Logistics and Trickery, the Only Resort
Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2020 9:40 am
Even a cursory glance at the statistics for Terran weapons and ships reveals them to be about as useful in set piece battle against the Loroi or Umiak as a pre-dreadnaught against a supercarrier.
But to take this analogy entirely too far, a supercarrier has very high operational costs and severe logistical requirements compared to a pre-dreadnaught. And the vast distance between Earth and the territory of either major power makes an assault on the humans a very expensive one - the ships involved will require massive supply stores and be useless for the duration of the transit.
Extracting appreciable resources from the humans requires sending convoys (which have to be guarded) through unfamiliar territory. And since this is a long route that takes you through fringe territories, you have to worry about hostiles (if near contested territory, the enemy; if far from civilization, space pirates). Now, the convoys themselves better have something valuable, and raw resources almost certainly won't cut it given the logistics involved. Nuclear isotopes might be used, but do you really want your new subjects producing massive quantities of fissile material in which a thermonuclear device to scuttle your valuable transport ship might be hidden?
So your best bet is to give them manufacturing blueprints and help them work their way up to producing finished goods for you, but then you have to worry about giving far-flung disloyal subjects advanced technology that they might one day turn against you - and remember, your lines of communication are very, very tenuous so it will take months for word of a rebellion to reach your central military command.
And if you don't want to be bled dry supplying this outpost in the middle of nowhere, you need to locally synthesize antimatter. Which means either giving away this potent tech to the locals or establishing an expensive colony to synthesize it yourself (and still give the locals a fighting chance at stealing your precious tech through clever espionage).
This situation is even worse for munitions, which you really want to have against any incursions from your rival, so they can't just steal your new outpost from you. The Umiak, in particular, probably have to bring along a massive cargo of torpedoes in their supply vessels. The Loroi don't have that particular worry, but their ships are fuel-inefficient vis-a-vis the Umiak, so they have to tow along twice as much antimatter.
Supply ships are likely to be relatively slow, filled with highly volatile (antimatter for fuel and explosives) material, and weakly armored. In short: their escorts must be paranoid and take a "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude. They should be easily provoked into massive retaliation against a perceived threat.
And the enemy is unfamiliar with your technology and weaponry (I doubt the Historian construct, the only alien with such knowledge, will be sharing much with the Loroi or Umiak in this regard), they will have an even bigger incentive for trigger-happiness.
The enemy will be curious as to your tech. Leave derelict space probes or freighters near jump points in the long route to Eridani (the only reliable entry point to your system). Set them to detonate thermonuclear devices when a sufficiently large target gets sufficiently close. Build the tension as much as you can. Maybe even have what appears to be an abandoned facility on a barren stellar object fire a single, powerful laser beam at the enemy supply vessel, not with any realistic hope of destroying it, but in the hopes of building MOAR PARANOIA.
And when the enemy does arrive at Eridani, have a division or three of fake ships - hollow, but opaque-to-sensors "vessels" with minimal drive systems and some puny dime store armaments (bottom barrel mass drivers, weak torpedoes that are little more than flashy nuclear fireworks, etc). When the enemy arrives in the system, filled with trigger-happy paranoia, they will instantly go into evasive maneuvers and start firing (both actions burning up fuel). If they're the Umiak, they probably throw a lot of torpedoes at you, too.
If you really want to screw with them, have a few thousand nukes with minimal propulsion capabilities lying around the jump point detonate. No damage intended. You just want to freak them out with more fireworks and make them think you're shooting something real at them.
And leave lots more of them lying around. Include a couple dozen real torpedoes, so if the enemy gets complacent you can try to rush a ship or two. If you have 20,000 cheap nuclear devices and 100 real torpedoes that all "deploy" from asteroids and space junk in your system but don't actually launch or detonate until properly provoked (ie someone gets close enough for a real torpedo to rush at them), your enemy will want to shoot all of them. More antimatter fuel wasted.
And use real railguns mounted on random asteroids! They don't need to hit the enemy to force them to keep accelerating or decelerating. You just want to make them burn more fuel.
Now eventually, they will get wise. They'll properly respond and avoid burning too many resources against you. But how much of their supply did they actually waste at your farthest outpost? Probably a lot more than they'd like. And they still have no idea regarding the disposition of your real fleet, in numbers or location.
A prudent officer might well pull back.If they do not, then you've carefully left a few (powered off and decently hidden) combatants in each system and if they try to run a cargo ship through you try to attack it. Even in the likely event you can't damage them, you raise their paranoia and suddenly they feel compelled to sweep every corner of the systems they've attacked for potential foes. Every piece of sufficiently large space debris might seem a threat (again, even sniping ineffectually at a cargo vessel with mass drivers may worry them, because it means there are enemies in their rear).
So they waste more and more fuel sweeping systems of enemies. And you keep trying to provoke the use of moar fuel and munitions.
The goal is to force them to do one of two things:
(a) They retreat. You win.
(b) They go straight for your capital planet in your capital system with depleted munitions and depleted fuel reserves. Their maneuverability is constrained and so is their willingness to shoot and their ability to use torpedoes. You keep your best real combat vessels, and lots of cheap AI-piloted empty shells in your home system. Your goal is to get them to rush you blindly and get close enough to your real ships (remember, they don't know for sure what is and isn't the space equivalent of a rubber tank) for you to inflict serious damage.
If you are very lucky, they lose. This is unlikely. If you are somewhat lucky, they take enough damage to be forced to choose between losing their entire strike force (with no ability to properly communicate what happened back to headquarters) while annihilating you (because they have expended way too much fuel to return home, and you can use nukes on any ground forces that try to forage on land - yes, they can annihilate you, but you can deny meaningful resupply) and the other option: negotiating your surrender on favorable terms to you.
This is far from a surefire plan, but a focus on extreme supply-focused attrition to produce a single costly battle at the end, while desperate, does seem effective at pretty thoroughly ruining the enemy's ability to properly subjugate you fully. They can annihilate you, yes, but this offers considerable incentive for a mild tributary status, given the limited resources they could extract from you even with total control of your system (simply on account of the vast distances involved, and the fact that any cargo vessels will have to pass through dangerous territories).
Anyhow, at least it is a plan, right?
But to take this analogy entirely too far, a supercarrier has very high operational costs and severe logistical requirements compared to a pre-dreadnaught. And the vast distance between Earth and the territory of either major power makes an assault on the humans a very expensive one - the ships involved will require massive supply stores and be useless for the duration of the transit.
Extracting appreciable resources from the humans requires sending convoys (which have to be guarded) through unfamiliar territory. And since this is a long route that takes you through fringe territories, you have to worry about hostiles (if near contested territory, the enemy; if far from civilization, space pirates). Now, the convoys themselves better have something valuable, and raw resources almost certainly won't cut it given the logistics involved. Nuclear isotopes might be used, but do you really want your new subjects producing massive quantities of fissile material in which a thermonuclear device to scuttle your valuable transport ship might be hidden?
So your best bet is to give them manufacturing blueprints and help them work their way up to producing finished goods for you, but then you have to worry about giving far-flung disloyal subjects advanced technology that they might one day turn against you - and remember, your lines of communication are very, very tenuous so it will take months for word of a rebellion to reach your central military command.
And if you don't want to be bled dry supplying this outpost in the middle of nowhere, you need to locally synthesize antimatter. Which means either giving away this potent tech to the locals or establishing an expensive colony to synthesize it yourself (and still give the locals a fighting chance at stealing your precious tech through clever espionage).
This situation is even worse for munitions, which you really want to have against any incursions from your rival, so they can't just steal your new outpost from you. The Umiak, in particular, probably have to bring along a massive cargo of torpedoes in their supply vessels. The Loroi don't have that particular worry, but their ships are fuel-inefficient vis-a-vis the Umiak, so they have to tow along twice as much antimatter.
Supply ships are likely to be relatively slow, filled with highly volatile (antimatter for fuel and explosives) material, and weakly armored. In short: their escorts must be paranoid and take a "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude. They should be easily provoked into massive retaliation against a perceived threat.
And the enemy is unfamiliar with your technology and weaponry (I doubt the Historian construct, the only alien with such knowledge, will be sharing much with the Loroi or Umiak in this regard), they will have an even bigger incentive for trigger-happiness.
The enemy will be curious as to your tech. Leave derelict space probes or freighters near jump points in the long route to Eridani (the only reliable entry point to your system). Set them to detonate thermonuclear devices when a sufficiently large target gets sufficiently close. Build the tension as much as you can. Maybe even have what appears to be an abandoned facility on a barren stellar object fire a single, powerful laser beam at the enemy supply vessel, not with any realistic hope of destroying it, but in the hopes of building MOAR PARANOIA.
And when the enemy does arrive at Eridani, have a division or three of fake ships - hollow, but opaque-to-sensors "vessels" with minimal drive systems and some puny dime store armaments (bottom barrel mass drivers, weak torpedoes that are little more than flashy nuclear fireworks, etc). When the enemy arrives in the system, filled with trigger-happy paranoia, they will instantly go into evasive maneuvers and start firing (both actions burning up fuel). If they're the Umiak, they probably throw a lot of torpedoes at you, too.
If you really want to screw with them, have a few thousand nukes with minimal propulsion capabilities lying around the jump point detonate. No damage intended. You just want to freak them out with more fireworks and make them think you're shooting something real at them.
And leave lots more of them lying around. Include a couple dozen real torpedoes, so if the enemy gets complacent you can try to rush a ship or two. If you have 20,000 cheap nuclear devices and 100 real torpedoes that all "deploy" from asteroids and space junk in your system but don't actually launch or detonate until properly provoked (ie someone gets close enough for a real torpedo to rush at them), your enemy will want to shoot all of them. More antimatter fuel wasted.
And use real railguns mounted on random asteroids! They don't need to hit the enemy to force them to keep accelerating or decelerating. You just want to make them burn more fuel.
Now eventually, they will get wise. They'll properly respond and avoid burning too many resources against you. But how much of their supply did they actually waste at your farthest outpost? Probably a lot more than they'd like. And they still have no idea regarding the disposition of your real fleet, in numbers or location.
A prudent officer might well pull back.If they do not, then you've carefully left a few (powered off and decently hidden) combatants in each system and if they try to run a cargo ship through you try to attack it. Even in the likely event you can't damage them, you raise their paranoia and suddenly they feel compelled to sweep every corner of the systems they've attacked for potential foes. Every piece of sufficiently large space debris might seem a threat (again, even sniping ineffectually at a cargo vessel with mass drivers may worry them, because it means there are enemies in their rear).
So they waste more and more fuel sweeping systems of enemies. And you keep trying to provoke the use of moar fuel and munitions.
The goal is to force them to do one of two things:
(a) They retreat. You win.
(b) They go straight for your capital planet in your capital system with depleted munitions and depleted fuel reserves. Their maneuverability is constrained and so is their willingness to shoot and their ability to use torpedoes. You keep your best real combat vessels, and lots of cheap AI-piloted empty shells in your home system. Your goal is to get them to rush you blindly and get close enough to your real ships (remember, they don't know for sure what is and isn't the space equivalent of a rubber tank) for you to inflict serious damage.
If you are very lucky, they lose. This is unlikely. If you are somewhat lucky, they take enough damage to be forced to choose between losing their entire strike force (with no ability to properly communicate what happened back to headquarters) while annihilating you (because they have expended way too much fuel to return home, and you can use nukes on any ground forces that try to forage on land - yes, they can annihilate you, but you can deny meaningful resupply) and the other option: negotiating your surrender on favorable terms to you.
This is far from a surefire plan, but a focus on extreme supply-focused attrition to produce a single costly battle at the end, while desperate, does seem effective at pretty thoroughly ruining the enemy's ability to properly subjugate you fully. They can annihilate you, yes, but this offers considerable incentive for a mild tributary status, given the limited resources they could extract from you even with total control of your system (simply on account of the vast distances involved, and the fact that any cargo vessels will have to pass through dangerous territories).
Anyhow, at least it is a plan, right?