Commerce raiding

Relax wrote:Unless there is a Giant grav wave speed up zone with giant benefits to shipping in which to concentrate commerce, there is ZERO need for convoy's in reality. In Honorverse war it would be better to AVOID concentration zones and AVOID convoy's completely. If you want to attack commerce just swan around outside the hyper limit and wait. It stupid to be inside the hyper limit.

In fact, every system would be FAR BETTER off having half if not ALL of its defenders OUTSIDE the hyperliimit, not inside unless off duty.

Why? Its near improbable/impossible to find or attack in Hyper. Hyper is literally the best stealth system around and even the toughest SD's are near naked in Hyper so would be stupid to attack there so may as well never use anything tougher than a CL in Hyper at all.

Jonathan_S wrote:During peacetime, yes. You're better off simply securing the hyper limit of each system against pirates and then freighters should (with minimally evasive routing) be free from any worries about interception in hyperspace. The only reason Silesia sometimes required convoys (and even there they were unusual) was that the SCN couldn't (or wouldn't) secure the local space of their systems against piracy and the government wouldn't let anybody else keep warships deployed in those systems long-term to do it for them.

During wartime however, Honor's capture showed why you need convoys. As can happen in war one of their destination systems was captured. Because of the convoy escort carefully checking each system before allowing the convoy to enter the convoy escaped with only the loss of a single escort. If those ships had instead proceeded independently then they'd each have been captured or destroyed as they showed up at Adler one at a time -- until news of the capture reached all ports and the flow of singletons to the system finally stopped.

However in Honor Among Enemies the example of Haven attacking ships in hyperspace did not occur in a gravity wave, but in the Selker Rift.

tlb wrote:Then please explain this component of Operation Dagger, from Flag in Exile:

Chapter 23 wrote:He'd strayed badly out of position on the approach to Masada, and the computers ruled that the Grayson battlecruisers protecting Endicott had managed a successful interception. They'd taken heavy losses from Chernov's escorts, but not heavy enough to keep them from killing both his troop transports and four of his five freighters full of weapons.
Theisman sighed. He wasn't at all happy about arming a planet full of religious fanatics—especially when he knew from personal experience what they were capable of—but if he had to do it, he preferred to do it right.

If they are transporting troops, then they must plan to stick around for some time; even if it is just to train soldiers in the use of the transported weapons.

I'd have to reread a bit more about the context of where this was in, but this seems to be a limited operation to arm insurgents on Masada to make the lives of the RMMC troops occupying the planet harder. Once they go to ground on the planet, they can stay hidden for months or years. Theisman's ships would be free to leave, taking the troop transport and freighters with them, so he would.

Besides, what were ground forces good for at this time in the war? On most if not all of the planets that the Alliance liberated, they wouldn't need many; the native population would welcome them with open arms. They'd only need marines and Army to root out StateSec troopers and maybe regular People's Army infantry that were occupying those planets, and maintain order. Plus, there weren't many liberations until much later in the war, with Operation Buttercup. On Haven's side, they probably had a surplus of ground troops that had been readied for the war, so they may as well put some of them to use.

The only exception for systems the Alliance liberated was Endicott. It would also appear it's the only system that the PRH had not fully infiltrated prior to the start of the hostilities.

tlb wrote:However in Honor Among Enemies the example of Haven attacking ships in hyperspace did not occur in a gravity wave, but in the Selker Rift.

Which is a rift between grav waves, so equally distinguishable for being a steady commerce and convoy route. Which is your point, I think.

Relax wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:
Also, its generally easier for militaries to get funding for the big shiny weapons than it is to convince politicians to properly fund the boring (but utterly necessary) logistics. That's why the US Navy started WWII with a near crippling shortage of fast fleet tankers. They'd known for decades that they'd need them in the pacific, but couldn't convince Congress to fund more than a few.

If you think they had a shortage of fleet tankers before WWII then.... Today is beyond pitiful. At least then USA was building fleet oiler tankers for the world at the time and its merchant marine owned most of the oilers of the world. Today it is not building them nor owns many. If you think the USA before WWII kicked off was short of fleet oilers, the UK was far far far SHORTER on fleet logistics ships.

PS: Logistics transfer in space--> Very easy. They have pressers/pullers in the HV

Um, while the number of tankers under US flag is pitiful today, the USN is better off for oilers than they were at the start of WWII. (An oiler is a tanker with additional pumping and hose equipment to allow ship to ship replenishment; ideally while under way - so don't conflate the pitiful position of the US merchant fleet with the position of the USN's logistics fleet)

Today they have 14 Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oilers, and the first 2 of their replacements the John Lewis-class replenishment oilers are already in service. Additionally they can refuel from the 2 remaining Supply-class fast combat support ships. So that makes 18 fast oilers.

In contrast at the start of 1940 the USN had 5 "slow" 14 knot oilers of Kanawha-class and Cuyama-class fleet replenishment oilers (plus one more Kanawha that was in a major refit), 12 even slower 10.5 knot ex-WWI oilers which by this point could really only be used for transporting oil, not proper replenishment, and just 3 of the fast 18 knot Cimarron-class oilers that could keep up with the fleet.

(Though they'd help finance a several more of the fast commercial tankers they were based on and during 1940 and 41 took them up from trade and began quick conversions of them to additional fast tanker; so the situation wasn't as dire by December 7th 1941, with 5 additional Cimarrons in commission)

Still, 8 proper oilers to supply an even larger fleet compares poorly to today's 16-18 oilers for a numerically smaller USN.

The Royal Navy went a different route in the world wars, they had very little fleet train due to their large number of naval bases scattered around the world. Their theory was they'd always be operating from within range of one of them and they could leverage their large merchant marine and presumed control of the seas to use commercial shipping (or at least standard tankers and freighters taken up from trade; or captured from their enemies merchant fleets) to move fuel and supplies to those bases; where it could be stored until the base needed to transfer it to warships -- so they saw little need for specialized logistics or replenishment ships.

Relax wrote:Adler was a perfect example of HOW NOT TO DO COMMERCE in wartime. It is pitifully DUMB. Made a great story, but really DUMB to anyone who wishes to actually think about it instead of taking DW's words as reality.

Adler showed the OPPOSITE. The idiots kept their ships inside the hyperlimit WITHOUT sidewalls or impellers at idle. They were acting as if there was not a damned war on.

If a convoy DID show up and the enemy had a scout watching(they did) then the OBVIOUS to attack a convoy is to keep the fleet in HYPER waiting for news of said convoy from said scout, maneuver in hyper with 60X speed advantage, or MICRO JUMP right behind them...

If you are a defender, and your ships are OUTSIDE the hyperlimit and they micro jump in behind your convoy or a singlton, guess what? Their hyper generator is down and you can smash them. Instead if you are inside the hyper limit you can't do $#!^. Oh right, take nice vids of them dying and then people with 2 brain cells at Saganami Island can teach new students how NOT to defend a system/commerce.

To make it so an enemy cannot sit on prearranged entry points ALA Cerberus with a single point, you have a rotating schedule of different points/timgings. You micro jump or are relieved by the guys sitting in a gravity well without impellers on etc who come up out of said gravity well to relieve you of duty and therefore at minimum during handoff you have 2 or 3 potential spots freighters will come in on. On top of that you can have prearranged pods making it VERY painful for any attacker. An attacker, sure can see these points, if they watch long enough and are not run off, and can concentrate on them, but said defending ships can just jump into hyper after firing off a crap ton of missiles while leaving a buoy behind with a prearranged code to go elsewhere. Said attackers CANNOT avoid the missiles in the slightest with their down hyper generator.

Adler was a perfect example of HOW NOT TO DO COMMERCE in wartime. It is pitifully DUMB. Made a great story, but really DUMB

The picket at Adler was fat, dumb, and lazy. No argument there.

And the one stupid part of Honor's plan by not making the convoy's exit from hyper failsafe. Yes, they waited and gave Prince Adrian time to poke around and attempt to touch base with the picket; but when they didn't hear about a problem they emerged from hyper and had to wait for their hyper generators to recharge before they could leave. If Prince Adrian had been immediately crippled or destroyed the convoy would have walked right into that same trap. But that bit of stupidity doesn't mean wartime convoys are useless -- just that the procedure used at Adler needs improvement.

If they'd simply left (or possibly dropped on another escort further out at a random spot to take a look) when Prince Adrian didn't return with an all-clear then I think the plan would have been fine.


As for leaving a scout and pouncing on the convoy from hyper -- that wasn't a tactic that anybody was trying yet. But even if Theisman and Foraker had thought of it I doubt it would work against even the original convoy plan. If the Peeps still punched out the picket then Prince Adrian would rapidly discover that they weren't responding and would pop back into hyper to warn the convoy off -- I don't think the scout could prevent that and thus would never even see the convoy as it'd never leave hyper.
But if the Peeps didn't punch out the picket then I don't think they'd be likely to be able to keep a ship scouting near the hyper limit for all that long before getting spotted and run off. After all, as apathetic as the picket was, there were destroyers out patrolling near the hyper limit -- they're the ones who survived and ran to bring the news of its destruction.

(And of course even if the convoy isn't a perfect counter to this the alternative is sending ships out piecemeal and then there's effectively no chance any of those freighters could have arrived at Adler without being captured or caught)

tlb wrote:However in Honor Among Enemies the example of Haven attacking ships in hyperspace did not occur in a gravity wave, but in the Selker Rift.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Which is a rift between grav waves, so equally distinguishable for being a steady commerce and convoy route. Which is your point, I think.

Yes, the posts to which I was responding were suggesting that convoys were only needed IN gravity waves.

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually even tertiary systems were usually picketed by ships heavier than cruisers.

Ok they were picketed by BC's... they still cannot stand up to BB's. Adler seemed to be picketed by nothing heavier than CA's and I doubt that would be the only system that would be picketed lightly as the alliance captured ~24 systems in the first 1-2 years of the war and that is far too many systems for them to be picketing with anything heavier than CA's.

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.

There were large concentrations of forces that ate up most of the RMN's and later GSN's wallers so there was likely not that much to go around and picket every secondary and tertiary system. Even if you are right and every tertiary system was infact picketed by a handful of DN/SD's that makes it even more criminal that they never bothered to launch a large offensive led by BB's. Hitting those isolate pickets with BB's would have deprived the RMN of their services. BB's may not be able to go 1 to 1 or 2 to 1 against DN's and SD's but they can easily go up 5 to 1 or 6 to 1 with DN's and SD's.

In cold calculations trading battleships for dreadnaughts and superdreadnaughts makes a lot of sense.

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.

There is a finite number of SD's and DN's, there is also a number of critical systems that MUST be held. The 25-35 systems the alliance had captured during the first phase of the war not to mention the at least Alliance members that the RMN was charged to defend. the simple volume of conquered territory leads me to believe that most had nothing heavier than a CA and those that did have SD's or DN's had very few which means that the RHN could have used those BB's crush the systems that were highly defended with a handful of BB's and crush the systems with wallers by sending overwhelming numbers of BB's .

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.

A force of 30-40 BB's backed by CA's and CL's and DD's can easily overwhelm that picket and lets be honest here, trading 5 BB's for every alliance DN/SD would still put Haven ahead.

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.

1) The RHN has the BB's to spare.

2) The RMN couldn't possibly have enough in a nodal force to respond immediately which means they would have to call on whatever offensive fleet the alliance has whether its 6th or 8th fleet. So the 25-35 systems that the RMN captured in the first few years of the war will have captured them again and again.

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)

And in the process they destroyed 1 SD and damaged from moderate to severe another 5 SD's. If they had kept their distance and kept concentrated the GSN Home Fleet would have been wiped out in one afternoon and all more than likely without taking such severe casualties. The Initial salvo for the GSN was ~1400 missiles and the RHN could have launched ~1050 from the 36 BB's they had there and and they could have repeated that salvo over 130 times while the GSN would have been reduced to no more than 300 from the 6 SD's, provide the BB's with a proper screen and the GSN is history and it would be with relatively light losses.

-- 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.

Trading BB's for SD's and DN's seems like it's worth it, especially if done right and in overwhelming force. When the RMN comes back to capture the RHN retreats and observes what the RMN does with the pickets for those systems.

Using the BB's to their maximum advantage doesn't mean throwing them away in hopeless battles. The BB's and the DuQuesne class SD's seem to use the same capital missiles and based on a quick look 40 BB's have roughly 80% of the tubes of 40 SD's. The 40 BB's pack the offensive punch of 32 SD's but the CM's of 22 SD's so they can easily overwhelm the right enemy force.

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.

The biggest advantage those BB's provided to the RHN would have been early in the war but even later on they could still have provided an advantage just by packing the offensive forces with substantial BB's to bolster the offensive power and the defensive power of the fleet in question.

Using BB's with proper screen to attack allied convoys would mean the RMN would have to provide more than 5 CA's as escort to a convoy of 20 Merchant ships and that would eat away at the RMN's offensive power. Attacking alliance members with BB's and proper screen costs the MA wallers while it costs the RHN BB's while leaving their SD's and DN's free to maneuver. Use BB's to support SD's to attack the Manticore Home System if for no other reason than to destroy some outlying industrial platforms and the SKM politicians will be screaming for Home Fleet to be strengthened.

The goal is to use those 370 BB's to their full potential while conserving their wallers gives the RHN an even bigger advantage. The BB's represented a tremendous advantage for the RHN that was never realized.

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.

By the time the SD(P)'s came around SD's were next to useless so BB's were just expensive coffins.

So I think you're overestimating how effective BBs would have been at diverting RMN forces by raiding system pickets

there were 370 BB's at start of war. Remove 70 for refits that leaves you with 300 BB's. Take 60 for sector quick reaction forces and that leaves you with 240 BB's that have the same offensive capability as 190 SD's and point defence of 132 SD's.

Throw them against forces they can't defeat and they die a useless death, use them in offensive overwhelming numbers and they can eat away at the RMN's wallers widening the gap between the RMN and RHN.

Sigs wrote:The RHN has the BB's to spare.

From Flag in Exile:

Chapter 11 wrote:"Secondly, the original ops plan required the assembly of all of Task Force Fourteen here so that we could proceed as a single, unified force. This—" he tapped the message again "—doesn't say anything specifically about the other units of the task force, but if HQ believes the situation around Nightingale is still so dangerous that it's delaying the release of Stalking Horse's superdreadnoughts, it may decide not to reduce the battleship covering forces in other systems around Trevor's Star, either. And since over half our total units are supposed to be drawn from that sector—"

He broke off with a shrug, and Preznikov's frown deepened.

"Why wasn't this possibility allowed for in the preliminary planning?" he asked in a colder voice, and Thurston controlled his own tone very carefully when he replied.

"When my staff and I prepared the original plan for this operation, Citizen Commissioner, we specifically requested that the forces for it be drawn from deeper inside the Republic to avoid this sort of problem. In fact, we originally asked for the Fifteenth and Forty-First Battle Squadrons, and our request was approved. Unfortunately, we were subsequently informed that both those squadrons—which as you know, are currently in Malagasy—had become . . . unavailable. That meant we had to find the ships somewhere else at a very late date, and if we were to avoid unacceptable delays in transit times to assemble the task force, that somewhere else had to be closer to hand. Unhappily, any system close enough for our purposes is also so close to Trevor's Star as to be susceptible to last-minute diversions in response to enemy pressure."

Preznikov's eyes flashed at the mention of the Malagasy System, but Thurston knew he'd scored a point. The squadrons he'd originally been promised were "unavailable" because Malagasy had exploded in the Committee of Public Safety's face. He didn't know precisely what had provoked it, though it seemed likely the officer corps purges had backed someone into too tight a corner. Shortly after Secretary Ransom had started whipping up the Proles, some of the SS "reeducation teams" had taken to shooting suspect officers' families, as well as the officers themselves. It had been among the stupider of many stupid things State Security had done, and he knew the maniacs responsible had exceeded their own authority when they did it, but moderation wasn't in great demand in the People's Republic just now, and he doubted they'd be punished for it.

I highlighted two important points:

First, the battleships are not all loitering in Haven's back reaches, some are actually included in the defense structure around Trevor's Star.
Second, even battleships in Haven's back reaches can get called into emergency support of political operations.

Relax wrote:
Partially true and why this discussion is fairly long. How many convoy systems are there in reality? You can't grab em in hyper9theoretically you can) So, grav waves as shown in books, but why bother they are slow and they had plenty of RHN Sultan BC's and they knew RMN shipping only had DD's/CL's still.

The idea isn't to raid convoys with BB's because its better, its to raid convoys will BB's to force the RMN to escort with DN's.

Hitting a convoy of 20 ships escorted by 5 CA's with CA's and BC's forces the RMN to deploy more CA's and BC's as escort forces. Hitting a convoy with 4 BB's, 4 CA's and 8 DD's forces the RMN to escort those convoys with much heavier escorts especially when they are supplying allied or conquered systems.

Also: When were they actually updated? HOW MANY were updated? We do not know. We only know they are an OLD design.

We know they are heavy missile platforms, send them in large enough numbers with a proper screen and they can bleed the RMN wallers little by little.

EDIT: Also, RMN had missile pods, RHN did not. So for system defense... Ugly exchange ratio. Commerce raiding grav waves, now there we have something.

You may have a system with 1000 pods but the picket will have only a limited number of control links. This just means that the RHN has to send a force of BB's that would be comically overkill, put the RMN on the defensive. Show up in Grayson with 240 BB's, 120 DD's, 60 CL's instead of 36 BB's and see what happens. What kind of force does the RMN have to put together to force 240 BB's and 180 screen out of Grayson? 50 wallers? 80 wallers? Where do you think are they going to get those wallers from?

Also: Their ENTIRE senior Admirals/planning staff was decapitated. Read up on what the USSR "senior" command was like in WWII... Shy mice who did NOTHING without Stalin's express authority.

Eventually they settled down and could have used those BB's to their advantage. Their initial offensive plan had no place for their BB's and they lost any chance of a devastating first strike. We can account for about 200 RMN wallers at the time of the short victorious war, that means there were 63 wallers unaccounted for and 46 in for refit. Those 63 wallers would be deployed to Grendelsbane, Talbot and the other dozen allied systems and forward bases. Instead of being tricky they could have deployed 180-240 BB's to support the the ~120 wallers they used in the offensive and destroyed ~35% of the available RMN wallers in the opening phases of the war. Instead they kept the BB's massive overkill in rear areas.

And elephant in room --> DW fumble fingered it. You can't envision everything when you begin the series and haven't been paid. Bills are piling up. First 5 books I think were bought in one fell swoop? Flag in Exile I believe is #5 and was supposed to align with UK/French war with Nelson around. He had no idea more were going to be ordered though by time publication he certainly did.

I love this series but he made the RHN extremely over powered snd then made them stupid to not take complete advantage of that power. The RHN starts the war with 440 SD's and DNs and an equalvaslent offensive firepower of 300 SD's worth of BB's agains 309 SD's and DN's. The BB's just don't make sense, they are this massive potential that is never utilized even when they could have provided devastating opening phase of the war.

tlb wrote: highlighted two important points:

First, the battleships are not all loitering in Haven's back reaches, some are actually included in the defense structure around Trevor's Star.
Second, even battleships in Haven's back reaches can get called into emergency support of political operations.

Well before commencement of hostilities the RHN should have concentrated, having 240 BB's in a few major bases means they have a chance to work as divisions, squadrons and task forces. The fact that they were spread around the republic meant that before an offensive they would have to be recalled and concentrated which gives the RMN a chance to get wind of BB's being withdrawn.

The RHN doesn't need to worry about a surprise attack from the SKM and they can press their own people with 60 BB's support by CL's and DD's. The 120 wallers they used in the opening phase of the war supported by 240 BB's and a decent screen would have absolutely crushed the alliance and forces the SKM to abandon the alliance and retreat to the home system.