Simon_Jester wrote:
1) To be able to defend the entire volume the convoy occupies from one place (i.e. AEGIS cruisers in the air defense role; they serve to control the entire airspace around a task force). Or...
2) To be able to rush around and protect the convoy at any point where it is threatened (i.e. WWII destroyers rushing at 30 knots to protect an 8-knot convoy from submerged submarines that traveled at comparable speed).
The Lancer doesn't have either the gun range for (1) or the speed for (2). Oops.
My point here is that there's an option 3) To be able to engage fighters or missiles very close to the convoy. 2) is substantially more ambitious than this, as to do it right requires substantial strategic depth, dramatically increasing the required range.
In contrast, the Lancer doesn't provide that depth. It relies on fighters, most likely supported by its charges, to provide depth, while it provides terminal protection, essentially acting as a moving CIWS, like you said. This also doesn't actually have to cover the entire convoy, instead covering the threat vector. It does require enough speed to be able to adapt to a moving threat vector, but freighters aren't known for their agility.
I suppose that the issue of contention here is how large is the volume that a single Lancer is responsible for. This is dependent on convoy size, the size of the escorted vessels, and the type of threat encountered. By defending a single threat vector, the Lancer can provide PD for that region, but its range must extend to cover the profile of the convoy from that angle. I think that this is easily possible, however I don't have access to range information.
Starting from the top, I think that this points to its intended used as a convoy escort. For economic reasons, commercial vessels don't carry PD, and thanks to the Rebel's use of asymmetric warfare there was a need to provide a long-endurance vessel able to handle fighters and their weapon payloads effectively. I think that this was the role the Lancer was designed for, staying close to large vessels armed with little weaponry, acting as a last line of defense while fighters preformed the offensive part of the defensive role.
But you can't park one Lancer next to each freighter, let alone the two or three it would take to provide 4*pi steradian coverage against attacks; that is not a realistic plan.
IRL, defending ships and escorts don't cover the entire area that they're defending, as threats can't be engaged fast enough. Instead, the vessels cover the threat vector, and reposition if the vector changes. By doing this, you don't need some number of Lancers to cover a sphere, you need enough to provide a given response time to cover a worst-case threat vector. This response could be improved by the use of microjumps, potentially dramatically limiting the number of vessels required.
Customs corvettes have the potential disadvantage over the Lancer of endurance, as well as the more clear-cut one of soaking up damage.
The obvious solution is to build the corvettes to associate with a dedicated tender; I'd expect such a tender class to already exist. And it could be built as an essentially civilian hull, so it would be one heck of a lot cheaper than almost any kind of dedicated warship.
The problem with this is that customs corvettes are already pretty big and require substantial maintenance, and 2 or 3 would have larger logistical requirements than a single Lancer would. This, in turn, means that their tender would have to be quite large and expensive, and I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff.
Simon_Jester wrote:
1) To be able to defend the entire volume the convoy occupies from one place (i.e. AEGIS cruisers in the air defense role; they serve to control the entire airspace around a task force). Or...
2) To be able to rush around and protect the convoy at any point where it is threatened (i.e. WWII destroyers rushing at 30 knots to protect an 8-knot convoy from submerged submarines that traveled at comparable speed).
The Lancer doesn't have either the gun range for (1) or the speed for (2). Oops.
My point here is that there's an option 3) To be able to engage fighters or missiles very close to the convoy. 2) is substantially more ambitious than this, as to do it right requires substantial strategic depth, dramatically increasing the required range.
In contrast, the Lancer doesn't provide that depth. It relies on fighters, most likely supported by its charges, to provide depth, while it provides terminal protection, essentially acting as a moving CIWS, like you said. This also doesn't actually have to cover the entire convoy, instead covering the threat vector. It does require enough speed to be able to adapt to a moving threat vector, but freighters aren't known for their agility.
I suppose that the issue of contention here is how large is the volume that a single Lancer is responsible for. This is dependent on convoy size, the size of the escorted vessels, and the type of threat encountered. By defending a single threat vector, the Lancer can provide PD for that region, but its range must extend to cover the profile of the convoy from that angle. I think that this is easily possible, however I don't have access to range information.
What the hell are you even talking about here? No, that isn't an option because it's a stupid way to defend anything-covering another ship with point defense is hard to do because point defense, by it's very nature, is already short ranged! And by trying to project it over another ship, you make it even shorter! The Lancer makes some sense as a Tarpit, a unit designed to engage fighters and tie them up, but not as something 'covering a threat vector'. Fighters are faster than it-they can just avoid it's range and fly around to the other side, forcing it to either follow or be useless. And they are more dispersed than it-if a squadron of y-wings split up to attack a convoy, one half can always be relatively sure of their ability to attack unmolested by a single Lancer. And if they are accompanied by a Corvette half it's size with LTL, the Lancer has no weapon that can effectively damage that ship! It makes no sense as a convoy escort, because you need so many other ships and fighters to cover all it's weaknesses! It's like arming a WW2 DE for anti-fighter duty with nothing but machine guns!
Starting from the top, I think that this points to its intended used as a convoy escort. For economic reasons, commercial vessels don't carry PD, and thanks to the Rebel's use of asymmetric warfare there was a need to provide a long-endurance vessel able to handle fighters and their weapon payloads effectively. I think that this was the role the Lancer was designed for, staying close to large vessels armed with little weaponry, acting as a last line of defense while fighters preformed the offensive part of the defensive role.
But you can't park one Lancer next to each freighter, let alone the two or three it would take to provide 4*pi steradian coverage against attacks; that is not a realistic plan.
IRL, defending ships and escorts don't cover the entire area that they're defending, as threats can't be engaged fast enough. Instead, the vessels cover the threat vector, and reposition if the vector changes. By doing this, you don't need some number of Lancers to cover a sphere, you need enough to provide a given response time to cover a worst-case threat vector. This response could be improved by the use of microjumps, potentially dramatically limiting the number of vessels required.
Escort ships are required to be able to move fast to re-position in response to changing threats. And if you can micro-jump, so can the enemy-it's easier for them in some senses since they aren't in as much danger of winding up far out of position from a microsecond emergence error. And again, it's SOL if anything larger than 100 meters shows up to blast the hell out of it-even a converted transport or a Star Galleon would be brown-trouser time for the crew of a Lancer.
Customs corvettes have the potential disadvantage over the Lancer of endurance, as well as the more clear-cut one of soaking up damage.
The obvious solution is to build the corvettes to associate with a dedicated tender; I'd expect such a tender class to already exist. And it could be built as an essentially civilian hull, so it would be one heck of a lot cheaper than almost any kind of dedicated warship.
The problem with this is that customs corvettes are already pretty big and require substantial maintenance, and 2 or 3 would have larger logistical requirements than a single Lancer would. This, in turn, means that their tender would have to be quite large and expensive, and I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff.
[/quote]Okay, can you seriously prove that the logistical requirements would be as extreme as you make them out to be? There's no reason the tender couldn't be a military cargo ship no larger than the ships it services-and since it's military, it could be armed with say, quad-laser turrets to provide some of that terminal defense you seem to be adoring.
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The Customs Corvette is actually supposed to be a medium endurance vessel, designed to do deep space interdictions were pirates and smugglers are likely move about. From memory, there is a model that also can carriers a pair of Ties in external racks and all have troop space. These would make better escorts then a lancer in every way. They have the speed and firepower to chase pirates, some PD, troops for counter-hoarding and if the model with external fighter racks it's used, you can cover a wider area for early warning and defence.
I have no idea when the Lancer was designed or by whom, but it occurs to me that it would make a lot more sense as a Clone Wars ship than a Rebellion-era one. Cheap, mass-produced, designed to fill one particular role very well and no others even semi-competently, I could definitely see it having been built as throwaway spare PD for major fleet actions against hordes of droid fighters. It can't cover much space, but that's fine because nothing could possibly cover enough space to deter multiple Lucrehulks' parasite complement, so the goal is to hover next to a Star Destroyer's bridge tower (or other weak point) and keep bombers away.
Maybe it was rushed into production after Coruscant, by which time the war was basically over and they had nothing better to do with the things than use them for convoy escort. Some sort of placebo defense, maybe - "Hey, space pirate buddy, let's pick a different convoy to attack - that one's got a frigate covering it!"
“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Esquire wrote:I have no idea when the Lancer was designed or by whom, but it occurs to me that it would make a lot more sense as a Clone Wars ship than a Rebellion-era one. Cheap, mass-produced, designed to fill one particular role very well and no others even semi-competently, I could definitely see it having been built as throwaway spare PD for major fleet actions against hordes of droid fighters. It can't cover much space, but that's fine because nothing could possibly cover enough space to deter multiple Lucrehulks' parasite complement, so the goal is to hover next to a Star Destroyer's bridge tower (or other weak point) and keep bombers away.
The problem with Lancers is that they aren't especially cheap for what they do. They're medium frigates in size, with large crew compliments, and carry complicated electronics, making them pretty expensive to operate in the long run. I don't think that the design was a particularly strategically well-founded one.
Esquire wrote:
Maybe it was rushed into production after Coruscant, by which time the war was basically over and they had nothing better to do with the things than use them for convoy escort. Some sort of placebo defense, maybe - "Hey, space pirate buddy, let's pick a different convoy to attack - that one's got a frigate covering it!"
Virtual attrition works great, but I don't think that a ship of the size of the Lancer is requisite to induce it. Loading fighters onto freighters might be enough, though. Dedicated escorts only make sense once the Rebels start raiding vessels.
InsaneTD wrote:The Customs Corvette is actually supposed to be a medium endurance vessel, designed to do deep space interdictions were pirates and smugglers are likely move about. From memory, there is a model that also can carriers a pair of Ties in external racks and all have troop space. These would make better escorts then a lancer in every way. They have the speed and firepower to chase pirates, some PD, troops for counter-hoarding and if the model with external fighter racks it's used, you can cover a wider area for early warning and defence.
The problem is that the freighters are long range vessels. In the role you're describing, the corvette is operating out of a local base that provides resupply and support to allow the corvette to operate against offenders in trade routes in deep space. While the distances are large, they aren't anything like as large as those involved in following the trade route itself, and the interdictors also get to choose the speed that they travel at, making the trip times shorter in comparison to the freighters.
Vehrec wrote:
macfanpro wrote:
My point here is that there's an option 3) To be able to engage fighters or missiles very close to the convoy. 2) is substantially more ambitious than this, as to do it right requires substantial strategic depth, dramatically increasing the required range.
In contrast, the Lancer doesn't provide that depth. It relies on fighters, most likely supported by its charges, to provide depth, while it provides terminal protection, essentially acting as a moving CIWS, like you said. This also doesn't actually have to cover the entire convoy, instead covering the threat vector. It does require enough speed to be able to adapt to a moving threat vector, but freighters aren't known for their agility.
I suppose that the issue of contention here is how large is the volume that a single Lancer is responsible for. This is dependent on convoy size, the size of the escorted vessels, and the type of threat encountered. By defending a single threat vector, the Lancer can provide PD for that region, but its range must extend to cover the profile of the convoy from that angle. I think that this is easily possible, however I don't have access to range information.
What the hell are you even talking about here? No, that isn't an option because it's a stupid way to defend anything-covering another ship with point defense is hard to do because point defense, by it's very nature, is already short ranged!
The Lancer isn't armed with PD cannons, it's armed with starfighter-scale lasers. This is important, since the starfighter lasers have substantially more range, allowing it to conceivably protect ships other than itself.
And by trying to project it over another ship, you make it even shorter! The Lancer makes some sense as a Tarpit, a unit designed to engage fighters and tie them up, but not as something 'covering a threat vector'.
While its role as a tarpit is the only good justification for its size, the use of short-ranged cannon instead of PD systems allows it to control a larger volume.
Fighters are faster than it-they can just avoid it's range and fly around to the other side, forcing it to either follow or be useless. And they are more dispersed than it-if a squadron of y-wings split up to attack a convoy, one half can always be relatively sure of their ability to attack unmolested by a single Lancer.
I never claimed that the Lancer was the only ship involved. A specialized ship like the Lancer needs additional assistance, and faster reacting antifighter assets would be an important part of those assets. TIE Interceptors carried by a freighter would be a potential solution.
The diversion is actually tatically useful, as it requires substantial central coordination to pull off (something that might not be present in, for example, proper pirates), as well as using up fuel, making it easier for interceptors to interdict the second try.
And if they are accompanied by a Corvette half it's size with LTL, the Lancer has no weapon that can effectively damage that ship! It makes no sense as a convoy escort, because you need so many other ships and fighters to cover all it's weaknesses! It's like arming a WW2 DE for anti-fighter duty with nothing but machine guns!
But you can't park one Lancer next to each freighter, let alone the two or three it would take to provide 4*pi steradian coverage against attacks; that is not a realistic plan.
IRL, defending ships and escorts don't cover the entire area that they're defending, as threats can't be engaged fast enough. Instead, the vessels cover the threat vector, and reposition if the vector changes. By doing this, you don't need some number of Lancers to cover a sphere, you need enough to provide a given response time to cover a worst-case threat vector. This response could be improved by the use of microjumps, potentially dramatically limiting the number of vessels required.
Escort ships are required to be able to move fast to re-position in response to changing threats. And if you can micro-jump, so can the enemy-it's easier for them in some senses since they aren't in as much danger of winding up far out of position from a microsecond emergence error.
Again, the use of longer-range (kinda) lasers helps a lot in preventing substantial tactical ramifications of hyperspace errors, but as I mentioned above, the change in plans required to make the course correction isn't entirely useless.
And again, it's SOL if anything larger than 100 meters shows up to blast the hell out of it-even a converted transport or a Star Galleon would be brown-trouser time for the crew of a Lancer.
As I mentioned before, Lancers would require additional escorting vessels to provide additional assistance. In the majority of circumstances, the Lancer and its charges should run if they encounter a 100m+ vessel, because the freighters are even more screwed against the aggressor. In this case, the Lancer is essentially either a distraction or a tarpit for its charges.
With more valuable assets, the fact that the Lancer isn't operating alone is important. Hyperdrive equipped TIE bombers would be a good choice to allow convoy protection against larger vessels, as their space footprint is minimal when compared to a superfreighter's volume, and they allow the mothership to escape without having to reload them onto the ship.
The obvious solution is to build the corvettes to associate with a dedicated tender; I'd expect such a tender class to already exist. And it could be built as an essentially civilian hull, so it would be one heck of a lot cheaper than almost any kind of dedicated warship.
The problem with this is that customs corvettes are already pretty big and require substantial maintenance, and 2 or 3 would have larger logistical requirements than a single Lancer would. This, in turn, means that their tender would have to be quite large and expensive, and I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff.
Okay, can you seriously prove that the logistical requirements would be as extreme as you make them out to be? There's no reason the tender couldn't be a military cargo ship no larger than the ships it services-and since it's military, it could be armed with say, quad-laser turrets to provide some of that terminal defense you seem to be adoring.
Now, consider the role of the frigate. It'll have to make a trip from a core world out to the termination of the trade route, then make its way back to the start of the trip with little in the way of resupply (note that this is a design criteria, not that it'll actually do this much). The radius of the galaxy is about 120,000ly, and the freighter's hyperdrives move at about 4 megalights (pulling out an intermediate value), making a one-way trip with no stops a 1.5 week trip. Since these are freighters and will likely have stopping points along the way to take on and offload cargo, let's add another week to the length of the trip. This means that outbound, it'll take about 2.5 weeks, and inbound it'll be about 1.5 weeks, creating a requirement for a month's endurance at low power.
At this point, I'm going completely off the canon numbers. The listed endurance for the corvette is 2 months, and the endurance for the Lancer is given as a week, but I'm going to come up with smaller numbers for the corvette and larger ones for the Lancer, which should be worse for me.
Let's begin with something that we can relate to easily: food and water. Each person requires about 1.2kg of food per day, so with a 58 member compliment, they'll need about 70kg of food per day. This means that the ship will need to carry (and refrigerate) 2.1 metric tons of food to make the trip. On a ship the size of the light corvette, this seems to be rather a lot. The crew will also need 3kg of water per day, adding another requirement. However, it's easier to replenish with water, so let's make a 1 week endurance requirement for water, giving a carry weight of 1.2 metric tons.
In toto, the corvette will have to carry 3.3 metric tons of food and water to keep its crew functioning. This isn't that heavy, but food tends to need a lot of space, although how much exactly isn't approachable, as we don't know how the Imperials store food.
Now, let's look at fuel consumption. Figures for this are really hard to find, but let's go with hypermatter reactor propulsion. I should note that at this point I don't have access to any source material, so I'm going to make some educated guesses from here on out. Let's say that energy usage scales linearly with area (caution: big assumption alert, I don't have any better figures to work with, however, so if anyone has better numbers (like, any ones at all) please correct me). Therefore, the corvette will need about .49% of the energy an ISD needs, which (to combat inaccuracy in the number), I'll adjust down to .001% (yes, I'm trying to make my argument harder). This gives us an energy requirement for the corvette of about 1E20 watts at maximum load.
For more assumptions, let's say that the average load is 1%, maintained for the entire duration of the trip, and that the reactor acts linearly. This means (assuming 100% energy conversion) that the corvette would have to carry 29200 tons of fuel! This isn't really reasonable for a ship the size of the customs corvette.
This implies that I'm either wrong in my 1% average loading, or the endurance of the craft is very limited. To get a more reasonable endurance, let's work in the other direction. A modern ship of about the same size weighs 30,000T, and to account for this being an estimate, let's double that to 60,000T in universe. If we set aside a quarter of that for fuel mass (this is a bad estimate, more realistically, it'll be a quarter for all fuel related equipment, which with hypermatter means that it's likely to have much less actual fuel). We now have 15,000T of fuel to work with, giving a endurance of about 2 weeks. This seems reasonable to me, though it's hard to say for certain.
The Lancer is better placed to carry this amount of fuel, but its bigger so it'll need more. However, it's easier to put aside larger regions of larger ships to propulsion, so it's easier to carry that much fuel onboard a ship the size of the Lancer.
As I've mentioned before, I agree that a missile-based antifighter ship makes much, much more sense when compared to a Lancer like ship, based around beam weapons. However, SW doesn't seem to like missiles much for reasons I can't understand.
Simon_Jester wrote:
1) To be able to defend the entire volume the convoy occupies from one place (i.e. AEGIS cruisers in the air defense role; they serve to control the entire airspace around a task force). Or...
2) To be able to rush around and protect the convoy at any point where it is threatened (i.e. WWII destroyers rushing at 30 knots to protect an 8-knot convoy from submerged submarines that traveled at comparable speed).
The Lancer doesn't have either the gun range for (1) or the speed for (2). Oops.
My point here is that there's an option 3) To be able to engage fighters or missiles very close to the convoy. 2) is substantially more ambitious than this, as to do it right requires substantial strategic depth, dramatically increasing the required range.
You cannot realistically clump the entire convoy into a blob small enough for a Lancer to protect, and the cost of building a 'globe' of Lancers to protect the entire volume the convoy occupies will soon become prohibitive.
The idea of the Lancer as a pure 'flying terminal point defense platform' is an extremely overspecialized and restrictive role, in which case no wonder it was hardly ever used in its intended role. That role is not compatible with the doctrine of a relatively "generalist" fleet, and with ships that can be used for more than one mission, which in Star Wars seems to be the norm.
The prototypical Imperial warship, the ISD, can serve pretty much any role from amphibious assault to naval combat to orbital fire support to broad "space control" fighter sweeps. And it does fairly well in all these roles.
Sure, more specialized designs might exist, but in practice the concept is going to be inherently weak because the typical squadron/fleet commander would much rather have a successful generalist frigate than a specialist that is utterly superb at one thing and miserable at others. Especially when the one thing isn't even a broad class like "counters fighters effectively," but rather a very narrow idea like "counters fighters if they come swooping in toward the slow-moving target you're closely escorting."
Esquire wrote:I have no idea when the Lancer was designed or by whom, but it occurs to me that it would make a lot more sense as a Clone Wars ship than a Rebellion-era one. Cheap, mass-produced, designed to fill one particular role very well and no others even semi-competently, I could definitely see it having been built as throwaway spare PD for major fleet actions against hordes of droid fighters. It can't cover much space, but that's fine because nothing could possibly cover enough space to deter multiple Lucrehulks' parasite complement, so the goal is to hover next to a Star Destroyer's bridge tower (or other weak point) and keep bombers away.
...
Fuuuu-
That actually makes a frightening amount of sense. Looking at the fighter environment we see at Coruscant in Episode III, and assuming that the Separatists have useful antiship strike fighters, that is one environment where a floating PD battery actually works.
macfanpro wrote:Virtual attrition works great, but I don't think that a ship of the size of the Lancer is requisite to induce it. Loading fighters onto freighters might be enough, though. Dedicated escorts only make sense once the Rebels start raiding vessels.
There have been parts of space with a serious pirate problem since well before the Rebellion got started- look at the Han Solo trilogy for an obvious example. As to the virtual attrition/deterrent issue, there are probably a lot of pirate out there in the equivalent of a Corellian Corvette: ships that could easily lose to a Lancer, if nothing else because the Lancer's shields are practically immune to its limited LTL weapons fit, and can just hang on and keep taking fire until a larger, nastier reinforcing ship arrives.
The Lancer doesn't become comically vulnerable unless it's fighting something armed with gigaton-range MTL, and I'm pretty sure that those are military-grade weapons seldom found in the hands of criminals. Except possibly for the largest, best-organized criminal organizations, the ones that effectively own whole planetary economies in their own right... and those are best treated as rival 'nations' which just happen to have a kleptocratic government.
The problem is that the freighters are long range vessels. In the role you're describing, the corvette is operating out of a local base that provides resupply and support to allow the corvette to operate against offenders in trade routes in deep space. While the distances are large, they aren't anything like as large as those involved in following the trade route itself, and the interdictors also get to choose the speed that they travel at, making the trip times shorter in comparison to the freighters.
So use a tender.
The Lancer isn't armed with PD cannons, it's armed with starfighter-scale lasers. This is important, since the starfighter lasers have substantially more range, allowing it to conceivably protect ships other than itself.
Sort of, but only if they're practically next door and/or much bigger targets than a normal fighter. Also note that in Star Wars, insofar as starships have any kind of point defense, it's typically the same class of guns the fighters mount, rather than yet another even lighter and inexplicably shorter-ranged type. "Point defense" does not mean "droid standing on the hull hosing down the incoming fighter with an E-Web blaster."
I never claimed that the Lancer was the only ship involved. A specialized ship like the Lancer needs additional assistance, and faster reacting antifighter assets would be an important part of those assets. TIE Interceptors carried by a freighter would be a potential solution.
The problem is that the aforementioned TIEs would also be a perfectly viable way of protecting the whole damn convoy; think "jeep carrier." The challenge of providing a sensible terminal defense for the freighters themselves would better be handled by just bolting some actual point defense turrets onto the freighters themselves, rather than building a whole dedicated warship class that spends ungodly amounts of time motoring around and waiting to jump in front of a squadron-level fighter attack. And which cannot do anything else, so it cannot, say, be retasked in an emergency to handle a threat other than "provide terminal point defense for a ship that has no point defense of its own."
Simon_Jester wrote:
1) To be able to defend the entire volume the convoy occupies from one place (i.e. AEGIS cruisers in the air defense role; they serve to control the entire airspace around a task force). Or...
2) To be able to rush around and protect the convoy at any point where it is threatened (i.e. WWII destroyers rushing at 30 knots to protect an 8-knot convoy from submerged submarines that traveled at comparable speed).
The Lancer doesn't have either the gun range for (1) or the speed for (2). Oops.
My point here is that there's an option 3) To be able to engage fighters or missiles very close to the convoy. 2) is substantially more ambitious than this, as to do it right requires substantial strategic depth, dramatically increasing the required range.
You cannot realistically clump the entire convoy into a blob small enough for a Lancer to protect, and the cost of building a 'globe' of Lancers to protect the entire volume the convoy occupies will soon become prohibitive.
How big is the convoy? That's the important question, and one that's governed by a lot of factors. It may be possible for a single Lancer to cover the convoy from the attack route that's the nicest for the attackers, or use it to force the attackers into another, better for the defenders, inroute. All of these are dependent on the tactics used by the convoy as well as the ships that they're using.
This idea is where the motivation for threat vectors comes in. Since you understand the vessels you're escorting, you know where the enemy is most likely to strike, and you can use shorter ranged assets like the Lancer to cover those vectors.
The idea of the Lancer as a pure 'flying terminal point defense platform' is an extremely overspecialized and restrictive role, in which case no wonder it was hardly ever used in its intended role. That role is not compatible with the doctrine of a relatively "generalist" fleet, and with ships that can be used for more than one mission, which in Star Wars seems to be the norm.
The Lancer class might be one of those Imperial experiments with new tactics, and one that seems to make some sense. They were never built in huge numbers, and seem a bit... odd in their design decisions, which adds some credence to the idea.
The prototypical Imperial warship, the ISD, can serve pretty much any role from amphibious assault to naval combat to orbital fire support to broad "space control" fighter sweeps. And it does fairly well in all these roles.
Is it worse in one of those roles than a dedicated vessel? Probably it is, but it can do the majority of the same job with lower logistical overhead. The Lancer may have been the Empire doing an extended design study.
Sure, more specialized designs might exist, but in practice the concept is going to be inherently weak because the typical squadron/fleet commander would much rather have a successful generalist frigate than a specialist that is utterly superb at one thing and miserable at others. Especially when the one thing isn't even a broad class like "counters fighters effectively," but rather a very narrow idea like "counters fighters if they come swooping in toward the slow-moving target you're closely escorting."
This isn't actually that unreasonable, at least in the rather constrained roles that I'm describing. Superfreighters take a lot of killing, and in order to do that you have a very limited number of points to attack that don't involve blowing up millions of tons of cargo, mainly sensors and engines. A carefully placed Lancer makes that much harder to do, buying time.
Esquire wrote:I have no idea when the Lancer was designed or by whom, but it occurs to me that it would make a lot more sense as a Clone Wars ship than a Rebellion-era one. Cheap, mass-produced, designed to fill one particular role very well and no others even semi-competently, I could definitely see it having been built as throwaway spare PD for major fleet actions against hordes of droid fighters. It can't cover much space, but that's fine because nothing could possibly cover enough space to deter multiple Lucrehulks' parasite complement, so the goal is to hover next to a Star Destroyer's bridge tower (or other weak point) and keep bombers away.
...
Fuuuu-
That actually makes a frightening amount of sense. Looking at the fighter environment we see at Coruscant in Episode III, and assuming that the Separatists have useful antiship strike fighters, that is one environment where a floating PD battery actually works.
That's what I'm describing, essentially, but for freighters and other large vessels. I talked about this idea for a bit in one of my earlier posts, where I mentioned it escorting cruisers. Capship PD isn't as dense as that provided by a Lancer, and freighter PD isn't anything near, providing a clear niche for the mobile PD platform. What I'm arguing is that this idea works for convoys as well, not only for capships.
I should also note that Lancers aren't cheap, not by a long shot, especially once you think about their running costs, which will rapidly eclipse the purchase cost. A better idea for capships may be modular Lancer-like turrets that can be mounted on critical components, or a droid starfighter that carries the same weapon system. Both have dramatically reduced costs while still giving most of the same functionality.
The problem is that the freighters are long range vessels. In the role you're describing, the corvette is operating out of a local base that provides resupply and support to allow the corvette to operate against offenders in trade routes in deep space. While the distances are large, they aren't anything like as large as those involved in following the trade route itself, and the interdictors also get to choose the speed that they travel at, making the trip times shorter in comparison to the freighters.
So use a tender.
Making it much more expensive, we've already discussed this. Tenders don't come free, and I think that the corvette based solution involving a tender will end up costing more than the Lancer would.
The Lancer isn't armed with PD cannons, it's armed with starfighter-scale lasers. This is important, since the starfighter lasers have substantially more range, allowing it to conceivably protect ships other than itself.
Sort of, but only if they're practically next door and/or much bigger targets than a normal fighter. Also note that in Star Wars, insofar as starships have any kind of point defense, it's typically the same class of guns the fighters mount, rather than yet another even lighter and inexplicably shorter-ranged type. "Point defense" does not mean "droid standing on the hull hosing down the incoming fighter with an E-Web blaster."
There are a couple of good reasons to use an even lighter and shorter ranged PD weapon. The first is power usage. It's vital that PD has a very high fire rate, and is able to maintain that fire rate, as it's unlikely that small numbers of shots will hit high-performance munitions, and a overpowered weapon will simply blow through capacitor charge while having a reduced overall PK and increasing the probability that wild shots will cause fratricide. Focusing PD to a very short range is also beneficial, as it lets the high-rate of fire shots do more damage when they hit.
In addition, the Lancer is very likely able to get it's guns to go further than those on a starfighter, as improved mounts and FCS, as well as larger power supplies, could allow it to have additional flexibility when compared to the same systems on a fighter. With directed energy weapons, I wouldn't be surprised if the Lancer was able to take tactically useful shots at 2x the range that the fighter could take the same shot, as the better sensors and more stable firing platform allows the mount FCS to make more accurate shots with more regularity. The additional power helps as well, maintaining lethality for longer distances and improving the cyclic rate of the guns.
I never claimed that the Lancer was the only ship involved. A specialized ship like the Lancer needs additional assistance, and faster reacting antifighter assets would be an important part of those assets. TIE Interceptors carried by a freighter would be a potential solution.
The problem is that the aforementioned TIEs would also be a perfectly viable way of protecting the whole damn convoy; think "jeep carrier." The challenge of providing a sensible terminal defense for the freighters themselves would better be handled by just bolting some actual point defense turrets onto the freighters themselves, rather than building a whole dedicated warship class that spends ungodly amounts of time motoring around and waiting to jump in front of a squadron-level fighter attack.
This solution has some problems. The big one is what you said earlier:
Simon_Jester wrote:
There have been parts of space with a serious pirate problem since well before the Rebellion got started- look at the Han Solo trilogy for an obvious example. As to the virtual attrition/deterrent issue, there are probably a lot of pirate out there in the equivalent of a Corellian Corvette: ships that could easily lose to a Lancer, if nothing else because the Lancer's shields are practically immune to its limited LTL weapons fit, and can just hang on and keep taking fire until a larger, nastier reinforcing ship arrives.
A starfighter-only solution can't do that. This is one of the big advantages of the Lancer, and one that it's hard to get through other solutions. Adding more bombers can improve PK, but won't keep the assets being protected by drawing fire anything like as much as a dedicated protection frigate would.
And which cannot do anything else, so it cannot, say, be retasked in an emergency to handle a threat other than "provide terminal point defense for a ship that has no point defense of its own."
This isn't that uncommon of a problem for the Empire, remember. If there was a Lancer sitting above the DS1 trench, the Rebels would have been in for a world of trouble, and many other similar situations have been depicted.
As I mentioned before, I think that the Lancer is a fundamentally reasonable idea, but it's weapons fit is a bit off. The problem that I see is demonstrated in how Kondrake's Lancer was mission-killed, by overwhelming the turrets with torpedoes, causing them to divert attention from the starfighters. Swamping is nigh-impossible to solve with beam weapons, but there is a good solution: missiles. I think that a better design would be the same hull as the Lancer, but with a 500 cell VLS with medium-range fully-active missiles. This would be next to impossible to swamp, while being cost-effective and easier to maintain. It would also be able to interdict a larger region of space from fighters, as well as being able to potentially take on ships armed with MTL and greater, using anti-capital torpedoes and their ilk.
IIRC the Lancer was introduced towards the end of the Clone Wars or just after, so with the end of droid fighter swarms I suspect it was never really tested in combat well.
Afterwards it would be a ship with no mission and no champion. Until the Death Star was killed by fighters, I'm guessing that whoever dismissed Rebel fighters as serious threat was demoted out an airlock and his replacement grabbed the Clone Wars design waved it and screamed "I'm doing something about Rebel fighters, see, see! Please don't kill me..."
It was in one of the X-Wing books that either Corrin Horn or Wedge comments that a Lancer is used to keep fighters off of Imperial cap ships. I'd think that most SD captains would prefer to waste a few dozen TIEs rather than frigate in anti-fighter work. Also most ships can't do the Black Prince's flack busts and other gunner tricks. So Lancers would find a use in that role. However that job would not go to aggressive commanders, it would go to officers that like being tied to an ISD and wouldn't be looking for glory.
The Lancer is a design that wasn't combat proven, given a job that TIE fighters could do for less money, and given to commanders that liked the idea of formation flying and taking orders from someone else. Or likely had commanders that pissed off someone more senior and where then given a booby prize command where the choice is death or frigate commander with 20 years seniority.
Hm. According to the Imperial Sourcebook writeup which I'm using, the Lancer was designed as a response to Rebel fighter actions, including the death star trench run. The idea that this is just a gloss, it was intended to face swarms of droid fighters, and it is a clone wars design reused in the civil war period is a good one, though.
It is however explicitly stated to be a military escort, intended to protect warships.
On the subject of starfighter/point defence weapons, I'm basically assuming that they're the same thing- that point defence is effectively composed of fighter throw-weight guns. Light turbolasers are the next step up from there, dual purpose with more reach than a fighter weapon and enough yield to be useful against a corvette, but under some conditions- see; trench run- 'dual purpose' has been a little optimistic.
One of the reasons the Nebulon B is an effective convoy escort, which it is, is its' layers of fighters, LTL, point defence guns- it has a little of everything. Which is one of the reasons the Rebels like it too, and go to quite elaborate lengths to ambush and subdue, and steal, them.
Thinking about convoys, virtual attrition comes to mind. The disruption to trade caused by forcing ships to be convoyed is almost certainly vastly greater than the loss caused to rebel raiders in all but a very few opareas, and while Ackbar may not, the privateers of the Alliance certainly do have the mindset to look for and strike at the soft spots, avoid hard targets, hit and run.
Actually there is a middle ground, a relatively rare breed of low throw weight, low weight light turbolaser with output like a fighter weapon, relatively rapid tracking, but most of the reach of a light turbolaser. This is what customs corvettes mount, and why (apart from their speed) they're a good option. Especially as they have enough lifting capacity to take in tow a captured smuggling ship- that capacity for a weapons module?
Apart from that, with the number and variety of things to defend- sixteen hundred fighting ships of all sizes and classes across fifty thousand planets and their trade routes?- how is the Empire even supposed to begin to defend them all? Escort only where and when you absolutely have to, rely on reaction force and support group tactics where possible?
(Oh, just an aside- considering that what's about to happen is basically destroyer versus destroyer, this is a massive, massive tangent.)
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Hm. According to the Imperial Sourcebook writeup which I'm using, the Lancer was designed as a response to Rebel fighter actions, including the death star trench run. The idea that this is just a gloss, it was intended to face swarms of droid fighters, and it is a clone wars design reused in the civil war period is a good one, though.
I don't think that the Lancer was designed in the Clone Wars, since the design has severe issues with larger numbers of vessels. A relatively small number of fighters would be able to overwhelm its weapons easily, and the Confederacy would easily be able to throw that many fighters at it. I think that a missile-based design would be better for that period, and wouldn't be easily adapted for guns after that decision was made.
It is however explicitly stated to be a military escort, intended to protect warships.
That does make sense, as it's a pretty expensive asset. However, this doesn't justify its size, as the vessels it was supporting would be able to resupply a smaller (and much cheaper) vessel, like a customs corvette.
Thinking about convoys, virtual attrition comes to mind. The disruption to trade caused by forcing ships to be convoyed is almost certainly vastly greater than the loss caused to rebel raiders in all but a very few opareas, and while Ackbar may not, the privateers of the Alliance certainly do have the mindset to look for and strike at the soft spots, avoid hard targets, hit and run.
Well, the Alliance is too small to do much else, and I'd be surprised if they forced the important trade routes to be ran as convoys.
Apart from that, with the number and variety of things to defend- sixteen hundred fighting ships of all sizes and classes across fifty thousand planets and their trade routes?- how is the Empire even supposed to begin to defend them all? Escort only where and when you absolutely have to, rely on reaction force and support group tactics where possible?
That's really the only good choice, as adding defensive weapons to the vessels being escorted is uneconomical, and having enough escorts is impossible. However, HVTs like millitary supply convoys would justify escort in a lot of cases, especially given the propensity of the Rebels to attack them.
(Oh, just an aside- considering that what's about to happen is basically destroyer versus destroyer, this is a massive, massive tangent.)
It's worse than that - this is a spinoff of a spinoff of a minor comment I made in a post 2 pages ago, about hypermissiles, which are marginally more relevant.
Talking about PD, one question that comes up a lot in our discussions is missiles. Missile-based PD doesn't seem to exist at all, despite having a lot of advantages over gun or beam PD, mainly from being much harder to swamp and having better ranges and single-shot PK. The missiles can be relatively inexpensive, especially with command guidance from the launcher vessel, and the footprint of missiles can be substantially smaller than that of a gun-based system, allowing easier retrofits onto existing vessels. The only issue that I can see is that the startup costs are higher than with a gun system, but the running costs are lower, as the missiles don't have to be maintained anything like as much as a laser system.
As an aside, I've been thinking about how mines work in interstellar distances and 3D space. You either need really long ranged warheads, or making the mines themselves into guided missiles to improve their effective ranges. It seems that minefields are an extremely expensive way of interdicting space, to the extent that they hardly make sense at all.
And now, at the end of all of that, a chapter. In which there are some missiles and much explodery.
Edrossaia and her escorts would be first into the system; they had left well ahead of the main body of the group. Both sides were still pretending that nothing was wrong.
Olghaan hadn't thought through the step when Lennart would stop pretending. Didn't expect the contingencies to kick in so soon, that he would ride the politics to the last feasible moment. Not actually the case. The small craft and fighters- losses made up from storage- were all there, which should have set antennae twitching.
The torpedo sphere arrived- made a decent entry, reasonably close to the capital moonlet of the system. Which was where, if everything was on the up and up, she would be needed.
Her captain looked around, began the system sky survey, called on the rebel world below to surrender or be bombarded. So far, so according to plan. Nothing on the location, no tac data or sensor feed from any of the huge flattened globe's many eyes, about the renegade destroyer.
Think, breathe. This is part of the plan. They're not supposed to be here yet. They won't know they've been declared renegade. 'Com-scan,' he nearly used the semi- official nickname and called them con-scam, 'contact the commander fighter group and tell them we have been detached to assist, tell them to prepare to strafe and drop troops.' He nearly added, they're not a threat to us, are they?
Torpedo spheres were only in the same length category as a heavy destroyer, but the clue was in the name- they were huge. There was a curious omission in their design, though- they carried a substantial troop complement, two reinforced regiments, but no fighters of their own.
Oh, a bay was a bay, leave a couple of drop barges behind and there would be room, given the huge size of their crew as well they would be difficult to board, but they were not really intended to fight at all.
Nothing to cover themselves against enemy fighters with except the very substantial armour and shielding, and that still left the possibility of precision, rebel- style component shots. It did not occur to him that the full spectrum transcievers that made up a large part of the scan capacity of the sphere could be used in emit mode as jammers, which was fair enough as it wasn't Imperial doctrine. It was rebel practise, though.
He felt, suddenly, like a blease's skywhale surrounded by ripperwings. Like something highly puncturable, and this part of the plan called for the fighters and gunships to get closer. There seemed to be a terrible lot of ways to damage a torpedo sphere popping into his head.
They did appear to be playing along for the time being, after a short pause presumably communicating with their flagship. Only thought to trace it when it was over, and the subspace com beam would have led to a relay drone anyway.
On the lead gunship, Teret Shulmar was thinking more or less the same thing, and wishing it was their target. He had been thinking hard about which side he was on, too. The fighters and dropships were the few who even had the chance to choose, to change sides if they felt like it, and even though they weren't exactly rebelling, per se, it still came close.
Looking at the looming oblate spheroid had made up his mind. That damn thing practically is the empire, at least a typical product of Imperial thinking; ponderous, slow, featurelessly brutalist apart from the killy bits and those dangerously simplistic, riddled with critical flaws in the details. Screw that.
Unfortunately, it wasn't their prey, not this time, which was a shame because he had a couple of good ideas. The main thing they had to do to it was sucker it in then get out of the blast radius, then, basically, enjoy themselves. The holds of all the space transports were full of mines, and there would be a time to use them.
The next move was their forming up, cued and briefed, waiting for the torpedo sphere to lock on to a weak point in the shield envelope and manoeuvre for a piercing shot through to reach the generator below.
In theory it wouldn't even be hard, against what was quite a cobbled together improvisation in the first place. In practise, it could even have been done for real if they were thinking that way. The fighters had had a plan that might have been enough.
Lennart had agonised over the next step. There were some seventy thousand people on that thing, and it was unfair not to offer them the chance to avoid cremation. Figuring a way to give them that chance to back down without spoiling the tactical approach they would need to destroy them if they chose to stand by their orders had been only moderately difficult, which made the moral choice easier.
Another drone relay. 'Commander HIMS Edrossaia, this is Black Prince Actual. We are determined to stand by our words, and to fight for them. We have evidence of corruption, malfeasance and tyranny in the highest quarters, and will not be silenced. You do not have to play a sacrificial pawn's part in this, stand down.'
The torpedo sphere's commanding officer let the mask slip for a moment, looked to his bridge crew. He was one of the ones who hadn't done much following of the news, and the daily briefs presented to him had the imperial security bureau's hand in them. They tended to suppress the bad, controversial news.
Most people who did go renegade were following old cultural grudges that had not been defused by the new order, or were simply power hungry, and he had been assuming those were Lennart's reasons. The idea that it might be political hadn't occurred to him.
The stormtroopers on the bridge, the imperial security agents glaring at him- even if he believed the renegade, there was nothing he could do.
There was nothing that made it more believable, in fact, than the precautions the system took to make sure he did do what he was told. That they thought they had to bully him into obedience. If he defaulted, there would be someone else who would obey, for the pleasure and the power of making others obey in their turn.
It would be necessary to make some gesture of defiance, for form's sake and that of keeping his own head on his shoulders- then it occurred to him; if the renegade had thought that far ahead, why was he pretending to follow the script?
The tactical display showed motion, the fighters and small craft generating vectors- they were starbursting away from Edrossaia and her escort group at full throttle, expanding outwards, beyond the field of coverage in this close environment of a single Interdictor. Some of them seemed to be leaving small objects behind as they went.
Flash a warning to the incoming ships, then? Warn them that they may be heading for a minefield, that- the security agents were glaring at him again, and something had to be said. 'It doesn't matter how you justify your treason, renegade. You cannot evade the might of the empire, come out and fight.'
Hoping that Swiftsure's plan would work. That they weren't as expendable as he felt, that the torpedo sphere's solid, well braced hull and heavy shielding could take the battering a line destroyer could give until the rest of the force came up; that the blip that had just appeared of an imminent hyperspace emergence was the interdictor cruiser supposed to be there and not the renegade.
Black Prince intercepted the message, the captain regretted the necessity, and put plan A into action. Actually most of the command crew were relieved; what the hell would they do with it if it did surrender, or recuse itself? A problem that they might, hopefully, have later on- if there wasn't too much blood in the way.
The main body was almost in sight, collective bow wave starting to tickle the detectors. They had anticipated Black Prince would try to regain freedom of movement first, had set to emerge close behind the interdictor, but there was a slice of time there that was enough to take advantage of.
Most ships took a minimum five minutes to calculate and set for jump; skill could shave some time off that, but it was hardly possible to get below one hundred seconds without starting to play with the factors of safety, and the inversely proportional danger of transitioning again before the generators had cooled and reset from the last.
Black Prince had made it in sixty before, on a set of motivators now replaced with more powerful and more robust, but the new Myrddin-C field generators had already been overstressed once. As would be the rest of the ship before long- nothing to do but throw the dice and see. This had to be precise- and it was.
There was one blip; two entries, almost on top of each other. The interdictor, slower, barely beginning to gather sensor data, reaching out for the torpedo sphere's datalink, trying to find place and role, knowing they would have to manoeuvre and avoid fire- not knowing they should have manoeuvred straight out of jump.
The renegade destroyer emerged behind, below and a hundred kilometres distant, a short run on targeting data from the fighter group. Perfect killing position.
No orders were required, all prearranged. There were contingencies, but unnecessary- the hyperdrive system went into purge cycle to spool up again for a precalculated course, and the newer gun mounts added during refit drew full power for the first time. All Lennart had to do was nod.
During the later stages of the refit process, they had acquired an extra gun, and this jump had been intended to put it precisely into position for a very specific trick shot. Just aft of and protecting the main bay, on the reinforced foundations of an old quad medium mount, was an additional globe turret for a single 320, part of the axial battery.
A very heavy, and in this version a very controllable weapon. Bolt shape, density, coherence, yield, spin, all highly variable- overelaborate for a service weapon in most hands, but perfect for a trick shot artist.
Torpedo spheres did have one obvious target zone, the amphitheatre of death where row on row of torpedo tubes sat waiting to be shot out in one massive volley to pound a hole in a planetary shield.
Could be protected against beams, particle shielding would be highly counterproductive. Edrossaia's crew had followed normal procedure as part of the bluff; they were armed and ready, and pointing away from the enemy. Not far enough.
It was basically a bank shot; a soft nosed bolt that would deflect on impact with the planetary shield, collapse and compress into a hard, high density shield piercer, glance upwards into the arrayed tubes, the weak spot. Tricky gunmanship, but the gunman was the best they had.
Wouldn't hit dead centre- the angle was wrong- but Aldrem's bolt impacted close enough to the centre of the ray shield zone over the torpedo bay to punch through, shedding power and breaking up into a conical spray of energy, which might have been enough to reduce the impact from distant shielding but with the handful of metres involved, was still hot and bright enough to do damage.
Weapon safeties didn't matter so much when the entire casing melted around the primary. Five hundred tubes, standard launchers- eight ready rounds and the rest in deep storage.
Many, most of the warheads were wrecked rather than triggered, but out of four thousand, enough went high order to challenge the integrity of the rest again, and reach the deep magazines- the sphere burst like a new star.
The interdictor was next on the list, which the howling cloud of com and sensor jamming astern should have told them even if common sense did not. Maximum acceleration, buy distance, buy time- all they were actually doing was clearing flash hazard range.
Minefields were being laid- a mix of the pirate blast- mines at the centre and the tender's supply of beam and captor mines around- and cover sought by the fighters, and as soon as the chief reported minimums achieved, hyperdrive ready to cycle- not a moment too soon as the drone web was picking up bow shocks- the new prow battery opened fire.
There were any number of things that could have gone wrong, but almost all of them had been foreseen. Well, theoretically anyway. Ripple fired, no sense going for the full stress test yet, and the first hit from the heavy twin right in the eyes of the bow blew out the medium frigate's shields.
Another half dozen rounds were enough. At long range, they might have managed to thread the barrage, jam and jink away long enough to rebuild their shields form the proportion that did hit. At point blank? Unlikely. Kill.
There were two minelayers that had been donated by Black Sun, even if they hadn't exactly meant it, and one of the bow shocks flared out and fell away as it found it's mark.
It had been a lucky hit on a lucrative target; the droid- controlled, hacked minelayer had swept across the track of Swiftsure's task force, rippling and registering on many of them- not large enough to knock them out of hyperspace. The one that did was already suffering mechanical trouble.
Escort carrier; solid, squarely built- but new, and the shakedown cruise had been an exercise in fraud. Not really ready at all, unset, the systems tripped and dropped the thing out of hyperspace- into the path of the improvised criminal minelayer- carrier.
Most of the mines had been borrowed for other fields, but there were enough demolition charges on board to be quite effective. The layer did jettison twenty cone shaped objects before accelerating into the intercept; hit the escort carrier starboard quarter low and detonated.
Quite what had been recycled to provide the basic design for the Imperial escort carrier was a little unclarified- they were extremely, almost ridiculously solidly built ships, ton for ton better than many intended to go toe to toe with the enemy, but their gun fit was almost comedically ineffectual.
Even one with half the blast doors not yet fitted to seal properly, engines running out of sequence and half the internal network returning cannot-find faults took some killing. The ship survived the initial impact, the crash, the rupture, the exposure to fire and vacuum and the terrible spalling that shredded men throughout the ship, at least long enough to call for help.
The signal was traceable, it was obvious the ship was hard hit, tumbling out of control and flaring out as the power grid, the veins of the ship, tore it to pieces; what came to help her was an element composed of a strike cruiser, a Munifex light cruiser- medium corvette really- and two Corellian Corvettes.
They were almost lucky; the corvettes triggered the second half of the ambush, the drifting torpedo volley the minelayer had dropped off. Twenty rounds fired up their drives and accelerated in towards the four ships just materialised.
Uncommanded, running on their own internal logic, the capital proton torpedoes divided themselves up and chased their targets, weaving and shimmying to avoid defensive fire.
One of the Corvettes had the sense to roll to bear and shoot, rely on guns for her life; the three warheads homing on her were plucked out of the sky, the last coming close enough to light up the shields and blacken that entire aspect of the ship, but nothing through.
The other turned to run, reasoning cold start, limited initial velocity, in with a chance; but the torpedoes did what so many smaller fighter missiles usually did- looked for the easiest rather than the shortest path.
Fighters' guns usually faced forwards, their sensors and best jammers usually forwards, the area over the engines was usually the weakest shielded; the cartoonish- looking tail chase was often actually the easiest route to the kill.
Capital ships usually had better all round weapons, sensors, jammers, shields not to mention a much hotter ion wake, but the corvette was stern on anyway and the same opportunity awaited. Straight up the skirt, and the thing wasn't even big enough to absorb the energy from two torpedoes- disintegrated in a glowing cloud.
The munifex light cruiser was unlucky. It should have been able to fend off or shoot down the five that addressed it; the thing was hardly short of guns. There was a little confusion over which target was whose; part of the jamming suite was put into reset by the power surge of the guns coming active; nothing much, nothing that would have caused them to fail an exercise even.
Heavier weapons than most light turbolasers, not exactly full dual purpose, not optimised for shooting at missiles, but decent all round coverage, ion cannon backup. They really should have done better than they did. Fortune just was not with them; it wasn't their day.
Never would be again, as two of the torps managed to close and detonate before the defence fire could get them. Not the total spinal evisceration inflicted on the little Corvette, but most of the after half of the ship was now existing at temperatures somewhere upwards of those of a stellar core. Existing was, on consideration, optimistic.
There were survivors in the bow; the hull had stood up to that much. A spray of escape pods, at least.
The strike cruiser had most of the torpedoes homing on it, rolled to bear, gun compensators tracking- hosing the sky with guns on rapid pulse mode, expecting to meet enemy fighters. Jamming was ineffective, largely- it was too big a target, putting out too much fire. Following the muzzle flashes worked.
A burst exploded the first torpedo, the energy flare damaged another close to it; the second fell down the target priorities as the others raced ahead. One clipped in the flank as it made an evasive S- turn, sent rolling away to detonate; ion cannon slammed one leaving it defused and drifting.
One section of guns carrying out a grid shoot, the torpedoes recognising the pattern and trying to fit down the gaps; the adjacent gun section noticing this and concentrating on the spaces in the pattern, one torpedo hit, one forced to evade into the grid of fire and hit.
one partially contacted by an ion bolt, engines shorting, tumbling, picked off by a turbolaser; one more tricked into predictability by a last minute evasion sideslip, made to make an obvious move to catch up, caught and shot.
Two thrown off by evasion and jamming, sensing that the range was within damage potential but increasing, they were past closest approach; they detonated, made relatively low order proximity hits. The energy they threw at shields and sensors whited the defensive fire computers out for a second- long enough for the last pair of torpedoes to contact and explode.
One hit shredded the engines; the other the bridge tower. Modular design had it's advantages, but it was a soft kill at the very least- left the thing uncommanded, tumbling in three axes, such comms as were left howling for help.
Olghaan looked at the holonetted after action report- some action; one sided butchery. We wouldn't have thought of that, he noticed. Not a good sign- a bloody slaughter in fact. Could have been us, though. We wouldn't have been that easy to hit but it would not have been an easy thing to come out unhurt.
We brought them along- don't dodge the responsibility of it, I- in order that it not be us, that we should have an expendable, erodible barrier to absorb Black Prince's nastier tricks and ambushes. Their purpose was, exactly was, to die like this so that it wasn't us.
I should have been expecting that- what, the Interdictor's beacon's gone? Where's the, how? He got the Edrossaia too? Those things are almost ridiculously solid, how did he prompt- kill something designed to take as much pounding as a siege platform? Through the weak points, of course.
Plan A is gone, then, along with, the crews of a torpedo sphere, escort carrier and interdictor- about ninety thousand men. No watchtower, he has escaped our trap and now we are entering his. No turning back.
The only purpose in my still being here is the stories and the people who come to read them. About all else, I no longer care.
Hm. That really is a very conspicuous vulnerability for something like a torpedo sphere which is designed to hover menacingly over a fortified world. If they shoot it center mass with a heavy defense turbolaser, any single-mount weapon in the same general weight class as the V-150, there is a very real danger that it would simply explode. There should be a plan for mitigating that problem.
Sensibly, what would be the counter to that? One option is to hold the torpedoes in deep storage, under enough extra magazine armor that they don't present an obvious target, under normal operating conditions. In that case, you'd only "run out the guns" when you actually expect to take the shot, to identify a weakness in an enemy's planetary shield that takes split-second timing to exploit.
Of course, bad decisions happen. I've heard it said that in real life, the Japanese Long Lance torpedo sank more Japanese cruisers than it did American, because it had so much excess volatility and flammability that it caused disastrous fires and explosions on a number of ships that would otherwise have survived battle damage.
And if they ever get round to painting kill credit on this thing, it's a good thing they cannot be confused for, say, an X-Wing: because those are more or less the only other things in the galaxy with that shape painted on their fuselage.
Also, some interesting rambles about missile technology in there, and why the tail-chase format might be adopted after all. The contrary factor is that the tail is also where a Star Wars fighter's exhaust plume comes out, and that's arguably a more destructive weapon than any of the beams mounted on the front end. We've already seen capital ships use their exhaust plume as a 'burn everything' defense against small close-in targets; a fighter might have trouble doing the same, but it's still a threat.
At least in real life, a Sidewinder that gets pulled into a tail chase doesn't get vaporized if it flies through the jet exhaust of the fighter it's trying to kill.
Simon_Jester wrote:Hm. That really is a very conspicuous vulnerability for something like a torpedo sphere which is designed to hover menacingly over a fortified world. If they shoot it center mass with a heavy defense turbolaser, any single-mount weapon in the same general weight class as the V-150, there is a very real danger that it would simply explode. There should be a plan for mitigating that problem.
Sensibly, what would be the counter to that? One option is to hold the torpedoes in deep storage, under enough extra magazine armor that they don't present an obvious target, under normal operating conditions. In that case, you'd only "run out the guns" when you actually expect to take the shot, to identify a weakness in an enemy's planetary shield that takes split-second timing to exploit.
I think that putting the torpedoes into deep storage makes the problem one of salvo frequency, since you have to move the torpedoes from storage to the launcher, and that takes time and is liable to break.
My best suggestion would be "don't put a torpedo sphere there," but as you mentioned, that spoils the point of the sphere in the first place. This might be a good application for long range carriers (not necessarily hyperdrive enabled), though, to allow the sphere to stand off from its targets.
Of course, bad decisions happen. I've heard it said that in real life, the Japanese Long Lance torpedo sank more Japanese cruisers than it did American, because it had so much excess volatility and flammability that it caused disastrous fires and explosions on a number of ships that would otherwise have survived battle damage.
There's a long, long history of ordinance blowing the ship that was carrying it up, especially when under enemy fire. A good example would be one of the battleships that were sunk by hits on their power magazines.
Also, some interesting rambles about missile technology in there, and why the tail-chase format might be adopted after all. The contrary factor is that the tail is also where a Star Wars fighter's exhaust plume comes out, and that's arguably a more destructive weapon than any of the beams mounted on the front end. We've already seen capital ships use their exhaust plume as a 'burn everything' defense against small close-in targets; a fighter might have trouble doing the same, but it's still a threat.
At least in real life, a Sidewinder that gets pulled into a tail chase doesn't get vaporized if it flies through the jet exhaust of the fighter it's trying to kill.
It would be reasonable to presume that the frontal surfaces of missiles are hardened to avoid them burning up in high energy environments. This hardening would also help when hitting shields, so it seems like a good idea in general.
I'm not sure that the additional vulnerability offsets the loss of PK that getting into a tail chase implies. It seems like a tactic that the missile would employ when there were no better options, or when it was targeting a vessel that it knew had good side defences. However, it seems like SW missiles have better burn lengths than modern ones, by rather a large margin. This lets them have much better PKs in tail-chase situations. On the other hand, they seem to trade off acceleration for this, so there's a tradeoff here.
macfanpro wrote:I think that putting the torpedoes into deep storage makes the problem one of salvo frequency, since you have to move the torpedoes from storage to the launcher, and that takes time and is liable to break.
Torpedo spheres are, doctrinally, not just bombardment platforms; they have a dedicated and specialized role, which you can look up on the wiki. To fulfill that role, they do have a legitimate need to fire huge bursts of torpedoes from all available launchers... but they don't need to do it very frequently. These aren't Honorverse podlayers, these are the equivalent of Doc Smith's Galactic Patrol "maulers" trying to crack a planetary shield.
That same reality of their operation precludes the use of massive carriers for torpedo bombers; getting a thousand-plus torpedo bombers to do what a torpedo sphere does would be prohibitively difficult.
There's a long, long history of ordinance blowing the ship that was carrying it up, especially when under enemy fire. A good example would be one of the battleships that were sunk by hits on their power magazines.
It's not just that, though, it's the problem of carrying unusually volatile ordnance (like torpedo warheads) in an exposed position (like in tubes permanently ready to fire) where relatively light enemy fire can cause them to cook off.
This is also a potential problem with VLS missile cells. In real life we don't worry about it, because antiship missiles have gotten so deadly that ships aren't seriously expected to remain mission capable after sustaining more than a couple of hits from modern weapons, so having big boxes of missiles sitting there vulnerable to a top-attack doesn't really make things worse than they would be anyway. In Star Wars, or at least the ECR version thereof, ships are expected to give and take sustained fire from each others' weapons for long periods.
It's why the Victory sd has those side wings.
It's a cover to protect those missile launchers untill they are used.
But normaly they don't show this well on the top/side view drawnings of the Victory.
macfanpro wrote:I think that putting the torpedoes into deep storage makes the problem one of salvo frequency, since you have to move the torpedoes from storage to the launcher, and that takes time and is liable to break.
Torpedo spheres are, doctrinally, not just bombardment platforms; they have a dedicated and specialized role, which you can look up on the wiki. To fulfill that role, they do have a legitimate need to fire huge bursts of torpedoes from all available launchers... but they don't need to do it very frequently. These aren't Honorverse podlayers, these are the equivalent of Doc Smith's Galactic Patrol "maulers" trying to crack a planetary shield.
That's a good point, and it justifies the use of lots of ready tubes to store the torpedoes. I think, then, that the only response to planetary defence artillery would be reducing the volatility of the missiles themselves, which may or may not be possible at all.
That same reality of their operation precludes the use of massive carriers for torpedo bombers; getting a thousand-plus torpedo bombers to do what a torpedo sphere does would be prohibitively difficult.
You might be able to go all trade federation here, but the point stands.
This is also a potential problem with VLS missile cells. In real life we don't worry about it, because antiship missiles have gotten so deadly that ships aren't seriously expected to remain mission capable after sustaining more than a couple of hits from modern weapons, so having big boxes of missiles sitting there vulnerable to a top-attack doesn't really make things worse than they would be anyway. In Star Wars, or at least the ECR version thereof, ships are expected to give and take sustained fire from each others' weapons for long periods.
I think that modern weapons also have the advantage over SW weapons of being more inert at temperatures and pressures that they're likely to encounter, making them somewhat safer to store in a big, exposed, VLS.
Another potential approach may be to distribute the launch tubes over the surface of the sphere, trading off utterly horrid reload times (imagine getting torpedoes through the mess hall) for being harder to kill. By rotating the sphere, you could get roughly similar salvo weights, but making it harder to make the turbolaser shots to kill the generators.
The best solution would be reducing the reactivity of the torpedoes, but that may not be possible. I'm not sure that the sphere designers had any other good possibilities to explore in their design.
macfanpro wrote:That's a good point, and it justifies the use of lots of ready tubes to store the torpedoes. I think, then, that the only response to planetary defence artillery would be reducing the volatility of the missiles themselves, which may or may not be possible at all.
Because of what the sphere does, it is actually quite reasonable to keep all its torpedoes stored under heavy armor, and only roll them out into the ready magazines when you know you are going to be taking a shot in the next... half hour or so. If the mission does not require such a shot to be fired at that moment, the torpedoes should not be in an exposed place in the first place. At the very least, only some of them should be loaded, enough for the sphere to defend itself with a torpedo launch, but not enough to explosively cook off and blow the whole ship apart.
Of course, I'm envisioning it as possible to run the torpedoes along dedicated tracks, conveyors, or freight elevators to get them quickly from the heavily armored magazines tucked into the core of the ship, up to the ready magazines just below the launchers.
That same reality of their operation precludes the use of massive carriers for torpedo bombers; getting a thousand-plus torpedo bombers to do what a torpedo sphere does would be prohibitively difficult.
You might be able to go all trade federation here, but the point stands.
Nonono; I thought this was obvious. Darnit.
The torpedo sphere doesn't just launch four thousand torpedoes at a targeted weak point in a planetary shield. It fires them all at once, in a massed, carefully coordinated volley, intended to deliver a time on target strike that will locally burn through the shield. That opens a gap, so they can put a turbolaser bolt through the underlying shield generator.
It would be very difficult to put a thousand-plus small craft in racetrack orbits above a weak spot in the shield, have the bombers identify the shield, and get all four thousand pieces of ordnance to launch and strike in synchronized patterns exactly on schedule. The reason the torpedo sphere exists is because firing all the torpedoes from one launch platform greatly simplifies the problem of actually hitting the target at the right instant.
Another potential approach may be to distribute the launch tubes over the surface of the sphere, trading off utterly horrid reload times (imagine getting torpedoes through the mess hall) for being harder to kill. By rotating the sphere, you could get roughly similar salvo weights, but making it harder to make the turbolaser shots to kill the generators.
Again, the problem isn't just salvo weight, it's salvo synchronization. As noted, my solution would be to keep the torpedoes in the center of the ship, and roll them out on dedicated hoists when you expect to need to fire them soon. In this case that might have helped quite a bit, because the torpedo sphere had no reason to load four thousand torpedoes to deal with a single renegade destroyer.
Another option would be to spread the launchers out more over the surface of the vessel. This are maneuverable ordance and advanced targeting computers with weapons control. It should be possible to launcher from one hemisphere, not just half a hemisphere, and still have all the torpedoes hit the target at the same time.
macfanpro wrote:That's a good point, and it justifies the use of lots of ready tubes to store the torpedoes. I think, then, that the only response to planetary defence artillery would be reducing the volatility of the missiles themselves, which may or may not be possible at all.
Because of what the sphere does, it is actually quite reasonable to keep all its torpedoes stored under heavy armor, and only roll them out into the ready magazines when you know you are going to be taking a shot in the next... half hour or so. If the mission does not require such a shot to be fired at that moment, the torpedoes should not be in an exposed place in the first place. At the very least, only some of them should be loaded, enough for the sphere to defend itself with a torpedo launch, but not enough to explosively cook off and blow the whole ship apart.
The problem is that planetary defence artillery isn't going to be nice to you, and they have the luxury of being able to wait for you, so to speak. If you're going to have a full salvo in the tubes at any one time, then it's going to be a major liability, especially if the ground operators recognize the signs of an impending launch. From what's depicted, it seems that surface petaton-range SHTL would be able to penetrate well enough to cause burn-through to the tubes at any time, and if a heavy emplacement waited until the right time, they could easily kill the sphere.
Of course, I'm envisioning it as possible to run the torpedoes along dedicated tracks, conveyors, or freight elevators to get them quickly from the heavily armored magazines tucked into the core of the ship, up to the ready magazines just below the launchers.
These systems never work anything like as well as the designers said they would. I'd say that 5-10% of them would never get there, for a really wide range of quite surprising problems.
That same reality of their operation precludes the use of massive carriers for torpedo bombers; getting a thousand-plus torpedo bombers to do what a torpedo sphere does would be prohibitively difficult.
You might be able to go all trade federation here, but the point stands.
Nonono; I thought this was obvious. Darnit.
The torpedo sphere doesn't just launch four thousand torpedoes at a targeted weak point in a planetary shield. It fires them all at once, in a massed, carefully coordinated volley, intended to deliver a time on target strike that will locally burn through the shield. That opens a gap, so they can put a turbolaser bolt through the underlying shield generator.
It would be very difficult to put a thousand-plus small craft in racetrack orbits above a weak spot in the shield, have the bombers identify the shield, and get all four thousand pieces of ordnance to launch and strike in synchronized patterns exactly on schedule. The reason the torpedo sphere exists is because firing all the torpedoes from one launch platform greatly simplifies the problem of actually hitting the target at the right instant.
SW ships don't have to use orbits, remember, as they have more than enough fuel and acceleration to cancel gravity's influence. They have enough spare propulsion to maintain powered positions, allowing bomber swarms to congregate in a powered position, then maintain the swarm until launch.
The swarm would require a additional SIGINT ship to allow shield analysis and swarm coordination. However, you could have redundant control vessels, and they're much harder to hit, so the swarm would be less vulnerable.
Another potential approach may be to distribute the launch tubes over the surface of the sphere, trading off utterly horrid reload times (imagine getting torpedoes through the mess hall) for being harder to kill. By rotating the sphere, you could get roughly similar salvo weights, but making it harder to make the turbolaser shots to kill the generators.
Again, the problem isn't just salvo weight, it's salvo synchronization. As noted, my solution would be to keep the torpedoes in the center of the ship, and roll them out on dedicated hoists when you expect to need to fire them soon. In this case that might have helped quite a bit, because the torpedo sphere had no reason to load four thousand torpedoes to deal with a single renegade destroyer.
This was an inarguably insane use of the torpedo sphere, and one that the designers wouldn't have ever really designed for. When faced with peer capital ships, torpedo spheres should run away and let support elements handle the threat.
Torpedo spheres are designed for a even nastier role, planetary bombardment inside the umbrella of ground planetary defences. The torpedo sphere needs to make a full salvo while being engaged by multiple 300+ teraton HTL and petaton SHTL, combined with ion fire, anticap mines, ground based anticap missiles, and fighters. This means that it needs to be able to take hits from HTL and SHTL with full torpedo salvoes ready to fire, and the design presented isn't able to do that.
InsaneTD wrote:Another option would be to spread the launchers out more over the surface of the vessel. This are maneuverable ordance and advanced targeting computers with weapons control. It should be possible to launcher from one hemisphere, not just half a hemisphere, and still have all the torpedoes hit the target at the same time.
That's what I was suggesting earlier. It makes a nightmare of torpedo loading (think of all the various rails needed), but it can prevent sectoral hits from causing mass cookoffs. To explain how it would work, the torpedoes would launch, orient, and then accelerate at a precomputed low velocity. This reduced acceleration would allow all torpedoes to be launched into a plane of missiles. Once all torpedoes were launched, the torpedoes would accelerate to attack velocity.
Now consider this: this swarm of 4000 torpedoes has just been launched from the sphere. What happens if the defenders fire a SHTL flack burst into it?
Ok I like the ending section, where we hear to a certain extent Olghaan's got things under control and this is him analysing/depleting Lennart's repertoire of tricks. but I still can't help but roll my eyes a bit at Lennart massacring the first wave with such ease. Especially the special turbolaser trick shot.
I also have to question why considering the interdictor was noted to be both puny and mission critical by Olghaan in a previous chapter it didn't have a tough escort in close formation with it. Like a couple of those destroyers in the squadron.
Crazedwraith wrote:I also have to question why considering the interdictor was noted to be both puny and mission critical by Olghaan in a previous chapter it didn't have a tough escort in close formation with it. Like a couple of those destroyers in the squadron.
I think the Torpedo Sphere right next to it might be considered a tough escort.
The trick shot that took it out was no surprise to us, as we know Pel Aldrems REAL capability with a turbolaser. Olghaan and co were NOT aware of that 320, as it was a late addition, and they are also unaware of the crews real capabilities as the performance reviews are falsified (noone is allowed to have a higher rating than x) as per the squadron's standing orders so that valuable personnel isn't "lost" to death squadron.
In this context the trick shot was
1, in character
2, believeable
3, totally unexpected for Olghaan
Torpedo Sphere's are not ship-to-ship combatants and it was said in the briefing scene that it was not expected to fight Black Prince but was there for its scanners. Even in the chapter, the sphere's captain basically expected to have to take fire until backup arrived. Not duke it out if the Black Prince.
Yeah Aldrem's good but the trickshot is ridiculous. We've never heard of bouncing shots off shields before. We've never heard of this new super duper trick shot gun in story before.(ECR mentioned wanting to add an extra gun so Black Prince could be a 74, out-of-universe) It's an asspull. And its unnecessary. Black Prince could just have microjumped to the right place to put a broadside down the torpedo tubes.
Crazedwraith wrote:Ok I like the ending section, where we hear to a certain extent Olghaan's got things under control and this is him analysing/depleting Lennart's repertoire of tricks. but I still can't help but roll my eyes a bit at Lennart massacring the first wave with such ease. Especially the special turbolaser trick shot.
We have heard of one thing before, these. The torpedo sphere is a siege ship, and needs to be able to take hits from petaton-range planetary defence artillery, like that turbolaser, and the operators of that artillery wouldn't have to make a trick shot like that (since their turbolaser is underneath the torpedo sphere already); instead, they could simply fire the turbolaser with the parameters to make a shield penetrator shot.
I find it surprising, then, that a torpedo sphere would be vulnerable to a 100-gigaton (after shield bounce, down from 320-gigaton) shot, as it needs to be able to take petaton shots from similar aspects.
Given that it was noted that particle-shielding that particular point would be counter productive, any sort of mass-based weapon or torpedo would have been a better choice for the shot than a bank-hit with a turbolaser. There's crazy-awesome, and then there's contradicting yourself. Even detaching one of the shuttles with a large bomb on-board would have excited less comment than what was actually chosen.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
Vehrec wrote:Given that it was noted that particle-shielding that particular point would be counter productive, any sort of mass-based weapon or torpedo would have been a better choice for the shot than a bank-hit with a turbolaser. There's crazy-awesome, and then there's contradicting yourself. Even detaching one of the shuttles with a large bomb on-board would have excited less comment than what was actually chosen.
It's a lot more vulnerable to interception, though, as the torpedo sphere presumably has PD and other anti fighter armament. The reason why is in a siege situation, one good tactic would be to launch fighters from under the shield, and have them use the shield for protection for as long as possible, then at the last minute leave the protected area, right on top of the sphere. Another way to do this would be to strap an anticap proton torpedo onto a chemical rocket, and launch it from within the shield. Since the sphere needs to stay relatively close to the shield, the torpedo is protected by the planetary defences until the very last minute.
I'd imagine, then, that the PD on the sphere must be pretty extensive, as all of these situations provide miniscule engagement windows (as the attackers are protected by the shield for the majority of their onset), while requiring the infliction of massive attrition on large numbers of targets (in the anticap torpedo on rocket scenario). I'd guess that the sphere solves this problem like the (wait for it) Lancer does, with large numbers of fighter scale PD armament. I'd also suggest that the area that they would be the most concentrated would be around the launcher area.
As I've mentioned before, I think that the whole idea of the trickshot working is somewhat strange. The sphere needs to face far greater turbolaser threats as a part of its normal mission, yet it was killed with a shot that (post reflection) any PDA operator could pull off?
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
