OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

cthia wrote:Now that you mention it, it was before the attack, but the timeline moves so slowly ... and six months before reckoning isn't exactly an eternity to be wasting 12,000 missile Apollo salvos as demonstration launches.

Why not? This was nearly 8 months after the Battle of Manticore. During that entire period, Manticore would have been producing Apollo missiles but not using any at all. They had a large stockpile, sufficient to fully arm Eighth Fleet for their visit to the Haven System, which happened after the Python Lump got out of the yards and Adm. Higgins took command of the newly reconstituted Home Fleet, which presumably would also be fully loaded.

At this point in time, Manticore had a sufficient stockpile to spare.

And Terekhov, Khumalo and Henke's solution was good. They managed to avoid killing 282,000 solarian spacers aboard the 47 surviving SDs. They did that with zero Manticore personnel or civilian losses, with no destruction to the system infrastructure.

Tenth Fleet could presumably have fired its complement of Mk16 that would have been aboard the 14 BCs that were present and the 5 Saganami-C. Those do outrange anything the SLN had. But while those are RMN missiles meant to kill an RHN SD, it's still not as powerful as a Mk23. So they'd have to expend far more of those to achieve the same objective. Plus, they still managed to somewhat hide the capabilities of the Apollos, by pretending those were system defence missiles.

You filthy rich MBS! I bet you wish you had that demonstration salvo worth of Apollo missiles back!

There's no doubt, but not yet.

But let's calculate. After the Python Lump is commissioned (let's say 50 new Invictus-class), it's going to get armed. So will Eighth Fleet, so let's say another 42 Invictus / Harrington II. Each of those carries 1074 pods of 9 missiles internally. So just the internal pod storage of those ships means nearly 1 million missiles. Eighth Fleet would have been provisioned for at least one full reload in its fleet train, so add another 400k. And if they'd repeated for Home Fleet what D'Orville had had, they'd have limpeted a lot of pods to those 50, so I'm going to add another half a million. Then you add the Grayson First Fleet, which if we assume to be 75% of the Home Fleet (not a binary system to protect), you add another million missiles.

That means at this point in time, even excluding any warehoused production, the RMN and GSN had 3 million Apollo missiles. And we know they had warehouses and were shipping those, because Spindle got some -- they'd probably received some quarter million missiles? So Terekhov and Henke "wasting" 12,000 is less than half a percent of the missiles we could conceivably assume they had.

BTW, how much does a missile cost? Those were still not long after prototype stage, so let's say each costs a quarter million Manticore dollars. That means the arsenal I calculated above cost $750 billion.

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.

Yep, which means the 3 million mark was a low-ball. Because if it was worth recalling those shipments, they must have added up to a significant number -- at a minimum another million.

4 million Apollo against 10,000 SLN SDs is just 400 missiles per ship. We know it's a reasonable number, but they couldn't know yet because the details from the Battle of Spindle hadn't arrived, much less ONI's dissection of the computers and learning that a significant fraction of the SLN Reserve was still equipped with autocannons. But even if they had known this, 4 million isn't enough to persecute the war because they'd have to be distributed and you can't be strong everywhere. They had to concentrate those.

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.

There wouldn't be any. The only Keyhole II ships that existed at the time of the Battle of Manticore were assigned to Eighth Fleet. Subsequently, the Python Lump was commissioned and became the new Home Fleet, and those would be Keyhole II-capable from the first day of operation.

The only other KH2 ships would be the IAN Adlers that would have presumably finished their refits between BoMa and Oyster Bay. That's 42 more ships and they'd be split between Eighth Fleet and the New Berlin protection.

tlb wrote:Isn't Eighth Fleet the only Home Fleet standing after the Battle of Manticore. I believe that the forces returned from the Lynx terminal (after the forts were completed) could have stood guard when Honor took Eighth Fleet and her private ship to Haven's capitol to bargain.

She didn't take her yacht alone. She took the entirety of Eighth Fleet, but went in-system on the Paul Tankersley instead of HMS Imperator.

We know the Python Lump had exited the yards by the time Oyster Bay struck. I presume that they'd been made Home Fleet under Adm. Higgins at that point. That explains why Honor waited until January 1922 to go.

Galactic Sapper wrote:One of the diabolically evil things Manticore could have done instead of Sanskrit - or even Cutworm - would have been to send out hordes of destroyers with maximum loads of Mistletoe drones to literally besiege Havenite systems. Any ship that takes down its wedge could get lasers to the boat bay at any time. Or a kinetic kill on a parked SD like the missile freighters at Hypatia. No warning, no survivors. Or a proximity nuke close aboard to your LAC base. A hundred gone in a second.

lieutenant Smith's personal journal wrote:No way to tell if the sieging destroyer is still in system or not. That hyper footprint on Thursday; was that the destroyer that was already here microjumping just to create a footprint, or was it a second ship jumping in to replace the one that had expended most of its drones? Can't tell until it claims more victims. Or doesn't. Maybe they're just making us wait it out? How long since the last attack before we can feel safe again?

I don't think Mistletoe is stealthy enough to sneak up on a defended base. It can pick off things without good defenses but I don't think it can go after something guarded by a large alert warship.

Loren Pechtel wrote:
I don't think Mistletoe is stealthy enough to sneak up on a defended base. It can pick off things without good defenses but I don't think it can go after something guarded by a large alert warship.

Things are only magic when convenient to the plot.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:Now that you mention it, it was before the attack, but the timeline moves so slowly ... and six months before reckoning isn't exactly an eternity to be wasting 12,000 missile Apollo salvos as demonstration launches.

Why not? This was nearly 8 months after the Battle of Manticore. During that entire period, Manticore would have been producing Apollo missiles but not using any at all. They had a large stockpile, sufficient to fully arm Eighth Fleet for their visit to the Haven System, which happened after the Python Lump got out of the yards and Adm. Higgins took command of the newly reconstituted Home Fleet, which presumably would also be fully loaded.

At this point in time, Manticore had a sufficient stockpile to spare.

And Terekhov, Khumalo and Henke's solution was good. They managed to avoid killing 282,000 solarian spacers aboard the 47 surviving SDs. They did that with zero Manticore personnel or civilian losses, with no destruction to the system infrastructure.

Tenth Fleet could presumably have fired its complement of Mk16 that would have been aboard the 14 BCs that were present and the 5 Saganami-C. Those do outrange anything the SLN had. But while those are RMN missiles meant to kill an RHN SD, it's still not as powerful as a Mk23. So they'd have to expend far more of those to achieve the same objective. Plus, they still managed to somewhat hide the capabilities of the Apollos, by pretending those were system defence missiles.

You filthy rich MBS! I bet you wish you had that demonstration salvo worth of Apollo missiles back!

There's no doubt, but not yet.

But let's calculate. After the Python Lump is commissioned (let's say 50 new Invictus-class), it's going to get armed. So will Eighth Fleet, so let's say another 42 Invictus / Harrington II. Each of those carries 1074 pods of 9 missiles internally. So just the internal pod storage of those ships means nearly 1 million missiles. Eighth Fleet would have been provisioned for at least one full reload in its fleet train, so add another 400k. And if they'd repeated for Home Fleet what D'Orville had had, they'd have limpeted a lot of pods to those 50, so I'm going to add another half a million. Then you add the Grayson First Fleet, which if we assume to be 75% of the Home Fleet (not a binary system to protect), you add another million missiles.

That means at this point in time, even excluding any warehoused production, the RMN and GSN had 3 million Apollo missiles. And we know they had warehouses and were shipping those, because Spindle got some -- they'd probably received some quarter million missiles? So Terekhov and Henke "wasting" 12,000 is less than half a percent of the missiles we could conceivably assume they had.

BTW, how much does a missile cost? Those were still not long after prototype stage, so let's say each costs a quarter million Manticore dollars. That means the arsenal I calculated above cost $750 billion.

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.

Yep, which means the 3 million mark was a low-ball. Because if it was worth recalling those shipments, they must have added up to a significant number -- at a minimum another million.

4 million Apollo against 10,000 SLN SDs is just 400 missiles per ship. We know it's a reasonable number, but they couldn't know yet because the details from the Battle of Spindle hadn't arrived, much less ONI's dissection of the computers and learning that a significant fraction of the SLN Reserve was still equipped with autocannons. But even if they had known this, 4 million isn't enough to persecute the war because they'd have to be distributed and you can't be strong everywhere. They had to concentrate those.

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.

There wouldn't be any. The only Keyhole II ships that existed at the time of the Battle of Manticore were assigned to Eighth Fleet. Subsequently, the Python Lump was commissioned and became the new Home Fleet, and those would be Keyhole II-capable from the first day of operation.

The only other KH2 ships would be the IAN Adlers that would have presumably finished their refits between BoMa and Oyster Bay. That's 42 more ships and they'd be split between Eighth Fleet and the New Berlin protection.

Given how many Keyhole II equipped ships Honor's 8th fleet had at the BoM - and given that she had IAN wallers that were part of her exercise (the one that had her away from the terminus when the BoM kicked off) I'm pretty sure that a fair number of the Adlers had actually completed refit and been assigned to 8th fleet prior to the BoM.

And it was 7 months between BoM and OB. (And a week or three less than that for the Battle of Spindle))

But otherwise I agree with you. The situation in February of 1922 PD, after the Phython lump is complete and after Manticore has had all those months of combat lull to build up their Apollo stockpiles, is a far cry from their situation on July 24 1921 PD when the Battle of Manticore happened.

And around the end of Jan or the beginning of Feb is also when Honor was finally able to take 8th fleet to Haven to try to negotiate and end to the 2nd war. That was only possible once the fresh Apollo-capable ships of the Python lump were available to form a new home fleet in her absence. Until those were ready 8th fleet was chained to the Manticore system as its home fleet.

And Mike started getting her first Apollo missile pods around that same Jan/Feb 1922 timeframe. Sent as reloads for the 6 (newly built; fruits of the Python Lump) Invictus-class Apollo-capable SD(P)s she was being assigned. Though as the book explains because the original Apollo-capable ships got retasked there was enough of a delay in getting her the replacement squadron that the reloads arrived before the SD(P)s; despite originally being planned to arrive a week or two after. (And it was that tiny 4-6 week window, between getting her first Apollo pods and getting the Apollo-capable ships they were earmarked to support, that the Battle of Spindle and Oyster Bay both happened. With OB being February 26, 1922 PD)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

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.

No, they don't contribute at all because the fight would still be above the powered range of a DDM. Even D'Orville wouldn't have waited to get to 29 million km to fire the second salvo, because he'd know that RMN hardware was better than RHN at a distance. So firing while the range is higher benefited him.

They might think to use a ballistic stage between the two powered ones. In that case, the DDMs would have to cover the difference between 29.2 and (say) 60 million km at the first stage's final velocity of 0.27c. That's 6 minutes and 22 seconds. How many internal launcher salvos from the SDs is that? Meanwhile, those BCs would be taking under fire from the enemy's SD for the entirety of the ballistic flight.

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.

But so do SDs and CLACs, and those have an even larger surface area and a much more powerful wedge. I again don't think 14 or 16 BC(L)s would make that much of a difference compared to what Home Fleet already had.

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.

Tenth Fleet's BCs were Nike-class BC(L)s, not Agamemnon-class BC(P)s. I'd venture that an Agamemnon is far more useful for supporting a wall of battle than a Nike, because those carry pods of Mk23. Nikes are more useful for independent action, anywhere from individual to squadron-strength operations, instead.

The ship that Henke was aboard of that got shot under her and led to her capture was an Agamemnon-class: HMS Ajax.

Nikes and Agamemons have the same Keyholes - and presumedly, a similiar # of offensive links.

The 24 BC(p)s of home Fleet, like the SD(p)s, never got to fire their internal missile load, they were still firing the externally loaded missile pod on their hulls and the hulls of th e tube SDs. Home fleet didn't launch 1 alpha, but (iirc) 8 identical ~120,000 missile salvos, each was limited by their fire control; so adding 5-6000 fire control links from 16 Nikes (or roughly the fire control capabilities of all 48 tube SDs combined), would still add (marginally) to the total each salvo could throw.

Edit - Home fleet had just 12 BC(p)s (24 BCs total). Its 48 pre-pod SDs carried 27,840 pods externally, and another ~21,000 pods were carried internally.

In the seven and a half minutes it took the lead salvo to cross between Home Fleet and Second Fleet, Sebastian D'Orville's ships fired seven salvos at sixty-five-second intervals, each of 1,800 pods, containing a total of 21,600 missiles. Over a hundred and fifty thousand missiles, the maximum Home Fleet's fire control could manage <snip>

Home Fleet had not even fired 1/2 it's external pod load, let alone internal pods before it died.

Home Fleet's Fire Plan Avalanche called for the pre-pod superdreadnoughts to deploy their pods as quickly as possible. They had to jettison them anyway, in order to clear their own defensive systems, and D'Orville had known from the beginning that he was going to lose a huge percentage of their total pod loads without ever actually firing their missiles. There was nothing he could do about that, however, and the older ships passed control of as many of their additional missiles as they could to their more capable consorts.
The Medusa, Harrington, Adler, and Invictus-class ships didn't deploy a single pod of their own in the initial broadsides. They used solely the pods deployed by D'Orville's older ships, reserving their better protected, internally stowed pods for the follow-up salvos it was at least possible they might live to launch.

Theemile wrote:But yes, the planetary defenses seem to be plot driven. If nothing else, their existence should have been part of the calculus of BoMA. Even without the clouds of pods, a single intact modern fort would require 1/2 a squadron of SD(p)s or more to achieve parity. Cracking Sphinx would require a considerable minimum force size, and Manticore would require that again.

Forts can be c-fraced unless they have missiles which can have a ballistic phase--and we only saw ballistic stuff with Apollo. All you need to take them out is enough throw weight to penetrate their defenses.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Unfortunately an Apollo fire control link between Keyhole II and missile seems to have a maximum signal range of less than 108 million km (FTL signal taking 5.8 seconds) - so you just can't FTL control them at large enough distances (again, without Mycroft relays) to get Apollo as laggy as normal fire control's ideal engagement range.

Where did you get that number? Because Honor fired at Tourville from 150 million km away and managed to evade all defences and fire at nothing.

She specifically admitted she could not have done that with a real salvo. She only threw a demonstration because she had to trade capacity for range.

tlb wrote:Lets say he goes for Manticore: I do not think Honor's fleet has to shoot itself dry before he gets there, harassing fire would be sufficient until it get into better range to use Apollo. The reason is that, for me, the RHN cannot claim to be in control of the orbitals if they are still contesting with the RMN. So the RHN either has to slow down as it nears Manticore allowing Honor's fleet to get into a better distance that puts the advantage with Apollo or take passing shots as it heads for the hyper limit losing wounded ships as it goes, without Honor's fleet ever needing to get into a range where it can be reliably hit.

Worse--you can't really claim control of orbitals you're merely blasting past at an appreciable percentage of lightspeed. To actually claim them means stopping and thus letting Honor into effective range.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:It does if there's a range in which the mothership has to be in when the missile arrives. If Honor is only gaining on Tourville at 613 m/s² and starts at 150 million km away, she'll need 3.25 hours to reach 108 million km, at which point she's travelling at 0.22c. Given that the 3 stages in a missile impart a Δv of 0.81c (it accelerates at 0.090 c/min), that would put the missile above my putative max speed. So when fired with a 0.22c base speed, the missile can accelerate for no more than 455s instead of 540.

If Honor fires this pattern from 108 million km away and with the 0.22c base velocity, the missile has attained 0.76c when its second stage shuts down. It then must coast for 104 s and cover 23.6 million km, before lighting up the third stage to bring it to 0.9 just as it reaches Tourville. Total flight time: 9 minutes, 18.9 seconds.

She was able to control the demonstration. Had it been fired for effect it would have had an up-the-rear shot at whatever it was shooting at--figure that as a kill (drive damage means it doesn't get away, you don't need to take it out.)

As there's no scenario in which she's not closing the range she can continue to fire at least that many missiles per salvo for the entire chase, wherever he goes. Thus Tourville loses a couple of ships per minute and the kill rate goes up as the range goes down.