[X] Plan Parthian Shot
Terminus Quest: A CKII Mass Effect Quest
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
Say, do we have any indication about what reserves the Rachni might have to throw at the situation?
Ganurath
Literal Enthusiast
- Location
- A Valid Location
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, @Daemon Hunter rolled a 66 against a DC of 35 to contact the Alliance, while @NotAlwaysFanfic rolled a 97 against a DC of 50 to contact the Citadel. We've also received ominous contact from the Alliance asking how long we can hold out. I have my fingers crossed that their reserves are either shallow due to being used elsewhere against forces that are far more prepared than they hoped, or are going to be diverted as they become desperately needed elsewhere.
Strange9
hdellaverson@gmail.com
- Location
- Los Angeles, CA
I think this is entirely true, and is honestly most of my problem. Quotes like this:
Ask other posters to take people on their word because [Math], and this bothers me for three reasons. I think it's probably ill-justified in a quest that's run by a person, not a numerical simulation, I think it probably excludes people from discussions unnecessarily, and finally it bothers me because Lanchester's laws are a spectacularly bad model to apply as a justification, given that the only two cases where they maybe-kinda-sorta seem to have worked as a good model are in trench warfare and in some cases of aircraft warfare (particularly a problem since most of the empirical analysis doesn't support the option Simon (sorry for not tagging, not quite sure how) is using them for.
With that in mind...
If units need time to retarget or down time spent not fighting, and those amounts of time are consistent across your formation
Plus, we're in a space battle, so "ships engaged in a battle are trying to bring harm to the enemy more or less continuously, and are able to switch targets rapidly" are pretty good assumptions.
You're right that ships have to be targeting individual targets, not blindly bombarding an area; I mentioned that repeatedly. But that, too, is a good assumption in this battle. I don't know the full details of our gunners' training regimen, but I'm pretty sure they do not eyeball it. These are weapons of mass destruction, they are not cowboys shooting from the hip.
If reinforcements show up, you press "pause" on the outcome and set up a new differential equations problem.
Speaking roughly, 1618 to 1905 takes us to the era of volley fire by blocks of infantry firing volleys into other blocks of infantry, plus command and control limitations that tended to keep large armies artificially compressed into smaller spaces where a smaller army. That is exactly the kind of situation that promotes the Lanchester Linear Law: lots of effectively unaimed fire at blocks of men that then take casualties roughly proportionate to their density on the ground.
Honestly I'd expect the Lanchester Square Law to be a better model of ancient fighting with melee weapons than of Napoleonic musketeers.
It's like, yes, obviously, there are combat situations that the Lanchester Square Law doesn't model. Or where you can't model an entire battle that way because what actually happened was a series of separate engagements, which would in any good differential-equations model require you to stop after each engagement and begin again in the new one with new parameters.
I am not expressing blind zombie idiot faith in the Lanchester Square Law. Sometimes the Lanchester Linear Law applies. Sometimes a hybrid (something like a 1.5th power law) applies, because a mix of blind-fire and direct aimed fire are being used. Sometimes combat, even in the moment of the combat itself, is too weird to be modeled by any reasonably straightforward set of differential equations.
This is not mysticism or worship.
But the specific context of our space battles is almost ideally suited for the Lanchester Square Law, inasmuch as both fleets consist of a collection of point targets firing at each other in the midst of a huge expanse of vacuum.
Over a week-long land battle, this is very likely to be correct. In the kinds of fighting we're dealing with right here? So far, probably going to apply.
It's like, if you point to a two week period during which large groups of soldiers clashed on and off across a 100-mile area as one big engagement to be modeled with a single one-step calculation using the Lanchester Square Law, yes you are going to get a bad fit. This is sort of like how you will get a bad fit for the laws of motion describing an ideal projectile flying through the air on a ballistic path, if you throw the ball into a tornado.
None of that invalidates the point that, as @Kinruush pointed out, when large groups ARE directly engaged in combat and firing on each other and are in fact all capable of directly targeting the enemy, which describes the exact scenario we now find ourselves in, concentration of fire into a killzone that the enemy occupies is a very effective way of finishing them off rapidly, before they can return fire to good effect and freeing up the forces manning the killzone to go do something else. Which is my point.
You really can't in good faith say (earlier on this page!) that
and then say that the laws don't apply to any war between 1618 and 1905. Like I said, you've really hyped up the cross-applicability of the laws, and now you're saying that they practically don't apply to any conflict thus tested.
I'm also not sure what you mean by the one-step approximation (as far as I can tell, none of the analyses did that). Lanchester's laws make clear predictions (given initial conditions) about what attrition rates should look like (namely, like this). We can simply check how many casualties one side took (given initial conditions/sizes), then make a prediction from the diff. eqn solutions as to what the other side should have taken.
The proper analogy isn't using a one-step approximation of Newton's Laws, it's predicting where a ball will land given initial conditions (which is both simple and easy).
But hey, if you're really attached to the discrete-time step model, that's fine, because we can check that too! L. R. Speight did a day-by-day analysis of the battle of Kursk, and found that, "What is also apparent from this analysis, as well as many others that have been based on historical results, is that using Lanchester 's Square Law as a basis for predicting outcomes in the direct fire battle may lead to very misleading indications indeed" (Speight, L. R. "Within-Campaign Analysis: A Statistical Evaluation of the Battle of Kursk." Military Operations Research, vol. 16, no. 2, 2011, pp. 41–62. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43941475.) .
Guys, I know it started as being extremely relevant to this quest, but maybe at this point take the Lanchesters argument to PMs or its own thread? It's interesting and all, but I forsee "agree to disagree" in its future and I don't know if it's going to stay thread-relevant as it gets there.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
I wonder if the Terminus and Council have any estimates on the total number of fleets the Rachni have, either from espionage or Rachni industrial analysis or some combination of both. With intelligence coordination between the fronts all three could potentially figure out whether any fleets were hanging around unaccounted for, which would be awfully useful information for planning engagements. Perhaps something to discuss with them.
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- Location
- Florida
[X] Plan Parthian Shot
- Location
- Grandview
[X] Plan Slowly at First, and Then All at Once
- Location
- calgary
[X] Plan Slowly at First, and Then All at Once
- Location
- Aotearoa
[X] Plan Slowly at First, and Then All at Once
Not that there's a whole lot of difference.
Not that there's a whole lot of difference.
- Location
- Finland
[X] Plan Charge
-[X] Withdraw away from the relay and try to make it to extreme range. The rachni have a massive cruiser advantage, and long range is where cruiser guns start coming into play. Try and get to extreme range, dragging them past the defense platforms on the way, and try to buy time with the slower pace of a capital ship duel.
-[X] Dive in and shatter them. They have failed to form a formation; now make it impossible. Put an end to this assault with crushing speed so that you can reinforce one of the other fleets. Of course, rachni carry a lot of torpedoes, so if you don't shatter them, this could hurt.
-[X] Remain at extreme range at all costs. Through good gunnery, you've taken out most of the rachni dreadnoughts, leaving you facing just one dreadnought and a bevy of battlecruisers. If you remain at extreme range, you are facing what is effectively an only slightly-larger hostile force, and you can draw this out for much longer.
-[X] Do not commit them. You do not need them badly enough to accept the casualties of doing so just yet.
-[X] Withdraw away from the relay and try to make it to extreme range. The rachni have a massive cruiser advantage, and long range is where cruiser guns start coming into play. Try and get to extreme range, dragging them past the defense platforms on the way, and try to buy time with the slower pace of a capital ship duel.
-[X] Dive in and shatter them. They have failed to form a formation; now make it impossible. Put an end to this assault with crushing speed so that you can reinforce one of the other fleets. Of course, rachni carry a lot of torpedoes, so if you don't shatter them, this could hurt.
-[X] Remain at extreme range at all costs. Through good gunnery, you've taken out most of the rachni dreadnoughts, leaving you facing just one dreadnought and a bevy of battlecruisers. If you remain at extreme range, you are facing what is effectively an only slightly-larger hostile force, and you can draw this out for much longer.
-[X] Do not commit them. You do not need them badly enough to accept the casualties of doing so just yet.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
@Strange9
Okay, you know what? Fine. You win. Congratulations. You have destroyed me with facts and logic.
But then we have a problem, because you've also knocked out a pretty important concept that's one of the underpinnings of military strategy.
...
See, the core implication of "the Lanchester Laws are more or less true" is basically "outnumbering the enemy is very effective."
Suppose for the sake of argument that I concede that the Lanchester Laws are a useless and invalid model. Stipulate that it's impossible to model fighting forces as inflicting mortality on the enemy proportionate to their own numbers, as the principles behind the Lanchester Square Law do.
Does that mean outnumbering the enemy has stopped being effective, either as a way to maximize damage to the enemy, or as a way to minimize damage to one's own forces by putting the enemy down quickly before they can put up protracted resistance?
...
If "yes," then that means some very counterintuitive things have become true.
If "no," then ultimately, the Lanchester Law doesn't really matter very much, because we still wrap back to the same conclusion. Which is that in general, the most effective way to defeat an enemy, under the kinds of conditions we face, is to concentrate a large force against a small one and destroy it quickly with minimal losses. And that the more we concentrate our forces, the more likely we are to get a clean success.
Okay, you know what? Fine. You win. Congratulations. You have destroyed me with facts and logic.
But then we have a problem, because you've also knocked out a pretty important concept that's one of the underpinnings of military strategy.
...
See, the core implication of "the Lanchester Laws are more or less true" is basically "outnumbering the enemy is very effective."
Suppose for the sake of argument that I concede that the Lanchester Laws are a useless and invalid model. Stipulate that it's impossible to model fighting forces as inflicting mortality on the enemy proportionate to their own numbers, as the principles behind the Lanchester Square Law do.
Does that mean outnumbering the enemy has stopped being effective, either as a way to maximize damage to the enemy, or as a way to minimize damage to one's own forces by putting the enemy down quickly before they can put up protracted resistance?
...
If "yes," then that means some very counterintuitive things have become true.
If "no," then ultimately, the Lanchester Law doesn't really matter very much, because we still wrap back to the same conclusion. Which is that in general, the most effective way to defeat an enemy, under the kinds of conditions we face, is to concentrate a large force against a small one and destroy it quickly with minimal losses. And that the more we concentrate our forces, the more likely we are to get a clean success.
Thors_Alumni
Proud member of Thors Class VII from Liberl
- Location
- Liberl Zemuria.
Guys seriously cut it out. Your starting to derail the thread with this topic. If you want to keep talking about it take it to PM.
- Location
- Finland
Outnumbering the enemy is nice, but not even close to the most important part of winning, maximizing enemy losses or minimizing own losses.
Here, for instance, yes having more ships is helpful. But those same ships are likely to be many times more effective if given time to gather, form up and organize first. The question is, which of these two benefits is better overall.
The reason I prefer charge to surround is that I believe that reorganising and redeploying the fleet elsewhere will be difficult and take time, and the chances of losing one of the other two battles decisively increases quickly over time, so the risk of taking heavier losses in the charge is offset by the speed we win in reinforcing the other battles if we succeed.
Here, for instance, yes having more ships is helpful. But those same ships are likely to be many times more effective if given time to gather, form up and organize first. The question is, which of these two benefits is better overall.
The reason I prefer charge to surround is that I believe that reorganising and redeploying the fleet elsewhere will be difficult and take time, and the chances of losing one of the other two battles decisively increases quickly over time, so the risk of taking heavier losses in the charge is offset by the speed we win in reinforcing the other battles if we succeed.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'm trying to explicitly walk this back from detailed discussion of the Lanchester Laws. Because originally, I brought them up as an underlying reason why "outnumbering the enemy is powerful, and increasing your numerical superiority at the point of contact can have disproportionate positive effects." And to caution us that a big enough enemy force may well roll over a small force of our own while staying intact, taking very limited losses and maybe even inflicting disproportionate casualties on us.
If that's true, then when you get right down to it, it doesn't matter that much whether the Lanchester Laws are the reason it is true.
If it isn't true, that has a looot of very weird implications.
But at a single point where we can possibly apply numerical superiority - AB-MS Relay - we can't apply enough of it.
Like, reserve right now has 6% of Explorer Corps and 8% and 14% of two Raiding fleets. That's not combat effective by any measure, and if we commit these scraps, they would remain not combat effective, in addition to whatever further reinforcements arriving too being not combat effective.
There's a good reason why in history of warfare people tended to amass reserves before going on offensive rather than throwing formations into attack as soon as they arrived to the front.
Thus, unless we want to lose disproportionate number of ships in comparison to additional Rachni ships taken out, committing reserves right now is not the most sound of moves.
Thus, I would say that 2nd Battle Fleet has to deal with opponent caught in a killzone by itself.
Opponent which is in a killzone and in a minefield, but still has 2/3rds of it's strength.
If 2nd Battle Fleet moves to encircle Rachni and thus remain out of a killzone, it has an overwhelming superiority in firepower - both having full complement of it's capitals as opposed to badly battered Rachni one, support of combat stations and freedom of maneuverability - Rachni don't have the last one, what with being constrained by a minefield.
However, if 2nd Battle Fleet moves in, it gains the same constraint on maneuverability, with all the mines and debris in the killzone, and gets into range of torpedoes - and those don't depend on being launched out of a bigger ship to be killy to everything including dreadnaughts.
Furthermore, we have witnessed Rachni fleets containing battlecruisers. As far as I'm aware, our Battle Fleets don't make use of them, as they're relatively vulnerable in slugging-out Relay battles.
Combining relative Battlecruiser superiority on closer ranges and every Rachni ship from CL down carrying torpedoes, I don't see how engaging that constrained Rachni fleet in melee is playing to our strengths.
Encircling and bombarding them, while being longer and more punishing on our defence installations there, would preserve more of our ships to be reassigned elsewhere...
And we don't need to eradicate every bug in the killzone before doing so. Once Rachni strength there falls to around fifth of nominal, we would be able to move the (Bolstered by late arrivals) reserves to finish the job.
Like, reserve right now has 6% of Explorer Corps and 8% and 14% of two Raiding fleets. That's not combat effective by any measure, and if we commit these scraps, they would remain not combat effective, in addition to whatever further reinforcements arriving too being not combat effective.
There's a good reason why in history of warfare people tended to amass reserves before going on offensive rather than throwing formations into attack as soon as they arrived to the front.
Thus, unless we want to lose disproportionate number of ships in comparison to additional Rachni ships taken out, committing reserves right now is not the most sound of moves.
Thus, I would say that 2nd Battle Fleet has to deal with opponent caught in a killzone by itself.
Opponent which is in a killzone and in a minefield, but still has 2/3rds of it's strength.
If 2nd Battle Fleet moves to encircle Rachni and thus remain out of a killzone, it has an overwhelming superiority in firepower - both having full complement of it's capitals as opposed to badly battered Rachni one, support of combat stations and freedom of maneuverability - Rachni don't have the last one, what with being constrained by a minefield.
However, if 2nd Battle Fleet moves in, it gains the same constraint on maneuverability, with all the mines and debris in the killzone, and gets into range of torpedoes - and those don't depend on being launched out of a bigger ship to be killy to everything including dreadnaughts.
Furthermore, we have witnessed Rachni fleets containing battlecruisers. As far as I'm aware, our Battle Fleets don't make use of them, as they're relatively vulnerable in slugging-out Relay battles.
Combining relative Battlecruiser superiority on closer ranges and every Rachni ship from CL down carrying torpedoes, I don't see how engaging that constrained Rachni fleet in melee is playing to our strengths.
Encircling and bombarding them, while being longer and more punishing on our defence installations there, would preserve more of our ships to be reassigned elsewhere...
And we don't need to eradicate every bug in the killzone before doing so. Once Rachni strength there falls to around fifth of nominal, we would be able to move the (Bolstered by late arrivals) reserves to finish the job.
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Kinruush
Who?
- Location
- USA
Wait, what? They're not going to just die off from being near a fight. If they go help at MS, where we already have an advantage, then fewer total ships on our side will die at MS. That's inarguable.
These reserves are, right now, a mess made out of scraps of three different formations. Expecting it to make a big positive difference is optimistic to the extreme.
And if they're going to affect the fight in some way, they wouldn't be "near" a fight. They would engage the Rachni, and due to these reserves being a mess they would suffer higher losses than properly integrated into formation 2nd Battle fleet.
If these were all the ships we were going to get, I might have agreed with you, if only because they would have served just fine absorbing some of the hits that would otherwise damage 2nd Battle fleet.
But more ships arrive by the hour, and I'd prefer to assemble a formation with enough guns and torpedoes to make a difference before throwing them into the grinder.
Kinruush
Who?
- Location
- USA
I have literally never claimed it would make a major difference. The point is that small positive benefits now can have knock-on effects down the road, and we're weighing that against the possibility that there'll be a better time to intervene with a slightly larger force later.
Again, as per Poptart, if the reinforcements are sent to the MS-AB relay, they'll help counter any potential rushes the rachni make on the picket sphere. When I said, "They're not going to just die off from being near a fight" I mean that they do not magically suffer losses from being involved. The rachni do not get extra guns to fire just because there are more potential targets, and the reinforcements are not going to be involved in a way that makes the force there less effective. They aren't just going to be damage sponges or something. We will be a little more capable of handling whatever the rachni decide to do in response to the picket sphere.
We will, inherently, lose fewer total ships than if the reinforcements weren't there, and we will probably kill the rachni there a little faster.
It's not going to be an incredible difference, but it will still be a difference, and it will still be a benefit.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Except we're already locked in combat. We don't have a choice about whether or not to commit to battle. All our relevant combat formations are already in battle, and cannot disengage. We won't have enough reinforcements to constitute a relevant reserve fleet on the scale of what we're dealing with for days, and by that point we'll already be losing the overall battle.
All this stuff about waiting until you have a decisive reserve is mis-applied theory in this context.
We don't really have a meaningful reserve; if we want to get one, we'll need to do it by destroying an existing rachni formation to free up the ships that are now fighting it.
If we continue to follow this logic, Mira's going to be saying "wait for it... waaait for it..." and awaiting the perfect moment to deploy her reinforcement fleet for far longer than we can reasonably hope to hold out. By the time she commits the reserve force, the greater casualties we'll have taken from waiting so long will tend to offset its effect and make it easier for the rachni to concentrate against the new threat.
@PoptartProdigy , is this true?
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- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Okay, I'm making a few rulings as the QM.
First of all, your Battle Fleets do have battlecruisers. Their current dominance in a melee makes them useful to have and crippling to lack, which is why the rachni now have them.
Second, and I want to state this as clearly as I can: BEING OUTNUMBERED IS BAD. Whether you justify that with Lanchestrian laws or by simply acknowledging that being shot at by two things while you can only shoot at one is undesirable, nobody likes being on the smaller side of a fight. Does your tech help? Yes. The fight is survivable. You can phrase that, as you prefer, as, "Virmire's technological edge enables it to survive in the face of the rachni's superior numbers," or as, "The rachni's insane numerical superiority has enabled them to overcome the crushing technological disadvantage imposed on them due to having discovered FTL less than a century ago."
Now, I'll leave the vote open a while longer. If either of the above facts is going to change your vote, let it do so now.
First of all, your Battle Fleets do have battlecruisers. Their current dominance in a melee makes them useful to have and crippling to lack, which is why the rachni now have them.
Second, and I want to state this as clearly as I can: BEING OUTNUMBERED IS BAD. Whether you justify that with Lanchestrian laws or by simply acknowledging that being shot at by two things while you can only shoot at one is undesirable, nobody likes being on the smaller side of a fight. Does your tech help? Yes. The fight is survivable. You can phrase that, as you prefer, as, "Virmire's technological edge enables it to survive in the face of the rachni's superior numbers," or as, "The rachni's insane numerical superiority has enabled them to overcome the crushing technological disadvantage imposed on them due to having discovered FTL less than a century ago."
Now, I'll leave the vote open a while longer. If either of the above facts is going to change your vote, let it do so now.
