Attacking Darius:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:You should reconsider. Case Zulu offers a glorious chance to destroy the entire RMN fleet as it is defenseless and trapped in the exit lane. It you can somehow sneak a bunch of grasers into position...

You can't fit a whole fleet in the exit lane. Well... ok, it depends on the size of the fleet. 25 SD(P)s from the Eighth performed a mass transit and that's a huge prize. But it was not the entire Eighth.

TBH, for anyone except the GA powers and the SLN, 25 SD(P)s is either their entire navy or more than they have in the first place. Though it also means they'd never push their entire navy in a mass transit.

You put a group of g-trops in place and then you wait for the fleet to start traversing. You probably can’t fit the entire fleet in the lane at once. But you can fit a LOT of very expensive ships in the lane. So you hit them. You don’t need to utterly destroy them. The lane will do that if you do enough damage. And a 3-second graser might well do that.

And the rest of the fleet will keep coming through (they don’t know what is going on as it takes minutes to send a messanger), so you an keep repeating this if the defenders are unable to kill the waiting g-torps, which requires finding them.

penny wrote:

penny wrote:Dunno who brought it up last, but it has never sit well with me that LDs will not have screens. It isn't that I disagree. But is it possible?

I suppose an LD will carry a lot of those long-legged CMs that we were shown at Galton. Something.

But why can't an LD have Sharks and even Ghosts as screens? Would their accel be the same? Even if not, an LD isn't actually maneuvering at its max accel all the time. And a shell of Sharks can carry CMs to thicken the missile defense? (Learning from your enemy.) And a Ghost can sacrifice itself if it appears the enemy has detected something.

This probably won't be possible in enemy territory, but in the Darius system?

Jonathan_S wrote:Sharks and Ghosts can keep up with an LD just fine -- they're all limited by the acceleration their crews can take.

That is what I thought, but since many people are advocating that LDs would not have escort ships, it made me think they couldn't keep up. Which is the only reason I can think of that would keep them out of the role.

Jonathan_S wrote:The Ghost would be virtually useless as a defensive asset.
...it has no offensive weapons.

Yet the converse of the above is also true ...

The best offense is to have the best defense.

A Ghost's defensive capabilities lies in the fact that it can be sacrificed. It is the perfect sacrificial lamb. Very low cost. Very little crew. Very high build rate.

Sacrificing itself is an offensive decision to execute a defensive maneuver.

If you want sacrificial units that can't attack anything build decoys. A MAlign spider-drive Lorelei would be far cheaper and quicker to build than even a Ghost -- and when you scarified it you wouldn't be throwing away a crew that took years to train.

Even if the MAlign can birth clones at arbitrarily high rates they still need for them to grow up, educate them, and then put them through military training -- so they still can't be all that cavalier about sacrificing crew. This isn't Star Wars Clone Troopers that decant from cloning tanks as adults; fully ready for combat.


Now if they end up in desperation then yes, I could easily see the MAlign expending their Ghosts, Sharks, or even LDs in suicidal ways. But if things are that desperate they've likely already lost and all they're doing is slightly delaying the inevitable.

penny wrote:The strategy I think the MAN will use in the opening phase of the war is to send the LDs in to attack a system with surprise. The LDs will unleash an Alpha launch from the edge of the system. Much like Honor. This launch will utilize the element of surprise as a force multiplier. It will destroy the system's infrastructure and possibly take out enemy warships which are sitting with wedges down, and even mission kill many ships that had wedges up but were not cleared for action.

Then the wedge based pod-laying MAN ships who are waiting in hyper will attack, where hopefully the enemy's defenses are whittled down.

Then the LDs and Sharks and Ghosts will join the fray, swashbuckling their way to victory.

You could also use g-torps, launched from LDs or carried by the SD(P) formation, to whittle down a conventional naval force attempting to stop the SD(P) attack. (The SD(P) formation could potentially have some externally attached to the SD(P)s, or carried in a fast collier that accompanies them, or even in a wedge powered ship class that mounts g-torp tubes)

Exit hyper at range, and the defensive fleet will need to start heading towards you. Launch g-torps towards them and hopefully score a bunch of down the throat shots before the fleets close to effective MDM range and the defenders bring all their defensive tricks online.

Because if the enemy's vector is mostly towards you then even the low acceleration of the g-torp can probably adjust for any minor evasive maneuvering they might do.

penny wrote:The defense of Darius will always be inseparably intertwined with offensive operations on the GA. You can't attack me if you are defending yourself. And if my campaigns are successful, you won't have anything to attack me with.

The MA can not afford to give the GA the initiative. The MAN will absolutely positively want to strike first!

When attacking enemy systems, those very huge masses of ones system defense pods have no use. System defense pods have no strategic mobility ... available behind enemy lines.

I agree that's the strategy.

And yet I don't think it's sufficient to win. The strategy must have another component.

The MAlign could devastate all of the GA's rear area systems and not degrade at all the GA's fighting ability. Their main industrial centres wouldn't get touched. No, they need to repeat Oyster Bay on the main systems. The rear area ones aren't worth it.

And though low risk, in the beginning, the risk increases every time you use it. Remember how Honor did get mousetrapped in the Battle of Solon, during Operation Cutworm. She extricated herself, but that battle is a loss on the Alliance's column, losing one SD(P) and Adm. Gold Peak getting captured.

The equivalent for that for the MAlign is that they lose one LD and some escorts. I presume those would just blow themselves up to avoid any capture, but there will still be hardware captured, which gives S&S ideas.

kzt wrote:You put a group of g-trops in place and then you wait for the fleet to start traversing. You probably can’t fit the entire fleet in the lane at once. But you can fit a LOT of very expensive ships in the lane. So you hit them. You don’t need to utterly destroy them. The lane will do that if you do enough damage. And a 3-second graser might well do that.

Are you talking about the outgoing lane, as opposed to the emergence one?

Why would any fleet put all its ships on the outgoing lane if they are not planning on a mass transit? Instead, there would be ships outside of it that would be queueing up for transit, and would still be running with wedges. Those couldn't be attacked, unless the geometry happened to work.

So they may attack an attempt at mass transit... but can you count on the enemy attempting that in the first place?

And the rest of the fleet will keep coming through (they don’t know what is going on as it takes minutes to send a messanger), so you an keep repeating this if the defenders are unable to kill the waiting g-torps, which requires finding them.

That's describing the exit lane. And that works more than once only if there are no defenders left. That's what happened on the Battle of the Prime-Ajay Hyperbridge: the SLN was transiting to a system they didn't hold (they thought they did).

If there are defenders left (who were caught unawares), they'll send out shells of recon drones and push out all the LACs and escorts that are available.

And again, you're counting on a mass transit and this time you don't even know when it's coming. The first notice you have that the mass transit is happening is when those 25 ships appear in the exit lane, with blazing Warshawski sails. That probably signifies the end of the fleet's transit, which probably means that a hundred other ships have already transited.

So while this could work, and is low risk for the LDs, the chance of success is also pretty low. The chance that you can keep those g-torps loitering outside of detection range, ready to fire, for hours while a hundred warships transit and take up positions defending the junction, is low.

kzt wrote:You put a group of g-trops in place and then you wait for the fleet to start traversing. You probably can’t fit the entire fleet in the lane at once. But you can fit a LOT of very expensive ships in the lane. So you hit them. You don’t need to utterly destroy them. The lane will do that if you do enough damage. And a 3-second graser might well do that.

And the rest of the fleet will keep coming through (they don’t know what is going on as it takes minutes to send a messanger), so you an keep repeating this if the defenders are unable to kill the waiting g-torps, which requires finding them.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's describing the exit lane. And that works more than once only if there are no defenders left. That's what happened on the Battle of the Prime-Ajay Hyperbridge: the SLN was transiting to a system they didn't hold (they thought they did).

If there are defenders left (who were caught unawares), they'll send out shells of recon drones and push out all the LACs and escorts that are available.

And again, you're counting on a mass transit and this time you don't even know when it's coming. The first notice you have that the mass transit is happening is when those 25 ships appear in the exit lane, with blazing Warshawski sails. That probably signifies the end of the fleet's transit, which probably means that a hundred other ships have already transited.

So while this could work, and is low risk for the LDs, the chance of success is also pretty low. The chance that you can keep those g-torps loitering outside of detection range, ready to fire, for hours while a hundred warships transit and take up positions defending the junction, is low.

Yes, I am certain that he meant to have the force take out the defenders. Depending on where this is, there might not be too many. It presumes that the Malign have set up a situation where a fleet needs to use this wormhole to respond.

It would not work on the lanes entering the wormhole, because than ships would just scatter until they could make a normal entry into hyper-space. It is here that a mass transit would be needed to get this to work.

Alpha's make mistakes. They misjudge things. They have demonstrated they can jump the gun (use Oyster Bay to try & cripple Manticore & Grayson but end up creating the GA) and exposing the existence if not the tech of their most advanced weapons.

Having an LD materialize in the High Orbitals around Manticore to demand surrender would possibly have the LD look like a target full of arrow holes just before it disintegrated/vaporized as any RMN ship and some planetary weapons opened up on it. No wedge......humm. That would be like a WWII submarine surfacing to the survivor of a convoy and telling the crew to abandon ship so the sub could use it's deck gun to kill it only to discover it was facing a Q-ship commerce raider.......Naw, the Alignment Navy would stand off and kill people till it was all wrapped up.

The Sharks (that we know of) don't have any "defensive " armament. They were proof of concept pieces for the LDs. Sure, they can probably keep (or be required to be as relatively show as the LDs) but then the same sort of rules apply. Unless the Alignment has spider drive CM - slow bastards again the the speed of even conventional laser head missiles- when the Shark fires it will light it's pollution like a firework going off. If the Alignment keeps them in inventory as training but uses them for other strikes it would more likely like 3rd or 4th tier target systems and just do the same thing as Oyster Bay...blow the crap out of infrastruter from "invisible ships" from way far away. Not configured for any kind of escort duty that we have been told of.

Ghosts....again, no mention any defensive armament. And why would you deliberately sacrifice some of your most capable people as decoys? They are also not configured for escort duty or possibly even self defense --remember, these are limited in speed to what the crews can survive without the compensation provided by a wedge----so even running is very low probability from as deep inside a hyper limit as they are used at to pinpoint targets. They are inteligence gathering and recon/scout ....kind of like photo recon aircraft in WW II....not armed (and not as relatively fast as say a photo/recon Spitfire or Mustang or any one of a number of other aircraft which were also flying at high altitude)....so they only survive if they are not discovered.

Using LDs to "mine" lanes of a wormhole junction or just a wormhole mostly means sneaking in, dropping highly stealthed pods or G-Torps and then......communicating with them when you have targets for them. Then there is the loitering endurance limits on the pods or tropes-- you are unlikely to emplace them in ORBITS relative to the terminus for months due to power demands.

I don't know but the LD's seem to be primarily ways to shatter the orbitals and in-system fabrication & control facilities. The seem to be a way to vastly accelerated the fall of systems and multi-system governments by destroying their ability to support themselves and defend themselves in the face of almost any other group looking to take them over. Remember, the RF is/was supposed to be a rallying point for the collapsing SL and any other organized government trying to stave off a fall to Dark Ages. Destroy their ability to build/maintain warships or even any starships plus off-planet manufacturing and reproduce extraction and they are .....vunerable.
The Alignment doesn't care how many people are lilled in their attacks (the fine tuning of Oyster Bay NOT to hit planets was ONLY to avoid an EE event and draw in any kind of "favorable" attention of the SL. If they have "only" say, 20 LDs they can destroy the economies of 20 systems with ship building and major orbital manufacturing every (perhaps 4 months or so if you also provide the LDs with resupply ships using normal hyper dives to meet them soon after each attack then continue on to next target. If you hit 60 systems for Star Nations like Manticore, Beowulf, Grason, Erwhon, The Judean Leage, in a T-year you have chaos and economic ruin plus lack of defense. Pick off the leaders, then whittle down the rest till the RF sucked them into the Alignment philosophy and starts building the Alignment Continuum .

Billions of "normal" humans killed plus those who no longer can access Prolong and modern medicine....so what says the Alignment, they're only use is to make our compleat takeover happen.

Brigade XO wrote:The Sharks (that we know of) don't have any "defensive " armament. They were proof of concept pieces for the LDs. Sure, they can probably keep (or be required to be as relatively show as the LDs) but then the same sort of rules apply. Unless the Alignment has spider drive CM - slow bastards again the the speed of even conventional laser head missiles- when the Shark fires it will light it's pollution like a firework going off. If the Alignment keeps them in inventory as training but uses them for other strikes it would more likely like 3rd or 4th tier target systems and just do the same thing as Oyster Bay...blow the crap out of infrastruter from "invisible ships" from way far away. Not configured for any kind of escort duty that we have been told of.

Ghosts....again, no mention any defensive armament. And why would you deliberately sacrifice some of your most capable people as decoys? They are also not configured for escort duty or possibly even self defense --remember, these are limited in speed to what the crews can survive without the compensation provided by a wedge----so even running is very low probability from as deep inside a hyper limit as they are used at to pinpoint targets. They are inteligence gathering and recon/scout ....kind of like photo recon aircraft in WW II....not armed (and not as relatively fast as say a photo/recon Spitfire or Mustang or any one of a number of other aircraft which were also flying at high altitude)....so they only survive if they are not discovered.

Sharks are described as pod-layers, so it would strange if they did not have defensive weapons. It would be simple for them to have pods of CM's, so they would not have their position directly indicated.

The Ghosts do not have offensive weapons, but they are described as having minor anti missile defenses.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
So while this could work, and is low risk for the LDs, the chance of success is also pretty low. The chance that you can keep those g-torps loitering outside of detection range, ready to fire, for hours while a hundred warships transit and take up positions defending the junction, is low.

Not at all. You intend to create a situation where the RMN will suddenly want to bring a bunch of warships through the junction. So you know when it will likely happen and will be prepared to deal with it if it does. If not, well, the Junction infrastructure is always available as a target.

Brigade XO wrote:
Having an LD materialize in the High Orbitals around Manticore to demand surrender would possibly have the LD look like a target full of arrow holes just before it disintegrated/vaporized as any RMN ship and some planetary weapons opened up on it. No wedge......humm.

It's got a fort-class bubble sidewall. And all the nearby RMN ships would have had a sudden problem some seconds or minute previously. And if you shoot at it it will shoot back. Hope nothing you care about is within say 10-15 KM of the ground-based system.