Earth Defense Campaign

D

David Wade

2nd Lieutenant
Was reading Fleet Action last night and caught something mabye you know better than me. Did Thrakath have strotium-90 missiles on the carriers at all. All I saw in the novel was the cruisers having them which leads to the strategy of hitting the support ships first then work towards the carriers of the Hakaga fleet. The other question I had is how would you guys have commanded that fight differently
 
I'd never had signed the armistice :)

Ok if that doesn't count, I would have ordered Dr.Severin to up his research and complete at least a dozen temblor bombs ahead of time. It wouldn't help defend Earth but as soon as the Chief of Staffs ship went down, I'd have Kilrah reduced to ashes.
 
I was thinking use more Wake escorts to keep the pressure on but if that armistice was signed then maybe use production to keep building wake escort carriers to replace "Older Obsolete" ones and then use them to harass the Hakaga Fleet and focus on the support ships as they seem to be the only ones with the Strotium 90 missiles if I read the novel correctly
 
Yes, the novel talks about the cruisers being armed with the missiles. We can assume that cruisers do the missile launching because that's the way it works today, and that's what inspired the writer - cruise missiles today are usually not launched from carriers, but from other vessels, including submarines and cruisers. What the novel does not say is that only cruisers can launch those missiles. It's easily conceivable that the Hakaga also carried such missiles, but did not launch them, because they weren't close enough (the cruisers moved ahead of the carriers), and because they were too busy with fighter operations.

In any case, I doubt that destroying the cruisers would have been a viable strategy. When a carrier is destroyed, this heavily disrupts enemy carrier operations in all kinds of ways. Destroying carriers helped quickly whittle down enemy forces. On the other hand, concentrating on the cruisers would have meant constantly dealing with all the fighters the carriers could muster. It also means leaving the initiative to the enemy, giving them the freedom to use their carriers to destroy your own. And what happens if you manage to destroy the cruisers, but the enemy carriers ultimately win the battle? Even if there really would have been no more Strontium missiles to contend with, you still have a fleet of enemy bombers over the Earth, probably dropping anti-matter bombs and whatever else ground-attack weaponry aircraft can carry in the Wing Commander universe.
 
Yes, what Confed needed was not to destroy the cruisers, but rather to have more antimissile weapons in position to shoot down the warheads.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if the carriers didn't carry missiles. Making a jack-of-all-trades ship that can do everything is not efficient (that's presumably why we see most of the ships are specialized ships like cruisers and carriers and lighter escorts; only a very few are "do everything" ships like the Concordia or the Gettysburg (supercruiser) ). I mean, you could stick missile tubes or anti matter guns on a Snakeir or a Hakaga, I'm sure, but the space you take up to do that would eat up some of your capacity for fuel storage, magazine, damage control, a few extra bombers, etc. And frankly, a carrier doesn't really need missiles -- it has lots of bombers that can attack other cap ships or bombard planets from much greater ranges than missiles can.

(Regarding jack-of-all-trades ships, we do see hangars stuck on cruisers and destroyers because, in the fighter dominated world of WC, it would be suicide not to. Any ship without any kind of fighter capacity would be completely unable to operate in any area without carrier support).

If you're going to arm some of your ships with anti-planet missiles, it makes sense to arm your fastest ships with missiles: hence cruisers. These can maneuver around away from the main fleet and strike with them, exactly as occurs in Fleet Action. In fact, this is not too dissimilar from the manner in which frigates were used in the 18th century. They weren't your main ships of the line, but because of their speed and maneuverability, they would maneuver away from the big fleets to take out the commerce and supporting ships.
 
Its also the same policy the US Navy used in WWII with its destroyers and destroyer escorts they would dart in launch a spread of torpedoes and then run for all they were worth back to the cruiser line hopefully under the cover of carrier air.
 
That's why I am saying if you could sucker the Kilrathi into ambushing their Cruisers away from the main fleet then the civilian casualties would not have been as bad as the Hakaga Fleet did not have any troop transports so if you hit the support ships then knocked out the older carriers then the Hakagas would have been alone and very vulnerable by the time they reached Earth
 
problem is, confed was massively outnumbered. Tolwyn had to abandon the outer systems and let the Kilrathi potentially roll them up (they didn't, they burnt straight into earth), even then it was only the intervention of Landreich that stopped earth getting 90'd, along with a Kilrathi traitor.
I don't think their was enough of a confed fleet to lure enough kilrathi cruisers into an ambush, plus they had plenty more in reserve.
if confed had kept hitting the supply lines before the armistice, they'd have defeated the kilrathi, who didn't value supply and considered confess tactics cowardly , and even then confed couldn't take the empire in a straight up fight
 
It is important to keep in mind that Confed could continue to fight, while obviously greatly weakened, even had Earth been wiped out. But Confed could not continue to fight had they lost their fleet. For this reason, any kind of special focus on the cruisers just wouldn't have made sense, because in doing so, you virtually guarantee total defeat in the war - and at this time, that seemed to mean the death of all humans in any case. What would be the benefit of saving Earth if in doing so, you guarantee that in the space of the weeks or months to come, Earth will be devastated along with many other worlds?
 
Can a jump point be destroyed or disrupted? Either by detonating something inside it, or destroying the navigational beacon? Its been awhile since I've read Fleet Action, but if it were my decision and I knew the Kilrathi were bearing down on Earth I may try to do something to the jump point to either prevent the Kilrathi from using it and force them to take a longer route, or make it more difficult to use. The idea being to slow the Kilrathi and give more time to prepare defences and for additional Confed forces to arrive.
 
ck9791 said:
Can a jump point be destroyed or disrupted? Either by detonating something inside it, or destroying the navigational beacon? Its been awhile since I've read Fleet Action, but if it were my decision and I knew the Kilrathi were bearing down on Earth I may try to do something to the jump point to either prevent the Kilrathi from using it and force them to take a longer route, or make it more difficult to use. The idea being to slow the Kilrathi and give more time to prepare defences and for additional Confed forces to arrive.
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The Confederation Handbook has a whole section on the physics behind jump points and jump point nodes. Granted, that guide was written for the movie (well after the events of Fleet Action) but is generally accepted as canon. There's a whole guide on the topic here at CIC, but the long and the short of it is that (if I understand the technobabble correctly) local gravitational fields determine the positions and available energy pool for Akwende jumps. Disrupting/destroying a jump point would require an event on the order of a supernova to occur, and it wouldn't screw with just a single jump point - it could affect jump points sector-wide. That sort of thing sounds like it'd be a tactic banned by interstellar treaty (not necessarily between the Confederation and Kilrathi, mind you, but between the member systems of the Confederation) due to the potentially catastrophic effect it would have on interstellar commerce.

I'll have to find that page again.

The Cats use a technique to passively 'cloak' a jump point in WC3; I seem to recall that particular piece of trickery was dependent upon the presence of a nebula in the Ariel system - I want to say it was a different system in the novelization. They flooded the jump sphere with the nebula's gases, preventing Confederation sensors from detecting its presence.

EDIT: Here we go - https://www.wcnews.com/articles/art6.shtml - it's a pretty extensive writeup on the topic from the CIC's earlier days, and the bulk of it also appears in the Confederation Handbook.
 
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The Confed Handbook article is actually taken almost directly from the 1994 series bible! It's fluff about Jump Point someone at Origin wrote pretty early on.
 
Closing the jump point would be physically impossible. The intelligent thing to do would be to place the biggest, densest mine field possible around the jump point, and station as much forces as possible to try to kill anything as soon as it jumps in. The only reason that fighting should be happening near the planet is because of a failure to interdict the attackers when they jumped in.

Ships are vulnerable when they jump in--their engines are at low thrust for the jump, all of their fighters are landed, they are briefly disoriented, they are separated from the part of their forces that has not yet completed the jump, and furthermore their formations are messed up because the wormhole has a bit of randomness in it such that they don't maintain exact relative position (part of why each ship needs to move clear of the jump point lest the next ship jump in on top of them). Thus, an enemy who is ready to strike a jumping-in force can get in the first hits--see Tolwyn's strike on the Kilrathi fleet at the end of the WC movie.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
The Confed Handbook article is actually taken almost directly from the 1994 series bible! It's fluff about Jump Point someone at Origin wrote pretty early on.
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You're right (obviously). I've seen the series bible before (y'all offered it as a download for one of the recent birthday celebrations IIRC); it's been a while since I've looked at it and I'd forgotten all that stuff was in it.
 
The Handbook is especially interesting because it was done by the same guys that did every manual from WC2 to WCP Gold, David Ladyman's IMGS team. So grand arguments about continuity aside, the tone is just right!
 
I just wanted to know how you guys would have conducted the campaign. Another variant what if you had access to 15 fully stocked Wake escort Carriers would that change how you conduct this campaign
 
Based on the question, I gather you're planning (or maybe already doing) a "what if" RPG scenario where a different set of pre-conditions exist as opposed to those prior to the canonical Battle of Earth. Perhaps one where the Confederation discovered the ruse before so much of the Fleet had been dismantled. What specific changes to the pre-conditions are you thinking about?

Given the same set of pre-conditions, I'm not sure I would (or could) run the campaign any differently than the way it played out, to be honest. Then again, I'm not an Admiral in any sense other than my CIC rank at the time of this posting...
 
capi3101 said:
Based on the question, I gather you're planning (or maybe already doing) a "what if" RPG scenario where a different set of pre-conditions exist as opposed to those prior to the canonical Battle of Earth. Perhaps one where the Confederation discovered the ruse before so much of the Fleet had been dismantled. What specific changes to the pre-conditions are you thinking about?

Given the same set of pre-conditions, I'm not sure I would (or could) run the campaign any differently than the way it played out, to be honest. Then again, I'm not an Admiral in any sense other than my CIC rank at the time of this posting...
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what I was thinking was Tolwyn sent out on a recon mission with 6 CVEs no escorts. That's the first part of the campaign to see if they can find the Hari shipyard without raising suspicion. After that would be an extra five CVEs for reinforcement at each battle Warsaw, Sirius, Gilead I think were the systems. When they finally reach Earth there are an extra six CVs at Luna. I figure at least six Marine divisions to run the boarding operations. But the catch to this if they cant find the Hari shipyard then they will face 8-12 Hakagas depending on Die Rolls. That should make it interesting what do you guys think
 
David Wade said:
what I was thinking was Tolwyn sent out on a recon mission with 6 CVEs no escorts. That's the first part of the campaign to see if they can find the Hari shipyard without raising suspicion. After that would be an extra five CVEs for reinforcement at each battle Warsaw, Sirius, Gilead I think were the systems. When they finally reach Earth there are an extra six CVs at Luna. I figure at least six Marine divisions to run the boarding operations. But the catch to this if they cant find the Hari shipyard then they will face 8-12 Hakagas depending on Die Rolls. That should make it interesting what do you guys think
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Okay - so you're wanting to do an alternative history scenario, either where the Kilrathi ruse was discovered before most of Confed's fleet was dismantled or the conditions of the armistice were not as strict, i.e. one where the political situation was much different and Confed was somewhat more ready to face the Kilrathi onslaught, or where the Kilrathi had access to more materiel than they did (perhaps Confed's commerce raiding hadn't been as effective).

How are you planning on doing the Hari Sector? The old CIC map is horribly (and deliberately IIRC) incomplete. Were you planning on building a custom map?

Point of order: Warsaw, Gilead and Sirius Prime are generally accepted as all three being located in Sirius; all three were destroyed during the Battle of Sirius (and should either be listed as individual Nav Points on a Nav Map of the system or planets/moons in a solar model). Collectively they had a population of more than two billion people at the time of the Kilrathi campaign.

What flight compliment were you thinking of loading out the Wakes with, a Ferret / Rapier-II/G / Sabre mix like Tarawa, or were you thinking of swapping things out a bit?

It's an interesting idea, I suppose. I mean, even with 15 CVEs the Confederation forces would still be horribly outnumbered if you go with the standard numbers of fighters listed for the involved classes in WCRPG's Core Rules. What might be more interesting, though, would be a campaign to slip that 6 CVE escort mission through known Kilrathi space without getting caught in the first place...
 
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