Strategic scaling issue...or, "Why warships don't actually break the setting.."

[Cannonshop]

...as much as you think.

18,000 meters.

18 kilometers.  Sounds like a lot, right?

look up the earth/moon perigee and apogee sometime.  it ain't that far.  you'd need a basketball court to handle it at one-inch increments.

18,000 Kilometers and you just need a really big table.

a VERY big table.

but not as bad as the one you need for 18Km hexes.

Thus, part of the problem.  Every tabletop scenario with battlespace is essentially a fixed position battle in low to mid orbit at what amounts to 'standing in their boots' distance.

This, in turn, distorts the role of warships into a binary choice of "bus for battlemechs" or "Flying atrocity platform".

it also creates a false impression that somehow, you can adequately patrol a region the size of the Solar System with dropships.

because, after all, PWs work just fine in that fixed, setpiece, standing-in-your-boots fight that you end up with, if you're using the standard mapsheets for battlespace or aerotech.

when logically they would not work just fine.

Space is big.  it's really big, (insert the rest of the Douglas Adams quote here).

How big? distance from Mars to Earth at acceleration profiles that don't screw up your crew and passengers can be measured, not in hours as you assume, but days to months (depending on relative position in their respective orbits-yes, that's right kids, the newtonian distances CHANGE SIGNIFICANTLY depending on the time of year between planets.)

you know what doesn't change significantly depending on time of year?

how long it takes to go from L1 Earth/Luna to L1 Mars/phobos...IF YOU USE A JUMP DRIVE.

THAT trip might take a few hours at 1 Gee (the accel you need to be running if you want, say, your warriors to arrive at the target orbit and not be exhausted and/or injured after hours upon hours of thrust.)

if you're relying on your PWS, they're going to be wallowing on the wrong side of the star system when the raiders come to steal your daughters and your good silverware.

Said raiders will then happily be on their way and gone by the time your Castrum or whatever you're relying on actually gets to the crime scene, never mind catching the criminals-they'll be in the next star system by the time your response team is halfway to the target.

This is actually slightly less reliable than many urban police forces are when responding to an urban crime, or rural cops responding to a break-in out in farm country.

but only SLIGHTLY less useful.

Why don't we see this? because the map, whether Aerotech or Battlespace, only covers a tiny area and thus, only covers a close-orbit or fixed battle in a tiny patch of space.

because?

Space is BIG.

Even in the Solar system, it's big.  really big.  lots of distance and Battletech doesn't include Inertial dampeners or technologies even The Expanse uses to get enough acceleration going hard enough, over long enough periods of time, to let you have an intrasystem haul that doesn't take weeks to months between say, Earth and Mars at closest approach.  (walking around at three gees for days on end won't make you superman, it'll give you a stroke and muscular, skeletal and organ ruptures instead.)

[worktroll]

I think you've highlighted the imbalance issue. You simply can't protect a planet from a rampaging fleet. It's the classic "defender can't be everywhere, attacker can choose to concentrate" that we saw back in the old days of the FGC games. 

The only 'defense' is along the lines of MAD - if your stack-o-doom starts wiping my planets, my stack will start wiping your planets.

More germanely, this is not the only real-world disconnect in the game ... (Yup, me telling you CS :D )

[Cannonshop]

I think you've highlighted the imbalance issue. You simply can't protect a planet from a rampaging fleet. It's the classic "defender can't be everywhere, attacker can choose to concentrate" that we saw back in the old days of the FGC games. 

The only 'defense' is along the lines of MAD - if your stack-o-doom starts wiping my planets, my stack will start wiping your planets.

More germanely, this is not the only real-world disconnect in the game ... (Yup, me telling you CS :D )

The major problem I saw with the FGC game, can be laid out in terms of 'unrealistic resources'.  it doesn't matter how many battleships you can shit out of the factory, what matters is how well you can crew and support them, and how well those officers can actually use them.

The fiction highlights this problem in the form of the late-novel-FASA era where there was a fetish for ramming attacks, or the ongoing obsession with orbital bombardment to the exclusion of victory conditions.

IOW sure, you can level a continent...and then, you'll have a continent's worth of slightly to severely radioactive dirt-something you can get for free by landing on the nearest Mercury analog with a shovel.

IOW anything on the ground worth the effort is going to be too fragile to survive the bombardment.

This isn't a problem if your sole interest, is making dead bodies and ash.  It's not so great an idea if you're there to actually benefit from your conquest.

If you actually WANT to benefit from your conquest, you'd better have ground troops ready to land, and a means to keep them supplied.

thus, why even without arms limitation treaties, the U.S. didn't uncork the atom bombs in Korea in the 1950s.  There comes a point where overkill really does reach the point of 'too much' and that's at the point where you're salting the earth as you take it, spending umpteen trillions of [currency analogue] for what amounts to range-days you can hold in the uninhabitable parts of your own solar system without ANY of the risks.

on the flip side of that equation, for the defender, there's a decided need for things like early warning and a mobile reaction force, because while you can't watch every angle, you CAN react to a doomstack if you can move your own forces fast and decisively.

Which is a problem for Dropships, which cannot move quickly OR decisively in a timely manner on their own.

[Cannonshop]

[in case someone responded to my last post]

The FGC game Worktroll's referencing, I stalled a couple of those doomstax with single vessels in outlying systems, because they had to eliminate each one, clean up the region it was in, and move the next turn.

As the Lyran player, I was basically stripped of assets by previous faction heads including one that dumped most of the fleet into resurrecting the Rim Worlds Republic, leaving the rest of the nation effectively undefended, impoverished, and under seige.

what I did there, was cheesy rules lawyering, but it had a basis in realistic strategy-by having pickets out, I could respond to the doomstax and delay them, since they had to make sure I didn't have a fleet-in-being in those unclaimed regions waiting to hammer them from behind and cut them off.

This is actually what you WANT your navy to be able to do-instill doubt  when the enemy is stronger by being where it's inconvenient for him and he HAS TO deal with it.  I hit several opponents simultaneously with commerce raids using pathetically small forces in the same game, which also created doubt and hesitation.

which isn't entirely bad for someone whose entire faction went from 'major nation' to 'thirteen hexes with a pandemic' under the previous leadership.

I wasn't even supposed to BE the faction head, I was just the guy who showed up.

[Giovanni Blasini]

[in case someone responded to my last post]

The FGC game Worktroll's referencing, I stalled a couple of those doomstax with single vessels in outlying systems, because they had to eliminate each one, clean up the region it was in, and move the next turn.

Single Scout-class JumpShip, a Leopard CV, and a squadron of six heavy ASFs works out to around 15,000 BV, the minimum required to have a 1-point aerospace force under the FGC '62 rules, thus serving as a tripwire force the Doomstax^(tm) would have to clean up in the outlying systems on the way in.

Of course, one of the problems I had in that game is I was a single-hex faction.  i didn't have depth-of-defense...

As the Lyran player, I was basically stripped of assets by previous faction heads including one that dumped most of the fleet into resurrecting the Rim Worlds Republic, leaving the rest of the nation effectively undefended, impoverished, and under seige.

I still marvel that the GMs allowed that crap, though, in no small part, it was with the intent of giving that player enough rope to hang themselves, I imagine.

[Daryk]

Jump drives for all my Navy friends!  :D

[Vehrec]

I honestly don't think that jump drives are as essential for in-system defense as you think for several reasons.

Reason 1: Most systems aren't depicted as widely developed, but instead as simple point-defense situations.  They don't even have recharge gear at the normal jump points, and those that do are probably better serves by 'static defenses' at jump points rather than by highly expensive mobile defenses.  There simply isn't much for raiders to steal unless you want to defend things like untapped asteroids or bulk hydrogen.

Reason 2: The setting depicts pirate-point jumps as dangerous, and I think that treating them as routine, even if the rules suggest that they are reasonably safe when done by professionals, is mistaken.  Pirate-to-pirate point jumps are even more dangerous, a +8 modifier to the control roll difficulty at minimum-maybe a +12 if the bonus from non-standard and transient points stack.  Which I mean, they must stack, since all transient points are by definition non-standard, why have a specific rule for transient points if they aren't stacking with the more general case?

Reason 3: Warships already have the Delta-V advantage.  Most warships have thousands of tons of fuel, and much more efficient drives than any dropship can fit.  But even this 'advantage' is well, tricky to realize because most in-system transits take like 10 days to go from Earth-orbit to the orbit of Saturn where the Primary Points in Sol are.  There is no realistic point-to-point transit or interception that's gonna take more than about 20 days, because that's the time required to start from earth, fly out to the Zenith or Nadir, and then turn around and fly down to Mars at opposition, and more realistically, you'd just fly a sun-skimming Brachiostrome near the limits of your thermal management systems.

Reason 4: Mahan is Right.  Decisive Battle is something you actually do want to seek as a naval power, because it lets you splinter your doomstack into squadrons and set up a hundred naval blockades all at once.  Because of Reason 1, all star nations are archipelagos, and not terribly difficult ones to navigate.  So you want to get a doomstack going and send it to knock over something the enemy has to respond to with a doomstack of his own, or simply threaten something so painful to lose that peace negotiations can proceed.  Of course, Mahan also says that if the enemy lacks a standing battle fleet, then go ahead and disperse your forces, your battleships ought to be hell to fight in penny packets as well as in line or wall formations.  If they have dispersed into tripwire formations, trip every wire you can find and gobble them up.

[Cannonshop]

I honestly don't think that jump drives are as essential for in-system defense as you think for several reasons.

Reason 1: Most systems aren't depicted as widely developed, but instead as simple point-defense situations.  They don't even have recharge gear at the normal jump points, and those that do are probably better serves by 'static defenses' at jump points rather than by highly expensive mobile defenses.  There simply isn't much for raiders to steal unless you want to defend things like untapped asteroids or bulk hydrogen.

Reason 2: The setting depicts pirate-point jumps as dangerous, and I think that treating them as routine, even if the rules suggest that they are reasonably safe when done by professionals, is mistaken.  Pirate-to-pirate point jumps are even more dangerous, a +8 modifier to the control roll difficulty at minimum-maybe a +12 if the bonus from non-standard and transient points stack.  Which I mean, they must stack, since all transient points are by definition non-standard, why have a specific rule for transient points if they aren't stacking with the more general case?

Reason 3: Warships already have the Delta-V advantage.  Most warships have thousands of tons of fuel, and much more efficient drives than any dropship can fit.  But even this 'advantage' is well, tricky to realize because most in-system transits take like 10 days to go from Earth-orbit to the orbit of Saturn where the Primary Points in Sol are.  There is no realistic point-to-point transit or interception that's gonna take more than about 20 days, because that's the time required to start from earth, fly out to the Zenith or Nadir, and then turn around and fly down to Mars at opposition, and more realistically, you'd just fly a sun-skimming Brachiostrome near the limits of your thermal management systems.

Reason 4: Mahan is Right.  Decisive Battle is something you actually do want to seek as a naval power, because it lets you splinter your doomstack into squadrons and set up a hundred naval blockades all at once.  Because of Reason 1, all star nations are archipelagos, and not terribly difficult ones to navigate.  So you want to get a doomstack going and send it to knock over something the enemy has to respond to with a doomstack of his own, or simply threaten something so painful to lose that peace negotiations can proceed.  Of course, Mahan also says that if the enemy lacks a standing battle fleet, then go ahead and disperse your forces, your battleships ought to be hell to fight in penny packets as well as in line or wall formations.  If they have dispersed into tripwire formations, trip every wire you can find and gobble them up.

4 first: Mahan WAS right, except you don't seek decisive battle when you're going to lose.  You need to re-read Mahan, he goes into depth about the value of setting up conditions before you seek that decisive battle, including but not limited to reducing the enemy's ability to concentrate forces when he has a numerical or firepower advantage, reducing the health and welfare of enemy forces in preparation FOR said decisive battle, and choosing where and when to carry OUT decisive battle.  Seeking decisive battle when you're in the weaker position is how you LOSE a naval war...decisively.

3. Do the math. The battletech book timeframes are built on closest approach, an enemy isn't going to oblige you by striking when your garrison at Titan is at closest approach to Earth orbit. (insert planets/planetary bodies where you will here).  They're going to hit you when and where your defenses are isolated by distance and time. Why? because orbital periods are predictable.  (also they undercount how long it takes so they can fit it all on a mapsheet. part of our scaling problem there-you can't sustain 2 or 3 g's thrust with a hold full of ground troops for days on end and have healthy ground troops when you arrive.  High Gees don't create supermen, they create super medical problems like internal bleeding, gray out, red-out, broken bones and joint damage, not super strength.)  Sustained hard burns over long durations won't make your soldiers super-men, they'll put them in intensive care or kill them.

2. Blind pirate-points would be, but if you have enough population to be worth raiding, you've got good enough mapping to know where your major planetary bodies are and at about what time.  You're not shooting blind in a system as developed as the Solar system unless your 'captains' don't know how to do basic astronomy or read a chart.  Notably this might actually be true for most of the guys they give a warship to-they'll be 'mechwarriors and some of those guys can't even read a GROUND MAP.

1. If you have traffic, you have charting.  The lagrange points at minimum would be mapped because gravity impacts things in NEWTONIAN SPACE TOO.  tidal influences will impact whether your dropship winds up far off course or delivering their cargo before they're subject to late fees.

[Vehrec]

4 first: Mahan WAS right, except you don't seek decisive battle when you're going to lose.  You need to re-read Mahan, he goes into depth about the value of setting up conditions before you seek that decisive battle, including but not limited to reducing the enemy's ability to concentrate forces when he has a numerical or firepower advantage, reducing the health and welfare of enemy forces in preparation FOR said decisive battle, and choosing where and when to carry OUT decisive battle.  Seeking decisive battle when you're in the weaker position is how you LOSE a naval war...decisively.

3. Do the math. The battletech book timeframes are built on closest approach, an enemy isn't going to oblige you by striking when your garrison at Titan is at closest approach to Earth orbit. (insert planets/planetary bodies where you will here).  They're going to hit you when and where your defenses are isolated by distance and time. Why? because orbital periods are predictable.  (also they undercount how long it takes so they can fit it all on a mapsheet. part of our scaling problem there-you can't sustain 2 or 3 g's thrust with a hold full of ground troops for days on end and have healthy ground troops when you arrive.  High Gees don't create supermen, they create super medical problems like internal bleeding, gray out, red-out, broken bones and joint damage, not super strength.)  Sustained hard burns over long durations won't make your soldiers super-men, they'll put them in intensive care or kill them.

2. Blind pirate-points would be, but if you have enough population to be worth raiding, you've got good enough mapping to know where your major planetary bodies are and at about what time.  You're not shooting blind in a system as developed as the Solar system unless your 'captains' don't know how to do basic astronomy or read a chart.  Notably this might actually be true for most of the guys they give a warship to-they'll be 'mechwarriors and some of those guys can't even read a GROUND MAP.

1. If you have traffic, you have charting.  The lagrange points at minimum would be mapped because gravity impacts things in NEWTONIAN SPACE TOO.  tidal influences will impact whether your dropship winds up far off course or delivering their cargo before they're subject to late fees.

So we're in agreement on point 4, and I'll drop it.  The stronger power ought to seek overwhelming victory, and the weaker power should avoid that, but dispersing your fleet in ones and twos to dozens of systems doesn't seem like it would be a pattern to avoid overwhelming victory because the stronger power can also divide and conquer.  Now, you can unite and try to achieve local superiority-but this is fraught and dangerous and beyond the scope of this argument.

I don't understand what you are saying on 1 with 'Charting'  Why are we 'charting' the system when there's nothing there to be worth stealing, raiding, or operating near?  The average BattleTech system has a single developed planet with maybe a few orbitals.  Almost nowhere is as developed as Terra-Sol.  Are you saying that because we have a map, all our civilian traffic ought to operate only in Pirate-to-Pirate jumps?  Aren't tidal forces on orbital paths that are days long actually quite trivial to account for, and with the delta-V for most dropships in the millions of meters, I think we can compensate.

You can't do a blind pirate point jump.  You can't do a pirate point jump without a very good map, and a very good computer, and even if you have both of those things, you are still going to lose ships if you attempt to do these as a matter of course.  Non-standard jump points are risky, and that is a fact of the setting, one so ironclad that I can't believe I'm having to repeatedly tell you that.  All non-standard jumps carry risk, and non-standard to non-standard jumps carry even more risk.  There is no amount of 'good maps' that eliminate this risk, no amount of training that can eliminate the danger, and you need to stop pretending that the problem is that the ship drivers can't read a map.  I know you have built an extensive fanfic universe where this is just casually assumed to be the correct way of doing things, but there is a chart in StatOps that tells us that even a 'very simple' Lagrange to Lagrange jump is actually a +8 control roll.  And this isn't a combat roll to throw away a few hundred C-bills of ammo, it's a multi-billion C-bill spaceship.

The book timeframes are not built on closest approach, nor are they built on holding 2-3 gs for days at a time.  The transit times for ships to jump points, which are for all ships, regardless of type, are assuming a 1 g transit.  1 g is enough to get anywhere you like in a plenty big hurry, earth to Pluto in about two weeks.  Even space stations in BattleTech are capable of Brachistochrone trajectories, just slower ones.  Traveling about 1-2 AU takes 4 days, traveling 10 AU takes 9 and a half days, traveling 100 AU takes 3-4ish weeks.  Avail yourself of a helpful chart like this one to see that doubling your gees only shaves two days off a Sol-Saturn transit.  And cutting your gees to 1/10th for a space station still lets you cruise from earth to Saturn in a month, coming to a stop relative to your destination and dropping into a very neat little orbit.  The reason people don't sprint everywhere at full speed is because, honestly, it's not worth it to get there two days early, but need to spend a day recuperating.  Here, you are the one who isn't accounting for scale-you're not accounting for the outrageous scale of acceleration that even the tiniest and weakest fusion thrusters are capable of, and how that shrinks even a solar system into something that's about a week or two wide.  Now, I will grant that a week isn't the same as hours, but see reason 1 and 2.  Small areas that need defending, and Pirate Points Are Always Risky.

[monbvol]

See I think you both have a valid point.

Yes Cannonshop has ignored how difficult and time consuming it is to plot jumps for a long time in his fanfics and it shows in these sorts of discussions.

But that does not make him wrong about in system jumping being far superior to anything a Dropship, Space Station, Satelite, or ASF can do as a defensive response.

You simply cannot monitor just around where the important stuff is.  That surrenders far too much initiative and advantage to a canny invader.

A lot of that is the fact that by being called points where an invader can come in at is being given the impression that it is a limited and easily defended area of space.  Which simply is not true.

Some good telescopes from 25-30 AU out from the local star is a great way to manage a stealth insertion and gather some much needed intel.  Including where you can come in at to punish a defender relying on newtonian navigation/speeds for defensive response.

Now I will contend I think how long it takes to calculate a jump point could use a more consistent formula rather than the highly variable (2d6-MoS)*30 minutes for a non-standard point.  But I'll stop there to avoid getting this booted down to Fan Rules.

[Vehrec]

See I think you both have a valid point.

Yes Cannonshop has ignored how difficult and time consuming it is to plot jumps for a long time in his fanfics and it shows in these sorts of discussions.

But that does not make him wrong about in system jumping being far superior to anything a Dropship, Space Station, Satelite, or ASF can do as a defensive response.

You simply cannot monitor just around where the important stuff is.  That surrenders far too much initiative and advantage to a canny invader.

A lot of that is the fact that by being called points where an invader can come in at is being given the impression that it is a limited and easily defended area of space.  Which simply is not true.

Some good telescopes from 25-30 AU out from the local star is a great way to manage a stealth insertion and gather some much needed intel.  Including where you can come in at to punish a defender relying on newtonian navigation/speeds for defensive response.

Now I will contend I think how long it takes to calculate a jump point could use a more consistent formula rather than the highly variable (2d6-MoS)*30 minutes for a non-standard point.  But I'll stop there to avoid getting this booted down to Fan Rules.

I'm not being 'given the impression' by names of things.  Most systems lack any kind of stuff to patrol in the outer system.  A few have recharge stations near the 'standard points' those might need to be protected, but the stations really are point targets, and the attached ships and other facilities are close enough that static space defenses can do a quite adequate job.  A tiny number of systems, really, have anything like enough space industry and population to be worth raiding above the level of 'three guys on an asteroid doing wildcat mining'.  What kind of 'much needed intel' do you need on such a system?

And both you and Cannonshop are ignoring the destruction of WarShips this kind of thing courts.  I know of no surer way to misjump than to use a pirate point, but even if you succeed in avoiding that, you're putting undue stress on both the ship and the crew.  The crew will be subjected to much nastier transit sickness, and the ship will be forced to operate right on the edges of it's safety margins.  It's like pulling a 'barn door stop' on an Iowa class battleship-you can do it, but it will forever after haunt your ship, making her shake and rattle and warn you not to do it again.  So you need to, after such a maneuver, carefully baby your ship back to a shipyard, rather than simply continuing to remain on station.  And what happens if your highly trained navigation officer, the guy you invested nine years of training into to make this jump decides to tender his resignation and join ComStar or the merchant marine, because you made him do this trick too many times and now he sees squids when he shuts his eyes?

Now, both of you might disagree with me on the above point that constantly training for and using this maneuver type will cause fatalities.  But I'm sticking my flag in it and not budging-this is a good way to lose ships and crew alike.

[monbvol]

I know I'm not ignoring it.

JumpShips always arrive stationary relative to the destination
jump point.
Upon “arriving” at the intended destination, the navigator
makes a second Control Roll. Apply the MoS from the original
coordinate calculation as a bonus to the roll. Additionally, apply
a +2 modifi er for every point of damage sustained by the ship’s
K-F drive. Success indicates a “clean” jump, while failure indicates
a miscalculation or erroneous data, causing damage or possibly
destroying the ship. If the roll fails (i.e. a mis-jump occurs), apply
(1D6 x 2 x MoF) points of capital-scale damage to each armor
facing of the JumpShip and any DropShips carried. In addition,
reduce the JumpShip’s K-F Drive Integrity by the MoF. If the Drive
Integrity is reduced to zero or lower, the K-F drive and the unit
are destroyed, along with all DropShips carried.

That's the only part of StratOps I can find that talks about when KF damage is possible.

The actual calculation TNs only come into play if there is a MoS.  If the calculation control roll is a failure then all that happens is the calculations need to be done again.  The MoF from that does not carry over.

So without pre-existing damage even if the jump calculation TN is 11 and takes 4 days before it is finally gotten right a Warship only would need to beat a 5 on 2d6 with a Regular crew.

Sure that's not 100% but it isn't wear out Warships at an alarming rate bad either.  Hell that's I'll take those odds if it means I can have an advantage for taking it.  And trust me if a defender is not actively patrolling their outer system even if there's nothing out there nor do they have a Jump capable reaction force it is a huge advantage for the invader.

And as a hilarious aside.  That second control roll is made even for arriving at a standard Zenith/Nadir point.

[Cannonshop]

I'm not being 'given the impression' by names of things.  Most systems lack any kind of stuff to patrol in the outer system.  A few have recharge stations near the 'standard points' those might need to be protected, but the stations really are point targets, and the attached ships and other facilities are close enough that static space defenses can do a quite adequate job.  A tiny number of systems, really, have anything like enough space industry and population to be worth raiding above the level of 'three guys on an asteroid doing wildcat mining'.  What kind of 'much needed intel' do you need on such a system?

And both you and Cannonshop are ignoring the destruction of WarShips this kind of thing courts.  I know of no surer way to misjump than to use a pirate point, but even if you succeed in avoiding that, you're putting undue stress on both the ship and the crew.  The crew will be subjected to much nastier transit sickness, and the ship will be forced to operate right on the edges of it's safety margins.  It's like pulling a 'barn door stop' on an Iowa class battleship-you can do it, but it will forever after haunt your ship, making her shake and rattle and warn you not to do it again.  So you need to, after such a maneuver, carefully baby your ship back to a shipyard, rather than simply continuing to remain on station.  And what happens if your highly trained navigation officer, the guy you invested nine years of training into to make this jump decides to tender his resignation and join ComStar or the merchant marine, because you made him do this trick too many times and now he sees squids when he shuts his eyes?

Now, both of you might disagree with me on the above point that constantly training for and using this maneuver type will cause fatalities.  But I'm sticking my flag in it and not budging-this is a good way to lose ships and crew alike.

Vehrec, static 'defenses' DON't do an adequate job.  Never Have done an adequate job, never WILL do an adequate job.  The closest thing to an adequate static defense, is siting on a Moon and letting the mass of the moon handle reducing angle of attack to a slightly narrower front while absorbing some of the energy from an attack.

anything else, is dangerous levels of delusional stupidity, because space is NOT TWO DIMENSIONAL.

It's not even as two-dimensional as ground combat, or air combat in an atmosphere and Le Maginot showed just how useful static defense was in the modern era of air-power and mechanized warfare.  (Which is to say, "Not at all useful" in case you missed it.)

Your castle is only as good as the speed at which you can get a relief force of adequate size to it, and no better, and that's been true since the siege of Vienna, or even the fall of Constantinople.  I mean, we're talking since the 15th Century here, only we're not talking 15th century firepower or 15th century mobility, restrained to a two dimensional board where terrain actually MATTERS or choke points are an actual thing you can fortify.

The ONLY defense that actually works, is a mobile defense with the ability to counter-attack.  anything else? is intense wishful thinking by people who don't grasp the scale of what we're looking at.

including time-scales for travel, or how they actually vary.

Earth/Mars alone can vary from days to months depending on time of year.

Zenith and Nadir are simply the CLOSEST approaches that remain fixed year 'round. (The L1 does vary-by planetary positions thanks to the fact that gravity reaches a VERY long way, and influences like moons, other planets in the system, how many stars you have, etc. can and do influence where that point is going to be based on orbital periods)

Dropping into the outer system and with a good telescope and a BB or HPG I can monitor where your patrols are to a point making them absolutely predictable, removing your initiative in the entire by giving my side the choice of where, when, and how to engage them when they're most vulnerable.

With a stopwatch and chemical rockets (I don't even need fusion thrusters for this) I can remove your fixed defenses, because they can ONLY SEE ON A NARROW FRONT.  Alaric's ramming ships were unnecessary because he could've doen the same thing with SRB's and moderate sized asteroids with a little more lead time.   Likewise for Kerensky's ramming ships-they weren't 'clever' or strategic, they were wasteful expressions of personal power and authority.

"well charted' means "We know the bodies in the system and their positioning at least as well as we did in 1940, we can have those 'dangerous' jumps pre-plotted to the nth decimal place, the're not hitting terra incognita."

It's LITERALLY just calculus, and it can be automated with a commodore sixty-four. (or even a vic-20, or even a tandy-you can do it with an eight bit computer without a graphical interface) once you've got a basic survey map of the system that would've been necessary to find the Zenith and Nadir points in the FIRST PLACE.

further, every single body in a given star system, has an L1 point (along with the other, irrelevant ones like L2, 3, 4, and 5).  There's an Earth/Luna L1 and a Titan/Saturn L1.

Because? Gravity works the same way  whether it's a gas giant or a star, whether it's an inhabitable world like earth, or a barren rock like Mercury.

all the shfits? are predictable, and it's not even hard to predict.

certainly not for anyone from a culture where they know how to predict burn rates to get goods from point a, to point b in newtonian space without taking the next ten years of course corrections to get the insertion angle and speed such that you're not using the planetary surface as your braking material.

at 6AM local time, X is where your emergence point will be on the 2nd of March, 2023.  That's how complicated it is.  The only time it's going to be complex, is the first time in a brand new system you've never mapped before.

[monbvol]

Vehrec, static 'defenses' DON't do an adequate job.  Never Have done an adequate job, never WILL do an adequate job.  The closest thing to an adequate static defense, is siting on a Moon and letting the mass of the moon handle reducing angle of attack to a slightly narrower front while absorbing some of the energy from an attack.

anything else, is dangerous levels of delusional stupidity, because space is NOT TWO DIMENSIONAL.

It's not even as two-dimensional as ground combat, or air combat in an atmosphere and Le Maginot showed just how useful static defense was in the modern era of air-power and mechanized warfare.  (Which is to say, "Not at all useful" in case you missed it.)

Your castle is only as good as the speed at which you can get a relief force of adequate size to it, and no better, and that's been true since the siege of Vienna, or even the fall of Constantinople.  I mean, we're talking since the 15th Century here, only we're not talking 15th century firepower or 15th century mobility, restrained to a two dimensional board where terrain actually MATTERS or choke points are an actual thing you can fortify.

The ONLY defense that actually works, is a mobile defense with the ability to counter-attack.  anything else? is intense wishful thinking by people who don't grasp the scale of what we're looking at.

including time-scales for travel, or how they actually vary.

Earth/Mars alone can vary from days to months depending on time of year.

Zenith and Nadir are simply the CLOSEST approaches that remain fixed year 'round. (The L1 does vary-by planetary positions thanks to the fact that gravity reaches a VERY long way, and influences like moons, other planets in the system, how many stars you have, etc. can and do influence where that point is going to be based on orbital periods)

Dropping into the outer system and with a good telescope and a BB or HPG I can monitor where your patrols are to a point making them absolutely predictable, removing your initiative in the entire by giving my side the choice of where, when, and how to engage them when they're most vulnerable.

With a stopwatch and chemical rockets (I don't even need fusion thrusters for this) I can remove your fixed defenses, because they can ONLY SEE ON A NARROW FRONT.  Alaric's ramming ships were unnecessary because he could've doen the same thing with SRB's and moderate sized asteroids with a little more lead time.   Likewise for Kerensky's ramming ships-they weren't 'clever' or strategic, they were wasteful expressions of personal power and authority.

"well charted' means "We know the bodies in the system and their positioning at least as well as we did in 1940, we can have those 'dangerous' jumps pre-plotted to the nth decimal place, the're not hitting terra incognita."

It's LITERALLY just calculus, and it can be automated with a commodore sixty-four. (or even a vic-20, or even a tandy-you can do it with an eight bit computer without a graphical interface) once you've got a basic survey map of the system that would've been necessary to find the Zenith and Nadir points in the FIRST PLACE.

further, every single body in a given star system, has an L1 point (along with the other, irrelevant ones like L2, 3, 4, and 5).  There's an Earth/Luna L1 and a Titan/Saturn L1.

Because? Gravity works the same way  whether it's a gas giant or a star, whether it's an inhabitable world like earth, or a barren rock like Mercury.

all the shfits? are predictable, and it's not even hard to predict.

certainly not for anyone from a culture where they know how to predict burn rates to get goods from point a, to point b in newtonian space without taking the next ten years of course corrections to get the insertion angle and speed such that you're not using the planetary surface as your braking material.

at 6AM local time, X is where your emergence point will be on the 2nd of March, 2023.  That's how complicated it is.  The only time it's going to be complex, is the first time in a brand new system you've never mapped before.

Where I do side with Verhic a bit is it is quite clear it isn't just calculus that can be done by hand or with any old computer no matter how well charted a system is.  StratOps makes it quite clear that without the sophisticated jump computer it is impossible to plot a non-standard jump point.  Even a Terra Luna L1.

[Daryk]

AToW's skill system can almost replace some of that computer gobbledygook...  ^-^

More seriously, the human race has in fact produced people who can do multi-variable calculus in their heads, and the Inner Sphere's multi-trillion population guarantees they're out there in sufficient numbers to be recruited for JumpShip navigation...  8)

[Vehrec]

Vehrec, static 'defenses' DON't do an adequate job.  Never Have done an adequate job, never WILL do an adequate job.  The closest thing to an adequate static defense, is siting on a Moon and letting the mass of the moon handle reducing angle of attack to a slightly narrower front while absorbing some of the energy from an attack.

anything else, is dangerous levels of delusional stupidity, because space is NOT TWO DIMENSIONAL.

It's not even as two-dimensional as ground combat, or air combat in an atmosphere and Le Maginot showed just how useful static defense was in the modern era of air-power and mechanized warfare.  (Which is to say, "Not at all useful" in case you missed it.)

Your castle is only as good as the speed at which you can get a relief force of adequate size to it, and no better, and that's been true since the siege of Vienna, or even the fall of Constantinople.  I mean, we're talking since the 15th Century here, only we're not talking 15th century firepower or 15th century mobility, restrained to a two dimensional board where terrain actually MATTERS or choke points are an actual thing you can fortify.

The ONLY defense that actually works, is a mobile defense with the ability to counter-attack.  anything else? is intense wishful thinking by people who don't grasp the scale of what we're looking at.

Static defense doesn't work blah blah three dimensions make defense impossible blah blah, MAGINOT LINE Holy Hannah you're a riot here.  Tell me, if static defenses don't work, why is the US Army currently watching events in eastern Europe and writing 'relearn how to dig' in it's notebook?  If static defenses don't work, why do we teach soldiers to dig foxholes and ranger graves, and if they're gonna be in place for a couple of days, grab some HESCO barriers and fill them with rocks and dirt?  You've learned to misquote Patton, but I don't know if you actually understand the interplay between defense and offense other than to completely dismiss the former as how you lose wars and the later as how you win.

I urge you to read Dr. Bret C. Devereaux's excellent five part series on the history of defenses back to the dawn of siege warfare, it's very interesting, here's the final part.  Fixed defenses aren't supposed to make you invincible, they're there to raise the bar needed to successfully persecute an attack.  Or to quote the good doctor, "In the end, the continued relevance of fortifications comes from the continued strategic imperatives: for weaker powers to find ways to deter attackers or at least shift the balance of strength so that a weaker power might win and for stronger powers to force a conflict to occur in favorable conditions."

including time-scales for travel, or how they actually vary.

Earth/Mars alone can vary from days to months depending on time of year.

No, no, NO!  How the hell do you get this so wrong?  Even at *opposition* wheen they are as far from each other as they can get, instead of simply at an 'average speration' of 1.4 AU, they are still only about 2.4 AU apart.  That's never going to take more than a week to transit, and yes, that's including the time to take to go around the sun.  Where are you getting 'months' to transit from Earth/Mars?

Zenith and Nadir are simply the CLOSEST approaches that remain fixed year 'round. (The L1 does vary-by planetary positions thanks to the fact that gravity reaches a VERY long way, and influences like moons, other planets in the system, how many stars you have, etc. can and do influence where that point is going to be based on orbital periods)

Dropping into the outer system and with a good telescope and a BB or HPG I can monitor where your patrols are to a point making them absolutely predictable, removing your initiative in the entire by giving my side the choice of where, when, and how to engage them when they're most vulnerable.

With a stopwatch and chemical rockets (I don't even need fusion thrusters for this) I can remove your fixed defenses, because they can ONLY SEE ON A NARROW FRONT.  Alaric's ramming ships were unnecessary because he could've doen the same thing with SRB's and moderate sized asteroids with a little more lead time.   Likewise for Kerensky's ramming ships-they weren't 'clever' or strategic, they were wasteful expressions of personal power and authority.

'Only see on a narrow front' what?  Space is three dimensional, what the heck are you talking about?

Patrols can include randomness, so that you can't trivially deduce them, and even if they aren't, I can move my 'fixed' defenses because even space stations have .1g thrusters that can allow you to transit several AU in a month.  Shuffling them around a bit at random in wartime to vary their positions by several hundred kilometers per day is trivial, you only need to burn for about sixty seconds at each shift change to alter their orbits by 58 m/s.  After an hour, that's a variation from your pre-calculated trajectory of over 210 kilometers.  In other words, simple, ordinary shift change routines can completely negate your stopwatch and chemical rockets.

"well charted' means "We know the bodies in the system and their positioning at least as well as we did in 1940, we can have those 'dangerous' jumps pre-plotted to the nth decimal place, the're not hitting terra incognita."

It's LITERALLY just calculus, and it can be automated with a commodore sixty-four. (or even a vic-20, or even a tandy-you can do it with an eight bit computer without a graphical interface) once you've got a basic survey map of the system that would've been necessary to find the Zenith and Nadir points in the FIRST PLACE.

further, every single body in a given star system, has an L1 point (along with the other, irrelevant ones like L2, 3, 4, and 5).  There's an Earth/Luna L1 and a Titan/Saturn L1.

Because? Gravity works the same way  whether it's a gas giant or a star, whether it's an inhabitable world like earth, or a barren rock like Mercury.

all the shfits? are predictable, and it's not even hard to predict.

certainly not for anyone from a culture where they know how to predict burn rates to get goods from point a, to point b in newtonian space without taking the next ten years of course corrections to get the insertion angle and speed such that you're not using the planetary surface as your braking material.

at 6AM local time, X is where your emergence point will be on the 2nd of March, 2023.  That's how complicated it is.  The only time it's going to be complex, is the first time in a brand new system you've never mapped before.

Hogwash, utter and complete nonsense.  You're talking out of your rear-end here and nobody should take this seriously.  This is not how these things work-because hyperspace physics is not Newtonian physics.  The L1 point is not the Non-standard point, they're just reasonably close to each other.  Maybe you can pre-calculate these things, but then you are locked into a specific departure time and place, and *velocity* too, if you enter at the wrong angle and speed, you've just invalidated your calculations and are gonna get smeared.  Maybe you don't understand just how much accuracy is needed here, you might need to depart not at 6:00:00 but at 6:00:00.0248569.  With an accuracy of alignment of the ship of .01 milliradians, of course.

Now, neither of us can prove our positions on how much and how accurate the math needed here is, but I can point to a table that says 'Target is Non-standard Jump Point.  Without Computer: IMPOSSIBLE' and you can't bring any evidence of that sort. 

[Daryk]

If your defenders can reposition with jumps, sure.  Anything at slower speeds can be predicted with observations from a couple of AU out before a jump in system.

[Cannonshop]

Static defense doesn't work blah blah three dimensions make defense impossible blah blah, MAGINOT LINE Holy Hannah you're a riot here.  Tell me, if static defenses don't work, why is the US Army currently watching events in eastern Europe and writing 'relearn how to dig' in it's notebook?  If static defenses don't work, why do we teach soldiers to dig foxholes and ranger graves, and if they're gonna be in place for a couple of days, grab some HESCO barriers and fill them with rocks and dirt?  You've learned to misquote Patton, but I don't know if you actually understand the interplay between defense and offense other than to completely dismiss the former as how you lose wars and the later as how you win.

I urge you to read Dr. Bret C. Devereaux's excellent five part series on the history of defenses back to the dawn of siege warfare, it's very interesting, here's the final part.  Fixed defenses aren't supposed to make you invincible, they're there to raise the bar needed to successfully persecute an attack.  Or to quote the good doctor, "In the end, the continued relevance of fortifications comes from the continued strategic imperatives: for weaker powers to find ways to deter attackers or at least shift the balance of strength so that a weaker power might win and for stronger powers to force a conflict to occur in favorable conditions."
 No, no, NO!  How the hell do you get this so wrong?  Even at *opposition* wheen they are as far from each other as they can get, instead of simply at an 'average speration' of 1.4 AU, they are still only about 2.4 AU apart.  That's never going to take more than a week to transit, and yes, that's including the time to take to go around the sun.  Where are you getting 'months' to transit from Earth/Mars?
 'Only see on a narrow front' what?  Space is three dimensional, what the heck are you talking about?

Patrols can include randomness, so that you can't trivially deduce them, and even if they aren't, I can move my 'fixed' defenses because even space stations have .1g thrusters that can allow you to transit several AU in a month.  Shuffling them around a bit at random in wartime to vary their positions by several hundred kilometers per day is trivial, you only need to burn for about sixty seconds at each shift change to alter their orbits by 58 m/s.  After an hour, that's a variation from your pre-calculated trajectory of over 210 kilometers.  In other words, simple, ordinary shift change routines can completely negate your stopwatch and chemical rockets.

Hogwash, utter and complete nonsense.  You're talking out of your rear-end here and nobody should take this seriously.  This is not how these things work-because hyperspace physics is not Newtonian physics.  The L1 point is not the Non-standard point, they're just reasonably close to each other.  Maybe you can pre-calculate these things, but then you are locked into a specific departure time and place, and *velocity* too, if you enter at the wrong angle and speed, you've just invalidated your calculations and are gonna get smeared.  Maybe you don't understand just how much accuracy is needed here, you might need to depart not at 6:00:00 but at 6:00:00.0248569.  With an accuracy of alignment of the ship of .01 milliradians, of course.

Now, neither of us can prove our positions on how much and how accurate the math needed here is, but I can point to a table that says 'Target is Non-standard Jump Point.  Without Computer: IMPOSSIBLE' and you can't bring any evidence of that sort.

One AU, is earth-to-sol.  MARS is further away.  YOUR CLOSEST approach is 1.4 AU, Vehrec.  That's lined up on the same side of Sol. You're over TWICE that when Sol's in the middle.

and you've got to bypass that big burning ball of fusion, which means diverting, so add curve distance, y'all, and burns to match orbital velocity because it's not going to hold still while you're burning in.

(no matter how you do it, your course is at BEST a curve unless you're breaking into light-speed velocities, and half or more of your trip is going to be deceleration, that is, slowing down, unless you have a burning need to make a big crater with your landing approach.)

Your 'fast approach' math ignores everything from the actual terrain (how close can you go before uncle Sol's radiation cooks your life support) to the time you need to match vector and velocity for orbital insertion instead making a no-doubt-spectacular impact on the surface because you're going too fast.

you know, 'SPlat, you're dead-and so is everything in a few dozen to a few hundred kilometers."

[Cannonshop]

Moving on...

Dr. Devereaux's assessment comes form the existence of something called 'Strategic terrain'-wherein, becasue of how the land is laid out, you can actually fortify something because it channels enemy forces into that point.

This doesn't really exist in space, Vehrec.  There are no narrow inlets, no mountain passes, no lines of hills or marshes in space, an enemy isn't confined to ground to march on, and isn't confined to a specific angle of attack, except against a position at the bottom of a gravity well.

There's no way to force an enemy to smash into your defenses in that environment, which means you have to have equal firepower distributed across EVERY angle in a sphereical volume out tot he limits of your weapons range.

which can be bypassed until you reach close orbit.  The enemy is under no obligation to come at your fortress face-on.

Thus, why the practice of coastal forts went out of favor in the late 1940s-an enemy with aircraft carriers is under zero obligation come at your European Wall, and the assets needed to MAKE that wall are geometrically more demanding than the assets needed to bypass or break it.

Further, is the fun of something called 'vertical envelopment', which even hampers terrestrial fortifications. (yes, even in the real world), and that's not ALL the tactics that work.

again, a lot of wishful thinking goes into building fortresses and relying on them for your defense.  Forts ONLY work as a delay until your reinforcement can come, and most often fail at that one too.

[Cannonshop]

Just an aside note: Warships as tools of conquest aren't that great.  Why?

Anything worth using orbital bombardment to take, isn't going to survive the bombardment to be taken.

Conquest, is about gaining advantage, in particular in the form of resources of some kind you can't afford to just prospect for out in the wilds where nobody is shooting at you.

It's like the logic of using nuclear weapons to capture an oil refinery.  The defenders won't be thre, but neither will the oil refinery when you're done.

Raw firepower may win a tactical FIGHT, but as a Strategic basis, it has the flaw of destroying your strategic objectives that were the reason you went to war in the first place.  Hence why Iraq isn't glow-in-the-dark despite 20 years of invasion-the invasion was necessary because the objective was too fragile to win by just blowing it up.

This is the underlying REAL logic of the Ares conventions-Tintavel was rendered strategically worthless to all sides, because what was there didn't and couldn't survive the strategic scale weapons of the time, making the entire operation on both sides a waste of resources, time, and manpower.

[Vehrec]

One AU, is earth-to-sol.  MARS is further away.  YOUR CLOSEST approach is 1.4 AU, Vehrec.  That's lined up on the same side of Sol. You're over TWICE that when Sol's in the middle.

and you've got to bypass that big burning ball of fusion, which means diverting, so add curve distance, y'all, and burns to match orbital velocity because it's not going to hold still while you're burning in.

(no matter how you do it, your course is at BEST a curve unless you're breaking into light-speed velocities, and half or more of your trip is going to be deceleration, that is, slowing down, unless you have a burning need to make a big crater with your landing approach.)

Your 'fast approach' math ignores everything from the actual terrain (how close can you go before uncle Sol's radiation cooks your life support) to the time you need to match vector and velocity for orbital insertion instead making a no-doubt-spectacular impact on the surface because you're going too fast.

you know, 'SPlat, you're dead-and so is everything in a few dozen to a few hundred kilometers."

Closest approach is .4 AU, furthest distance is 2.4 AU, this is not difficult math, you either add 1 AU or subtract it from Mars' orbital distance.  How close you can get to the sun depends on your thermal qualities, but I'm assuming .1 AU is possible and we're swinging in close, but that's also near the tip-over point so we're traveling at near max speed at opposition.  And if I need to match velocity with Mars, well it's traveling at 24 km/s.  At 10m/s/s, and starting from a very unrealistic dead stop, I can match speed with Mars in just 40 minutes.  Isn't that four battlespace turns?  Orbital velocity around mars is considerably lower.  Inserting into a parking orbit is a trivial exercise in spent fuel.  My 'fast approach' is perfectly suitable to the setting and is used everywhere to calculate transit times for all kinds of things.  You haven't posted a single number, equation,  or link supporting your 'months to mars' position.  You just assert that's how long it takes.

It's also very droll that you assert that anyone with a high-school calculus education can do jump calcs, but somehow, regular spacefarers are splatting into planets left and right.

Moving on...

Dr. Devereaux's assessment comes form the existence of something called 'Strategic terrain'-wherein, becasue of how the land is laid out, you can actually fortify something because it channels enemy forces into that point.

This doesn't really exist in space, Vehrec.  There are no narrow inlets, no mountain passes, no lines of hills or marshes in space, an enemy isn't confined to ground to march on, and isn't confined to a specific angle of attack, except against a position at the bottom of a gravity well.

There's no way to force an enemy to smash into your defenses in that environment, which means you have to have equal firepower distributed across EVERY angle in a sphereical volume out tot he limits of your weapons range.

which can be bypassed until you reach close orbit.  The enemy is under no obligation to come at your fortress face-on.

Thus, why the practice of coastal forts went out of favor in the late 1940s-an enemy with aircraft carriers is under zero obligation come at your European Wall, and the assets needed to MAKE that wall are geometrically more demanding than the assets needed to bypass or break it.

Further, is the fun of something called 'vertical envelopment', which even hampers terrestrial fortifications. (yes, even in the real world), and that's not ALL the tactics that work.

again, a lot of wishful thinking goes into building fortresses and relying on them for your defense.  Forts ONLY work as a delay until your reinforcement can come, and most often fail at that one too.

Have you heard of these things called 'anti-shipping missiles?  I hear that some of them attacked a ship last year.  Might have sunk it even, though there is also talk about a storm. Probably didn't cost anywhere near as much as the ship they may or may not have sunk.

Defensive terrain isn't the only kind of thing that can create defenses, you can add things like 'pre-sighted fires' or 'minefields' or 'an ASF squadron hanger'.  You know, just examples of things you might have lying around your defensive works. We are not aiming to overmatch all possible comers, we are just raising the required ante to play the game.

And you know, the best job a defensive works can do is to stop an attack from ever happening in the first place because it shifts the calculus of the force needed to achieve victory.  Or it can push back the enemy's timetables.

Just an aside note: Warships as tools of conquest aren't that great.  Why?

Anything worth using orbital bombardment to take, isn't going to survive the bombardment to be taken.

Conquest, is about gaining advantage, in particular in the form of resources of some kind you can't afford to just prospect for out in the wilds where nobody is shooting at you.

It's like the logic of using nuclear weapons to capture an oil refinery.  The defenders won't be thre, but neither will the oil refinery when you're done.

Raw firepower may win a tactical FIGHT, but as a Strategic basis, it has the flaw of destroying your strategic objectives that were the reason you went to war in the first place.  Hence why Iraq isn't glow-in-the-dark despite 20 years of invasion-the invasion was necessary because the objective was too fragile to win by just blowing it up.

This is the underlying REAL logic of the Ares conventions-Tintavel was rendered strategically worthless to all sides, because what was there didn't and couldn't survive the strategic scale weapons of the time, making the entire operation on both sides a waste of resources, time, and manpower.

Okay, but Warships are in fact, great tools of conquest, because they cut off your enemy's supply lines.  The orbital bombardment is at best a nice extra to crack things that require extra firepower you don't care about capturing intact, at worst, an active detriment to your cause, but the supply interdiction is going to win you the war.  Just one or two warships can reasonably shoo away any cargo ship coming in to resupply your enemy, and an army without ammunition isn't going to be able to fight on the ground. Maybe the occasional blockade runner or two gets through, but wow, now there's a fresh enemy supply dump you can in fact, bombard from orbit because it's in the middle of a giant ferrocrete landing pad. 

[Cannonshop]

Closest approach is .4 AU, furthest distance is 2.4 AU, this is not difficult math, you either add 1 AU or subtract it from Mars' orbital distance.  How close you can get to the sun depends on your thermal qualities, but I'm assuming .1 AU is possible and we're swinging in close, but that's also near the tip-over point so we're traveling at near max speed at opposition.  And if I need to match velocity with Mars, well it's traveling at 24 km/s.  At 10m/s/s, and starting from a very unrealistic dead stop, I can match speed with Mars in just 40 minutes.  Isn't that four battlespace turns?  Orbital velocity around mars is considerably lower.  Inserting into a parking orbit is a trivial exercise in spent fuel.  My 'fast approach' is perfectly suitable to the setting and is used everywhere to calculate transit times for all kinds of things.  You haven't posted a single number, equation,  or link supporting your 'months to mars' position.  You just assert that's how long it takes.

It's also very droll that you assert that anyone with a high-school calculus education can do jump calcs, but somehow, regular spacefarers are splatting into planets left and right.

Have you heard of these things called 'anti-shipping missiles?  I hear that some of them attacked a ship last year.  Might have sunk it even, though there is also talk about a storm. Probably didn't cost anywhere near as much as the ship they may or may not have sunk.

Defensive terrain isn't the only kind of thing that can create defenses, you can add things like 'pre-sighted fires' or 'minefields' or 'an ASF squadron hanger'.  You know, just examples of things you might have lying around your defensive works. We are not aiming to overmatch all possible comers, we are just raising the required ante to play the game.

And you know, the best job a defensive works can do is to stop an attack from ever happening in the first place because it shifts the calculus of the force needed to achieve victory.  Or it can push back the enemy's timetables.

Okay, but Warships are in fact, great tools of conquest, because they cut off your enemy's supply lines.  The orbital bombardment is at best a nice extra to crack things that require extra firepower you don't care about capturing intact, at worst, an active detriment to your cause, but the supply interdiction is going to win you the war.  Just one or two warships can reasonably shoo away any cargo ship coming in to resupply your enemy, and an army without ammunition isn't going to be able to fight on the ground. Maybe the occasional blockade runner or two gets through, but wow, now there's a fresh enemy supply dump you can in fact, bombard from orbit because it's in the middle of a giant ferrocrete landing pad.

Antishipping missiles do not have infinite range, or infinite detection range, and in space, work both ways.  Your fortress station is MORE vulnerable than the ship it's shooting at.

y'know because it's positioned PREDICTABLY and I don't have to have good twitch reflexes to hit it.

I don't even need a guidance system if I can do ballistic math against a largely to completely stationary object whose location I already know.

(objects will continue to travel until acted upon in space.  Guess what I can do that your ASM can't?)

Silkworm did SUCH a good job on the USN in 1990, right??

Oh, wait, it didn't.

It didn't stop the Marine landing in Kuwait, and didn't secure the straits of Hormuz, and didn't pose more than a brief problem for the USN in two invasions.

Historically, the best performer in the ASM game in live combat was Exocet, and that was in the Falklands, and required airborne launch from MOBILE UNITS.

There's a reason we drill in "Shoot and Scoot" with artillery, instead of investing in huge bunker complexes ala the Atlantic Wall of the 1940s, Vehrec-it's because a stationary battery isn't an overwhelming obstacle, it's an expensive target for calibrating ranging.

[monbvol]

AToW's skill system can almost replace some of that computer gobbledygook...  ^-^

More seriously, the human race has in fact produced people who can do multi-variable calculus in their heads, and the Inner Sphere's multi-trillion population guarantees they're out there in sufficient numbers to be recruited for JumpShip navigation...  8)

As Vehrec states StratOps page 89 clearly states impossible for target number if the navigation computer is broken and zero indication is given that lesser/alternate computers can be used in a pinch or enough whiteboards and enough math nerds can eventually work it out.  Which clearly shows hyperspace math isn't multi-variable calculus as we know it today.

StratOps also lists a maximum time limit of 20 minutes that a calculation is good for for ANY non-standard point.

After all we are talking about a method of travel that takes you out of normal reality for up to a few minutes.  It should not be too much of a stretch to accept that the math to make it work without scattering your atoms across the galaxy or making you one with the bulkhead is a completely new form of math that isn't doable by hand.  At least not for non-standard points.

Closest approach is .4 AU, furthest distance is 2.4 AU, this is not difficult math, you either add 1 AU or subtract it from Mars' orbital distance.  How close you can get to the sun depends on your thermal qualities, but I'm assuming .1 AU is possible and we're swinging in close, but that's also near the tip-over point so we're traveling at near max speed at opposition.  And if I need to match velocity with Mars, well it's traveling at 24 km/s.  At 10m/s/s, and starting from a very unrealistic dead stop, I can match speed with Mars in just 40 minutes.  Isn't that four battlespace turns?  Orbital velocity around mars is considerably lower.  Inserting into a parking orbit is a trivial exercise in spent fuel.  My 'fast approach' is perfectly suitable to the setting and is used everywhere to calculate transit times for all kinds of things.  You haven't posted a single number, equation,  or link supporting your 'months to mars' position.  You just assert that's how long it takes.

It's also very droll that you assert that anyone with a high-school calculus education can do jump calcs, but somehow, regular spacefarers are splatting into planets left and right.

Have you heard of these things called 'anti-shipping missiles?  I hear that some of them attacked a ship last year.  Might have sunk it even, though there is also talk about a storm. Probably didn't cost anywhere near as much as the ship they may or may not have sunk.

Defensive terrain isn't the only kind of thing that can create defenses, you can add things like 'pre-sighted fires' or 'minefields' or 'an ASF squadron hanger'.  You know, just examples of things you might have lying around your defensive works. We are not aiming to overmatch all possible comers, we are just raising the required ante to play the game.

And you know, the best job a defensive works can do is to stop an attack from ever happening in the first place because it shifts the calculus of the force needed to achieve victory.  Or it can push back the enemy's timetables.

Okay, but Warships are in fact, great tools of conquest, because they cut off your enemy's supply lines.  The orbital bombardment is at best a nice extra to crack things that require extra firepower you don't care about capturing intact, at worst, an active detriment to your cause, but the supply interdiction is going to win you the war.  Just one or two warships can reasonably shoo away any cargo ship coming in to resupply your enemy, and an army without ammunition isn't going to be able to fight on the ground. Maybe the occasional blockade runner or two gets through, but wow, now there's a fresh enemy supply dump you can in fact, bombard from orbit because it's in the middle of a giant ferrocrete landing pad. 

Since Aerotech 2 a turn has been a minute not 10.  So that'd be 40 turns.

But I will agree with Cannonshop again in one aspect comparing Battletech Warships to modern blue water naval vessels, especially one with what was an absolute horror show of a maintenance report that never would have been allowed out to sea by any self respecting naval power, is ignoring the fact that we are talking about a completely different engagement environment and tech level.

Now yes he's underestimating how evasive stations can be with station keeping thrusters but it's also not entirely wrong to think there's good reasons for why such thrusters are not used that way since we never see any indication in any of the fiction that stations do that.

[Cannonshop]

Let me give you your nightmare scenario that the game devs didn't think of, Vherec.


I slide into your system out int he outer reaches where planetary gravity is a non-factor because it's too far out, this is beyond your Jump points even.

I sit there with a telescope, a hand calculator, and a gauss rifle, and start shooting.  Let's say... one ton of gauss rifle ammo at 1 cap. point per burst until the entire eight shots per ton is used up.

then I leave.

Next week, your station takes eight capital points to a single facing, and by the time your reaction force has gotten to the point I fired from, I've been gone for a week.

I can do this all year long, and you have no way of knowing when, or where, or fro what angle the fire is coming.

That's  a basic harassment campaign to make you invest resources in moving your defenses and putting out patrols at ranges where fuel becomes an issue.

I don't even need a Warship for this.

If I know when your resupply boat is docking, I can have those rounds intersecting with your docking collar during docking operations.

This is what is wrong with your fixed installation-I dont have to run up to fire. I don't even have to be where I fired, before it hits.  newton does the work for me.


If ou're using your evasive thrusters, it's going to become a routine, which means predictable, which means I can keep doing it, and using up your defensive resources or tying up your reaction forces until you're significantly weaker somewhere else-because I'm not obligated to stick around in the same place playing artillery tennis...but yoru fixed defense? IS obligated to stay there, or it's no good for a defense.

this is also what it means to run a fleet-in-being.  I don't have to BE where your interception is, I don't have to grant you a decisive battle where you have the advantage.  I can wear you down until I'm ready to give a decisive battle where I have the advantage.

[Vehrec]

Let me give you your nightmare scenario that the game devs didn't think of, Vherec.


I slide into your system out int he outer reaches where planetary gravity is a non-factor because it's too far out, this is beyond your Jump points even.

I sit there with a telescope, a hand calculator, and a gauss rifle, and start shooting.  Let's say... one ton of gauss rifle ammo at 1 cap. point per burst until the entire eight shots per ton is used up.

then I leave.

Next week, your station takes eight capital points to a single facing, and by the time your reaction force has gotten to the point I fired from, I've been gone for a week.

I can do this all year long, and you have no way of knowing when, or where, or fro what angle the fire is coming.

That's  a basic harassment campaign to make you invest resources in moving your defenses and putting out patrols at ranges where fuel becomes an issue.

I don't even need a Warship for this.

If I know when your resupply boat is docking, I can have those rounds intersecting with your docking collar during docking operations.

This is what is wrong with your fixed installation-I dont have to run up to fire. I don't even have to be where I fired, before it hits.  newton does the work for me.


If ou're using your evasive thrusters, it's going to become a routine, which means predictable, which means I can keep doing it, and using up your defensive resources or tying up your reaction forces until you're significantly weaker somewhere else-because I'm not obligated to stick around in the same place playing artillery tennis...but yoru fixed defense? IS obligated to stay there, or it's no good for a defense.

this is also what it means to run a fleet-in-being.  I don't have to BE where your interception is, I don't have to grant you a decisive battle where you have the advantage.  I can wear you down until I'm ready to give a decisive battle where I have the advantage.

I just lost my reply so I'm gonna go to bed after I post this shortened version

I don't need to intercept you, you can't hit a static space station with a gauss rifle, you physically can't hold it steady enough and aim accurately enough to generate hits at a distance of 900 million miles, this should be obvious.  You cannot shoot something even if you know it's coming because you are so far away you can't aim that good, you do understand that, right?

[Daryk]

I wonder how we put all those robots on Mars...  ::)

[Giovanni Blasini]

I wonder how we put all those robots on Mars...  ::)

You don't think those probes have had to periodically make minor attitude or course corrections between here and Mars?  Hell, even the Voyager probes have continued to do so, and in 2017 did a test on their backup thrusters to ensure that they'll be available when the primary ones fail, in order to extend their ability to contact Earth by 2-3 years.

The Perseverance rover also also made course corrections on its way to Mars.

Space isn't entirely empty, and whether its drag from random particles, solar winds, perturbations due to gravity from random objects, or even light pressure and thermal affects on your projectle/vehicle, they all can have affects, which is why you don't generally see the "gauss rifle and a calculator" method of bombardment of static installations in canon.

And we haven't even gotten into the quality of sensors yet, image resolution of real telescopes.

[Vehrec]

You don't think those probes have had to periodically make minor attitude or course corrections between here and Mars?  Hell, even the Voyager probes have continued to do so, and in 2017 did a test on their backup thrusters to ensure that they'll be available when the primary ones fail, in order to extend their ability to contact Earth by 2-3 years.

The Perseverance rover also also made course corrections on its way to Mars.

Space isn't entirely empty, and whether its drag from random particles, solar winds, perturbations due to gravity from random objects, or even light pressure and thermal affects on your projectle/vehicle, they all can have affects, which is why you don't generally see the "gauss rifle and a calculator" method of bombardment of static installations in canon.

And we haven't even gotten into the quality of sensors yet, image resolution of real telescopes.

Thank you for saying this, yes this is exactly what I mean.  Without the ability to mid-course correct, small errors or imprecisions at the start will be amplified so outrageously by the hundred-million kilometer range that you can't actually hit due to dispersion.

[monbvol]

There is also the consideration that even the most well manufactured military weapon is going to have inherent random dispersion.

"But what about lasers?"  I hear people about to ask.  That's easy to explain.  Even the best laser is going to need to be held on a very specific spot for a length of time that beyond a certain range becomes too impossible to translate into damage.

[Cannonshop]

You don't think those probes have had to periodically make minor attitude or course corrections between here and Mars?  Hell, even the Voyager probes have continued to do so, and in 2017 did a test on their backup thrusters to ensure that they'll be available when the primary ones fail, in order to extend their ability to contact Earth by 2-3 years.

The Perseverance rover also also made course corrections on its way to Mars.

Space isn't entirely empty, and whether its drag from random particles, solar winds, perturbations due to gravity from random objects, or even light pressure and thermal affects on your projectle/vehicle, they all can have affects, which is why you don't generally see the "gauss rifle and a calculator" method of bombardment of static installations in canon.

And we haven't even gotten into the quality of sensors yet, image resolution of real telescopes.

we know what the resolution for targeting sensors is, and it's less than the resolution for a homemade telescope, which is utterly insane considering that there's no atmospheric distortion inside a solar system until you reach a planet or the tail of a comet.

The dispersion argument holds more water, but then, we're talking about ballistic weapons that can drill through armor plate instead of dispersing already, so your odds of dispersal are significantly lower than it might appear.

(also, the dispersal may be a feature instead of a bug in this case, if he's maneuvering the odds are that the spread's going to have a birdshot effect, making hits MORE likely, though less damaging.)

Thing is, this can be done with rockets or missiles and inertial guidance instead of active homing too-they don't HAVE to burn the whole way in once they've reached muzzle velocity, and electroplasma rockets exist, don't cost much, don't take up much space, and are most of what you see correcting orbits right now (or course correcting for probes.)

At the distance of a Zenith or Nadir point, most of those factors you listed? aren't a factor that randomizes things enough to matter for something that small, moving that fast.

Most of the 'space battles' are written up to be DRAMATIC, not realistic.  Hence the fetish for ramming attacks, which pervades the setting and has since someone put a shilone on the bridge of a certain Clan's flagship in a move copied from Star Wars episode VI.  this, because most of the scaling problem comes from writers influenced more by war stories from the 1940s than what we knew about space by the 1960s.

Which I would in turn, argue is why Battlespace didn't sell well, and why the subject in general doesn't sell well-the people actually interested in the stuff read the rules and go 'Nah, If I wanted play fantasy in space I'd still be playing spelljammer or Space:1889."