Adapting Wolfpack Tactics to HV

ThinksMarkedly wrote:For an LD wolfpack, this implies they have an escape solution before the enemy can vector anyone to shoot at them. They're either out of the hyperlimit or close to it anyway, or they are assured of complete victory with a single attack that there will be no one left to threaten them.

I've argued before that's the only type of attack I see LDs used for. They are high reward and minimum risk. All the more so if there aren't that many ships to spare in the first place. They will be treated more like a full aircraft carrier in terms of risk/reward than a submarine.

That scenario of yours of "decloaking" in orbit of Manticore, shooting all the defences down in 1 second, then demanding the Queen surrender, would be such a scenario, provided that it were feasible. I've argued why I don't think it is and, instead, it's actually a high risk scenario with moderate to low chance of success.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:For an LD wolfpack, this implies they have an escape solution before the enemy can vector anyone to shoot at them. They're either out of the hyperlimit or close to it anyway, or they are assured of complete victory with a single attack that there will be no one left to threaten them.

I've argued before that's the only type of attack I see LDs used for. They are high reward and minimum risk. All the more so if there aren't that many ships to spare in the first place. They will be treated more like a full aircraft carrier in terms of risk/reward than a submarine.

That scenario of yours of "decloaking" in orbit of Manticore, shooting all the defences down in 1 second, then demanding the Queen surrender, would be such a scenario, provided that it were feasible. I've argued why I don't think it is and, instead, it's actually a high risk scenario with moderate to low chance of success.

Pawn to Q-7 ... Checkmate? is the thread in question.

If you have crossed to my side of the fence and agree that that mission would be worthy of risk. You shouldn't have a problem agreeing with what I have been saying all along. Submarines have been used for varying missions according to their importance. In fact, submarines were the only means of achieving certain At All Costs missions.

The most successful USN submarine commander surfaced in the middle of a convoy and destroyed 14 Japanese ships. He was ordered to do so under the stealth of night. It is always night for the LDs.

LDs will be ordered to execute certain missions At All Costs. Especially in the end game and during the initial maiden voyage of a super-stealthy-by-surprise attack.

I cannot see utilizing the prowess of an LD - certainly if it scales up to RFC's memo of the destructive firepower of a fort - to be ordered simply to sit out on the outskirts of town and chuck torpedoes. Squadrons of Ghosts can do that and probably all around much cheaper.

Ghosts should be able to carry at least two g-torps each in their holster.

But if later versions of LDs transition into pod layers of invisible pods, the GA will be hurt. One of the biggest problems of war has always been getting your firepower in place to attack the enemy. An LD doesn't really need all of the stealth just to lob invisible torps at the enemy. They can hyper in and do that from wedge based ships. Then hyper out and the invisible torps are on their way.

You can gut the enemy in the opening phase of a war with a surprise attack. The surprise itself is a force multiplier. See Honor at Cerberus. Surprise along with stealth, and you have the makings of a short victorious war. You don't want to assist the enemy by being coy.

penny wrote:If you have crossed to my side of the fence and agree that that mission would be worthy of risk. You shouldn't have a problem agreeing with what I have been saying all along. Submarines have been used for varying missions according to their importance. In fact, submarines were the only means of achieving certain At All Costs missions.

I haven't. There's a big conditional in my paragraph, which I even bolded.

LDs will be ordered to execute certain missions At All Costs. Especially in the end game and during the initial maiden voyage of a super-stealthy-by-surprise attack.

Let me start by saying that I think you're right and they will be used for such all-costs missions. But as a result of desperation and imminent defeat, not as a well-thought-out strategy and doctrine. So not as the maiden voyage, at least by design.

In the beginning, that won't be the case. I am arguing that a) LDs are not like to submarines when it comes to cost and thus the necessary risk/reward and that b) the MAN will not start with At-All-Costs missions. If you try an AAC and you lose, you make your situation much worse. Taking the case of Operation Beatrice: if Haven had instead brought those 350 SD(P)s to the Haven system, Eighth Fleet would have had to pay a hefty price to win, meaning Haven stood a good chance of having favourable negotiating terms of surrender. But after it lost those ships and a million spacers, Honor could walk over the remainder of the Capital Fleet and impose any demands of surrender that the Alliance chose.

I have said and will repeat: LDs may be as stealthy as subs are to us, but they are as costly to build as a carrier (or a full carrier group, because it appears they aren't meant to have escort ships). Any mission they are supposed to undertake has to be one with a large reward. Any admiral who suggests using an LD to fight a mere CruRon and still have a chance of losing should be cashiered out.

What they will end up being used for is a different story. But that will depend on how poorly the situation is going for the MAlign.

I cannot see utilizing the prowess of an LD - certainly if it scales up to RFC's memo of the destructive firepower of a fort - to be ordered simply to sit out on the outskirts of town and chuck torpedoes. Squadrons of Ghosts can do that and probably all around much cheaper.

Ghosts should be able to carry at least two g-torps each in their holster.

Quite true. I agree with your assessment and conclusion.

All this means the LDs must have another purpose in mind and/or that we're ignorant of some detail of their capability. As described so far, those ships make no sense.

It's possible that they really do not make sense, because they were designed by megalomaniacal geneticists, not level-headed military strategists.

You can gut the enemy in the opening phase of a war with a surprise attack. The surprise itself is a force multiplier. See Honor at Cerberus. Surprise along with stealth, and you have the makings of a short victorious war. You don't want to assist the enemy by being coy.

Again agreed. But I don't see why you'd need an LD for this and I can use your arguments from above for why.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:FTL transmitters are another story. The physics we know about them is that you can't localise the GA FTL transmitters enough to shoot at them. You can tell there are transmissions, but you can't read them and you can't find the drones.

Or rather the GA FTL transmitters are usually mounted on things that are quick enough that they can move faster than you can localize them; and are directional enough they're usually aimed away from known enemy locations (see sometimes relaying through a 2nd or 3rd RD way off to the side)

But Silver Bullets at Beowulf showed that if you stick GA FTL transmitters on stationary objects and give the enemy effectively unlimited time to trace them then they absolutely can be localized -- the directional grav signals from system tests is how the Silver Bullets (slowly) tracked down the Mycroft platforms.

penny wrote:But wolfpacks always ran silent. I read somewhere that they were punished for unnecessary chatter.

Certainly not the German wolfpacks. Dönitz insisted on 2-way command and control and the u-boats, whether solo or in wolfpacks transmitted way too much back to Germany. And when in wolf-packs they had orders to radio the rest of the pack that they'd spotted a convoy before attempting an attack. A radio transmission that often alerted the convoy escorts of the nearby threat.

Even when Bletchly Park couldn't break their enegima encrypted transmissions the 'Y' service radio direction finding stations scattered across the Uk and other North Atlantic allied territories often were able to nail down the u-boat locations well enough from their transmissions to route convoys north or south of them.

And as the German's switched to shorter burst transmissions the Allies [url]huff-duff[/url], at both 'Y' stations and on their escorts, was still able to provide bearing on the u-boats despite the short (usually less than 20 seconds) transmission. And of course by checking multiple bearings from known locations you can generate a known location of the transmitter.

Right at the end of the war Germany was working on the Kurier system which would have gotten the burst down to about half a second; to short for even the current huff-duff equipment to get a useful bearing on.


US wolfpacks, when our subs operated in them, were different. They did use far few radio transmissions, and did tend to attack first and transmit later. (Or transmit after it became clear they wouldn't be able to maneuver for attack). Though the US subs offset that reduced use of radio transmissions with significant use of surface search radar; which growing numbers of Japanese escorts could detect and get bearing on...

penny wrote:I cannot see utilizing the prowess of an LD - certainly if it scales up to RFC's memo of the destructive firepower of a fort - to be ordered simply to sit out on the outskirts of town and chuck torpedoes. Squadrons of Ghosts can do that and probably all around much cheaper.

Ghosts should be able to carry at least two g-torps each in their holster.

No, Ghosts almost certainly can't carry two g-torps.

The 4 million ton Sharks were only apparently able to carry two or three g-torps on their improvised external mounts. The attack on Manticore-A seems to have involved about 40 graser torps, launched from the 14 Sharks of Task Group 1.1. We know for sure that the Mike Attack directed at Manticore, and HMSS Hephaestus orbiting above it was 18 g-torps, and it doesn't seem reasonable to allocate much more than that to the Sierra Attack going after HMSS Vulcan and the rest of the Sphynx orbital industry.
We're probably looking at 42 or fewer g-torps from 14 Sharks.

No way a Ghost, which is frigate sized, or about 50-60,000 tons (or about 66x smaller than a Shark) is going to be able to carry 2/3rds the g-torp loadout of a 4 million ton Shark. I'd be shocked if it could carry and launch a single g-torp -- can't see any way it could manage two.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:For an LD wolfpack, this implies they have an escape solution before the enemy can vector anyone to shoot at them. They're either out of the hyperlimit or close to it anyway, or they are assured of complete victory with a single attack that there will be no one left to threaten them.

I've argued before that's the only type of attack I see LDs used for. They are high reward and minimum risk. All the more so if there aren't that many ships to spare in the first place. They will be treated more like a full aircraft carrier in terms of risk/reward than a submarine.

That scenario of yours of "decloaking" in orbit of Manticore, shooting all the defences down in 1 second, then demanding the Queen surrender, would be such a scenario, provided that it were feasible. I've argued why I don't think it is and, instead, it's actually a high risk scenario with moderate to low chance of success.

I agree about the high-reward minimum risk nature of the LD as part of their repertoire. So let's establish the fact that one LD should be able to replace an entire Eighth Fleet in rear area assaults.

And Honor could only accomplish her task by both...

1. Picking systems that were not heavily defended and were valuable assets to the enemy.

2. Picking one of those systems where the enemy didn't expect her.

And she had to accomplish her destruction quickly in a fly-by. After an LD slots into place firing g-torps, it will be over before you can return from the concession stand with popcorn.

The opening attack of such a campaign will net an LD enemy warships as well. No clue. No sidewalls.

So, like submarines which destroyed shipping, an LD will natively eat infrastructure and rear areas for breakfast, lunch, dinner and a movie.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I cannot see utilizing the prowess of an LD - certainly if it scales up to RFC's memo of the destructive firepower of a fort - to be ordered simply to sit out on the outskirts of town and chuck torpedoes. Squadrons of Ghosts can do that and probably all around much cheaper.

Ghosts should be able to carry at least two g-torps each in their holster.

No, Ghosts almost certainly can't carry two g-torps.

The 4 million ton Sharks were only apparently able to carry two or three g-torps on their improvised external mounts. The attack on Manticore-A seems to have involved about 40 graser torps, launched from the 14 Sharks of Task Group 1.1. We know for sure that the Mike Attack directed at Manticore, and HMSS Hephaestus orbiting above it was 18 g-torps, and it doesn't seem reasonable to allocate much more than that to the Sierra Attack going after HMSS Vulcan and the rest of the Sphynx orbital industry.
We're probably looking at 42 or fewer g-torps from 14 Sharks.

No way a Ghost, which is frigate sized, or about 50-60,000 tons (or about 66x smaller than a Shark) is going to be able to carry 2/3rds the g-torp loadout of a 4 million ton Shark. I'd be shocked if it could carry and launch a single g-torp -- can't see any way it could manage two.

Ghosts don't even carry any internal offensive weapons - not even a single DD laser.

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:No, Ghosts almost certainly can't carry two g-torps.

The 4 million ton Sharks were only apparently able to carry two or three g-torps on their improvised external mounts. The attack on Manticore-A seems to have involved about 40 graser torps, launched from the 14 Sharks of Task Group 1.1. We know for sure that the Mike Attack directed at Manticore, and HMSS Hephaestus orbiting above it was 18 g-torps, and it doesn't seem reasonable to allocate much more than that to the Sierra Attack going after HMSS Vulcan and the rest of the Sphynx orbital industry.
We're probably looking at 42 or fewer g-torps from 14 Sharks.

No way a Ghost, which is frigate sized, or about 50-60,000 tons (or about 66x smaller than a Shark) is going to be able to carry 2/3rds the g-torp loadout of a 4 million ton Shark. I'd be shocked if it could carry and launch a single g-torp -- can't see any way it could manage two.

Ghosts don't even carry any internal offensive weapons - not even a single DD laser.

True.

And even the Sharks had a bodged on jerry rigged external mount for carrying their (handful of) g-torps.

What I was trying to say was that the Ghosts seemed far too small for any similar bodge job -- that I'd be shocked if there was any way to externally strap on even a single g-torp.
But I wasn't so clear on that. oops.

Jonathan_S wrote:True.

And even the Sharks had a bodged on jerry rigged external mount for carrying their (handful of) g-torps.

What I was trying to say was that the Ghosts seemed far too small for any similar bodge job -- that I'd be shocked if there was any way to externally strap on even a single g-torp.
But I wasn't so clear on that. oops.

No you were clear, I was just emphasizing that the Ghosts are just NOT an offensive platform, nor are they intended to be.