failed. The Sollies sent three billion and that failed too.

The Detweilers sent a mere hundred and twenty million tons of spiderships and accomplished far more than almost six billion tons of waller. They don't want to fight those first-raters, they want to tug a metaphorical rug out from under them while engineering mutual conflict.

Being able to use them against secondary targets is more of an optional bonus. They could even decide to not use them against such, retaining the spider fleet for use against anyone that manages to become a major target again.

Yeah, but a detailed look at the Yawatta Strike and the Beowulf raid shows that it's easy to get weapons like Hastas and Graser Torps delivered into a 1st tier system by mere freighters (the same freighters which dropped of Ghosts for scouting in OB could have dropped dozens of Gtorps instead.) When a weapons system has a loiter time of weeks or months, standard shipping can easily drop off such weapons in the vast of space 10s of light minutes from their targets when they are not observed, conduct "normal" business in system, and innocuously leave the system weeks before a strike occurs. Who needs a 15Mton uber weapon which could be caught and destroyed after a 3 month special insertion mission?

I remember the end of a cold war novel I read in my youth - the KGB "proved" that they could trump a US advanced space weapon system by showing two pictures - the first of a KGB officer in Full uniform standing in Red Square with his hand on a paint chipped 55" Gallon drum with a Russian NBC warning label on it, the Second of the same drum and the same KGB officer in the same pose, now wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses - while standing in front of the White House.

We fall in love with concepts - like that defeating a strong enemy requires an equally strong opponent. As far back as Sun Tsu, it's been pointed out that the best way to defeat a strong enemy is to oppose them where they are week. Like the Taliban has done for 170 years, snipe at the strong Empires who invade. kill them in their sleep, strike at them unconventionally, and wait for them to relax (and leave) before you strike.

If the low tech method accomplishes the same result, why invest in the expensive one.

munroburton wrote:LDs aren't going to be that eggshelly. If they resemble forts, they are definitely not eggshells but something that has to be pounded into wreckage with large gobs of firepower. Since SVW, we know multiple battlecruisers don't perform that well against single dreadnoughts - and a LD is likely to be exponentially tougher than that single dreadnought, if less maneuverable.

BCs and DNs have similar acceleration. The incident involving HMS Bellerophon was within energy range, so those BCs never stood a chance. You're right that you don't send a smaller ship, even a squadron of them, against a larger ship's energy range. Note not a single RMN/SLN engagement ended up in energy range.

With stand-off weapons, though, that's a different story. Yes, that LD can probably launch conventional missiles and has a lot of them. That's its defence, actually: it has to lure the BC squadrons to within its missile range and less than the time the BCs take to transition out into alpha, if it's caught out of the hyperlimit.

Unlike forts, the LD would be operating in enemy territory, far from resupply. And it's burdened by having alpha nodes and a hyper generator, so it doesn't have as deep an ammo stock as a fort does. It's also trying to approach a target, unlike a fort. So a fort strategy doesn't work for an LD.

Or it could just come all guns blazing in the open. Reinforcements for the defenders are going to take a couple of weeks to arrive, at the minimum. But this goes back to my point: would the MAN think of abandoning stealth in order to pursue military victory?

Those are not nice people. Against weaker targets, they can pop over the hyper wall quietly, fire from beyond the hyper limit and leave, to hell with the collateral damage. They only needed such severe reconaissance during Oyster Bay because they were operating on a shoestring and had to ensure every missile and every torpedo was precisely on target.

Close to the hyperlimit, they're going to be detected in almost any system. Catching torpedoes at that range is not going to be difficult.

If they were to flush missiles towards the planet and then leave, that might work. But are they going to go for blatant & explicit Eridani Edict Violations? From David's posts, we don't think this is going to happen. I don't know how they'll justify, though.

That would be why all wormhole nodes should be among the first-rank targets. Someone like Manticore is supposed to be sitting there reeling from Yawata 2.0 with Beowulf, San Martin and Basilisk immediately reporting the same attacks, then getting those dispatch boats arriving from everywhere screaming for aid over the next year.

Yawata 2.0 is unlikely to work on a Manticore tier one system, or Haven or New Berlin, Grayson or Beowulf. The same strategy is unlikely to work twice. So how do they attack those systems?

If the good guys start from scratch, they're going to need closer to that thousand years - or they can find yet another long-lost colony with several billion humans prepared to go to war.

Population growth is not that difficult if you have an impetus. None of the diaspora of Mankind seem to have had it. There's no reason why they couldn't match or outpace Darius if they needed to, with no slaves required. Especially with prolong, where your average human is going to remain productive and reproductive for 300 years.

It's going to take centuries, agreed. But I don't think it needs to come close to a thousand.

Jonathan_S wrote:An LD is probably tough - but against massed strikes of Apollo from entire SD(P) squadrons? I doubt it's that tough. At that point it's on the wrong end of the mass imbalance and its likely to get battered to pieces before it can drive off or destroy all its attackers.
(Which doesn't mater if it picks its fights intelligently as, short of the final assault on Darius, its stealth should mean it has the option to not engage if that might mean picking a fight with that much firepower)

If the LD CO dosen't like the odds he hypers out. Poof. No signature on real space.

So now that the entire security force is looking in the wrong place the LDs come back somewhere else in an hour or so.

kzt wrote:If the LD CO dosen't like the odds he hypers out. Poof. No signature on real space.

So now that the entire security force is looking in the wrong place the LDs come back somewhere else in an hour or so.

Yes, it can hyper out any time the captain doesn't like the odds. The LD can choose not to engage. So long as there are no missiles striking within the next 4 minutes, because otherwise the hyper generators won't have time. That's true of any ship, but any other capital ship is not travelling alone.

The problem is coming back. If the LD hypers in anywhere close to the hyper limit, it's going to stick out like a sore thumb in any of hundreds of systems. No stealth. The defending force can move into a position to block an attack it can see any time.

The question is whether that force is sufficient. And for the purposes of this thread: whether the MAN trains its captains for a military, overt solution, as opposed to a sneaky, covert one. An LD is a huge amount of fire power, both offensively and defensively, and can probably barrel through any third-rate system's BC squadron or smaller. Those won't have good ships or well-trained crews either.

But that won't work in tier one or tier two systems. And it's still a military operation.

Will they do it?