Solly Fleet Advancements

I think that we have to assume that particularly after Fillereta's debacle, the Sollies are starting to sober up. Read Kingsford's conversation with Kolokoltzov in the aftermath of Rajampets death. I think it's a bit late and if they can't figure a way to tap the wealth of the core worlds to support the war, they are sunk. But Kingsford obviously has brain cells to rub together and he summarizes the situation pretty accurately.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the expedition to Beowulf. I bet they have orders to run away if confronted by big nasty Manties.

Don

Alizon wrote:
This also reveals the safest and most potentially rewarding strategy the SLN raiding forces can adopt, hyperspace intercepts.

Hyperspace intercepts are difficult to achieve especially when you're going after warships, but in this kind of situation you're going after the merchants and their escorting force which will tied to the maneuvering capabilities of their flock.

Convoys also travel along fairly predictable paths which means figuring out the general area to perform an intercept isn't horribly difficult and you have the numbers to spread a pretty effective net.

Yes there are challenges to hyperspace combat, but the elimination of LAC's and MDM's from the picture should be awfully appealing to any SLN raiding force commander.

Such intercepts eliminate the effectiveness of garrisoning LAC squadrons and forces warships into the one area of combat where the SLN is going to be their equal if not their superior, close range energy weapons engagements with Graser and Lasers.

In this case, the SLN can use the GA tendency to depend on LAC in the commerce protection role against them. If the only real advantage you have over a LAC squadron in your hyperdrive, use it. It's a feature that GA commanders are likely to undervalue somewhat so use it to your advantage.

And don't discount the morale effect of even an minor naval victory. During the war of 1812 the US Navy had a handful of frigates matched against the most powerful navy in the world. But the handful of victories which those frigates won carried a significance all out of proportion to their actual impact on the war. Even in defeat, the courage of the bravery of the sailors of the USS Chesapeake and the last words of her Captain "don't give up the ship" has echoed in history.

In this case, if the enemy seems to be all powerful, even a small victory can tell your people, even those in your armed forces, that no, they aren't invincible after all, their just hard to beat but you can do it. A brave defeat spitting defiance in the eye of the enemy can also serve.

For the League to defy the GA, they need to find and cultivate that defiant spirit and even small victories can serve to fuel that defiance. They aren't going to get those victories against the GA's primary fleets, at least not in the early phases of the conflict so if you want to find them, it's going to be the raiding forces that find them for you.

Oh, btw, the time lag doesn't matter as much as it might. It might be news that's months old, but when it arrives it's new news to the general public most of which won't look beyond the headlines. Even if they do, who is to say Commodore X hasn't won even greater victories that we just don't know about yet so the time lag can actually work for you in a lot of ways.

Hope spring eternal after all.

I'm pretty sure there's a post from RFC somewhere that points out that combat in hyperspace is extremely rare and that the two or three hyperspace battles that have occurred in the 20+ years that Haven and Manticore have been shooting at each other is actually an over-representation of what would be expected. If it was super easy to hang around near the hyper limit and jump on vessels as they translate up then it'd be happening more often if you ask me.

As for the morale stuff, I think you're drastically overestimating the good that a single victory is going to achieve when pretty much any significant battle is going to result in catastrophic defeat.

There's only so long that you're going to be able to keep it from being obvious to the people that crew your ships that they're all going to die as soon as they find themselves in a battle that isn't custom made to give them all the advantages. Heck, you can't even get a win most of the time even with an overwhelming advantage in tonnage. Battlecruisers are getting killed by destroyers, how long do you think you're going to get battlecruiser crews to willingly engage enemy battlecruisers? Or even heavy cruisers.

This thread deals with a lot of technological and ship-construction topics but I haven't yet seen anyone comment on the human aspect of the problem. The SLN needs at least 4-5 years before having ships that can adequately shoot back (and in my opinion that's probably being generous), let alone actually win one-on-one with an equal weight foe. The SLN also won't exist in 4-5 years because there's no way known that they're going to have enough crews willing to commit suicide to last that long.

Alizon wrote:

Castenea wrote:I think people are avoiding the best example of how hide bound the SLN is. Crandall (and Filareta?) were using the same canned ECM routines as Byng. These should have been replaced on an ongoing routine basis, likely requiring nothing more than one or two competent code monkeys per revision, and with independent routines for each command.

Why?

To begin with, these canned ECM routines are probably far better and more than sufficient to meet any threat that the League would be expected to reasonably encounter. If you discount the nations of the Haven sector and the advancements they've made, then you still have no reason to make such a change.

Even with Byng's information, you have to remember that Henke didn't reveal her full capabilities to Byng and there's a big difference between the ability to take out a few BC's and lighter vessels and doing the same to a fleet of SD's with supporting elements.

True, but it's unlikely that Henke was able to keep information so well bottled up that the SLN was unaware that some of Byng's ships had surrendered intact.

Even if the ECM routines were the best in the universe it would make sense to allow for the fact that the computers on those BCs might have been cracked, and any ECM routines from them pulled.

You may not assign it a high probability but given some time I'd have set the tac sections of Crandal's fleet a competition for the best routines to counter-program against those in Byng''s computers. Routines based around setting up a "known signature" from those files and then depart from it at the worst time to screw up an attacker that was attempting to exploit knowing the original routine.

If you're wrong you're using almost as good a ECM routine, but if you're right and they are attempting to exploit captured info you should have made your defenses much better than the uncompromised routines were.

Jonathan_S wrote:True, but it's unlikely that Henke was able to keep information so well bottled up that the SLN was unaware that some of Byng's ships had surrendered intact.

Adm Crandall left Meyers with a full description of which ships surrendered at New Tuscany; The dispatch boat that escaped New Tuscany received an upload from Adm Sigbee before it translated to hyper.

Mission of Honor
Chapter Eighteen
wrote:... Apparently, Admiral Byng, in yet another dazzling display of incompetence, had seen no reason even to order his other courier boats to bring up their nodes, which meant they'd all still been sitting heplessly in orbit when Sigbee surrendered. They were fortunate the one boat he had ordered to get underway had still been close enough to receive Sigbee's burst-transmitted final dispatch—the one which had announced Jean Bart's destruction and her own surrender—but there'd been no time for her to send DB 17702 detailed tactical reports or sensor data on the Manties' weapons. And, through no fault of Gruner's, he couldn't provide that information either, since courier boats' sensor suites weren't what anyone might call sophisticated. Although he'd been able to tell them what had happened, more or less, they had virtually no hard information on how the Manties had made it happen. Additional information might well have been sent to Meyers by now, but if so, it was still somewhere in the pipeline astern of Task Force 496.

Weird Harold wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:True, but it's unlikely that Henke was able to keep information so well bottled up that the SLN was unaware that some of Byng's ships had surrendered intact.

Adm Crandall left Meyers with a full description of which ships surrendered at New Tuscany; The dispatch boat that escaped New Tuscany received an upload from Adm Sigbee before it translated to hyper.

Thanks for confirming that.

kzt wrote:Hyperspace intercepts in deep space are hard. They are not nearly that hard at departure. The 60:1 compression means you are likely to be in energy range and almost certainly SDM range of a merchant entering hyper and they can't exit hyper or change bands in time. If you are not, you can almost certainly chase them down.

Even physically pulling off the intercept is damned hard, even after you've managed the implausibly lucky event of getting within (the very limited) sensor range of your target.

The majority of the time your target is going to be at the 0.6 c limit imposed by particle shielding, so you've got no speed advantage and any acceleration advantage is useless if the target is already at full speed.

Unless you were stupidly lucky and are ahead of the target at similar speed on a roughly similar course you simply can't match vectors from within the same hyper band. Now against convoy of civilian ships (stuck down in the Delta bands) a warship can jump up into the Epsilon bands and use the 30% higher effective speed to get ahead.

But even there that's tricky, since given hyper generator cycle times you're looking at guessing where the target is going to be a minimum of 8-10 minutes later (could be more it you need more time to get in position). And worse, dropping back to the Delta band bleeds off 61% of your speed so you almost have to drop where they'll run over you. You don't have the speed to match them, so at best you get a snap shot as they go past.

(Hmm, I don't recall, does the 0.3c speed limit on upward transition speed apply only from Normal to Alpha, or is any upward transition between bands? That could make this even less practical)


Things would be less dire if the convoy contained some ships with sub-par particle screening. With a lower top speed your warships could eventually overhaul them. (You still risk them escaping out of sensor range before you can accelerate enough to begin to overhaul. And if they break contact, even briefly, they can switch bands or alter course and good luck reacquiring them then)

SWM wrote:Alizon, I'm afraid that you have several mistaken ideas about hyperspace.

Missiles, sidewalls, buckler sidewalls, FTL Comm, LACs, and drones can all be used in hyperspace.

In grav waves, you cannot use missiles, drones, LACs or drones. You can still use FTL Comm between ships. But grav waves make up only a small percentage of hyperspace.

We have seen two battles in hyperspace: in The Short Victorious War (with Anton Zilwicki's wife), and in Honor Among Enemies.

Thanks for the information, I stand corrected.

That being said, the original idea of hyperspace intercepts to avoid system defense LAC's is still a valid strategy.

And my impression of Hyperspace intercepts isn't that they can't be done may be a bit overstated. It's more difficult due to limited scanner range and engagement ranges are going to be tighter which tends to work against Manties with their longer range missiles.

However, there is evidence to suggest, primarily in Honor Amongst Enemies that vessels who really work at it can accomplish them with a little bit of luck. If it's reasonably possible to find a ship or two moving through hyper then how much easier would it be for a fleet or a convoy?

The trick it would seem would be to get close enough to use your limited scanner range to detect an enemy force as well as choosing the correct hyperband to do the looking.

There would be a bit of guesswork involved. You'd have to place your fleet in the correct hyperband and in the right location but since you have a good idea of what the probable approach courses will be and what hyperbands an enemy is most likely to use, if the enemy actually does use that course, then achieving an intercept with a raiding squadron or a fleet should be possible.

For raiders, this makes a lot of sense but it might work for fleets as well. Degraded sensors mean that an enemy will probably detect you and a significantly closer range. The question is can you reasonably create a situation where that detection range is energy weapon range or, at a minimum SDM range. Could you achieve this by simply holding your position with reaction thrusters and with wedges down?

Anyway, there aren't many n-space alternatives for SLN fleet commanders in the short term, not much in the way of "terrain features" which a SLN commander could use to draw a GA fleet into effective range. However that may be possible to achieve in hyperspace.

So why don't people use this strategy on an ongoing basis. Well, it's dangerous. In n-space a hit to a drive node slows a vessel and even in the vessel is heavily damaged, it can still be found and the surviving crew recovered. A single hit to a ships hypergenerator locks that ship into that hyperband. Escape pods are of limited use in hyperspace.

It's harder to effect an intercept. Sensor range is significantly degraded making it more difficult to locate whatever it is that you are looking for. In n-space the hyperfoot print of the Alpha translation is a dead give away and wedges can be detected from a great distance.

So all things being equal, hyper intercepts create added danger and difficulties which are not supportable given typical circumstances.

So I think it's not so much a case of hyper intercepts being so improbably that you're playing with Vegas odds, I think it's more of a case of there being better alternatives.

However, I think that the current balance of forces and comparrision of capabilities may change that in the minds of some SLN commanders if they can figure how to use hyperspace to give their fleets a fighting chance.

Alizon wrote:That being said, the original idea of hyperspace intercepts to avoid system defense LAC's is still a valid strategy.

I'm not sure how "valid" a strategy is, which gives you so many additional layers to patrol.

Each band of hyperspace is mutually invisible to each other as well as invisible to N-space. The only thing necessary to defeat your hyperspace pickets is to use a band not normally used for a given class of ship -- especially near origin or destination systems.

Initially, commerce raiding in hyperspace would be effective, but it requires more ships to be effective than lurking near arrival points like pirates would. Compare Giscard's deployments for n-space raiding and for blockading the Selkar Rift.

n7axw wrote:It will be interesting to see what happens with the expedition to Beowulf. I bet they have orders to run away if confronted by big nasty Manties.

Don

I concur...but will they be able too? I rather think that Admiral Truman (or whoever is in Command if Alice is busy...elsewhere...has some ideas about that...

We shall see..eventually.

Alizon wrote:And my impression of Hyperspace intercepts isn't that they can't be done may be a bit overstated. It's more difficult due to limited scanner range and engagement ranges are going to be tighter which tends to work against Manties with their longer range missiles.

However, there is evidence to suggest, primarily in Honor Amongst Enemies that vessels who really work at it can accomplish them with a little bit of luck. If it's reasonably possible to find a ship or two moving through hyper then how much easier would it be for a fleet or a convoy?

That intercept was helped by
1) having a lot of ships spread out - the Peeps had what at least 3 or 4 BC and some CAs (probably at least as many) strung out at max sensor range from each other.
2) Special geography - the Selker Rift had unusually clear sensor conditions and a rogue wave that required relatively slow transits.

So with a significant number of ships you could spread out and keep watch over a much larger than normal zone and your targets weren't going to blow by you at 0.6c so you could use your superior acceleration to overtake them (admittedly, by running an increased risk of having too much speed to dodge should the rogue wave pop up unexpectedly)


I think hyper intercepts are, normally, way worse than Vegas odds.

But there may be other risky Selker-like areas where the odds are much more in the raider's favor. We may yet see combat in hyper; but I won't be holding my breath.