Honorverse Top Ten Tacticians, Strategists

kzt wrote:Yup. And it was totally silly, as having a huge fleet jump in on top of your fleet is not something you can be expected to account for in your operations or planning. So even if she'd done everything right 3rd fleet was going to get crushed.

Against just a mauled 2nd fleet, and having a single squadron of Apollo wallers to back up her 50ish 1st gen SD(p)s, She was pretty much at parity if she played her forces right, with her ammo levels equal to what remained in 2nd fleet.

5th fleet shut the door on her, game over.

but not using every advantage she had, using tactics that pre-dated the 1st war.... whatever.

Theemile wrote:My only comment to that is someone so noted as Kusak, who shared a fleetbase with Honor (who, let's face it, would have asked Kusak to play OpFor while training up 8th fleet at least once), would have been so far behind the tactical ball is ridiculous. 3rd fleet's actions were purely plot driven. Every armchair admiral knows she should have send spoiling salvos against 2nd fleet, while rolling an alpha strike, which launched at maximum effective range, with layered LAC antimissile shells. Nope, we got 1900pd tactics against 1921pd foes. It was a total setup for failure driven by plot.

kzt wrote:Yup. And it was totally silly, as having a huge fleet jump in on top of your fleet is not something you can be expected to account for in your operations or planning. So even if she'd done everything right 3rd fleet was going to get crushed.

I do not have a comment on either strategy or tactics; but I am curious about one or two things: what exactly was the composition of Kuzak's forces and what missiles was she carrying (ERM or MDM)? I looked in At all Costs, but could not find a breakdown. The best that I could do was to find Haven's estimates of the forces when discussing Beatrice. From chapter 54:

"Basically, Beatrice is a direct attack on the Manticoran home system," Theisman told her. "There's not much finesse to it. We'll take forty-two battle squadrons—three hundred and thirty-six SD(P)s; equal to eighty-plus percent of their entire modern wall of battle, including the Andies, according to NavInt's current estimates—and we'll throw it straight at their toughest defenses and their most critical defensive objective. They'll have to fight to defend Manticore, and the system astrography is going to leave Sphinx especially exposed. Essentially, we'll be able to get at Sphinx quickly enough their Home Fleet will have no choice but to meet us head-on, however bad the odds are from their perspective. And the odds will be bad. Because they've had to deploy so much of their strength to cover other, secondary objectives, they'll be significantly outnumbered at the point of contact.
"We'll take along several thousand LACs. The attack force, which will be under Javier's command, with Lester as his second, will also be accompanied by a full press fleet train—repair ships, ammunition ships, hospital ships, everything. We'll be prepared to repeat Lester's Zanzibar tactics, complete to reloading our SD(P)s several times, if necessary.
"Even in the best-case scenario," he said soberly, "our losses will be heavy—very heavy. Don't think they won't. We'll be hitting very hard, well-prepared defenses—probably the toughest in the explored galaxy, at the moment—manned by highly motivated people, and they'll still have the technological advantage, even though we've narrowed it. Not only that, but we don't estimate we'll be able to hold the system against counterattack, even after we win. Certainly not indefinitely.
"At the moment, their Home Fleet consists of about fifty SD(P)s and the same number of older superdreadnoughts, according to NavInt. They have another fifty of the wall in Third Fleet, and Eighth Fleet has another twenty-four to thirty. Against Home Fleet alone, we'll have a better than three-to-one advantage in total hulls, and seven-to-one in SD(P)s. Their fixed defenses and the LACs they've deployed for home system defense will offset some of that advantage, but not as much as you might think. According to NavInt's latest reports, some of the dispositions they've been forced to make to protect Manticore-B and the Junction have forced compromises in Manticore-A we think we can make work for us.
"If both Third Fleet and Eighth Fleet are called in from Trevor's Star, the numerical odds will shift from seven-to-one in pod—layers to approximately four-to-one, but we don't really know how likely it is that both of them will be committed.

He is estimating that Third and Eighth combined have about 34 pod-laying Super Dreadnoughts. Since Eighth has the Apollo units, perhaps all of their Super Dreadnoughts should be pod-layers; which just leaves Third with at most 10 out of the estimated 50 units. Does that sound right?

tlb wrote:I do not have a comment on either strategy or tactics; but I am curious about one or two things: what exactly was the composition of Kuzak's forces and what missiles was she carrying (ERM or MDM)? The best that I could do was to find Haven's estimates of the forces when discussing Beatrice. From chapter 54
[snip]

At the moment, their Home Fleet consists of about fifty SD(P)s and the same number of older superdreadnoughts, according to NavInt. They have another fifty of the wall in Third Fleet, and Eighth Fleet has another twenty-four to thirty.
Against Home Fleet alone, we'll have a better than three-to-one advantage in total hulls, and seven-to-one in SD(P)s.
If both Third Fleet and Eighth Fleet are called in from Trevor's Star, the numerical odds will shift from seven-to-one in pod—layers to approximately four-to-one

He is estimating that Third and Eighth combined have about 34 pod-laying Super Dreadnoughts. Since Eighth has the Apollo units, perhaps all of their Super Dreadnoughts should be pod-layers; which just leaves Third with at most 10 out of the estimated 50 units. Does that sound right?

Well they never built a capital ship ERM. So wallers only have 2 possible options for missiles -- MDMs (from pods or from the handful of legacy SDs that got refit with MDM launchers) or SDM (from legacy launchers)

As for his calculations - that's seems to be what he's saying. His intel is home fleet as 50 SD(P), and he's got a 7:1 advantage (so 350 SD(P)) - if 3rd + 8th come in he thinks that drops to about 4:1 advantage 350:87.5. 87 total SD(P)s - 50 in home fleet = 37 spread between 3rd and 8th. Problem is -- he's dead wrong His estimate for home fleet was a little high, on the day D'Orville had 42 SD(P)s and 48 older SDs, but his estimate for 3rd and 8th combined having 80ish wallers are fairly accurate (actually 87); but it appears that all of 3rd and 8th fleet's wallers are SD(P)s. So if they appeared and combined with home fleet he'd only hold a 2.7:1 advantage (350:129) in pod-layers.


Kuzak had McKeon's Sixty-First Battle Squadron (3 on which are Apollo capable; at a SD squadron should be 6 SD(P)s) & Truman's carriers (1 2-CLAC division detached and with the IAN in 8th fleet's exercise; which I think leaves 4 of her CLACs with Kukak). And for total wallers AAC says she's "only got fifty-five, even with Duchess Harrington's orphans" and "all of ours are Medusas or Harringtons" (so it says she had no legacy SDs)

With her having 55 SD(P)s (3 of which were Apollo capable) -- it means all her wallers would be carrying all MDMs (And her CLACs may have a few MDM tubes as well). Anything shorter ranged (DDM, ERM, SDM) would be carried by her screen -- but she left most of it behind to cut down on transit time and get her wallers into battle against 2nd fleet all the sooner.
Now it's not clear how many of those 1st generation SD(P)s might have been built with or refitted for Keyhole I -- but that's mostly a question about their defenses; not their offense.

And AAC also tells us that Honor still had "her thirty-two superdreadnoughts", all of which should also be SD(P)s as 8th fleet is where they concentrated all their most advanced ships (allowing them to punch out of their weight class and thus tie down many times their numbers). Though some of Honor's ships by now I believe are the refitted IAN Adler SD(P)s.
So as mentioned above 3rd + 8th fleets appear to have a combined 87 SD(P)s.

Yup. Kuzak should have told McKeon to engage as soon as he was in range. Shortly Theisman's ship start to blow up about one per minute. Lots of happy folks on 3rd. And then 96 SD(P) drop in and start shooting and it's a bad day.

Jonathan_S wrote:As for his calculations - that's seems to be what he's saying. His intel is home fleet as 50 SD(P), and he's got a 7:1 advantage (so 350 SD(P)) - if 3rd + 8th come in he thinks that drops to about 4:1 advantage 350:87.5. 87 total SD(P)s - 50 in home fleet = 37 spread between 3rd and 8th. Problem is -- he's dead wrong His estimate for home fleet was a little high, on the day D'Orville had 42 SD(P)s and 48 older SDs, but his estimate for 3rd and 8th combined having 80ish wallers are fairly accurate (actually 87); but it appears that all of 3rd and 8th fleet's wallers are SD(P)s. So if they appeared and combined with home fleet he'd only hold a 2.7:1 advantage (350:129) in pod-layers.

I did look for the numbers, but obviously not well enough. Where should I have looked to find the real ship counts?

He said "three hundred and thirty-six SD(P)s;", which is 6.7 times the estimated 50 wallers of home fleet.

Never mind, I found the quote that mentions "Honor's orphans" that you pointed out; in chapter 66 (before Chin's fleet appears):

"Damned if I know," she acknowledged frankly. "Maybe he just figures he's still got the firepower to take us. After all, he's still got a hundred and eighteen wallers, and we've only got fifty-five, even with Duchess Harrington's orphans."
"But he's had the crap hammered out of him, Ma'am," Smithson objected. "The recon platforms indicate he's got heavy battle damage to at least half his survivors, and his acceleration rate would be proof enough of that, even without the platforms' reports. So say he's got the equivalent of eighty wallers' combat power—which is generous, I'd say—and they're still Peep SD(P)s. We don't have as many units as Home Fleet had, but all of ours are Medusas or Harringtons, and that gives us the edge in real combat power. Not only that, but he's got to have used up a lot of ammo. Hell, he didn't fire a single MDM at the LACs, and you saw what they did to his screen. His magazines have to be close to empty."

If you are going to fire missiles with the intent to include one or more ballistic phases, your targeting has to take that into account. Where do you Project your targets are going to be at the end of the ballistic phase and what do you expect your missiles sensors to see-and try to get a lock on at that point?
RMN has Ghost Rider and at the point you first spotted an attacking force you should be trying to put a drone to where it gets the best read on your opponent. Then there is the whole FTL component and the question of IF you can send updated targeting information generated by your FTL drones to your missile strike.

Depending on how fast and at what acceleration your opponent is using and where they are heading at the time you make your first launch, you have a fair idea of where they are going to be when your missiles come out of ballistic and start looking for their targets.
How likely is it that an attacking force is going to -even if it has a significant reserve capability in acceleration- is going to curve away from 1( the estimated trajectory of the missies in ballistic phase and 2) change speed/acceleration sufficiently to get out of the targeting basket for those weapons? No 90º changes of direction possible for either the attacker or the defender. You can change orientation but not bend your projected path sufficient to get out of engagement range IF you are heading more or less right at the point your opponent is going to be in X time so that you can bring them under fire. Physics,,,,,it's a bitch.
Without all the calculations, what you are doing is leading your target based on what you (think) you know and the capabilities of your weapons.

It is possible that, in your defense, could run something like Barricade and push a volly of EMC birds out to be more or less between yourself and the attacking missiles when the come out of ballistic, so they almost immediately get swamped with interference and something like Dragon's teeth to give them targets in the wrong vector. Get the attacking missiles looking- and driving/curveing off at those kind of speeds- off the vector to intercept and engage your ships with any sort of decoys? Every second they have fallen for the illusion the further away they are getting from where they should be heading and where they should be looking.

But this is me sitting in a nice comfy chair with nobody shooting at me. Still, smoke & mirrors is fair.

Brigade XO wrote:Depending on how fast and at what acceleration your opponent is using and where they are heading at the time you make your first launch, you have a fair idea of where they are going to be when your missiles come out of ballistic and start looking for their targets.

Why would they start looking for the targets when the light up the third stage?

They should have either be looking for the targets all along, or it's a range limitation that has nothing to do with the ballistic phase. For example, if they can't lock on targets above 10 million km away, which is roughly the range of an SDM, then they're going to need another 131 seconds after lighting up the third stage.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:[


Why would they start looking for the targets when the light up the third stage?

They should have either be looking for the targets all along, or it's a range limitation that has nothing to do with the ballistic phase. For example, if they can't lock on targets above 10 million km away, which is roughly the range of an SDM, then they're going to need another 131 seconds after lighting up the third stage.

What is the passive range of the missile's sensors for target acquisition? Passive range when the the power for the missiles wedge is not running? Also in the ballistic phase, are they going to be receiving targeting updates or is there no practical communication that can get to them?

What is the active sensor range? I presume that when the final stage lights off, the missiles targeting sensors also come back....but are they "active" meaning sending out something to get a return like you do with radar or are they passive- so they don't scream their locations such that CMs and energy weapons can track and home in on them?

If Apollo isn't involved with FTL, at what point do the RMN missiles outrun the ability of the launching ships to send them practical targeting information and have to depend on the on-board sensors? Because if you have Apollo, the FTL command missiles and particularly one or more Ghost Rider drones further down range and on the targets, the missiles are getting essentialy real-time updating.

The question with the Apollo command missile (with FTL) starts becoming the same challenge that the Silver Bullets used to locate the relay/command stations for the pod system at Beowulf. You figure out where the FTL is going to and coming from and vaporize that nexus with the graser.

Brigade XO wrote:What is the passive range of the missile's sensors for target acquisition? Passive range when the the power for the missiles wedge is not running? Also in the ballistic phase, are they going to be receiving targeting updates or is there no practical communication that can get to them?

I don't see why they wouldn't be scanning in any portion of the flight, ballistic or powered, or stop receiving telemetry at all. The missiles don't power down completely. They shut down the wedge, but the electronics inside are still powered. The missile has enough power in its capacitors to relight the third stage of the wedge, after all. And besides, when the warhead fires, it's dropped the wedge, so it has to have sensor technology that is independent of the wedge

What is the active sensor range? I presume that when the final stage lights off, the missiles targeting sensors also come back....but are they "active" meaning sending out something to get a return like you do with radar or are they passive- so they don't scream their locations such that CMs and energy weapons can track and home in on them?

Active targetting sensors from over 35 million km out? A three-stage MDM flies 29.2 million km in the first 6 minutes and 36.5 in the final three. That means the missile is actually closer to the launching ship than it is to its target, if it is going to need a ballistic phase. If it can receive useful telemetry up to 50 million km out from the launching ship, it can do that during the entire ballistic phase.

I suppose there's some technology that only works in the presence of an active wedge or impeller ring. For example, if FTL gravitic sensors are tied to those, then the missile flies blind in the gravitic spectrum during the ballistic phase. It would still have EM spectrum sensors, but those are limited to light-speed. I don't think the speed itself is the issue, but it may correlate to sensing accuracy. That is, an FTL gravitic sensor can resolve at 62 light-seconds what an EM light-speed sensor can resolve at most at 1 light-second away. That would be the difference between true targets and a tiny dot for the entire enemy's formation.

I still don't think it should miss a fleet of 100 ships moving in formation from 2 light-minutes away. So they are going to come crashing down on the enemy. The only question is whether they target the ships that they were meant to target, or whether they expend themselves on the screen and on decoys.

If Apollo isn't involved with FTL, at what point do the RMN missiles outrun the ability of the launching ships to send them practical targeting information and have to depend on the on-board sensors? Because if you have Apollo, the FTL command missiles and particularly one or more Ghost Rider drones further down range and on the targets, the missiles are getting essentialy real-time updating.

As we saw in both Spindle and Beowulf, a great deal of the Apollo brood's capability is the ACM itself: dedicating 11.1% of your birds to computing exclusively and networking them together in a distributed mesh. The FTL is a near after-thought in that case. The launching ship may have bigger processing capabilities and better sensors, but it's also much further away and thus has a lower resolution. I suspect that the FTL component alone wouldn't have accounted for much.

We've been told that accuracy at long ranges was a problem. We've also seen frantic reprogramming of missile waves' ECM and ECCM based on the data acquired from prior waves (Hypatia). Those are definitely limited by range and light-speed. If you're shooting at an enemy 3 light-minutes out, the signal from that attack takes 3 minutes to reach you and another 3 minutes to reach the closest missile that is about to attack. That 6-minute delay is the interval between salvos that can be reprogrammed with feedback.

Brigade XO wrote:If Apollo isn't involved with FTL, at what point do the RMN missiles outrun the ability of the launching ships to send them practical targeting information and have to depend on the on-board sensors? Because if you have Apollo, the FTL command missiles and particularly one or more Ghost Rider drones further down range and on the targets, the missiles are getting essentialy real-time updating.

The exact range that occurs as is a function of missile velocity and the engagement geometry (chase, broadside, or closing).

But assuming a standard broadside engagement, and no ballistic segment, then the MDM is already beyond the range of lightspeed updates before bringing up its 3rd drive.

I didn't work out the exact range but it's less than the 29 million km the missile would have reached by the time its second drive burns out -- at that distance the signal can't catch the missile before it reaches attack range. (29 million km is, remember, already less than half the powered range of an MDM!)

The actual range wouldn't be much past 20 million km from the launch ship. At 20 million km (about 67 light seconds) the missile has been accelerating for 5 minutes and is up to 0.45c. A lightspeed signal from its launch platform then will finally catch up to the missile after 158 seconds -- by which time the missile has been accelerating for 458 seconds and is up to 0.69c and all the way out to 47,280,806 km! (So, just 82 seconds acceleration short of its maximum powered endurance)


And this is purely the one-way signal lag. It totally ignores how old the data the ship was working with might be - so even Ghost Rider drones feeding the ship intel in (near) real-time doesn't allow it to send a new update to an MDM past about 240 seconds (and 45 million km) till impact.