Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I don't think that is incompatible with my scenario. SOMEONE has to be killing Confed pilots. My take is this: in the Confed fleet, 20% of the pilots do 80% of the killing. In the Kilrathi, it is something like 5% do 95%. They have a core of highly skilled, highly talented pilots who are the core of the Kilrathi fleet. Due to their sheer amount of overpopulation, and a culture demanding that warriors prove themselves in battle, much of the rest of their fighter force is made up of young, inexperienced rookies flying cheap, hastily constructed fighters. This results in a high rate of attrition with a handful of extremely successful Kilrathi pilots.
I understand your take (shifting numbers aside)... but the issue here is finding something in the games (heck, or the novels or manuals since I acknowledge those) that supports that take. As best I can tell, there's no evidence of Kilrathi overpopulation.
(That said, these particular claims don't really affect the debate... since percentages do not define a whole.)
Yeah, but Japan lost the war in a few years. By comparison the Kilrathi war was a stalemate for decades. If Confed was maintaining a kill-ratio much greater than the relative numbers advantage the Kilrathi held, they would have won the war fairly quickly.
But there's no evidence that Confed *does* have a higher kill-ratio (in WC1, at least - we know from the WCP Guide they did before Custer's Carnival and that that changed). Confed's ability to kill a thousand enemy fighters with ten ace pilots doesn't in any way counterindicate that the Kilrathi are doing the same thing.
I actually kind of wrote a little timeline for WC based on my own interpretation. The way I figured it is that, the Vega Campaign and the survey of the data obtained from the wreckage of the Venice starbase revealed to Confed Tactical what they had expected all along -- that the Kilrathi outnumbered Confed greatly and that this would only get worse due to the size of the Empire and the sheer amount of population pressure (they're cats after all, they have like 8 kids in a go).
I'm all for supporting fanfic... but if Confed's intelligence didn't have an idea of what size force they were fighting for *twenty years* then they really really didn't deserve to win the war in the first place.
(With regards to the 'litters' issue... there's not necessarily any evidence of this. Every set of Kilrathi 'siblings' we've ever seen have been of different ages. Furthermore, every Kilrathi birth we've ever seen mentioned has been a single individual. Looking like cats isn't necessarily the same as being cats, in this instance.)
I'm just sort of equating 100 fighters = 1 fleet carrier or equivalent. I'm not saying those 13 carriers are *destroyed*, but without fighters they are empty floating boxes. The implication behind Confed having 10-15 fleet carriers is that they have about 1000-1500 fighters aboard these carriers. So with a 1.5 ratio, the Kilrathi would have about 1500-2250 fighters aboard their heavy carriers. So a loss of 1300 fighters would represent the annihilation of half their fighter force aboard these carriers -- a catastrophic loss regardless whether they were ground based, cruiser-based or carrier-based -- inflicted by 7 pilots in less than 3 years. And it doesn't really matter whether the number is 900, 1000, or 1300 either.
The problem with that assumption is that 1,300 fighters alone lack the most important ability of the carrier: power projection. Every planet/moon/star base/etc. in the Wing Commander universe has its supply of fighters - heck, the round starbases in WC2 carrrier four times the complement of a carrier. Without the ability to move those fighters from System A to System C those fighters are generally unimportant.
In the process of fighting through eleven systems (in WC1, not counting various concurrent fiction) the Tiger's Claw may have shot down 1,300 fighters... but killing a dozen local garrisons worth of fighters isn't the same thing as destroying a fleet carrier and its complement, because those local squadrons would never be a direct threat in any other situation.
Here's the modern equivalent: China has a two hundred million man army. That's significantly larger than any other force in the world... and communist China is generally looked upon in an unfavorable light by the rest of the world. Why aren't they a thread? No power projection. China has no lifting capacity... their army may be two hundred times the size of any other, but it can't really be sent anywhere to fight a war.
I just think it's easier to assume the Kilrathi hold a large numerical advantage such that losing 1000 fighters, the Sivar, and the Vega Sector is bad, real bad. But FAR from beating them. As far as the number, I said *at least* 4 to 1. I waffle on the actual number since there's no way of knowing. In SM2, it feels like it has to be 5 to 1 or greater. In WC2, more like 3 to 1. In WC3, 5 to 1 again.
Well, see, exactly - there's no way to tell (save in the novels, where it's actually stated). You just can't establish facts about an entire universe worth of facts based on one man (Blair)'s experiences, nor can odds be used to establish a total number (in any situation).
Aside: Of *course* the odds are 5 to 1 in the Secret Missions... your carrier is alone behind enemy lines. If a Kilrathi carrier were in Confed space, the odds would be 5 to 1 against it. The same thing applies to the entire WC1 experience... if a Kilrathi carrier were attacking a Confed system it'd be up against the 400 fighters from that systems base (mentioned earlier) and the odds would be 4 to 1 against it.
This was just an off-shoot of my argument that Forstchen places too much importance on carriers (because cruisers and destroyers can carry them too unlike in WW2). I just got the picture when I read Fleet Action that they were real concerned about how many carriers they had where as I saw it, it wouldn't really make a difference.
The fighters carried by cruisers and destroyers in the Wing Commander universe are light and medium units, though. The Exeter carried eighteen Rapier, the Tallahassee carried five Hellcats and the mighty Waterloo carried forty Ferrets and Epees. These are small recon and light strike units... they don't fulfill the same role as a carrier at all (not to mention that their limited numbers means that the vast majority of an escort ships fighter complement will be for point defense...).
I have no idea regarding the similarities behind Midway and the Battle of Earth. I was just arguing the base at Midway isn't equivalent to Earth. I would think the various orbital and planetary bases in the Sol System would make fine staging points for a defense. I have no idea what Midway's was like.
Midway was (essentially) two islands. One of them had three airstrips, the other had a seaplane base. Planes from Midway performed reconassance missions during the battle, but none were involved in the air strikes.
Orbital and planetary bases were used to defend Earth (there's a great example of that in the TPoF novel, which talks about how Confed moved Orion into LEO for the final defense of Earth)... but that doesn't change the fact that the units based on them aren't the experienced and well equipped units that have already been depleted facing the Kilrathi on the frontier.
(Relying on orbital bases in a situation like the Battle of Terra may be a problem - as Fleet Action pointed out, orbital mechanics means that there's a good chance that some of your bases are going to be on the other side of the system when the enemy attacks. All of Confed's outer planets assets (Port of Titan and such) were farther away from Earth than the Kilrathi.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that carrier did not continue on to the Battle of Earth due to the damage it took. Four torpedoes messed it up pretty bad, I don't think it's fair to say it could have taken 10 more based on what was in the book. But four torpedoes will mess up a Hakaga but only take down two Fralthra, leaving five more perfectly functional ships.
The carrier was still operating under its own power... a big part of the decision to send it home (along with two regular carriers) was because it simply wasn't needed. The Kilrathi were rushing forward without establishing a supply line... so as fighters were depleted they could return entire carriers to their space rather than risk them in further actions.
Easier to defend? A few lucky hits and the ship is crippled. 7-8 ships are much, MUCH easier to defend do to the nature of their being 7-8 of them. All other things being equal any sane commander would rather have multiple small ships as a means of reducing the risk involved. Cheaper? How the heck would you know? Judging by the fact it took so much effort just to build five of them, I'm guessing they're not very cheap at all.
One of the first things Thrakhath introduced regarding the Hakagas was their massive amount of anti-fighter defenses. Destroyers and cruisers are quick to build assembly line ships which don't have the anti-fighter weaponry of a carrier.
Yeah, and it makes no difference whatsoever to my argument that corvettes don't have hangar bays. You bring up the US Navy, but that is my whole point. On Earth -- with gravity -- you NEED a massive metal floating runway to carry fighters through the ocean. You CANNOT do it on cruiser or destroyer. In SPACE, you can, hence the Fralthra carrying 40 fighters. Yes, there are tradeoffs involved, but the fact that ships that are not dedicated carriers can carry a lot of fighters, does in fact DIMINISH, NOT ELIMINATE the importance of carriers in space. IMHO, the games seem to indicate the Kilrathi generally prefer to use heavy cruisers/light carriers on the front lines as a means of deploying fighters, using carriers more as mobile headquarters and resupply. This is something I think Forstchen missed, hence the obsession with the # of carriers on both sides at every engagement.
The implication in the Wing Commander games has always been that a flight deck is necessary for a 'true' fighter complement - regardless of physics, you need a flight deck (for whatever reason) to launch heavy fighters and bombers.