The obvious problem that you're ignoring is that raids will put dreads against BC's. All raids will need to pass through relays, and those relays will be guarded. The enemy doesn't need to chase our raiders around. They can simply lock down the relays with a few, strong taskforces.
In addition, any enemy counteroffensive will also involve Dreads, and our forces can not retreat then.
Edit : On a side note, Territory defense doctrine does raids too.
Except jumping to FTL after a Relay assault is a pretty quick affair. Those relays are still pretty porous unless the attackers have any real desire to actually
hold the relay.
Seriously, find a secondary relay to assault, launch the distraction invasion- and
fucking laugh as battlecruisers use the same relay they just entered to scatter across the stars. Relays evidently don't have cooldowns, and an assault force is liable as not to be near enough to jump quickly.
Space combat is not quick, especially if the relays fortifications aren't up to par. Barring FTL comm relays (which theoretically could be jammed if you can prevent ships from sending it a signal to FTL out) you have pretty much
minutes to get your raiders going- and that's
easily manageable, especially when it's a doctrine that no one has a ton of experience encountering.
Guerre De Course relies, and has always relied on not having fixed, accessible, known centers of gravity that said stronger navies can retaliate against.
The Rachni know damn well where to find our bases.
Your commerce raider force is going to have Issues when they turn up with a dozen dreadnought doorknockers and a support fleet to match
Except assaulting relays
is not a quick endeavor. It took us
the better part of a year to gather our forces to launch an assault out of our relay. And you're ignoring the massive amount of logistics said invasion fleet requires, that are incredibly vulnerable to raiders or the fact said invasion fleet means you've concentrated your counter to raids and are allowing entire worlds and clusters to burn beneath Dreadnought scale guns.
What you are proposing
is probably not going to happen. Because at that point, yeah- you've probably guaranteed a kill against the nuisance but allowed the nuisance to do far more damage than it otherwise could have. And you've still got WMDs running amok amongst your territory. You are assuming the worst possible scenario and claiming it a certainty, a scenario mind you
that actively runs against our foes interests in the favor of arbitrarily crushing us. I absolutely can't take it seriously.
Especially when Battlecruisers defending in a Relay assault against Dreads
heavily favors the BC. Because guess what? It can better guarantee it hits the sweet spot of 'Medium' range and guts Dreads while outmaneuvering them. So yeah, I have absolutely zero concerns over what you're proposing, because in a 'back against the wall dozen dread relay assault'
it's quite possible spamming BCs is better than a typical Dreadnought based order of battle.
All of this is wrong.
The Rachni are an acknowledged Tier 1 polity, as confirmed by the GM.
That means that there is no significant technological gap between it and the Citadel, and that what there is is compensated for by their industrial capacity.
Rachni ships are not poor in terms of quality; they leverage different things.
They are less-casualty shy than we are, and replace crew members faster and so they build accordingly, like not bothering with kinetic barriers on small ships, which they can mass-produce. This comes with certain advantages, like reduced cost, and a smaller power budget.
Rachni doctrine OTOH is very goddamn good. It has to be.
They didn't kick the Citadel out of this region by counting bottlecaps.
Rachni logistics are no worse than ours are, and is possibly better.
They are, and have been, prosecuting an interstellar war on at least three fronts for more than three decades, and their opponents are on the defensive.
Said opponents include 2 Tier 1 nations and multiple Tier 2 nations.
Rachni have organic FTLcomm.
This gives them a logistical advantage in organizing intracluster supply lines, and a tactical advantage in maneuvering combat formations in a system.
AND early warning on raiders.
Again, I will point out that we've seen the results of what happens when you mistime assaults.
There
is a tech gap, at least in terms of what they deploy. That's an objective fucking fact so don't even bother arguing otherwise. Yes, the Rachni are the meanest bastards in the galaxy but that doesn't mean their doctrine doesn't have some explicit flaws. Whether you like it or not, our ships are
objectively qualitatively superior.
As for the superior doctrine? In the sense we have a novel doctrine, with novel warships the Rachni have utterly no equivalent for nor counter raiding doctrine. Seriously regardless of what you want- it's all pretty objective that raiding is far more dangerous before the other polity has developed it's own counter doctrine. They have no counter doctrine yet.
Ans as for logistics,
you're being obtuse. Of course the Rachni are awesome logistics, you have to be to fight a massive pangalactic war like they're doing, but they also have
absolutely obscene logistic requirements, and the forces we faced by all appearances were at a pretty long logistical tail. It's not a matter of comparison, it's a simply matter of scale. By sheer neccesity, they will have a
ton of stuff vulnerable to raiding and not a huge amount of experience dealing with a comprehensive battlecruiser based raiding force.
Contrary to that,
the Rachni are very very fucking good at using their superior numbers to bottle people up, cede initiative and allow themselves to be defeated in detail as Rachni gradually reduce fronts and commitments elsewhere. You can't afford to be so reactive in the face of such an overwhelming material and manpower advantage, because if you do eventually they'll spare the time to simply crush you.
Rachni have organic FTLcomm.
This gives them a logistical advantage in organizing intracluster supply lines, and a tactical advantage in maneuvering combat formations in a system.
AND early warning on raiders.
Again, I will point out that we've seen the results of what happens when you mistime assaults.
It happened to us the first time we tried to take Hercules; we lost the entirety of First Fleet, much of Second Fleet, and it was the proximate cause of our character's coup d'etat.
The first assault had no capitalships, wasn't well lead, and was foreseen as a military disaster a mile away, it's no fucking comparison.
And we've seen zero indication of ubiquitous interstellar FTL comms allowing phenomenal multi-system coordination. Otherwise the cluster's remnants would be far better raiders than they are
and the relay assault we already fucking launched would have been seen considering we launched it on the tail of one of their relay assaults. You are blatantly grasping at straws because we have objective proof it does not work that way.
Historically, the guerre de course tactics did little more than prolong wars, and tended to create a long string of indecisive minor defeats for the nation practicing them, unless the opposing navy was doing something very wrong. And that was on the high seas, in situations where the raiders didn't all have to pass through narrow, easily fortified relay networks to reach their targets.
Keep in mind, historically- the powers targeted by such tended to have at least comparable if not superior quality, be surprisingly close to the guerre de course using nations, and have theorycrafted against commerce raiding to some degree or another.
The Rachni have individually inferior ships in terms of combat performance, relying on numbers (which are logistics intensive), and don't have theorycrafting on how to counter a battlecruiser raiding doctrine. And I can absolutely assure you, commerce raiding and guerre de course served Germany and French better than Mahanian doctrine would have- or do I need to whip out the Battle of Jutland?
As for prolonging the war-
exactly, that's the entire point. We can afford to suffer consistent strings of minor defeats if we slow the Rachni down, and unlike historical examples, there are huge commitments elsewhere the Rachni can't afford to draw down yet. We need to buy ourselves and whoever else is out there fighting the Rachni time. Time for the Krogan, time for an offensive, even time for the Rachni to potentially draw down on the war effort themselves. Trading ships for time is a much better deal IMO than relying on a defensive posture liable to lead to decisive battles with losses we're ill capable of affording even in nominal victory.
I consider Relays as much a feature as a problem for raiding because they allow raiders obscene mobility if properly leveraged. Any commerce raider theorist who heard of a secondary relay would
die of joy. Because suddenly, a raider can hit
anywhere in that radius nigh simultaneously and requires far more assets to defend against.
In this cluster, we have a target so good for raiding operations that I'm actually worried that we might learn the wrong lessons from trying them against this opponent- sort of like how the IJN learned the wrong lessons about its own ability to auto-win battles from the early phase of the Pacific War.
And that's possible, but we won't really know until we study raiding doctrine. I feel we really,
really need to explore it to find out. Producing BCs until we develop native dreads costs us nothing, and while a switch in doctrine would be painful I by no means think it would be impossible. And the advantage of such a proactive doctrine of raiding is that we could test it immediately and examine the results, whereas the defensiev doctrine currently winning might only be proven wrong when our fleets are shattered in a decisive battle gone wrong.
The biggest problem here is dealing with relay systems. Competently organized raiding doctrine would seem very obviously good... if not for relays.
I vehemently disagree. Because Secondary Relays change
everything. And suddenly, with raiders in the cluster you have to fortify the Primary relays in nominally safe areas otherwise those raiders might slip in god knows how far into your interior and tear it apart. If the Germans could get raiders off the East Coast, I shudder to think just how far ranging our raiders might be able to manage in the initial period.
And for the matter, it's quite possible that raiders ranging potentially reopens some degree of communication between us and other polities. If only through intermitten and sparse encounters.
Man, I seem to have a special knack to getting my arguments dogpiled- sorry as it tends to make me more caustic and defensive.
But let me have my final words on this: Virmiran Naval Theorists better understand void warfare and the limitations and possibilities imposed by the Relay Network. They would not suggest a commerce raiding doctrine if they did not earnestly expect that it was workable. The argument 'relays make it unfeasible' is not some objective fact, and merely an opinion.
And for my double,
double last words- I reiterate there is an incredibly reasonable argument that for a defensive posture, BCs are in fact more cost effective than Dreads regardless given that in the BC's goldilocks zone (medium range) it's the king of the battlefield. And a Relay defense can guarantee that sort of opportunity to close with Dreads better than any other practical scenario.
