[Sciguy]

But scrapping the Colossus if it did survive would also be negative psychologically for the GTVA.  The Colossus had taken 14 years to construct, and was a powerful symbol for the unity of the Terran and Vasudan governments.  If it survived Capella, I'm sure the GTVA would parade it around as the "ship that saved us from the Shivans".

Or it might have the opposite effect. The Colossus was supposed to be the expensive but absolute solution to the Shivans; Capella turned it into expensive cannon fodder. There's a good chance the public would rather not spend a ton of resources continuing to maintain it over traditional warships, especially with the economic fallout of a flood of refugees from a lost system.

Not to nitpick, but the fact that it lived means that it is the expensive thing that killed a Sathanas and ended the NTF rebellion.  While I do agree that for the purposes of fighting Juggs it is very much a sledgehammer when you really need an hatchet.  It does have its uses.  Just because cheaper things can kill it does not mean that it is worthless.  A guy with a rocket launcher could kill an Abrams tank but the US army still builds them because that is a role that needs filling.  The real question is does the Post-Capella fleet need a heavy carrier that can engage multiple targets even without its fighter wings.  With the immediate Shivan threat gone the answer to that question might be no (it would be overkill for system police work).  At worst you refit it and keep it around flying the flag for a few years and then mothball it for if/when the Shivans return.

[NGTM-1R]

(The Colossus is not a heavy carrier, people. Look at how many fighters it can deploy in comparison to a much much smaller Hecate.)

The survival of the Colossus would be the unlooked-for miracle of the Capella evacuation. The GTVA faces an uncertain internal future after the invasion. The Colossus proved a sound design in its intended role, but that turned out to have relatively little bearing on events against the Shivans. Still, the design purpose was sound for both combat against the Shivans and against possible rogue internal GTVA elements.

To further optimize the Colossus and to cut down on its extreme maintenance and logistics costs, several changes can be made.

Elimination or reduction of long-term fighter carrying capabilities. Reducing the flight group to sixty fighters, with provision to carry others (another sixty to eighty?) briefly in quick-launch cells with minimal support. Or simply give the Colossus the ability to support a hundred or so fighters from other ships in such cells. This gives the Colossus self-defense capability and enough fighters to establish quick local superiority in a node engagement. This will also allow a reduced crew figure.

Increase weapons fitting. Exchange slash beams, flak guns, missile launchers, for heavier coverage of Terran Turret and BGreen. Increase raw killing power for capital craft, increase bomb interception ability, deemphasize actually killing incoming fighters and leave that to your escort force.

Improvement of subspace drive systems; accuracy, time to charge. Try to preserve room for growth and ensure ease of refit and replacement so that as more capable drives become available they can be fitted. Probably at the expense of the standard drive systems; the Colossus is already significantly faster than most GTVA capital craft and could potentially outpace escorting ships in a combat situation, so bringing its speed in line with other GTVA ships would be a worthwhile objective in itself and probably reduce logistical costs, crew number, and maintenance.

The Colossus and a small number of cruisers (4 to 6) would operate essentially independently within the fleet and battlegroup structure, attaching themselves to whatever unit in the battle zone offers the best mutual protection. Its role would be the same as its original, linebreaker, with an added shock-jump capability. The Colossus was fundamentally designed to jump into the midst of the enemy and establish local superiority by destroying or driving off everything close enough to threaten it. That it was expected to do this at a jump node does not mean it is incapable of doing so anywhere it can jump to.

[Alex Heartnet]

0) What kind of fleet remains from the second shivan incursion? What is the current status of our Navy?

Our fleet has been completely pulverized, with the fleet in shambles.  Previously mothballed ships will have to be pressed back into service, and civilian ships may have to be converted into warships.  Even our supply of outdated Fenris cruisers will have to continue their service, ideally not within dangerous regions of space.

2) What kinds of missions will the Colossus undertake?

Unless a major threat shows up, the Colossus will just have to be in low power mode, behaving like a space station.  With most of its system offline, and the only real activity occurring in the bridge and hangar, the Colossus shouldn't require nearly as much supplies as it would be if it was at full war footing.

During wartime, the Colossus doesn't actually need to be deployed against enemy vessels to make it effective.  It just needs to be moved up close to the frontline, and preparations made to bring it back onto full war footing if needed.  The mere threat of the Colossus getting deployed can have a huge impact on the war effort, without the massive drain of supplies that actually deploying it would require.

4) What kinds of vessels will be in the Colossus's battlegroup?

As a joint project between the Terrans and Vasudans, the vessel should be escorted by a mix of Terran and Vasudan warships.    During peacetime, it should serve as a major rallying point for in-system forces, to ensure that there is always some ships on the scene should something try to sneak attack the Colossus.

Escorting Vasudan warships need to take note that they have major blind spots in their anti-fighter defenses.    Thankfully, this can be reduced or eliminated by proper formation tactics.

5) What kind of armament are you putting on the vessel?

An offensive variant of shield technology, dubbed the 'Disruptor Shield', to serve as a weapon should the Colossus decide to ram an enemy ship.  Something that can shred enemy warships at a molecular level, to maximize damage done to enemy ships while greatly reducing damage done to the Colossus.  The disruptor shield will be mounted on the front end of the ship, as that is the direction the Colossus should be facing if it wants to ram something.

The energy required to maintain the shield will be an issue, but as this is in fact an offensive system and not a defensive one, this should be doable.  The disruptor shield, in fact, is completely incapable of blocking incoming munitions, and is only meant to be brought online for short periods of time.

So long as the Disruptor Shield is fully functioning and online at the moment of impact, the Colossus should not sustain significant damage from ramming anything smaller then a juggernaut, and its odds of surviving a ramming attempt against something bigger then it will have gone way up.

Alternatively, a cautious captain can just use the Disruptor Shield to continuously shread an enemy destroyer or juggernaut right in front of it, without actually colliding with it.

Anti-fighter weapons will be removed entirely, as that job can be handled far more efficiently by escorts.
These weapons will get replaced by anti-capital ship weapons and dedicated torpedo intercept weapons, as power supply and ammo carrying capacity allows.  This thing is a juggernaut, not an anti-fighter platform.

It is important that the drive systems remain capable of moving it faster then most warships.  In a normal combat situation, the Colossus can just not move at full speed so that the escorts can keep up.  But during a ramming attempt, the Colossus will need all the speed it can get.

Recommendation:  Cross-reference with other inbox suggestions as needed.

[headdie]

In anti destroyer warfare the colossus proved it's supremacy, the only reason it failed in Capella was the fact the shivans started throwing saths around like corvettes.

So we have a close to gutted Colossus what can we do other than scrapping it?

1. Rebuild it into it's previous roll and use it as a symbol of GTVA unity and the alliances ability to come back from near destruction.  It might be worth looking at making the ship easier to repair and improve the ship's heat management.  It's battlefield roll would be suppression of large scale insurrections like the NTF, for the rest of the time it will be in D-S as a tourist attraction.

2. Turn it into the galaxies largest technology test bed similar to BP's Carthage, Use large modular sections that are easily removed in zero g yards to swap out new tech like Reactors, weapons and the like.  the handicap here is that you risk making the internal structure much weaker so the ship will take more damaged in combat.

3. Fill it with refugees, make the hull airtight, gut the military grade tech and stick Capellan refugees on board with tools, materials, a few construction workers and administrators and have them rebuild the interior into homes.  They can then slowly filter out into alliance space as they find homes in more permanent places.  Done properly and you will have an all in one disaster response ship by the end of it.

[crizza]

I still vote for a mobile foundry ship like the Homeworld mothership.
This thing is really huge and should be able to even build Deimos-sized ships as well as producing anything required to repair ships.
Granted, that would require some sort of logistic train, unless the Colossus can also harvest Asteroids.

[MatthTheGeek]

I doubt a ship that wasn't originally build from the ground-up to accommodate giant innate ship-building factories would be able to build anything larger than fighters and bombers. Not saying that the GTVA doesn't have the tech required to make a HW-like mothership, but the Colossus isn't the ship to make it from. If you're going to have to rebuild nearly the whole ship for that, better build a new ship from scratch.

I like headdie's idea #3. Basically, turn the Collie into a massive colony ship. Perfect emergency reaction to early post-Capella needs. If well-maintained (shouldn't be too costly to maintain an empty, unused ship after the refugee crisis cooled off), it could even be kept as-is for use in the aftermath of the next Shivan Invasion.

[Drogoth]

Logistically, the loss of Capella is going to devastate the GTVA's economy and the ships that escaped are going to be too busy ferrying food and clothing for refugees to toss the military a screwdriver.

I lurked on the forums for years, off and on, so i'm sorry if I missed this discussion, but looking at the node map, how devastating is it really? Regulas is actually CLOSER to Vega then to Capella. The others are all farther yeah, but how heavy is the population in Epsilon Pegasi, Procyon, Mirfak and Adhara? Do we have hard data on this? Shipping there would be more expensive yes, but cripplingly so? I see two situations here.

1) All of them are fledgling colonies that require heavy investment to maintain in the growth phase. In this case yes, it would be crippling IF we were to maintain them. In this situation I find it much more likely that there would be a mass migration back to the core worlds. Keep in mind that all of the major systems mentioned in FS1 are on the Vega side of Capella. Therefore, the most established and entrenched GTVA economy and manufacturing power would be focused there, and if the colonies' people simply migrated back (which tends to be the case in any nation. I'm Canadian, I don't know parallel situations elsewhere, but here, workers from Atlantic provinces are migrating west to where jobs and livelihoods are) the economy wouldn't take much of a hit since there was little to no production out there in the first place, and the population is dwindling and thus easier to support.

2) They are midrange to developed worlds that DID contribute a lot to the GTVA economy. Too valuable to simply abandon, but not valuable enough to support themselves. In this case the situation looks really bad in the short term, but maybe stonger in the long term. Look at Epsilon Pegasi on the node map. That system is a businessman's dream, it's the lynchpin for the entire sector. With Capella gone, it would no longer be cheaper products to be shipped in from the established core world economies, and instead some real industrial metal would start to develop in EP (over time). I think in the long term that actually helps the economy become more diverse and independent then it might have been before. Some dangers to national unity within the GTVA certainly, it might develop a kind of galactic north-south divide in identity much like the east-west economic divide in Canada. This *could* be exaggerated by the fact that the GTVA would need to keep heavy garrisons in the area in light of the recent NTF uprising.

Either way, we lost whatever industrial capacity was in Capella, but I'm inclined to think it wasn't that much, even though it had a heavy population. You simply don't need a bunch of capacity in a system that is one jump from Vega. Vega has been around forever, what with being one jump from Vasuda, and is likely a major centre of industry rivaled only by Beta Aquilae or Delta Serpentis. I don't think Capella could be that developed, considering it's behind what were Vasudan lines in the T-V war, and yet is clearly a terran colony, which implies it was colonized post great war.

All of this is pure speculation, like I said if there is hard data on any of this that refutes what I have said, I missed it and I retract my statements. But yeah. I dunno

EDIT-

Also, I doubt the majority of the GTVA fleet is pulverized, if only for the reason that they approached the war so casually in the beginning. There MUST be Garrisons in Ikeya and Ross 128 since they were original Shivan Points of contact, as well as major garrison in Delta Serpentis, Alderbarron and Beta Aquilae for their racial and state capital status. I feel like the forces engaged in FS2 were the Vega 'sector' forces, dominated by the Vasudans, as well as the Capella/Pegasi fleets. It was the 13th Vasudan battlegroup as well as 6th and 3rd Terran fleets that were involved. That deeply implies, allthough doesn't prove that there are a LOT of other fleet groups. I guess they may have been there and Alpha 1 was never told, but like I said. GTVA command was pretty sure of itself going into the campaign, and even then, advanced fairly cautiously in the nebulae. After they destroyed the first Sathanas, their feeling of dominance was only reinforced. Why would they bring the entire hammer of their navy down when local forces SEEMED to be doing the job just fine? And then when the true magnitude of the Shivan forces became apparent, the GTVA was way too busy getting the hell out of dodge to have had time to bring up more forces from their other sectors, and to be fair, at that point, why would they?

[SaltyWaffles]

Logistically, the loss of Capella is going to devastate the GTVA's economy and the ships that escaped are going to be too busy ferrying food and clothing for refugees to toss the military a screwdriver.

What gives you that impression? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I just don't get what information you're thinking of. That, and I don't think they NEED to toss the military a screwdriver; the war with the Shivans is over (for now/a while) and the NTF has been thoroughly defeated.

If the GTVA was willing to commit that many forces in a single engagement the war would have been over ages ago. Have fun speculating what would happen in bpmassivebattle3.fs2 though.

The GTVA would be completely willing to commit that many forces in a single engagement--the UEF is invading them, and the GTVA has a proven trump-card up their sleeves--along with the element of surprise with regards to that trump card--making a single huge engagement very much in their favor. The GTVA also hugely outnumbers the UEF forces--sure, they will probably keep a good number of them back for defense in case of Shivans, but I imagine the UEF would not commit the sum of its fleets to this invasion, meaning that you won't have all 3 Solaris destroyers in the field, at the least.

In FS2, the GTVA definitely committed those numbers and much more against the Shivan incursion, and it's implied that they still have a good deal more where that came from (though much of it is kept in defense of their systems, and when there are 80 Shivan juggernauts incoming, none of that matters...).

It takes 30 seconds to recharge an LRBGreen, three shots to kill a Karuna, and another month of repairs to the Collie for every shot. TerSlash lacks range. GTVA bombers are a joke in BP.

...and 3 shots could be brought to bear at once, maybe even from a single Orion. Besides, UEF ships do near-constant damage over time, but it takes a while for that damage to reach critical levels (usually).

GTVA bombers aren't a joke...sure, they're inferior to their UEF counterparts, but not entirely; the top-tier UEF bombers are very few in number. The Artemis medium bombers are not bad at all, provided they're given some fighter cover.

Also, don't forget the immense power of Maxims; if an Erinyes is equipped with 8 of them, it can do (based on shorthand calculations) nearly 1400 damage per second from 3000+ meters away, with primaries alone. Trebuchets give a modest boost to that (as well as sniping subsystems and fighter cover); Infyrno missiles, though closer range weapons, can ramp up that DPS to very threatening levels.

TerSlash beams (not the blue versions) may not be worth much, but they still do significant damage, and most UEF ships are not exactly hearty; it adds up.

As for overdriving the BGreens on the Colossus--no, it does not end up with a month of repairs for each shot. At all. After its fight against the Sathanas, it was stated to need 3 months for repair back up to full capability, and that was after using overdriven beam cannons for several minutes straight (as well as any potential damage from the Sathanas' LReds). Despite that, the Colossus would then go on to take on a bunch of Shivan ships as a diversion, and still wipe the floor with cruisers and a destroyer (potentially more; can't remember) with those same beam cannons (no longer overdriven).

Factor the morale and psychological aspects back in, and things would go downhill for the UEF very quickly in that situation.

You seem to keep mentioning this psychology and morale like the Feds are going to soil their pants and discard their training and rational philosophy rather than make dick jokes about it
[/quote]
Uh...what? When your force is in full retreat back to your territory after a major fleet engagement, and you already have a destroyer and several corvettes blocking your way, things aren't going well. Then the Colossus shows up without warning, right off your flank--a monster of a warship, over six kilometers long and voluminous to house 6 Lucifers inside its hull. Dozens of fighters launch from the ship as it opens up with several BGreens (or even LRBGreens), and maybe a couple slash beams (potentially destroying a ship or two right off the bat). THEN another destroyer shows up, along with at least a couple corvettes and some cruisers.

I'm not saying they'd crap their pants, but it would put despair and hopelessness on their minds to a huge degree. Even if you overcome that, it still is one more thing you have to overcome in a losing battle.

And the UEF has far superior fighter craft, superior anti-fighter screens on their warships, anti-subsystem missiles that can't be shot down, fighter-mounted railguns, and enough saturating fire to overwhelm intercept efforts. Furthermore, the Colossus can't launch all its fighters at once, provided it can at all; it has a track record of having a broken fighter bay in critical engagements and a single well-placed warhead would do it all over again.

We're looking at 2 potential scenarios here. One of them does not give the UEF as much of a craft advantage. The other means that the UEF doesn't have beam jamming in the first place, making the likelihood of this scenario occurring very small to begin with.

The Colossus wouldn't need to launch all of its fighters at once; it could have deployed them well beforehand, and had them all jump in at once. In this combat scenario, the UEF probably wouldn't have their OP anti-subsystem missiles to begin with. Only Uriels have those railguns (assuming that the handful of super-advanced bombers the UEF has were still around 18 years ago). They'd have been top priority targets for a while now, especially in the previous stage of this battle, and now they're still top priority targets to the dozens upon dozens of GTVA fighters.

The remaining UEF bombers (especially the ones capable of carrying such a warhead, assuming they existed 18 years ago) would not get near enough to the Colossus to ensure a hit, even if it somehow magically knew the potential weaknesses of the Colossus.

UEF ships are not THAT hard to take down; even assuming they were that capable 18 years ago, they're still helpless against Maxims, and bombers would probably be used as either a distraction or an attack to be used against ships with weakened point defenses. Or as heavy missile boats against enemy fighters.

The only reason the GTVA didn't get kicked out of Sol after the First Battle of Neptune is that the Elders wouldn't allow an operation to secure the node. You're seriously underestimating the UEF.

...what? Erm...what? The First Battle of Neptune, IIRC, was a victory for the UEF in that they held off the GTVA attack and inflicted significant ship losses, but they took major ship losses of their own, and the GTVA destroyer got away. The GTVA still had a sizable force at the node, and was capable of sending in major reinforcements in an emergency.

Oh, and the only reason the UEF didn't lose outright in less than a day is because the Vishnans intervened and whisked the entire 14th Battlegroup into an alternate dimension full of Shivans and no allies in sight. And then the 14th BG didn't carry out their orders. They still casually obliterated a UEF frigate, though.

Not that I wanted them to succeed like that at all--I'm not some GTVA fanboy--but I think you're seriously overestimating the UEF. Especially in a situation in which they're launching a massive invasion into enemy territory--something in which their military is totally ill-suited for.

[Drogoth]

It's cool Salty, I've got enough Tev Fanboy in me for the both of us.

Down with the dirty Buntu!

[Black Wolf]

2) They are midrange to developed worlds that DID contribute a lot to the GTVA economy. Too valuable to simply abandon, but not valuable enough to support themselves. In this case the situation looks really bad in the short term, but maybe stonger in the long term. Look at Epsilon Pegasi on the node map. That system is a businessman's dream, it's the lynchpin for the entire sector. With Capella gone, it would no longer be cheaper products to be shipped in from the established core world economies, and instead some real industrial metal would start to develop in EP (over time). I think in the long term that actually helps the economy become more diverse and independent then it might have been before. Some dangers to national unity within the GTVA certainly, it might develop a kind of galactic north-south divide in identity much like the east-west economic divide in Canada. This *could* be exaggerated by the fact that the GTVA would need to keep heavy garrisons in the area in light of the recent NTF uprising.

Awesome! Someone should make a campaign about that!

[MatthTheGeek]

Awesome! Someone should make a campaign about that!

ahCwatUdidthar

The only reason the GTVA didn't get kicked out of Sol after the First Battle of Neptune is that the Elders wouldn't allow an operation to secure the node. You're seriously underestimating the UEF.

...what? Erm...what? The First Battle of Neptune, IIRC, was a victory for the UEF in that they held off the GTVA attack and inflicted significant ship losses, but they took major ship losses of their own, and the GTVA destroyer got away. The GTVA still had a sizable force at the node, and was capable of sending in major reinforcements in an emergency.
[...]
I think you're seriously overestimating the UEF. Especially in a situation in which they're launching a massive invasion into enemy territory--something in which their military is totally ill-suited for.

Ahem. First, destroying a corvette, and crippling the rest of a whole destroyer battlegroup and fighter complement, for the trade of a few cruisers and a couple of frigates (when the UEF still had dozens of them) is a significant victory, not only militarily, but also psychologically. The Tevs, despite all their experience from Capella and the Shivans, still got their asses majorly kicked by what they were still considering a bunch of hippies with GW-era tech and no military experience.

Second, the Tevs started fortifying the node after First Neptune, because their original plan was to secure and fortify Neptune as a beachhead first. When qwadtep was talking about securing the node, he obviously meant the Sol side of the node, so I don't see where your "launching a massive invasion into enemy territory" comes from. We're not overestimating the UEF, we're just taking into account that, at this stage of the war, the balance of power was massively in favour of the UEF.

[qwadtep]

Logistically, the loss of Capella is going to devastate the GTVA's economy and the ships that escaped are going to be too busy ferrying food and clothing for refugees to toss the military a screwdriver.

What gives you that impression? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I just don't get what information you're thinking of. That, and I don't think they NEED to toss the military a screwdriver; the war with the Shivans is over (for now/a while) and the NTF has been thoroughly defeated.

Because massive refugee movements are always a strain on an economy. You've got a bunch of people who no longer have homes, jobs, or money, and you have to provide them with food and clothing and shelter, and move them places and help them reestablish themselves, and so forth. And you have to do it without the resources or manufacturing of their old home. And in the GTVA's case, you have to do it with a tattered fleet and an existing refugee problem from the NTF's genocide of Vasudans. Bad situation all around.

[MatthTheGeek]

Not to mention the likelihood of an increase in criminality due to both the difficult situation of refugees and GTVA as a whole, and poor military/police (are they really separated in the GTVA ?) presence due to a hammered, scattered fleet.

[Drogoth]

Awesome! Someone should make a campaign about that!

ahCwatUdidthar

Erm. Did someone already do that? Is that one I'm getting from this? Like I said, I was an off and on lurker for a long time, missed a bunch of stuff haha.

[MatthTheGeek]

The Procyon Insurgency, campaign set about the situation in Adhara and Procyon post-Capella. Go play it.

[NGTM-1R]

Uh, actually, I believe the campaign you're looking for is (considering this is Black Wolf), Twisted Infinities.

[Drogoth]

The Procyon Insurgency, campaign set about the situation in Adhara and Procyon post-Capella. Go play it.

That I've played (I quite liked it), and I didn't get the economic separation feel I was mentioning so I was wondering if it was something else. Twisted Infinities I have not played though, so I will do that haha.

[NGTM-1R]

Twisted Infinities I have not played though, so I will do that haha.

You will be waiting some time.

[Drogoth]

Twisted Infinities I have not played though, so I will do that haha.

You will be waiting some time.

Bummer

[CT27]

Hypothetically, if they did send it to Sol:

I agree with others that it probably wouldn't work as a front line combat vessel, maybe just have it sit on the Sol side of the jump node to guard it?



On a more general note:  if the Colossus was alive during WIH, wouldn't there be pressure by the military to deploy it in Sol (whether that would be wise or not)?