OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

Loren Pechtel wrote:
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.

Basically, the Apollo capable ships with 3rd were in range as soon as 3rd exited hyper and could have started killing ships from 2nd right then. They would have shot themselves dry somewhere around the point where he had destroyed 50% on the remaining combat capability of 2nd.

But for plot related purposes, everyone in 3rd needed to be high on crack.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

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.

Forts are mobile and have wedges and sidewalls - any C-frac attack is eaten by wedges and sidewalls - that's what they are designed to do, swallow any weaker wedges, causing a feedback loop which destroys the nodes (and usually the entire hull) of the incoming device. Any smart Fort commander has the fort being mobile with a "random walk" pattern in constant use so they avoid patterns (while deploying to cover their zone with the other forts).

I'm not saying that forts cannot be overcome, that's stupid, but they require a lot of firepower to do so. I'm just saying that their existence doesn't seem part of the calculus.

After taking out Kusak's fleet, Tourville was not in a position (with his remaining forces) to crack the nut of 2 planetary defenses without depleting his entire force in either the real or discussed universes. In the Real universe, he had 68 effectives surviving Kusak's pounding, all moderately damaged, and he still had a LAC strike inbound with no remaining screen to fend them off and >2 minutes of ammo. (meanwhile Kusak still had enough effectives for several more weak salvos, though 3rd fleet's end is a given). If that had played out as was being discussed, Tourville would have lost most of his remaining cripples and had more damage done to his effectives.

As I said earlier, in this senario, he would have to attack Sphinx after his resupply, with no more than the 68 ships he had effective in the real universe (and would have taken extra losses and damage as above), but he probably would have only have had the firepower and defenses of roughly 30-35 intact ships in those 60ish hulls to prosecute the attack.

Medusa's defenses, rebuilt between the wars, were built around 5 new Forts. We can assume that Sphinx would have AT LEAST this amount of firepower, if not more. And if 12 of the new forts can easily fend off 200 Manty SD(p)s (said about the Lynx terminus defenses), just 5 (of which Sphinx should have more) can easily fend off 40 Manty SD(p)s - or 60 undamaged Havenite ones.

Which still leaves Manticore's defenses. Manticore has forts as well, and again has probably at least as many as Medusa. But, unlike Sphinx, still has LACs to thicken her defenses. So Tourville has to go through another 1000+ LAC assault with no screen, and then face sufficient forts to take out another 60 undamaged Havenite SD(p)s.

Even with Chin's survivors against a mostly conventionally armed 8th fleet (in a universe where Honor screwed up royally and only killed her weight), the Havenites don't have enough Hulls to take both Planetary defenses.

And again, Blaine probably would have gotten in-system from Lynx with his 12 SD(p)s, hooked up with Oversteegen, and his BC(p)s, Nikes and Sag-Cs, and deployed to Sphinx before Chin and Tourville can rearm and return to the system - leaving the equivalent of 3+ fresh SD(p) squadrons to back the Sphinx defenses.

Can the Havenites mess up the distributed yards - of course, And those are vulnerable to c-frac assaults (though that would endanger the planets, so would not be attempted) - but their fleets will not survive the defenses.


Tourville and Chin are not taking the system.

The LACS will probably have as much success as the last batch of LACs had on 2nds SDs. Which I think was 95% losses with no damage on the SDs.

So the RHN might not be very worried about the LACs.

Whether there are forts around the planets seems to depend on the needs of the plot. We know that David has written that there were at one point in time, but at every point where they should figure in the story they are absent.

Loren Pechtel wrote: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.)

She was able to control a handful of ACM (presumably 6; since the demonstration was with "less than sixty of them", and 6*9=54) using, IIRC, the bandwidth of a Hermes bouy as an impromptu relay.

But even against the first surprise demonstration salvo - missiles that never had to settle down for proper terminal attack runs, and appeared to continue to maneuver evasively all the way through his formation - his point defense crews nailed 2/3 of them. His hit percentages should go up against subsequent waves since he knows where they're coming from and his point defense crews will be looking in the right direction and expecting them.

Also, a Hermes buoy broadcasting FTL fire control signals should be pretty obvious on grav sensors. If Honor had continued to try to utilize it I wouldn't be all that surprised if Tourville was able to localize and destroy it. It's not like the buoy has a single defense to its name.

So FTL control at 150 million km is simply beyond the capability of Apollo. At least without a relay of some kind (whether a proper Mycroft one or the very limited bodged lash-up Honor made out of one of the pre-deployed system Hermes buoys. That's why Honor told Tourville that she'd have been unable to destroy his remaining fleet from that range.

(Mind you we now know how good Apollo is in fully autonomous mode. Depending on how much ammo Honor had left she could have seriously hurt Tourville from where she was. But she couldn't have provided FTL control for any substantial number of missiles from that far back. And it's not clear that anybody in the RMN yet realized quite how good Apollo was when beyond it's own FTL range. [The uncharitable person would speculate on whether the author had yet decided to give its "AI" that capability back when writing those scenes])

kzt wrote:Whether there are forts around the planets seems to depend on the needs of the plot. We know that David has written that there were at one point in time, but at every point where they should figure in the story they are absent.

I have posted this before elsewhere , but this seems like a good point to post it again. At the time of the Battle of Manticore there were no forts at Sphinx nor at the Manticore home planet. All the old style forts had been retired and the new ones being built. The wormhole junctions had first priority. Admiral of the Fleet Sebastian D'Orville is at the wormhole junction waiting for the transit by Hexapuma and Warlock. While there he comtemplates the new forts and muses about the others being created to defend the planets.

This is from chapter 62 of At All Costs.

Which was why D'Orville was so relieved the new forts were finally operational. Much smaller than the old prewar fortifications which had been decommissioned to provide the manpower to crew new construction, they were actually more powerfully armed, thanks to the same increased automation and weapons developments which had gone into the Navy's new warships. And each of those forts was surrounded by literally hundreds of missile pods, with the fire control to handle stupendous salvos. It would take an attack in overwhelming force to break those defenses, which had freed D'Orville to move Home Fleet closer to a more traditional covering position, locating his command in Sphinx orbit.
His new station provided Sphinx with badly needed, close-in protection. And with the planet of Manticore still trailing its orbital position, and so still deeper into the zone and (as always) further inside the hyper-limit, he was actually better placed to cover Manticore than he would have been anywhere else. Any least-time course to Manticore would require the attacker to get past his position at Sphinx, first, and he could easily intercept the opposing fleet short of its objective.
The solution wasn't perfect, of course. For one thing, the move left Manticore-B and its inhabited planet of Gryphon more exposed than it had been when Home Fleet was stationed at the Junction, since D'Orville would now have to get clear of the zone before he could hyper out to the system's secondary component. But the extra danger wasn't very great, now that Sphinx was within eight light-minutes of the zone's boundary. And more vulnerable or not, Gryphon had the smallest population and industrial base of any of the Star Kingdom's original inhabited worlds. If something had to be exposed, cold logic said Gryphon was a better choice than the other two planets, and the Admiralty had compensated as best it could by assigning the buildup of Manticore-B's fixed defenses a higher priority than Manticore-A's. In fact, Manticore-B's forts and space station were already refitting with Keyhole II and would begin deploying the first of the system-defense Apollo pods within the next three weeks, on the theory that it would need them worse since it couldn't call as readily on Home Fleet's protection.
And once Manticore-B's defenses were fully up to speed, Sphinx would receive the next highest priority, despite the fact that the planet of Manticore had the largest population and the greatest economic and industrial value of any of the binary system's worlds. Like Manticore-B, Sphinx was simply more exposed than Manticore.

At the end of that chapter Tourville is receiving Chin's fleet and thinking that his force departs in one week. So at the time that they attack Home fleet, only the forts at Gryphon and the junction will be ready.

Well, that doesn't say they don't exist. That says they are not fully modernized. Which I can buy. I can't see them not existing if they used to exist.

One of the things the previous government had not stinted on were fixed planetary defenses. (Apparently mostly because of the kickbacks)

kzt wrote:Well, that doesn't say they don't exist. That says they are not fully modernized. Which I can buy. I can't see them not existing if they used to exist.

One of the things the previous government had not stinted on were fixed planetary defenses. (Apparently mostly because of the kickbacks)

You are right, it can be read that way. But still all the pre-war forts were decommissioned (that process started with the capture of Trevor's Star) and all the new forts had the "same increased automation and weapons developments which had gone into the Navy's new warships". Now that automation did precede Keyhole II, so it depends on the timing of how far they got with building the new forts before they realized that the forts needed to be refitted with Keyhole II. It certainly sounds as though only the junction forts have the missiles pods that Keyhole II allowed them to control. I cannot tell whether the others have older pods; but it is entirely possible that in the process of refitting to handle Apollo, that all of the old stuff was stripped away.

On the other hand, if they did have old style pods; they could be what Honor ordered to stay out of the fight near Sphinx.

Note how long the Andermani ships required to be refitted with Keyhole:

The longer-range fix is to modify their existing SD(P)s to accept the Keyhole platforms and fire our new 'flat-pack' pods with the all-up fusion-powered birds. That's going to take considerably longer, because each ship will have to spend an absolute minimum of ninety days in yard hands to carry out the modifications.

I would expect while similar work was being done on the forts (except for being Keyhole II), that they were offline and had their missiles unloaded

tlb wrote:You are right, it can be read that way. But still all the pre-war forts were decommissioned (that process started with the capture of Trevor's Star) and all the new forts had the "same increased automation and weapons developments which had gone into the Navy's new warships". Now that automation did precede Keyhole II, so it depends on the timing of how far they got with building the new forts before they realized that the forts needed to be refitted with Keyhole II. It certainly sounds as though only the junction forts have the missiles pods that Keyhole II allowed them to control. I cannot tell whether the others have older pods; but it is entirely possible that in the process of refitting to handle Apollo, that all of the old stuff was stripped away.

On the other hand, if they did have old style pods; they could be what Honor ordered to stay out of the fight near Sphinx.

You can't have old style pods without some form of fire control for them. You need to leave warships there to control the missiles, build a fire control platform, or put in ground control (which has its own limitations -- and makes for a priority target for bombardment).

Yes, I know AAC mentions that the "he system reconnaissance platforms are going to give the defense pods very good accuracy" but recon data doesn't automatically get consumed as fire control data. You need a tactical computers and fire control links to consume the recon data, make decisions, and transmit instructions to the missiles

And a fire control platform that's unprotected is damned vulnerable. (See what the RMN did with mistletoe to the Republic's unprotected Moriarty fire control platform!) That's why you generally put that fire control into forts - and the RMN should know that lesson as it's taught it to its enemies.


We know the Lynx forts were coming online in March or April 1921 PD, were "being shipped in in prefabricated chunks", were 10 million tons "built with the latest in weapons, sensors, and EW systems [...] Bristling with missile tubes and LAC service bays", and designed to stand off 250 (pre-Apollo) podnaughts. They were originally build without Apollo then then in MoH we're told they've now been upgraded to include it.

We also know that in the interval between SftS (which ends in Feb 1921 PD), where it's implied the central Junction currently doesn't have forts, and the Battle of Manticore (July 24, 1921 PD) the Junction does get its new modern (yet apparently non-Apollo) forts online.

If Manticore deployed any significant number of (pre-Apollo) missile pods around around Sphinx that they'd also have to provide fire control. I'd think the most reasonable way to do that is to simply make some more of the prefabricated fortress chunks that they were already sending to Lynx, and probably using for the forts around the Junction, and assemble them in Sphinx orbit to manage the orbital defenses. But as we saw with Lynx those were pre-Apollo designs and so it's quite reasonable to think Sphinx had at least a few of the new 10 million ton standard forts -- but that they hadn't yet been updated for Apollo. (That having happened first for the more isolated Gryphon defenses)

tlb wrote:Note how long the Andermani ships required to be refitted with Keyhole:

The longer-range fix is to modify their existing SD(P)s to accept the Keyhole platforms and fire our new 'flat-pack' pods with the all-up fusion-powered birds. That's going to take considerably longer, because each ship will have to spend an absolute minimum of ninety days in yard hands to carry out the modifications.

I would expect while similar work was being done on the forts (except for being Keyhole II), that they were offline and had their missiles unloaded

Note that this was about Keyhole II on the Adlers already.

I agree the forts being refitted would need to be offline while work happens. But unlike what was done for the IAN, they wouldn't be MIA. The forts would stay roughly where they are. But more importantly, the work wouldn't be on all of them at the same time, as was done for the Adlers.

I also don't know how to compare the time. On one hand, the Andermani technology would be far different than the forts, which were Manticore through and through. Manticore had had 10 years of knowledge of its own technical progress to carry out incremental upgrades that would facilitate that. It would be inconceivable that those forts couldn't fire MDMs in the first place. On the other hand, forts are larger and they can't be towed to a drydock for being serviced.

kzt wrote:Basically, the Apollo capable ships with 3rd were in range as soon as 3rd exited hyper and could have started killing ships from 2nd right then. They would have shot themselves dry somewhere around the point where he had destroyed 50% on the remaining combat capability of 2nd.

But for plot related purposes, everyone in 3rd needed to be high on crack.

McKeon was killing one ship per salvo. But he only had one battle squadron.

What was the range when Third Fleet exited hyper?