Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Assassin714 on September 03, 2024, 08:02:28 pm
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Let's assume that the GTVA knows what the Sathanas fleet is trying to do, and they dedicate all of their resources to stop it. All rational thought is out the window: evacuating the system, sealing off the nodes, etc. don't matter anymore, all that's important is stopping the Juggernauts from destroying the star.
Let's also assume that the amount of Juggernauts in Capella would not be reinforced with any more, and the supernova process would fail if less than 75% of them were intact/operational.
What would be the GTVA's best strategy to try to pull this off?
I'm thinking don't bother with capship attacks, rather throw as many bombers as possible at them, with at least as many fighters for escort. Concentrate on one Sathanas at a time, and if they can't destroy it, at least try to take out its subspace weapon.
Maybe also use kamikaze Meson bombs jumping right on top of them.
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Nah I mean not even close
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Of course.
The most insignificant ships are the biggest threat. The GTVA should have spared the SC Bane and SC Melchom.
They seem to have parts of the Shivan Hive on board, that command the Sathanas fleet. After one of them went down, the kill trigger was activated :cool:
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if 75% of the Sathanas juggernauts were needed for the weapon to work, the GTVA would have had to destroy twenty juggernauts. The Colossus burned itself out taking down the first one, and it only succeeded because the 203rd Scorpions disarmed the Sathanas beforehand. Unless the Sathanas had some unknown weak spot, there was no chance of the GTVA destroying enough juggernauts. As for disabling the weapon, even that would have required a very large number of bombs. Both Helios bombs and Meson bombs are established as very expensive which restricts their deployment. The GTVA was simply not ready to face an armada of that scale, so Capella was lost due to Command's overconfidence. They should have just sealed off Gamma Draconis after the fall of the first juggernaut. Even then, that would only delay the inevitable
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The problem would be risk assessment - according to the canon info (see below, emphasis mine) the GTVA is barely able to detect the operations of Sathanas fleet, which makes not only difficult to gauge impact of individual actions to formulate a strategy but also to anticipate undesirable effects, e.g. what if an attack on the Sathanas fleet destabilizes the star faster than letting them be?
A Subspace Anomaly
Over 80 Shivan Juggernauts are now in position around the Capella sun. Science vessels monitoring their activity have detected an anomalous subspace field rippling from the Juggernaut fleet. Though we can barely detect the field with our instruments, its intensity has been increasing slowly over the past seventy-two hours. We have known since the Great War that the Shivans possess advanced subspace technologies, but this field goes beyond our wildest speculations. The Shivans may be powering up a new kind of weapon, the likes of which we have never before encountered.
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I don't see it. Where are you bombers coming from? If they're deployed from a destroyer or installation it takes a single Sathanas about 1 second to wipe it out. If you're moving in materiel from Vega such as Meson Bombs for a kamikaze effort it takes one Sathanas to blockade the jump nodes and nothing is getting through ever again.
Even with suicide tactics, when an Orion went into the Colossus it sustained minimal damage. Maybe you can get that up with filling it with ordnance but how many giant warships have you got on hand to do this?
Don't forget the Sathanas also have fighterbays of their own. The Colossus carried 60 wings, if the Sathanas has a comparable complement the bomber strategy is far harder.
You could only do it if the Shivans were complete idiots and didn't take very basic steps to secure the system when they came under attack.
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I was thinking that if they sent a few hundred bombers at a single Sathanas at a time, they could take them down pretty quickly, but they might run out of warheads before they did enough damage.
Hmm... a Helios does 6800 damage, so to take out a Sathanas you would need 148 of them. We can probably lower that to 140 considering the other weapons fire the fighters and bombers will be using, also if we assume half of the torpedoes are intercepted, then we double it to 280. Assuming kamikaze Meson bombs could take down 4 Juggernauts (optimistic estimate), then to take out 20 of them total we would need 4480 Helios torpedoes. Maybe if we used Cyclops too, we could take out a single Sathanas with 140 Helios and 500 Cyclops each? But that would give us a total requirement of 2240 Helios and 8000 Cyclops... I don't think they had that much ordinance that could be deployed at the time.
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I was thinking that if they sent a few hundred bombers at a single Sathanas at a time, they could take them down pretty quickly, but they might run out of warheads before they did enough damage.
Hmm... a Helios does 6800 damage, so to take out a Sathanas you would need 148 of them. We can probably lower that to 140 considering the other weapons fire the fighters and bombers will be using, also if we assume half of the torpedoes are intercepted, then we double it to 280. Assuming kamikaze Meson bombs could take down 4 Juggernauts (optimistic estimate), then to take out 20 of them total we would need 4480 Helios torpedoes. Maybe if we used Cyclops too, we could take out a single Sathanas with 140 Helios and 500 Cyclops each? But that would give us a total requirement of 2240 Helios and 8000 Cyclops... I don't think they had that much ordinance that could be deployed at the time.
I think in practice this would be extremely challenging, destroyers are needed to stage the bombers out of and if the sathanas fleet felt the need to start trying to clean up the system prior to going forward with the supernova then the destroyers would stop existing fairly quickly and make it impossible to keep up massed bomber strikes like that.
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Knowing the Shivans, those Sathanases would have immediately deployed hundreds of Dragons, Astaroths, Maras, and Manticores to ensure no warheads made contact with the juggernauts. Allied bombers would be blown to bits before they got into firing range along with any fighter escorts
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Okay, so let's run with this concept a bit:
It's 30 years after Capella. You are a student in the GTVA's officer academy. This academy has some really realistic wargame simulations running, and the fall of Capella is obviously one of the situations. One of the final tests.
I imagine it's a lot like the Kobayashi Maru Simulation in Star Trek: This is supposed to be a no-win scenario. Everyone knows this, and the whole point is that it's a test about what you would do when faced with unsurmountable odds. So off course every year there's a couple of people who try to win the whole thing entirely.
So let's start! The scenario starts shortly after the destruction of the GVD Psamtik - at the exact point the GTVA knows it can't win. The evacuation of Capella has already been underway since the first Sathanas was destroyed, and your job is to save as many people as you can. What do you do?
The first plan is to try and detonate the Gamma Draconis-Capella node. We'll say that you simply don't have the meson-ships yet in order to do that. They're still rigging up those Orions. We'll also say that we can't just shove the Colossus into the Gamma Draconis node and self-destruct it there. There's nothing to say that it can't do that successfully, but I suspect that two meson-filled orions have more detonation power then a Colossus, and the Lucifer must have just been really special (5 exposed reactors and shield-generating capability).
Plan two: We instead engage the Sathani on their way to Capella, inside the node. We'll bring the Colossus with us, and just do High Noon in Subspace! There's two disadvantages I can see with this plan: First off, no shields. In FS1 that was your one saving grace. In FS2 that's a liability, since Sathanasses are just glorified space excavators that assume that the Lucifer already wiped out the dangerous stuff. They have the advantage in subspace. Those frontal flak guns on the Sathanas are really quite deadly, and trying to do that bombing run without shields is quite tricky.
Secondly, assuming that Subspace tunnels are a line, there's no real way to engage a Sathanas except from the front. You'll essentially be engaging the shivans in unfavourable terrain - if there's anything that Sathanas is good at, it's clearing a path in a straight line. But, well, hey - if you blow up even one Sathanas, you'll probably kill the node. We could assume that if the Lucifer could detonate a node, so can a Sathanas.
But what if it doesn't? What if the Sathanas is a more well-rounded ship, and not basically a flying shield projector powered by the shivan equivalent of the Chernobyl NPP that the Lucifer was, and that means it doesn't blow up as nicely? Well, then you're ****ed. Because now you've elected to do High Noon in Subspace, 80 times. Without shields.
Plan Three would be to try and stop the Sathanans at the exit of the node. Just drop all the Mjolnir turrets you have at the exit, cover them with fighters, have bombers take care of the frontal beam turrets, and then send in the fleet. The good thing: You'll have shields, so your fighters and bombers will last longer. It's probably a lot easier to get in some meson bombs if you can drop them behind where the Sathanas is going to jump in too.
The bad thing is also a problem with plan two: How many ships are you going to commit to this? You'll have to kill the Sathans faster then they leave the node. You need to be able to do that 80 times, which is insane. You'll also have to deal with the simple problem that every other Shivan is also coming through the node, and if you let even one of them through, those Shivans are going to kill a lot of people, which you will need to protect since that's literally your job. How long can you keep that up? Your job isn't to kill Shivans, it's to save Terrans and Vasudans. Even if you somehow manage to destroy 20 Sathanas, and that somehow cancels that Capella detonation plan... Cool! What's next?
Because now you still have to shut off the jump nodes to Capella, because the Shivan armada is still running amok in there. You'll have 60 Sathanazzes that now can't do their primary task. They'll probably not go back to Gamma Draconis to get some more ships, they'll probably just decide to hunt down some of your own ships - even when fully task oriented we see a Sathanas take some time out of its day to frag the Colossus.
But if you do commit to plan 2 and/or 3, we do have to have a plan 4: How do we deal with the Juggernauts that get through? This is actually the hardest part. Not only are the shivans establishing air superiority basically everywhere very quickly, now you can't actually engage a Sathanas without having to worry about friends jumping in and blasting you from an arbitrary angle. Your forces will already have suffered attrition trying to engage these beasts directly too, so your ability to continue doing this diminishes significantly faster then theirs. You may have killed a lot of shivans. But the Shivans have killed a lot of soldiers and citizens. People who wouldn't have died if you actually had focused on saving them rather then a celestial object. And once the Shivans are out of the chokehold, they basically control the battlefield entirely.
Which brings us to plan five: Just ignore them. The best way to save lives in Capella is actually just doing what the GTVA did in Capella: Get everyone out of there. Even if you could kill the required amount of Shivans in order to save the Capella star, the point is that the supernova doesn't actually change much about the GTVA's plans. They had already given up the system and the one thing that saves the GTVA here is that the Shivans weren't actually all that interested in wiping out the GTVA, they just wanted to do their thing. The supernova happens at the very end of the evacuation. It doesn't actually kill all that many people.
If I were teaching this battle in class, that would be the point: You're here to save lives, not kill Shivans.
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I wasn't asking if it was a good idea (it's obviously not), but if it could be done.
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Plan Three would be to try and stop the Sathanans at the exit of the node. Just drop all the Mjolnir turrets you have at the exit, cover them with fighters, have bombers take care of the frontal beam turrets, and then send in the fleet. The good thing: You'll have shields, so your fighters and bombers will last longer. It's probably a lot easier to get in some meson bombs if you can drop them behind where the Sathanas is going to jump in too.
The bad thing is also a problem with plan two: How many ships are you going to commit to this? You'll have to kill the Sathans faster then they leave the node. You need to be able to do that 80 times, which is insane. You'll also have to deal with the simple problem that every other Shivan is also coming through the node, and if you let even one of them through, those Shivans are going to kill a lot of people, which you will need to protect since that's literally your job. How long can you keep that up? Your job isn't to kill Shivans, it's to save Terrans and Vasudans. Even if you somehow manage to destroy 20 Sathanas, and that somehow cancels that Capella detonation plan... Cool! What's next?
There might be something to this. IIRC ships leave nodes by a predictable route, they don't ever come out in different directions, they always come out on basically the same heading and always going front ways. Maybe you could just park all your destroyers and cruisers along the line of entry, create a cylinder of death and just obliterate them as they come through.
The NTF at its height controlled three or four systems, they had eight destroyers towards the end of the war (https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/FreeSpace_2_Rebel_Ship_Database#NTD_Jacobus). You'd think the GTVA would be able to put up plenty to save civilisation. It doesn't take very long to take out a Sathanas with a dozen destroyers + the Colossus. You don't have to worry about about the frontal beam cannons, just line up alongside it so they'll never hit you.
As for how many ships you're committing, you can commit pretty much all of your warships, you can commit all of your fighters and bombers to get any stragglers. You can keep the evacuation going too, keep the Bastion/Nereid Plan B, but if you're wasting everything Shivan as soon as it enters Capella there's nobody to defend the evacuees from.
The fact we never see this done probably indicates there's a lore reason they can't do it. After all, when the first Sathanas comes through they don't just park up a load of ships at the Capella/Gamma Draconis node and annihilate it. It's indicated in the High Noon briefing that they tried something like that and it completely failed. "The Sathanas entered the Capella system and obliterated the line of defence we had establish to intercept it". Maybe they can enter doing a handbrake turn if the situation requires it.
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I think the line of defense was in Gamma Draconis, for which the last ship was the Phoenicia, which said "F U Command!" and jumped the hell out of there.
On the other hand, I think Grizzly's breakdown would make a great campaign. Just have a 'chose your defense method' beginning to identify the branch you want to try, followed by maybe 3 missions in each branch.
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Of course.
The most insignificant ships are the biggest threat. The GTVA should have spared the SC Bane and SC Melchom.
They seem to have parts of the Shivan Hive on board, that command the Sathanas fleet. After one of them went down, the kill trigger was activated :cool:
See now this is working smarter, not harder. :D
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I think the line of defense was in Gamma Draconis, for which the last ship was the Phoenicia, which said "F U Command!" and jumped the hell out of there.
The line from the High Noon briefing, if you haven't destroyed all 4 beams, is "The Sathanas entered the Capella system and obliterated the line of defence we had established to intercept it", which reads to me like it decimated a line of defence in Capella. If you have destroyed all 4 beams there's no mention of the line of defence, they just send the Colossus straight in to finish the job.
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Ah. Well, I never allow myself to pass 'Bear Bating' without a 4-beams-down completion... and the Demon being destroyed.
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If I were teaching this battle in class, that would be the point: You're here to save lives, not kill Shivans.
+1
I was thinking that if they sent a few hundred bombers at a single Sathanas at a time, they could take them down pretty quickly, but they might run out of warheads before they did enough damage.
Hmm... a Helios does 6800 damage, so to take out a Sathanas you would need 148 of them. We can probably lower that to 140 considering the other weapons fire the fighters and bombers will be using, also if we assume half of the torpedoes are intercepted, then we double it to 280. Assuming kamikaze Meson bombs could take down 4 Juggernauts (optimistic estimate), then to take out 20 of them total we would need 4480 Helios torpedoes. Maybe if we used Cyclops too, we could take out a single Sathanas with 140 Helios and 500 Cyclops each? But that would give us a total requirement of 2240 Helios and 8000 Cyclops... I don't think they had that much ordinance that could be deployed at the time.
There is a piece of canon info, that might simplify things - there is a throwaway line in Speaking in Tongues that somehow drops of the radar in Bearbaiting and High Noon:
Your reconnaissance of the $h Sathanas identified weak points in the Juggernaut's defenses. However, exploiting these weaknesses will require firepower that can be provided only by the main guns of our capital ships. The $f GVD $f Psamtik, the $f GTD $f Aquitaine, and the $f GVD $f Toeris are standing by. Your mission is to lure the $h Sathanas into position.
What exactly these weak points are, is not discussed. Occam's Razor suggest that this about blind spots in the turret placement, but what if this so something different - especially something the game engine simply isn't capable of but would conceivably fit under the umbrella of "defenses" - e.g. non-redundant systems, gaps in the armor, primary structural beams right under armor etc etc pp.
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I've been thinking about this scenario for some time now, for my own purposes. I think the number one problem to consider is logistics and resources. Helios bombs aren't infinite, take time to produce, bombers will need to be refueled. repaired and replaced. Given the scale of the crisis, rotating fleet after fleet worth of assets and ammunition to and from Vega would cause such an extreme toll on logistics - but assuming the thousands of transports and freighters are used for resupply rather than rescuing civilians, it might be doable for as long as communication isn't overwhelmed and stocks aren't empty.
The Shivans have so many fighter and bomber swarms that they can endlessly deploy that AAA beams would melt from overuse, flak batteries would run out, it becomes a battle of attrition, just delaying the inevitable. Had the NTF rebellion never happened or didn't weaken the GTVA so much they were at the edge of suing for peace at the slightest defeat it's a little harder to be sure, but I think the only definitively winning move would be to blow up the Capella - Gamma Draconis node, assuming the Shivans don't have another (unknown) route into the system. And that might require sending a fleet into Gamma Draconis to buy time so the bomb delivery can go smoothly.
EDIT: Oh, another important thing is that it may take a long time to gather fleets from across GTVA space and to have them in Vega/Capella. I'm not sure if there's canon knowledge on how long it takes to move from system to system, including or excluding travel time in-system, the exact time it takes for the subspace drives to recharge, if you can jump from one node to the other at all times irregardless of physical distances, and so on.
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Logistics, Manpower, Morale.
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[snip]
This is a really good and well-thought-out writeup. :yes:
But...
Of course.
The most insignificant ships are the biggest threat. The GTVA should have spared the SC Bane and SC Melchom.
They seem to have parts of the Shivan Hive on board, that command the Sathanas fleet. After one of them went down, the kill trigger was activated :cool:
See now this is working smarter, not harder. :D
Indeed, I think Novachen won the thread.
Logistics, Manpower, Morale.
Yeah, there's a lot of FreeSpace story and plot regarding tactics and strategy, but not too much about operations.
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Freespace 2 honestly didn't touch logistics much compared to Freespace 1. Attacks on supply depots and convoys were much less common
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Any attempt of directly engaging the Sathanii would've been snuffed out with zero, or close to zero success. If not to Sathanii's own weapons or the onslaught of other Shivan units, then even under ideal circumstances, to simple technological wear and tear.
During the engagement with only the first Sathanas, even without taking a single beam hit Colossus has racked up months worth of drydock repairs due to technical wear and tear plus internal damage caused by pushing the ship to its limits to defeat the monster in a satisfactory amonut of time. The same would happen to the hypothetical assault effort, but by tenfold.
Realistically looking (outside of just game logic), I doubt the entirety of GTVA would have enough resources - ship durability, reactor fuel, heavy bombers and Helios bombs - to defeat more than several Sathanii, let alone twenty, let alone with fleets worth of smaller Shivan vessels likely moving to defend, let alone with an evacuation to handle, let alone with a short time limit... Even if they somehow managed it, I expect they'd be met with Shivan fleets rampaging through the core worlds. Not ideal.
If there was anything to change the outcome I can think of, it'd be one of:
a) certain higher up decisions being done earlier and/or differently - hindsight is 20/20, but a faster decision to abandon the nebula exploration might have led to Knossos destruction being successful, or starting preparations to nuke existing nodes earlier might have put GTVA in a position where they could disable the Capella-Gamma Draconis node before it was too late,
b) something completely ridiculous and desperate - what if instead of nuking nodes, the GTVA attempted to disrupt whatever Sathanii were doing by detonating all of Meson bombs close to the star?
c) any other plot point/MacGuffin you could imagine, from wonder weapons to divine interventions. My favourite thought is a group of desperate GTVA survivors stuck behind enemy lines deciding to go out in glory, trying to deal as much damage to whatever looks important as possible, potentially striking something VERY important to Shivans that would distract them from Capella.
It's all about what kind of an alternate story you'd want to write...
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Any attempt of directly engaging the Sathanii would've been snuffed out with zero, or close to zero success. If not to Sathanii's own weapons or the onslaught of other Shivan units, then even under ideal circumstances, to simple technological wear and tear.
During the engagement with only the first Sathanas, even without taking a single beam hit Colossus has racked up months worth of drydock repairs due to technical wear and tear plus internal damage caused by pushing the ship to its limits to defeat the monster in a satisfactory amonut of time. The same would happen to the hypothetical assault effort, but by tenfold.
Realistically looking (outside of just game logic), I doubt the entirety of GTVA would have enough resources - ship durability, reactor fuel, heavy bombers and Helios bombs - to defeat more than several Sathanii, let alone twenty, let alone with fleets worth of smaller Shivan vessels likely moving to defend, let alone with an evacuation to handle, let alone with a short time limit... Even if they somehow managed it, I expect they'd be met with Shivan fleets rampaging through the core worlds. Not ideal.
If there was anything to change the outcome I can think of, it'd be one of:
a) certain higher up decisions being done earlier and/or differently - hindsight is 20/20, but a faster decision to abandon the nebula exploration might have led to Knossos destruction being successful, or starting preparations to nuke existing nodes earlier might have put GTVA in a position where they could disable the Capella-Gamma Draconis node before it was too late,
b) something completely ridiculous and desperate - what if instead of nuking nodes, the GTVA attempted to disrupt whatever Sathanii were doing by detonating all of Meson bombs close to the star?
c) any other plot point/MacGuffin you could imagine, from wonder weapons to divine interventions. My favourite thought is a group of desperate GTVA survivors stuck behind enemy lines deciding to go out in glory, trying to deal as much damage to whatever looks important as possible, potentially striking something VERY important to Shivans that would distract them from Capella.
It's all about what kind of an alternate story you'd want to write...
Sealing the Capella - Gamma Draconis Node after the fall of the first Sathanas was Command's best move. The portal was open too long and stabilized the Nebula node. Knowing the Shivans, this would have only delayed them, but it could have bought the GTVA time to arm up to fight the Shivans.