Has anyone else decided to root against Manticore?

kzt wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
My point was that the Manties fought the war really well. They played to the Solly arrogance, pressed the right economic buttons, denied the SLN the ability to learn from its mistakes and didn't give them time to even attempt to put new doctrines in practice. Plus the MAlign playing with the strings and forcing the SLN to make even more mistakes.

If the war had dragged on for long enough, the SLN would have been a much better adversary. It didn't.

Literally, they never tried a single tactic that played to their strength and not to the manties. It was ‘lets sharpen our spears and this time we’ll run faster towards their machinguns behind 6 layers of barbed wire. I’m sure you’ll pull it off this time lads.’

Their strength was being able to concentrate overwhelming quantities of energy weapons. Did they ever try that, say on the pickets just waiting there in hyperspace on the 43rd day of being at general quarters?

And how can they concentrate their fire on opponents with significantly higher accelerations? Space is really big, thus, the probability that somebody would emerge right into their laps would be rather low.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:And how can they concentrate their fire on opponents with significantly higher accelerations? Space is really big, thus, the probability that somebody would emerge right into their laps would be rather low.

You get the 40 best navigators out of the 20,000 or so in the SLN and each of them attempts, after having practiced this more then a few times, to get a SLN SD to emerge from hyperspace as close to the picket as possible. It is, as has been noted from time time to time in the books, really really hard on the crew to keep them at full alert all the time. And those few momenta in energy range are all you need, as your weapons are manned, charged up and ready to shoot.

And given the small scale of the pickets, the inability to keep pods deployed, the relative toughness of a DN sized ship and the reasonably good hyperspace egress accuracy you should be able to achieve allowing a vaguely effective defensive network, the odds are you'll be able to get away.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:It's all too true it was the wrong type of experience, as someone else pointed out to me in another thread, and although sims alone don't make a strategic or tactical genious, I can conceive of a rare officer who was a fast study. Heck, Honor was ready to do some serious damage during her first hyper command w/o much more experience. 'OUCH!'

Except that any Honor in the SLN would have been quickly punished or at least discouraged from taking action after the Casimir Raid. Oh, a Solly skipper would most definitely have hammered the local Silesian government who didn't play ball, but her superiors wouldn't have liked to see the initiative and would probably have also been told to stop the raiding of slave depots. Heck, that almost happened to Honor herself in the RMN!

An eager commander can only be beat down so often before they too start to toe the line and keep their heads down. The problem is the SLN culture, both FF and BF. The way I see it, Kingsford needs to scrap the BF doctrine completely, rebuild the new SLN from the ground up with a core of FF doctrine. He needs to identify the change agents and promote those, let everyone else know that they are his voice and have his backing.

But perhaps an Honor in FF would have accrued lots of experience and goodwill. Accomplishing what she was required to do, without complete abandon of morals, scruples and values. Noone would have cared if she was accruing so much momentum as long as she kept bringing home the bacon.

GloriousRuse wrote:As I read the thread on tactics and officer experience, I can’t help but notice that we are falling into a classic western thought-trap. We’re over-emphasizing the tactical level; hardly new, but the idea that small groups should do great things and therefore stacking enough good small groups means you win.

This of course is rather untrue. Many people (Including, ironically, the Americans in WWII) have found several ways to win their wars despite being inferior tactically and in several weapons technologies. One of the reasons the Manties are fundamentally unlikeable is that their opponents, despite being technically and tactically inferior, are always fundamentally unwilling to fight any way but the Mantie way and then get slaughtered, when there are so many reasonable ways they could actually compete. Not genius plans of super brains, just reasonable answers to the problem posed.

Fundamentally unlikeable? What you been drinkin' Willis! LOL

It's the same dilemma my niece faced against the college students in that thread. They only wanted to discuss tactics, and they felt tactics is more important to know than strategy.

Tactics is the more exciting of the two for certain, but without strategy, as my niece pointed out, it's like going off all half-cocked.

The Peeps were willing to drastically depart from fighting the Manty way. Assassinations! The MA has seriously deviated from the script as well.

Choosing to fight the Manty way, with common decency and respect, has it's rewards.

Someone like Rear Admiral Pyun would have come up through FF and, along with getting to be the enforcer of OFS and it's dictator or TransStellar partners, would have been out patroling and anti-piracy work. Even local totalitarian governments don't like pirates - at least the ones who don't either work for them or pay really good money to use their systems as bases for a "fee".

We don't see much of actual work by FF except them being used to cow or punish varioius planets and suppress uprisings against people who have agreements (and pay off) OFS.
Actually, we don't see BF doing any work at all except perhaps swanning around in clumps of SDs being important.

BF probably has people who have combat experience, we just don't see them. You also have to ask yourself why there are SL member worlds that have SDF's when there is both BF and FF to protect them. Beowulf is an exception in the size of the SDF but it has reasons- one of which is the Sigma Draconis terminus of the Junction- and they apparently never did want BF hanging around "protecting" them. Beowulf also has a fair sized group of both daughter colonies and allied trading partners and seems to do commerce protection for it's and with it's allies. We just arn't shown any of that and while there probably hasn't been much in the way of actual piracy in the Core Worlds area, anybody who has their own trade moveing out into less controled areas is going to have to think about setting up protection.
We don't see much of anything in below BC activity for BF except the mention as scouting/screen for the Capital ships- very much the pre-war situation with both Haven and Manticore and SLN both didn't experience the evolution of weapos and tactics that Haven & Manticore did in their war so they -having also not having paid attention to what was going on- didn't experiment with different tactics. FF on the other hand, has often been shown to deploy single ships or only a few at BC or lighter levels to deal with problems for OFS.

Kingsford is going to have a number of problems if he gets to reconstitute the SLN. One of those is to get rid or retire all sorts of people who are too wedded to the old system to be useful and find people who will be able to grow in the new environment while dealing with sorting out SLN.

kzt wrote:Literally, they never tried a single tactic that played to their strength and not to the manties. It was ‘lets sharpen our spears and this time we’ll run faster towards their machinguns behind 6 layers of barbed wire. I’m sure you’ll pull it off this time lads.’

Their strength was being able to concentrate overwhelming quantities of energy weapons. Did they ever try that, say on the pickets just waiting there in hyperspace on the 43rd day of being at general quarters?

And how do you get to energy range? Like your metaphor, it's like having contact poison that kills really quickly, if only you can get through the machine guns and barbed wire.

Actually, it’s not that difficult.

There is a massive missile fight and mobility advantage to being “out-limit”, but the vulnerability is that whoever jumps in gets to set the range, and by definition you are not near the major orbital infrastructure. From there a few common sense answers:

1) Pick a low yield SEM planet, one with maybe a squadron or two covering it. Show up out limit with strike group one; target orbital infrastructure and accept very low Ph/Pk numbers. Your industrial base is massive enough to literally give you millions of missiles per op. The defenders, if out limit, are now forced to try to jump to another location out limit to knock you down unless they want a constant stream of 0.5% hit rates to take another planet’s industry out of the SEM and contribute to planets deciding leaving the SEM is in their best interests. They jump, they’re fixed until the next jump cycle.

Aggressor picket jumps back to assembly area and calls in the next jump group. They jump in on top of the defenders. Energy range fight. Eventually this articulates into smaller and smaller jump groups coming in on top of each other and blowing the crap out of each other with point blank missiles and energy, ensuring a group committed is a group hammered. Which if you can trade anywhere near one for one, or even two for one, means at the operational/strategic level you can force the manties to either disperse their fleet or sacrifice lesser systems.

2) Use your intelligence apparatus (and let’s be honest, the MAlign is literally snuggling nukes into orbitals and commission nanny-assassins, their system works) to relay Manty picket positions near the out limit. Smash them. The manties either reinforce their pickets, exposing more ships to energy range, or at least SL missile range, fights off the jump and thereby are open to be big bled dry.

Or they cede the out system, allowing you to play “endless unanswerable missile barraged crap missiles. What’s that? Only one in 500 hits? Cool, good thing we sent 500k of them. Guess that’s a couple squadrons or major planet infrastructure sets that don’t exist anymore.

3) Defensive repeat. Manties jump in out limit. Grav sensor pocket jumps to hide positions, counterattack groups jump in and have a smash fight at energy range.

4) Use constant stealth missile threats to create a pattern pulling manties forward from in system. Leave them a pattern that is easy enough to analyze that they drive either battle units out to catch you, or engineer types out to seed pod fields. This will be closer to the out limit where you can...you guessed it...jump in at close ranges.

5) Accept operational trade offs in a total war. Just put enough defenses out to make the manties commit real forces to any given attack. They smash a planet’s industry, you use the force differential to smash one of theirs. The SEM runs out of planets first.

Again, against stationary/orbital predicted targets this doesn’t take suicide runs, just enough missiles to cross the one CM volley and saturate local energy PDs.

6) Defend with your own strike groups “out limit”. If they jump in on you, great. If they jump in away from you, you jump to the grav signature and fight a naval meeting engagement in the jump cycle.

And that’s what I thought up while waiting for brunch

2)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:Literally, they never tried a single tactic that played to their strength and not to the manties. It was ‘lets sharpen our spears and this time we’ll run faster towards their machinguns behind 6 layers of barbed wire. I’m sure you’ll pull it off this time lads.’

Their strength was being able to concentrate overwhelming quantities of energy weapons. Did they ever try that, say on the pickets just waiting there in hyperspace on the 43rd day of being at general quarters?

And how do you get to energy range? Like your metaphor, it's like having contact poison that kills really quickly, if only you can get through the machine guns and barbed wire.

I always thought one of the Peep's biggest tactical errors was their huge reliance on their energy weapons. They led in that regard, but every Manty enemy they faced was always aware of the Peeps superiority in that area. Getting in range of someone's energy weapons reminds me of the dilemma a woman faces trying to fend off an attacker with her contact taser who's armmed with a gun.

Why didn't the Peep's abandon their heavy energy armaments in favor of more missile tubes? Quite frankly, there was a point I thought all but a couple of energy batteries made sense. Didn't Grayson wake up and champion a ship class with few energy weapons?

The pickets on the WH termini are great targets. You are not trying to get all of them, you just have to get one of the picket ships.

And at knife fighting range the RMN missiles are not that much more effective than anyone elses.

GloriousRuse wrote:Actually, it’s not that difficult.

There is a massive missile fight and mobility advantage to being “out-limit”, but the vulnerability is that whoever jumps in gets to set the range, and by definition you are not near the major orbital infrastructure. From there a few common sense answers:

[snip]

And that’s what I thought up while waiting for brunch

I don't see why any Manty officer would be caught outside the hyper limit. With their speed advantage and longer-ranged missiles, they get to choose the engagement range. So why be out of the hyperlimit where your strategy works: someone can drop close to you and fire before you can translate out? And even out the hyperlimit, can't they simply outmanoeuvre any SLN units of similar mass? The surprise force needs to drop into the path of the Manty defenders who have built up velocity, close enough that they will come into energy range before deflecting the vector enough or simply translating into alpha. Note that out of the hyperlimit, ships aren't moving at high speeds anyway. So at a conservatively high 15000 kps and assuming the hypergenerators take a full minute to translate the ship, the surprise force needs to drop in at most at 900000 km (3 light-seconds), which is already inside the energy range.

And what's to stop them from turning turtle? At which point the Manty vessel can still fire missiles but can't be fired upon.

The strategies of firing at orbital industries and infrastructure from out of the hyperlimit, with huge swarms of missiles to offset a low Pk/Ph ratio might work. The drawback is that they may hit the planet and then you have Eridani Edict Violations, which brings the Grand Fleet to your capital system.

Finally, the strategy of massively outnumbering the RMN and accepting losses were what the SLN was trying to do. The FF probably had 10k ships of BC, CA and CL range, so they could absorb those losses. The problem here was that the loss ratio was so high that the Mandarins couldn't sell that to the Solly public, especially out-Kuiper.