2) Of the two nations only Skimmer has an effective quick-launch system. For Shep he has to spool all of his bombers and fighters up, get them airborne, form them up and then somehow launch them in co-ordinated waves against the MESS...all of that takes time.
That's the advantage of a pre-emptive first strike. I can disguise it as leadup to an exercise; and once they're in the air, I can then redirect them as necessary from orbiting command posts -- if I had based my entire force around missiles, I wouldn't have been able to respond near instantly to the FUN's attack against me by retasking some bombers from the attack on Canissia.
Also, I could have launched quite a few early and had them orbiting their fail safe points; once again an advantage of manned bombers.
CmdrWilkens wrote:3) I'm still working through exactly what the numbers work towards but here are some problems. For the RB-73s there was no chance for a response which ignores that we've spent the last several years, and as Ipointed out, billions in creating a sucessor system for C$I to AEGIS and our current ground setup. I've already shown we can track the RB-73s and we've got mr than enough SM-3s to hit them.
The RB-73 is not a simple ballistic missile coming in on a predictive track. It is a manned
manouvering orbital bomber. Ballistic missiles don't suddenly accelerate or make unpredictable dives. To intercept an incoming orbital bomber which can detect enemy SAM/ABMs coming up towards it; and can change it's angle of dive and speed in response to cause the SAM/ABMs to miss, you need a really really really big missile; far more energetic than SM-3s. You don't have that. SM-3s are actually quite very marginal as far as ABM goes; there's a reason the Navy is looking into dedicated ABM VLS cells for CG(X) which are freaking huge.
In fact, I'd probably say the only feasible defense against the RB-73 was Stas' own SPIRALs, armed with Space to Space missiles instead of Space to Ground Missiles, which is what I had the one lost fall to; a R-900 Space Interception Missile by NPO Vympel fired by a MiG-105 SPIRAL.
At a minimum I'm figuring that's 104 fighters against 35 bombers
Wrong. Even the mighty Soviet Union could only afford about 2 to 4 active-duty interceptors per regiment of 25-40 interceptors ready to go in five minutes. Same thing with carriers - only a few aircraft are actually ready in alert five, ten, or fifteen status at any one moment.
The B-1C and RB-1D cruise at Mach 2 at 50,000 feet; that's 1320 MPH, or 22 miles a minute.
The deep reaches of Canissia are only 500-700 miles away from bombers based in lower Shepnukistan; that's a trip of 23 to 32 minutes.
A circular route from North-Eastern Shepnukistan which circles around the IRT and approaches Wilkonia's Northeastern coastline is 2,000~ miles; and my bombers fly that in ninety minutes.
To reach the LSR while avoiding Wilkonia means a trip of 2,500~ miles -- as a bonus; this flightpath also ends up being able to hit northern Tian Xia at the same time they hit the LSR -- that's in 114 minutes. Hitting Tian Xia's middle needs a 3,000 mile trip; that's 136 minutes.
Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that I might have ordered my bombers to violate the Bear Republic's (FUN) airspace to save time after the RT's attack on Shepnukistan with hypersonic missiles.
So you have in the best case (Tian Xia), a mere 2 hours and 16 minutes to generate all of your aircraft and get them into the air; which means you won't be able to get them all into the air; you'll have to pull AIM-120s, etc from weapons storage bunkers, load them onto pylons, and fuel the planes up -- and this is where things hit the little snags -- what happens if you don't have enough weapons loading carts to handle all your planes at once? Do you have enough fuel tankers to load all your planes at once? Do you even have enough personnel on duty or recallable on rapid order to fuel them all at once?
And so on.
the MGM-191s would have had to come through the exact same hell only more units would be on alert.
Actually, no. The MGM-191s are programmed to come in well after the initial destruction of your air defenses by the RB-1Ds and B-1Cs as they penetrate.
The UAR, like Slade's US in the TBOverse and Phong's IRT defeats enemy air defenses by nuking them with long range nuclear tipped stand-off missiles. Did you spend a lot of expensive money on burying hardened landlines and in multiply redunant C3I complexes and radars? Because if not, your system will begin to fall apart as node after node go up in mushroom clouds.
There's a good reason I didn't spend much on air defenses -- I looked at the amount of money I would have to spend to defeat an equivalent attack from SAC; decided that it would cost so much that I'd be reduced to just a semi-defensive role like Phong's IRT; which did go for a heavy IADS route.
3) On the bio-war front they went with an Ebola derived agent...only problem is that I announced back in year one that I was working towards treatment and vaccination.
Are your hospitals at least 30 miles from any major urban area and superhardened bunkers? No? Then by the end of the day, you'll have millions of casualties and only 44,000 hospital beds to deal with it.
The other hospital beds in Wilkonia will be blasted, charred rubble from nuclear strikes; along with the various things such as sanitation plants, meaning that clean water supplies will be scarce to get, leading to outbreaks of cholera, etc.
For the conventional follow-on forces has at bes 1 wing of bombers per major nation he was attacking this means fewer than 35 bombers per naiton
You forget that unlike ballistic missiles, manned bombers can be refuelled and rearmed after a mission. Which means that the bombers which dropped their loads on Canissia 15 minutes into the attack can fly back to their alternate landing points in Shepnukistan, and be refuelled and rearmed by dispersal teams from such places as civil aviation airfields or particularly long stretches of highway, and sent back to strike other targets.
In fact, teh last Shepnukistani SAC mission was flown 48 hours after hostilities began by a three-ship group carrying chemical and biological weapons, which were dropped five minutes before the "stand down" order was given by GEN O'Leary, Acting CINCSAC, who you'll be hearing from in the SDN World thread later today.
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- PeZook
