Jump Point Defense

W

Wolf Dog

Spaceman
Something that always bothered me about Fleet Action is that the jump points weren't defended. As a strangle point, it seems like they would be highly defensible locations. At the very least you'd expect them to be mined or, if more ambitious, why not move the fleet up to defend them like in the movie?

Since this was not done (or in the case of mining at least not mentioned so not a pivotal tactic) in the battle, there must be a reason. A minefield would have had to be deployed after the 3rd Fleet jumped to Sol, and there might not have been time to deploy one. Also, a minefield that would be effective against such a large fleet might not be realistic. Shockwaves from the initial explosions and the number of ships the Kilrathi would have to throw into the mix might quickly make a hole in the field. As for bringing the fleet up, this might have been avoided since there was no chance for suprise and doing so would allow the Kilrathi to jump in their fighters and attack the fleet with no risk to their cap ships (assuming the fighters are jump capable).

Additional tactics not seen in WC but that would seem to make sense would be jumping mines in front of an incoming fleet on jump approach. The shockwave could alter the trajectory of the ships at the last moment before the jump which hopefully would have disasterous consequences. Another possibility might be deploying a debris field within the probablistic area where ships materialize from the jump. While this could also be cleared quickly by the initial explosions, it has the bonus of being effective even against the best combatants since it would bypass shields and armor of any affected ships. In fact, it would be more successful against ships with greater volume which would be more likely to hit a piece of debris. This would seem like a really cheap way to try and take out a Hakaga, but such a debris field would also have to be deployed after the Third fleet returned to Sol. Given the ammount and size of debris you would want, it would likely take a good while to deploy too (assuming such material was even available).

What do you guys think about these and other possible methods of defending a jump point? Would they have any chance of being effective? Do they fit the universe?
 
Given that there are several occasions where we see mined jump points (or where we ourselves mine them) or defend them against incoming ships, I don't quite understand why you're asking about such things not being done.
 
In the Battle of Earth, they should have at least mined the jump point. It might have given them the extra time to regroup the remnants of the fleet. Although after reading the novels so many times, I am still ticked off why Jamison was able to force Confed to reduce the fleet to 2-4 carriers. You would have think that from previous experience in world history in world war 1 and 2, that such a truce offered by the Kilrathi is highly questionable and suspicious.
There are 101 different ways/reason why nothing was done by they way I see it I would have done the following -
1. Convince Admiral Nuragami was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2668 to not allow the fleet to stand down and have convince the President to send a recon fleet at least or something to monitor the Kilrathi space and determine if there was any trap layed out.
2. If that did not work and if the events led to the point where the 3rd Fleet were force to retreat to Earth I would have deployed mine sweepers + escorts to mine the jump points that would have led to Sol. Then it would buy as much time possible to regroup any remaining available carriers and capital ships and defend major key positions and contact the Border Worlds region to send any available capital ships and come from rear of the Kilrathi fleet if possible.
This is all a relative point of view however like I said there is a 101 different ways/reason to see this.
 
I think there were several reasons they didnt mine the jump point in the Battle of Earth. First, they needed as much time as possible just to get the carriers online and assembled into formation, they didnt have time to detail off transports(which are also minelayers) away to the jump point. Second, IIRC, they still didnt know what route the Kilrathi were going to take. There is obviously more than one jump point into Sol, so I believe they didnt know exactly what route to defend until only a marginal amount time before the actual fight. Basically the biggest problem was time and the availability of ships during that time. At least thats my take on it.
 
I've always wondered why they didn't destroy jump points. I'm sure there's a reason, I just haven't heard it. I've tried to destroy jump points with my fighter, but they're invincible for some reason. You'd think they could've destroyed all jump points going to and from Sol in order to keep the huge unbeatable Kilrathi fleet from moving into Sol in the losing scenarios of WC3. Also, why didn't they do that before the Battle of Earth and other invasion scenarios?
 
Sarty said:
Second, IIRC, they still didnt know what route the Kilrathi were going to take. There is obviously more than one jump point into Sol, so I believe they didnt know exactly what route to defend until only a marginal amount time before the actual fight.
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Tolwn knew Thrakhath would come straight in at Sol....he was going for kill shot...
 
@Mjr. Whoopass
Mh...wrong game maybe ^_^

...but its an interesting point about the jumppoints not beeing guarded.
I would have at least set some defanceturrets around the jumpoints at least for the most importend system at some point during the war. Maybe not enough firepower to hold an attacker but maybe enough to buy some time.

Still we don't know if Confed would have the resources for that or another reason could be the sometimes strange behavoir of JP as mentioned in the books so that if the JPs outgoing place changed their could be the possibility that friendly ships collide with mines or turrets.

Whatever the reason is why they aren't their it still is a good reason for the gamedesigners to send you on patrole around JP once in a while ^_^
 
Mjr. Whoopass said:
I've always wondered why they didn't destroy jump points. I'm sure there's a reason, I just haven't heard it. I've tried to destroy jump points with my fighter, but they're invincible for some reason. You'd think they could've destroyed all jump points going to and from Sol in order to keep the huge unbeatable Kilrathi fleet from moving into Sol in the losing scenarios of WC3. Also, why didn't they do that before the Battle of Earth and other invasion scenarios?
Click to expand...

What you were actually shooting at was probably just the jump buoy. According to that article about jump points, the point itself is a natural phenomena that connects two points in space, so I don't think destroying the buoy would close it. I wonder if it is even possible to destroy a jump point in the wing commander universe. Maybe it could be done freespace style by detonating a ship in mid-jump. While this would have cut off Sol from the rest of the universe (until warp is invented :) ) this should have worked as a last resort.
 
There is no way of closing down a jump point. Kilrathi had the ability to create a cloak that hid the jump point but even a ship exploding in mid jump will not close down the jump tunnel. In AS when the kilrathi are jumping into McAuliffe they lose one of their carriers during jump, only bits and pieces are ejected out the other end.
 
I don't know how exactly the WC JP work but I think they where tunnels of extrem gravity. If thats so it would need so much energie to close a JP that the gravimetrical forces would collapse...I don't belive that their is anything powerfull enough in WC to do that.

But guarding a JP with ships or turreted mines or even a small station for very importend systems should be possible.
Also the cloaking technologie of the Kilrathi is something interesting....would love to see Thrakath face if Confed would had the technologie to do it and when Thrakath came charing at Earth the JP just disapearse...man I think he would nuke everything in its way to find another route to Earth.
 
Another tactic, though not seen WC, would be to block a jump point with space debris. Ships jumping into the objects path would be recieving a painful welcome gift.
 
Problem with that would be that you can't controle these debris.
What when a retreating friendly ships comes through the JP?

Also you would need quite some big debris.
IIRC when you ram a capship with your fighter the cap wasn't damaged at all so what object would be massiv enought to do some damage to a capship.
 
The novels take about the consequences of two ships occupying the same space on them when one jumped into said space....they cease to exist
 
I should think that what with the rather extreme mothballing ops that Confed was running, they wouldn't have the either the transports to lay the mines, or even enough mines to deploy.

And, as I recall reading in the Jump FAQ, mining was a standard practice, but it was countered by sending probes through the jump point first.

So, whether or not they had mined the jump point, it wouldn't have really mattered.
 
In WC3 were also able to "shield" a jump point (Freya I think) which hardly made much sense to me except just another mission to fly to destroy the generator. The mission briefinf made it look like there was a shield over the actual buoy itself, which would do nothing since (as said before) the buoy's just a marker. How can you shield the actual gate itself? And if so, why wasn't it done more often? I doubt it woulda made much difference in the Battle of Earth since Terra's resources were stretched too thin to even think about trying to concoct such an elaborate mechanism, but still interesting that this tactic was never used before nor afterwards.
 
Again, from the Jump FAQ, iirc, buoys were not merely markers. That info was already in the Nav computer. They also served as relays, sending information through the line. Thus, shielding one would be important in some instances.
 
Porthos said:
I should think that what with the rather extreme mothballing ops that Confed was running, they wouldn't have the either the transports to lay the mines, or even enough mines to deploy.

And, as I recall reading in the Jump FAQ, mining was a standard practice, but it was countered by sending probes through the jump point first.
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You would think they could have used the civilian craft to deploy a mine field, but if Confed was destroying ordinance in addition to mothballing the fleet then they likely didn't have the mines to use.

As for mines fields being taken out by probes, you'd have to be using really dumb homing mines for that to work. The easy counter would be to have the mines descriminate targets such that they wouldn't home in on probes.
 
The problem still remains, Wolf Dog - they had but a week or so to do anything, and they STILL had to worry about sending ships to the front and then pulling them back; this kind of precludes a lot of the deployment of static defenses as they had neither the ships (and I really doubt that laying mines consists of filling a cargo hold and then just opening the hatch when the time comes, thus eliminating civvie ships as a possible minelayer) or the personnel to do this with, given half the fleet's crewers were scattered all across the Confederation. Also, asteroids can't determine who's an enemy and who's a friend, which means the jump point is rendered unusable... and there are several jump points in Sol system - two were mentioned in Fleet Action, after all. Also, 'smart' mines would've still been fairly detectable by the probes, which is how minelayers began their deployment, IIRC, so that would've been useless.

Minefields can delay an enemy, but not really stop a determined one. Automated turrets ditto; they can hurt someone, but the only way to really kill a fleet at a jump point is to use another fleet, as per the WC movie. And the problem is that a properly prepared fleet can blow through a patrol or picket at the jump point if it's moving fast enough or the defenders are unprepared, as Kruger's task force showed in the novel False Colors, where the relatively static jump point picket deployed by Governor Ragark was unable to mount a significant attack on Kruger's rescue force before they'd already left engagement range.

And Confed, at the time of Fleet Action, didn't have much of a fleet left to deploy, which meant that even the ambush of the WC movie would've been impossible to pull... especially with the enemy sending full-fledged carriers and cruisers in as a vanguard, with the heavily armored Hakaga-class supercarriers following. The normal fleet cruisers and carriers would've blown right past or through Concordia and her escorts (remembering that Lexington and the other carrier pulled out of spacedock were effectively sitting ducks with almost no propulsion), and then nuked Earth before turning to finish off the remaining Confederation forces.

Between the fact that jump points are whole regions of space where a jumping ship can arrive at any point in (meaning that you have to cover a vast amount of space with a lot of mines or debris), and the fact that static defenses don't do much against mobile attack units (capships being able to move around those defenses by using alternate jump points), then the most one can do is to dump a few mines and maybe jump point monitoring equipment to keep watch for you. Incidentally, this tactic was apparently used by the Kilrathi and the Confederation.
 
Somehow I think that it is next to impossible that they would mothball the fleet leaving only 2 carriers left. What did Jamison do you covince the President to recall the fleet.
High Command should have warned the consequences of mothballing a majority of their fleet.
 
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