[Hades]

But when they start coming in in a line then boom.
There went the fleet.

[TrashMan]

Who's fleet?

Shivns would be on the recieveing end there methinks.

[General Battuta]

There's always the danger of the blockade being hit by Sathanas debris.

That can be fairly devastating, as High Noon demonstrates.

[AlphaOne]

Guis gooing static on the shivans is not the best thing to do since well if they do gather up a couple of Sath's around your door you can be sure they will use the superior numbers of they cargoholds to launch swarming fighter/bommber attacks at you! And you can be sure you will run out of fighters and bommbers before they do! And then what??? You get your arse kicked all over the sistem.


What would be ideal is a combination of tactics fast mobila warfare to lure the shivans into carefully planned killing fields.

I mean lure a Sath into a trap where you have a couple of large warships craging up they m,ain guns to fire on the sath. I mean imagine ships such as the Hattie and the orrion and iceni class friggates waiting for it to emerge then they fire! Sure the Sath is a very roboust ship but even such a ship would do down after just 2 voleis of fire from 20 or more beam cannons firing at it at once. 



Edit: Well heres something i usualy think when i'm playng RTS I mean i usualy start of y baiting the enemy no matter how large the force is or how powerfull the enemy force is i usualy start off by engaging the enemy with my light and medium forces sure sometimes they take some damage but if everithing goes oki my heavy forces can get there just in time and suround him while the lighter forces make an escape usualy to the rpair yards )  but by that time the enemy has lost most of his lighter element so he can not oumanouver me and with me attacking from all sides even if he did manage to breack throuigh my tras he would take serious losses and damage to his ships and by that point my lighter forces can just catch up to him and take off his forces one by one! and if reinforcements appear then i just run away. making sure the heavy forces are close by in case i need something to blocade the basterd whyle i ran! So the same should apply to Freespace tactics reagrding heavy and lighter forces.

[BengalTiger]

And when all nodes are blocked, the Shivans do a Sath-rush and overrun our positions with minimum losses, using the Sathanas just as it was designed to.

Which might work if the Saths could exit at the same time, but since they can't, 2 or 3 large destroyers combined with a few RBCs and Corvettes, and the Saths would be chopped liver.

If they can jump out in a couple minute distance (as proved by 'Into The Lion's Den'), they can jump in on the blockade every few minutes.

On the other hand:
10 Mjolnirs can kill a Sath in 66.7 seconds, so we might get somewhere IF the RBC's are outside the SJ's field of fire and  are protected from Shivan strike craft.

[Dark Hunter]

On the other hand:
10 Mjolnirs can kill a Sath in 66.7 seconds, so we might get somewhere IF the RBC's are outside the SJ's field of fire and  are protected from Shivan strike craft.

Well, put them in a rough ring around the node, and they would be outside the Sath's firing arc, since like 90% of its firepower is in those four forward beams. But Shivans like to "build-up" their attacks: Begin with fighters. Then send more fighters. Then bombers. Then a cruiser or two. Then a corvette. Next a Destroyer... repeat until Sath shows up. The RBCs would be rubble long before the Sath got there... unless there were around two wings of guard fighters to each.

Even supposing all Mjolnirs survive to shoot at the Sath... it still takes them a minute to take it down. Easily enough time for it to jump out again. And it would likely drop off a wing or two of fighters and bombers. Then the next Sath comes...

You might be able to damage a Sath this way... if you are very lucky, you may destroy it. But the next Sath to come through would likely win.

[NGTM-1R]

The Sathanas' subspace drive capablities are totally mission designer fiat (see High Noon), so that's not certain. On the other hand because of its size a Sathanas exits subspace at extremely high speed and travels a long way, so if you set it up to kill juggernauts, the blockade will not be posistioned effectively for cruisers or corvettes.

[Mustang19]

Most missions have sentry guns guarding their targets very closely, but Mjolnirs actually have very long range and you can get accurate shots at a target the size of a Sath from a good distance away. So with proper angling and distancing it would work.

Of course this all suposes that you can't just bomb out the heaviest beams and let the thing sit there. You can actually kill a Sathanas with a Fenris in a side-versus-side battle, with the cruiser staying just within fusion mortar range. In general, FS juggernauts have no range once their heavy weapons are down.

[jaedub51]

Guis gooing static on the shivans is not the best thing to do since well if they do gather up a couple of Sath's around your door you can be sure they will use the superior numbers of they cargoholds to launch swarming fighter/bommber attacks at you! And you can be sure you will run out of fighters and bommbers before they do! And then what??? You get your arse kicked all over the sistem.


What would be ideal is a combination of tactics fast mobila warfare to lure the shivans into carefully planned killing fields.

I mean lure a Sath into a trap where you have a couple of large warships craging up they m,ain guns to fire on the sath. I mean imagine ships such as the Hattie and the orrion and iceni class friggates waiting for it to emerge then they fire! Sure the Sath is a very roboust ship but even such a ship would do down after just 2 voleis of fire from 20 or more beam cannons firing at it at once. 

That's exactly the same thing as blockading a node, except you have to build extra ships to lure the shivans to the trap.

Well, put them in a rough ring around the node, and they would be outside the Sath's firing arc, since like 90% of its firepower is in those four forward beams. But Shivans like to "build-up" their attacks: Begin with fighters. Then send more fighters. Then bombers. Then a cruiser or two. Then a corvette. Next a Destroyer... repeat until Sath shows up. The RBCs would be rubble long before the Sath got there... unless there were around two wings of guard fighters to each.

Even supposing all Mjolnirs survive to shoot at the Sath... it still takes them a minute to take it down. Easily enough time for it to jump out again. And it would likely drop off a wing or two of fighters and bombers. Then the next Sath comes...

You might be able to damage a Sath this way... if you are very lucky, you may destroy it. But the next Sath to come through would likely win.

Which is why I said the main brunt of the attack would be Big Ships, not RBCs. If the GTVA built a number of slow moving, heavily armored destroyers with the beams concentrated in the forward section of the ship, You could blockade the node by having them sit outside the firing arc of the Saths, and bombarding the Saths as the come in. Yes, it could be overwhelmed, and yes you would need a lot of fighter cover, but this is the only way to protect the Terran and Vasudan Civilian populations (guerilla tactics would probably be better against the Shivans, but in a matter of weeks, while you keep doing little hit and run attacks, the Shivans will vaporize every single inhabited planet).

[Gamma_Draconis]

The problem I see with blockading is, you'll need to commit a huge fleet for every single node. I do not believe the GTVA is capable of securing every node including unstable ones since the Shivans appear to be able to travel through some of the move unstable nodes.

[Fearless Leader]

Why not destroy the nodes you cant afford to blockade?

[AlphaOne]

because that would be a disaster for the GTVA while i dont like to admit it the GTVA is as much dependant on the subspace nodes as the shivans are! In fact much more so! Reopening a colapsed node is quite a drain at the moment for the GTVA !

Also what i was sugesting is nothing like a blocade where you have a huge amount of receources tied down at one single point whioch is also vulnerable to attacks from withing the sistem itself. Also with the ships packed toghether like that they are vulnerable from rammings by shivan juggs.

While my tactics would resemble a blocade its what you would call an active mobile blocade of the shivans. The GTVA can use its superior defensive capabilaties to not only inflict serious damage to the shivans, but with its superior smaller classes of ships, which seem to become increasingly more powerfull making some of them almost as powerfull as a destroyer, inflict crushing defeats to the shivans. In the end a full scale inavasion by the shivans of GTVA space would not be stopped the GTVA simpli isnt big enough however holding the shivans at bay at least for a few decades till the GTVA can develop new ways of combating the shivans is very much posible even if the shivans threw the entire jugg armada that we saw before at the GTVA they would lose most of them if the armada would be engaged in a cleaver manner.

[jaedub51]

Also what i was sugesting is nothing like a blocade where you have a huge amount of receources tied down at one single point whioch is also vulnerable to attacks from withing the sistem itself. Also with the ships packed toghether like that they are vulnerable from rammings by shivan juggs.

While my tactics would resemble a blocade its what you would call an active mobile blocade of the shivans. The GTVA can use its superior defensive capabilaties to not only inflict serious damage to the shivans, but with its superior smaller classes of ships, which seem to become increasingly more powerfull making some of them almost as powerfull as a destroyer, inflict crushing defeats to the shivans. In the end a full scale inavasion by the shivans of GTVA space would not be stopped the GTVA simpli isnt big enough however holding the shivans at bay at least for a few decades till the GTVA can develop new ways of combating the shivans is very much posible even if the shivans threw the entire jugg armada that we saw before at the GTVA they would lose most of them if the armada would be engaged in a cleaver manner.

And why does a node blockade have to be static? If it were large ships, you could move it (i.e.- fall back to the following node when your losses start to mount to regroup), or have it react dynamically to incoming threats.

The problem I see with blockading is, you'll need to commit a huge fleet for every single node. I do not believe the GTVA is capable of securing every node including unstable ones since the Shivans appear to be able to travel through some of the move unstable nodes.

While there is most certainly the possibility of Shivans coming through unstable nodes, you don't need to blockade every single node.

If anyone has a better idea on how to try to protect civilians, I'd like to hear it. You know, before I start fredding...... lol.

[TrashMan]

One thing that is rather obvious about nodes - they seem to connect systems that are relatively close to each other.

Therefore, you wouldn't need to blockade every single node, just the ones in your territory that border the shivan territory (since shivans can't jump from Capella to Delta Serpentis - there are no such connections...so why blockade DS nodes? )

[General Battuta]

You're wrong about the relation between distance and node connections. Delta Serpentis is about 200 light years from Earth; Luyten, Procyon, Sirius, Barnard's Star, Ross 128, and Proxima Centauri (most of which are in Freespace) are all closer. Earth has no node connections with them. Nodes seem to be arranged essentially arbitrarily.

In any case, Shivans seem to be able to jump wherever they darn well please - at least the Lucifer did. Distance may not be a huge factor.

[BengalTiger]

Probably there are MANY uncharted nodes (possibly some forgotten), which the Shivans know about, so our blockade would need to be really mobile.
Actually- I'd let the Shivans in my system without a huge welcome. They'd spread out chasing cruisers, while I'd be hunting down SJ after SJ with a strike force of really fast and mostly corvette/frigate size ships (with a few heavy battleships used as fire support, not main units of the force).
If they don't spread out, well than I could surround them with a 'bubble' thousands of kilometers wider than their formation and let no transports/cargo ships/gas miners through, while picking out some more vulnerable units.

[General Battuta]

All of these battle plans require extraordinary coordination, perfect execution, and good luck: no jump drive failures, no weapons taken offline due to malfunctions, all elements in the right places at the right time with the right supplies. They rely on the Shivans to behave predictably and to exhibit capabilities on par with those of the GTVA.

Military history shows that these are all bad assumptions. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and this goes doubly for a complex battle plan.

It's easy for us to play armchair admiral, but I'm inclined to be skeptical as to the efficacy of any of these plans in a real encounter with the Shivans.

[Snail]

I would rather intercept ships in the node, then have lots of AWACS searching the system if any ships get through (then send pest control).

[TrashMan]

You're wrong about the relation between distance and node connections. Delta Serpentis is about 200 light years from Earth; Luyten, Procyon, Sirius, Barnard's Star, Ross 128, and Proxima Centauri (most of which are in Freespace) are all closer. Earth has no node connections with them. Nodes seem to be arranged essentially arbitrarily.

In any case, Shivans seem to be able to jump wherever they darn well please - at least the Lucifer did. Distance may not be a huge factor.

RL distance and FS distance aren't necesarily the same. And who said there is a magic distance after which there are no nodes? Given the theoretical knowledge of how subspace works (needs large gravity sources - stars) the greater the distance between two stars, the smaller the chance that a node tunell will exist.  Of course, this is also dependant on the mass of the suns and planets in system. So it's either liner or exponential - after some distance the chance for a node connection becomes near 0. So it's obvious some nodes would have great strategic importance, others will not.

FYI I did some FRED tests of a good node blockade - a Sath dies in under 50 seconds and I didn't even use that many friendly ships.

[General Battuta]

It appears that you're trying to argue that only closely related stars have node connections, and that, as you said:

the greater the distance between two stars, the smaller the chance that a node tunnel will exist.

 This is false. There is no observable relation between distance and the presence or absence of a node tunnel, unless you decide to arbitrarily rearrange the cosmos (as you propose.)

Occam's Razor. Until we have evidence that Freespace universe distances are in fact different from real-life distances, the simplest explanation is that node connections have no relation to distance between stars.

There's no reason to believe that Volition created a fictional universe in which the names are the same as in ours, but the actual stars are different. If you did that you could hypothesize anything and claim it was valid.

I will acknowledge that there are definite differences between star systems in the Freespace universe and their real-life counterparts, such as the presence or absence of binaries, but there's no reason to extend this to actual stellar position.