Author Topic: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?  (Read 21493 times)

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Can I just begin by saying that this is the most fun I've had in a debate in months? Anyway:

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And speaking of fighter assets, the wave 2 TEI fighters outclass anything the UEF has. The canonical reason UEF fighter corps have been able to pick up wins is that GTVA pilots are fresher but slowly improving with experience, sending their best pilots away from combat to train new pilots while the UEF keeps their best pilots on the front lines to "rack up ridiculous kill numbers". The UEF won't find it all that easy to keep picking up wins against superior fighters as the GTVA pilots catch up.

The Nyx and the Atalanta are both very strong ships, but Nyx production didn't begin until after the Sol invasion, and Atalantas are "rare in the Terran theatre", according to their respective tech room entries. I'm not sure what to make of the Draco - does it ever actually show up in a mission? Meanwhile, the basic Uhlan is extremely effective against the outdated Herc IIs and Myrmidons the GTVA is still fielding, has the maneuverability to get the drop on heavier ships like the Ares, and is comparable, perhaps slightly favored, against the Perseus and Kulas, Kents are extremely flexible in the field, and Slammers exist. In the Fedayeen arc, Laporte, Thorn, and Al-da'wa all agree that Calder's fighter corps is still relevant, especially the bombers.

Oh, and the Fedayeen are still a thing.



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I think in a more coordinated shock jump you wouldn't have all the ships emerging from the same location with the same vector. I think it would look more like A time for Heroes where the entire battlegroup coordinates to burn through the Sath's 1 million health pool in about a minute and a half. That can reasonably happen to a stranded Solaris that doesn't have time to recharge its jump drives when it overcommits to an engagement.

By splitting up and coming in from different angles Tevs can both bring more firepower and split up the UEF torpedo swarms which makes them easier for fighters to shoot down.

The Serkr team jumping in side-by-side looks impressive and terrifying but with more assets you'd want to do a 90 degree or 180 degree split.

Agreed, and this why I said shock-jumps against multiple frigates are hard to model mathematically: depending on the distribution of forces, it might be impossible for the corvettes to effectively focus-fire. Let C denote a Chimera and F a Karuna:

Code: [Select]
C   F F    |  C F F C
 C         |         

The first case is clearly much easier for the Tevs than the second.


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Over the course of the war the UEF scores very few important kills on-screen. Mostly cruisers and 2 Diomedes, and some Deimoses depending on whether the player disables them. The GTVA on the other hand scores 6 frigate kills(and remember, frigates are a size class above corvettes) alongside some Sancti (Sanctuses?). A big reason for this is due to the UEF's lower subspace manoeuvrability and much more even damage with no real options for finishing off ships before they can jump out.

The Valerie, Medea, Arethusa, Antenor, and Siren are guaranteed corvette kills before Tenebra. The capture of the Agincourt is also guaranteed. The UEF is guaranteed to lose the Cormorant, Akula, and Ranvir, plus three of the four Wargods frigates, and I can't think of any other guaranteed (or... even allowable) frigate losses (well, there's the Serenity, but I think we've agreed not to count Tenebra here). That leaves the UEF with five guaranteed on-screen corvette kills to the GTVA's six on-screen frigate kills. There are surprisingly few guaranteed cruiser kills that I can think of: the Norfolk, Utica, and Elissa on the Tev side, and... none on the Fed side? Am I forgetting something? I suppose we can count the Dea Icaunis and Dea Bricta since it's difficult and optional to save them, but saving the Auxerre doesn't always require any particular effort.

Now, I'm going to do something totally ad-hoc here, borrowed from chess analysis, and say that a cruiser is the basic quantum of warship significance, a corvette is "worth" two cruisers, a frigate three, and the Agincourt five. These numbers are an estimate based more on what feels right than any particular formalization, but if we go with them, the Tevs have 17 cruisers-worth of onscreen kills, and the Feds 18. You can disagree with the numbers, but the point I'm making is that it's not actually that clear-cut. On the other hand, Steele's been tearing apart UEF logistics and there are frequent mentions of UEF supply shortages, so Steele's definitely pulling ahead...

...but that's just is. It's Steele, innit? He makes a lot of trades and takes a lot of risk, and while he generally gains some slight advantage on each one, that's not Severanti's style at all. The biggest on-screen loss for the Feds is Delenda Est, which Severanti simply can't do. He hasn't the chutzpah. All the pressure you've cited as Steele's advantages wouldn't happen; the Feds could build up, train up, scale up, and... I can't think of a way to turn R&D into "up", but you get the idea. I'unno, if the topic's drifted away from Severanti to shock jumps, that's fine, but I'm still interested in the original question.



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Most GTVA kills that we get to see come from shock jumps. GTVA jump drive tech is simply years ahead of what the UEF has which allows them to set up precise jumps and pick up kills with much less setup required. UEF kills on the other hand come from well-planned ops that utilise their infrastructure advantage but this also means that they're much less flexible once committed. Severanti never really exploits that, preferring to play it safely.

Exactly.

Well, I have to nitpick your characterization of the UEF style. It's true of Byrne and it's certainly true of 3JRF, but the fiction makes a pretty big deal out of Netreba's style being different, and describes 2 Fleet frigrons as extremely autonomous.



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On the other hand long-range artillery is much easier to set up but is less likely to pick up kills without very complicated setup that leaves GTVA ships stranded.
We've actually seen Narayanas shock-jump things (the Atreus and arguably the Arathusa), and the threat of the Katana and Altan Orde shocking the Carthage was cited as probably influencing her behavior (knowing the Imperiuse was coming was probably a bigger reason, but the Wargods' logic was still sound). I think the big difference between Fed and Tev subspace tactics is that, with proper navigation data, the Tevs can shock anything they can target, while the Feds can only effectively shock the flanks of an enemy they've already engaged.

Which means, come to think of it, that the Feds could offer one ship to bait a corvette pack, then roll in the Narayanas - probably not often in practice, but I can't see Severanti ignoring the possibility. A warship in the handreserve and all.



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The jammer in Aristea is scripted to die, sure, but it's really not very hard to kill an AWACS ship from long-range with maxim-armed fighters and bombers. A wing of 4 Ares or Artemi with maxims in their 4-bank can burn through its 30k HP in just over 10 seconds. Even with active armour it shouldn't take much longer. Deploy 2 wings jumping at opposite sides of the Oculus, preferably from above and below(since that gives them a larger target profile to work with) at 4000 kilometres and fighter assets will have a very hard time responding before it goes down.

All of the scripting is supposed to have a diegetic explanation in-universe. The Imperiuse might have an ECM advantage which throws off the Wargods targetting and causes their shots to deal much less damage or it might have advanced new active armour that the UEF wasn't prepared for yet. The railguns on the frigates might have taken battle damage which causes them to be much less effective.

The Oculus dies before enough damage is dealt because of a lucky maxim hit that tore through the hull and hit the reactor. Or maybe something went wrong with its active armour, making it take way more damage than it should. Or a previous glancing hit ****ed up its cooling which caused the reactor to overheat and the ship to suddenly explode. There are plenty of factors not represented by game mechanics that explain away the "cheating".

Sure, damage to the Wargods' weapons (or the simple surprise factor of a Titan-class destroyer out of nowhere) could certainly mess up their targeting. The point I was making was more about not writing off the Gauss cannon due to its low hull damage. You've repeatedly cited the ease of blowing up an Oculus, but the one time we did see the Tevs throw bombers at one (I'm referring to Aristeia), it kinda... doesn't work.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
More Nyxes and Atalantas are rolling into the sol theatre AFAIK. The Draco shows up in exactly 1 mission, The Blade Itself. You can also fly it yourself in Aristeia but it's not as good for that mission as the Atalanta.

The Uhlan is very good because it's basically a souped up Perseus. It's on about the same level as the Kulas, with slightly less shielding, manoeuvrability, and primary firepower but it has more health and much more secondary firepower. The Kulas edges it out due to that sick afterburner and balors just being better than UEF weapons though. While the UEF has Slammers the GTVA has trebs and both are really good at killing wings of less experienced pilots.

The Kent is... really clunky. It's a really good interceptor but not really that flexible. It's way too big to be useful anywhere near pulses and it's also not the best dogfighter(again, due to the size). With gattlers it's reasonably good at performing disarming strikes on older cruisers and corvettes but not that great against the TEI ships with TT2s and pulses.

The GTVA still uses a lot of older fighters but they have greater numbers in total. The UEF fighter corps is still relevant, of course, I'm just saying it might not be as easy to always have better fighter cover in the future.



The Artemi in Aristeia are equipped with balors instead of maxims which forces them to go in close for a bombing run. This makes it much easier for the player to defend the Oculus. The Hercs with maxims that jump in later can really tear it up if you're not paying attention and it can go down, it's not a mission-fail if it does. You just have to destroy the Hood's main beams. So I wouldn't really use Aristeia as an example of an Oculus being protected as its survival depends on the player. In some of my playthroughs of the mission the HercII maxim strike worked wonderfully and in others I managed to stop it.
Hell, HercIIs with maxims are one of the biggest threads to your Karunas in "Post Meridian". Maxims are really dangerous and really hard to intercept which makes guarding fragile AWACS ships rather difficult. It's not impossible but definitely not all that easy. When you factor in possible stealth TAG strikes it starts looking pretty bad for the poor UEA Oculus. Not that the Charbdys fares all that much better. It gets stormed by fighters or gets its radar domes sniped off.


While the threat of Narayanas point-jumping in at your flank and bombarding you is real it's not as deadly as a Chimera pack. It will still take it some time to kill you and you have a chance to recharge your subspace drives and get out of there. With a Chimera pack you either need a good jamming solution or you're dead in 4 seconds flat. If your infrastructure can predict the jump and warn you in advance it gives you a much better chance to GTFO but it won't always be able to do that.
Also, you're warned about the Medea in Aristeia because Calder was engaging Steele elsewhere and his BG probably saw the Medea jump out on their sensors and calculated its jump trajectory. It wasn't the system-wide net that detected it.

When comparing kills for the purpose of determining how effective ships are at finishing off targets I really wouldn't count the Agincourt. It's a vital target but its capture after the Siren was destroyed didn't really require that much. Cutting off supply lines is also very vital to the war effort but doesn't really showcase the effectiveness of GTVA shock-jumps or SSM strikes.

And even ignoring the actual numbers, almost all of the frigate kills seen on-screen are shock-jumps or SSM bombardments that kill the target in seconds. We don't really know how the Cormorant got into the situation it did and Nelson just charged the Atreus and got gutted. Also the Nelson brings the number of confirmed frigate kills to 7 even though it doesn't actually die on-screen. All UEF Corvette kills are a longer, drawn out brawl. The UEF hasn't been able to finalise kills with its shock jumps, only being able to force ships to retreat.
We see a lot more GTVA ships managing to safely jump out after getting seriously damaged by long-range bombardment while the Indus is the only ship we see actually escaping a shock jump.
So while shock jumps can be a lot of trouble to set up properly they reap massive rewards for the GTVA with almost all of them resulting in a kill.
[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?
Right, I somehow conflated the Cormorant and Nelson. I'unno, if we're trying to compare effectiveness, Severanti hasn't actually made a single on-screen warship kill - wait, no, there was the UEC Vilnius in "Post Meridian", if you want to credit him for that. If you don't want to count the Agincourt then I think I'm missing your point. I think we'll have to agree to disagree about the Kentauroi; it probably comes down to affinities for different playstyles.

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The Artemi in Aristeia are equipped with balors instead of maxims which forces them to go in close for a bombing run. This makes it much easier for the player to defend the Oculus. The Hercs with maxims that jump in later can really tear it up if you're not paying attention and it can go down, it's not a mission-fail if it does. You just have to destroy the Hood's main beams. So I wouldn't really use Aristeia as an example of an Oculus being protected as its survival depends on the player. In some of my playthroughs of the mission the HercII maxim strike worked wonderfully and in others I managed to stop it.
Hell, HercIIs with maxims are one of the biggest threads to your Karunas in "Post Meridian". Maxims are really dangerous and really hard to intercept which makes guarding fragile AWACS ships rather difficult. It's not impossible but definitely not all that easy. When you factor in possible stealth TAG strikes it starts looking pretty bad for the poor UEA Oculus. Not that the Charbdys fares all that much better. It gets stormed by fighters or gets its radar domes sniped off.

Yeah, the Balors in "Aristeia" really confused me, since I can't think of any other time when Artemis don't carry Maxims - maybe "The Cost of War"? I really have a hard time visualizing Steele or any of his captains making that mistake here. I suspect a nondiagetic explanation but really don't have much of an idea.

I'm not sure that stealth fighters are the best answer to an AWACS sitting in the middle of a frigate team.



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While the threat of Narayanas point-jumping in at your flank and bombarding you is real it's not as deadly as a Chimera pack. It will still take it some time to kill you and you have a chance to recharge your subspace drives and get out of there. With a Chimera pack you either need a good jamming solution or you're dead in 4 seconds flat. If your infrastructure can predict the jump and warn you in advance it gives you a much better chance to GTFO but it won't always be able to do that.
Agreed on both points. Hey, let me run something by you: "During the first 18 months of the Sol invasion, Severanti kept Calder on the defensive with shock jumps and the threat thereof, but was unwilling to risk assets to effectively press this advantage." Agree or disagree?

 

Offline -Norbert-

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
The multi-angle jumping has one disadvantage though: No overlapping point defense.

We've seen at least two instances in WiH where Serkr's combined close-in defense rips appart any fighters, bombers and torpedoes that are thrown at them.

If each comes in from a different angle, each ship will only be covered by it's own PD. And if the UEF concentrate all their torpedoes on just one GTVA ship, I seriously doubt their PD can cope with it. It also leaves each single ship more vulnerable against bomber strikes and UEF bombers are damn dangerous.

If you can be absolutely sure that the first salvo will cripple the enemy, it might be woth it, but it's still a risk. If that first salvo doesn't work well enough, the answering torpedo hail will severely ruin at least one Serkr corvette's day.

Besides, instead of calculating one optimal entry, you'd need to do it three times and factor in different courses through subspace to make sure that all ships arrive at roughly the same time.

And then there's the shock-and-awe moment. Seeing Serkr arrive in perfect formation and open up synchronised is surely also meant to give the enemy pause or outright panic them. It's called "Shock"-jump for a reason.

There may also be the matter of overwhelming the defensive systems and active armour. Concentrating the firepower from one side may be more effective in that than spreading the damage around three sides of the ship. Sure in raw, unscripted fights that's not an issue, but in lore-battles (so to say) it likely is.

  
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
The Idea is to have multiple 'packs' rather than standalone ships and it makes sense when your entire battlegroup is engaging(like in A Time for Heroes). You have 2-3 ship packs spread out throughout the battlefield, they have enough concentrated PD firepower to fend off bombers and torps but are far enough apart from other packs that they don't get in each other's way.


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During the first 18 months of the Sol invasion, Severanti kept Calder on the defensive with shock jumps and the threat thereof, but was unwilling to risk assets to effectively press this advantage." Agree or disagree?

I would agree with this. We know from various lore tidbits that most of the early war effort was spent reorganizing the GTVA and dealing moderate damage to UEF infrastructure in the outer layer. In those circumstances Severanti was likely not willing to risk losing assets even if that risk could've let him push deeper into Sol much sooner.
After Steel took over he immediately kicked the war into high gear and seems to be looking to end it within the month. By the end of Tenebra his decisive attack is only days away. Though to give Severanti some credit he was working with the 4th BG which mostly consisted of Capella-era ships. He didn't have the supsbace manoeuvrability and shock potential that Steele had.


I didn't want to count the Agincourt because I was trying to compare UEF and GTVA ability to kill hard targets rather than "who's winning the war". The Agincourt isn't really a hard target and got captured, not destroyed.


As for stealth ships vs AWACS vessels we know that AWACS ships can detect stealth fighters at around ~2000m. That just happens to be the range of TAG-As and with the Oculus not really being very manoeuvrable the fact that As are dumbfires shouldn't matter. Pegasi could creep up, just barely get detected for a few seconds, fire their TAG-As and immediately jump out.
« Last Edit: April 08, 2017, 07:44:05 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

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
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The Karuna has 2 mass drivers which are pretty big and pretty easy to disable, just like the Chimera's front beams. It also has 5 Gauss cannons which aren't very hard to hit and don't do that much hull damage.
IIRC one of the Gauss Cannons is located at the back of the frigate and it's pointed to the rear. That means no Tev vessel effectively chasing it down (ignoring Karuna's superior speed).
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A 1300m Karuna and an 800m Chimera aren't in the same class and the GTVA currently has way more corvettes in sol than the UEF has frigates. Directly comparing a Karuna and Chimera 1:1 is just as pointless as directly comparing a Karuna and a Hecate 1:1.
When you get a good look at the Karuna, you can notice that a) entire frontal piece of the vessel is just empty space with an armor shell, which houses an extension of its main guns and a single torpedo launcher (and PD's), b) that rotary device is totally unarmed and c) Karuna has a fighterbay. I don't deny it, Karuna is so much bigger - but at least 300+ meters of that length is mostly non-warfare utility (or a silly design if you like it that way). I think if that frigate was meant to be a pure warship, it would rather be either Karuna mk2 from the beginning, or it would be so much shorter - all these turrets could be moved back a lot.


The subspace manoeuvrability is actually a pretty strange thing to me right here - I agree, Tevs have subspace drives years ahead from what UEF has, but the UEF is five decades ahead with system mapping, that is also true for the local knowledge of subspace characteristics... I mean here that the UEF could technologically make use of more... subtle subspace events that Tevs aren't aware of/can't register without years of research of the area. Okay, but what's with the past knowledge from GTA times? It's irrelevant, I say that the node collapse must have made havoc in Sol subspace environment (I also think that that happened on the GTVA side, something about other jump nodes closing?) and everything is completely different in this regard. I can also imagine some crazy UEF scientists using the jump gate network to manipulate with subspace in Sol ("dry firing"? Shambala? :nervous: )...
Of course, the GTVA doesn't need to use such techniques, they can just pump more power into their jump drives.

We can't pretend that these beams don't exist - but if we get an ideal situation when a UEF frigate pack is shock-jumped by a Tev corvette pack, disregarding everything outside local battlespace... Well, the UEF would be decimated/forced to leave the battlezone ASAP. But if we consider some outside interference (like subspace environment itself or any jamming going around the target), the GTVA might completely miss the jump (too far from enemies to fire or not facing the target) and then... Well, Karunas would face the corvettes in a matter of seconds, definitely before Tevs could even turn around, and then unload their Gauss Cannons on enemy beams. And Tevs would have to either leave right away (not by jumping, because cooldown, not by sublight, because Karunae are so damn fast) or stand and fight - that's secondary Tev armaments vs mass driver, torpedo, PD and fighter spam.

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If there's an Oculus jammer in the battlespace you either send in maxim-armed hercs or connect with a TAG missile.
An Oculus jammer should not, by any means, be far away from allies. I think the only reason it can be even destroyed in Aristea (I mean - except the SEXP) is because it lagged behind and was outside of UEF effective point defence range. If it was close then in Aristea, what would you do? Maxim? That's why there should be a "sandwich" of the jammer and two frigates and any holes filled up by Kents (that's what they are for, get to enemy fighters in seconds). TAGs? Okay, but you've got an Oculus there, which both seems superior to any Tev AWACS and can have its stealth fighter detection range even boosted by passive EWAR abilities of two frigates (which can jam a Hecate's main beams on their own). Of course, in Aristea Wargods don't have any spare Kents to kill inbound maxim-spamming Hercs and the Oculus was too far from the frigates.
And from what I've seen in Delenda Est, the most probable way how the TAG warhead got onto Hanuman's hull would be treason. You just need someone who throws a small beacon somewhere behind some crates and activates it in proper time.
Though it could have been a stealth fighter this instance - Wargods were so focused on jamming beams and outbound transmissions that nobody might have expected a need for that kind of detection...

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GTVA Corvettes are enough of a threat without their beams considering their size class that they don't have to immediately retreat[...]
I see The Plunder as a very frequent example here - that two Karunas are still pounded hard by the Siren and two cruisers even when the corvette has its beam emitters down... I don't know how it goes for you people, but I cannot ever disarm the main beams of the cruisers and each Karuna absorbs about three volleys of two beams. And when Auroras are down and UEF torpedoes start hitting hard, Fed's victory just a matter of a minute. Not to mention that both Karunas have to use majority of their EWAR capabilities to jam all outbound transmissions, leaving not-so-much to actively suppress enemy weapons.
I also have to point out that I've seen Karunas restoring their hull in battle, but never any Tev vessel doing the same...

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While the threat of Narayanas point-jumping in at your flank and bombarding you is real it's not as deadly as a Chimera pack.
The Darkest Hour - just look at hull integrity of the Atreus goes even with torpedoes not even touching the target... I'd say that Serkr would have made some considerable damage to the Atreus, but two Narayanas would have killed it faster with their consistent but deadly guns. I think. Besides, that range.

And I still can't chew through decisions made in Delenda Est - Wargods can just make a U-turn and outrun the Imperiuse. Even with drives not in the best condition. And Tevs send squadrons of bombers shooting at Yangtze, which is going to be evaporated in seconds by the destroyer. wat
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
IIRC one of the Gauss Cannons is located at the back of the frigate and it's pointed to the rear. That means no Tev vessel effectively chasing it down (ignoring Karuna's superior speed).

a) I'm pretty sure there's no rear-facing cannon on the Karuna; b) a single Karuna-grade gauss cannon is a pretty minor threat, certainly not enough to deter pursuers.
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
I thought it was only in Karuna#AoA, but no, take a good look (couldn't find any pictures of the rear of a new Karuna): https://youtu.be/degdOAP4POE?t=279
And it seems a pretty minor threat, at least until it starts to disarm beamz (with maybe a little help from fighters spamming long range missiles).
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Good gods, BP has gone Wall of Text again.

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And I still can't chew through decisions made in Delenda Est - Wargods can just make a U-turn and outrun the Imperiuse. Even with drives not in the best condition.
My read of this part of the battle is that if they all turned & run, the Imperieuse would have simply gone full speed ahead & started shooting at the Indus & Yangtze before they got out of range, then pick the others one by one. By having the other frigates & cruisers charge head on, they force the Imperieuse to engage them first, and by the time they're finished dealing with them, I & Y are out of beam range.

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The Darkest Hour - just look at hull integrity of the Atreus goes even with torpedoes not even touching the target... I'd say that Serkr would have made some considerable damage to the Atreus, but two Narayanas would have killed it faster with their consistent but deadly guns. I think.
I'm not sure I what you are saying here, 'cause if with are assuming the ambusher is in range and able to deal consistent damage to its target, the Atreus would be vaporized in seconds by a Hunter Killer team, while it would take a Nara team a good 30 seconds to deal critical damage.

As strong as the Narayana's guns & torpedoes are, what makes them powerful assets is their ability to outrange GTVA beams. Negate that, and they're just harder-hitting Karunas.


Re:How to deal with an Occulus, it depends on what kind of assets you have available :
- Nix, Atalanta or Draco to keep the Kents busy + Hercs 2 with Maxim (& Trebs if the AWACS can't jam these).
- Pegasus diving through with TAG-A, depending on the Occulus' detection range.
- Say "**** it" & just send in slash beams with proper escort.


The point is both sides have a number of options to deal with each other, which is why the war is still going on & what makes the missions themselves interesting.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
The Idea is to have multiple 'packs' rather than standalone ships and it makes sense when your entire battlegroup is engaging(like in A Time for Heroes). You have 2-3 ship packs spread out throughout the battlefield, they have enough concentrated PD firepower to fend off bombers and torps but are far enough apart from other packs that they don't get in each other's way.

If there were that many Bellerophon/Chimera groups in system, sure. But most of the corvette HK groups are Deimos pairs. And while Deimos are extremely good ships, they lack the high alpha strike capability of the newer TEI corvettes. In fact, given that lack of high alpha, I'm not convinced of the conventional wisdom that paired Deimos are equivalent to a Karuna/Sanctus pair. I think the organic strikecraft capability of the Karuna provides the edge there. Of course, if the Deimos are escorted, that calculus changes, but Deimos pairs even supported by strikecraft and cruisers have a pretty poor on-screen track record against UEF frigate groups. Diomedes corvettes are scary, but they don't have any better survivability when deployed individually than a Karuna does.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
On the original topic of the thread, 'Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?'

I suppose it depends on your definition of 'worked'. The UEF clearly has a long term initiative to create a win condition through nonmilitary means. I suspect that Severanti's strategy would give them the time to implement it. But a win condition for the UEF is not necessarily a lose condition for the GTA. Given that there are numerous possibilities when strategic/political objectives of military action change, I will limit myself to the mutually exclusive objectives 1) GTA forcing the UEF to capitulate or 2) UEF successfully stopping the current GTA military invasion. To do this, I'm also going to consider the use of resources by both sides for objectives other than the direct military conflict at hand as logistical limitations. The GTA has a gigantic military, but has an equally huge number of obligations that interfere with the goal of forcing the UEF to surrender. Similarly, as of the Jupiter blitz, the UEF has numerous assets that are committed to other missions than directly fighting the GTA invasion.

I think that Severanti was essentially working a war of attrition. He had to be, considering the GTA wanted to keep Sol's infrastructure intact. Outside of a slow whittling of 3JRF, the only major strategic success for Severanti was the capture of Neptune. Even then, it took two pitched battles and IIRC the UEF was able to destroy most of their facilities before the defeat. He was certainly able to put pressure on UEF logistics (see the death of LaPorte's mother). On the other hand, in 18 months, 1st Fleet basically never saw combat and 2nd Fleet Mars only rarely saw action. There was considerable available slack in UEF forces for a stronger tempo of combat that I don't think the GTA could logistically sustain. It is easier, after all, to jump 1st Fleet around from Earth than to bring in more destroyer groups from Delta Serpentis. Given the relative lack of pressure on Earth and Mars, I think that Severanti's slow strategy might also have given the UEF time to gear up their industry and reverse the attritional losses he was inflicting. Severanti was doomed strategically any way you look at it. Either his gradual buildup of pressure provoked a stronger response from the UEF if he poked something sensitive and forces him to face more than just 3JRF, or the time he gave the UEF would allow them to start out-building the stream of reinforcements available through Delta Serpentis, or (as actually happened) his political masters replaced him with someone more aggressive and willing to risk both fleet components and Sol infrastructure for a decisive blow.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
The Atreus was overdriving its jump drives in Darkest Hour and the effectiveness of its active armour was pretty minor at that point. Without the active armour a hunter-killer team of 2 Chimeras and a Bellerophon can do 191400 damage in 4 seconds, more than enough to oneshot the Atreus' 145000 health.
In fact, if it managed to catch a Solaris with its pants down and without beam jamming or active armour to reduce the damage it could oneshot its 180000 health too. You seriously underestimate just how insane a hunter-killer alpha strike is.


And with 7 destroyers in Sol surely they have more than 2 Chimeras and 1 Bellerophon. Lore-wise these frigates were hot **** and every admiral wanted one in his fleet.
[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?
Per http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Blue_Planet_Orders_of_Battle, of the GTA fleets and battlegroups where anything beyond the destroyers are known, there are only Chimera/Bellerophon corvettes attached to battlegroups with TEI destroyers. Granted, the composition of most of the battlegroups is unknown, but it seems reasonable to look at the two battlegroups we've seen with TEI corvettes (14th and 15th battlegroups) and the two battlegroups we've seen without TEI corvettes (2nd and 13th battlegroups) and extrapolate rough numbers. By my count, that would put two battlegroups assigned to METIS/MORPHEUS with TEI corvettes, and the rest of the battlegroups have Deimos escorts. That means there are roughly 6 Chimeras and 2 Bellerophons running around in Sol. Three, more likely two, hunter-killer groups including Serkr. Extremely dangerous, but given how much has to go exactly right for an alpha strike, it clearly isn't an insurmountable problem for the UEF. Otherwise there would be fewer Solaris destroyers.

 

Offline -Norbert-

  • 211
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Quote
Lore-wise these frigates were hot **** and every admiral wanted one in his fleet.

Lol... sure everyone wants them, but what they want and what they can get their hands on are two different matters.

I'm sure GTVA high command isn't all to thrilled about the idea of sending the majority of their TEI corvettes into Sol and leaving only decade old ships behind to fend of the ever feared next Shivan Incusion.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Jeepers, that low? Even if it's slightly higher, it's certainly relevant that these things are so much rarer compared to the Deimos. (It also fits with the numbers of ships we actually see on-screen.) Hm.

 

Offline Snarks

  • 27
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Otherwise there would be fewer Solaris destroyers.

I don't think counting Solaris destroyers is a good metric of Tev shock effectiveness. Solaris destroyers are primarily command and control vessels, and it's only after things got super desperate that Calder even began committing the Toutatis for combat operations. From what we can see, only TEI destroyers are seen on the frontlines given their next generation firepower and more importantly, sprint drives. Without sprint drives, shock jumps become far riskier.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
It isn't a measure of shock effectiveness, it is a measure of how often the GTA can risk making shock jumps given the number of vessels they have that are capable of performing them. If the GTA has sufficient numbers of Serkr-type groups available, they can risk one to force a Solaris to crash jump away and then respond to the openings that presents in the UEF defense. Deimos groups don't have the ability to kill a destroyer in 30 seconds, so they aren't as threatening to the UEF defensive posture.

 

Offline Snarks

  • 27
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
It isn't a measure of shock effectiveness, it is a measure of how often the GTA can risk making shock jumps given the number of vessels they have that are capable of performing them. If the GTA has sufficient numbers of Serkr-type groups available, they can risk one to force a Solaris to crash jump away and then respond to the openings that presents in the UEF defense. Deimos groups don't have the ability to kill a destroyer in 30 seconds, so they aren't as threatening to the UEF defensive posture.

There are far better targets to shock jump than a Solaris in a defensive posture. Orbital stations, frigates, freighters, and cruisers are all preferable targets because of their low hull strength but still high values. If you doubled the amount of sprint drive vessels in the GTA, they still wouldn't go out of their way to attack a Solaris because: 1) a Solaris is going to be some of the most heavily defended targets, 2) why go after a heavily defended target when there's plenty of other high value targets to shoot still, 3) Solaris destroyers rarely go on the offense, which means their exact position isn't always known. And if there were indeed more sprint drive vessels, the UEF would play even more defensively with their destroyers; what you would see is not fewer Solaris destroyers, but even fewer frigates.

 
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
It isn't exactly unknown where the various UEF destroyers are. Especially when one is in for refit like the Toutatis was for several weeks after getting torn up during the Delenda Est operations. I'm sure in normal operations they move around quite a bit, but even without scouting you know that the Solaris is likely to be in Earth proximity, and Eris is likely to be in Mars proximity.

Regardless, I think you focused on a rather flippant remark rather than the actual point I made about how much worse the situation for the UEF would be if the Tevs had a higher ratio of TEI to Capella-era corvettes in theater.

 

Offline Snarks

  • 27
Re: Would Severanti's strategy eventually have worked?
Regardless, I think you focused on a rather flippant remark rather than the actual point I made about how much worse the situation for the UEF would be if the Tevs had a higher ratio of TEI to Capella-era corvettes in theater.

Fair enough. That does raise the question of whether or not the GTVA had intended to replace Severanti to begin with, with the accompanying question of whether or not he was aware of Morpheus/Shambala/Vishnan, or if Severanti had always been intended to keep a foot in the door while the GTVA re-evaluated their plans. We know Steele knows about Morpheus, and it seems Lopez was not privileged to this information. Is Severanti's strategy acting under the notion that there is no Shambala, no Morpheus contingency?

We know Severanti did not have TEI ships under his disposal for the most part. It was not until Steele's 15th Battlegroup was deployed that the Terrans were given the actual resources for the Blitz. While Severanti was theater commander, Steele seem to of had enough autonomy to conduct the Blitz, which seems contrary to Severanti's overall strategy to begin with.