Commerce raiding

Jonathan_S wrote:

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

Seems those numbers were Retconned heavily by the book Flag in Exile Ch 31. Flag in Exile says the Triumph class BB had only 30% the missile power of her SD's. Oh yea and 15% of her energy armament.

The SD's in question were the ex RHN DuQuesne class SD modified to Gryson.
Mass 7, 187,250 tons
Length 1,305 m
Beam 189 m
Draught 176 m
Acceleration 417.1 G
Missiles (broadside) 36
Missiles (chase) 10
Lasers (broadside) 12
Lasers (chase) 4
Grasers (broadside) 12
Grasers (chase) 6
CM tubes (broadside) 28
CM tubes (chase) 12
PDLC (broadside) 24
PDLC (chase) 12

SO, 30% the missile broadside would be 12 missile tubes. Not 30. Not sure how he squares the 15% of Broadside energy as that would be ~2 Graser&Lasers broadside, something even CA's have more of(true, smaller but...)

Not sure how that Squares when the 1846 Winton class DN has 20 Missile tubes as is supposed to fight with Grasers and stand in battle line with SD's on 5.8Mtons ~1.3M tons more yet supposedly the BB's are "missile heavy" and would still have 8 fewer tubes.

Unless of course they are "just" missile heavy for an early 1800's design which could be what DW actually mean in his description of the Triumphant class BB's. This could make more sense. AFter all an equivalent era RMN DD, Noblese-class has a whopping 4 missile tubes. Later Falcon class RMN DD has only 3 per broadside. RMN Warrior class CA has all of 6 missile tubes of same era design. RMN Truncheon class has only 5 Broadside missile tubes.

But next we have a problem with above theory as Redoubtable class BC's of same vintage have 18M Broadside. 18. Maybe this is actually a misprint that fell through the cracks as CA's of same period had only 5 or 6 missile tubes and it should only be ~12 or so??? And if BB's Triumph class 12 missile tubes were CAPITAL grade missile instead of cruiser grade, this would make FAR MORE SENSE. Same ~era Star knight had 12 and Reliant had 22 ~2X Sag A vrs reliant would be 14:22

EDIT: Of course Older smaller Ad Astra's have 18M, were refurbished in 1878 from the keel out as stated in HoS but then Triumphant class BB were also refitted but, how Flight IV vrs 1... Manticore class SD have 22M(also heavily refitted). Maybe Original Triumphant BB's were 30% of DuQuenes SD's and only had 12 tubes, but flight IV has ??? broadside missile tubes. 30 does not sound reasonable at all. SD's until most recent classes built around 1900 who only have greater than 30 broadside missile tubes.

Either way either FiE retconned Jayne's SITS, or DW meant something else about his 30%

Anyways.

tlb wrote:

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.

Why would the chase be impossible? 2 forces, 1 chases, the other half of the force waits outside hyper limit and watches vector the defender is running away to. Micro jump around and KABOOM, you bring them to bear with your missiles. Why need roughly 4:1 RHN/RMN advantage as missiles/Ecm of RHN not as good as RMN.

Sigs wrote: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...

Even without going into anything else, answer this: why use BBs at all if the PN had SDs available? They had more SDs than BBs and those were definitely not used for system picket. They had to defend some crucial systems like Trevor's Star, Haven and probably wherever they have their other shipyard, but they surely must have had some available to use.

After wall, they had been planning on a war against an Alliance with 250 of the wall.

So, why choose BBs when they had SDs?

The books give a limited view of Commerce Raiding since our principle characters are not that involved. Still we see Helen Z.'s mum die in a convoy action not in Silesia or to the League. We also know about the other members of the Manti Alliance with whom trade from Manticore would have been going and coming.

So A RHN Commerce raider needs to be fast enough to get in and get out and also expendable. The Old BB's were not fast and in terms of man power not expendable.

Talking about Commerce Raiding being a choice of weakness I don't agree - During both WW's the RN interdicted German Trade to the point of non-existance. That is a full on war on Commercial Traffic. Same during the Napolionic wars and the Dutch wars, the RN went after trade and authorised privateers to do so. There is not much difference between these "interdiction" campains and a full on Commerce Raiding campain.

On the BB's having a % of the SD's strength in Missiles and Beams the Jayne's guides give numbers but not strength/size. So if they have the same number of Beams but they are that much weaker or if the small numbers of tubes fire smaller missiles then the strength outcome would be the same.

Captain Golding wrote:Talking about Commerce Raiding being a choice of weakness I don't agree - During both WW's the RN interdicted German Trade to the point of non-existance. That is a full on war on Commercial Traffic. Same during the Napolionic wars and the Dutch wars, the RN went after trade and authorised privateers to do so. There is not much difference between these "interdiction" campains and a full on Commerce Raiding campain.

When commerce raiding is the ONLY option for one of the combatants, then it is clearly a strategy of weakness.

To call a full naval blockade nothing more than commerce raiding is to insult the navy involved and ignore the strength implied. A full blockade (such as by the British during the Napoleonic War or either World War) is saying NONE of your ships, not even your strongest warship, will leave port without being captured or destroyed. Yes, blockade duty might be enlivened by the occasional chase or fight, but mainly it is one of the strongest forms of economic warfare.

Examples of commerce raiding in World War 2 are the submarine campaigns of the German Navy in the Atlantic and the US Navy in the Pacific. Germany was operating from a position of naval weakness and was almost their sole naval strategy. The US Navy was operating from a position of strength (after the torpedo problems were fixed) and had a strong surface strategy also.

We are spinning round with speculation about what should have been or could have been done. Need a new book. So- when Manticore is grasping at ways of damaging/distracting Haven, perhaps (since they know they BBs exist and how Haven is using them) RMN could run system raids deep into Haven territory to strike at those politically positioned BB to do two things. First is to cause Haven to commit more ships to keep down problems of their subjugated equations and second to destroy or severely damage those BBs as part of destroying military resources including the crews.
This implies that RMN can find the assets to do what amounts to deep independent raiding -with trailing logistical support- with something like or the equivalent of a squadron of BC with a really heavy pod load out in tow. 1st you quietly scout systems with DDs then bring in the pod heavy BC. It's early war so you are going to have to go inside the hyper limit and sling the pods at where the defensive forces are. Essentially doing the passing version of Buccaneer at Beowulf with much shorter range missiles. Launch from your internal tubes but not light up the wedges. Stay out of the engagement range of BBs and whatever (since we don't presently know anything about what they did or did not leave as light units with anti-uprising BBs) and coast your pods/missiles into range. This is to attempt to swamp the defenses of the BBs and destroy or at least seriously damage several ships. That's war of attrition from a distance.
If successful, you are potentially destroying BBs and trained crews. If you don't destroy them you could at least seriously damage them to the point where they are going to have to use a repair ship to do anything useful since they could be unable to hyper anywhere. That is using resources and killing trained military spacers. Then there is the political challenges this COULD cause with a need to send more ground forces as well as additional ships (of whatever size) to keep the local population for getting restive.
Problems? 1) Where are you going to find and divert the RMN warships from to proved the forces plus the logistical support in the form of a repair ship and supply ships. 2) You're going deep into enemy territory and anything you have damaged (and still hyper capable) would need to be repaired unless you want to take off the crew and scuttle the ship. 3) All of this is going to take time to get where your target(s) are, do the scouting, do the raid and get back to what should be a safe place.
What's it worth to destroy or seriously damage several BBs, possibly kill smaller escorts and sew havoc among captive populations supporting Haven and providing "some" level of materials and economic support to Haven?

Relax wrote:Seems those numbers were Retconned heavily by the book Flag in Exile Ch 31. Flag in Exile says the Triumph class BB had only 30% the missile power of her SD's. Oh yea and 15% of her energy armament.

[snip]
Either way either FiE retconned Jayne's SITS, or DW meant something else about his 30%

That's a good catch that FIE info doesn't line up with Jayne's. (Though I don't think you can really call FIE a retcon as it was published over a decade earlier ; 1995 vs 2007).

So it's possible that when working with Ad Astra on the SITS game RFC realized that he'd badly undersold the power of the Triumphants. After all, 15% of the energy broadside and 30% of the missile is pretty pitiful on a hull that's 56% the tonnage. (Though going from 30% to 86% missile tubes, or vice versa, seems a pretty extreme revision)

But it's also possible that the Triumphant's are supposed to be as weak as FIE says -- though that seems unlikely as that'd make them poor at stopping BC raids. As you pointed out modern BCs have more tubes than FIE seems to say the BBs carry; and throwing just a 12 missile salvos at something like a Reliant isn't going to be a massive deterrent. (Even if we can still assume those are the bigger nastier capital missiles)

Captain Golding wrote:The books give a limited view of Commerce Raiding since our principle characters are not that involved. Still we see Helen Z.'s mum die in a convoy action not in Silesia or to the League. We also know about the other members of the Manti Alliance with whom trade from Manticore would have been going and coming.

So A RHN Commerce raider needs to be fast enough to get in and get out and also expendable. The Old BB's were not fast and in terms of man power not expendable.

Talking about Commerce Raiding being a choice of weakness I don't agree - During both WW's the RN interdicted German Trade to the point of non-existance. That is a full on war on Commercial Traffic. Same during the Napolionic wars and the Dutch wars, the RN went after trade and authorised privateers to do so. There is not much difference between these "interdiction" campains and a full on Commerce Raiding campain.

On the BB's having a % of the SD's strength in Missiles and Beams the Jayne's guides give numbers but not strength/size. So if they have the same number of Beams but they are that much weaker or if the small numbers of tubes fire smaller missiles then the strength outcome would be the same.

But we're also told this occurred because Peep intelligence managed to steal the exact convoy routing information -- something they can't necessarily rely on being able to do once war is actually declared. (And convoy might be permitted, or required, under wartime conditions to add locally devised evasive routing so nobody outside the convoy would know the exact route.

They'd only have to diverge a couple of light hours from the most direct route to be effectively impossible to find while in hyper (and that's not a big detour given that you wouldn't even need to leave the grav wave to do it; just move closer to some randomly chosen part of its crossectional edge.

As for being a strategy of weakness. Commerce raiding is far different from blockade. The Royal Navy choked of (most of) German oceanic commerce in WWI and WWII (or French oceanic commerce in the Napoleonic Wars) because they had control of the ocean and were able to blockade the ports and stop commerce -- that's part of a strategy of strength. Even in WWII where the USN wasn't able to blockage Japanese ports (unless very late in the conflict) their submarine campaign of commerce raiding was in conjunctions with, and supporting, their campaign of island hopping invasions -- another strategy of strength; working to gain control of the ocean. (However one could argue that being force to raid Japanese shipping was because the USN was too weak to immediately seize control of the sea; still the overall strategy wasn't one of weakness and refraining from raiding commerce wouldn't magically make it stronger)

Where commerce raiding is a strategy of weakness is when it is (basically) the only naval operation you can manage. When you have to adopt it because you can't otherwise contest the enemy's control of the seas. So (with the early war exception of supporting the invasion of Norway) the WWII German navy wasn't able to do much at sea except attempt to raid Allied commerce -- they were too weak to do anything else. Similarly in the war of 1812 the USN (and US privateers) largely had to stick to raiding British commerce as they lacked the power to actually contest control of the seas or blockage British ports --- and that despite most of the RN being busy dealing with France. (Though there were of course some famous frigate duels as part of that commerce raiding strategy) By the end of the war most US ships were blockaded in port and only able to occasionally escape due to luck and during bad weather. Or for that matter the French strategy of Jeune École relied on commerce raiding as part of what could be argued as a strategy of weakness -- they believe that the French government couldn't afford to fund a navy able to directly defeat the RN, and so they looked to cheap torpedo boats and the like to make (close) blockade too costly to sustain and to protect their coast while fast cruisers would raid British commerce and (hopefully) cause sufficient economic pain to convince the British to end a war. (Or fear of that deter them from starting one)


For the Peeps, engaging in more commerce raiding (especially with units that could otherwise be significantly helping in major fleet battles) is something of a strategy of weakness in that they're in effect admitting that they lack the strength to quickly defeat the enemy's navy or to blockade or capture their systems. But that doesn't mean the Peeps are weak; just that they're not strong enough to yet gain that control. (And commerce raiding with units that can't contribute meaningfully to fleet battles is just good practice as it'll weaken the enemy and force them to divert effort more than simply throwing those light units in as additional screening forces)

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:Seems those numbers were Retconned heavily by the book Flag in Exile Ch 31. Flag in Exile says the Triumph class BB had only 30% the missile power of her SD's. Oh yea and 15% of her energy armament.

[snip]
Either way either FiE retconned Jayne's SITS, or DW meant something else about his 30%

That's a good catch that FIE info doesn't line up with Jayne's. (Though I don't think you can really call FIE a retcon as it was published over a decade earlier ; 1995 vs 2007).

So it's possible that when working with Ad Astra on the SITS game RFC realized that he'd badly undersold the power of the Triumphants. After all, 15% of the energy broadside and 30% of the missile is pretty pitiful on a hull that's 56% the tonnage. (Though going from 30% to 86% missile tubes, or vice versa, seems a pretty extreme revision)

But it's also possible that the Triumphant's are supposed to be as weak as FIE says -- though that seems unlikely as that'd make them poor at stopping BC raids. As you pointed out modern BCs have more tubes than FIE seems to say the BBs carry; and throwing just a 12 missile salvos at something like a Reliant isn't going to be a massive deterrent. (Even if we can still assume those are the bigger nastier capital missiles)

Well if you take the lengths of the 2 ship classes I compared up above or even other DN's/SD you get a ratio of near ~86% so... Of course DN's of that time period only have ~~ 20 odd missile tubes, not 30. Maybe the 30% is missile firing endurance?, but how is that in same sentence as the 15% energy of SD?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Sigs wrote:Ok they were picketed by BC's... they still cannot stand up to BB's.

Actually, can't they?

How would an 1823-designed BB build in the 1830s and 1840s going to stand up to a Reliant-class BC from 1897? Depending on how recently they were updated or which Flight they were from, they may have very slow missile launchers. I wouldn't be surprised if they fired only once per minute, whereas a Reliant can probably sustain a 12 to 15-second cycle.

The Royal Winton was from 1844 and served till 1916, Ad Astra was from 1632 and served until 1913, Samothrace SD is from 1840's.

I won't waste my time with you if you cannot grasp basic concepts of refit and upgrade.

So even though the 700k-tonne BC has fewer missile tubes than a 4.5-million-tonne BB, the BC may be able to fire more missiles per minute than the BB. In the long run, the BB has deeper magazines so they can fire more, but they have to survive to do so.

Im fairly certain that BC's use lighter missiles than BB's, DN's and SD's. We have 24 BB's destroy 1 SD and cripple 5 others even after being tricked into getting too close and not using their missile advantage and this guy is arguing BC's would take BB's on.

Then let's consider the quality of the missiles. An RMN BC would be firing their best, state-of-the-art shipkiller.

BC's do NOT fire the same missiles as SD's

At this stage, BC missiles aren't designed to take on wallers, but they are very good at what they do.

Taking on BC's, CA's, CL's and DD's?

What kind of missiles do 80-year-old design BBs fire? In fact, were they even updated to have the same launchers as their bigger cousins, the DNs and SDs?

So every once in a while the Navy in question would pull their ships and refit them one at a time, improve their electronics, weapons, engines etc... make them better than they were when they went in. A ship built in 1820's or 1830's wouldn't have the same weapon and electronics load out in 1905 because they would have had 1,2,3,4 or 5 refits in the 75 years between construction and start of war. You don't build a ship and do nothing with it for the next three quarters of a century.

A passage above quoted from Jaynes says PN ships have stronger armour and comparatively weaker sidewalls to RMN units. A PN BB would have much stronger armour than any BC, but it might actually have sidewalls as strong as the RMN BC, so the missiles may be able to get through them.

There are capital ship missiles and BC/CA missiles, both are missiles just different power. A BB is still a BB with more armour than a BC and bigger more capable missiles.

Are you really trying to say that a ship that has a mass of 800,000 tons is more capable than 4,500,000 battleship?

Finally, consider the laserhead: those didn't exist in the 1820s yet.

REFIT