OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

cthia wrote:I recall some CO in some scene firing a demonstration launch of Apollo missiles against the SLN before they got the memo that the MBS had been attacked and the Admiralty was recalling all Apollo pods!

Also, I disagree about Henke's parole status disqualifying her for defending the MBS. Remember, the MBS was worried about an attack from the SL. And they had had an attack from an entity in the shadows.

The conditions of Henke's parole prevented her from participating in any active operations against the Havenites. Defending her home system squashes that agreement.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
In any case, Tenth Fleet at this time was composed of 14 BCs, 12 CAs, and some even lighter elements. Those battlecruisers were all Nike-class, so while they sported Keyholes, those were Mark 1 and the Nike can only fire Mark 16 DDMs, not Mk23 MDMs. Those ships could contribute to missile defence, but not to offensive capabilities of Home Fleet against the RHN.

Theemile wrote:And I disagree, the Nikes could have thickened the throw weight of each Home Fleet salvo by about 5% - those KHIs nearly gave a Nike the fire control capability of a first war Medusa. Every SD in Home fleet was carrying as many flatpacks as they could - Even Sphinx class an carry >400 externally, a Nike can carry 80 with no loss in acceleration, losing 100gs would probably allow her to carry 40 more.

Anyway, the podlayers were using their spare firecontol to fire the extra pods carried externally on the 48 old SDs. With each Nike controlling ~300 missiles in each salvo, or around 5-6000 additional missiles per salvo, if all 16 ships were present. The existent 24 BC(p)s with home fleet added ~8-9,000 additional missiles per salvo, so their addition was nothing to sneeze at.

cthia wrote:I recall some CO in some scene firing a demonstration launch of Apollo missiles against the SLN before they got the memo that the MBS had been attacked and the Admiralty was recalling all Apollo pods!

cthia wrote:Also, I disagree about Henke's parole status disqualifying her for defending the MBS. Remember, the MBS was worried about an attack from the SL. And they had had an attack from an entity in the shadows.

The conditions of Henke's parole prevented her from participating in any active operations against the Havenites. Defending her home system squashes that agreement.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
The Keyholes could have contributed fire control, but the Nikes couldn't meaningfully have contributed missiles. Was Home Fleet short in fire control links? The RMN hadn't been designing fire-control support "just enough" for a decade already.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
And only for the alpha launch. Once they flush their external racks, they can't contribute missiles.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:I recall some CO in some scene firing a demonstration launch of Apollo missiles against the SLN before they got the memo that the MBS had been attacked and the Admiralty was recalling all Apollo pods!

I don't think that happened just quite the way you remember it. I think you're mixing two different scenes.

There was the "Exclamation Mark" that Terekhov made in front of Crandall's surviving forces, with his second 12,000-missile Apollo launch during the Battle of Spindle. That was a show of force, showing that he had missiles to spare to destroy every single SD in the fleet. And he probably did, since the first salvo took 23 out of the 70. He only needed two more salvos of that size to obliterate Crandall's fleet. And he didn't even need them to be that big, since the first one would have proven they could allocate fewer missiles per target.

But this was before the MBS was attacked. The Battle of Spindle occurred in the beginning of February 1922, while the Yawata Strike happened late the same month.

There was another scene where a Manty CO fired missiles at a SLN targets during Case Lacoön II, then had those waste themselves on the wedges of the SLN ships. That was the Zunker Incident, but the missiles Capt./Commodore Ivanov fired were Mark 16 DDMs, not Apollos. His biggest ship was a Saganami-C heavy cruiser.

As far as I can remember, the RMN fired Apollos at the SLN two or three times only: for sure, during the Battle of Spindle (before Oyster Bay) and during the Battle of Beowulf; plus likely Honor did again during the Battle of Sol. But both Beowulf and Sol happened in January 1923, 11 months after Oyster Bay, so it's reasonable to assume Beowulf, New Berlin, and Bolthole had begun production of Apollo missiles.

Also, I disagree about Henke's parole status disqualifying her for defending the MBS. Remember, the MBS was worried about an attack from the SL. And they had had an attack from an entity in the shadows.

The conditions of Henke's parole prevented her from participating in any active operations against the Havenites. Defending her home system squashes that agreement.

Not sure it does. You can't say "I'll respect the terms of the parole until they become inconvenient." But regardless, it wouldn't be necessary to violate it. If the RMN needed her ships, she could send those home or take them home herself, but not participate in the engagement against the RHN. And if the RMN was worried about attacks from the SL, then Henke's best place was exactly where she was: in the Talbott Quadrant. That's where the known point of contact with the SLN existed. The strategy meeting related above makes it quite clear there was nothing the SLN could throw at the Manticore system itself in less than 6 months.

In any case, Tenth Fleet at this time was composed of 14 BCs, 12 CAs, and some even lighter elements. Those battlecruisers were all Nike-class, so while they sported Keyholes, those were Mark 1 and the Nike can only fire Mark 16 DDMs, not Mk23 MDMs. Those ships could contribute to missile defence, but not to offensive capabilities of Home Fleet against the RHN.

cthia wrote:But the significant part of my post is that, iinm, the Admiraly had expressed plans for recalling Apollo pods that were already allocated, and those enroute in colliers. Which means there had to be ships in the wild that were using them, for them to be recalled.

If there were Keyhole II capable ships in the wild, it begs a question. If a significant number of Keyhole II capable ships returned, and considering the limited number of pods, how would they be allocated? Would the pods be spread even thinner between additional Apollo capable fleets, or would Eighth Fleet still have commandeered them all?

It becomes an unusual aspect of defeat in detail.

Jonathan_S wrote:Remember that the legacy SDs of Home Fleet had gotten shoals of Mk23 flat-pack pods to tractor themselves to the SDs' hulls before heading out to meet the Republic's forces. Those external pods were definitely fire control limited because a) those SDs predated to pod revolution and there was only so much extra fire control they'd have gotten via various refits, and b) they could have shed all those pods nearly instantly -- much faster than an SD(P) could have rolled them -- simply by ordering them to turn off their onboard tractors.

So yes, if 16 Nikes could have been recalled to join home fleet before the BoM commences then their extra fire control could have utilized some of those external pods (even ignoring whatever external pods of Mk23s they themselves might have picked up)

kzt wrote:Well, they contribute at a slower rate once they have used all their external pods. But in the actual event, they never got to their internal pods.

IIRC, they carry externally an absurd number of pods. Like thousands, stacked layers deep over the entire surface of the ship. You need to drop some for combat, and you want to have dropped all of them before taking incoming fire. You don't have to dump them all at once, you can separate them into salvos and drop them under acceleration at appropriate intervals.

It's unclear what the actual salvo capacity of a BC(P) is. It should be at least 256 missiles per salvo (quad pattern Mk16s), and it might be more. 16 pods per 12 seconds x 8 minutes gets you 640 pods per ship. And if so you should not try to combine in giant salvos, you should all fire as fast as you can. This results in saturation throughout the depth of the defense zone.

And if you can't likely survive counterfire you should add a whole lot of 'to whom it may concern' Mk23s to each pattern.