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Jonathan_S
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 8769
Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2011 2:01 pm
Location: Virginia, USA
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First, I want to thank you for bringing this up. It's something that had kind of bothered me, and even on reading your post I was initially tending to agree with you. But it made me think a bit deeper about it and try to come up with supporting data; which actually led me to reverse my initially assumption.
Your question is something the book definitely doesn't address. And I can't recall RFC speaking directly to it either.
The book covers why the convoy didn't attempt to break out of the grav wave within the current band of hyper-space (it'd take more hours than they had), but not why it didn't drop to a lower band or even to n-space to attempt to evade.
However, thinking about that question, there is one example in a later book (HAE) where a ship does attempt to evade a mid-hyper intercept by dropping to n-space. That's when Honor, in HMS Wayfarer, was trying to cover the liner Artemis. And if we look at that later fight it may give us some clues about why Helen didn't try a similar approach.
So to start with, the differences:
- The later fight was in the Selker Rift, not in a grav wave - so sidewalls and missiles were in play.
- The later fight had only a single Peep BC within sensor range, rather than 6 CAs.
- The later fight had 1 AMC defending, rather than 2 CLs + 3 DDs
- The SVW convoy was 5 unarmed freighters. While Artemis basically had the shielding, sidewalls, point defense, and propulsion of a BC - but a far, far, lighter offensive weapons fit. (Heck, she even had most of a BC's EW/stealth suite and a post-Grayson compensator; though not the absolute latest one)
- Artemis had taken some damage already while the SVW convoy's freighters were undamaged.
But the similarities:
- Both combats appear to have occurred in the Delta bands.
- Both, for different reasons, were limited to the acceleration and rad shielding of a freighter ship.
- In both cases the civilian ship(s) were [now] unable to climb above the Delta bands
So let's refresh ourselves on how the Wayfarer fight went:
Despite only one Peep ship being in sensor range (rather than 6), and it being 2 hours out of missile range, Honor still felt that the single BC would be able to find and run down Artemis after she'd slipped down into n-space; unless the Artemis was given hours to get away from it's last known position and hide. And even then Honor wasn't sure that would work if the BC was undamaged and given free reign to search.
That's why Honor did the trick with the EW drone, to create uncertainty about exactly when Artemis separated and slipped out of the Delta bands.
And yet, even with only a single ship in range to see she wasn't confident that would be enough to let a ship with the stealth and EW of a pretty modern RMN BC successfully hide from the BC should it come back and start looking.
If it's that hard to hide from a single ship, it must be nearly impossible for the convoy escort in SVW to have long hidden that the freighters they'd been escorting had slipped away; given that there were 6 CAs watching them -- providing more redundancy as well as multiple angles of view on each target. Certainly the ruse wouldn't have lasted longer than it took to run down the first EW drone - at which point the CAs can easily double back and find the hiding freighters (since those will be far easier to find than a single well equipped liner)
As for dropping the whole convoy out en-mass to fight a missile duel in normal space; remember that Theisman (who'd fought RMN cruisers and destroyers already) was far more confident that the 6 Havenite CAs would be able to win a missile fight against the heavily outmassed RMN CLs + DDs. Haven's got more ships, each of which is tougher and carries more point defense and more missile tubes than any of the RMN escorts. The RMN has a tech edge in missile combat - but at this point it's not enough of one for CLs and DDs to fight outnumbered against heavy cruisers with any likelihood of victory. Maybe, maybe, an RMN CL is a near even match for the bigger more armored Havenite CA. But the RMN DD's aren't, and the RMN only has 2 CLs there. Plus Haven's got an extra CA anyway so even if the fight was a toss-up one on one, in a 6 on 5 fight and given the tonnage imbalance it's Haven's fight to lose
And when the RMN escort does lose then the freighters have little chance of escape in the deep interstellar void of n-space.
How about if they all drop to normal space and the freighters are ordered to scatter while the escort turns to engage the CAs? Well the CAs outnumber the escort - Haven could afford to detach one or two to run down the slower freighters while the rest fought the escorts. So that seems like a failing plan too.
So we seem to come back to the plan the RMN escorts did follow. Order to freighters to scatter, and then turn the 5 escorts back en-mass in an attempt to cripple as many of the attacking CAs as possible -- taking advantage of the grav wave environment to magnify the effects of the damage. That seemingly giving them their best chance to minimize the number of CAs that would be able to hunt down the scattering freighters (and as it was they managed to reduce that number all the way to zero - so the sacrifice of the 5 escorts ensured the survival of all 5 freighters. Something that seems quite unlikely in the scenarios where they try to move the combat out of the grav wave)
So while RFC didn't give us this full infodump during SVW the more I think about it the more I'm coming to the conclusion that given the forces involved that trying to move the fight to normal space, or trying to let the freighters hide while the escort scattered, would be extremely risky if not totally unworkable strategies.
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Sat May 29, 2021 8:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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