I'm not going to go hunting for ships in transit, I'm going to spawn camp and blockade worlds with F-ratings on their agriculture and industrial precursors until they starve. I'm not going for 'sublte tool' I'm going for ripping the arteries of trade out of the enemy, that's what unrestricted commerce warfare is all about. Dropships actually have superior strategic mobility, if you aren't fussed about keeping the same jumpship. You can't count on what you see two-weeks trip away still being there when your buddies converge either, so the idea of bringing together a wolfpack is slightly ridiculous. The wolves have to either travel together as a unit, or they need to wait at least 1 week to recharge their jump drives and coordinate whose target to actually pursue. And when they converge, their targets have likely got a full charge or already moved on. Meanwhile, in theory, dropships can seize a jumpship at the nadir point, use it's charge to jump to the zenith point, and seize a third jumpship there to keep moving on.
And again, I cannot keep beating this dead horse enough, commerce warfare is a numbers game. You do better at it the more hunters and beaters and such you have. It divides the attention of those hunting your U-boat analogs, and it gives you more claws to do the ripping with. Space is not an ocean in battletech, you can't have a map 20 feet across where the useful identification range of one ship is a push-pin's head. Every jump point is a strait, and it is trivially easy to set up and tear down a blockade of one of these straits. But to raid usefully, you need to blockade a lot of points simultaneously. If we assume that each raider bags 1 Jumpship a week, and they spend six months raiding with no losses, but a force of PWS loses a squadron a week while a warship raider force loses one raider per week to accidentally jumping under the guns of an enemy Cruiser, then if our raiders are totally wiped out after six months, they've destroyed 351 jumpships. But if the PWS have just ten more squadrons than our 26 week supply of raiders, then they can have bagged 661 in the same period. Ten more hunters at the start nearly doubles the effective total of kills. Now, there's like what twenty thousand jumpships in the inner sphere? Okay, so you need more than 36 hunter groups to make a serious dent in those numbers. Maybe not that many more, but I certainly wouldn't attempt this with less. But this is a major naval building program,
There is no reason to ever go into the non-jump point majority of the system. The jump ships are either at the jump point or they aren't. If they aren't proceed to the next target system, don't stop and poke around. You sit at the jump point for a week and ambush anyone coming through, then move to another system, kill anyone at the jump point, and spend another week as an ambush predator. Rinse, repeat, always keep moving. That's how you do commerce warfare. What profit the enemy are the twenty Mules full of cargo fleeing you without ships to carry them away? Heck, why are we destroying these ships that take years to build instead of bringing along enough prize crews to fly them back home? Again, the problem of 'unrestricted' commerce warfare in a setting where most transports strike their colors on seeing anything with a large laser rears it's head. It's more profitable to do restricted commerce warfare and just steal every jumpship you can instead of blowing them up. But you don't want to capture them you want to blow stuff up.
So no, I'm not designing for you 'U-boat in space' role, but I do think that in the setting, I've come up with something just as if not more effective. You may argue that I've not met your ideal, but I think your ideal is flawed and focuses on the wrong things.
Vehrec, your 'spawn camp' method works if you're DEFENDING the system. Otherwise, it's an endurance contest where I strangle your jumpship assets until your crews end up surrendering to eat/get fresh air/have water.
It's logistics, man. Strategic Logistics. the FIRST thing a reacting force is going to go for, is your jumpship-because once that's down, your ovewhelming force that doesn't have a ground unit, is stranded and I only need enough pursuit to keep your guys burning fuel and not sleeping, resulting in eventually your dropships are either dead, or mine.
Your concept works for short engagements on a fluid front or in support of an invasion force that has their own logistics. For commerce suppression, my units have plenty of food, water and fuel in that 'spawn camp' area, and yours are, by definition, limited. MY patrol forces also KNOW the system better, and hold the cards as far as resupply and being able to thrust or back off as needed, YOU still need the ultra-vulnerable jumpships to keep your crews alive.
Thus, again, PWS are fine for playing defense, or as line units in an invasion operation (when supported by large scale external logistics) but they're NOT for the kind of operations that cut someone's supply lines and cripple their offensive.
The whole concept of the commerce raider, is based on logistics. You're forcing the opponent to devote heavy resources to supply his forces over a long distance, and making sustained operations increasingly more expensive for every jump toward your territory he makes.
To get best impact it requires the ability to SPREAD, to cover area. One jumpship spine isn't going to handle that, you need twelve, or twenty-enough to find where his traffic is moving and get them where they're not protected by anything but what they're carrying, rather than having the surface bases, independent air wings and dropships-that-don't-need-to-move. (and possibly stations or even other naval units).
I mean, it's a NICE hammer you've got there, but anyone who's done carpentry knows you don't use a hammer to drive screws.
I suspect the major divide here, Vehrec, is that you're focusing on Tactically, while I'm asking for a
Strategic asset. it's a matter of scale of operations. Six PWS on a mapsheet is a powerful force. (esp. if they've got adequate supporting arms), but on a strategic level they're purely local to a single system.
What I'm after is a
strategic platform, where the 'map' includes multiple
star systems.
