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tlb
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 4911
Joined: Mon Sep 03, 2012 11:34 am
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kzt wrote:You are right, I'm shifting between 5rd and 5th there. Assume I said Chin and 5th everywhere.
But 5th can't flush pods and hyper out, for two reasons:
1) They just hypered in, so they have two hyper generator cycles to go though. So if 5th arrives and 2nd is an expanding plasma cloud it takes a bare minimum of 8 minutes get out. And maybe longer, David is elusive on this.
2)
A. Unguided missiles are ineffective, because it is so written Without guidance they just are not worth using. Notice how Home Fleet didn't fire a bunch without guidance. Why is that? Did they plan to go on vacation when the collected the missile pod deposit from the Queen? No, they knew perfectly well they were all going to get blowed up and and they still didn't shoot them.
B. 5th doesn't have tractor pods. They don't have a huge number of pods ready to go. They have none. They need to launch pods, and they need to guide them. So they start launching pods and building a salvo. How long does this take? Now they launch them and guide them. How long does this take? Once 8th fleet missiles arrive they will be losing an average of at least one ship every 12 seconds as a thousand plus Apollo missiles hammer them.
Are you considering the donkey, which is a substitute for the tractor pod? From chapter 65 of AAC: When NavInt reported that the new Manty pods incorporated onboard tractors as a way to allow their pre-pod ships to tow greater numbers of them, it had seemed impossible for the Republic to respond. Their pods were already too big, and they had too limited a power budget, to permit the designers to cram a tractor into them (and power the damned thing), as well. But Shannon had decided to turn the problem on its head. Instead of fitting additional tractors into the pods, she'd come up with the "donkey." That was what everyone was calling it, although it had a suitably esoteric alphabet-soup designation, and it was another of those elegantly simple Foraker specialties.
Instead of the typically Manty bells-and-whistles approach of putting the tractor inside the pod, Shannon had simply built a very stealthy pod-sized platform which consisted of nothing except a solid mass of tractor beams and a receiver for beamed power from the ships which deployed it. Each "donkey" had the capacity to tow ten pods, and a Sovereign of Space-class SD(P) had enough tractors to tow twenty of them. Better yet, they could actually be ganged together, as long as all the pods in the gang could be lined up for power transmission from the mother ship. In theory, they could have been stacked three tiers deep, with each donkey towing ten more donkeys, each towing ten more donkeys, each . . .
If Lester Tourville had so chosen, his two hundred and forty superdreadnoughts could—in theory—have towed 4.8 million pods. Except for the minor fact that the drag would have reduced them to negative acceleration numbers. Not to mention the fact that he didn't begin to have the power transmission capability to feed that many donkeys. Still, he could tow quite a lot of them.
Admittedly there is still a problem of control, but there will be some control until the last of Chin's ships are gone. I presume that Chin already had these tractored from before the jump, the same as Tourville in his attack on Home Fleet. Home Fleet fired every missile that they could control and we know that even a missile that loses a lock can lock onto something else. You can point to Filareta's launch, but that had no attack data at all. All of these missiles and Kuzak's and Chin's would receive some attack data. Same book and chapter: Sebastian D'Orville's forty-eight pre-pod superdreadnoughts carried 27,840 pods externally, and theoretically, they could have deployed all of them in a single massive wave. In fact, Home Fleet carried a total of almost forty-nine thousand pods, with well over half a million missiles. Lester Tourville's slightly larger superdreadnoughts carried fewer pods, and each of those pods carried fewer missiles, because of the size penalty their bulkier MDMs imposed. So although he had two and a half times as many ships, he had barely twice as many pods, and each of those pods carried seventeen percent fewer missiles. He actually had "only" sixty-four percent more total missiles than Home Fleet.
But Lester Tourville also had Shannon Foraker's "donkey," and that meant every one of Sebastian D'Orville assumptions about the number and size of the salvos he could throw was fatally flawed. And what else he had was far more control channels for the missiles he carried. Not all of the forty-two Manticoran, Grayson, and Andermani SD(P)s confronting him were Keyhole-capable. Still, the majority of them were, and the pod-layers as a group could simultaneously control an average of four hundred missiles each. But the older, pre-pod ships could control only a hundred apiece, whereas each of Tourville's ships had control links for three hundred and fifty missiles, and by using Shannon Foraker's rotating control technique, they could increase that number by approximately sixty percent. So whereas Home Fleet could effectively control a total of just under twenty-two thousand missiles per salvo, Second Fleet could control eighty-four thousand without rotating control links. Worse, it could have increased that total to almost a hundred and thirty-five thousand, if it was prepared to accept somewhat lower hit probabilities, and the "donkey" meant Tourville could actually have deployed the pods to fire that many.
Manticoran fire control was better, Manticoran electronic warfare capabilities and penetration aids were better, and Manticoran MDM's were both faster and more agile. Sebastian D'Orville could confidently expect to score a significantly higher percentage of hits, but that couldn't offset the fact that Second Fleet could control over six times as many missiles. Even if Tourville's hit probabilities had been only half as good as his, the Republic would have scored three times as many hits.
It wasn't quite as bad for the Alliance as the raw numbers suggested. For one thing, deploying that many missiles and launching them without allowing their impeller wedges to cut one another's telemetry links was a far from trivial challenge. In fact, Tourville had decided to limit himself to no more than eighty percent of his theoretical maximum weight of fire. And to clear the firing and control arcs for even that many missiles, he'd been forced to spread his squadrons and their lumpy trails of donkeys and pods more broadly than he'd really wanted to. The separation between his units, necessary for effective offensive fire control, made it more difficult for them to coordinate their defensive fire. On the other hand, Havenite counter-missile doctrine relied so much more heavily than Manticoran doctrine did on mass, as opposed to accuracy, that the sacrifice was less significant than it might have been.
Even now, no one on either side knew exactly what would happen when fleets of pod-layers this size engaged one another. There was simply no experiential meterstick, because no one had ever done it before. For that matter, no battle in history had yet seen almost three hundred and fifty superdreadnoughts of any kind engage in what could only be a fight to the death. Over the centuries, tactical formalism had become the rule, with indecisive battles and limited losses. That might have changed, at least in this corner of the galaxy, but even here, most of the combatants were still feeling their way into the changing realities of interstellar carnage.
The Battle of Manticore would be something new and unique in the annals of deep-space combat. Everyone in both fleets knew that.
But that was all they knew as the missiles began to launch.
* * *
The range at launch was 65,770,000 kilometers. Flight time for Home Fleet's faster MDMs was 7.6 minutes, and their closing speed as they streaked into Second Fleet's teeth was 246,972 kilometers per second. Second Fleet's slower missiles took fifteen more seconds to reach their targets, and had a closing speed of "only" 237,655 KPS.
At those speeds, both sides' defenses were stretched to and beyond the theoretical limits of their capabilities. Manticore's longer-ranged counter-missiles, and the greater capability of the Katanas in the fleet defense role, gave D'Orville's ships a significant advantage, but not a big enough one. Not the one he'd anticipated against the weight of fire he'd expected.
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. And since they were firing pods which had been effectively deployed in a single massive pattern, Avalanche also fired its salvos in closer, more tightly spaced intervals than the Republican Navy had yet seen out of any Allied fleet. In fact, Avalanche was almost—not quite, but almost—conceptually identical to Shannon Foraker's rotating control doctrine.
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