For the first few years of the Grand Alliance, any naval battle is going to be a massacre. The tech imbalance is just too severe; unless the SLN runs the GA ship out of ammunition or surprises them at energy range, the outcome isn't in doubt at all. So I set myself the challenge of creating a battle scenario that would be worth more attention than "Manties launched, some Sollies blew up, the survivors surrendered."
What I came up with was almost a rehash of OBS with a single Katana chasing a Rampart destroyer trying to reach the hyper limit. For... reasons... BAD THINGS would happen if the Sollie is allowed out of the system to get help, and other... reasons... explain how a single Katana would find itself the only unit available to stop the fleeing destroyer. The details are unimportant.
I'm using a Katana because the missiles that Shrikes or Ferrets carry are actually designed to kill ships larger than DDs. A single Ferret would have no trouble taking out a DD with missiles. A single Shrike might not have enough missiles to finish the ship, but a graser shot certainly would and could be delivered from outside the range at which a Sollie DD energy mount is going to burn through the Shrike's bow wall.
First, I'm assuming the utility of Vipers against anything heavier than an LAC is minor but not trivial. Much like pelting an SD with hundreds of prewar DD sized missiles; individual hits can turn the outer surface of the ship into a golf ball of overlapping craters but can't penetrate to anything vital. Surface hits can still wreck surface features like missile tubes, energy mounts, point defense stations, sensors, drive nodes, etc. and will eventually reduce the missile defense capacity to nothing simply by attrition. At that point KI/contact nukes could finish the kill.
My mental image of a Viper hit is the same energy output of the "surface burn" Hexapuma delivered with its point defense lasers in SoS. Each hit can wreck a surface feature but not penetrate even a lightly armored warship. Of course, Hexapuma delivered scores of hits in a few seconds whereas Vipers take a missile to score just one hit of that caliber. The entire missile loadout of the Katana (120-ish, IIRC) of a Katana would be enough to "golf ball" a destroyer pretty well but not be enough to assure the ship is incapacitated or even rendered incapable of hyper drive.
During the approach the Katana captain makes the decision to leave all missile defense to the PDLs rather than wasting even a single Viper that could be inflicting damage on the enemy. It's risky but so is not getting enough hits through to disable the DD. Presumably this pays off or the story would end at that point.
After unloading everything it had at the DD, that leaves the Katana having to close to literal suicide range to take one pass with its forward point defense clusters before the DDs surviving energy mount gets a shot through the bow wall. It's unlikely the DD would be entirely defanged, after all.
I see two possible endings to this scenario. In both cases the Shrike captain orders the rest of the crew into the life pod and ejects them a few seconds short of the DD. In the first possibility the Shrike commits to a pass within 5k km while covering itself with its wedge, then rolling down and goes to full power a couple seconds out and simply rams the DD. Wedge collision kills both ships. The second possibility is that the Katana closes to the same range, turns its bow to the DD and targets all of its forward lasers on the DD's aft impeller ring. With all the previous structural damage to the DD, this shatters the narrowest dimension of the ship and the aft hammerhead is completely blown off. Shockwaves and asymmetric stresses finish tearing the DD apart - but a shot from a remaining energy mount punches through the bow wall at that absurdly short range and destroys the Katana.
Has this sort of scenario been discussed on the board? Other than the conditions setting up the battle, is any of it implausible or inconsistent with canon tech?
