Hi,
This is exactly along my lines of thinking. What this implies to me is that;
a) just because an attacking fleet jumps into a defended system is no guarantee that there will be contact between the attackers and defenders
YES! FFW got that wrong - though, in its defense, trying to emulate the "real" situation would have made the game wickedly complicated.
b) the presence of a defending fleet is no guarantee that the attacker won't be able to refuel at a local gas giant
YES!! Or rather, SOMETIMES!! Regina, for example, has an unusual layout with the primary world in orbit around one of the local gas giants - and is a trinary system with yet another gas giant orbiting one of the sister stars, some 5000 AU distant from the primary world. On such oddities are grand strategies developed.
(Actually, given the technology, one can envision the combatants floating specially constructed meson batteries deep within the atmospheres of gas giants, where other weapons could not reach them and where the enemy would be obliged to rely solely on meson fire to counter it or would have to enter the atmosphere and face conducting battle while within a gravity well and dense atmosphere. Makes for one deadly combat scenario - though we'd need to come up with our own rules.)
c) as such, a raiding fleet may be able to reach further behind front lines than might other wise be expected, since its no guarantee that defenders will stop them from refueling
YES!!! In fact, the key limiting factor is more likely to be other supplies and the ability of the enemy to interdict them. Not captured at all under High Guard, for example, is the circumstance of a fleet diving deep into enemy territory and having to make attacks without missiles or sand. There's little or no information on the ability of that life support system to meet food needs - one tends to think of the crew eating stuff brought in from planets, but it's conceivable that a far-future ship might have a way to use some of that massive amount of power it has to convert some of the solid wastes to synthetic foods that would serve the need for a time.
d) if contact is made battle may well be a phased affair with 1st contact being made by only limited forces with major forces being much delayed
Y... uh, okay. "Phased" battles don't tend to be as successful for the attacker as the sudden overwhelming thrust, but I guess there might be specific strategic circumstances favoring that kind of attack.
e) there are many potential widely separated points where an attacker may enter the system, which would be hard for a defender to cover
Yes, though with caveats. An attacker can enter literally anywhere in the system, except within 100 diameters of a mass, but there are only so many places that are militarily useful. Jumping into the outsystem can be threatening, but it does nothing to actually take useful territory.
This creates another wrinkle: jump masking. Some primary worlds are deep within the gravity well of their system's primary star. An attacker is compelled to jump to some point a long way from the primary, then drive for hours or even days to reach the primary world - and faces the same outbound drive before he can jump, if he is forced to withdraw.
In a nutshell, the strategic campaign is way more complex than is envisioned in FFW - necessarily so, but it might be fun to see what would happen if...
f) micro-jumps may allow an attacker to 1st jump into a system, refuel and then jump again only to reappear elsewhere in the same system about one week later
Warning: speed of advance is critical in overwhelming a defense and keeping the enemy off-balance. Give the enemy time, and he gains the opportunity to concentrate forces ahead of your advance, not to mention plan and implement advances of his own. This is especially true if attacking the Imperium - they've got a lot of depth and therefore a lot of resources that can come forward to meet your attack if given sufficient time. Whle you're twiddling around finding the optimum method to take Efate, he's showing up in force at Ninjar.
(Patton is every bit as useful as Mahan for some things.)
Think of it like chess. If you waste time on a chessboard, you lose - or at best manage a draw. His attack unfolds before your attack can, and you end up spending the rest of the game on defense. In space war, you need the battle won and your fleet on the way to the next objective as quickly as possible, or your carefully executed victory at THIS objective may end up being your last.
However, there again may be specific circumstances recommending such a strategy for a given system. The only hard rule in war is that there aren't any hard rules, so long as it moves you toward victory.
In general then, to me a lot of this kind of suggests that "fronts" in a battle (say like in the game "5th Frontier War") may actually be much more porous then may otherwise be expected, with an attacker passing through some systems only stopping to refuel (even if a defending fleet is present) and moving on before a coherent defense is put together.
Pretty much. This being sci fi, everything depends on the base assumptions. If your ships are dependent on planetary sources for food, or are consuming spare parts that they can't fabricate for themselves in the course of routinely moving about, there may be something more like "fronts" going on. If not, then ... well, in its most extreme interpretation, a Zhodani or Solomani fleet could conceivably show up at Capital.
In the interests of a milieu that behaves more like the one GDW has offered us, it might be advisable to accept certain broad limits on that idea.
If the ships are always fully manned and the expense of operating them is not an issue (vs ships in reserve) why not have random patrols so that the enemy can't predict what forces will be where. Not saying take the whole fleet out to the asteroid belt and away from any viable targets.
There's no reason not to have such patrols, assuming you can do so without reducing your readiness at the key target. It's a question of force multipliers: a small unexpected force in an unexpected place can have an impact far beyond their actual strength under the right circumstances.
It's the same reason you might want to retreat your force to the outsystem if you expected to be confronted by a superior force: your continued existence somewhere in the system means he has to commit forces to keep you from showing up at some unexpected time and hurting him, which means his spearhead has that much less strength.
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