NationStates Jolt Archive

Our main battlefleet is exiting as we speak, as now the Jason Coon has met with it. Our expoditionary fleet is currently attempting to disengage the enemy fleet

The eight men had escaped from the lands held by DMG, and travelled to another nation, to throw off any possible links.

OOC: My subs are still in the area ready to ambush Axinons convoy with the sattelite.

OOC: My subs are still in the area ready to ambush Axinons convoy with the sattelite.

ooc: I believe you will have to intercept his entire battlefleet, which is 250 ships (if I remember correctly)

OOC: Axinon First Battlefleet-Commander George O'Conner
1 x Ultimatum-Class Battlecarrier (Daniel Wilson/"Big Willie")
7 x Dynamic-Class Battleship
13 x O'Conner-Class Battleship
20 x Coon-Class Battlecruisers
30 x Soloman-Class Cruisers
15 x Liberty-Class Carrier
40 x Falcon-Class Destroyer (ASW)
40 x Falcon-Class Destroyer (AA)
40 x Falcon-Class Destroyer (Anti-ship)
20 x Millenium Wall Anti-Missle Cruisers
15 x Exorcist Railgun Cruisers
20 x Skipjack-class nuclear powered attack submarines (SSN)
10 x Stalwart-class nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBN)
10 x Griffon-class conventional powered attack submarines (SSC)
Airwing
800 x F/A-1 Wasp
500 x F/A-2 Blackhunter


The detachment sent to retrieve the sattlite is: 4 Falcon-Class Destroyers, 1 Flytrap-Class Aircraft Destroyer, 1 Pelican-Class Sub Destroyer and 1 Millennium Wall-Class Anti-Missile Cruiser. These units are currently about 5-10 minutes from joining the battlefleet, and are well within range of anti-sub missles from the destroyers and helecopters of the fleet.


IC: Sam Sampson looked grimly at the radar screen on the command deck. The Jason Coon was about 6 minutes away from joining the First Battlefleet, at which point almost nothing could stop them from returning to Axinon.

The plan was in motion. The six submarines were several miles off the fleets track, staying just out of detection ange the Kracken class Hunter Killer's were running deep and silent on newly upgraded Hydrogen Fuel Cell power plants. the new upgrades allowed the ships to 'refuel' in deeper water and coolant system upgrades allowed the subs to run faster for longer without overheating the MHD thrusters. The skippers were very appreciative of their new capabilities but not aware that one of them was about to be doomed by their new power.

The problem was not in the new coolant sytem itself but, as so many flaws are, in the training the engineers had recieved to care for the new 'coolers' which had led them to believe that the pipes could handle more pressure for longer than they actually could and that less maintenance was required than was safe.
The engineer in question had taken his training officer's word to be totally unflawed and, possessing a mild lazy streak and an over abundance of confidence in his machines had only performed maintenance as his training had outlined and had let the coolant pipes run with just under the proscribed 'safe' limits. The problems this decudedly un cautious behaviour caused remained dormant until five minutes before the enemy fleet hit the decoy laden patch of sea in which the ambush was to take place. This was when the subs powered up slowly and carefully to be ready for the ambush.
As the power levels increased, so did the coolant pressure, and on the MNS "Freehold" this meant that the pressure was now above the proscribed safe levels and even farther above the realistic safe levels. Combined with a lax maintenance routine this caused a coolant pipe to blow, in seconds the temperature in the engines spiked and within a two minutes, as the engineer's tried to fix the broken coolant line and get the temperature under control the temperature was at critical levels and the High pressure Hydrogen flowing into the Fuel Cells ignited, in seconds the flames had reached the storage tank causing a catastrophic explosion. The detonation alerted everybody within a hundred miles or more on a sonar set of the location of the Mondothina Submarines and the captains had to act fast. The MNS "Morray" lit off its sonar in the special signal hat activated the hundreds of canister docys that immediately began broadcasting white noise over powerful speakers to mask the sounds of the Submarines, effectively blinding any sonar operator over about the same range as the explosion could have been heard. Even as their fellow submarines died horribly in the horrific hull breech following the explosion the crews of the other five subs were working feverishly to pull off the busted ambush. Three of the remaining subs pulled emergency ballast blows to a depth of around 40 meters, launch depth for their Neptune SLASM anti shipping missiles. within seconds of reaching that depth three volley's of ten missile each were roaring out of VLS cells on the backs of the submarines targetted on the ship carrying the Sattelite by the remaining Silent Crow drone.
The other two subs stayed deep and moved in fast, armed with an array of ADCAP and Super Cavitating Torpedoes they launched three volley's of four torpedoes each, these were targetted ont he outer echelon of the fleets defenses, trying to cripple the defensive ships before the missiles reached them. AFter expending the majority of their munitions the five subs turned and fled at full speed, taking as much advantage as they could of the remaining ten minutes before the decoys cut out.

"Huh?" was all that one confused sonar operator on board one of the destroyers in the escort group could say.

A massive spot appeared on the sonar screen, and then went out. For a few short seconds, a handful of subs could be seen on the screen, and then... nothing. A massive wave of noise appeared, and the relatively simplistic sonar on board the AxS Varium could not handle it. Sonar operators on all of the hundreds of other ships had the same reaction.

The operators on board the AxS Pelican knew what was going on first. As the only ship currently in the vicinity that focused exclusively on ASW, its operators were the best trained Axinon could offer.

"To all fleet sonar operators, this is the operator of the Pelican. The enemy seems to be using some sort of noise generation system to blind our sonars."

The noise instantly made the sonar on every ship in the fleet, save the Pelican and Daniel Wilson, totally useless. But then an even more disturbing announcement came over the radio"

"Fleet, this is 2-Green [A member of one of the airwings launched]. We've got missile launches at point 72245alpha."

"2-Green, this is the Guardian. We are tracking the missiles now.... Locked on.... firing counterstrikes..."

"2-Green, this is the Daniel Wilson, attack the area the missiles were launched from at will."

At this command, green squadron (16 airplanes) dropped 4 each (or a total of 64) anti-sub missiles, hoping for a blind hit with the position of the enemy known to the tens of meters.

Meanwhile, the crewmembers of the AxS Flytrap, an Aircraft Destroyer, got a nasty surprise in the form of a breached hull. A torpedo flew into the hull, breaching it and crippling the ship. 12 sailors died and the ship began to sink slowly. The remainder of the crew members were able to escape however. 3 other ships in the fleet received damage from the sub attacks, but none of the others sunk.

Meanwhile, back on board the Pelican, the SONAR operators were hard at work designing software filters to block out the majority of the noise. They had gathered samples of the noise, and now just like the workers at Bell Labs who discovered the cosmic background noise, they were on the verge of being able to screen it out, by searching for irregularities in the noise caused by objects moving. However, their new filters were not ready yet, and until then the fleet would continue to fire blindly...

As it turns out, the Counterstrikes did a OK job on the quick nimble anti-shipping missiles. 10 missiles down... an additional 10 were detonated or shorted out by the electrolasers that were the second line of defense. Then the CIWS of the Jason Coon kicked in. 3 missiles hit dead on; the other 2 were disabled by the Millennium Guns on the Jason Coon and did not detonate. One of the Coon's 10 inch guns was knocked out of commission, and 2 people were killed.

Message to all nations concerned:

As of 0900 this morning, the Supreme Ruler has scaled back our active military exploits. As per order of the Supreme Ruler and the Supreme Allied Commander, the Dominion's Military has been brought down to Defense Condition 3.

The Subs that had launched missiles were too near the surface to avoid the Anti Submarine weapons dropped by the ASW aircraft and were practically obliterated. the deeper subs that had launched torpedoes survived with only some sprung pipes from the overpressure caused by the overhead detonations. They quickly departed the area, stayng deep to avoid detection and more ASW weapons.
The ambush had been a total failure and every living captain in the squadron knew it without having to surface for damage confirmation. The MNS "Main Guache" deployed a signal buoy that sent a short, encryped burst to an orbiting satelite informing Mondoth Fleet Command of the failure and letting the second ambush know that it would be needed, and it would need to be deep to avoid detection.

Four swift class fast atack submarines positioned well away from any shoreline waited patiently, just above Crush Depth these subs were even quieter than the Kracken's and were much faster, faster than most non-supercavitating torpedoes, but the tradeoff was in weaponry, the Swifts were lightly armed, mainly with magnetic mines that had to be deployed either close in front of or below an enemy ship.

George O'Conner surveyed the battlefield from his command/control suite on board the Daniel Wilson. His fleet's casualties: 1 ship sunk, 2 mission killed, 1 lightly damaged, 33 casualties. He could not be sure about the enemy casualties, but from explosions sighted from aircraft after the anti-sub saturation bombing it seemed that the enemy had taken casualties too. Now he faced a tough decision: what to do with the satellite? Keep it on the Jason Coon, or transfer it to another ship? He could put it in a Dynamic-Class battleship or the Daniel Wilson, to afford it better protection, or he could keep it in the Jason Coon. After much thinking about it, he decided to have it transferred via helicopter to the Daniel Wilson. As the Jason Coon's escorts had merged with the battlefleet following the unsuccessful enemy mission, and the Jason Coon was less than 90 meters from the Wilson, the transfer itself was not risky. The thing was... the Daniel Wilson was a big target, and his enemies may be expecting him to move the satellite into the heaviest capital ship in the area. He thought to himself "Well, if the Wilson is destroyed, that means that the battlefleet itself is screwed, so I can see no damage in it. If they are expecting this move, let’s see them do anything about it"

And so a heavy transport helicopter launched off the port runway and flew over to the Coon. In minutes, the satellite was strapped on, transferred to the Wilson, and secured in the storage area.

"Now to make a break for Axinon" O'Conner thought, while ordering his ships to go "Toward Axinon with maximum sustainable speed while on the lookout for any submarine, surface or aerial threat."

The lone drone was nearing the end of its loiter time but had still duitifully recorded and transmitted images of the sattelite being transferred, not good news.

Mondothian Military Command
"Sir, the sattelite has just jumped ships to the Daniel Wilson, I'm not sure the ambush has enough firepower to punch through that."
"Nonsense, those mines were designed to kill Super Dreadnaughts, what resistance could a single battleship put up?"
"Its technical, but the method the lamprey's use to defeat the keel armor of Superdreadnaugths won't work on smaller ships, the most damage we could do witht he assets in theater now is to crack the Wilsons lower hull, it might sink but even if it did would do so slowly enough to have plenty of time to move the Sattelite again."

"We've already expanded to many resources to give up at this point, I wan toptions in twenty four hours!"
"Sir, there aren't any that wouldn't solidly peg us, we're already implicated up to our eyeballs but the only other option is a strategic air strike that can have no origin other than Mondoth. We've lost this one."
The general fumed but realized it was pointless, this crises had ended, unfavorably but ended none the less.

After a long sail home, the members of the Axinonian first battlefleet arrived at the Westport naval base. William McConnel, Speaker of the House Cedric Wilson and Prime Minister of the Senate Luke Marshall were all on hand for a round table meeting with the generals involved in the conflict. Waiting in an underground bunker, they hardly spoke until Admiral George O'Conner, Commander Sam Sampson and Fleet Major Fred Wilson (commander of Taskforce Guardian) walked in.

McConnel broke the silence. "Gentlemen, we've just wrapped up this conflict. So the obvious question is, what can we learn from it"

"We need better ASW tactics, and better trained infantry." O'Conner pointed out.

"Agreed" said Sampson

"It’s hard to draw any conclusions other than that. The whole thing was short, and the only naval action saw both fleets fire missiles at each other from long range, before we withdrew because our fleet was no longer needed." stated O'Conner

"Ok, guys." McConnel said. "You're dismissed."

Government Release

In a brief yet informitive announcment today. The Dominion Government has declared the end of all hostilies due to recent events. The investigative section has been completed and the case is closed.


ooc: just a quick post to end the thread.