SAR Op @ Heretic Base. Pegasus, + Baseship vs. Covenant

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User3084
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SAR Op @ Heretic Base. Pegasus, + Baseship vs. Covenant

Post by User3084 » Thu Feb 23, 2012 7:44 am

I am helping a dear friend of mine, writing a fanfic, crossover, and I'd like some advice with some backstory, along with the basic logistics of the mission in general.

The story can be found here:  (Please Review! WE NEED FEEDBACK) i.e. - this is the de facto Site of fanfiction on the Internet.

http://fanfiction.net/s/4352751/1/

The perticular chapter arc that I need help with is going to play out like this:

One jump before the jump to Alpha Halo, there is a contact on the Baseships sensors. As (Note: Cylons DO NOT use DRADIS ["Direction, RAnge, and DIStance"]). Anyways, after a very unoccupied Battlestar Pegasus is comendeered, they set out to rescue the Heritics on Alpha Halo.

Once there, logistically, how long would a Cylon Baseship, with a compliment of 800+ Raiders (plus nukes!) & the Murcuray-class Battlestar (with Cylon healing goo) be able to hold off Covenant forces at the Gas Mine, near Installation 04?

Would they be able to hold out for at least a plausible 20 minutes? Trying to rescue 400 souls?

Please give me your honest opinion.

And not just one sentence.

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Mr. Oragahn
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Re: SAR Op @ Heretic Base. Pegasus, + Baseship vs. Covenant

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Feb 23, 2012 2:30 pm

Hi!
I'm not sure to understand the premise of that plot (and I don't have time to read the fanfic yet), but there's a couple of things to be known.

Basestars are fairly agile and can enter atmosphere. Eventually, one can be parked over a specific target the Covenant want to protect. I'm not sure there's such a goal, but it's a way to make sure that if the ship is downed, it will crash on the area that's being protected.

A Mercury-class Battlestar, on the battle side of things, can tank some massive punishment, due to its important quantity of armour and its size. Weapon range is usually limited in space to a couple kilometers, I'd say about twenty for the effective range in general, perhaps more. Against a ground based objective, a proper calculation could allow for a greater range, unless the weapon is so unstable that it's impossible to properly align a slug to land on some ship located inside the atmosphere.
The Pegasus' main forwards guns were seen to impale a Basestar in one shot, so they're very relevant against the kind of ships we saw in Halo: Reach, taken down by the guns used by UNSC frigates.
The larger Covenant ships would however require much more efforts to bring down and would quickly destroy any BSG ship with their plasma torpedoes and beams, longer ranged and much more powerful, only matched by the nukes.
Thankfully, nukes aren't rare in BSG.

As usual, Cylon Raiders are capable of long range jumps, notably inside an atmosphere, like Colonial Raptors, and both can carry nukes. Actually the Raptors can carry a shit lot of them (a volley of sixteen nukes managed to royally screw the extremely huge Cylon Colony - although the guys doing the VFX for the plan had the bad idea of forgetting about the size they had established in the series finale, and most likely decided to use a fan made scaling which was never validated).

A fully prepared Basestar has a fuckton of missile launchers, each one capable of carrying one large nuke (50 MT), or a MIRV containing 16 nukes identical to the 50 KT ones fired by the Raiders, or more basic chemical warheads (might be capable of armour piercing - I'd consider it logical but it's never specified), or an array of interceptor missiles to counter other missiles (and perhaps fighters although we never saw them used that way, but then again we barely saw that interception system used at all).
A Basestar seems to have a total of 220 weapon launchers.

The retconned Basestars don't have the ~800 Raiders anymore, but 434. That's still a huge force to consider how far it can be projected.
Technically, a fully nuclear-ready Basestar could with its mere squadrons bring the entirety of the US down. A Raider can carry about five missiles under each wing IIRC, and all of them can be nukes, allowing a single craft to carry, in theory, about 500 KT of firepower.

All in all, they clearly have enough firepower to soften the defenses of any Covenant warship.

Covenant have point defense guns which, based on the books, are stellar, but based on the games and anime, aren't anything better than your average SF show or movie. Game material still being of higher canon, it trumps the claims from the books so Raiders and Colonial ships should do fine.

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Re: SAR Op @ Heretic Base. Pegasus, + Baseship vs. Covenant

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Feb 23, 2012 7:42 pm

EmeraldReporter wrote:Once there, logistically, how long would a Cylon Baseship, with a compliment of 800+ Raiders (plus nukes!) & the Mercury-class Battlestar (with Cylon healing goo) be able to hold off Covenant forces at the Gas Mine, near Installation 04?
Welcome to the forum, EmeraldReporter.

Mr. Oragahn's already given a fairly detailed accounting of nBSG capabilties, so I'll just cover a few side issues. The "healing goo" really doesn't work very well on Colonial materials. At best it can kind of sort of fill in and reinforce the existing structure, and it won't magically or instantly regenerate a heavily damaged battlestar's structure in the heat of combat. So I would not consider that a real factor in the story beyond allowing the ship to maybe handle a little bit more in the way of hard maneuvering stress and allow the alloys to handle more small-scale collision or explosive damage than it otherwise normally could.
-Mike

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