Attacking Darius:

Brigade XO wrote:Alpha's make mistakes. They misjudge things. They have demonstrated they can jump the gun (use Oyster Bay to try & cripple Manticore & Grayson but end up creating the GA) and exposing the existence if not the tech of their most advanced weapons.

Those were abstract mistakes, and, as far as the MA were concerned considering the situation they were in, it was more like "six of one, half dozen of the other." Or "damned if we do damned if we don't." Plus, it was plot driven. I am sure the author knew that if the MA saved the opening attack until they were ready, it would be the Detweilerverse. The author likes the HV.

Having an LD materialize in the High Orbitals around Manticore to demand surrender would possibly have the LD look like a target full of arrow holes just before it disintegrated/vaporized as any RMN ship and some planetary weapons opened up on it.

I'm none too sure about that Brigade. First, they won't be decloaking to demand surrender. They wouldn't need to decloak to demand surrender, so why should they? Besides, that would be one of those tactical errors that I don't think an Alpha would make. Decloaking would open them up for a sucker punch even after the planet surrendered.

No wedge......humm. That would be like a WWII submarine surfacing to the survivor of a convoy and telling the crew to abandon ship so the sub could use it's deck gun to kill it only to discover it was facing a Q-ship commerce raider.......Naw, the Alignment Navy would stand off and kill people till it was all wrapped up.

The Sharks (that we know of) don't have any "defensive " armament. They were proof of concept pieces for the LDs. Sure, they can probably keep (or be required to be as relatively show as the LDs) but then the same sort of rules apply. Unless the Alignment has spider drive CM - slow bastards again the the speed of even conventional laser head missiles- when the Shark fires it will light it's pollution like a firework going off. If the Alignment keeps them in inventory as training but uses them for other strikes it would more likely like 3rd or 4th tier target systems and just do the same thing as Oyster Bay...blow the crap out of infrastruter from "invisible ships" from way far away. Not configured for any kind of escort duty that we have been told of.

I think tlb pointed out there is no reason they cannot be fitted with CMs.

Ghosts....again, no mention any defensive armament. And why would you deliberately sacrifice some of your most capable people as decoys?

To save an LD! I don't get everyone saying a Ghost should not be sacrificed because of the personnel aboard????

Honor did it all the time! The RMN did it all the time!

"Get those ships in closer!!!"

Mutual defense sacrificed the officers in the outer shell, to save Honor's bacon! Pavel Young wasn't having no part of being sacrificed.

LACs were definitely sacrificial lambs in the beginning; they are lambs now. They're just lambs that got teeth, but their doctrine is still to take enemy fire first!!! Take a bullet for the Commander. Sacrificing is the nature of an escort. Save those battleships!!!

They are also not configured for escort duty or possibly even self defense --remember, these are limited in speed to what the crews can survive without the compensation provided by a wedge----so even running is very low probability from as deep inside a hyper limit as they are used at to pinpoint targets. They are inteligence gathering and recon/scout ....kind of like photo recon aircraft in WW II....not armed (and not as relatively fast as say a photo/recon Spitfire or Mustang or any one of a number of other aircraft which were also flying at high altitude)....so they only survive if they are not discovered.

A Ghost's prowess is in its extreme innate stealth. I disagree they shouldn't tag along with the mission. Whereas an RD may be detected, a Ghost will not. And a Ghost has more autonomy.

Using LDs to "mine" lanes of a wormhole junction or just a wormhole mostly means sneaking in, dropping highly stealthed pods or G-Torps and then......communicating with them when you have targets for them. Then there is the loitering endurance limits on the pods or tropes-- you are unlikely to emplace them in ORBITS relative to the terminus for months due to power demands.

I don't know but the LD's seem to be primarily ways to shatter the orbitals and in-system fabrication & control facilities. The seem to be a way to vastly accelerated the fall of systems and multi-system governments by destroying their ability to support themselves and defend themselves in the face of almost any other group looking to take them over. Remember, the RF is/was supposed to be a rallying point for the collapsing SL and any other organized government trying to stave off a fall to Dark Ages. Destroy their ability to build/maintain warships or even any starships plus off-planet manufacturing and reproduce extraction and they are .....vunerable.
The Alignment doesn't care how many people are lilled in their attacks (the fine tuning of Oyster Bay NOT to hit planets was ONLY to avoid an EE event and draw in any kind of "favorable" attention of the SL. If they have "only" say, 20 LDs they can destroy the economies of 20 systems with ship building and major orbital manufacturing every (perhaps 4 months or so if you also provide the LDs with resupply ships using normal hyper dives to meet them soon after each attack then continue on to next target. If you hit 60 systems for Star Nations like Manticore, Beowulf, Grason, Erwhon, The Judean Leage, in a T-year you have chaos and economic ruin plus lack of defense. Pick off the leaders, then whittle down the rest till the RF sucked them into the Alignment philosophy and starts building the Alignment Continuum .

Billions of "normal" humans killed plus those who no longer can access Prolong and modern medicine....so what says the Alignment, they're only use is to make our compleat takeover happen.

LDs definitely are rear area masters, but I just cannot agree that that is their only reason for living.

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penny wrote:Upstream, I assumed Ghosts will always be used because they should be the stealthiest ship because they are the smallest ship. So a Ghost somewhat has stealth by design. And if they are already with the convoy, they can be sacrificed for the greater good.

Sure, if it becomes necessary. But you're not going to bring them for a role where you need a proper warship. Just bring a warship!

I understand "you fight with the weapons you have, not the weapons you wish you had." But that's not an excuse for not building armed escort ships (the role of a destroyer). It's short-sightedness.

And in this case, no one is talking about sacrificing the Ghost. In fact, it's a good ship for this role because it has a good chance of not needing to sacrificing itself.

penny wrote:LDs definitely are rear area masters, but I just cannot agree that that is their only reason for living.

I can agree that it makes little sense for them to have only one reason for living. That's a horrible design, because it's an expensive ship. If an enemy can overcome that Achilles heel, then it becomes useless.

The problem is we don't know what else it is good for and it's hard to speculate, because of lack of information. I say they have other uses in mind which we don't know about, which means they have other advantages or mitigations for the weaknesses that we equally don't know about.

And yet I wouldn't be surprised if they have a single use in mind, because they were created at the behest of the Detweilers, not proper military strategians.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Upstream, I assumed Ghosts will always be used because they should be the stealthiest ship because they are the smallest ship. So a Ghost somewhat has stealth by design. And if they are already with the convoy, they can be sacrificed for the greater good.

Sure, if it becomes necessary. But you're not going to bring them for a role where you need a proper warship. Just bring a warship!

I understand "you fight with the weapons you have, not the weapons you wish you had." But that's not an excuse for not building armed escort ships (the role of a destroyer). It's short-sightedness.

And in this case, no one is talking about sacrificing the Ghost. In fact, it's a good ship for this role because it has a good chance of not needing to sacrificing itself.

I agree about the need to have dedicated warships. However, doctrine is going to be completely different for this navy. I suggested long ago that we cannot judge this navy by GA standards. Everything will be different.

I was never advocating intentionally using a Ghost for the purpose of sacrificing it. I am just saying, per the tactical situations that will arise for this navy, they might need to sacrifice a ship to save an LD or more. The best ship to sacrifice will be the Ghost.

For the RMN, the best ship to sacrifice is a LAC or LACs.

penny wrote:Upstream, I assumed Ghosts will always be used because they should be the stealthiest ship because they are the smallest ship. So a Ghost somewhat has stealth by design. And if they are already with the convoy, they can be sacrificed for the greater good.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Sure, if it becomes necessary. But you're not going to bring them for a role where you need a proper warship. Just bring a warship!

I understand "you fight with the weapons you have, not the weapons you wish you had." But that's not an excuse for not building armed escort ships (the role of a destroyer). It's short-sightedness.

And in this case, no one is talking about sacrificing the Ghost. In fact, it's a good ship for this role because it has a good chance of not needing to sacrificing itself.

The only reason why a Shark might be slightly less stealthy than a Ghost is that it is bigger, but it is bigger because it's armed; so there is your proper escort for an LD. Why waste sacrificing people on a ship that cannot fight back? Don't waste a Ghost when a Shark might make the enemy pay more.

If the Ghosts and Sharks have defensive weapons and at least the Sharks have some offensive weapons other than the G-Torps and whatever driven ballistic packages were used Oyster Bay, then they could provide some escort capability. The problem is that they are limited by the ability of the crew to withstand even their relatively low acceleration capable of the Spider drives so that when they start defending themselves with CM and even shooting back with missiles that are non-spider driven.

Pending the revelation of several sets of spider drive CM or offensive missile weapons that have not yet been mentioned, there are things you could do. Like dropping pods and or missile like was done at the Hypatia System so the SLN would see where the missile lit off there drives rather than where the ship that ejected the missiles from the ships tubes using mass drivers or other non detectable launch methods and the location of the launch of any of the laid-down volleys will not give the opponent a read or a direction of where the warship actually is. Of course this gets to be an iffy game since you have to drop or propel you missies out such that they should be within range of your opponent as you are trying to creep (this is spider drive speeds) for the hyper limit. and you hope that you will do enough damage to those ships that could reach you before you get to the hyper limit can't effectively engage you.

How many points of data (where there are sensor reading that show where you WERE over time, does it take to let a good tactical officer (and their computer) project where your ship is "now" and where it is likely to be in x time at that obscenely low (for a even an SLN tech warship) acceleration with the trajectory it seems to be trying to make........throw a net of missiles in it's way and see what happens. If you get even one interception or defensive fire you now have a hot target to chase.

The Spider LDs really do appear to be stand-off ambush systems. Not designed to go after conventional warships but to pick off a system's ability to build or repair/maintain any kind of warship or even basic orbital fabrication industries. Drive them back to the Steam Age and deny them the ability to have interstellar trade to support their civilization.

For the Alignment it really doesn't matter how many people are killed or die of otherwise preventable problems in the current Honververse if the planets are capable of being the equivalent of cattle farms for the use of the Alignment to raise human cattle that will submit to Alignment rule.

penny wrote:I agree about the need to have dedicated warships. However, doctrine is going to be completely different for this navy. I suggested long ago that we cannot judge this navy by GA standards. Everything will be different.

I only agree in part. You're being hyperbolic here when you say "everything will be different." So in the same hyperbolic terms, I will agree that they will come to very different conclusions about the balance between cost and benefit. The underlying morals are different and we know the Inner Onion doesn't value very highly the lives of almost anyone, even sometimes of themselves (q.v. Albrecht's suicide).

But it isn't literally true. It can't be, because the laws of physics are the same. Ships cost money, resources, and time. People cost too (time to train, at a minimum). So there's still an equation to be solved for, to determine whether an operation with high risk of loss is still to be launched. That means there are still a lot of similarities between the doctrines.

I was never advocating intentionally using a Ghost for the purpose of sacrificing it. I am just saying, per the tactical situations that will arise for this navy, they might need to sacrifice a ship to save an LD or more. The best ship to sacrifice will be the Ghost.

For the RMN, the best ship to sacrifice is A LAC or LACs.

It sounded like you were. It sounded like you were calling for bringing Ghosts for the express purpose of sacrificing them if the need arose. For me, this especially sounded like you were calling for bringing Ghosts instead of a more capable ship that might instead survive.

With the clarification, I now understand differently.

Using impeller drive warships as escorts for spider drive ships negates the primary advantage of the spider drive ships........nobody can yet detect them.

If you bring even one conventional drive starship to ride escort on your spider drive ship, you have started waiving a big obvious flag that says "Here I am, come get me" which means that your spider drive ship has a finite amount of time to get off it's payload and vanish before warships come looking.

Ok, you could be setting up an ambush a couple of light hours or days out from the star but, really, why? After Oyster Bay and whatever happens next using "invisible warships" you would expect to find any system that has somebody pop in at such range to be involved in a ballistic or "invisible attack and it will go on alert. They might even start picking up interesting data that lead to identifying the operation of "invisible starships" and POOF, the advantage starts to dissipate like fog on a sunny day.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Upstream, I assumed Ghosts will always be used because they should be the stealthiest ship because they are the smallest ship. So a Ghost somewhat has stealth by design. And if they are already with the convoy, they can be sacrificed for the greater good.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Sure, if it becomes necessary. But you're not going to bring them for a role where you need a proper warship. Just bring a warship!

I understand "you fight with the weapons you have, not the weapons you wish you had." But that's not an excuse for not building armed escort ships (the role of a destroyer). It's short-sightedness.

And in this case, no one is talking about sacrificing the Ghost. In fact, it's a good ship for this role because it has a good chance of not needing to sacrificing itself.

The only reason why a Shark might be slightly less stealthy than a Ghost is that it is bigger, but it is bigger because it's armed; so there is your proper escort for an LD. Why waste sacrificing people on a ship that cannot fight back? Don't waste a Ghost when a Shark might make the enemy pay more.

A Ghost is not a Shark and a Shark is not a Ghost. Why send a Shark to do a Ghost's job? If a Shark is detected, that is not the time to say, "We should've brought the Ghost, because they barely detected the Shark."

Whether it is armed or not, if a Ghost is your stealthiest unit, why leave it behind? Have you ever seen a movie where the big bad men brought along a small kid because the small kid could slip through the fence, or gain access to the home by crawling in through the doggy door? There you have it!

tlb wrote:The only reason why a Shark might be slightly less stealthy than a Ghost is that it is bigger, but it is bigger because it's armed; so there is your proper escort for an LD. Why waste sacrificing people on a ship that cannot fight back? Don't waste a Ghost when a Shark might make the enemy pay more.

Maybe, but I think the escorts should be smaller; cruiser-sized, not battleship-sized. The Shark is a mini-LD: it serves the same role, but can't carry torpedoes on the inside. It's not an escort, it's just a poor main combatant.

An escort ship is meant to protect the capital ship and expand its reach. It needs to have plenty of counter-batteries, have a powerful EW suite, provide ECM, etc. It usually needs to exist at a greater quantity than the capital ship(s) it is protecting. And yes, it is meant to sacrifice itself if necessary so the capital ship survives.

For all of those reasons, I don't think the Shark is the correct design. I think we simply haven't seen yet what this ship will be.