Supplies, Schmupplies

[Pantastic]

I've noticed some SF uses 'securing supply lines' or 'securing a base near the target' as a reason for putting a delay into a story even if it doesn't fit with the capabilities of the world's tech, as part of the 'space ships are like ocean ships' brain bug. That is, one side should be able to strike directly at the other one by the capabilities and technology shown, but for some reason spend months or years securing nearby planets or systems to use for supply depots or secure a supply line. Since the author wants a long war or a lot of small invasions, he just says 'amateurs study battles, professionals study logistics, so it's a supply problem' without looking at whether there are any logistics problems.

A lot of SF settings are set up so that hyperspace protects ships using it from interception, so you don't have to worry about 'submarines' intercepting your supply ships. In these universes, it's possible to bring a tanker along with your ships, and then refuel in normal space in the middle of nowhere or in hyperspace, then have it hang out with any missle freighters and repair ships in hyperspace or in an out of the way place until the main fleet gets done fighting. And in many cases ships are routinely shown operating at much longer distances than the 'supply line problem' when the author doesn't want a delay. Space fleets can bombard planets into submission, troop ships can keep troops comfortable for weeks or months, and can land them directly from ship. In these settings, there is no real reason for intermediate bases, it's just a holdover from oceanic wars.

Babylon 5 has a good example of this. During the Earth-Minbari war, it takes the Minbari 2 years to get from the start of the war to fighting at Earth, supposedly because they needed to take Earth's colonies and build up supply lines. But Minbari isn't that far from Earth (according to what I found in a search, it's 25LY distant compared to B5 at 18LY), we've seen them operate at longer distances, and the colonies themselves are just outposts, not military threats. They don't have to worry about significant ship damage, since they know they can blow through Earth ships without trouble, and they don't have to worry about sustaining ground forces, since they're planning to wipe out Earth. They should only need enough time to mobilize their fleets (weeks, maybe months) then hop to earth and be done with it.

The main war in the Honor Harrington series is a huge example too. Manticore makes a point of making alliances with less powerful star systems so that they have a defense in depth before the war starts. But aside from Grayson (who build a significant fleet of their own) and Erewhon (who holds one terminus of the manticore wormhole), all that the other systems do is tie up ships for system defense and agitate for more protection when Haven raids them. It's always the threat of the home fleet, not simple distance from Haven systems that disuades Haven from a direct assault on Manticore, the depth appears to be all detriment and no gain.

Then in Ashes of Victory, the SKM fleet can destroy any Havenite force they encounter without trouble, and they go on to spend months conquering around two dozen assorted star systems so they'll have the supply lines to assault the Haven system itself. In War of Honor, after the ceasefire when tensions heat up again, Haven worries about the fact that those forward bases leave them vulnerable. But in the same book Haven, with worse supply abilities than Manticore, takes a huge fleet through normal space completely around and past all of Manticorian space, sits on an uninhabited star for weeks or months, then attacks the Manticorian forces nearby when the ceasefire ends. There's simply no good reason for Manticore to have spend AOV grabbing worthless systems, they should have struck directly at Haven and ended the war right then and there by occupying haven and destroying or taking all infrastructure, and clearly could have done it.

Anyone see any other examples of this, or see anything wrong with what I'm saying?

[Batman]

The term 'Yes' comes to mind.
In B5, the Minbari didn't take out human outposts because they NEEDED to, which they didn't. They COULD have struck at Earth any time they wanted to. Except they weren't out to CONQUER EA. They meant to ANNIHILATE it. And I notice how you blithely ignore them actually BYPASSING EA outposts because they could always deal with them later. They weren't out for a quick victory, they were bent on GENOCIDE.
As for the HH universe you DO know Weber goes into great detail as to WHY simply going to your opponent's capital and smash them doesn't work, right?
And has it ever occurred to you that all those allies that add all that useless strategic depth ALSO add to the Allliances shipbuilding capacity in special and general industrial capacity in general?

[Stofsk]

I've noticed some SF uses 'securing supply lines' or 'securing a base near the target' as a reason for putting a delay into a story even if it doesn't fit with the capabilities of the world's tech, as part of the 'space ships are like ocean ships' brain bug. That is, one side should be able to strike directly at the other one by the capabilities and technology shown, but for some reason spend months or years securing nearby planets or systems to use for supply depots or secure a supply line. Since the author wants a long war or a lot of small invasions, he just says 'amateurs study battles, professionals study logistics, so it's a supply problem' without looking at whether there are any logistics problems.

Except there will always be logistics problems. You can't get past that.

A lot of SF settings are set up so that hyperspace protects ships using it from interception, so you don't have to worry about 'submarines' intercepting your supply ships. In these universes, it's possible to bring a tanker along with your ships, and then refuel in normal space in the middle of nowhere or in hyperspace, then have it hang out with any missle freighters and repair ships in hyperspace or in an out of the way place until the main fleet gets done fighting. And in many cases ships are routinely shown operating at much longer distances than the 'supply line problem' when the author doesn't want a delay. Space fleets can bombard planets into submission, troop ships can keep troops comfortable for weeks or months, and can land them directly from ship. In these settings, there is no real reason for intermediate bases, it's just a holdover from oceanic wars.

What you forget is that the logistics issues for a single ship are a lot different to a task force with a mission to invade and conquer a planet or a system of planets. The starship Enterprise travelling through unexplorered space has different requirements than Task Force Awesome, with the mission to invade the planet of the gaping assholes, to bring peace, justice and capitalism to them. And because they have 'space oil'.

Enterprise is one ship, with just over 400 guys onboard it. It's set up for redundancy (in 'The Cage' Pike had half the crew that Kirk did), it doesn't need to worry about fuel, and even with a 5 year mission where it'll be by itself for most of the time they still need to pop in to a starbase every now and then. As for the Task Force, you're talking about many more ships, but also many more crew to look after. The troop transports probably can't hold their troops indefinitely, since they probably aren't used to carry heaps of troops when there's no war going on. Being able to resupply and get reinforcements is also an issue with logistics. One issue that is important is how the hyperspace or FTL model works. If it's limitless and instantaneous, resupplying is less of an issue. If on the other hand, you can't go that far with FTL before you need to refuel, having a logistics supply train is pretty unavoidable.

The details of the setting determine this. But saying 'it's just an ocean analogy' doesn't help at all.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The main war in the Honor Harrington series is a huge example too. Manticore makes a point of making alliances with less powerful star systems so that they have a defense in depth before the war starts. But aside from Grayson (who build a significant fleet of their own) and Erewhon (who holds one terminus of the manticore wormhole), all that the other systems do is tie up ships for system defense and agitate for more protection when Haven raids them. It's always the threat of the home fleet, not simple distance from Haven systems that disuades Haven from a direct assault on Manticore, the depth appears to be all detriment and no gain.

Then in Ashes of Victory, the SKM fleet can destroy any Havenite force they encounter without trouble, and they go on to spend months conquering around two dozen assorted star systems so they'll have the supply lines to assault the Haven system itself. In War of Honor, after the ceasefire when tensions heat up again, Haven worries about the fact that those forward bases leave them vulnerable. But in the same book Haven, with worse supply abilities than Manticore, takes a huge fleet through normal space completely around and past all of Manticorian space, sits on an uninhabited star for weeks or months, then attacks the Manticorian forces nearby when the ceasefire ends. There's simply no good reason for Manticore to have spend AOV grabbing worthless systems, they should have struck directly at Haven and ended the war right then and there by occupying haven and destroying or taking all infrastructure, and clearly could have done it.

First, they didn't know how much better they were for sure; and at that point it's uncertain that they could have taken Haven in an all out assault. Especially since they had to keep their home system covered. It would be awkward to conquer the Haven system and find out that the PRN has conquered the Manticore system in the meantime because you used the ships of Home Fleet to do it.

Second, the "uninhabited star" in question was one where Haven had built a fleet base, not just some random undeveloped star.

And third, they didn't know that such deep strike tactics actually worked; recall, there hadn't been a war on this scale in centuries if ever. One of the later books in facts comments on how all the effort they put into building defensive depth in the end didn't mean much because tactics had changed.

"Good. Having said that, however," Honor continued, "there are some members of the Government—and a few people at Admiralty House, for that matter—who think we should actually be encouraging Zanzibar, and possibly Alizon, as well, to declare nonbelligerent status."

"They what?" Brigham blinked. "After all the trouble we went to to build the Alliance in the first place?"

"The situation was a bit different then," Honor pointed out. "We were on our own against the Peeps, and we were looking for strategic depth. Zanzibar and Alizon have both been net contributors to the Alliance—or would have been, if the need to rebuild both of them after McQueen's Operation Icarus hadn't cost so much—but what we really wanted them for was forward bases when everyone was still thinking in terms of system-by-system advances."

She shrugged.

"Strategic thinking's changed, as our own ops—and Tourville's attack on Zanzibar—demonstrate. Both sides are thinking in terms of deep strikes now, operating deep into 'enemy territory,' and simple strategic depth, unless you've got one heck of a lot of it, is looking less and less important.

[Sea Skimmer]

Anyone see any other examples of this, or see anything wrong with what I'm saying?

Nope, I agree completely. So too for that matter does the US military, which is already moving to a sea basing model in which all supply dumps stay on ships and supplies are moved directly to combat units from those mobile ships. Space warfare would absurdly favor this. Supplies dumped on planets surface would need to be thrown back into orbit to go anywhere, so a planet as a supply depot is irrelevant to space logistics. All that matters is the original source of the supplies and the distance from that point to the objective. If the distance is too far, you need a supply dump in the middle so that you can use more relays of ships. But that's easy enough, since you can just 'cluster' sealed shipping containers and let them drift under guard in deep space until another ship can pick them up.

The only reason we needed crap like island hopping in WW2 was because we needed sheltered water to unload ships, and air bases to bring in land based air power. Neither factor matters at all in space which has no tides or storms, while spacecraft don't need 10,000 foot long runways. So nothing stops a forward logistics base from being a cluster of ships or relocatable space stations in deep space, and nothing else makes very much sense. Once you have space superiority you can setup a logistics base anywhere you want. Planet hopping should only be necessary is if that's required to eliminate the planets as threats to the supply line. But in reality, all that requires is seizing control of orbit, not the planet surface. Once you control orbit you can blow away anything on the surface that would be a threat to stuff in orbit or deep space. It might not even require seizing orbit, if you are simply able to raid the area with enough regular intensity to keep it from being a major base. We did that all the time in WW2. We'd bypass Japanese held islands, then just bomb them every week or so to keep the airfield runways cratered. Some Japanese islands were kept neutralized like this for two years.

Only in extreme situations would planetary invasions be required. Mainly, if the distance to the enemy was SO MASSIVE that you could not operate a supply line at all. You needed to build actual forward factories that make supplies from local resources. But even in that case, most resources could be found on asteroids and moons. You would still have little to no reason to invade anything against ground opposition. Plus if the distance really was that massive, one might ask what on earth you are fighting over.

[fgalkin]

The term 'Yes' comes to mind.
In B5, the Minbari didn't take out human outposts because they NEEDED to, which they didn't. They COULD have struck at Earth any time they wanted to. Except they weren't out to CONQUER EA. They meant to ANNIHILATE it. And I notice how you blithely ignore them actually BYPASSING EA outposts because they could always deal with them later. They weren't out for a quick victory, they were bent on GENOCIDE.
As for the HH universe you DO know Weber goes into great detail as to WHY simply going to your opponent's capital and smash them doesn't work, right?
And has it ever occurred to you that all those allies that add all that useless strategic depth ALSO add to the Allliances shipbuilding capacity in special and general industrial capacity in general?

They bypassed the ones on Mars and Io so they could get to Earth, and that's the only one they did, IIRC. Also, you have to remember that Earth constituted the vast majority of human population- all the colonies seem to have populations in the thousands or millions, where Earth is several billion. If they wanted to commit genocide, it would make far more sense to hit Earth, then spread out to mop up the survivors.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Stofsk]

That, and the fact Earth has all the industry and ship-building capacity. Really JMS wrote the Minbari as a pack of idiots.

[Simon_Jester]

The main war in the Honor Harrington series is a huge example too. Manticore makes a point of making alliances with less powerful star systems so that they have a defense in depth before the war starts. But aside from Grayson (who build a significant fleet of their own) and Erewhon (who holds one terminus of the manticore wormhole), all that the other systems do is tie up ships for system defense and agitate for more protection when Haven raids them. It's always the threat of the home fleet, not simple distance from Haven systems that disuades Haven from a direct assault on Manticore, the depth appears to be all detriment and no gain.

The real problem in the Honorverse during the First Havenite War is that the two sides are close to parity in capital ships. Neither side can afford to launch an alpha strike at the other's home system and punch them out directly, because they can't spare enough ships to hit the enemy capital and be sure of victory.

So you need extended fleet campaigns. One reason is that you're trying to wear down the enemy's capital ship force while preserving your own, so as to eventually thin them out to the point where you can punch out the capital. Another is that you do still need a fleet train, and in the Honorverse ships are vulnerable to interception because if they want to travel fast they have to use certain specific hyperspace lanes. So you still have a need for bases within relatively short striking range of a major target; otherwise there's a big risk of running out of ammunition, fuel, and spares. Which would turn any tactical defeat you suffer into a major disaster for your forces; you have to allow for the possibility of losing, especially when you go after heavily defended targets.

That's the need for defense in depth. If the Havenites are allowed to concentrate all their forces against Manticore, with fleet bases very close to Manticore itself (say, if they had wound up controlling Grayson via Masada in The Honor of the Queen, Manticore would be in a precarious position. They would have to concentrate their fleet at Manticore (with no other place to leave it), which would free up Haven's capital ships to sit near Manticore and growl menacingly at them. If the Manticorans launched an offensive, it would leave their capital defense force outnumbered by large enemy strike forces very close the capital, which is a good way to lose a war.

So the Manties needed to deny such positions to Haven, which meant controlling them itself.

Then in Ashes of Victory, the SKM fleet can destroy any Havenite force they encounter without trouble, and they go on to spend months conquering around two dozen assorted star systems so they'll have the supply lines to assault the Haven system itself.

There are at least two reasons for this:
1) They need to work the bugs out of the doctrine for their new weapons; attacking their home system with a surprise assault would be a bad time to discover that the enemy has a counter to them.
2) Haven is a multisystem power; it is theoretically possible to take the capital and still have to worry about enemies in the provinces. If nothing else, the power structure is liable to break up, at which point you're dealing with a bunch of isolated warlords instead of a central government- the Havenite Civil War that actually happened in War of Honor, only with Manticore caught in the middle of it.

In War of Honor, after the ceasefire when tensions heat up again, Haven worries about the fact that those forward bases leave them vulnerable. But in the same book Haven, with worse supply abilities than Manticore, takes a huge fleet through normal space completely around and past all of Manticorian space, sits on an uninhabited star for weeks or months, then attacks the Manticorian forces nearby when the ceasefire ends.

They wouldn't have gotten away with it, though, if they'd traveled through patrolled space. Even then they were taking a hell of a risk; their fleet was devastated because it happened to lose in spite of the sneak attack. A defeat that would have merely been bad otherwise was a disaster because they had no nearby base to repair the fleet and take care of their wounded.

Anyone see any other examples of this, or see anything wrong with what I'm saying?

It's true to a point, but I think you overestimate just how easy deep strike attacks are in a setting where all forces travel at the same strategic speed and where localized defenses are often strong enough to repel full-scale fleet offensives.

[Pantastic]

Except there will always be logistics problems. You can't get past that.

Logistics is only a problem if you can't get enough supplies. If you have enough supplies, you have a logistics solution, not logistics problems. When you have ships which are shown to fly to a place 4X away, fight, and return home, you don't need to secure a close base to fight soe

What you forget is that the logistics issues for a single ship are a lot different to a task force with a mission to invade and conquer a planet or a system of planets. The starship Enterprise travelling through unexplorered space has different requirements than Task Force Awesome, with the mission to invade the planet of the gaping assholes, to bring peace, justice and capitalism to them. And because they have 'space oil'.

You've missed that neither of my examples involve conquering a planet or system of planets. The Minbari wanted to exterminate all life on Earth, not invade and conquer it. Manticore merely needed to destroy everything in orbit around Nouveau Paris and have a fleet in orbit to probably secure a collapse or surrender or collapse of Haven, and if that didn't happen they'd just need to occupy the capital, arrest who looks like they're government, and destroy every military and government building before leaving to cripple them completely. Neither of my examples need 'space oil', they want the planet of gaping assholes to either be dead (B5) or stop bothering them (HH), which can be accomplished with only a little extra effort if you can get to the system and defeat the ships there.

As for the Task Force, you're talking about many more ships, but also many more crew to look after. The troop transports probably can't hold their troops indefinitely, since they probably aren't used to carry heaps of troops when there's no war going on.

Minbari don't need many troop transports to exterminate life on Earth unless they're even more boneheaded than usual and want to walk around individually shooting each human. Manticorian troop transports can be overloaded with escapees from a prison planet and safely spend several months getting to their destination (shown in Echoes of Honor), and they don't really need many to accomplish a quick strike. You're trying to make a direct analogy with a naval invasion while ignoring the differences between space warfare and ocean-land warfare - supplying troops isn't a problem if I don't need troops or if my troopships carry enough supplies for longer than my mission.

Being able to resupply and get reinforcements is also an issue with logistics. One issue that is important is how the hyperspace or FTL model works. If it's limitless and instantaneous, resupplying is less of an issue. If on the other hand, you can't go that far with FTL before you need to refuel, having a logistics supply train is pretty unavoidable.

Minbari (and B5 ships in general) operate directly without bases at distances greater than the Earth-Minbar distance, hyperspace travel doesn't appear to take very much fuel in B5. Harringtonverse ships demonstrate the ability to carry more than six months of supplies with supply ships. Reinforcements are completely irrelevant when you don't take losses because your ships are that much better than the opposition which, again, is exactly the situation for Eighth Fleet vs Haven or Minbari vs Earth.

The details of the setting determine this. But saying 'it's just an ocean analogy' doesn't help at all.

When I mention two specific settings, pretending that I didn't doesn't help at all.

[Pantastic]

First, they didn't know how much better they were for sure; and at that point it's uncertain that they could have taken Haven in an all out assault. Especially since they had to keep their home system covered. It would be awkward to conquer the Haven system and find out that the PRN has conquered the Manticore system in the meantime because you used the ships of Home Fleet to do it.

Eighth Fleet under White Haven was blowing through peep task forces so casually that he felt guilty about how easy it was - they conquered multiple systems without taking any losses at all. If they couldn't tell how much better they were for sure from that, they're too stupid to keep breathing. I'm not sure where you got this idea about sending the Home Fleet to do anything, aside from the end of At All Costs Manticore has had fleets that weren't Home Fleet engaged in offensive operations, and I specifically mentioned Eighth Fleet, not Home fleet.

Second, the "uninhabited star" in question was one where Haven had built a fleet base, not just some random undeveloped star.

You may be thinking about something different than 2nd fleet which attacked Honor's forces in War of Honor, which is what I was talking about, if you're not thinking of something different then provide a quote. None of the planning discussion mentions a base, they mention that it's a 'uninhabited system', and when the fleet moved to an alternate system (did that have a fleet base?) with an hour's notice when the destroyer didn't report in. When the Manticorians swept the system they said on p 724 "We've swept the system pretty thoroughly. I suppose it's remotely possible that there could be one or two stealthed pickets hiding out there somewhere. After all, any star system is a mighty big haystack. But there's no way there's anything I'd call a fleet inside the system Hyper Limit".

Doesn't sound like there was any fleet base at all to me, and it would be really strange for Haven to maintain a base that far away from their systems all through their civil war.

And third, they didn't know that such deep strike tactics actually worked; recall, there hadn't been a war on this scale in centuries if ever. One of the later books in facts comments on how all the effort they put into building defensive depth in the end didn't mean much because tactics had changed.

They know the operational ranges for their ships, in Ashes of Victory they know they can smash peep fleets at will. There is no reason at all for them to think that blowing everything out of the Sky in Nouveau Paris, then demanding a surrender, then (if there is no surrender) occupying or destroying every government building and military base on the planet will not at least put a damper on Haven's war-making ability. There is no major change in logistics systems throughout the series. And they know the history of World War II (Honor's cat is named for a US admiral), so they're familiar with the concept of island hopping, and there's no reason not to apply the same idea to their fights.

Your quote shows that multiple military geniuses took forever to catch on to a technique so old the Solarian League uses it casually (in Storm from the Shadows), even though these geniuses have spent years fighting for survival and completely revamping old tactics. If the old hidebound Solarian League gets the concept of launching a deep strike at an enemy's key point instead of messing around with useless outlying systems, Harrington, White Haven, or anyone else in Manticore shouldn't need to wait for Theisman to demonstrate it. There's no justification for their blindness, except that Weber wanted lots of small shifts in the early part of the war, but now wants sweeping deep strikes.

[Pantastic]

The real problem in the Honorverse during the First Havenite War is that the two sides are close to parity in capital ships. Neither side can afford to launch an alpha strike at the other's home system and punch them out directly, because they can't spare enough ships to hit the enemy capital and be sure of victory.

Except that Manticore COULD easily be sure of it late in Ashes of Victory, since Eighth fleet was simply walking through Havenite fleets. They didn't need to keep capturing crappy minor systems, they could have gone for the knockout blow, but didn't. Yes, during most of the war they couldn't do it, but that isn't relevant to the time when they could.

Another is that you do still need a fleet train, and in the Honorverse ships are vulnerable to interception because if they want to travel fast they have to use certain specific hyperspace lanes.

Honorverse fleet supply ships are not vulnerable to interception, because they're not dumb enough to send unescorted supply ships down grav waves that the enemy patrols. Merchantmen stick to grav waves because of cheapness and speed, but fleet supply ships are not merchant ships, and non-merchant ships are only spotted when they're in a star system except under very exceptional circumstances. Honor was able to fly a whole captured fleet and 2 slow transports all the way from Hades to Trevor's Star through Haven's space without being detected in Echoes of Honor, and that wasn't considered any special feat.

So you still have a need for bases within relatively short striking range of a major target; otherwise there's a big risk of running out of ammunition, fuel, and spares. Which would turn any tactical defeat you suffer into a major disaster for your forces; you have to allow for the possibility of losing, especially when you go after heavily defended targets.

Honorverse ships carry enough fuel for months of travel, you don't have any risk of running out of fuel. You only spend ammunition when fighting and combat ships aren't intercepted in space, so there's no problems with ammo. If your ship can't make hyper, it can't get to a nearby base for spares anyway. None of these are actual concerns, you're getting a bad case of the 'space navies are just like ocean navies' brain bug, and presuming that Honorverse ships work differently than they do in the books.

That's the need for defense in depth. If the Havenites are allowed to concentrate all their forces against Manticore, with fleet bases very close to Manticore itself (say, if they had wound up controlling Grayson via Masada in The Honor of the Queen, Manticore would be in a precarious position. They would have to concentrate their fleet at Manticore (with no other place to leave it), which would free up Haven's capital ships to sit near Manticore and growl menacingly at them. If the Manticorans launched an offensive, it would leave their capital defense force outnumbered by large enemy strike forces very close the capital, which is a good way to lose a war.

There's no need for defense in depth. Manticore throughout the series concentrates enough of a fleet at Manticore to defeat a direct Havenite attack, closer bases doesn't change this at all, since they clearly realize that Haven could launch a deep strike at any time. Without having to waste fleets and forts defending systems other than Manticore, they're in a BETTER position. They keep the same Home Fleet that they've kept throughout the books, but form an offensive fleet that includes what they had PLUS what they had sitting around in useless 'defense in depth' systems that didn't actually prevent a Haven strike directly at Manticore, and their fleet is free to go marauding Havenite systems, destroying ships and shipyards and conquering anything really nice with less distractions.

The home fleet has always been kept strong enough to defend against a possible Havenite deep strike, the 'depth' never changed that.

2) Haven is a multisystem power; it is theoretically possible to take the capital and still have to worry about enemies in the provinces. If nothing else, the power structure is liable to break up, at which point you're dealing with a bunch of isolated warlords instead of a central government- the Havenite Civil War that actually happened in War of Honor, only with Manticore caught in the middle of it.

Let's see, am I better off fighting one unified enemy who's throwing everything at me, or a split up fractions of that enemy who are also fighting each other? How on earth would breaking up Haven be bad for Manticore, it makes it easier to defeat in detail. Fighting a bunch of small, uncoordinated powers after crushing the major organizational center and a major shipbuilding center sounds much better than fighting those same planets all together at once. Haven surrendering or breaking up is great for Manticore, I'm pretty sure that was their war objective before the government switch in AOV.

Ignoring that little issue, if capturing Nouveu Paris would result in something you consider a disaster for Manticore, what are they supposed to do to achieve victory? It sounds like you think the only way Manticore would win is by conquering and holding every single Havenite system, and that the offensive planned for the end of AOV would have been a disaster for them.

They wouldn't have gotten away with it, though, if they'd traveled through patrolled space. Even then they were taking a hell of a risk; their fleet was devastated because it happened to lose in spite of the sneak attack. A defeat that would have merely been bad otherwise was a disaster because they had no nearby base to repair the fleet and take care of their wounded.

No one patrols deep space in the Honorverse. Seriously, it's just not done, and would take more ships than the Solarian League has because of the absolutely vast volume of space between stars. If you think they do, name ONE major fleet that was detected by such a patrol. You can find merchantmen because they follow certain lowest-cost or highest-speed paths, and escorts and priates because they go where the merchantmen are, but the combat fleets of navies simply don't do that. When an attack happens, you find out about it either by observing the start point, or by seeing ships drop out of hyper in your lap. Again, Honor managed to take her whole fleet through Havenite space from Hades to Trevor's Star without being spotted.

I don't remember the 'was a disaster because of no base' part - from what I remember, it was a disaster because they got caught and couldn't withdraw, and Tourville still managed to get a good chunk of his fleet away. Also, what repair facilities can and are built in a few weeks after conquering a system? I don't think significant shipbuilding/repair yards can be made that fast, so your forward base is really just a convenient place to set a bunch of repair and supply ships. You can do the same thing in an uninhabited system or random point in deep space, distance to major repair yards isn't going to change just by capturing minor systems.

It's true to a point, but I think you overestimate just how easy deep strike attacks are in a setting where all forces travel at the same strategic speed and where localized defenses are often strong enough to repel full-scale fleet offensives.

No localized defenses in any book have ever been strong enough to repel a full-scale fleet offensive unless backed by a strong fleet, other than possibly Manticore's when they have a big missile advantage. Plus localized defenses tend to be better close to enemy bases, meaning that deep strikes are actually easier. It's not a new idea in the world, and there's not anything in the characteristics of ships that we actually see (most significantly, no deep space interceptions) that make them espeically difficult. The Solarian League plans to use the technique casually in Storm from the Shadows, Honor plans to launch all deep strikes if war comes with the league, and in the snippets for the next book there's a demonstration of how easy they really are.

[Stofsk]

Except there will always be logistics problems. You can't get past that.

Logistics is only a problem if you can't get enough supplies. If you have enough supplies, you have a logistics solution, not logistics problems. When you have ships which are shown to fly to a place 4X away, fight, and return home, you don't need to secure a close base to fight soe

Of course. And I agree. But what if they need to fly to place that's 8X away, fight, and return home? What if their range is only 8X, and therefore they can only go there one-way and need to refuel before returning home?

What if the mission is to conquer the place that's 8X away and occupy them while a larger and dedicated occupational force is scheduled to arrive at a later date? What if allocating internal volume and mass to these sort of logistics issues dilutes the warship away from ship-to-ship combat performance?

You've missed that neither of my examples involve conquering a planet or system of planets.

Um, what you've missed is that I wasn't responding to your examples, but to the general thesis you made before you used your examples.

The Minbari wanted to exterminate all life on Earth, not invade and conquer it.

If that was their sole goal, they went about it in the most retarded way possible since it took them 2-3 years. That might be because it took them that long to get their fleet ready, or it might be because they went about their goals in a totally ass-backwards way. When Sheridan killed the Black Star, IIRC it wasn't early in the conflict but it wasn't in the end either, it was sometime in the middle, and that was done in the asteroid belt not in any other system. That means the Minbari could hit earth at any point, it wasn't a question of getting supply lines or forward bases or some such. But they didn't, so why? Well it turns out the Minbari were hitting earth outposts but only targeting the military, and leaving the civilian structures intact. They have a political/cultural reason for this, they were wiping out what they perceived to be earth's 'warrior caste' first, then they would move on to the civilian castes.

Was this stupid and inefficient? Certainly. Does this necessarily have anything to do with your point about logistics? Not really. You began this discussion by using the B5 example, but you didn't prove it with reference to anything in the show - certainly nothing I can remember.

As for your Honor Harrington example, I haven't even read it other than the first book and I wasn't even responding to it.

Minbari don't need many troop transports to exterminate life on Earth unless they're even more boneheaded than usual and want to walk around individually shooting each human.

I'm sorry, but have you even seen B5 or more to the point, the movie In The Beginning? That is exactly what we see Minbari do. There's a reason why few people even like the Minbari. Not only are they genocidal fuckwits with sticks up their asses, but they're pretty stupid genocidal fuckwits with sticks up their asses.

You're trying to make a direct analogy with a naval invasion while ignoring the differences between space warfare and ocean-land warfare - supplying troops isn't a problem if I don't need troops or if my troopships carry enough supplies for longer than my mission.

lollerskates

Of course, if you don't need troops then you don't need to supply them. So how do you propose to invade, or raid, or take command of, or board a colony or space station if you don't have troops? I guess you could just nuke them to oblivion, no need to invade anyone. Of course you don't really need ships either, you could just make automated space missiles to go hit another planet in the solar system. Hey we could nuke people too nowadays, hmm I wonder why nobody does...

Minbari (and B5 ships in general) operate directly without bases at distances greater than the Earth-Minbar distance, hyperspace travel doesn't appear to take very much fuel in B5.

I guess you and I watched a different show with the same name, because the show I watched references supply lines and bases and outposts all the time. The Narn had a base in Quadrant 36 which was a cause for concern for the Centauri. They had a colony at Ragesh III which the Centauri assumed was being used as a listening post and/or staging area. G'kar was worried about G'sten's plan to take out a Centauri supply depot by calling in every remaining ship in the Narn fleet, but the strategy was that if that depot could be taken out the Centauri advance would be slowed or stymied for a time, enough to harden the defences of the Narn homeworld. It would never have outright stopped the Centauri, but it would have delayed them enough to set up more defences - and if the Centauri came to Narn and couldn't crack that nut, they might come to the bargaining table.

Hyperspace travel is fraught with difficulties in B5. The YR can't stay in hyperspace indefinitely because if they fall 'off the beacon' they'll become lost and unable to return to normal space. Small ships can't open their own jump points, it takes a lot of power that only big ships can generate. There is no 'hyperspace fuel' as such, but those big ships need fuel just for their own reactors. Their crew needs to be fed, their weapons need ammunition, any damage needs to be repaired - you can bring that stuff with you, and in many ways like Seaskimmer said, it's a smart idea to do so, but unless there's some self-sustaining ability to replenish your supplies without returning to base, sooner or later you'll need to. War plays havoc with equipment and personnel.

The details of the setting determine this. But saying 'it's just an ocean analogy' doesn't help at all.

When I mention two specific settings, pretending that I didn't doesn't help at all.

What the hell are you talking about? I didn't pretend that you didn't, 'The details of the setting determine this' is a general comment that didn't refer to your examples but to any examples you happen to give. And you haven't even properly analysed or proved with references at least one of your examples (B5).

[Samuel]

I'm sorry, but have you even seen B5 or more to the point, the movie In The Beginning? That is exactly what we see Minbari do. There's a reason why few people even like the Minbari. Not only are they genocidal fuckwits with sticks up their asses, but they're pretty stupid genocidal fuckwits with sticks up their asses.

Why are they a major power if they are that dumb? All they needed to do was eliminate humanities ability to produce warships and then take us apart.

So how do you propose to invade, or raid, or take command of, or board a colony or space station if you don't have troops?

Why would you need to in a war? Just eliminate their ability to supply and build warships.

They had a colony at Ragesh III which the Centauri assumed was being used as a listening post and/or staging area.

How do you get a listening post to tap into FTL communication?

Their crew needs to be fed, their weapons need ammunition, any damage needs to be repaired - you can bring that stuff with you, and in many ways like Seaskimmer said, it's a smart idea to do so, but unless there's some self-sustaining ability to replenish your supplies without returning to base, sooner or later you'll need to. War plays havoc with equipment and personnel.

This implies that you can't fit this all inside cargo ships. Isn't this decided by volume which you have a large amount of?

[NecronLord]

The Minbari were said to be following their code of honour, and only striking military targets (they would then strike the civillian targets!) during their advance. It's a fair bet they could have done it quicker, but I wouldn't call them a pack of idiots; it's not like the whole war wasn't for revenge or something; they could afford to draw it out. Considering how rarely they seem to have wars, perhaps they deliberately extended it to enjoy it more.

[Stofsk]

I'm sorry, but have you even seen B5 or more to the point, the movie In The Beginning? That is exactly what we see Minbari do. There's a reason why few people even like the Minbari. Not only are they genocidal fuckwits with sticks up their asses, but they're pretty stupid genocidal fuckwits with sticks up their asses.

Why are they a major power if they are that dumb? All they needed to do was eliminate humanities ability to produce warships and then take us apart.

They've got better ships than anyone else and they've been on the top of the pecking order for at least a millennium (since the last time the Shadows came out to play with the YR). Blame it on JMS, he wrote it.

So how do you propose to invade, or raid, or take command of, or board a colony or space station if you don't have troops?

Why would you need to in a war? Just eliminate their ability to supply and build warships.

You can't capture territory if you can't put boots on the ground. Assuming that is actually part of the objective in the war. Like I said, you could just nuke the other side into oblivion.

They had a colony at Ragesh III which the Centauri assumed was being used as a listening post and/or staging area.

How do you get a listening post to tap into FTL communication?

How do you expect me to answer that question? I don't know how they do it, but the fact remains that the colony is referred to by Refa as a listening post and that the Narn have been spying on them for years. Also, sorry it wasn't Ragesh III it was Quadrant 14.

Their crew needs to be fed, their weapons need ammunition, any damage needs to be repaired - you can bring that stuff with you, and in many ways like Seaskimmer said, it's a smart idea to do so, but unless there's some self-sustaining ability to replenish your supplies without returning to base, sooner or later you'll need to. War plays havoc with equipment and personnel.

This implies that you can't fit this all inside cargo ships. Isn't this decided by volume which you have a large amount of?

That depends on how large the cargo ships are. I don't see why a ship that's dedicated to carrying supplies would be disadvantaged compared to a combat ship, which has to be dedicated towards winning fights.

[Simon_Jester]

Except that Manticore COULD easily be sure of it late in Ashes of Victory, since Eighth fleet was simply walking through Havenite fleets. They didn't need to keep capturing crappy minor systems, they could have gone for the knockout blow, but didn't. Yes, during most of the war they couldn't do it, but that isn't relevant to the time when they could.

Haven has so much depth that they were still fifty light years from Haven even at the end of the war. And for sustained combat operations, they can't strike much deeper than that without a solid base to provide fuel for the ships from. Moreover, as long as they keep punching out the major fleet bases, grabbing "crappy minor systems" en passant is very easy- operating three squadrons twenty light years from the nearest base can be easier than operating one squadron sixty light years away, and most of those minor systems would have been so lightly defended that one or two SD(P)s could mop the place up.

Honorverse fleet supply ships are not vulnerable to interception, because they're not dumb enough to send unescorted supply ships down grav waves that the enemy patrols. Merchantmen stick to grav waves because of cheapness and speed, but fleet supply ships are not merchant ships, and non-merchant ships are only spotted when they're in a star system except under very exceptional circumstances. Honor was able to fly a whole captured fleet and 2 slow transports all the way from Hades to Trevor's Star through Haven's space without being detected in Echoes of Honor, and that wasn't considered any special feat.

You're missing several things.

For the logistics train of a fleet, speed matters. The fleet absolutely requires a certain amount of supplies per week, to be delivered in a certain number of hulls. This number goes up as a function of how much combat and training the fleet is in. Now, say that you need 10 freighters per week to supply the fleet.

Assume it takes one day to load the freighter (very optimistic for six million ton ships), one day to unload, and six days' flying time each way. Each ship needs two weeks to pick up a load of supplies, fly over to the fleet, drop it off, and return for the next load. Therefore, you need twenty freighters to supply the fleet, so that ten arrive each week.

Now increase the flying time by a factor of two. Suddenly, instead of needing fourteen days per round trip, each ship needs twenty-six. Instead of needing 20 freighters to supply the fleet, you need 38. The cost of maintaining the fleet increases accordingly, since you're now paying upkeep for more ships. If the availability of fast supply ships is limited (and it probably is, since you can't just convert civilian merchant hulls), this also limits the total number of ships you can support at the given distance away from their bases. If there are only 100 supply ships, the number of warships you can support drops almost by half.

There are several ways to increase the round trip time for the supply ships. One is the obvious one: operate farther from your bases. A six day trip for fleet supply ships using the higher hyperspace bands is about forty light-years; a twelve day trip is about eighty. So the number of ships I can support at a distance of 40 ly from the nearest fuel refinery (a gas giant with the right industrial infrastructure is all I really need, in the Honorverse) is roughly twice what I can support 80 ly from the refinery.*

Another, less obvious one: use slower ships. This is what happens if I replace my fast fleet supply ships (which, in the Honorverse, can make something like 2500c) with merchantmen (who travel at more like 1000c). Trip times go up by a factor of 2.5, and suddenly I find that it takes thirty merchantmen or more to replace a dozen fast supply ships.

Another, still less obvious method: use evasive routing. If my ships have to fly 30% farther to avoid known zones of enemy raider activity, it takes them 30% longer to complete the round trip, and I need 30% more supply ships to support the same number of warships on the front. In the Honorverse, evasive routing is especially bad for this, because if you don't use the grav waves, your travel times are greatly increased, and you have to use more fuel to make up for the lack of "free" power from the grav waves.

So yes, you can escape detection, but it takes you a lot longer to get there and you burn more fuel in the process. You can use evasive routing away from major hyperspace lanes to avoid having your supply convoys intercepted. The cost is that you can't support as many ships at a given distance from your base of operations as you could otherwise, and the supply ships burn more fuel getting there... which cuts into the tonnage of supplies they deliver to the fleet itself, because each ship is carrying so many extra tons of fuel. Which further reduces the size of the fleet you can support.

To maximize your combat power at the front, you need to have your supply ships flying the quickest practical routes to get to the front. Which requires that you either control bases close to your area of operations, use the grav wave network to speed the freighters' journeys, or both.

Honorverse ships carry enough fuel for months of travel, you don't have any risk of running out of fuel. You only spend ammunition when fighting and combat ships aren't intercepted in space, so there's no problems with ammo. If your ship can't make hyper, it can't get to a nearby base for spares anyway. None of these are actual concerns, you're getting a bad case of the 'space navies are just like ocean navies' brain bug, and presuming that Honorverse ships work differently than they do in the books.

The fact that an Honorverse ship can operate independently for months does not make it immune to supply problems. Among other things, you still have to supply fuel on a week by week basis, or the ships do run out of gas. Electronics on board ship have a service life and have to be replaced. The crew has to eat. Crew have to be transferred onto the ship (to replace casualties to illness or enemy action) or off the ship (if they get reassigned or kicked off for disciplinary reasons).

You cannot make do without logistics. In theory, you can have the ships act as raiders, with no in-space supply train, striking from their bases... but that ties the ships up for weeks in transit each way, and you wind up with a similar problem. If each raider operates in the combat zone for four weeks and spends a week flying each way back to base, they spend six weeks total but only four weeks in the combat zone. So you need half again as many warships as you would if you kept the fleet on station and had a dedicated supply train.

In effect, trying to make do without the supply train reduces the size of your navy by 33% in this case. The exact percentage depends on just how far your raiders have to travel, but it's still going to be there.

There's no need for defense in depth. Manticore throughout the series concentrates enough of a fleet at Manticore to defeat a direct Havenite attack, closer bases doesn't change this at all, since they clearly realize that Haven could launch a deep strike at any time. Without having to waste fleets and forts defending systems other than Manticore, they're in a BETTER position.

Except, of course, that if Haven seizes these systems, they are now in position to keep a large permanent fleet, not just a gigantic raid, operating in the vicinity of Manticore. Which is a very different and much more difficult threat to defend against, from the point of view of Home Fleet.

The home fleet has always been kept strong enough to defend against a possible Havenite deep strike, the 'depth' never changed that.

An enemy fleet with the ability to keep up a permanent presence right next to you is much more dangerous than an identical fleet on a raid.

2) Haven is a multisystem power; it is theoretically possible to take the capital and still have to worry about enemies in the provinces. If nothing else, the power structure is liable to break up, at which point you're dealing with a bunch of isolated warlords instead of a central government- the Havenite Civil War that actually happened in War of Honor, only with Manticore caught in the middle of it.

Let's see, am I better off fighting one unified enemy who's throwing everything at me, or a split up fractions of that enemy who are also fighting each other?

It's not a question of whether this is bad for Manticore. It's a question of taking the trouble to secure the positions you plan to hold. You don't just need to zip into Haven, shoot the place up, and zip out. You need to be able to stay there, to point your ships' weapons at the capital and dictate a surrender. Which requires a permanent fleet presence... which requires a supply train.

You seem to be missing the difference between a raid, even a militarily devastating raid, and a capture.

They wouldn't have gotten away with it, though, if they'd traveled through patrolled space. Even then they were taking a hell of a risk; their fleet was devastated because it happened to lose in spite of the sneak attack. A defeat that would have merely been bad otherwise was a disaster because they had no nearby base to repair the fleet and take care of their wounded.

No one patrols deep space in the Honorverse.

"Patrolled space" in this context means:
-Star systems that are patrolled; any sane power will use a few hyper-capable ships to occasionally check out the closest neighbors to its own fleet bases and major systems. The ones within four or five light years.
-Major shipping lanes. Again, evasive routing in the Honorverse means going slower, much slower; this is very undesirable when you're dispatching a major fleet, especially if it will need months to get there and only has months of endurance to begin with.

Again, Honor managed to take her whole fleet through Havenite space from Hades to Trevor's Star without being spotted.

Yes. Because she didn't have to worry about keeping up a continuous stream of ships running back and forth. It is possible, with guaranteed refueling at the other end, to send a fleet through remote space and evade detection by avoiding the major shipping lanes. For a raid, for a one-time exodus of prisoners, this works. It does not work if you want to maintain a permanent fleet presence, unless you are prepared to use far more ships than you would otherwise need.

I don't remember the 'was a disaster because of no base' part - from what I remember, it was a disaster because they got caught and couldn't withdraw, and Tourville still managed to get a good chunk of his fleet away. Also, what repair facilities can and are built in a few weeks after conquering a system? I don't think significant shipbuilding/repair yards can be made that fast, so your forward base is really just a convenient place to set a bunch of repair and supply ships.

Few weeks? Few months. Look at the capture of bases like Seaford Nine

As for the consequence for a fleet limping back from a deep raid gone wrong:

[Tourville's] calm expression concealed an inner shudder as he remembered the nightmare in the Marsh system. Four hundred light-years from home, with a fleet which was supposed to have a decisive edge over its unprepared, unsuspecting opponents, only to discover that its opponents were anything but unsuspecting... and very well prepared, indeed.

...Most of the ships he'd gotten out had been badly battered, and although he'd managed to evade any pursuit in the depths of hyperspace, the voyage home had been a nightmare all its own. Restricted by damage to the delta bands, his maximum apparent velocity had been only 1300c, which meant the trip had taken over three months. Three months of dealing with damage out of onboard resources. Three months of watching his wounded recover- or not- when even his surviving units had lost thirty percent of their medical personnel. And three months without any idea at all how the rest of Operation Thunderbolt had gone.

Not to be taken lightly.

It's true to a point, but I think you overestimate just how easy deep strike attacks are in a setting where all forces travel at the same strategic speed and where localized defenses are often strong enough to repel full-scale fleet offensives.

No localized defenses in any book have ever been strong enough to repel a full-scale fleet offensive unless backed by a strong fleet, other than possibly Manticore's when they have a big missile advantage.

Localized defenses include the fleets on station.

[Simon_Jester]

For everyone saying logistics matter, ok, sure, but why does capturing random planets help?

In the Honorverse? Not much.

On the other hand, it also doesn't cost very much. All you really need to do is jump into a system with enough force to brush aside the orbital defenses and any ships on station in the system, then point your large menacing energy weapons and even larger, more menacing missile launchers at the planet. The tradition is for them to surrender at this point. You don't see protracted ground campaigns very often in the Honorverse, and between two non-genocidal opponents like Haven and Manticore, you're not likely to.

So that's a major difference between, say, the First Havenite War and the "island hopping" war between the US and Japan in WWII. In the Pacific Theater, each island was the subject of massive, brutal fighting between the US Marines and the Japanese Army. Taking an unnecessary island meant burning up supplies and troops on a large scale, for no good reason.

In the Honorverse, taking a planet when you already have naval superiority is not difficult. Therefore, mopping up the minor systems around each nodal system you need to capture is a reasonable thing to do with your ships while you build up the fleet train to support the next major bound forward deeper into enemy space.

---

I'd argue that the decision to capture minor systems (the ones without significant fleet repair and refueling facilities and such that you can turn to your advantage) comes from the logistics issue I mentioned in my last post. If you have X ships in your fleet and Y fast fleet tankers to keep their fuel gauges reading nice and close to "full," you can only maintain the fleet at an average distance of Z away from the nearest fuel source.

At that point you have three options:

1) Send long range raids out to great distances from your fuel source, relying on the ships' endurance of three to four months to make sure they can make it back without resupply. This works well if your goal is strategic bombing, so to speak (see At All Costs and Harrington's deep raiding strategy for Eighth Fleet). It doesn't work so well if your goal includes permanent occupation of the targets to prevent them from rebuilding.

2) Pare down the actual size of your fleet relative to the fleet supply train, so that you can maximize the striking range at which your fleet can be supplied from your bases. This works up to a point, but sooner or later you simply don't have the firepower to destroy tough targets: even with the overwhelming capability of the Manticore Missile Massacre at your disposal, you still need thousands of missiles to take out an enemy battlefleet or defense network, and therefore you need enough ships to launch them.

3) Maintain the large size of your fleet, but operate relatively close to your bases so as not to overstrain your logistics. If you're on the offensive, you are constantly sending more and more supply ships to the front to lengthen the supply train, and occasionally sending the facilities to build a new fuel refinery on station (which lets you push forward into a new region of space).

Politically, both sides in the First Havenite War had objectives that made it worthwhile to physically occupy random planets. The Havenites needed to occupy enemy worlds both to enforce puppet regimes, because they needed those regimes to collaborate in plans to loot the local economies. For the Manties, snagging Havenite minor systems contributed heavily to the overall "war of liberation" theme that they were playing up on the propaganda front. Since it could be done at relatively low cost, it was at least something to do under system (3) while the logistics train caught up.

[Serafina]

Do not forget the Deneb accors, which forbid bombarding a planet from orbit (well - major strikes, small interdiction strikes against enemy militaries are allowed) unless they are unwilling to surrender.
So if you capture a planet, you have to garrision it. You won't be able to nuke it to deny it to the enemy.

[Simon_Jester]

Do not forget the Deneb accors, which forbid bombarding a planet from orbit (well - major strikes, small interdiction strikes against enemy militaries are allowed) unless they are unwilling to surrender.
So if you capture a planet, you have to garrision it. You won't be able to nuke it to deny it to the enemy.

The real danger here isn't the Deneb Accords as such (which are the equivalent of the Geneva Conventions). It's the Solarian League's Eridani Edict that's the problem, because the Eridani Edict is a constitutional amendment in the League constitution requiring them to declare war against any power that uses weapons of mass destruction indiscriminately against planetary targets. That's a much greater threat than any probable consequences of ignoring the Deneb Accords.

But that's a detail. Basically, yes, mass bombardment against planets is politically not an option in the Honorverse. But naval supremacy over a planet still puts you in a position to dominate the planet, and there's little or no need for protracted ground campaigns.

[Serafina]

Well - i was just saying that in the Honorverse, hit&run attacks to take out enemy planets are not feasible, since you won't be able to destroy any infrastructure on the planet. At least not without occupying it and dismantling it.

[Connor MacLeod]

I'm not exactly clear why this discussion is operating on the assumption of "un-interceptable FTL" as being a given. We know its possible to intercept ships in hyperspace (it happened in Short Victorious war and was even discussed - Helen Zilwicki Senior died in that notable instance.) In B5 we're given a number of examples of starships being detected or intercepted in hyperspace (The one most often coming to mind is Delenn's white star getting blasted by Drakh-guided Centauri warships in season 5.) Hell, many other sci fi series I can think of (Lensman, Star Wars, Warhammer 40K, etc) also do not present "un-interceptable FTL".

[Sarevok]

A very easy example disproving commonality of uninterceptable FTL comes from Star Trek. There starships are frequently intercepted while at warp speed. Even in jump drive users like Colonials FTL has some limitations like recharge periods so ships can and are engaged in void of interstellar space. I really cant think of any well known science fiction verse while ships are immune to attack while in FTL.

[Connor MacLeod]

There's lots of examples. Star Wars has Interidctor cruisers for crying out loud, nevermind all the sorts of stuff hinging on basic realspace/hyperspace interactions (its not an alternate dimension remember). Lensman is a no brainer since it was "realspace" FTL with tractor beams or magnetic fields being able to grapple ships in range. In 40K its possible to fight or hunt vessels in the Warp (EG EXecution Hour).

This is the Honorverse example I pulled from Short victorious War:

On the face of it, the possibility of locating and attacking someone else's commerce in hyper shouldn't even exist. Maximum reliable scanner range is barely twenty light-minutes, hyper-space is vast, and even knowing a convoy's planned arrival and departure times shouldn't help much.

But appearances can be deceiving. To be sure, hyperspace is vast, yet virtually all its traffic moves down the highways of its grav waves, drawing both its power and absurdly high acceleration from its Warshawski sails. There are only so many efficient grav wave connections from one star system to another, and the optimum points of interchange are known to most navies. So are the points which must be avoided because of high levels of grav turbulence. If a raider knows a given ship's schedule, he doesn't really need its route. He can work through the same astro tables as his target's skipper and project its probable course closely enough to intercept it.

For those not blessed with such foreknowledge, there are still ways. Merchant skippers, for example, vastly prefer to ride a grav wave clear through their final hyper translation. Power costs are lower, and riding the wave through the hyper wall reduces both the structural and physiological stresses. Which means raiders often lurk at points where inbound grav waves intersect a star's hyper limit, waiting for prey to amble up to them.

And, if all else fails, there is always the blind chance method. Ships are at their most vulnerable at and shortly after they translate back into normal space. Their base velocities are low, their sensor systems are still sorting out the sudden influx of n-space information, and for at least ten minutes or so, while their hyper generators recycle, they can't even dodge back into hyper and run away if something comes at them. A translation right on the system ecliptic is the norm, if not the inviolable rule, so a patient raider might put his ship into a solar orbit right on the hyper limit, run his power (and emissions) down to minimum levels, and simply wait until some fat and unwary freighter translates within his interception envelope. With no emissions to betray it, something as tiny as a warship is extremely difficult to spot, and many an unfortunate merchant skipper's first intimation of trouble has been the arrival of the leading missile salvo.

But the heavy cruiser PNS Sword and her consorts had no need for such hit-or-miss hunting techniques, Captain Theisman thought. Thanks to Nav Int's spies, Commodore Reichman knew her prey's exact schedule. In fact, Theisman's tac officer had spotted the five-ship convoy and its escort hours ago as Sword's squadron lay doggo in a handy "bubble" in the local grav wave, letting them pass without being spotted in return before emerging in pursuit.

[Pantastic]

I'm sorry, but have you even seen B5 or more to the point, the movie In The Beginning? That is exactly what we see Minbari do. There's a reason why few people even like the Minbari. Not only are they genocidal fuckwits with sticks up their asses, but they're pretty stupid genocidal fuckwits with sticks up their asses.

I'm sorry, but did you pay attention when you were watching B5 or more to the point, the movie In The Beginning? That is not what the Minbari do at all. The Minbari capture colonies, kill all military forces, and leave the civilian population alone, an Earth officer comments that it's consistent with their 'three castes'. The pictures of hand-to-hand fighting are of Minbari fighting military forces, not killing engaging in genocide. All of the 250,000 casualties from the war were military. Take a look at 36:45 on the In the Beginning DVD and watch for about a minute, they explicitly say that the Minbari are not killing the civilian population.

lollerskates

Of course, if you don't need troops then you don't need to supply them. So how do you propose to invade, or raid, or take command of, or board a colony or space station if you don't have troops? I guess you could just nuke them to oblivion, no need to invade anyone. Of course you don't really need ships either, you could just make automated space missiles to go hit another planet in the solar system. Hey we could nuke people too nowadays, hmm I wonder why nobody does...

Try reading the material you quoted. I know, I know, reading more than a line is a strain, but really try! You see, there's this bit "or if my troopships carry enough supplies for longer than my mission.". If you can bring supplies with you, you don't need a supply line. In the B5 example, you need zero troops since you're going for extermination, where the best plan is to nuke them to oblivion, no need to invade anyone. In the Honorverse example, you don't need to supply a protracted campaign, you just need enough force to occupy the capital as you take their surrender or drop and destroy undefended infrastructure, and their ships carry more than enough supplies for that.

We don't nuke people nowadays because of political and military factors that generally don't exist in SF worlds. If a nuclear-capable country did want to exterminate another country and didn't care about public or other country's opinions, they would use nukes.

You might want to try getting the basic facts right and read all of a statement that you respond to before activating your condescending asshole mode and demonstrating your ignorance of the source material. "Arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you."

[Pantastic]

Haven has so much depth that they were still fifty light years from Haven even at the end of the war. And for sustained combat operations, they can't strike much deeper than that without a solid base to provide fuel for the ships from.

That statement is shown to be wrong in the snippets that have been released of the next book Mantiocore can and does strike at Haven without taking any intermediate fleet bases. It is also completely at odds with Honor's stated plan to deal with the Solarian League in Storm from the Shadows, which requires operations at significantly greater distances. It also implies that the Solarian League has vastly better logistics than Manticore, since they're starting a strike of similar length at the end of SFS.

For the logistics train of a fleet, speed matters. The fleet absolutely requires a certain amount of supplies per week, to be delivered in a certain number of hulls. This number goes up as a function of how much combat and training the fleet is in. Now, say that you need 10 freighters per week to supply the fleet.

In War of Honor, Haven launched a huge coordinated attack at the end of the ceasefire, IIRC it was the most massive offensive in Honorverse history at that time. All of the ships for this attack except for one fleet (the one off in Silesea) went to one uninhabited system so that it would be harder to spot them. Haven sent supply ships to the system with six months of supplies for the ships. While that wouldn't need to include much ammunition, since they weren't in combat, it did include enough food, spares, and fuel for them to continuously operate under combat-like fuel usage (they were conducting exercises to keep in practice).

You're vastly, vastly underestimating how much supply Honorverse ships can carry, and vastly, vastly exaggerating the difficulties of supply. All of your detailed calculations completely ignore the fact that it's possible to bring six months of supplies in one jump of supply ships. This is not multiple supply runs per week, this is one per three months (to be on the safe side), which is not a continuous run of supplies.

The fact that an Honorverse ship can operate independently for months does not make it immune to supply problems. Among other things, you still have to supply fuel on a week by week basis, or the ships do run out of gas.

If a ship can operate independantly for multiples of 4 weeks at a time, it does not need more fuel each week to operate. This is basic math. For example, nuclear submarines here on Earth do not need to recieve fuel on a week by week basis, as they carry months worth of fuel at a time.

Except, of course, that if Haven seizes these systems, they are now in position to keep a large permanent fleet, not just a gigantic raid, operating in the vicinity of Manticore. Which is a very different and much more difficult threat to defend against, from the point of view of Home Fleet.

Haven held Trevor's star all through the early part of the war, and Trevor's star is literally right next to Manticore since it has a junction of the wormhole. If they hold some other system nearby, it doesn't make it any more difficult to defend. And there is no difference between a permament fleet and a gigantic raid. If Haven can control space in the Manticore home system for a day or so, the war is over, as Manticore can no longer offer effective resistance. The planet will surrender or be bombed, and every military and shipbuilding facility will be occupied or destroyed. Ocean navies can't really force an end to a war by going to a port and beating a fleet, Space navies generally can.

It's not a question of whether this is bad for Manticore.

Then why did you present that scenario as if it was a bad outcome for Manticore? You wrote it as though that was a drawback of the proposed course of action, but it would be a great thing from Manticore's perspective.

It's a question of taking the trouble to secure the positions you plan to hold. You don't just need to zip into Haven, shoot the place up, and zip out. You need to be able to stay there, to point your ships' weapons at the capital and dictate a surrender. Which requires a permanent fleet presence... which requires a supply train.

You just need to zip into Haven, defeat the fleet, then go into orbit around the planet and point your ships weapons at the capital to dictate a surrender. A week is more than enough time to force the planet where Haven's central government is located to surrender, and to trash all military, government, and production facilities. Six months is massively more than enough time, and it's demonstrated that a single wave of supply ships can carry six months of supplies, so you don't need a continuous supply train, you need one every few months.