Attacking Darius:

cthia wrote:
If you cannot detect it, it is pretty much graser proof. Unless you get lucky. If you are going to need luck to defeat your enemy, bring along your own body bags.

Yup. It is totally unimportant how good your weapons are if you can never find a target for them. Space is very, very big. If you don't know exactly where the enemy is you can't effectively attack the enemy. But they know where you are and can target you. This often leads to bad outcomes.

Worse still is if the only way you know they are present is when your ships start to explode. Which is where the RMN is, but apparently is either in ignorance or denial of this issue.

cthia wrote:Let's think about it. The biggest complaints about the LDs is that they appear to be glass cannons, and that they are slow comparatively, as subs are.

I wouldn't call them glass cannons. They could be as big and tough as Galton's doomforts. If so, they can still be killed once located and crucially, they cannot escape detection in the way that a submarine can. "Diving" into hyperspace could buy a LD some time, but the more massive it is - the longer its hyper generator will take to cycle and unlike surface ships, conventional Honorverse warships can make this "dive" too.

Another thing. The RMN (and any other navy at the very least, I suppose) designs its warships and doctrines around its own weapons. If the LDs are designed to withstand its own weapons, wouldn't that nullify the charge of the glass cannon?

At the end of TEiF, we're told that the GA is bringing unmanned LACs out next. An unmanned Shrike is basically a graser torpedo - far more powerful than the Alignment's light-cruiser graser torpedoes being fired by the Lenny Ds.

You can't hit what you can't see. Historically, subs had to be found. And during the time of the wet navy, at least the direction of the attack was known because of the side of the ship which exploded. And in those times, only 25% of the sphere mattered. In space, you have to locate an invisible prey in 100% of the battlefield. You can't fight blind.

Yes. The Alignment's secret weapon is totally reliant on this point of failure - not being found in the tactical theater. If it happens within a hyper limit of a major opponent where they can't even "dive", there is no win-scenario for the spidership, which can only surrender or die at that point, regardless of the damage it can inflict. It can't move fast enough to break contact. An egghead inventing a new sensor or a tac witch figuring out how to reuse an ancient sensor dooms them utterly.

Given what we know of the Spiders, the Alignment is coming dangerously close to replicating the People's Navy's old doctrine of winning on the first salvo. That may work for around 90% of potential targets, but it's just not good enough against a Navy prepared to slug it out and which has many of the tools it would need for Anti-Spider Warfare.

I think there's something about the implications of Apollo FTL fire control which alarmed Albrecht, beyond its ability to smash the Havenite and Solarian Navies. RFC was kind enough to have Tenth Fleet possibly demonstrate that other ability in a training exercise, where they fired an Apollo pod preceding and another following the main salvo in order to better penetrate their target's defenses and then assess the aftermath.

The essence of which is that Manticore can make recon drones capable of reaching .8c in barely ten minutes and can communicate with them at the speed of the alpha wall. They have the launch systems to fling literally thousands of those things once they figure out to do it. They just haven't quite gotten that far yet.

If those "drones" can burn their drives out and go ballistic before entering a spider ship's gravitic sensor range, it may never see anything coming in time to do anything.

cthia wrote:Torpedos didn't have the skills that missiles do. Early torpedos could not track a target, and they had to make contact with the ship to explode. Honorverse missiles can be fired from below a ship but detonate on the side of the ship or even beyond. And if the ship is completely destroyed, who can report the direction of the attack anyway.

If you cannot detect it, it is pretty much graser proof. Unless you get lucky. If you are going to need luck to defeat your enemy, bring along your own body bags.

Good point about the graser torpedo.

However saying "that you cannot hit what you cannot see" is not normally what is meant by the phrase "designed to withstand its own weapons". If and when the author(s) introduce a spider drive sensor; then the fact that a spider dive ship cannot defend against graser fire will put the glass back into the glass cannon.

cthia wrote:My Spider senses are tingling at not taking Maddock's statement at face value. You are not really "taking on" a navy if you are simply going to rely on attacking when they are moored.

What I meant about taking Maddock's argument literally (and I literally mean literally here) is that he was not a trustworthy source. He was thinking about warships that hadn't been constructed, whose full-scale prototypes were only now just getting into service, for which doctrine did not yet exist, and which had never been tested under battle conditions. There's a good chance too that he had incomplete information of what was actually known, in addition to the fact that much was unknown. It's plausible that any weaknesses found in the design had not been communicated to him -- and this could be an honest thing, because those are prototypes and there's a good chance that the designers were still tweaking it. Finally, since this was a passage about his thoughts, not the trustworthy narrator's infodump, we have to accept exaggeration and boasting from him, and again this can be a completely honest reaction from the fact he's proud of what his Navy has accomplished.

Of course, it gets worse if he's a zealot, like the GAULs, but there's no indication he was and neither does Milliken seem to be. All indications are that he was a rational member of the Alignment (hyperrational even), as the zealot GAULs were looked down from the inner layers of the Onion.

You can't hit what you can't see. Historically, subs had to be found. And during the time of the wet navy, at least the direction of the attack was known because of the side of the ship which exploded. And in those times, only 25% of the sphere mattered. In space, you have to locate an invisible prey in 100% of the battlefield. You can't fight blind.

You can't hit what you can't see, but you can devise ways to find it. And yet you need to have some idea of where it is. The fact that the weapons in the LD are light-speed grasers means it must find itself within 1 million km, probably half a million, of the target it wants to hit.

I find that it being used as a launch platform for spider pods of missiles and graser torpedoes is far safer for the crew of the LD. They would always be far away from the targets when the targets are hit, possibly having never crossed into the hyperlimit.

munroburton wrote:Given what we know of the Spiders, the Alignment is coming dangerously close to replicating the People's Navy's old doctrine of winning on the first salvo. That may work for around 90% of potential targets, but it's just not good enough against a Navy prepared to slug it out and which has many of the tools it would need for Anti-Spider Warfare.

Interesting explanation. That goes in-line with what I've been pondering (see the When you're a hammer: MAlign blind spots thread).

But I don't know if that's correct. All indications so far are that the MAlign and the MAN have big blind spots in their military doctrine and/or, like you propose, they're planning on winning on the first battle. And yet, those holes are too obvious to have been missed. Since we know RFC likes to keep revelations up his sleeve, there may very well be more about the doctrine and the strengths of the spider ships that we don't know about. Or weaknesses everywhere else, for that matter.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:My Spider senses are tingling at not taking Maddock's statement at face value. You are not really "taking on" a navy if you are simply going to rely on attacking when they are moored.

What I meant about taking Maddock's argument literally (and I literally mean literally here) is that he was not a trustworthy source. He was thinking about warships that hadn't been constructed, whose full-scale prototypes were only now just getting into service, for which doctrine did not yet exist, and which had never been tested under battle conditions. There's a good chance too that he had incomplete information of what was actually known, in addition to the fact that much was unknown. It's plausible that any weaknesses found in the design had not been communicated to him -- and this could be an honest thing, because those are prototypes and there's a good chance that the designers were still tweaking it. Finally, since this was a passage about his thoughts, not the trustworthy narrator's infodump, we have to accept exaggeration and boasting from him, and again this can be a completely honest reaction from the fact he's proud of what his Navy has accomplished.

Of course, it gets worse if he's a zealot, like the GAULs, but there's no indication he was and neither does Milliken seem to be. All indications are that he was a rational member of the Alignment (hyperrational even), as the zealot GAULs were looked down from the inner layers of the Onion.

You can't hit what you can't see. Historically, subs had to be found. And during the time of the wet navy, at least the direction of the attack was known because of the side of the ship which exploded. And in those times, only 25% of the sphere mattered. In space, you have to locate an invisible prey in 100% of the battlefield. You can't fight blind.

You can't hit what you can't see, but you can devise ways to find it. And yet you need to have some idea of where it is. The fact that the weapons in the LD are light-speed grasers means it must find itself within 1 million km, probably half a million, of the target it wants to hit.

I find that it being used as a launch platform for spider pods of missiles and graser torpedoes is far safer for the crew of the LD. They would always be far away from the targets when the targets are hit, possibly having never crossed into the hyperlimit.

No the primary weapons of an LD are powered pod missiles and torpedoes. Both of which have an absurd stand-off range, as in light hours.

cthia wrote:Another thing. The RMN (and any other navy at the very least, I suppose) designs its warships and doctrines around its own weapons. If the LDs are designed to withstand its own weapons, wouldn't that nullify the charge of the glass cannon?

Only when they expect those warships to slug it out with their direct counterparts.

Now the RMN really does mostly build warships for mirror image fights -- though you might be able to quibble a little about the LACs.

But historic 20th century navies often didn't build all their warships that way. Very few ships that carried torpedoes, be they torpedo boats, destroyers, cruisers, or submarines, were designed to withstand a hit from a torpedo equivalent to the ones they carried. (And several USN subs were lost in WWII to malfunctions of their own torpedoes when they looped around and hit the sub -- and the sensor that was supposed to disable the warhead if the torpedo looped also failed)

There were a fair number of cruisers that weren't armored to withstand their own guns (at lot of the 8" gunned heavy cruisers only carried armor sufficient to blunt 6" gunfire).

Destroyers didn't carry any armor, beyond maybe some splinter protection; certainly not enough to stand up to their own 4-5.5" guns.

And many battlecruisers were famously not well protected against their own guns. Looks at probably the most robust of the RN battlecruisers at Jutland, HMS Tiger (1913) - she carried 13.5" guns and had a maximum belt armor of 9" - while the fist battleships carrying the same 13.5" weapons, the Orion-class, were deemed to need 12" of belt armor to withstand their own guns.

It was really only some cruisers, and then battleships, that were designed to be able to withstand their own guns (at expected, or reasonable, battle ranges)

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Another thing. The RMN (and any other navy at the very least, I suppose) designs its warships and doctrines around its own weapons. If the LDs are designed to withstand its own weapons, wouldn't that nullify the charge of the glass cannon?

Only when they expect those warships to slug it out with their direct counterparts.

Now the RMN really does mostly build warships for mirror image fights -- though you might be able to quibble a little about the LACs.

Because that's the type of war that the RMN expected to fight and the best specimens it could design to fight against were their own ships. The Havenites designed their ships not to fight their mirror images, but the RMN/GSN ships, which were qualitatively better than their own on a unit-by-unit basis.

But that doesn't mean the LDs are designed to fight their equal because that may not be the doctrine they are designed for. If they are designed as long-range stand-off weapon platforms, then they may not be designed to fight directly at all. We even have an example of that in the GA fleet: the CLACS.

So that brings back to their maybe having a single point of failure, that of remaining undetected.

kzt wrote:No the primary weapons of an LD are powered pod missiles and torpedoes. Both of which have an absurd stand-off range, as in light hours.

Indeed, but that weapon isn't sufficient if the inner system saw your hypering in those many light-hours away and therefore had half a day to prepare everything. It takes 15 hours for a torpedo launched from 2 light-hours away to reach its destination at 150 gravities, 10.6 hours for 1 light-hour. And this is assuming they flew in a direct line, which they wouldn't because that would place them in a very, very narrow cone and allow for interception.

An arrival 2 light-hours away takes just over 2 minutes to be noticed. If there's a QRF ready to go outside the hyperlimit, they can hyper out in less than 5 minutes, then travel in alpha at 62 * 700 pseudo-gravities for 53 minutes without turnover (because they reach only 0.07c in alpha, so they can translate down without slowing). That's 60 minutes response time if they stick to alpha.

If they instead go up to beta, they get 767 * 700 gravity pseudo-acceleration, so the transit takes 15 minutes. If it takes 10 minutes to cycle the hyper generators in alpha after the first translation, that's 2 + 5 + 10 + 15 + 10 = 42 minutes reaction time. Going to gamma doesn't help because the pseudo-acceleration multiplies by under 2, so the transit time reduces by roughly square root of 2 and that doesn't compensate the extra time to cycle the hypergenerators twice at this range.

That means those ships may find themselves being chased by the defenders before they could bring those unlimited-range stand-off weapons to bear. It's also the amount of time they have to deploy their weapons. It's likely (though not certain) that they are detectable while deploying the torpedoes because those their pod bay doors must be open, which compromises their stealth. In any case, we know that the spider powering up does emit a power spike, so they don't want to do that after the QRF has arrived.

cthia wrote:If you cannot detect it, it is pretty much graser proof. Unless you get lucky. If you are going to need luck to defeat your enemy, bring along your own body bags.

I don't think the LD can hide from a bunch of recon drones and I don't think it can shoot them down without exposing itself. A fast flyby would no doubt allow it to get the first shot but I don't think it can get that shot without the energy spillage being spotted.