Keep in mind that the Imperieuse has to basically cheat to make sure it wins against the Wargods all the time.
The Imperiuse only needs to overdrive on the 2nd shot to clean up the Katana and Atlan Orde before they can damage her beam emmiters. Beam overdrives are common in BP and it's reasonable to assume that ships can overdrive the damage or the firerate with practised crews. That's not really 'cheating', that's just the basic capability of the ship.
This is very important and I can't believe I forgot it. Somewhere in the developer's commentary, there's an anecdote about
Delenda Est actually being "winnable" due to 3JRF's frigates sometimes nailing the
Imperiuse's beams - and it's the much-maligned Gauss Cannon#Karuna that did it. This was resolved by making the beam emitters indestructible, but the point remains - without plot armor, those beams can go down
quite quickly, and I somehow doubt that ship-subsys-guardian-threshold is within the capabilities of a Titan-class destroyer.
Actually, let me do the math here... As a first-order approximation, I'm going to model this as Chimeras vs. Karunae.
A Chimera corvette has 80,000 HP, and its MBlue emitters have 5% HP, aka 4000 HP, according to bp-shp.tbm. The Gauss Cannon#Karuna deals 1200 subsystem damage per shot, and a Karuna has five of them. (I know I'm assuming Chimeras vs. Karunae, but as an aside... If Narayanas are in play, the Gauss Cannon#Narayana deals 2400 damage per shot and fires in bursts of two, so a
single Narayana-grade gauss cannon can snipe an MBlue.) This is assuming perfect-or-close-to-it accuracy, which is less fair if we're trying to leverage the Narayana's range or ROF advantage.
On the defensive, a Karuna has 85,000 HP, and an MBlue deals 19800 damage per pulse. It takes roughly 4.3 MBlue pulses to sink a Karuna. If a single Chimera tries to shock-jump a single Karuna, it will leave the Karuna with 25600 HP, just barely enough to survive another MBlue pulse. If the Chimera emerged in TerPulse range, the Karuna is probably toast. If not, the Karuna has 35(!) seconds to strip the Chimera's beams before the lethargic MBlue has recharged... or, if the orientation of the ships doesn't suit that, it can just go be somewhere else, since the Karuna's got nearly twice the speed of the Chimera (and, another aside,
fully twice the speed of the Bellerophon), all the while getting in some incidental damage with its Apocalypse launchers. Hypothetically speaking, if the Chimera's jump is particularly lackluster, it can even have an emitter taken out
before it can fire (or before firing a full pulse), due to the Gauss Cannon#Karuna's range advantage[1]. Against paired Karunae, we see a similar situation, with the Chimeras inflicting moderate-to-severe damage but, depending on their insertion range, not necessarily taking out the Karunae unless they have numeric superiority. You can do the math on this one.
But that's going off the tables, and those don't paint a full picture. First off, beam jamming. I'm not talking about full-scale, the-
Anjaneya-pwns-Serkr-Team-in-their-noob-asses sorta beam jamming here, though. It's been well-established in fluff that warships on both sides need extremely precise targeting is needed to get maximum effect from their main weapons in the face of enemy active armor[2]. Therefore, even slight degradation of beam targeting matters. I can't think of this being made explicit in canon, but it certainly
seems to be the narrative justification for the special armor types used by Buntu ships in some missions. There aren't any canonical numbers here, but going off
Delenda Est, a 20% degradation in damage seems plausible, in which case it takes a little over five full MBlue pulses to sink a Karuna with an ECM ship[3] escorting it. At 30% degradation, you'd need six, and at 40%, you'd need seven. In other words, depending on the ECM environment, a single Karuna may be able to escape even a paired Chimera strike!
What if we have multiple Karunae? Well, that's when this approach starts running into geometrical problems. How close together Chimera corvettes can safely jump in together starts to play a bigger and bigger role, but above a certain point, they're going to start having trouble emerging in a good shock-jump formation. I think there's some sort of diminishing return here, where at a certain point the corvettes start getting in each other's way. Another question would be whether ECM can mess up an incoming jump by interfering with whatever's relaying coordinates, which I don't think has ever been addressed. My guess would be that four Chimeras can almost always sink two Karunae, possibly with losses of their own depending on the Feds ECM, but that six can't reliably sink three since they'll get in each other's way.
Okay, so, why don't the Tevs just kill the AWACS? Well, if we're adding Tev fighters to the equation, we need to add Federal fighters as well. In "Aristeia", a pair of Kents or Uriels is sufficient to defend the
Anjaneya more or less indefinitely, while Torpedo 2's AWACS is killed by SEXP
fiat (which I discovered on one playthrough when I tried to save it to see if the Medea fight went differently). Karunae excel in the point defense department, and the AWACS would be nearby, so it seems plausible in-universe, too. Furthermore, the time spent fighting the AWACS gives the Feds time to Gauss Cannon the beams.
Okay, what about TAG missiles? Yes, it worked against the
Hanuman, but I'd argue that that's not actually representative. It's been confirmed (and you'd have to find this yourself, I'm not searching through the entire BP discussion thread for it) that beam jamming is a combination of throwing off enemy targeting and physically messing with the beam magnetic bottle. At shorter ranges, it can be physically impossible to fire a direct-fire beam. If you send along a Deimos or Diomedes to TerSlash/TerSlashBlue the AWACS, you're still giving the Feds time to return fire.
Another issue is SUTRAC. Sol is the UEF's home turf. They've got listening posts, they've got recon elements, they've got whole installations devoted to computing enemy jump vectors. Conversely, the Tevs, erm, don't. The Feds also have their gate network, which, according to the tech room entry, helps them keep their own positions hidden by activating the gates at random intervals whether or not something's actually using them. Now, let's look at the times when we actually see a Tev shock-jump in practice:
- In "Collateral Damage", the player gets a warning quite some time in advance of Serkr's arrival. I can't remember what prevented the Ranvir from jumping out, but under ordinary circumstances, it would have had a wide window to do so.
- In "Aristeia", Calder warns you a full 30 seconds before the Medea arrives. If the Feds hadn't been escorting the crippled Agincourt, they could have jumped out right then and there. The Auxerre's CO, incidentally, describes the [/i]Medea's jump as unusually good, even though all she did was arrive in the correct orientation to fire her beams.
- In "Delenda Est", the Imperiuse had to jump all the way from the Kuiper belt to avoid detection.
All of this hints that shock-jumps are harder to
start than they sound, between the long lead time and the difficulty of actually finding the friggin UEF ship in the first place. Even if successfully launched, executing it successfully requires good navigational data to deploy correctly, and for the Feds not to have sufficient ECM cover. For the record, I'm not suggesting that Severanti launched many (any?) failed shock-jump attacks, especially given how cautious he is; I
am, however, suggesting that Calder knows how to answer them, and that Severanti can't just throw corvettes at the enemy without careful preparations. ("Subspace speed chess" and all...) All three of these attacks were Steele's, not Severanti's, and one can still fail miserably, depending on the player's skill.
Lastly, we can apply a variation of the anthropic principle: if shock-jumps really were so impossible to counter as has been suggested, then either Severanti's severely underutilizing them[4], or the war would already be over.
Wow, that ended up being longer than I expected.
[1] The Karuna's main guns do slightly outrange the Chimera's, and it's enough to disrupt an MBlue if the Chimera comes in from too far away and within the gauss cannon's firing arc. The tech room explicitly states that this is a considerable deterrent for Tev strikes.
[2] For example, the
Toutatis certainly
could lob torpedoes at the
Hood through the
Hoover's ECM, and the
Vikrant and
Toreador actually do so against the
Shrievality and
Beholder. In both cases, it's a matter of reduced effect, not being completely unable to target. (Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure the
Toutatis doesn't actually do so.) Ships will sometimes hold off on firing into heavy ECM to preserve ammo (UEF) or to avoid needless heat/recharge cycles (Tev).
[3] I've already said that I think, had Severanti continued to fight the long war he was fighting, the Feds would figure out how to mass-produce Oculi and/or retrofit existing spaceframes into jamming ships. Imagine an ECM block upgrade to the Custos - or, hell, maybe the Demeter or the friggin Puruyasha.
[4] Which I can totally believe. Steele shock-jumps a
planet, after all - but we're talking about Severanti, not Steele[5].
[5] Incidentally, the
Carthage,
Imperiuse, and Serkr Team are all Steele's assets. I think it's relevant that the most feared shock-jumpers were customized and trained by Severanti's replacement.
EDIT:
If the Carthage can overdrive the firerate of her old BGreens then a Titan can probably get her BBLues to fire every 10 seconds(maybe sacrificing some damage). Even with reduced damage 3 BBlues and 3 MBlues from the supporting Chimera is more than enough to OHK a Karuna.
A Titan probably could, but the Chimera's tech room entry is quite explicit that it has heat issues as it is - it's got plenty of energy, but risks blowing itself up if it routes any more to the main guns.