The SLN commerce raiding strategy WILL work.

munroburton wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Which ever way you slice this. SLN ONI is going to go into a frenzy of investigation when the reports from 2nd Manticore make it obvious that THEY KNEW WE WERE COMING AND WERE WAITING FOR US. Find that leak!!!!!!

Easier said than done. Because they basically told Beowulf what they were planning when they requested permission to send Tsang in. That was astonishingly foolish, especially as they went ahead after being explicitly told to back off.

Even if not for that, literally thousands of people knew it was happening. The League has no sense nor enforcement of operational security, having never been in a war where military secrets mattered. They probably circulated the finalised Raging Justice op plan as a memo whose clearance list reads like it came out of Blackadder. "Fleet Admiral Rajani, Fleet Admiral Rajani's wife, Fleet Admiral Rajani's wife's friends, their families, their families' servants, their families' servants' tennis partners..." duplicated for everyone ranked Admiral or higher.

Even more to the point, the Mantie Ambassador (Carmichael?) had already let the treecat out of the bag with various messages to the Mandarins that the SEM knew about Filareta and asking them to call it off (which the Mandarins ignored, choosing to believe Rampajet's fanasty that the Manties had lost too much at OB to make a credible defense--and feeling that calling it off would expose them to the rest of the SL as weak and indecisive.

So while they may not know WHO leaked the secret, the Mandarins knew it was leaked well before Filareta got to Manticore.

MAD-4A wrote: Without the FTL links the MDMs are basically useless at anything past single drive range anyway. The FC update loop is too long.

I think the entire Havenite navy during Buttercup would beg to differ.

Or as Mike's command crew put it at Solon "Toss enough missiles and even BAD solutions will give you enough hits".

MDMS are good to about 30 million km before accuracy degrades a lot, and they've accomplished quite a bit at twice that range against both the Foraker and Ghost Rider defensive doctrines, neither of which the SLN has.

They are WORSE at missile defense than either Haven or Manticore was in 1905. Their ships are equipped more like Silesian pirates than real warships (all guns, no defense). Their defenses are barely adequate against contact nuke attacks from SDM range, in volley sizes similar to their pathetic throw weight.

wastedfly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote: There never had been a SD vrs SD fight until 1905.

You sure about that? I can buy a statement of there had not been multiple fleets of SDs pounding other multiple fleets of SDs -- each with complete fleet trains, screens and support infrastructure on fronts of 100's of light years --- but I would be surprised that an SD had not fired at another SD at some point in the past.

fester wrote:

wastedfly wrote: There never had been a SD vrs SD fight until 1905.

You sure about that? I can buy a statement of there had not been multiple fleets of SDs pounding other multiple fleets of SDs -- each with complete fleet trains, screens and support infrastructure on fronts of 100's of light years --- but I would be surprised that an SD had not fired at another SD at some point in the past.

First - the quote accidently attributed wastedfly's comment to me (I've edited this quote).

I'm not sure if he's right, but there's a decent chance. We know the last significant action Battlefleet saw was the Battle of Farley's Crossing. RFC's 2004 infodump on that gave me the impression that the "less than a dozen ships of the wall" involved were all on the SLN side.

If so then Battlefleet has no direct SD vs SD actions. I'm assuming that no SDF within the League would have had an SD vs SD action.


Manticore doesn't seem to have.
While there were ships of the wall in the force Manticore sent to the San Martin system during the brief 'war' with them, the only combat was with a single San Martin CL.

We also know DNs were dispatched to Silesia after Saganami's death in the Battle of Carson, but apparently the show of force was sufficient to achieve Manticore's goals. (And Silesia, even then early in their decent into a failed state, seems unlikely to have had wallers of their own)

And I seem to recall another pre-war deployment, but I'm failing to turn up a reference. But again I don't have the impression of SD combat.


We don't know much about the Andies
But aside from Manticore or Haven there's a shortage of people out their way that they could have gotten into a shooting war with.


The real question (in my mind) would be whether any of the single planet systems Haven picked off before 1905 had managed to build or buy some wallers. That's probably the best chance for an SD vs SD (or at least SD vs DN) fight...



But basically it seems to boil down to, very few navies even have SDs, and in the few hundred years they've superceeded BBs those navies don't seem to have had much chance to fight each other.

wastedfly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I'd guess because SD(P)s are more of a "why didn't I think of that" idea. Once you know about the basic concept they're not that hard to duplicate.

No one had the need before. No fear = no R&D budget. RMN had fear of Haven = large R&D budget where ideas are likely not to get Shit canned by the eggs and braid because it upsets the apple cart and their tiny little bureaucratic fiefdom. There never had been a SD vrs SD fight until 1905.

You guys are forgetting Pods SUCKED before Manticore's updates. Without the new, cheaper, lightweight Grav drivers Manticore introduced, Pods didn't eject missiles with the same initial velocity shipborne launchers did.

Lower initial velocity = shorter range and lower terminal velocity.

So a Pre-Hemphill Pod SD(p) could be outranged by a normal SD, which could stand at maximum range and rip up the SD(p)'s sidewalls with contact nukes until the SD(p)s rolled wedge and went away. The few missiles which did reach them had a significantly lower velocity and were more easily defeated by the SD's defenses.

The SD(p) is just another progression step in the laserhead, pod, MDM progression (between pod and MDM, I would believe....)

In Scott Adams' (of Dilbert Fame) latest non-fiction book, he tells of his investment in a startup company with the idea to allow people to share videos on the internet. The company was not YouTube, but another company several years earlier. At that time, the storage was multiple times too expensive and the internet was still too slow, and video encoding was still laging - in short, the right idea at the wrong time.

And a 1900 tech SD(p) is definately at the wrong time.

That oh so "significant" word, "significant initial velocity". Could actually be only 10km/s or it could be 10,000km/s. Its utterly nebulous. We are talking a target position of several orders of magnitude in "nebulous" land.

Then there is missile acceleration and burn duration. A 1905 Pod RMN missile equipped SDP with SDM's and without the new grav pod drivers would wipe out SLN SDP with SDM's since SLN missile acceleration blew monkey chunks in comparison.

From rest in 1905 RMN missiles had a range of 8+Mkm. SLN is at a whopping 6.75Mkm as I recall.

It is not JUST, initial velocity imparted.

Add in everyone thought fighting at 8Mkm was insane and higly ineffective as the missile seekers stank at such ranges.

In the MDM environment, said need for initial velocity is insignificant and all that mass and energy budget can be saved.

SD's from In Fire Forged are basically a new ship type. Certainly no more than 250 years old. Clearly someone was having wars as this ship type entered the SLN to begin with. These unknown folks were not a big enough war to come even close to Haven/Manticore per canon in the books as it is stated that the current war was completely unknown for 700 years at a minimum and closer to 1000 years.

wastedfly wrote:That oh so "significant" word, "significant initial velocity". Could actually be only 10km/s or it could be 10,000km/s. Its utterly nebulous. We are talking a target position of several orders of magnitude in "nebulous" land.

Then there is missile acceleration and burn duration. A 1905 Pod RMN missile equipped SDP with SDM's and without the new grav pod drivers would wipe out SLN SDP with SDM's since SLN missile acceleration blew monkey chunks in comparison.

From rest in 1905 RMN missiles had a range of 8+Mkm. SLN is at a whopping 6.75Mkm as I recall.

It is not JUST, initial velocity imparted.

In the MDM environment, said need for initial velocity is insignificant and all that mass and energy budget can be saved.

Ok, enough baloney, back to other arguments.

It was significant enough that missile pods fell out of favor because the the difference flight patterns between shipborn launchers and pod launchers.

And Yes, I ignored the relative capabilities of RMN versus SLN or PRH missiles.

And the nebulous # is closer to 10,000 than 10 - but you are right, it is a nebulous margin and could be offset by superior missiles.

But as you pointed out it wsan't until the MDM environment that that did not matter. In an era without MDMs or advanced grav launchers, the Podnaught would have far less of an advantage, even with longer ranged SDMs.

Theemile wrote:It was significant enough that missile pods fell out of favor because the the difference flight patterns between shipborn launchers and pod launchers.

And Yes, I ignored the relative capabilities of RMN versus SLN or PRH missiles.

And the nebulous # is closer to 10,000 than 10 - but you are right, it is a nebulous margin and could be offset by superior missiles.

But as you pointed out it wsan't until the MDM environment that that did not matter. In an era without MDMs or advanced grav launchers, the Podnaught would have far less of an advantage, even with longer ranged SDMs.

Even if we accept that a 1890s era pod launched missiles have inferior range and terminal velocity, by the time we're talking about SD(P)s I don't know that it really matters.

Remember, before pods missile fire from SDs was almost never decisive. It was attritional, and you used it for probing the other side and degrading their ships (although if you mission killed a couple that's a nice bonus) before closing to energy range.

But given the huge numbers of missiles any pod layer can fire off the increased effectiveness of the other side's point defense against the slower missiles is probably irrelevant. Something scaled to deal with less than 40 missile broadsides is going to get over-saturated and break down when faced with a 120 missile double pattern (assuming 10 missiles per pod, 6 pods per salvo) even if they are moving a bit slower.

Even if the SD(P) has to wade through as much as a million KM of unanswered fire it's still going to be relatively unscathed when it reaches a point where it can unleash a (shorter ranged) missile swarm.



The lightweight grav launchers matter more if an SD is towing only a couple pods; then achieving time on target, with full terminal velocity, of the pod and broadside missiles is somewhat important. But when you're throwing 12+ pods every 30 seconds shear numbers trump distance and terminal velocity.

Hutch wrote:
Easier said than done. Because they basically told Beowulf what they were planning when they requested permission to send Tsang in. That was astonishingly foolish, especially as they went ahead after being explicitly told to back off.

Even if not for that, literally thousands of people knew it was happening. The League has no sense nor enforcement of operational security, having never been in a war where military secrets mattered. They probably circulated the finalised Raging Justice op plan as a memo whose clearance list reads like it came out of Blackadder. "Fleet Admiral Rajani, Fleet Admiral Rajani's wife, Fleet Admiral Rajani's wife's friends, their families, their families' servants, their families' servants' tennis partners..." duplicated for everyone ranked Admiral or higher.

Even more to the point, the Mantie Ambassador (Carmichael?) had already let the treecat out of the bag with various messages to the Mandarins that the SEM knew about Filareta and asking them to call it off (which the Mandarins ignored, choosing to believe Rampajet's fanasty that the Manties had lost too much at OB to make a credible defense--and feeling that calling it off would expose them to the rest of the SL as weak and indecisive.

So while they may not know WHO leaked the secret, the Mandarins knew it was leaked well before Filareta got to Manticore.[/quote]

If memory serves, Beowulf passed the information to Manticore well before Tsang showed up at Beowulf. Then there was that odd meeting of the SLN officer sent to Beowulf to discuss some sensitive information at a much lower than you would expect grade level for the SLN officer. I had the impression that Tsang was expecting the BSDF officer in charge when she got there to have no idea she was comming and was suprised to find such a senior person as did answer being the one to take her call from an SD's flag deck.
At that point, she should have sent one of her DBs back home to at least let someone in higher authority know they had a problem. Doesn't mean that she isn't going to carry out her mission, just that someone should know that the main attack is probably compromised and that the Manties know if is at least comming if not from where and when. Or course the when is getting close since Tsang is now hanging off the terminus. The where from is a practical guess based on the geometry of the Manticore System.
Why would she NOT have attached DBs if she knew she was going to have to hang around somewhere outside of direct Beowulf controlled space but close enough to the terminus to post a DD as message guard to get the word over to her fleet that Filerta had arrived and attacked?
Even such a simple message saying "Be advised, BSDF is deployed in force and has stated that if I approach the wormhole in an attempt to force transit, will attack my force. Given the known treaty relations with Manticore (I am guessing about that piece) it can be expected that our presence and stated intention to transit the wormhole peacefully or by force has been relatyed to Manticore authorities. Traffic between Beowulf and the wormhole is observed being at a high level although no information is available on the nature of that traffic".

Brigade XO wrote:At that point, she should have sent one of her DBs back home to at least let someone in higher authority know they had a problem. Doesn't mean that she isn't going to carry out her mission, just that someone should know that the main attack is probably compromised and that the Manties know if is at least comming if not from where and when. Or course the when is getting close since Tsang is now hanging off the terminus. The where from is a practical guess based on the geometry of the Manticore System.
Why would she NOT have attached DBs if she knew she was going to have to hang around somewhere outside of direct Beowulf controlled space but close enough to the terminus to post a DD as message guard to get the word over to her fleet that Filerta had arrived and attacked?
Even such a simple message saying "Be advised, BSDF is deployed in force and has stated that if I approach the wormhole in an attempt to force transit, will attack my force. Given the known treaty relations with Manticore (I am guessing about that piece) it can be expected that our presence and stated intention to transit the wormhole peacefully or by force has been relatyed to Manticore authorities. Traffic between Beowulf and the wormhole is observed being at a high level although no information is available on the nature of that traffic".

I guess she could have sent a DB, but Beowulf is pushing 5 days one way from Sol by DB - 40 ly divided by 3000x c effective speed (that Theta band gives you) and you get 4.87 days. (but that ignores any acceleration time or the possibility of detours).

By interstellar communications standards that's quite quick. But in terms of tactical considerations it's next to forever. Even is someone at Sol could make the decision within the hour it's still almost 10 days before you get updated orders. And that's just to the forces at Beowulf; you need Manti cooperation - or a lot longer to get new orders to Filerata.