penny wrote:Like when the GA decides to attack Darius? Something will certainly be shooting at the LACs then. To a stealthy foe like the MAN, a LAC will be no more than a glorified probe on steroids. Like Ghost Rider. Even the GA's tactics include eating probes. And in the Darius system, I simply do not think there will be a lack of resources. Except perhaps on the GA's side of the fence. The GA will have to rely on the resources they could afford to bring to the party.
Again the issue of quantity and vectoring the units. We've discussed this before.
The GA would have the choice of timing and position, because it is the one with the initiative on attacking. That means the MAN wouldn't have anything in the early engagement and needs to vector whatever weapon assets into position. And we know just how slow those things are, however stealthy.
On a full-out attack on Darius, the GA is going to launch 2000 LACs and even more Ghost Riders outwards of them. Can the MAN weapons get close enough to shoot at the LACs? And would they expend this many weapons on the least important GF ships? And even if they did this and succeeded in severely reducing the LAC shell, what would the admiral in command of the GA force do? They're just going to hyper out and get even more LACs, and be ready for the next time.
This at best buys Darius some reprieve, but not enough of it. It stands to reason that the GA would have already launched their missiles at the Darius infrastructure before the MAN weapons could get into range of that many LACs and shoot simultaneously, so the MAN can't rebuild.
Remember when I said long ago that when attacking an enemy as unprecedentedly stealthy as the MAN, the tactics involved will be different across the board? The MAN can afford to take out LACs because the enemy still can't find their ships. The LDs will be nowhere near the point of launch.
Yes, I do. But stealth alone doesn't win the battle. Taking out the LACs doesn't win against the GA. Unless the MAN can somehow destroy upwards of 300 capital ships, the GA is just going to keep on coming. And if you anger them with actions with little strategic consequence, they're more likely to just send two million missiles down into Darius system and destroy
everything. The LDs would die on the vine.
All of this assuming there hasn't been enough time for the SLN to get its own SD(P)s and CLACs in production. Because if there has and their SD(P)s are just the same quality as what Erewhon is producing for itself and Maya, then we need to revise all those numbers up.
Acceleration might not be an asset against a stealthy foe, as I mentioned in other threads, said the Spider to the Fly.
You don't need to know there's a stealthy foe out there to do basic evasion and not be anywhere close. That means the spider-drive torpedoes can't keep up with the LACs, meaning even if you could get them close to LACs, you're not going to be able to destroy the 1000 LACs in a single salvo. After the first salvo, it gets more difficult because the MAN has fewer weapons in place (everything that fired is no longer there, including those that missed) and the LACs are doing even more aggressive evasions.
Plus, this revealed to the fleet what the potential detections had been and they will react by improving their sensor detection techniques.
Again as in other threads, how can active evasion help except for potluck? How can one evade or "tip toe through the tulips" when the tulips cannot be seen? One might zig into a trap, then zag into a bigger trap. Like I said before, when has zig-zagging ever worked when in a "minefield", except for the mines?
Law of averages. Evasion doesn't need to know where the threat is going to be, it just needs to increase the volume of where you can be to a level where the enemy's ability to guess or react to your position is compromised. That increases the number of LACs that will survive. Yes, through sheer random luck, but it doesn't matter.
Ordinarily (but cautiously) I'd agree with this on average, if the MAN has come to dinner in a system near you. But when the GA hypers into Darius the law of averages must be thrown out the airlock.
The MAN needs to think tactically and strategically. See above for the latter; for the former, they need to use the weapons they have in a rational manner. Expending the torpedoes on LACs accomplishes little and reveals a lot.
Maybe it's the only thing they can do. But if that's the case, they are screwed. Then again... this may be exactly the plan: delay the GF long enough and make them withdraw to rearm, so the Detweilers can flee to Plan B. It won't save Darius and would set the Galaxy domination plan back centuries, but the egotistical Inner Onion members may go for it.
Perhaps. But that leaves the RFN. Whenever wherever and however the two forces meet, the RFN better not have copied the SLN's plans for being a paper tiger.
The RFN is a non-entity. It doesn't have anything that is even of SLN quality and it's under observation. They can't outbuild the GA and the SLN, neither in quantity nor quality.
Getting help from Darius under the wraps isn't helping either. The moment those ships show up, Mannerheim gets a visit.
And if you can not localize your enemy and your enemy is having a party sending wave after wave of dense salvos at you, your CM warfare is going to eventually suffer. AirForce One can shit out a shitload of flares, but they ain't gonna last forever.
Air Force One doesn't have a hypergenerator.
Besides, you
can localise an enemy firing missiles because you can tell where the wedges lit up for the first time. The spider drive ships can fire a lot of missiles, but they shouldn't want to because that reveals their rough position. Assuming the MAN hasn't cracked the accuracy of Apollo yet, they will be within 50 million km of the target, so the worst time for an RD to arrive on-scene is 10 minutes. At emergency acceleration of 350 gravities, the LD can change its position by 615,000 km, which is usually good enough for its stealth against one target, but insufficient for the number of GRs that are going to be flying past.
Within 18 minutes of the LD launching missiles, it is eating missiles launched at it. It's probably enough time to hyper out, though.
Conventional wisdom places CMs and missiles aboard ships together. But as I tried to impart before, conventional ships have launch tubes that are not all available for CM launch, no?
No. The shipkiller tubes can be used to launch CMs too, by fitting multiple CM missiles in a canister that is fired through the wider tube.
Or you can just do like Grayson did and not have shipkiller tubes at all, just energy weapons and CM tubes.
And conventional ships do not have the control links to wage a simultaneous war of missiles and CMs simultaneously.
As far as we can tell, that's not true. Those are different links. The impediment to controlling the anti-shipping missiles downrange was the wedge: if the ship had to turn turtle and interpose its wedge, it would lose contact with the missiles.
But that's not a problem any more for Apollo because they are controlled from the Keyhole IIs, not the ship itself. So there's nothing stopping the ship from defending itself with wedge interposed and still controlling the attacking birds several light-minutes downrange.
Even Saganami-Cs do that: in the Battle of Ajay-Prime, the RMN ships turned wedge-on to the SLN launch when the Cataphracts were arriving and just let their own missiles attack the SLN's battlecruisers. Sure, this is not a tactic to use against a peer power, but the capability is there if necessary. And if it's a peer power, then the peer has the same limitations as you do and must turn wedge-on too.
The MAN's Ninurta is unlikely to be as capable as the Apollo.
So, yes, I still think CM warships are a logical progression. The threat environment has not only changed, it is totally different. Remember back in the Attacking Darius thread you suggested blind firing an avalanche of missiles to flush out hidden enemies? Well, I still think that is a wasteful tactic firing into the dark (and talk about wasting resources when you're away from home and your colliers have been destroyed) but missiles blindly fired at an enemy that has not been localized with an avalanche of missiles with no control links is a double blind. Wait, what?
It would be wasteful if you were firing blind and with no control links. But I didn't propose that at all: see the case above of the LD firing missiles. You have a tentative detection and the GA has FTL control links, in spite of having to turn wedge-on. So if send the GR drone wave 2 minutes ahead of the missile salvo, you can still tell the Mk23 salvo to change course and attempt a hit. Once hit, the stealth of the LD is compromised and it must retreat.
When the GA hypers into Darius, LACs will become snacks. Same as probes.
Again, cost-benefit is skewed. Every LAC and every drone that is destroyed degrades the GA's capabilities by much less than it does the MAN's. The MAN has a limited supply of those, can't retreat, and every use reveals that bit more about their capabilities and stealth.
You may win the battle only to throw the war away.
