OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

Ladies and gentlemen. I think the evening's edification of Why it is impossible to mousetrap Apollo has been a success. I hope you enjoyed our distinguished tactician, kzt, who provided the numbers behind the science of why it is impossible to mousetrap Apollo. Unless you have a bigger mousetrap made of at least three fleets. I certainly enjoyed him.


Transcript:

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 a mano.

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

kzt wrote:

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. 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.

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?

Full transcript provided online by kzt upstream.

Kzt reminds me of a professor I once had. He had a charming habit of asking profound questions, then answering them before you can respond. He did that because there is always a profound analysis following in its wake that couldn't wait. I loved his style.

I will never understand why Theisman only sent two fleets for all the marbles and at all costs? Really?

kzt wrote: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.

The point about completely losing lock as ships die is not correct because Haven's missile control allows for multiplexing. From chapter 65:

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.

So Chin could control 35 thousand missiles without rotating control links. Against Kuzak, fewer than that were in a salvo from Chin, only about 20 thousand; but that means there would be no loss of control as five ships were lost.

kzt wrote: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).

Where did the number 576 come from? I know I saw the calculation in the past week, but I can't find "576" in the last 12 pages of this thread.

I wanted to check the conditions under which that was obtained. Because they're not going to be the same as attacking Chin's intact Fifth Fleet. She had 96 SD(P)s with escorts and 30 CLAC, which can put out a massive amount of counter-missile fire. The previous (and only) instance of Apollo in small quantities was the Battle of Lovat, where Judah Yanakov used 1000 missiles per RHN ship. We can assume that's a significant overkill and that they can now reduce that number, but the RHN has also learned. But far more importantly, in Lovat, Giscard had helped by splitting his 48 SDs in three groups of 16. That put an upper limit on how much counter-fire those could do. The performance numbers are not going to be the same for 16 and for 96 SD(P)s, 30 CLACs and 5000 LACs.

What the real numbers will be actually matters little. Honor doesn't know that any more than we do. Therefore, she has to err on the side of caution and will probably send a massive overkill in all the salvos until the first one strikes. If Chin dropped at 7 minutes' missile time from Honor, then that's 7 minutes of overkill. I'm going to guess that it's at best 7 kills, not 35. And this is assuming she's firing only in Chin's direction, not towards Tourville.

And then Chin's Alpha launch arrives, if RHN ships can transit with pre-deployed pods (tractored to the hull via donkeys). If she can't, then she can't win against Eighth.

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

Keyhole I? Or was that a typo?

Yes, the Mark 1 can control the missiles and so can any other ship, but they don't have the FTL link, do they? We do know that Apollo broods are deadly by themselves, though.

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.

Why about a minute before? The Home/2nd Fleet exchange was only 15 seconds of difference.

I get the magic, but the magic still obeys Relativity and the speed of light. Those missiles don't lose effectiveness if the light of the mothership exploding hasn't reached them yet.

cthia wrote:I will never understand why Theisman only sent two fleets for all the marbles and at all costs? Really?

He sent half or more of his entire wall of battle. What more was there to send?

Remember his discussion with Pritchart: they couldn't uncover key systems (I think that's basically Haven) because Eighth could sortie and they had all those IAN SD(P)s that were MIA.

cthia wrote:I will never understand why Theisman only sent two fleets for all the marbles and at all costs? Really?

Because you only have so many ships available. Yes they were organized into "just" 2 fleets. But he sent 350 SD(P)s!

For comparison that's more SD(P)s than Manticore had of all types of wallers prior to the first war with Haven. That's something like 56% of all the SD(P)s Haven had in commission (including ones down for maintenance, still working up, or the bare minimum guard left covering a few most critical systems).

You're normally doing quite well if you can keep 1/3rd of your ships on the front lines, with the ability to surge up to 2/3rd with specific preparation for specific operations. (And that's not holding any back for defense -- that's simply the matter of repair, refit, maintenance, training, and transit times).

So getting over 50% of their entire wall together for a single operation is a vastly larger percentage of ships for a single op than anybody had previously managed during the entire pair of wars between Manticore and Haven. Sorry that organizing all of them into "only" "two fleets" made you think it wasn't a basically all out effort.

cthia wrote:Ladies and gentlemen. I think the evening's edification of Why it is impossible to mousetrap Apollo has been a success. I hope you enjoyed our distinguished tactician, kzt, who provided the numbers behind the science of why it is impossible to mousetrap Apollo. Unless you have a bigger mousetrap made of at least three fleets. I certainly enjoyed him.

I do not know why you are happy, if KZT ultimately proves to be correct, then Tom Theisman (of whom we all think highly) made the same mistake as Elvis Santino; only on a much larger scale. That puts him in a corner wearing a Dunce cap.

PS: I calculated based on Chin having 100 SD(p)'s; for 96 the size of her first salvo would be reduced to 33.6 thousand without rotating control (assuming that the 30 CLAC's have no missile control at all, which I do not think is true). But still the number has to dip below 60 ships before Chin's fleet cannot control 20 thousand missiles in a salvo without using multiplexing.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:I will never understand why Theisman only sent two fleets for all the marbles and at all costs? Really?

Because you only have so many ships available. Yes they were organized into "just" 2 fleets. But he sent 350 SD(P)s!

For comparison that's more SD(P)s than Manticore had of all types of wallers prior to the first war with Haven. That's something like 56% of all the SD(P)s Haven had in commission (including ones down for maintenance, still working up, or the bare minimum guard left covering a few most critical systems).

You're normally doing quite well if you can keep 1/3rd of your ships on the front lines, with the ability to surge up to 2/3rd with specific preparation for specific operations. (And that's not holding any back for defense -- that's simply the matter of repair, refit, maintenance, training, and transit times).

So getting over 50% of their entire wall together for a single operation is a vastly larger percentage of ships for a single op than anybody had previously managed during the entire pair of wars between Manticore and Haven. Sorry that organizing all of them into "only" "two fleets" made you think it wasn't a basically all out effort.

The weight of metal was indeed important for such an all out operation. But what was more important was the number of prongs of attack.

Two fleets are needed to mousetrap Eighth Fleet.

Eighth Fleet is led by the Salamander who doesn't get bitten by the same bug twice. And no fool who is worth his weight in brass will count on her to do so.

Murphy and the Salamander herself has always had something to say about the best laid plans of mice and men. Especially plans that are "recycled."

There should have been a contingency fleet.


If I were Theisman, at the very least I would have pulled 25 ships from each fleet as bait to spring the trap. It would have been obvious that it was all a ruse trying to run Sidemore's con game again. The RMN would have been arrogant and overconfident and swallowed the cheese hook, line, and sinker. And then after the bait is taken, the true trap door opens and closes.


Remember. All. The. Marbles.

The protection of Haven's flank and peripheral systems should have taken a back seat and played second fiddle to such an ambitious operation. Theisman should have stripped Haven's Home Fleet down to the very last destroyer!

I think it would have been tactically more sound to at least split the two forces into a third, providing a backup redundant mousetrap. Since the entire operation was dependent upon the very wily and "long-legged" mouse being trapped. In other words...

Theisman went all-out; he should have went all-in.

But then, would even a third prong matter against Apollo?

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Ladies and gentlemen. I think the evening's edification of Why it is impossible to mousetrap Apollo has been a success. I hope you enjoyed our distinguished tactician, kzt, who provided the numbers behind the science of why it is impossible to mousetrap Apollo. Unless you have a bigger mousetrap made of at least three fleets. I certainly enjoyed him.

I do not know why you are happy, if KZT ultimately proves to be correct, then Tom Theisman (of whom we all think highly) made the same mistake as Elvis Santino; only on a much larger scale. That puts him in a corner wearing a Dunce cap.

PS: I calculated based on Chin having 100 SD(p)'s; for 96 the size of her first salvo would be reduced to 33.6 thousand without rotating control (assuming that the 30 CLAC's have no missile control at all, which I do not think is true). But still the number has to dip below 60 ships before Chin's fleet cannot control 20 thousand missiles in a salvo without using multiplexing.

Pardon me, but does my elation show?

Well, Fleet Admiral kzt just helped scratch the surface of Apollo quite a bit more. Yes, it excites me. He proved that more than two sticks are needed to rub together to make fire against Eighth Fleet.

However, you are being much too harsh on Theisman, but then, you dismissed my post upstream about Honor simply being the better tactician / strategist.

Plus, Theisman did not know all of the variables. One very important variable. The nature of Apollo.

He did the best anyone could have done against the six meter tall Boogeyman who has been eating Havenite children for lunch since she left Saganami Island in search of an ally, or prey.

Short of sending another fleet to catch the wily long-legged mouse, that is.

tlb wrote:I do not know why you are happy, if KZT ultimately proves to be correct, then Tom Theisman (of whom we all think highly) made the same mistake as Elvis Santino; only on a much larger scale. That puts him in a corner wearing a Dunce cap.

I think he was expecting she only had the same 8 Harrington II ships from the GSN, not the 24 she actually did. Or hoping, at least. There was nothing he could do to mitigate that.

Also, Beatrice had been planned before Apollo was revealed. The only alternative to launching it with 336 SD(P)s and 40 CLACs would be to send a single ship with the white flag and say "we give up." I'm sure he considered that option, because he knew that a lot of his spacers would die even if they won.

PS: I calculated based on Chin having 100 SD(p)'s; for 96 the size of her first salvo would be reduced to 33.6 thousand without rotating control (assuming that the 30 CLAC's have no missile control at all, which I do not think is true). But still the number has to dip below 60 ships before Chin's fleet cannot control 20 thousand missiles in a salvo without using multiplexing.

Which means she could have sent 33k missiles to Eighth Fleet. Or, with 60% gain with multiplexing, 53k missiles. Or they just throw the kitchen sink to saturate Eighth's defences.