Sigs wrote:That's what didn't make sense, they capture a bunch of systems that they then picket with cruisers and below, why not use BB's to recapture those systems and force the alliance to fight for the same real estate over and over again, the fight to get to Trevor's Star wont be easy if they have to recapture everything around it 3,4 or 5 times.
Actually even tertiary systems were usually picketed by ships heavier than cruisers.
One of the rational advanced in Echoes of Honor for modern LACs and CLACs was to "be able to provide us with a local defense capability that can stand up to raiding Peep squadrons and let us pull our regular capital ships off picket duty" -- those "penny-packet pickets" of (mostly) DNs that were politically necessary even if the Admiralty would have preferred to concentrate them for offensive action.
Even Seaford Nine, which EoH says the Admiralty felt it could do without and had been drawing down the picket still had "two squadrons of heavy cruisers, and a reinforced division of superdreadnoughts, supported by a half-squadron of battlecruisers and a couple of destroyers" picketing it. 12-16 CAs, 3 SDs, and 4 BCs (originally that picket, on what had become a fairly unimportant system, had had "six or eight of the wall, plus a dozen battlecruisers" -- that's why when the Peeps did hit it, expecting that original force, they brought along 15-20 DN/SD to back up their 10 BBs; so they'd have overwhelming force.
So BBs attempting to raid picketed systems are likely to run into at least 2-4 DNs backed by BCs and cruisers -- and because it's a defensive picket all with access to towed pods. Send enough BBs and you can chase such picket force out; but unless you send truly overwhelming forces or get lucky against a stupid commander for the first couple years of the war the RMN's monopoly on missile pods ensure you'll take larger losses than the picket will. And if the BBs don't pull back then nodal response fleet will show up with enough force to crush them and make the losses even more lopsided.
At that point in the war the Peeps might have been able to spend that many semi-obsolete BBs; (after all they pulled together a bunch and lost them against Honor at Grayson) -- but without the forces to actually hold the recaptured systems (or something in them worth destroying - like the yards at Grayson) I don't see the crew losses being worth it for the Peeps. Those BBs have a lot of trained spacers who you'd like to be around to form the core of crews as new SDs come out of the yards.
Now, later on, after Trevor's Star was taken and reinforced so heavily it was considered certain to be held, a combination of things (ships overdue for refit and maintenance, having to strip pickets to build up 3rd Fleet at Trevor's Star, etc.) did lead to quiet sectors getting stripped of much of their picket strength. At
that later point, in the lull between the fall of Trevor's Star and the launch of the new 8th fleet's Buttercup, many pickets were light enough (especially with the Peeps also now having towed pods) that a few BBs could have raided those systems. But by that point such attacks are far too late to save Trevor's Star; and they're never going to make the Admiralty significantly reduce 3rd fleet in order to reinforce pickets in systems that simply aren't very important anymore.
And even then important systems, like Elric (where they were putting in a support base), were still picketed by wallers. Elric has 5 SDs (well actually 3 SD(P)s still pretending to be SDs and 2 SDs) plus battlecruisers and cruisers. A BB force isn't going to be able to raid that successfuly -- and that was a system that, even with the partially complete support base, wasn't expected to hold against any serious attack. And in fact they evacuated the base and destroyed it before performing a fighting withdrawal.
So I think you're overestimating how effective BBs would have been at diverting RMN forces by raiding system pickets
