Commerce raiding

tlb wrote:I doubt the pickets would be crushed if lead by a competent commander.

IF

Time and time again in the series the RMN has been shown to have idiots in charge that lead their pickets to their deaths.
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They would have flushed their pods and left (perhaps leaving an observer). [/quote]
And the RHN waits until the picket leaves, directs a force in hyper to cut them off and destroy that picket.

The roving heavy backup unit would arrive (loaded with pods) and force Haven's ships to flee.

Is the roving heavy backup sufficiently heavy to push out the BB's? Because the RMN cannot have a sufficiently heavy force to push out the RHN if they commit enough BB's to an offensive.

Then the RMN ends up dispersing their wallers in local QRF's to face off with BB's leaving the RMN weaker against the RHN wallers.The RMN QRF wallers end up needing more maintenance because they are constantly on the move. Imagine the wear and tear of the ships when they move from system 1 to system 2 to system 3 to system 1 to system 3 to system 4 to system 5 to system 1 to system 6 and back to system 2 to system 3 etc...

Then the system would be left with the original RMN picket ships. Note that the SD's of Manticore do not have to disperse, they can remain concentrated in the force used to drive Haven away.

Where does the "roving heavy back up" come from? Forts? DD's? Frigates?

Both pod launches would damage the ships from Haven, resulting in a net loss for them.

You do know the BB's have point defence? And they would be bringing screening vessels as well? Also that the RMN has pods but not an infinite amount of pods... you do know that right?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The systems the PN was picketing were conquests in a relatively rich sector of the Verge: the Haven Sector. Some of those had navies of their own, of which some may have driven away and could come back. The planetary governments in exile would have been lobbying for the liberation of their systems and they were in fact finding receptive ears in the Alliance.

And a portion of the sector QRF comes in an recaptures the system. They lose a system they can easily recapture it and as long as they don't risk any critical systems with their shipyards and war industry they can recapture at a later date.

Moreover, the PRH depended on the most recent conquests for their influx of cash, whereas the SL did not depend on the OFS money. The majority of that went to corruption and the transstellars, not the League government itself. That is to say, the SL had a much longer runway if it started losing systems than the PRH and had many more systems, scattered all over the Verge.

And Im going to go out on a limb and assume that the most recent conquests of the RHN are on the way to Manticore not in the other direction. More importantly the SLN and RHN are doing the exact same thing, oppressing a system that doesn't have naval resources.

They were somewhat blinded by the doctrine that was accepted by everyone at the time. They fought like the SLN taught and that included leaping from system to system to minimise your logistics. So all the fleet train that they needed would have been for this.

Again, they are supposedly professional officers, so they should be able to do basic math. They know the size of the MA and either they had sufficient logistical capacity or they are absolute idiots.

They were also settled in their own ways and between political subterfuge and overwhelming victories at the time of their choosing, they must have become complacent.

No matter how complacent they may have been the RHN had been in the business of conquest for close to a century, they were successful so presumably they know that their ships need fuel, spare parts, forward deployed maintenance and ammunutuin while their people need food, water, clothes, personal equipment etc....

However, the biggest problem they must have faced was competent manpower. Yes, you can load freighters and navy auxiliaries with equipment and dumb workers to move stuff along, but a fleet train is more than that. Without a repair ship and for damage that isn't a plug-and-play replacement, the expedition would be in trouble. That's another reason why they never ventured too far from known bases, which creates a vicious cycle of not needing large fleet trains.

A repair ship does just enough repairs to get you back to the nearest base. Do you think that when Haven conquered a system and suffers damage to their wallers that prevents them from going to hyper they just live them in system and wait the year or two or five or two till the system repair facilities are completed to repair the ships in system? What happens if a ship suffers an engineering casualty in a system without repair facilities? Do they scuttle every ship no matter how repairable just because they can't get them out of the system to a yard?

Those were to deny the Alliance the assets in the first place. For In both cases, I actually think the PN would have withdrawn, even if they had won. In Hancock's case, either they destroyed the facilities there (in which case the system is now valueless) or they captured it. If they did capture it, then the Alliance would be forced to respond in force because leaving the facilities in the Peep hands would have been strategically unacceptable. The PN would have had to win at Hancock with such an overwhelming victory that it took few losses and could hold against a counterattack, neither of which were in the plan.

The RHN would need logistics support if they conquer a system. That logistics support will rearm, refuel, resupply and repair the ships in the fleet that did the fighting. The RHN can't fight the RMN in Grayson if they blew through all of their ammunition in the first battle.

In the Yeltsin system, they didn't have the occupation forces so they wouldn't have stayed. Both Third and Fourth Yieltsin were designed to take out the picket forces that the PN admiralty thought was there (in Third's case) and the yards that had begun springing up in Fourth's.

So?

tlb wrote:Both pod launches would damage the ships from Haven, resulting in a net loss for them.

Sigs wrote:You do know the BB's have point defence? And they would be bringing screening vessels as well? Also that the RMN has pods but not an infinite amount of pods... you do know that right?

Yes, I know all three of those things. I also know that there is a point in the war when Manticore has pods that can be tractored to ships, while Haven is still limited to internal launchers. That means that even cruisers can do an initial launch that is massive (which is the Alpha launch mentioned) compared to what Havenite BB's or larger can launch. Obviously the smaller ships then have to flee, because after the pods are flushed the smaller ships cannot compete with just their internal launchers and smaller magazines.

So they retreat to wherever Manticore has the big ships concentrated and a force is put together, loaded down with pods, and sent to push Haven off whatever system that they had just conquered. With luck Haven's ships are faced with another Alpha launch before they go, causing damage that whittles Haven's ship advantage even more. The big ships return to the concentration area (which would a base like Hancock. Why would you even guess "Forts? DD's? Frigates?" ?), leaving the cruiser force (with pods) to picket the recovered system.

Manticore manufacturing cannot create an infinite number of pods, but they can create enough to supply the needs.

tlb wrote:If there is a major disadvantage because Manticore can launch Alpha strikes using their pods, which Haven cannot equal; then Haven should be more cautious, until they have similar pods. Adding more targets when being overwhelmed by a massive missile strike, does not seem like winning strategy; even if Manticore is also losing ships.

I'd disagree. Unless you're going to decline combat entirely you can't avoid the Alpha Strike. And the worst thing you could do is keep sending forces that after they've been hit with the Alpha Strike are left too weak to win the rest of the missile engagement.

So any caution that cause you to send smaller fleets is actually a wildly risky behavior.

The Alpha Strike is is basically independent of the size of the fleet the attacker brings. The Manticoran force is going to bring every pod they feel they can, and because towed pods are 'use it or lose it' they'll expend them all in the initial salvo. If you show up with 50% more wallers they can't magically throw a 50% larger Alpha Strike. You can almost look at it as a fixed price for entering missile range at all.

Now it is true that if you added several squadrons of BBs to an attack that was going to be just SDs and DNs you might lose more ships to the Alpha Strike, if the RMN ships focused it on the weaker BBs. But your fleet would still be more powerful after paying the cost of being hit by the Alpha Strike than it would have been had the additional ships not been there. And all those extra ships provide additional defenses; so your fleet might actually take fewer hits from the Alpha Strike than they would have had those weaker ships been left behind.

The actual cautious approach, at least short-term, in the face of the towed pod monopoly is to do everything you can to make the formations that do enter missile range large enough that they can be expected to be remain superior to the RMN force and be able to win the rest of the missile duel even after surviving the inevitable Alpha Strike. And if you aren't large/powerful enough to do that then try to retreat instead of entering missile range -- better to preserve those ships to fight later on more favorable terms than lose them in an unfavorable fight where you can't inflect enough damage on the RMN fleet to be worth it. (Longer term you focus your efforts on getting towed pods of your own)

Sigs wrote:Imagine how ridiculous it would be to travel 30LY to conquer a system and then retreat 30LY to rearm and refuel while scuttling perfectly repairable wallers only to to travel 30LY back to the system to find the RMN occupying the system again and have to do this all over again all because you don't have the fleet train to rearm, refuel, top up your consumables and repair your damaged ships after a battle.

I'll point out that Seaford Nine was less than 10 LY from the systems Haven intended to capture.

At that short a range, less than 2 days transit time, it wouldn't actually be a big deal to cycle ships back in waves to resupply, refuel (not that they'd need much fuel just a few days from base - since they've fuel and supplies for a couple months), and send ships needing repair (beyond onboard plug-and-play module replacement) to the yards where the limited number of Peep trained techs are.


And until going up against Manticore that's all they'd have needed. A short lunge against a enemy's home system, where their main fleet will be defeated, and you can leave the least damaged part of your attack fleet to hold the system against any warships that might have escaped, while cycling the others the short distance back to base. Then the occupation forces move in, and potentially that system slowly gets turn into a new base from which to launch an attack on the next victim.

Now the Peeps probably had some fleet train -- but they'd never needed a big one before. They seem to have operated much more like the WWI or WWII Royal Navy (with little to no fleet train for most of the wars because they had some many bases they simply had a base to operate from within range of any theater they wished to contest) than the WWII US Navy or Japanese Navy both of whom lacked significant numbers of bases in the Pacific and thus required significant fleet trains to allow them to operate many times further from a base than the Royal Navy ever planned to.

But we don't have evidence they have a major fleet train on the scale of the RMNs. We don't know what the original Legislaturalists war plans were - and whether they included holding systems as sufficient distance that the fleet would need to be patched up and resupplied in place. Hopefully they had contingency plans if their short victorious war didn't work out. Were they planning to quickly throw up forward bases in captured systems? Where they planning to fight an attritional war along the pre-war frontier, within range of their pre-war bases, until they felt a direct lunge at Manticore to end the war was possible? We just don't know.

Jonathan_S wrote:The actual cautious approach, at least short-term, in the face of the towed pod monopoly is to do everything you can to make the formations that do enter missile range large enough that they can be expected to be remain superior to the RMN force and be able to win the rest of the missile duel even after surviving the inevitable Alpha Strike. And if you aren't large/powerful enough to do that then try to retreat instead of entering missile range -- better to preserve those ships to fight later on more favorable terms than lose them in an unfavorable fight where you can't inflect enough damage on the RMN fleet to be worth it. (Longer term you focus your efforts on getting towed pods of your own)

I completely agree with what you say. Here is one possibility for a Havenite interim approach: in hyperspace, split off the ships below BB class and position them on the possible escape routes. Have the BB's transition at speed and launch as many missiles as possible at Manticore's pickets with an initial ballistic stage. Then the BB's brake a much as possible to stay at extreme range. Once the coasting missiles reach effective range the wedge come up for the attack. The plan is to force the picket ships to flush the pods before the enemy is in range. Then when the they begin to flee, bring the rest of the attackers out of hyperspace in order to keep the pickets under fire for as long as possible.

Actually they would not need to transition at speed, instead they could make a slow transition much further out, accelerate to a good speed, release the missiles to coast inward and then complete braking before crossing the hyper-limit. The pickets might not realize about the missiles until those wedges came up, so wait until the missiles are closer before they go active.

tlb wrote:Actually they would not need to transition at speed, instead they could make a slow transition much further out, accelerate to a good speed, release the missiles to coast inward and then complete braking before crossing the hyper-limit. The pickets might not realize about the missiles until those wedges came up, so wait until the missiles are closer before they go active.

It takes imagination to come up with that tactic. It's something I'd expect Theisman, McQueen, Giscard and maybe some others to come up with. We don't know much about the crop of Legislaturalist flag officers, but judging from Chin and Parnell, they weren't very imaginative or weren't promoted based on that.

Either way, once the purges started, there were no flag officers left with any experience whatsoever. The front-line commanders left in the Alliance-facing portion of the PRH were completely outclassed. They wouldn't have come up with this strategy. Any that even thought about it would have to explain to their resident commissioner, who invariably was not versed in naval tactics and would neither understand it nor approve it.

As for disengaging to fight another day? Also forget it: remember the collective responsibility? In the early stages of the war, the PN flag officers would prefer to die in trying a brute force approach than to live to fight another day with what the CPS might consider a defeat. It wasn't until McQueen assumed leadership of the PN and managed to put some order into things that it started to change.

Jonathan_S wrote: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.

The reason the convoy escaped with only 1 escort being lost is because that escort drew the attention of the ships that could have intercepted the convoy and slaughtered the merchant ships before they could do anything. If the escort goes in system, checks it out and then goes back to report to the convoy and bring it in then the scouting works, otherwise it is all based on luck because that escort would give you the condition of the system only after the convoy is in the system which may very well be too late.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:As for disengaging to fight another day? Also forget it: remember the collective responsibility? In the early stages of the war, the PN flag officers would prefer to die in trying a brute force approach than to live to fight another day with what the CPS might consider a defeat. It wasn't until McQueen assumed leadership of the PN and managed to put some order into things that it started to change.

True. Doing the militarily smart thing (withdrawing from less important systems when you’ve insufficient force to win) is suicidal in that regime. And the Manties would only kill you in combat. The CPS would kill your family too.

I considered mentioning that; but for once opted for a slightly shorter post.

Making their officers scared to do the smart thing is one of the main ways the Peeps managed to lose most of their pre-way numeric superiority.

tlb wrote: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.

1) They may be deployed to systems closer to the front but the question is are they being used the best way possible? Ex. Seabring System defence having 10 BB's as system picket which deprives the RHN from the offensive power those battleships by spreading them in dozens of systems in insufficient strength to defend those systems but depriving the RHN of their potential.

2) Using battleships to support political operations is only acceptable if the opponents of those political operations also have BB's. Why use BB's when BC's or CA's or CL's or DD's would do just fine? Or old style LAC's? If the Republic is at peace then using BB's or SD's might be just fine as a show of force but when the BB's are desperately needed at the front and can in fact change the course of the war if used right it makes no sense.