Sure, the Successor States don't have the stellar infrastructure to contest an Unrestricted Submarine Warfare campaign. And our shield technology make the standard anti-Warship tactics of ballistic nuke-spam unviable for a time. But there's one small problem: You're not cosplaying Admiral Dornitz. You're The Mighty Eight.
It's one thing to cripple tactical or operational movements of a military, but to bring an interstellar nation to its knees, you have to shred their economy. You have to hit everything. Warp drives make strategic movement easier, but every ship that sneaks through, that finds a way through to civilian population or military commands mean those pissed-off people starving in the streets and impotently angry soldiers in defensive positions have more means to do something about it.
Can you say we have the naval numbers to destroy the Mandate's entire civil and military logistics? How about the Feddies in the Outback? Or the Suns as a whole?
I'm asking what the practical scale of your "I Win" button is. Because we have two distinct but interconnected wars to fight.
And
you're still ignoring how:
A) Those trickles leaking through might let them fight
a little bit, it sure isn't letting them fight
well
B) This isn't a fucking submarine campaign anymore, it's a straightup surface blockade like Britain did to Germany in WW1: we're
not Dönitz, we're
Chester Nimitz, it's 1945, and we're running along the Japanese coast with our dicks out and there's nothing the enemy can do
C) That is already crippling their ability to make large scale offensives or strategic retreats, even with just a single frigate squadron, even as ORDI forces can reposition at their leisure, can concentrate force with confidence that the enemy cannot do the same
D) The overwhelming majority of logistics are jumpship logistics, IE, single jump point, weeklong charge, jumpships, that can be captured incredibly easily just by jumping in a Noctis and escorts, blowing their escorting dropships to kingdom come, and the jumpship captains are completely helpless
Please understand just what the compounding affects of such an interdiction imply, one of which is first and foremost, the blockading force can concentrate forces to their leisure, while the defender cannot reinforce nor can the defender move to exploit holes left by enemy movements. The Helghans and Taurians have warpships, and
advanced warpships at that; this means that warships can be positioned nodally and centrally and rapidly shift across the front to any given emergence point in the time it takes for a jumpship fleet to emerge, have their dropships unload and begin to burn for the planet, and recharge their jumpdrives.
No one's calling it an I win button, it's just a critical strategic advantage that you seem to think only exists to fight other warships and do orbital bombardments, when again,
these are warpships with Improved Warpdrives.
To repeat: we're not the fucking u-boat force in 1942, that's a stupid analogy, we are TF38 and we're partying like it's 1945.
