OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:It took him seconds to figure out what Apollo was and how it operated. Whether the Allies had enough of it was a complete guess. He bet the farm on it.

Not really seconds. The conversation is him presenting the information to Prichard. There were undoubtably hours of analysis and thought put into both how Apollo worked and the implications of how it was used, starting with the people in Lovat writing the reports to send to Haven. Heck, they could have sent some of their intelligence and technical people along with the dispatch so they could continue working on the analysis on the way to Haven (assuming they were willing - and had - anything larger than a dispatch boat to send it).

@Star Knight
Have you considered that the reason the second war is seeing more strategic errors is not that the Manticoran leadership (White Haven specifically) is poorer than it was in the first war, but that the opposition is considerably better than the Peep admiralty stuck under the commissars of the Committee For Public Safety? I seem to recall a few strategic reversals when the Peeps had McQueen calling the shots. Manticore could have been making some relatively poor strategic decisions the entire time and simply weren't getting punished for them the way Thiesman is doing.

Galactic Sapper wrote:
@Star Knight
Have you considered that the reason the second war is seeing more strategic errors is not that the Manticoran leadership (White Haven specifically) is poorer than it was in the first war, but that the opposition is considerably better than the Peep admiralty stuck under the commissars of the Committee For Public Safety? I seem to recall a few strategic reversals when the Peeps had McQueen calling the shots. Manticore could have been making some relatively poor strategic decisions the entire time and simply weren't getting punished for them the way Thiesman is doing.

It's an interesting idea but i don't see Theisman above everyone else. He's on the same level as Caparelli and Givens, if that.
But if you want to argue that the RMN only seemed semi-competent when trashing a bunch of lunatics, go right ahead.
Their performance in the so-called war against the Solarian League wasn't any better either after all.
The dominating factor again being White Haven

This has truly been an entertaining thread. You all know I like to peek under the hem of a subject. This thread has been a course in Voyeurism 799. All of you should be ashamed of yourselves. And me for enjoying what you've exposed.

It's amusing Haven managed to hold back letting Bolthole out of the bag while under so much pressure, politically and militarily. But Manticore couldn't keep Apollo under wraps. I have to admit, when the RMN exposed Apollo, I thought Foraker would somehow work her magic and counter it before the RMN could make a beeline directly to Haven. But it worked so effectively, I didn't think it mattered.

Could someone refresh my memory when Bolthole produced its first ships? Also, when did Manticore become aware of Bolthole? How could Manticore have been aware that the Peeps were stockpiling ships when they didn't choose to unveil them when Eighth Fleet was gearing up to invade? Instead, they calmly sought a ceasefire to buy more time. Talk about remaining calm under pressure. Say what you want about Saint Just, he was no dummy. Just ruthless as hell.

It would be interesting to note how many ships were available from Bolthole at the time the cease fire was accepted by High Ridge, just in case Beth had rejected the offer.

A lot of that is unclear. Basically ONI, when they were not keeping unpleasant realities from their most senior COs, determined that the capacity of the known Haven shipyards was insufficient for the number of ships.

St Just had nothing to counter the RMD SD(P)s. He just wanted to preserve Haven (and himself). That was all created during the extended ceasefire.

This is also why it so angered everyone who was involved with the RMN. They basically had the war won and then Obama turned the country over to ISIS. Or something like that.

Star Knight wrote:It’s strongly implied in AAC they only had enough Apollo pods to fully arm the ships attached to Eight Fleet in the timeframe February – June 1921. That is to say, they had enough Apollos to do what they did at Lovat but not much more.
They then had enough pods to restock Eighth Fleet after Lovat and equip the additional (IAN) wallers.
I doubt very much they had any Apollo spares available at Manticore, it’s even unknown if all of Honors ships had a full war load at Manticore. Well it might be known from a throwaway line somewhere but I’d need to look for it.

They may have had insufficient in February, but the summit gave the industries time to produce a lot of missiles and pods. By the time Sanskrit launched in late April / early May, they had quite a lot. By the time they'd return to base, there would be more available to rearm. And every time they came back, there should be even more plus new ships to be added.

Remember that in February of the next year (1922), during the Battle of Spindle, Tenth Fleet had at leat 33000 Apollo missiles: the first 11k crashed on Crandall, the second 11k were destroyed in "exclamation point" and the third was not fired. They did ask for whatever remained to be returned after Oyster Bay, but this tells us that the production capacity had been ramping up rather nicely before the freighters left Manticore for Spindle at the latest in November 1921, while the war was still officially on.

So maybe they didn't have enough to reload while in Havenite territory, but a full month of production ought to be enough to completely rearm Eight Fleet. So Eighth should have set out for another target in mid-June 1921.

But it didn't.

Opportunity for what, raid a pointless target?
If there is the possibility of a delay all the more reason to keep Eighth fleets combat power available at home.

Well, you wouldn't de-escalate and attack something less important than Lovat. You'd have to go for a bigger target. Whether that's Haven itself or not we don't know. I wouldn't call that pointless.

This is always the default answer to this line of argument. If you assume your vulnerable at home, Eighth fleet doesn’t go out to play. And otherwise you just run down the clock. You don’t tip them off until you’re ready to go for the kill.
Overall it really wouldn’t matter whether Manticore can pull the trigger in early September or delay until October of November.

They didn't they they were vulnerable. Couple that with retaining the initiative on the war and you can see why they went back on the attack.

But even if I'm right, as I pointed out above, they should have followed up on the attack on Lovat.

cthia wrote:It's amusing Haven managed to hold back letting Bolthole out of the bag while under so much pressure, politically and militarily. But Manticore couldn't keep Apollo under wraps. I have to admit, when the RMN exposed Apollo, I thought Foraker would somehow work her magic and counter it before the RMN could make a beeline directly to Haven. But it worked so effectively, I didn't think it mattered.

She still might find a solution. She didn't have time to do so, though. In fact, it's very likely the news about Lovat and Apollo hadn't yet reached Bolthole before Theisman launched Operatiton Beatrice. Which is something he ought to have done: if there was a chance of Apollo-equipped ships and defence pods guarding the MBS, he could use Foraker's insights.

Could someone refresh my memory when Bolthole produced its first ships? Also, when did Manticore become aware of Bolthole? How could Manticore have been aware that the Peeps were stockpiling ships when they didn't choose to unveil them when Eighth Fleet was gearing up to invade? Instead, they calmly sought a ceasefire to buy more time. Talk about remaining calm under pressure. Say what you want about Saint Just, he was no dummy. Just ruthless as hell.

Bolthole had been producing ships before the end of the first war, but nothing major. Definitely nothing that could turn the tide of the war after Operation Buttercup: no matter how many Duquesne-class SDs it produced, they would be nothing more than target practice for the Alliance.

It started producing SD(P)s sometime between the two wars, after Theisman sent Foraker there to oversee R&D and production. If we say that she went there immediately after "Oops" in 1914, the Sovereign of Space probably launched in 1917. Meanwhile, Theisman was careful not to use any SD(P) in the Havenite Civil War. He fought that with traditional SDs against other traditional SDs. So when Thunderbolt launched, he already had a couple hundred SD(P)s.

ONI found out about Bolthole's existence during the second war, but they never figured out where Bolthole was. That also means there was no reliable intel on Bolthole's production capacity, since you couldn't put some stealthed ships in the system and count how many SD-sized slips there were. So yes, it's very likely that ONI underestimated the RHN forces.

It would be interesting to note how many ships were available from Bolthole at the time the cease fire was accepted by High Ridge, just in case Beth had rejected the offer.

Irrelevant.

@ThinksMarkedly

I have a different take on the Mk-23E/F and Apollo pods.

I think its likley that they only had enough missiles for a partial weapons loadout of those 15 Apollo SDPs for the original Sanskrit in February 1921.
Probably all coming off a single experimental production line at the secret r&d facilities at Manticore B. It’s also possible they didn’t have enough Keyhole 2s for all the wallers.

They then start retooling the main production lines during the cease fire. Or probably more accurately, they start to set up many more addtional production lines for an eventual upgrade of their entire capital missile inventory.

If you think about it, it’s unlikey Manticore maintains a production capability of tens of thousands of pods every month. The expenditure just isn’t there. We could try to come up with accurate figures from WoH and AAC, but it doubt the RMN used more than a couple hundred thousand missiles during the second war.

This means they’re probably way over-stocked as far as conventional pods go anyway and don’t really need to produce more than a couple thousand pods every month.
And if this is true, this could be one reason why ramping up Apollo production took a fair amount of time and missiles weren’t comming of the line in great numbers until after the talks collapsed and Eighth Fleet departed for Solon.

Also keep in mind – they still would want to maintain a at leask token production capability of conventional missile pods. Most of the fleet wasn’t Apollo capable afterall. Another factor, since they felt the need to test Apollo, they might not commit fully to full scale Apollo production until after they get back results from Lovat. I don’t think that would be particularly smart, but who knows at this point.

In any case, the situation would change drastically after Lovat, but one could still convincingly argue that they only had enough Apollo pods ready to reload Eighth Fleet when it got back in June.

If we assume 1000 pods on average for 15 Apollo wallers in Eighth Fleet that‘s 15.000 for a complete loadout. If we assume Eighth Fleet used 5.000 Apollo pods at Lovat (they had to hit the fixed defenses too, right?) that a rough 20.000 Apollo pods to load the original wall of Eighth Fleet.

Additional Apollo pods produced in June / July would have been used for the 35+ IAN wallers completing the refit. If we assume some 500 pods (?) for IAN SDPs, that’s a planned 20.000 for just one complete loadout.

Additional production capacity would have gone to producing system defense Apollos. They were very likley looking to deploy them in similar numbers in Manticore B, Manticre A and at the Junction.

So very roughly speaking, we’re looking at some 80.000 Apollo pods being produced until September just to complete the load out of Eighth Fleet for Jouett and to properly defend the Manticore system.

If we assume (again very roughly) they started Apollo production at the beginning of 1921, that’s basically 10.000 Apollo pods per month on average. Tall order in my book.

A wild assed guess could look something like this:

January: 100 pods produced /inital LIRP at Weyland
February: 1000 pods produced /first full rate production line set up
March: 1500 pods produced /retooling starts in earnest, lessons learned from inital production line are incoporated
April: 2500 pods produced / production ramps up and Eight fleet leaves with about 5k Apollo pods
May: 5000 pods produced /production is well set up to double every month
June: 10.000 pods produced / enough pods have been produced to completley restock Eight Fleet
July: 20.000 pods produced / barely enough produced to load the IAN wallers and start deploying system defense pods
August 40.000 pods produced / enlarged Eighth fleet fully stocked, full rollout of Apollo system defense. The window of vulnerability has closed.
September 80.000 pods produced / all immideate demands met, stockpiles can be set up and ammunition supply ships can be restocked, an offensive against Haven system is possible.

I’m not married to those numbers, but probably in the general ballpark.

Well, you wouldn't de-escalate and attack something less important than Lovat. You'd have to go for a bigger target. Whether that's Haven itself or not we don't know. I wouldn't call that pointless.

You just don’t need to attack before the window of vulnerability has been closed. The attack on Lovat in May was pointless, Manticore could have waited till August or September, hit Lovat or Jouett and immediately go for Haven next, winning the war.

This is also the reason why Eighth Fleet didn’t hit another target immideatly after restocking in June. They finally realized what was in the cards for them and decided to build up Eighth into a fighting force capable of ending the war.

They still would have gone for Jouett (are much tougher target than Lovat as they say) but there’s no reason to assume the target after that woudln’t have been Haven. I think Jouett is pointless too, but even Manticore realized another Lovat would give them nothing.

They didn't they they were vulnerable. Couple that with retaining the initiative on the war and you can see why they went back on the attack.

Yeah well, case in point, they are morons then. Of course they were vulnerable. One just needs to look at the relative force levels to realize this.

Even if they are arrogantly assuming their raiding is the sole reason for Theismans inaction, there’s also the concept of diminishing returns. They have very little reason to assume that Theisman will continue to waste his ever increasing wall to guard Republican systems. At some point he’ll get fed up with it and realize, the best way to defend against those deep raids ist o take Trevors Star.
Not that they were thinking about any of this.

cthia wrote: I thought Foraker would somehow work her magic and counter it before the RMN could make a beeline directly to Haven. But it worked so effectively, I didn't think it mattered.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:She still might find a solution. She didn't have time to do so, though. In fact, it's very likely the news about Lovat and Apollo hadn't yet reached Bolthole before Theisman launched Operatiton Beatrice. Which is something he ought to have done: if there was a chance of Apollo-equipped ships and defence pods guarding the MBS, he could use Foraker's insights.

That is one reason the RMN needed to seize and keep the initiative, to help keep Foraker busy doing other things and out of her garage tinkering.

cthia wrote:It would be interesting to note how many ships were available from Bolthole at the time the cease fire was accepted by High Ridge, just in case Beth had rejected the offer.

Irrelevant.

Perhaps in the end, but still interesting. If Bolthole had amassed only half the number of ships, they still may have rolled the dice the same way, because there still would exist no other option. Nothing would have changed other than to go for broke.

In fact, one thing I think is being missed about the Manties continuing to press the Peeps with offensives, is it allows ship appreciation to be updated. If you're not attacking, you're not keeping abreast of enemy movement. The Peeps could have drawn down deployments all over Peep space to amass for an attack if they got desperate enough, like what caused them to attack anyway. If you discontinue pressing the initiative, you allow the enemy to redeploy, and Foraker to tinker. Having the advantage of interior lines of communication is useless, w/o the intel on their current deployment.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:She still might find a solution. She didn't have time to do so, though. In fact, it's very likely the news about Lovat and Apollo hadn't yet reached Bolthole before Theisman launched Operatiton Beatrice. Which is something he ought to have done: if there was a chance of Apollo-equipped ships and defence pods guarding the MBS, he could use Foraker's insights.

No time. The wormhole to Bolthole is weeks away from Haven, in the opposite direction from Manticore. Waiting for Foraker' input would have delayed Beatrice for at least a couple months. No way he could have waited that long before replying to Sanskrit. By the time he did anything he'd have been responding to Sanskrit II. Or maybe 8th fleet would have already been in Haven orbit when Shannon's reply arrived.

Star Knight wrote:I think its likley that they only had enough missiles for a partial weapons loadout of those 15 Apollo SDPs for the original Sanskrit in February 1921.
Probably all coming off a single experimental production line at the secret r&d facilities at Manticore B. It’s also possible they didn’t have enough Keyhole 2s for all the wallers.

Correct. The original Sanskrit op plan only had partial Apollo loadouts for the dozen ships they had available. That is given in the text. It is likely that they had Keyhole 2 platforms for all 12 of those ships, though, considering that Keyhole 2 is the defining characteristic for calling a ship Apollo capable. The six ships in Harrington's lead squadron were probably only Keyhole 1 equipped, though. It's not clear from the text when the extra three Manticoran Apollo wallers joined 8th fleet, but they were apparently not in the same squadron as Harrington's flagship.

It wasn't just one assembly line making Apollo at that point, but it was a relative handful of them. All operating under extreme secrecy, which was one of the reasons given for not ramping up production earlier/faster.

Star Knight wrote:If we assume 1000 pods on average for 15 Apollo wallers in Eighth Fleet that‘s 15.000 for a complete loadout. If we assume Eighth Fleet used 5.000 Apollo pods at Lovat (they had to hit the fixed defenses too, right?) that a rough 20.000 Apollo pods to load the original wall of Eighth Fleet.

About 6400 Apollo pods used at Lovat. The first ambush force took 11 quad salvos from 12 Apollo ships, or 3168 pods. The second force presumably took the same. The fixed defenses and LACs were taken out with standard pods from Harrington's lead (probably not Apollo equipped) squadron. If any of her ships were Apollo armed - Thiesman believed they were but there's no other evidence for it - that would simply add on top of that 6400.

cthia wrote:In fact, one thing I think is being missed about the Manties continuing to press the Peeps with offensives, is it allows ship appreciation to be updated. If you're not attacking, you're not keeping abreast of enemy movement. The Peeps could have drawn down deployments all over Peep space to amass for an attack if they got desperate enough, like what caused them to attack anyway. If you discontinue pressing the initiative, you allow the enemy to redeploy, and Foraker to tinker. Having the advantage of interior lines of communication is useless, w/o the intel on their current deployment.

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?

@Galactic Sapper

That is given in the text.

Yes, I couldn’t access the text yesterday so I was going from memory, but this is from Chapter 52:

"But at the moment, only Eighth Fleet is really equipped to handle them, and even they have only partial loadouts on the new pods. We're attempting to get into full production on them as quickly as possible, but we've hit some bottlenecks, and security issues have restricted the number of production facilities we could commit to them."

And this is interesting too, from the conversation about the attack on Jouett:

"Second, we're getting a handle on the production bottlenecks we've been experiencing. We're going to have a lot more of the Mistletoe-modified drones available, starting in about three weeks, and production of the Apollo pods and control platforms is beginning to accelerate, as well. We've got enough now to completely re-ammunition your command and began establishing a modest stockpile to support your operations. The system-defense version is still lagging; we won't be able to begin deploying those pods for another couple of months. But things are definitely looking up on the offensive front.”

So it’s pretty clear, Apollo production didn’t ramp up until after the cease-fire talks.
My rough numbers look pretty good IMO.

Not that it matters, but she had 15 Apollo capable ships, not 12. She had 3 Keyhole One ships in her wall for a total of 18 before the IAN arrived.