Commerce raiding

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.

Sigs wrote: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.

I am not sure that we can answer your questions, since we don't know how they are being used in defense around Trevor's Star and we don't know the threat structure in the subjugated regions.

Saying BC's would suffice is only true if the rebel forces do not have BC's also, which might be why BB's (commanded by reliable personnel) are being used. It is fine to talk as though the only front was facing Manticore, but an unstable entity held together by force potentially has numerous fronts.

We do know that Operation Dagger requested BB's from the back regions, but had to wait for ships to be released from around Trevor's Star instead. Whether they were replaced by something larger or smaller is not known.

Jonathan_S wrote:Right, because Adler was after Trevor's Star was captured -- when I already pointed out that the books said the picket forces were drawn down.

Which means that using the BB's between 1905 and 1911 in the most aggressive fashion possible would have been the way to go. If you are right the RMN would have had a lot of their wallers spread in dozens of systems in small pickets that cannot be mutually supporting so this makes the argument for using the BB's with appropriate screen to attack those small pocket forces even stronger...

If we take the lower estimate then one of the RHN's Triumphant Class BB's would have ~12 Missiles per broadside, 8 PDC and 9 CM's this would mean that 4 BB's would represent the equivalent firepower of 1 Sphinx class SD. If we on the other hand assume that they had the same number of Tubes as an Ad Astra DN with less energy armament they would have ~18 missile tubes, 8 CM's and 18 PDC per broadside since after all they are bigger than the Ad Astra and missile armament heavy. This would mean that it would bring the missile armament close to 2-1 when compared to the Sphinx Class.

Either way 374 BB's represent a massive advantage that if used right could have won the RHN the war early on. Even if we assume that 20% are in for refit, that would leave 300 BB's for operations. Take out 60 for rear area security and QRF's that still leaves us with 240 BB's that represent the equivalent of 80 Sphinx class SD's in missile throw weight.

Imagine what they can do against pickets of 2-4 wallers per system? Especially if they are sent out not in just enough strength but overkill strength?

And it's true that most of the captured systems would have light pickets -- because there's likely nothing left there worth fighting over;

So? Seems like good trade off to go into a system and wipe out the defending forces even if it's only lighter forces. Then the RHN pickets them with a destroyer just to make sure they are not reoccupied and move on to the next system.

you can cripple their militarily useful spaceborne industry on the way out and leave the Peep BB force guarding a system that's a net drain on the Republic's resources.

Then the task force leaves the system as it is no longer worth defending and moves on to the next system.

At that point unless they start building a new fleet base there's not even any reason to recapture it -- not unless you think you can force the Peep fleet to fight and die on good attritional terms.

What are you talking about? If there is a picket in a system then send overwhelming force to destroy that picket. Withdraw from the system, if the Alliance reoccupies it then do it again if not move on

And if the BBs show up in overwhelming numbers then any picket commander who isn't an idiot is just going to leave, not even a single passing salvo for the honor of the flag. (Okay, there were clearly a few idiots in command of RMN pickets; but I have to hope they were rare)

If the RHN shows up with 20 BB's, 4 CA's, 8 CL's, 10 DD's and the picket flees then the rest of the task force waits in hyper until the picket commits to an exit and then they cut them off. When that stops working move on to the next strategy and the next strategy...

As for sending BBs after convoys - convoys spend as much time as possible in a grav wave; and a BB is about the worst ship to use for combat there. As you yourself pointed out the BBs are a very missile heavy design, and missiles are useless in a grav wave. Further the achillies heels of ships in a grav wave are their alpha nodes, which cannot be protected by armor. Any ship hit on the alpha nodes is, at best, out of the fight and requiring a tow clear or else is immediately lost with all hands. Without sidewalls to burn through you don't need particularly powerful energy mounts to kill other warships -- so you'd be better off with a bunch of lighter units instead of a few BBs. Lighter units that you presumably need to divert to cover whatever the BBs had been doing before you threw them after convoys.

Sending BB's for commerce raiding doesn't mean excluding lighter units, it means using the lighter units but kind of forces the alliance to use stronger escorts. If the RHN uses 24 BB's along with escorts in commerce raiding and the alliance answers with detaching 16 DN's for escort then you just took out 2 squadrons of DN's from the alliances available strength with BB's which means they increase the gap between the Alliances wall and the RHN's wall.

And if the Peeps want to spread a few hundred BBs around trying to find the needle in a haystack that is a convoy I'm sure Manticore would be quite happy about that. It's a lot of time spent with very little return; and about the most harmless thing they could do with those BBs.

I know where the alliances bases are, I know the newly captured systems are, its not that complicated to figure out where the convoy will come from... plus they don't need to hit every convoy, they need to hit a few convoys to make it necessary for the alliance to up the escort forces they don't need to actually destroy every convoy. Destroy one convoy like JNMTC 76 and its hundreds of billions of dollars in shipping and equipment and 100,000 alliance personnel. That would force them to send a strong escort next time, and escort with wallers.

They'd be better off with your other idea of massing them to kill pickets. At least then they might also catch a few convoys flying into the recaptured system (though not if the convoy escort commander is being smart about it -- but at least they could whittle down the escorts that scout the system ahead of the convoy)

With 300 BB's available for operation you can do both. The Commerce raiding doesn't require more than 2-3 squadrons and escorts.

If the Republic hadn't been thrown into disarray with the Pierre Coup, and removed the constraints on the use for force for regime change -- if the Harris Administration was still running the war then maybe they'd have been able to free up more BBs early on. But I don't know that we can simply declare Pierre and St. Just's concerns about internal stability and their determination that many BBs were needed for internal security to be fantasies and utterly stupid. Could they have freed up more BBs without the wheels coming off? Maybe. Maybe not.

The BB's should have been freed up BEFORE the war started.

At the outset of war, before the shenanigans of trying to stage manage the RMN's response the deployment for the RMN was as follows:

Home Fleet - 16 Squadrons of the wall
2nd Fleet - 8 Squadrons
Hancock - 5 squadrons
Grendelsbane ~1 Squadron

This is out of a total of ~33 Squadrons of the wall in the RMN. This means that 30 squadrons of the wall were committed and ~3 are deployed but we don't know where.

The offensive forces that the RHN used at the start of the war amounted to ~15 Squadrons of the wall. Using the BB's to strengthen that force could have made the war a lot shorter right off the bat.

Since the RHN gets to pick the time of the start of the war and they had 47 SD and DN squadrons they could have deployed a larger offensive force for the opening stages of the war.

Attack with 20 squadrons of the wall and 30 BB squadrons, 12 Squadrons of the wall and 15 of the wall against 2nd Fleet, 6 of the wall against Hancock with 10 BB squadrons in support and attack Alizon, Zanzibar and Yorik with the 8 remaining BB squadrons.

Or send out the entire offensive force against 2nd Fleet, in the opening phase of the war destroying second fleet takes out 25% of the Alliances wall in one day. Pull back to foreward deployed bases, rearm, repair and refuel then send them out to attack Hancock,Alizon, Zanzibar, Yorik, Talbot, Grendelsbane etc.... either they find pickets there or the SKM pulls the wallers out and back to the home system which means you an now blocked the Manticore Home System, tie down their entire wall and concentrate your forces even further.

Jonathan_S wrote:I know the situation was highly unusual, but I was just skimming back through Fourth Yeltsin, and is struck me that Honor's 6 SDs (and supporting lighter units) actually killed 17 of the 24 battleships with missiles (including the towed pod alpha strike); before reaching energy range! (for the loss of only one of the SDs; though somewhere along there 6 BCs joined her)

I guess battleship really can't stand the crush of battle with a proper waller!

In the battle of Seabring the RHN used 10 BBs and 11 BC's to fight against 11 DN's. The result was 1 DN destroyed, 6 DN's heavily damaged for the price of 7 BB's destroyed and 3 heavily damaged and the 11 BC's destroyed. I guess battleship really can stand the crush of battle with a proper waller!

Though Theisman's stand at Sebring, on the approaches to Trevor's Star during that campaign, while he was only facing DNs and had twice as many BBs, managed to damage them enough to cause the RMN force to withdraw -- but at the cost of 10 BBs written off for only 1 DN destroyed in exchange. Still not a good exchange rate -- and further evidence that the BBs weren't all sitting in the Peep rear areas on internal security duty.

He faced the DN's with 2-1 but that was with 10 BB's and 11 BC's not 20 BB's.

“He knew he'd fought well, even brilliantly, but brilliance had been too little to overcome his units' individual inferiority. He'd had twice as many ships as his opponent but less than two-thirds the tonnage, and battleships and battlecruisers had no business fighting dreadnoughts even at two-to-one odds.”

Excerpt From
In Enemy Hands
David Weber

If he had 20 BB's and 11 BC's he would have outgassed the 10 DN's. Since the heaviest DN is the Bellerophon that would mean that 11 of them would be ~77,000,000 tons vs 45,000,000 for the BB's and 10 million for the BC's. If there were 20 BB;s then Theism would have outgassed the RMN Taskforce 1.3 to 1 not 2/3 of their tonnage.


Once again:

I guess battleship really can stand the crush of battle with a proper waller!

Relax wrote:
I do note that support ships were mentioned, but the stress was on using fleet bases a centralized points for deployments, not lengthy deployments where fleet trains were used to refuel and re-arm units between repeated battled.

Obviously, this changed, but in 1905, this was the PRN operational pattern.

They seemed to have pretty long legs during Operation Icarus and I doubt that the RHN build their logistics all that much during the 7 disastrous years between 1905 and 1912. They went after Hancock, Basilisk, Zanzibar and Seaford Nine During the operations. What's more the force that attacked Zanzibar pulled out rearmed and hit Alizon as well so I highly doubt that the RHN's logistics prevented battleships from venturing far from home in 1905 but after 7 years of mismanagement the RHN had build up significant logistics resorurces to support 12th Fleets 32 SD's, 16 DN's and 80 BB's on an offensive so widely separated.

Relax wrote:I do note that support ships were mentioned, but the stress was on using fleet bases a centralized points for deployments, not lengthy deployments where fleet trains were used to refuel and re-arm units between repeated battled.

Obviously, this changed, but in 1905, this was the PRN operational pattern.

Sigs wrote:They seemed to have pretty long legs during Operation Icarus and I doubt that the RHN build their logistics all that much during the 7 disastrous years between 1905 and 1912. They went after Hancock, Basilisk, Zanzibar and Seaford Nine During the operations. What's more the force that attacked Zanzibar pulled out rearmed and hit Alizon as well so I highly doubt that the RHN's logistics prevented battleships from venturing far from home in 1905 but after 7 years of mismanagement the RHN had build up significant logistics resorurces to support 12th Fleets 32 SD's, 16 DN's and 80 BB's on an offensive so widely separated.

Here is text suggesting that things had changed between 1905 and 1912, From The Short Victorious War (1905):

Chapter 32 wrote:And then Parks had left one battle squadron to hold Seaford and returned to Hancock . . . just in time to meet Admiral Coatsworth as he moved in, expecting to find Rollins in possession. At least Coatsworth had gotten most of his ships out, yet his lead squadrons had taken a terrible pounding, and without Seaford's repair facilities, he'd been driven clear back to Barnett with his damaged units while his courier boats reported the disaster to Haven.

From Echoes of Honor (1912)

Chapter 15 wrote:"One reason the Manties have been able to beat up on us so far has been a fundamental flaw in our own strategy. For whatever reason—" even now she did not look at Fontein, Giscard noticed "—our approach has been to try to hold everything, to be strong everywhere, with the result that we've been unable to stop the Manties cold anywhere. We have to take some risks, uncover some less vital areas, to free up the strength we need to take the offensive to them for a change, and that's precisely what I propose to do."
Whoa! Giscard thought. "Uncover less vital areas"? She knows as well as I do that what we've really been covering some of those "less vital areas" against has been domestic unrest. Is she saying she's talked the Committee into—?
"We will be amassing a strike force and organizing a new fleet," she went on levelly, confirming that she had talked the Committee into it. "Its wall of battle will be composed primarily of battleships withdrawn from picket duties in less vulnerable, less exposed, and frankly, less valuable areas. We do not make those withdrawals lightly, and it will be imperative that, having made them, we use the forces thus freed up effectively. That will be your job, Citizen Admiral."

From EoH

Chapter 16 wrote:"On the logistical side," he nodded at Citizen Lieutenant Challot, who looked less than delighted to be brought center stage, "we'll be getting very heavy support. In addition to tankers and medical and repair ships, HQ is assigning two complete service squadrons of fast freighters for the specific purpose of assuring us an adequate supply of the new missile pods."
He bared his teeth in a fierce smile as several people around the table made pleased noises.
"The fact that we can finally match the Manties' capabilities in that area is certainly out of the bag by now—they could hardly miss knowing after the way Citizen Admiral Tourville kicked their ass at Adler—but this will be our first mass deployment of the system. In addition, we have upgraded recon drone capability courtesy of, ah, some technical assistance,"

Sigs wrote:If we take the lower estimate then one of the RHN's Triumphant Class BB's would have ~12 Missiles per broadside, 8 PDC and 9 CM's this would mean that 4 BB's would represent the equivalent firepower of 1 Sphinx class SD. If we on the other hand assume that they had the same number of Tubes as an Ad Astra DN with less energy armament they would have ~18 missile tubes, 8 CM's and 18 PDC per broadside since after all they are bigger than the Ad Astra and missile armament heavy. This would mean that it would bring the missile armament close to 2-1 when compared to the Sphinx Class.

We don't need to assume. Jaynes gives us the stats on the Triumphant-class
Introduced 1823 PD
Mass 4,493,250 tons
Length 1,168 m
Beam 159 m
Draught 145 m
Acceleration 445.1 G
Missiles (broadside) 30
Missiles (chase) 8
Lasers (broadside) 6
Lasers (chase) 2
Grasers (broadside) 6
Grasers (chase) 2
CM tubes (broadside) 16
CM tubes (chase) 6
PDLC (broadside) 18
PDLC (chase) 8

(Though It's a tad unfair to compare them to the Ad Astras which are 2 centuries older, and over half a million tons lighter)

There's no question Triumphants can throw a lot of weight. The problem is, even with a 4-ship squadron throwing 120 missiles per salvo it'll take dozens of such salvos to kill an SD, and in the meantime it'll be chewing up the BBs because it takes hundreds of hits to kill an SD but probably only dozens of hits to kill a BB. And each hit on a BB is going to wipe out more of their densely packed missiles tubes that it would on an SD which has tougher sidewalls, better separation between weapons, and more armor protecting the weapons from collateral damage. So the BBs' combat power is likely going to erode faster than the SD's. They might well kill the SD, but they'll likely take massive damage and probably lose a couple BBs in the process.

You'd really want more than just a 4:1 advantage to take on SDs with BBs.

Sigs wrote:If the RHN shows up with 20 BB's, 4 CA's, 8 CL's, 10 DD's and the picket flees then the rest of the task force waits in hyper until the picket commits to an exit and then they cut them off. When that stops working move on to the next strategy and the next strategy...

That wasn't a tactic anybody was using back then. Wasn't Sidemore Station at the start of the second war the first time somebody set up an ambush from hyper?

In fact IIRC nearly every time we've seen it it required FTL comms (which Haven't doesn't have yet) to get information quickly enough to the ship waiting to pop into hyper and pass along to the ambush force when and where to emerge to spring the mousetrap.

Jonathan_S wrote:In fact IIRC nearly every time we've seen it it required FTL comms (which Haven't doesn't have yet) to get information quickly enough to the ship waiting to pop into hyper and pass along to the ambush force when and where to emerge to spring the mousetrap.

But what if it did not take FTL to send the ship into hyperspace? Perhaps the attacking fleet is near the hyper-limit or the messenger knows to go once he sees the pickets fleeing (so the direction of flight is known in either case), then would it require FTL in hyper or can speedier movement allow the message to be carried?

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:In fact IIRC nearly every time we've seen it it required FTL comms (which Haven't doesn't have yet) to get information quickly enough to the ship waiting to pop into hyper and pass along to the ambush force when and where to emerge to spring the mousetrap.

But what if it did not take FTL to send the ship into hyperspace? Perhaps the attacking fleet is near the hyper-limit or the messenger knows to go once he sees the pickets fleeing (so the direction of flight is known in either case), then would it require FTL in hyper or can speedier movement allow the message to be carried?

I think the issue is that by the time the relay ship can see the fleeting ship's course itself there might not be time to set the trap.
The relay ship would need to activate its hyper-generator (which will take a couple minutes to go even from the hotest standby to actual translation, translate to the correct hyper band, possibly maneuver to meet the ambush force, give them the location and timing to translate down.
The ambush force then needs to move to calculate their exit point (taking sufficient concern for safely margin), move there, and then once they've triggered their hyper generators also wait for them to cycle (which should take even longer as bigger ships have a longer dwell time between pressing the button and actually translation; and the relay ship would likely be a DD while the ambush force would be much heavier units.

Depending on the velocity of the escaping force they might be able to get into hyper before all that happened.

But maybe there is time to pull all this off even with the relay ship's onboard grav sensors or lightspeed messages from the in-system forces. It's possible the tech existed to allow successful ambush from hyper long before Honor make the first use we know of; though IIRC it was presented as a novel thing there. Which seem to imply that
a) it wasn't actually possible previously, or
b) nobody thought of it, or
c) it was a known and used tactic; so Honor's use wasn't as novel as the book made it seem, or
d) it was one of those crazy ideas kicked around but never thought practical (so it was actually using it successfully that was the novel element)

Sigs: I think one of the biggest system raiding conceptual problems is this:

IF a larger force attacks
THEN smaller defending force just leaves.
No ships are damaged or lost by either party

Why? Vast majority of systems no one cares about, so NO, you are not going to attack a picketed system and kill them with BB's unless they are stupid and stand and fight. Defender just leaves. To cut them off you have to bring in at least 2 forces split evenly. Both of which are MORE superior than the defending force so they cannot RUN without being brought under attack. So, force parameters to take a system and obtain a kill on their defending picketing forces or a minimum fire missiles at them before they run away is roughly ~4:1 if you are RHN attacking RMN due to tech imbalance.

Now if you have 4:1 advantage in hulls(they don't) --> This tactic works just fine, but if you do NOT have a 4:1 advantage, or number of your hulls are all woefully out of date and in disrepair....?

Why DW specifically even SHOWED this more than once in first few books. The problem was FORCING defender to NOT run, to pick systems or objectives which FORCE defender to well, defend with inferior numbers instead of running away. Picketed systems are NOT meeting said criteria for this. Commerce in the grand scheme of things is not this way either. Now a commerce concentrator such as selker wave null space zones...

Jonathan_S wrote:The relay ship would need to activate its hyper-generator (which will take a couple minutes to go even from the hotest standby to actual translation, translate to the correct hyper band, possibly maneuver to meet the ambush force, give them the location and timing to translate down.
The ambush force then needs to move to calculate their exit point (taking sufficient concern for safely margin), move there, and then once they've triggered their hyper generators also wait for them to cycle (which should take even longer as bigger ships have a longer dwell time between pressing the button and actually translation; and the relay ship would likely be a DD while the ambush force would be much heavier units.

Depending on the velocity of the escaping force they might be able to get into hyper before all that happened.

I can think of a way to do all this, but it requires the dreaded micro-jump. Every ship comes out of hyperspace at the appropriate distance to accelerate, have the ships with the largest magazines push missiles out for the ballistic phase and then decelerate to a stop outside the hyper-limit. At this point the ships to seal the escape routes transit to the Alpha band at zero velocity, except for the messenger. The missile wedges activate, forcing the pickets to flush their pods and begin to flee. The messenger ship transits and the BB's begin the chase. The force in the Alpha band makes their move to the appropriate spot to transit (which I assume makes it a micro-jump) and return to normal space to join the chase.

I believe that the first way of attackers missiles have a good chance to get to the pickets, even if they decide to flee almost immediately. If so, this has a chance to cause damage, even if the chase is impossible.

PS: I did worry some about the lack of particle shielding (since the wedge is down), but decided it is not a problem. As long as enough missiles manage to raise their wedge and move against the pickets, then those ships will be forced to honor that threat. The purpose of this group of missiles is simply to force the pickets to flush pods at a position where the attackers will not be hurt. Provided the missiles from the pods have a time of flight that is long enough, the attackers could make a brief transit to hyper-space to escape if necessary.