Author Topic: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?  (Read 21490 times)

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Offline -Norbert-

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
That's odd... considering how much resistence there was to building any destroyers at all, I'd expect them to have a comparetively small military, or at least a small active military with most of the soldiers being reservists who spent most of their time away from the military.

 

Offline The E

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
That's odd... considering how much resistence there was to building any destroyers at all, I'd expect them to have a comparetively small military, or at least a small active military with most of the soldiers being reservists who spent most of their time away from the military.

Do recall that Sol's total population is huge. Compared to that and the strength of the solarian economy, the UEF Navy is actually tiny; by comparison, the terran portion of the GTVA alone with its somewhat more inefficient economy manages to keep 19 Destroyer Battlegroups in service (for a total of 35 Destroyers and over a hundred Corvettes and Cruisers). It's a matter of what measure you use to determine the size: For a single system navy, the UEF is ridiculously oversized. Compared to what the solarian economy could support, it's small.
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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Also, due to the way beam damage is very frontloaded GTVA ships benefit a lot more from being in larger groups than UEF ships. 4 Karunas can bombard and seriously hurt a GTVA battlegroup. 4 Chimeras can almost instantly evaporate a UEF frigate and give themselves a numbers advantage immediately or shoot and run, using their mobility to reposition/escape after the initial volley.

UEF ships simply don't have that explosive "one burst kill" firepower which makes them really unfavoured in a short-term attrition war. Even if you wreck a GTVA Corvette before it can jump away it can still be repaired and reused. A Narayana or Karuna hit by the Serkr team will only ever be used as scrap metal.

So even with ~relatively similar numbers the GTVA ships simply have more killing power, they have a much easier time turning advantages and tactical jumps into permanent damage rather than just a forced trip to Delta Serpentis.

Beam jamming changes this but it was a very late-war addition to the UEF arsenal, after Steele had already taken command in Sol.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Hellstryker

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Beam jamming changes this but it was a very late-war addition to the UEF arsenal, after Steele had already taken command in Sol.

I thought beam jamming was a thing well before WiH began. Source?

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
According to the Oculus tech room entry, a handful escaped the fall of Jupiter, bringing (among other things) beam jamming prototypes with them. The technology may have existed earlier, but wasn't in usable form until shortly after Steele arrived.

...however, the Feds had started producing more by as early as the Agincourt heist, so really, this just makes Severanti's strategy even less viable. The more jamming ships the UEF can build, the weaker the GTVA's weapons become, and we've already established that the UEF has the industrial base to do that, given time to retool some shipyards.

 

Offline The E

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
But as Delenda Est showed, beam jamming is something that the GTVA can counteract pretty much out of existing resources. Widespread deployment of the technology (which is something that isn't trivial, given the scarcity of Oculus hulls) will help to make the Tev's alpha strike advantage less acute, but it's not going to be nullified completely.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
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Offline Snarks

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
I don't think there's any evidence that the Federation's forces was actually growing rather than shrinking. Most of the Federation's industrial efforts seem geared towards replenishing strikecraft, repairing existing vessels, and on the rare occasion, retrofitting a capital ship. There might have been a few additional cruisers added to the fleet, but the general circumstances seem to suggest a shrinking fleet. I doubt Sol could afford to devote resources to construct more than a handful of frigates, if that is the intent at all given their Ubuntu philosophy and aim to resolve the conflict diplomatically.

There's also something else to keep in mind. There seems to be a desire to limit the escalation of the war as a result of the Elders' connection to the Vishnans, that seems to imply that if the Federation were to gear towards total war and abandon their Ubuntu philosophy, very bad things may happen, something along the lines of crossing the threshold.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
But as Delenda Est showed, beam jamming is something that the GTVA can counteract pretty much out of existing resources. Widespread deployment of the technology (which is something that isn't trivial, given the scarcity of Oculus hulls) will help to make the Tev's alpha strike advantage less acute, but it's not going to be nullified completely.

Delenda Est showed the ultramodern, highly experimental GTD Carthage can blow up an Oculus after a fighter's TAGged it. Even that isn't guaranteed to work, since the BP discussion thread has described beam jamming as a combination of ECM to throw off targeting and EM disruption of the beam's magnetic bottle; this hasn't been confirmed, but I suspect the Carthage's ability to lock the Hanuman is a combination of the TAG missile and the distance between the two more than some flaw of the jamming tech itself.

Oculus spaceframes may be rare, but the Jovians built at least "several" prototypes "[i]n the weeks leading up to the Fall of Jupiter", according to the tech entry. (I had actually been under the impression that they'd been available to assist Calder's forces in the 18 months before WiH; that Calder was able to maintain a stalemate even against full-strength Tev alpha strikes suggests that either they're not usually as deadly as proposed earlier, or that Severanti egregiously underutilized them. I suspect some combination of both, leaning towards the latter.) Now, the rest of the UEF probably doesn't have too many flux tube probes laying around, but if some Jovian engineers can "jury-rig" a fully capable ECM ship in a few weeks, I doubt the UEF would have trouble adapting the design to a more typical hull configuration... well, unless a certain metal-themed admiral decides to smash their logistics out of nowhere.



@Snarks: Simms mentions UEF shipyard output as a going consideration in the briefing (or maybe the CB, I'm not sure) to Pawns on a Board of Bone. That doesn't mean the fleet is growing, but I think you're underestimating somewhat. I don't think canon mentions any new warships coming online post-Severanti, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening. Further, we only have that perspective post-Steele. Severanti both inflicted fewer casualties and didn't prioritize attacking their economy, especially in and around Earth sector where most of their shipyards seem to have been located.

 

Offline Vidmaster

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Remember that crewing those ships is certainly an issue too, no matter how much you shortcut training.
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Offline The E

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Delenda Est showed the ultramodern, highly experimental GTD Carthage can blow up an Oculus after a fighter's TAGged it. Even that isn't guaranteed to work, since the BP discussion thread has described beam jamming as a combination of ECM to throw off targeting and EM disruption of the beam's magnetic bottle; this hasn't been confirmed, but I suspect the Carthage's ability to lock the Hanuman is a combination of the TAG missile and the distance between the two more than some flaw of the jamming tech itself.

DE showed the Carthage nailing an Oculus with a Crypt Hammer beam, guided by a regular TAG fired from an Aurora. Nothing about that requires experimental tech; even if it does, the GTVA is better positioned to put a solution into place than the UEF is to put beam jammers everywhere. It's a tech race that the GTVA can win in short order; the period of vulnerability created by the deployment of beam jammers is very small.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
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Offline -Norbert-

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
By an Aurora?

Didn't that tagging come out of nowhere, which would suggest either an inside job from someone on the ship or a stealth fighter.

An Aurora would have been shot down before it got into range of the most mission critical ship in the area.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
No, it's a standard TAG-B from a pop-up missile strike. Fighters have excellent subspace manoeuvrability and TAGs are too small and fast to be shot down so just jumping in, firing TAGs and jumping out is a very effective tactic. And with a range of almost 2000 metres for TAG-As and 1500m for TAG-Bs they can easily outrange BurstFlak.

If a subspace pop-up TAG strike isn't an option you can always send in stealth fighters though. That's why in Act 3 you see much less reliance on beam jamming and much more on long-range bombardment. Beam jamming was very effective for one op but mostly due to the surprise factor. It's become much less of a factor in warship engagements.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2017, 07:05:45 pm by FrikgFeek »
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Also, due to the way beam damage is very frontloaded GTVA ships benefit a lot more from being in larger groups than UEF ships. 4 Karunas can bombard and seriously hurt a GTVA battlegroup. 4 Chimeras can almost instantly evaporate a UEF frigate and give themselves a numbers advantage immediately or shoot and run, using their mobility to reposition/escape after the initial volley.

I once did the math on Serkr's alpha strike potential in Aristea, if UEF AWACS did not come online on station and assuming the pair of Karunas were target priority, one Chimera would devote full fire to one, the other onto second, have the two anti-corvette beams on the corvette leader (Bellarriphon-class in this case) on one Karuna and the single anti-destroyer beam again on the other, both commited Frigates of JTF Wargods would be almost instantly hulled in one volley even with FULL armor integrity. With this in mind, you could see why one-half of the Wargods were going on about how the battlespace conditions were entirely outrageous. And this was designed with Shivans in mind...

 

Offline Snarks

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
That's odd... considering how much resistence there was to building any destroyers at all, I'd expect them to have a comparetively small military, or at least a small active military with most of the soldiers being reservists who spent most of their time away from the military.

I mean, everything you said there is true. The Solaris class saw a lot of opposition and took a major effort from Byrne to even get approved. The vast majority of the Sol's personel in fact seem to be reservists. I believe Laporte and her wingmates were all reserves, and there's a lot of mention of reservists being pulled into action.

The Federation fleet is large for a system, but it's barely a fraction of the forces the GTVA can muster (which probably numbers nearly 50 destroyers across Terrans and Vasudans with associated support vessels).

What's stopping the GTVA from committing more resources is a need to maintain perimeter defenses from possible Shivan incursions and a bottlenecked logistical pipeline.

The strangest thing to me is that all the Federation fleets are of roughly the same size despite Earth being clearly the largest economic and population powerhouse of the three Sol factions. If the fleets represented population and economic power, then 1st Fleet should be overwhelming larger than 2nd and 3rd Fleet. This implies to me that Earth built most of the ships and simply gave them to Mars and Jupiter, all the while having incredibly fewer serviceman per capita. Ubuntu must be really strong for that to happen.

 

Offline Darius

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
3rd fleet is actually the largest of the three, due to a combination of having larger territory to cover, a martial frontier culture and troubles with fringe elements such as the gefs.

Earth has the larger population but the vast majority are planet bound, so they don't have the space culture that the Jovians have.

 

Offline The E

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
The strangest thing to me is that all the Federation fleets are of roughly the same size despite Earth being clearly the largest economic and population powerhouse of the three Sol factions. If the fleets represented population and economic power, then 1st Fleet should be overwhelming larger than 2nd and 3rd Fleet. This implies to me that Earth built most of the ships and simply gave them to Mars and Jupiter, all the while having incredibly fewer serviceman per capita. Ubuntu must be really strong for that to happen.

By the time of WiH, that is, 18 months after the outbreak of hostilities, 3JRF is the same size as the other fleets. It used to be larger.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
If that's true, then it blows my Calder/Severanti stalemate thing out of the water space. Bummer.

 

Offline Snarks

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
So how big was 3rd Fleet originally? I'm assuming the order of battle page doesn't cover original fleet strengths. We know at least one frigate was lost at the end of AoA.

That also seems to imply that by the end of Act 3, the Federation is probably down closer to 50% fleet strength as opposed to 66% (when all fleets were assumed to be roughly the same strength).

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
I once did the math on Serkr's alpha strike potential

I once did math on a Titan + Serkr alpha strike potential and concluded that a Solaris could quite easily get OHK'd. I was quickly corrected by Battuta saying that plot armour active armour makes those table-wanking calculations pretty much pointless.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Well I mean, thats certainly true of current naval combat.  If someone fired an energy weapon at a cruiser, then it wouldn't do exactly 5000 damage with every hit (or whatever) nor guarantee the same effect every time in general.