penny wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:The maintenance issue was a temporary funding problem; caused by Parliament refusing to issue the declaration of war. (Now later on, during the Trevor's Star campaign, there was a different backlog of refits/upgrades; where wallers were being kept at the front in an effort to maintain momentum. That required an operational pause after the campaign was concluded in order to catch up on maintenance and refits. But I get the impression that refits were being deferred more than maintenance)
But I'm unclear on how the Peeps could force the maintenance issue. The RMN gets to decide when and where to launch raids, and gets to decide whether to pick attack profiles that cause excess component wear.
The defender (the Peeps in this case) can't really do anything to force an attacker to make a crash translation. So how can they force Manticore to run its maintenance cycles even further behind?
By hypering in and out of every system under the protection of the RMN. Especially Home Fleet. Haven had a lot of destroyers that it could afford to send to hassle the heck out of every RMN system just enough to keep it honest and prepared by maintaining hot nodes. Haven actually had the numbers to attack the MBS so the RMN would have had to honor the possibility that a Case Zulu was coming. Dunno if it would have worked for the RMN in reverse. At any rate, maintaining hot nodes across the board would have crippled the RMN even if the funds had never been tied up. As it were, the RMN was robbing from Peter to pay Paul by replacing worn components with new components from the new but unfinished builds that were sitting in the slips. And the only reason they had time to do that was because the lack of a declaration of war had at least that one good side effect of giving the RMN some time to catch up on some overdue maintenance issues. So I can't readily agree the Peeps could not have forced the issue a lot more.
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That would put far more wear on Peep maintenance than it would on RMN maintenance. And the Peeps are worse at doing maintenance and their light units are more tightly stretched than Manticores. Also for much of the early war (and then again after Manticore took Trevor's Star) the Manticoran screening forces are closer to their maintenance yards than the Peep probing forces would be - since their front-line maintenance bases (like Seaford-Nine) were overrun during Riposte Gamma.
So not only are these Peep light units putting wear on their hyper generators, which the responding RMN pickets are not, but they having to make long flights from their bases to their targets, which puts more wear on their impellers than just keeping them at standby as the RMN pickets usually can. And when the Peep units need maintenance they're going to be off the front lines longer both because their (remaining) bases aren't as close but also because those bases aren't as efficient so even discounting the extra travel time it'll likely take the Peep yard workers longer to replace the worn components that it would take a workers in an RMN yard.
So based on all that I think attempting this would cause the Peeps to run out of serviceable destroyers and cruisers long before the RMN did. (Plus every time you make that probe you risk your light units stumbling over or getting caught by a superior force and destroyer -- so while you try to run the RMN out of spare parts you risk getting your scouting and screening forces defeated in detail).
Just don't see it as a winning strategy