Jutland in Space

[vegascat]

Don't forget about the naval battles in the Pacific around the Phillipeans.
The biggest problem is that naval fleets will not engage in battle unless both sides believe they have an overwelming advantage. To do otherwise is folly because of the expense of creating and manning a fleet.

 

[Nurd_boy]

BUT WHAT ABOUT AIRPOWER?

with the rise of the carrier group, battleships where ...{shrug}...pearl harbor? Midway? Coral Sea?

anywho...just thinking

 

[Erik Boielle]

You know what I'd like to see?

Well, I occasionally think that dreadnought battleships, notably big assed grand fleets of them, are just about the coolest thing in the world ever.

And while you get Hornblower in space a fair bit, I think there is room for Dreadnought! Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War, in space.

Which 2300 sorta is, but also isn't, but I like most of the background and so might as well use it as a basis for my daydreaming.

Firstly, no one refers to anything as a BB, BC, DD, HSBC or SMTV (nasty demeaning american invention. Battleships have names like Lion or Tiger or Warspite, and personalities and mythologies, not numbers). Battleships it is, and ideally the King George IV, or the British Grand Space Fleet.

Then, you need a weapon system. Some Big Guns to pound each other with.

Lasers are no fun, and don't have the range, and missiles don't work as you can catusha them off so you don't get the nice salvo effect.

So I was thinking of something that uses the stutterwarp core of the ship to initiate a short duration stutter effect in a projectile, that you the skips across reality towards its target and then, ideally, stops stuttering and deploys in to a cloud of particles that, with luck, impact your target.

Hence you need to predict the course and stutter pattern of your target, and can straddle a ship with good shooting.

Then you get a book on Jutland and do all this stuff about chasing around with battlecruiser squadrons trying to draw people on to the guns of the main fleets, and stuff.

Now, one of the nice things about Jutland in space is that you can have the battleships actually really shooting at each other, rather than half hearted indecisive engagements, in the same way that you can have the whole of a long period of history squished in to a little bit.

So you can do more fun things, like beat up minor alien nations to make you look good.

Although in fairness to all involved, British ships need to have a magazine explosion critical crop up more than it ought.

 

[Erik Boielle]

Originally posted by vegascat:
Don't forget about the naval battles in the Pacific around the Phillipeans.
The biggest problem is that naval fleets will not engage in battle unless both sides believe they have an overwelming advantage. To do otherwise is folly because of the expense of creating and manning a fleet.

And if they do have an overwhelming advantage, their fleet has served the purpose of gaining sea superiority, so actually engaging the enemy closely won't gain them much and might jepardise that position.

You can do things with messing with the ammount of intelligence people have available so that people have to engage when they arn't sure precisely what they are facing, or just have the opposing fleets so evenly matched on paper that both sides think they have a chance.

And people were trying some deceptions to trick people - send out an exposed battlecruiser squadron that the badguys just have to try for, then ambush them when they come.

Or just assume that one or both sides have optimistic and aggresive commanders who are willing to give orders to close range and force an engagement.

The rise of air power is precisely what I want to avoid, because battleships are cooler than aircraft carriers.

All comes from improvements in stutterwarp effieciency with core size and the need for large cores to power the big stutterguns meaning large ships are inherantly more powerful than an equivilant resource investment in fighters.

Jutland in space.

Not Midway in space. Thats for a different universe.

Simportant.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by Erik Boielle:
And if they do have an overwhelming advantage, their fleet has served the purpose of gaining sea superiority, so actually engaging the enemy closely won't gain them much and might jepardise that position.

Not true -- if you engage closely with superiority you'll very probably not only win, but win while taking less damage than the foe. This is usually worthwhile; an enemy force that's driven off is not a problem for you _here_, but one that's destroyed isn't a problem for you anywhere.

It's also not true that navies don't engage unless they have vast superiority. You generally try to avoid picking fights you can't win, but there are times when gambling on a close fight is the right thing to do.

 

[Erik Boielle]

Aye but hey I was just making excuses for the lack of a decisive RN victory in the Great War.

Course, that victory was won in the shipyards before the war even started, but, like, thats less visual.



See Germamy just didn't have much sea traffic for the RN to inderdict, so just staring down the Germans, preventing them from disrupting the sea traffic that Britain was very dependent upon. So losing a battle to the High Seas fleet, however unliky that was would have meant loosing the war, and they really didn’t want to bet that on half an hour when they didn’t have to.

So in postulated universe where Britain rules the space lanes but Germany has a powerful presence in the core (now standing in for Europe*) and with good intelligence of fleet strengths on both sides it still kinda works).

*The US aint the US as such, but a cluster of former colonies somewhere, and the China a vast, ancient and crap at fighting Alien empire, with a variety of alien species playing Africa.

 

[Uncle Bob]

Remember that in 1918 the 6th Battle Squadron of the British Grand Fleet were the USS New York, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware and Florida (AKA Battleship Division 9 of the USN). Arguably the New York and Texas were as powerful as any ships in the Grand Fleet, except the Queen Elizabeth class.

And Japan had the closest thing to a British fleet that money could buy.