OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

cthia wrote:If Honor can hyper directly in contention of the fleet in-system and immediately detroy it with an Alpha launch outside of its own effective range, then 8th fleet cannot be mousetrapped. It takes two to trap you. If one fleet is quickly eliminated, what is left is mano y mano.

That is exactly what happened. Honor made her intentions for somebody's daughter immediately known upon entering the system.

I don't think Honor could make a single Alpha launch that would decisively eliminate Tourville's survivors at that point. He still had too many ships and was too far from her, even with Apollo and if she had fired from the hyperlimit. She'd have to fire multiple salvos and endure counter-fire while building up, at which time Chin pops in to say hello.

RHN ships don't appear to be able to translate with the donkeys. See the point pasted a few pages ago where the acceleration in Tourville's fleet was dropping while they were donkeying, which says that the pods were outside the compensator field. So Chin can't jump in with pre-deployed pods, which in turn means that Honor can take the time to build up a salvo to fire in Chin's direction as quickly as Chin can do the same on her. In this exchange, Chin suffers more because, despite having over 2x more ships, her missiles are less than half as capable as Apollo ones. So it's possible Honor still wins, but it's a throw of the dice because it depends on which vessels are damaged in the process.

Unless of course Second Fleet is sending a steady stream of missiles in Eighth's direction. If that is the case, then Honor can't build a salvo because of soft proximity kills. She can probably fire 2000-4000 Apollo per minute in either direction, but that's not enough to overwhelm either opponent's defences.

So as I said above, this might have been how Honor died and KcKeon & Truman saved the day.

cthia wrote:If Honor can hyper directly in contention of the fleet in-system and immediately destroy it with an Alpha launch outside of its own effective range, then 8th fleet cannot be mousetrapped. It takes two to trap you. If one fleet is quickly eliminated, what is left is mano y mano.

That is exactly what happened. Honor made her intentions for somebody's daughter immediately known upon entering the system.

I do not think that is correct, because at that point the fleet in system is just bait; it fulfilled its purpose of destroying Home Fleet and now it draws the attention of whatever arrives from Trevor's Star. It does contribute to the carnage, but Chin's arrival upon a fleet that cannot immediately withdraw provides the hammer blow. If Honor immediately fires the one third of her pods at Tourville's force, then she cannot respond as fast to what Chin fires.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:RHN ships don't appear to be able to translate with the donkeys. See the point pasted a few pages ago where the acceleration in Tourville's fleet was dropping while they were donkeying, which says that the pods were outside the compensator field.

I believe you will find that missiles tractored within the wedge do not affect acceleration; it is only when they deployed outside the wedge, preparatory to firing that the acceleration drops. From chapter 65:

D'Orville nodded. Pods towed inside a ship's wedge didn't degrade its acceleration. That, after all, was exactly what his own pre-pod designs were doing with the tractor-equipped pods glued to their hulls. But superdreadnought wedges were huge; for the Peeps to be towing so many pods they couldn't fit them all inside their wedges, they'd have to have hundreds of tractors per ship. So they had to be up to something else.

cthia wrote:I am gobsmacked that the Admiralty would interpret their responsibility to the parole in that manner. Let alone Admiralty Henke. An officer who fired a salvo at a Peep Task Force, after she had struck her wedge. This is war!

She lost her wedge, she didn't strike it. There's no law saying that you have to surrender if you lose your wedge. Nor, for that matter, are you even required to have a wedge up in the first place. Witness Honor's escape from hell.

Jonathan_S wrote:There's no position Honor can jump to where Chin couldn't then spring the trap on her.

The one thing Honor might have been able to do, should she be the first responder AND suspect an additional 110 SD(P)s waiting to spring a trap (something we've no evidence that she was worried about), would be to split her force and use part as bait to try to get Chin to spring the trap so Honor could use the remainder of her force to in turn counter-trap Chin. (Though that could be quite hard on the bait)

If Honor expected something like this she'd keep a hundred pods per ship ready (after she obliterated 2nd fleet from outside 2nd fleet's range.) This would probably destroy half of 5th fleet in a single volley.

But assuming that Honor actually used Apollo in an intelligent fashion, 3rd is going to know that 8th is armed with Apollo in one of two ways:

Either 8th starts to pop 2nd fleet ships with small salvos as soon as they exit hyper or 8th waits until 2nd is inside effective range and obliterates 2nd in a single salvo well before 2nd expects any fire.

So either she arrives before 8th fires on 2nd, and gets obliterated when Honor fires the stacked salvo at 5th, or she arrives and 2nd is a cloud of glowing plasma.

What do you think Chin is going to do when she hypers in and 2nd is just a cloud of plasma?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't think Honor could make a single Alpha launch that would decisively eliminate Tourville's survivors at that point. He still had too many ships and was too far from her, even with Apollo and if she had fired from the hyperlimit.

How many missiles did Honor fire at 5th?
62208 attack missiles, with was about half her ammo load.
How many apollo missiles did it take to kill a SD(p) when 3rd was shooting at at 5th?
576.
How many equivalent combat vessels did 2rd have?
About 80.
How many ships can 62208 missiles kill at 576 per?
108.

So 5th arrives and either sees 2nd die under a massive wave of missiles or sees a cloud of plasma where she expects to see a fleet.

What does this mean? What do you expect Chin will do?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:(though not within the portion shadowed by the RZ -- but that's okay because no attacker can emerge in that area either)

Strictly speaking, that's not accurate. You can translate to and from hyperspace inside the RZ. But it's not a tactical military solution because it's inaccurate, so you can't really position yourself near your intended target for that operation. You may come out a few million km away from the ideal position -- which is what Chin's staff must have assumed Honor did.

I don't know how powerful the RZ is at Trevor's Star. And RFC's been possible somewhat inconsistent about the RZ effect, but in AAC we're told that it's possible to hyper out from it, at the cost of extra component wear and navigational inaccuracy

At All Costs wrote:Any wormhole terminus associated with a star formed a conical volume in hyper, with the wormhole at its apex and a base centered on the star and twice as wide as its hyper limit, in which hyper-space astrogation became less than totally reliable. The bigger the terminus or junction, the stronger the resonance effect . . . and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, with its multiple termini, was the largest ever discovered. The resonance wave it produced was more of a tsunami, and it didn't just make astrogation "less than reliable." It made it the next best thing to flatly impossible, and any transition within the resonance (assuming someone could have plotted one in the first place) would have been no more than a complicated way to commit suicide.

Though it occurs to me that back before the wormhole was discovered, back when it was associated with Manticore B, that would be because B was closer to the Junction than A. So any ship hypering over from A to B would likely not want to overfly B to emerge on the side closer to the wormhole. Plus, their sensors could detect the grav "turbulence" they simply didn't know it was associated with a wormhole -- so their charts should have marked off the really bad spots as a no-go zone.


Still, you made me reconsider and with only the single terminus at Trevor's Star (even if it is one of the highest tonnage terminus ever discovered) rather than the entire Junction, the RZ might be weak enough that you could emerge from hyper within it.

Still, if an enemy fleet can emerge there then so can a responding fleet coming in from near the terminus.

kzt wrote:How many missiles did Honor fire at 5th?
62208 attack missiles, with was about half her ammo load.
How many apollo missiles did it take to kill a SD(p) when 3rd was shooting at at 5th?
576.
How many equivalent combat vessels did 2rd have?
About 80.
How many ships can 62208 missiles kill at 576 per?
108.

So 5th arrives and either sees 2nd die under a massive wave of missiles or sees a cloud of plasma where she expects to see a fleet.

What does this mean? What do you expect Chin will do?

Are you sure Tourville's forces are reduced to that low a number at this point? In this scenario, he hadn't traded blows with Third Fleet and McKeon's squadron yet. He'd only gone through the meatgrinder of Home Fleet's only launch. You're saying Home Fleet reduced his effectiveness from 240 to 80 capital ships?

He did have 124 remaining ships at this point, though all but 11 had suffered some damage. Was that enough to reduce the overall effectiveness by one third?

In any event, there's a question of what firing solution Honor would adopt. There are 124 SD(P)s left. How does she task the missiles? During the Battle at Lovat, she was using 1000 missiles per ship. Since this is only the second use of Apollo, she may opt to go for the same, at least for the first salvo. So my point remains: some ships of Second Fleet remain and fire back.

More importantly, she's weathering their salvo. I suppose Haven's plan was that they'd fire considerably more missiles than she would, at roughly the same range which is what they'd just done with Home Fleet. Tourville with 124 ships can push out more missiles than Honor's 35, even though she'd have been rolling pods for longer. In this scenario, Honor's 35 are whittled down even as Chin appears on the scene with another 110.

However, I do think Honor wouldn't have obliged. She'd have fired at Second Fleet from beyond their range, relying on the Apollo's improved accuracy over the long range. Second would have fired immediately thereafter, accepting a ballistic phase, seeing as Honor wouldn't come into their range. But at nearly 4 light-minutes, their missiles wouldn't be anywhere as good as the Apollos. So she'd take some damage from that massive salvo from 124 ships, but she'd do far more damage on them.

That however doesn't change the overall picture. She can't build up another massive salvo while missiles from Second are arriving (whether their launching ships still exist or not), however crappy their accuracy is. Even the ones exploding because they were intercepted by PDLCs could kill some or all pods deployed. In fact, the ECM missiles could wreck the pods all by themselves. So Chin has time to build up her salvo before she's under attack.

Jonathan_S wrote:

At All Costs wrote:It made it the next best thing to flatly impossible, and any transition within the resonance (assuming someone could have plotted one in the first place) would have been no more than a complicated way to commit suicide.

Though it occurs to me that back before the wormhole was discovered, back when it was associated with Manticore B, that would be because B was closer to the Junction than A. So any ship hypering over from A to B would likely not want to overfly B to emerge on the side closer to the wormhole. Plus, their sensors could detect the grav "turbulence" they simply didn't know it was associated with a wormhole -- so their charts should have marked off the really bad spots as a no-go zone.

I don't know if we can take the "no more than a complicated way to commit suicide" at face value or if it's hyperbole. I tend to think the latter, even though this is infodump (omniscient narrator), not a passage that is one character's musings.

There wasn't much traffic to Manticore-B back before the Junction was discovered (or "discovered"), but there was some. We've been told there are other things that could account for the inaccuracies in plotting, but we haven't heard of anything as dire as ships getting destroyed by grav shear or something.

Mitigating factors though:

First, it's possible that the near totality of whatever little traffic there was to Manticore-B came from Manticore-A and thus was not in the RZ itself. We did hear of one ship hypering to B during the Axelrod's follow-up expedition with the Barcans and this ship seemed to have no trouble.

Second, it might be that the "suicide" part is that the ship gets thrown into the hyperlimit of the star and transitioning to n-space there is the suicide. So freighters that didn't even intend to come close to the hyperlimit, especially with 16th century's less accurate hyperlogs, wouldn't find themselves thrown into B's hyperlimit and then scattering their atoms through the system.

Still, if an enemy fleet can emerge there then so can a responding fleet coming in from near the terminus.

Yes, but as I said it's not tactically useful for the Havenites' plan because they couldn't be sure of coming in at the position they needed. They could be thrown off 20 million km out of position and thus an hour away from engagement range.

The same applies to Honor: however good her navigator might be, they couldn't emerge inside the RZ because they might be too far or too near Chin's forces.

She doesn’t need to build a salvo. Apollo is so deadly that they don’t need to. We’ve established that 576 apollo missiles can reliably kill a RHN SD and it takes on the order of 15-20,000 missiles to kill a RMN SD(P).

8th has about 32 ships but only about 24 of them are Apollo capable. Assuming that the all have Apollo pods every 12 seconds they fire 1536 attack missiles. So every 12 seconds three ships in 5th fleet die. So 5th fleet has 6 minute and 24 seconds after the first missile arrives before they are all dead.

And to prevent that you have to kill every single Apollo capable ship, as one KHI can control all the missiles.

It takes 5th about a minute to build the missile salvo to take out one ship. So it will take them about 30 minutes to kill 8th fleet. Pity they won’t get to fire those missiles as they will all be dead, eh?

How badly does everyone in 5th fleet want to die in exchange for killing less than 20% of 8th fleet?

Honors first salvo will arrive about a minute before the first salvo from 5th lands. So by the time that first salvo hits1/6th of 5th fleet is dead. And due to the magic of the honorverse the missile effectiveness from 5th drops too due to their guiding ships getting all blowed up.

So in the first slavo about 4500 missiles would have lost guidance. The second salvo about 9000 would have lost guidance, so only 16,000 missiles are there. The third salvo it drops to 13,000 missiles and 8th fleet probably doesn’t lose a ship. The next salvo has about 8000 missiles against about 28 undamaged ships, and they just swat them out of space.

If 5th decides to hyper out after they realize they are getting slaughtered by these tiny salvos it’s going to be too late for 2/3rds of them.