**** yeah
I...don't understand. This seems pretty clearly mocking to me, but I can't figure out why any of what I said is deserving of such.
...I guess, if you interpreted that as Tev wank or something, but even then, that'd be incredibly unfair. I'm not some moron who thinks the GTVA would ever stand a snowball's chance in hell of beating the Shivans back through force of arms if the Shivans really got serious (the presence of 81 juggernauts, on top of blowing up a ****ing sun instead of running rampant throughout GTVA space comes to mind), but that doesn't make the ability to resist Shivan might far better than before worthless. The Great War proved that, at the very least, and BP canon has the Shivans deliberately NOT getting serious in most hostilities as part of their greater strategic doctrine.
No, I loved your post.
Thank you, then. I appreciate it.
The Sathanas engagement was a bit of a tactical mess as the juggernaut ambushed the Orestes immediately after the Lucifer engagement was resolved, at a time when half the battlegroup was unavailable.
The scenarios that GTVA crews have drilled for probably match the final stages of that engagement - multiple capship shock jumps at the flanks once strikecraft waves have taken out the forward beams.
Yeah, which makes it even more impressive, I think. The Orestes had been jumping around the system, trying to evade the Lucifer, until it was forced to fight for a few minutes or so before it could jump away again. The Lucifer gets jumped by the Vishnans, who in turn get jumped by the Sathanas, and the Orestes is able to jump away before the Sathanas can reach the Orestes, too.
(Warning: incoming "wall" of text)
Then the Orestes continues to evade the Sathanas, until the juggernaut finally catches up...whereupon the Orestes turns to run from the Sathanas at sublight speeds for as long as it can, while its fighter/bomber wave takes out the Sathanas beams. Once they do so, the Orestes turns around and engages the Sathanas--but the Sathanas' engines are still fully intact, and Shivan juggernauts are notoriously durable, so chances are it would have managed to jump away before the Orestes could destroy it. Enter the entire rest of the 14th BG shock-jumping the Sathanas and quickly destroying it with their substantial firepower.
So the Orestes ends up outrunning a Lucifer-class superdestroyer for a while, then escaping from a Sathanas, then outrunning said Sathanas for a while, then launching a fighter/bomber wave at it to strike its beam cannons while it uses its sublight speed to buy them as much time as possible before the juggernaut gets in weapons range, then turning and engaging the Sathanas once its beam cannons are down. Even if the rest of the 14th never showed up and the Sathanas got away, it would still have proven the validity and value of the TEI's design principles for this destroyer type. All of the key points of its design worked exactly as envisioned, allowing a single destroyer to outmaneuver and outrun a Sathanas long enough to take out its beam cannons with bombers, then turn and engage the Sathanas and force it to retreat through heavy damage, all with the destroyer taking little damage of its own. (More than anything, the massive increase of cost-efficiency this provides is critical, as the GTVA can't afford to get into a battle of attrition with the Shivans, and the Shivans will always greatly outnumber the GTVA in the long run/big picture.)
Compare that to the last time the GTVA was thrown into a "tactical mess" by a Sathanas, where they lost one destroyer, had a corvette sustain major damage, had another destroyer very nearly destroyed, and the Colossus sustained very heavy damage in the process of directly confronting the Sathanas after bomber strikes managed to take out some of its beam cannons. And they only managed the bomber strike because they delayed the Sathanas' advance long enough for bombers to close in...by using a destroyer-class
carrier as
bait (by virtue of just sitting in its path, saying "shoot me!"), the ship nearly getting obliterated from taking a single salvo of BFReds.
The Orestes served as its own bait, but it still outmaneuvered the juggernaut by itself. It's a pretty stark contrast to the Second Incursion, where the Sathanas seemed to move and jump more rapidly than anything other than a Deimos or Sobek (and fighter/bomber craft).
And let's not even get into how badly the Hecate fails as a warship design when it comes to anything besides carrier-capacity and point-defense. Getting immediately disabled by a single corvette, let alone a corvette that focuses on versatility rather than anti-ship firepower, and getting badly damaged by said corvette in the time it took for reinforcements to arrive is just plain pathetic. Hell, look at Post-Meridian: no beam jamming in place, a modest warship escort and fighter screen, and a bunch of fighter/bomber wings jumping in to attack the enemy--two Karuna frigates and their own fighter complements, which included just a couple Uriels, IIRC. The Meridian failed to support its own escorts with its firepower, because its beam cannons are huge and fragile as hell, and its anti-ship firepower is meager enough (and its durability weak enough) that it quickly falls apart in direct combat even against single ships well below its own weight class, so it is forced to stay as far away from the enemy as possible for as long as possible. Then, the Meridian's forward beam cannons (including its only heavy beam) were disabled with ease, before it even got a shot off. They probably would have been disabled before doing severe damage even without fighters supporting the Karunas, such is how bad the showing was. Then the two Karunas pounded the Meridian, damaging it severely, before the destroyer could even jump away. Compare that to the Carthage, whose firepower was such that strong beam jamming was needed just to keep its heavy beams suppressed, and even then, four Karunas and two Sanctus's with heavy gunship support still took major damage breaking through and defeating the remainder of its escort/the Carthage itself.
The Hecate clearly showed a lack of any clear idea of what the designers wanted it to be. It had a single BGreen over a Deimos in terms of heavy firepower; even then, its beam cannons are massive and fragile, and three of them have very limited fields of fire. It says a lot that approaching a Hecate from above will prevent ANY of its beam cannons from firing on you, and that if you approach it from anywhere that isn't below or in front, you'll only have to contend with a single TerSlash at most. It's a great carrier, but far too incapable in direct combat and far too easily disabled to safely deploy without an extensive escort and a decent fighter screen. It has a decent amount of heavy firepower, but (aside from being easily disabled) poor fields of fire and distribution of coverage makes it really underwhelming in nearly all situations, and the ship's overall vulnerability means it never gets used except as a last resort.
The Titan and the Raynor, on the other hand, had very clear, cohesive design principles from the start. The Titan is more of a carrier, but it concentrates its heavy firepower in a forward configuration to destroy enemy warships before they can do much damage in turn; it also makes offensive maneuvering viable. Its two TerSlashBlue's have good fields of view and coverage, each providing enough firepower to reasonably deal with smaller, flanking ships, and its torpedoes and heavy pulse turrets supplement this firepower while giving SOME anti-ship capability for the areas without any beam coverage. Thus, on defense, it can orient its forward firepower to act as a deterrent and as fire support, while it has modest firepower elsewhere, and on offense, its forward firepower kills ships dead before they can fire back, leaving its flanks to be easily covered by escorts. And with shock-jumping, the threat of a Titan taking to the field directly is downright terrifying, rather than laughable (like with the Hecate). The Raynor has some concentration of its heavy firepower, but not overly so, and it still has pretty good coverage everywhere except directly behind and below. It has good durability, not great, but that's okay because it outruns and outmaneuvers the things it can't (or doesn't want to) stand against directly. The Hecate is kind of like a big, slow carrier that has a weird assortment of heavy guns with poor distribution and coverage, all in a package that has no armor anywhere (not even on its turrets). Too vulnerable and fragile to engage ships directly and put its guns to use, but still bogged down by the extra weight and bulk of having them at all. At the same time, its firepower is concentrated so bizarrely and positioned poorly enough to have major gaps in coverage that it can't effectively engage threats that DO close in anyway. The Raynor is more like a "fast battleship" or a battlecruiser, and is designed with that role in mind, strengths and weaknesses all. With the Hecate...it's like someone tried to make a ship that fit in two contradictory roles at once without making intelligent or reasonable compromises, leaving a ship that has weaknesses that it can't afford and capabilities it can't effectively use.
If nothing else, TEI is/was really good about laying out clear strengths and weaknesses, as well as roles, for its warship designs, and building those requirements around a doctrine that goes a long way to mitigate many of those weaknesses. It's not just copying shock-jumping from the Shivans, either--the emphasis on mobility and overwhelming concentrations of firepower to avoid taking damage rather than the sheer ability to tank it; largely self-sufficient point-defense coverage so that the most mobile part of Shivan forces--its fighters and bombers--would not be able to seriously threaten the warships by themselves, and so that more fighter/bomber assets could be sent at the Shivans offensively (particularly at their ships, softening them up and allowing their own warships to turn and engage with far less risk) rather than to cover allied warships from Shivan craft; more frequent jumping and with greater precision, allowing for not only shock-jumping, but also for quick-in-quick-out raids and counterattacks and quickly fleeing enemy attacks and shock-jumps; fewer glaring and exploitable vulnerabilities (like the Hecate, or the Tevs' relative lack of suitable answers to heavy, direct combatants that weren't overly concentrated--and thus, avoidable--like the Colossus), especially since the prevalence of the Raynor, Diomedes, and Deimos classes means that there is considerable answer to situations where you have to fight ships from multiple directions at once; much more decentralization of capability--you can send in a couple corvettes to get enough shock-jump power to kill a destroyer in a single salvo, or a single destroyer to achieve the same result, and if you want more generalized/sustained direct combat capability in a fight, there's a couple corvette classes for that, too, and the Raynor can fill the role well enough, and the addition of gunboats (as well as the greater self-sufficiency of warship point-defenses) allows one to concentrate or distribute anti-fighter/bomber coverage far more freely.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the introduction of a TEI-generation battlegroup into the Sol theater immediately and heavily shifted the balance of power in the war. Steele is Steele, of course, but the TEI-gen ships have far fewer tactical and strategic holes to cover/compensate for and allow for far more options/flexibility--they were what let him have such a devastating effect so quickly. If anything, Lopez deserves some major credit for getting so much mileage out of an entirely non-TEI battlegroup. The closest she gets are some experimental retrofits/packages for the Carthage itself, which give it a pale shadow of TEI capabilities in most cases (like her bastardized sprint-drive, for example). But even with that, the limits are apparent. I mean, can you imagine how funny it would be if, instead of a Titan-class destroyer showing up in Delenda Est, it was a Hecate instead?
"Huh. I didn't know there was a 'kill one, get a second one free' special going on. Neat."
