Far fewer people know the story of the origins of the sensational new military doctrine.
A British officer, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, invented it and attempted to convince the rather traditional officials at the Ministry of Defence that it would work. Having recently been through the First World War where aggressive audacity was brutally punished by defensive positions based on machine guns and barbed wire there weren't many takers. It was in Germany where there was more of an appetite for a fresh approach.
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| Tank warfare guru Liddell Hart |
In null sec it's very difficult to get fleet doctrines adopted by one's alliance. Theorycrafting doctrines is a job a lot of people want, so often it gets allocated by seniority even if the people coming up with the ideas are not active FCs. There are a lot of moving parts to implementing a doctrine from importing the ships, persuading pilots to own one, reimbursing them and of course taking them out and using them correctly.
So like a lot of FCs I come up with good ideas from time to time that my side leaves in the In Tray to moulder and gather dust.
While I was in Test I tried quite hard to get the alliance to adopt sniper cormorants. It was a real struggle, I got kinda half way and even ran a few cormorant fleets but people weren't turning up in the right ships and none of the other FCs were using the doctrine so it withered and died. I even took it against Mr Vee where I was able to out-manoeuvre his Jaguar fleet and keep the Cormorants in range to shoot while being out of range to get shot but we didn't have enough people in the right ships to apply effective dps. A few weeks later CFC introduced its very successful Harpy fleet - small rail sniper ships just like Cormorants which have been a spectacular success ever since and remain one of the CFC's most used doctrines.
Tonight we formed against NC. in Fountain to fight over a timer that they didn't want to contest. They formed in drop and blap Claws, a new doctrine not seen in null sec before. Eve Uni used to fly a similar Thrasher doctrine. The idea is you land, align, shoot then warp off, the whole process taking under 3 seconds. The Claws get one shot off, with the very high alpha of artillery and then are gone before anyone can shoot back (unless specially designed for fast lock). Even our instacane was not able to lock them in time and get a shot in.
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| The devastating Claw class interceptor. |
No Claws were lost in this battle.
Why am I feeling frustrated?
I'll just quote myself from a post I put in the Bastion forums after my friend Idoru and me had been theorycrafting on voice comms:
Here's a high skill, high damage variation. In this you don't point at all, you simply kill them. It's a concept for a fleet of only Clawtys. 576 volley damage at 27 km, 288 volley damage at 38 km (most inties can't even lock that far!). With close range ammo they do 1008 each volley damage allowing a fleet of 20 to warp to the bad guys, one shot a cruiser, then warp out immediately before most things can even lock them.
(Bastion forums, June 11th 2014)
Now I know how Liddell Hart must have felt when the German tanks chased the British Expeditionary Force out of France in 1940 using his ideas on Manoeuvre Warfare.
