[spoilers]What happens when Shannon Foraker meets...

kzt wrote:Without new builds or many months in shipyard there are severe limits to what the SLN can do. The critical problem is the baseline performance they have... So they need at least an order of magnitude improvement in their defenses in order to survive.

Over the next two years they'll be bringing a lot of ships out of reserve - they're going to require servicing and upgrading before they get sent out anyway. As has been discussed elsewhere, small steps + a massive fleet = a considerable increase in objective achievement.

Let's say, for example, they come up with a simple redesign of Halo. something that is the same size, and therefore doesn't require a massive refit of the ship itself. Cover Halo II in PDLC's and CM tubes (if possible), and use them like Keyhole to let you roll ship. Equip a thousand SD's with it, and send them off. The force multiplier on that thousand-waller fleet closes the gap quite considerably - I'm not saying it'd let them win, but it would make a difference.

Given the size of the League, it's entirely probable that over the next two years of slaughter, a dozen Shannons may come out of the woodwork - they may well make lots of simple, effective changes that, coupled with the size of the Solly fleets, will start to close the gap.

It's that perspective I'm coming from, to give something for the GA to get their teeth into...

Cap'n Roderick wrote:It's that perspective I'm coming from, to give something for the GA to get their teeth into...

Halo is an ecm system that seems about as effective as the 1905 RMN decoy systems. Even if they put out a system as clever as the RHN ecm, it isn't nearly enough.

It's not doctrine alone, and it's not ECM alone.

RMN and RHN CM doctrine is to fire multiple waves of CMs at incoming missiles, with each CM wave consisting of close to the number of attacking missiles. SLN fired one wave that was on the order of 15% of the size of the attacking missiles. That's as many as they can fire. Without new CMs, new tracking arrays and lots more launchers it's going to stay at about that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah; you have to give Hemphill her due; la cream de la tech weenie

And, yeah, yeah, yeah; everybody loves Shannon; the tactical officer gone McGyver.

But, there are some other folks around, you know. Folks known for boot strapping solutions too primitive to occur to snooty Manties, and folks with a tech base superior to what the Republicans have in place. I am not going to bet that the Graysons come up with the solution, but I wouldn't bet against it. And, I probably would bet that they get it deployed fleet wide first.

I believe the person who we will need to watch closely will be the lead scientist of the wormhole exploration team. I cannot recall his name now, but I strongly suspect that he's going to be involved in the process of grokking a spider drive detector.

The defector scientist + the wormhole and hyperspace genius + Foraker with toys provided by Hemphill.

Cheopis wrote:I believe the person who we will need to watch closely will be the lead scientist of the wormhole exploration team. I cannot recall his name now, but I strongly suspect that he's going to be involved in the process of grokking a spider drive detector.

The defector scientist + the wormhole and hyperspace genius + Foraker with toys provided by Hemphill.

He likely has already done this, at least someone in the MAN has and he is almost certain to know about it. The best they came up had a range of about a light second. As this is far less then graser range it's not an ideal solution....

kzt wrote:

Cheopis wrote:I believe the person who we will need to watch closely will be the lead scientist of the wormhole exploration team. I cannot recall his name now, but I strongly suspect that he's going to be involved in the process of grokking a spider drive detector.

The defector scientist + the wormhole and hyperspace genius + Foraker with toys provided by Hemphill.

He likely has already done this, at least someone in the MAN has and he is almost certain to know about it. The best they came up had a range of about a light second. As this is far less then graser range it's not an ideal solution....

Err, no, the person I am thinking will be the linchpin is the Manticorean hyper physicist who was not allowed to lead his team into the Torch wormhole, not the defector. Meh I hate being bad with names sometimes.

kzt wrote:...snip...

RMN figures are that an SD requires about 250 hits to kill. In the BoM the RMN killed one RHN SD per 1300 mark 23 missiles fired, so each RHN ship stopped an average 1050 of the RMN missiles. At Spindle each SLN ship stopped an average of 48 missiles.

...snip...

Thread Drift

I have seen this number of 1,300 quoted before. I think the number is actually less than a thousand. This comes from when I was doing all the number crunching on how many missiles were actually guided all the way by Home Fleet at the Battle of Manticore.

Rough guess after spending lots of hours on it. Forget now exactly how many waves were guided the whole way before the RHN incoming started taking out units. THink it was 4 waves of RMN MDMs. Then they are guiding much fewer as the RHN will be taking the SD(P)s first.

1,300 has less validity IMO and to quote as a fact until textev is a dangerous assumption.

And now back to regularly scheduled thread.
T2M

Cap'n Roderick wrote:...Admiral Hemphill?

Have you seen the vaudeville era mirror/doorway skits?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5lU52aWTJo&p=C5C3B2A307EB5D11&playnext=1&index=45

That is what is going to happen, then they will get down to business.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Rough guess after spending lots of hours on it. Forget now exactly how many waves were guided the whole way before the RHN incoming started taking out units. THink it was 4 waves of RMN MDMs. Then they are guiding much fewer as the RHN will be taking the SD(P)s first.

At 216 light seconds there is no difference between having the launching ship still there "providing guidance" until the missile hits and the launching ship blowing up 3.5 minutes before the missiles hit. The effect is identical, in both cases any "guidance" sent will arrive after the missiles have finished attacking. And the RMN missiles were launched 65 seconds apart, with the RMN missiles having higher thrust and longer burn times and hence arriving 15 seconds faster. So the first 3 waves have no degradation in "guidance", such as it is, and the 4th wave has only minimal loss. The next 3 waves are not so good, but neither is the RHN integrated missile defense network.

kzt wrote:

thinkstoomuch wrote:Rough guess after spending lots of hours on it. Forget now exactly how many waves were guided the whole way before the RHN incoming started taking out units. THink it was 4 waves of RMN MDMs. Then they are guiding much fewer as the RHN will be taking the SD(P)s first.

At 216 light seconds there is no difference between having the launching ship still there "providing guidance" until the missile hits and the launching ship blowing up 3.5 minutes before the missiles hit. The effect is identical, in both cases any "guidance" sent will arrive after the missiles have finished attacking. And the RMN missiles were launched 65 seconds apart, with the RMN missiles having higher thrust and longer burn times and hence arriving 15 seconds faster. So the first 3 waves have no degradation in "guidance", such as it is, and the 4th wave has only minimal loss. The next 3 waves are not so good, but neither is the RHN integrated missile defense network.

I agree with both of you. =)

Reason being that the number 1300 is not correct as a very large number of said missiles that got through on the RHN units did not destroy a unit but rather damaged another unit. Read how many effectives Kuzak and company thought Tourville had after said engagement. That would be the truer number. Not the number of ships destroyed entirely divided by the number of missiles thrown.

I mean if you did number of missiles thrown verses ships destroyed then you could "calculate" that the RHN units offensive missile capability combined with home fleet defensive capability means: (From memory)

RHN missiles ~575,000 divide by ~100 RMN SD's destroyed or a pathetic near 6k missiles/ship. But we know there were 1) other ships there and 2) was overkill even by Tourvilles estimation. We know this as there weren't even any hulks left of home fleet. They were all vaporized.

So: ~150k RMN missiles destroyed 240 - (60-80) effective RHN units left according to Kuzak. Obtains 180-160 RHN units destroyed. Or anywhere from 833 to 930 or so missiles per ship kill.

=)