April's thought experiment

Puidwen wrote:i'm not sure about that. Besides, what you say it will be a good way to avoid any unintentional erandani incidents. However i would think manticore would really pefer to recover them. missiles are really, really expensive. there were a few instances in the books, where an officer had to beg for permisson to live fire just a few. and we're talking two or four here. and those were more plain jane ones. so an order of more magnitude expesnive. for that matter while manticore never seem to run low on missles until oyster bay, there's also the time cost. Plus i'm sure a captain out in the wild would pefer to have his missle back to shoot a something else, instead of drifting as space dust, until he can get back home to get some more.

You're thinking of Travis Long, and indeed there was one exercise that they had explicit permission to fire a training warhead on. In the 1530s-1540s, missile warfare was much different. Engagements rarely launched more than a handful of missiles anyway, and one missile alone had a very success rate. Unless you could interpose your own wedge on the way, the missile could get through your autocannon defence and burn through your sidewalls. Not to mention that if you had your wedge on the way for defence, your own missiles would become uncontrolled and easy pickings.

Ships then didn't have broadsides to launch missiles from. They only launchers facing fore or aft, mounted on the dorsal or ventral aspects of the ship, and aft-launchers were only found on battleships and battlecruisers, and not all of the latter (look at the drawings at the beginning of A Call to Arms, you'll see HMS Invincible only had forward-facing launchers). So at the time, missiles were definitely far more expensive than they are in Honor's time.

Plus, the RMN was that much poorer. A Call to Duty starts all of its battlecruisers in mothballs and talking of breaking one of them (HMS Mars) into two so the operating costs would be commensurate with the benefit. When Travis graduates from boot camp and starts serving aboard HMS Vanguard and HMS Guardian, he keeps needing to find replacement parts and enlisted personnel kept on robbing Peter to pay Paul in order to keep the ships flying. Manticore was a backwater system with one or two freighter visits a month.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:First, how did they know to deploy the correct number of Silver Bullets? Did they prioritize the Mycroft stations that would be closest to the SLN attack, if the number was short? Were all of them programmed to fire when they see any other one fire, even if they did not have a target?

They may not have known for sure how many there were. The number of Silver Bullets was probably based on inferred information from human intelligence about how many Mycroft stations there would be plus a modicum of overkill, and the number of bullets that would be necessary to guarantee locating the stations in the time between delivery and the arrival of Operation Fabius.

I don't think the location to the attacker would be much of a difference, since those stations are coordinating with the Apollo launches via FTL. They could be on the other side of the system, within the hyperlimit, and still only add about 15 seconds to the lag, or roughly double it.

However these does appear to be a limit on how far Apollo level FTL can reach. For the normal ship-launched Mk23Es that appears to be around 4.5 - 5 lightminutes. Presumably Beowulf had pods of a system defense variant - and the books discussed how those were intended to have larger, more sensitive, FTL transceivers -- which would translate into somewhat increased FTL range (we've just no idea how much -- beyond the obvious that it was short enough fire control relays were still required for proper system defense)

And, if the attackers managed to eliminate the Mycroft relays on their side of the system, it wouldn't mater how low the signal lag would be using a relay on the far side of the star -- because it'd be so far out the Apollo missiles couldn't hear it in the first place.

So it'd be worth prioritizing the Silver Bullets on the area surrounding the planned attack vectors. Create as large as cleared zone as possible around that where you'll be -- so you get maximum benefit of your Silver Bullets if it turns out you didn't have enough to take out every relay in the system.

tlb wrote:First, how did they know to deploy the correct number of Silver Bullets? Did they prioritize the Mycroft stations that would be closest to the SLN attack, if the number was short? Were all of them programmed to fire when they see any other one fire, even if they did not have a target?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:They may not have known for sure how many there were. The number of Silver Bullets was probably based on inferred information from human intelligence about how many Mycroft stations there would be plus a modicum of overkill, and the number of bullets that would be necessary to guarantee locating the stations in the time between delivery and the arrival of Operation Fabius.

I don't think the location to the attacker would be much of a difference, since those stations are coordinating with the Apollo launches via FTL. They could be on the other side of the system, within the hyperlimit, and still only add about 15 seconds to the lag, or roughly double it.

Each Mycroft station likely has a fixed number of pods that it can control for the initial launch. I imagine that the central command sends out the threat parameters to each designated Mycroft and each Mycroft in turn updates its pods with that information. Once the pods have the vector to the enemy, then the launch command is sent through Mycroft and executed. If the Mycroft stations nearest the threat have been destroyed, then only those pods that are updated by surviving stations can launch to attack the threat. So it is not the control time that is mainly affected, but the number and location of pods that can launch under Mycroft control which show the effects of the loss of some stations. Also those missiles have much further to go.

As it happened all Mycroft stations were destroyed, so central command was forced to address each designated pod individually with the threat information and then get them to launch together. It took an appreciable amount of time to get each wave underway.

Jonathan_S wrote:And, if the attackers managed to eliminate the Mycroft relays on their side of the system, it wouldn't mater how low the signal lag would be using a relay on the far side of the star -- because it'd be so far out the Apollo missiles couldn't hear it in the first place.

Maybe, but this would depend on the CO of Operation Fabius not showing initiative and deciding to attack from another angle. The attack had a long ballistic phase anyway for the Hastas, so it didn't matter much if the force arrived 60° off from the least time course from Beowulf. And don't forget the other planet, Cassandra.

So maybe they didn't need to sweep the 120° arc opposite Beowulf (assuming Cassandra was on the near side, which I think it was), but that still leaves 240° of the ecliptic. Plus off the ecliptic.

Not to mention the MAlign did not know for sure there was a distance limit. Would they bank on there being none, leaving a station un-attacked on the opposite side, only for that one to do the heavy lifting and still wreck the attacking ships? They did miss the fact that a station was barely needed at all and the launched Apollo flight did wreck the SLN battlecruiser force, though they may be excused in not knowing this because no one knew Apollo was that effective. That being the case, if they had left one station unopposed and the attack turned out the way it did, they'd have concluded it was this station.

So it'd be worth prioritizing the Silver Bullets on the area surrounding the planned attack vectors. Create as large as cleared zone as possible around that where you'll be -- so you get maximum benefit of your Silver Bullets if it turns out you didn't have enough to take out every relay in the system.

Hence the overkill. Use the Mythbusters motto, "if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."

I thought lessons was learned at Grendlesbane. You don't want your major building shipyards out in the cold and unsupported. Yes they had a fleet there but it's not the same as something in a major system. Part of the lesson was that it was going to be safer to just run extraction operations and ship the ore or basic refined materials to the Home System to be used for what you needed built.

Talbot is probably going to need some warship building capasity but primarily it mostly will need reapair facilites. Amoung other things, you are going to have to build up the training and education of many parts of Talbot Quadrant to inclrease the manufacturing capabilities although there should be a fair number of peope that can train up quickly.
Yes we have the Oyster Bay strikes and clearly Manticore is working on alternative protectins such as running station sidewalls etc all the time but how much disbured capablity for capital ships are you going to want to palce there. But you could go with combinatons of Repair Ships, Engineering Ships and Mobile Dockyards.



Silesia, if it is not intended to stay as part of the SEM, should not have full up military shipyards for building. I understand that what the governor now has goind on is Manticorian operatons doing scrapping of a lot of ConFed military ships and other things as they are captured or come in but that's mostly materials handling and then building thing for ships even if it's for commerical transports. Mobil Docyards and Engineering/Repair ship coupled with what would pass for "tenders" in the WW II era on Earth would supply most of what you will need to support your fleet vessels and still be able to shift it elsewhere. In the Pacific, moble dry-docks for up to Battleships were built in multiple segments and could be towed whre needed and assembled to work on damaged ships.