The enemy in "extended space": SLN or MAlign

Weird Harold wrote:

StealthSeeker wrote:If the GA sits and does nothing but to wait on events to happen around it, the GA has lost. Don't tell me what you can't do, tell me what you can.

The GA is NOT just sitting around, they are -- according to plan -- using a mix of diplomacy and "economic warfare"

[various snippage]

StealthSeeker wrote:The GA has a technology advantage, it must be used, tell me, how would you choose to use it?

Commerce protection, commerce raiding, wormhole interdiction, liberation of OFS protectorates, suppression of Frontier Fleet and OFS "business as usual."

I would not go "Hulk Smash" or "Hackenslash" just because I could do so. Where possible, I would follow Adm Gold Peak's example from Meyers and Mesa; where not possible, I'd follow Aivars Terekov's example and demonstrate why you don't want to "make David Banner angry."

What Weird Harold said. It'd be a mistake to let technical advantages and the enthusiasm for using them dictate strategy.

Meyers seems to have gone well. Rinse and repeat. Cover your new friends against reprisals.

Make sure you're keeping the white hats on for all to see. But when someone puts on the black hat - comes to trash your home system without a declaration of war, comes to trash a friend's when they want to have a referendum on your "leadership" - you pound them. If you know where they came from, and you can do it without excess collateral damage, you pound the relevant military targets. And you make it clear to everyone who will listen (and hey, who is now at the middle of humanity's news media communication chains?) just what happened and why.

Keeping the white hats on does, unfortunately, mean a large measure of acting in response to specific provocations in measured amounts. But if people want to leave the League - in the protectorates or the Core - you get to help them do it, and you've got the communications and the tactical advantages to make that happen.

The League government has had both arms restrained and its air cut off. It's going to thrash for a bit. You may get your shins kicked badly. But if you only keep the hold on, it's enough to let a bit of time finish the job, without trying to free up a hand to stab them in the heart too.

What to do with all those SDs that were in home fleet of Manticore and Haven? Its not like the SLN is going to be making any new calls to the neighborhood and neither Haven or Manticore have any intention of attacking the other. All of them will eventually be needed when Darius is finally located, but what do I do with all these SDs in the mean time?

I would turn them loose on the SL's ability to produce new ships, but apparently folks in the forum think that would get the folks in the SL really upset. So then maybe I can go and start grabbing Verge sectors from the SL. Drop a couple of squadrons of SDs and escorts onto a Verge sector central government planet and do a repeat of Meyers in the Madras Sector. Hopefully most of the FF ships for the sector can be caught in that system and forced to scuttle. Then the rest of the systems in the sector can be "visited" with appropriate sized squadrons to handle what newly acquired intelligence says should be there. Just start punching out whole sectors leaving freedom and peace where ever you go.

Don't interrupt the enemy while he is busy making a mistake.

As has been pointed out right now Manticore can't produce missiles. They have a limited number of spares. Granted most of those SD's and escorts are brand new with extra spares produced due to the lack of testing before making them operational units.

But why use them up.

Six month's of war time production according to Henke but ... SLN isn't even MA's primary enemy. They know this.

Bold is my emphasis.

ART Chapter 7 wrote:In partial exchange, she’d gotten twenty Keyhole-One SD(P)s, and in terms of combat power, that was a pretty impressive consolation prize. No, they couldn’t use Apollo, but they could handle more missiles than any Solarian superdreadnought could even dream of firing, their own missile defenses were incomparably better than anything the other side might have, and while they weren’t equipped with the Mark 23-E control missiles, the standard Mark 23s in their magazines enormously out-ranged any Solarian weapon. Accuracy at extreme ranges was going to be much poorer than it would have been using Apollo, yet the missile storm they could bring down on any opponent would be devastating. And, fortunately, six T-months had passed between Haven’s Operation Beatrice and the Yawata Strike. The tempo of combat had dropped virtually to nothing during that time period, as well, which meant there’d been no real ammunition expenditures to cut into those six months worth of wartime-rate missile production. And that meant the Royal Manticoran Navy had a lot of those standard Mark 23s already produced and distributed to the fleet.

Have fun,
T2M

munroburton wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:A Nevada probably would win one-on-one against a Star Knight; but it'll be limping back to the body and fender shop afterwards.

Before the first war officially started, a Star Knight(actually, I think it was the Star Knight) took on four Peep BCs and sent at least two of them to the yards.

IMO, it'd do a little more than send a Nevada limping, but it'd be a fight similar to Jessica Epps vs Hellbarde.

Do you have a bit more on that encounter of the Star Knight and the BCs? I am drawing a memory blank here. Thanks...

Don

--snippint

n7axw wrote:Do you have a bit more on that encounter of the Star Knight and the BCs? I am drawing a memory blank here. Thanks...

Don

There's not much; the actual battle sequence takes place "offstage". HMS Star Knight was on patrol in the Poicter's system early in "Short Victoious War", right before Bellepheron wiped out 4 BC's that were positioned to jump a cruiser in the Talbot system. The Captain of the Star Knight saw them coming and rolled wedge and turned to escape, but the 4 Sultan Class BC's tasked to take him out split and boxed the CA before he could escape. Later in the book we read (Commodore Perot speaking to Amos Parnell, at the time Peep CNO):

Short Victorious War wrote:"And the Poicters side of the operation went off without a hitch. Commodore Yuranovich nailed a Star Knight-class cruiser right where he expected to find her. As you can see," Perot pointed at the information displayed below the names of the ships committed to the Poicters raid, "he took more damage than we'd hoped—I'm afraid Barbarossa and Sinjar are going to be in yard hands for some time—but there was no sign they'd suspected anything. Since both halves of the mission were covered by exactly the same security, our best guess is that they didn't know Pierre was coming, either."

Weird Harold wrote:You deny him the revenue streams to pay for them. (and/or accelerate the breakup so there is no Solarian League to fund a "SLN."

Can you show a single nation that ended an existential war solely or primarily due to an inability to pay for it? There are always ways to "deal with the bills in the future". And they will be used if you turn this into a general war.

kzt wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:You deny him the revenue streams to pay for them. (and/or accelerate the breakup so there is no Solarian League to fund a "SLN."

Can you show a single nation that ended an existential war solely or primarily due to an inability to pay for it? There are always ways to "deal with the bills in the future". And they will be used if you turn this into a general war.

I think you are defining an "existential war" as an all-or-nothing fight to the finish, correct? In that case, I'd have to think about it, otherwise, the Revolutionary War -- which partially to mostly ended because King George III ran out of money to pay for it given problems at home and with France constantly threatening.

SharkHunter wrote:I think you are defining an "existential war" as an all-or-nothing fight to the finish, correct? In that case, I'd have to think about it, otherwise, the Revolutionary War -- which partially to mostly ended because King George III ran out of money to pay for it given problems at home and with France constantly threatening.

Not really. "Existential war is a war for existence, not for status, power, territory or resources, but for existence itself – as a nation, as a people, and ultimately as an individual."

The very existence of the SL is what is being threatened.

JeffEngel wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Commerce protection, commerce raiding, wormhole interdiction, liberation of OFS protectorates, suppression of Frontier Fleet and OFS "business as usual."

I would not go "Hulk Smash" or "Hackenslash" just because I could do so. Where possible, I would follow Adm Gold Peak's example from Meyers and Mesa; where not possible, I'd follow Aivars Terekov's example and demonstrate why you don't want to "make David Banner angry."

What Weird Harold said. It'd be a mistake to let technical advantages and the enthusiasm for using them dictate strategy.

Meyers seems to have gone well. Rinse and repeat. Cover your new friends against reprisals.

Make sure you're keeping the white hats on for all to see. But when someone puts on the black hat - comes to trash your home system without a declaration of war, comes to trash a friend's when they want to have a referendum on your "leadership" - you pound them. If you know where they came from, and you can do it without excess collateral damage, you pound the relevant military targets. And you make it clear to everyone who will listen (and hey, who is now at the middle of humanity's news media communication chains?) just what happened and why.

Keeping the white hats on does, unfortunately, mean a large measure of acting in response to specific provocations in measured amounts. But if people want to leave the League - in the protectorates or the Core - you get to help them do it, and you've got the communications and the tactical advantages to make that happen.

The League government has had both arms restrained and its air cut off. It's going to thrash for a bit. You may get your shins kicked badly. But if you only keep the hold on, it's enough to let a bit of time finish the job, without trying to free up a hand to stab them in the heart too.

Offhand I'm kind of in favor of a tit-for-tat approach to FF bases. If you suffer FF/BF commerce raiding (or other offensive activity) only then send a raid to the nearest FF sector base, broadcast that you're here in response to aggregation you believe was supported from here, and that you don't have any quarrel with the system government. Then order any mobile FF/BF units in the system to surrender. Most likely they'll try to run or fight, so take them out or accept their surrender. But don't touch the base infrastructure -- not the first time.

Then ask that the government not support future attacks on the GA. If it happens again, then come back, take out any new defenders, and destroy the base. (Which should deny logistic support to future raids)

Ideally you want the system government annoyed at the League for repeatedly poking the GA and drawing a response into the system.


Because I agree, you can afford to take some risks of giving up the initiative (at least for a few years) in order to keep your hat as visibly white as possible.

kzt wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:You deny him the revenue streams to pay for them. (and/or accelerate the breakup so there is no Solarian League to fund a "SLN."

Can you show a single nation that ended an existential war solely or primarily due to an inability to pay for it? There are always ways to "deal with the bills in the future". And they will be used if you turn this into a general war.

No, I can't. However, The Solarian League is not really a "single nation" either. The fiscal policies that would allow the Solarian League to finance a war will do more to open the fault lines the GA hopes to exploit than it will to weld the League back together.

The Mandarins have already expressed concerns about their ability to pay for new ships.

I also disagree with your assumption that the GA will "turn this into a general war." The SEM, at least, has expressed an intent to stress, "we are at war with the unelected bureaucrats who have usurped your government, not the individual members of the league who are as much victims as we are," OWTTE.