Question about Beowulf tactics

Much of the recent discussion has been about borrowing some system defense pods from Manticore, and then replacing them from Beowulf's production to ensure Manticore's defensive strength. From ART

“Those are my missile pods, Admiral,” a soprano icicle told him. “Or some of them, to be more precise. I imagine you’re having a little difficulty getting a detailed count, so I’ll save you the effort. There are just over a quarter million of them . . . which represents less than ten percent of the total available to me. Moreover, every missile in those pods has a powered engagement range of better than forty million kilometers. And unlike you, we have the advantage of faster-than-light data transmission for fire control and electronic warfare management.”

From this it is apparent that Manticore could afford to loan a quarter million pods (about 2.5 million missiles) to Beowulf without reducing the defensive ability of Manticore. Since it takes no more than 500 missiles to destroy a SLN SD, that's 50 pods each or a quarter million pods is sufficient to handle only about 5000 SLN SDs. It is unlikely that the SLN will be able to put 5000 SDs into the system, given that they only have 1500 currently, a bunch of which are out in Tasmania, and they have only started activating the reserve.

Weird Harold wrote:

n7axw wrote:The difficulty is control links for those pods and how to provided what is needed. Further, the system being installed is Mycroft which means that it involves a ftl component with Apollo. How many pods with the Apollo component are available becomes another question which I am not aware of the answer to. The control centers are being constructed which is the hold up.

A Rising Thunder
Chapter Thirty-three wrote:Essentially, Mycroft was simply a couple of dozen Keyhole-Two platforms parked at various points in a star system. It was a little more complicated than that, since the platforms were designed to operate on beamed power from their motherships, so it was necessary to provide each platform with its own power plant. And it was also necessary to provide the raw fire control and the rest of the supporting hardware and software which was normally parked aboard the platform’s deploying ship-of-the-wall. Those were relatively straightforward problems in engineering, however, especially with an entire planet to work with, and tech crews were working at breakneck pace even as Honor stood with her uncle and her spouses to meet them.

Mycroft’s advantages over Moriarity would be profound. Unlimited by Moriarity’s lightspeed control links, Mycroft would be able to take full advantage of the Mark 23-E and the FTL reconnaissance platforms which were also being thickly seeded throughout the system’s volume. And unlike Moriarity—which had been unarmed and defenseless when Honor used Hemphill’s Baldur to take it out—Keyhole-Two platforms were simply crammed with active antimissile defenses. No doubt they could be taken out, but it would be a difficult task, and enough of them were being deployed as part of Mycroft to ensure survivability through sheer redundancy.

It strikes me as relevant that Beowulf is getting Mycroft before anyone else -- before the design work is even complete. That just screams, "Hey, Murphy! Check this out."

Design and deployment bugs aside, it sounds as if the basic control link problem is handled; why bring in an Invictus when you can just bring in the Invictus' control links (and tactical section?) and an auxiliary power source.

Since the system is based on the Keyhole system, I would expect that the light-speed control links for direct control of Mk-23 missiles is still in place from Keyhole I. (We know the Apollo has secondary light-speed control link capability; it doesn't make sense that the Keyhole II wouldn't be compatible.)

It also sounds like the system will be semi-functional with the first control unit on-line; each additional control unit will simply expand coverage and provide redundancy.

I just re-read ART. What's slowing things down at the moment is the need to construct power plants for each keyhole deployed since SDPs previously the provided that power.

Also here, I find myself wondering if they have enough of the Apollo pods to meet current needs. Remember that production of Apollo hasn't been going on all that long and still hadn't been fully deployed as of the BOM. Then along comes OB and wipes out the production lines.

All of leads me to question whether or not deployment of Mycroft should have been delayed until Apollo is once again coming off the production lines. Reprising Spindle with non-Apollo birds could be done in a very short time frame and covered the threat window.

Don

n7axw wrote:The problem really isn't the availability of pods for Beowulf. The GA has hundreds of thousands of those and it would be no trick at all to have those shipped in.

The difficulty is control links for those pods and how to provided what is needed. Further, the system being installed is Mycroft which means that it involves a ftl component with Apollo. How many pods with the Apollo component are available becomes another question which I am not aware of the answer to. The control centers are being constructed which is the hold up. The alternatives here is that you bring in in the Invictuses with Keyhole 2 to control the pods or you wait on the construction of the control centers to be complete. Bringing in the Invictuses, of course, is contraindicated prior to the vote.

However if you bring in the pre-Apollo Mark 23 pods, you can reprise Spindle with a a squadron of Sag Cs which have the control links to handle them. That would be more than sufficient to deal with the actual threat and avoid the expenditure of the Apollo pods. Whether or not using Sac Cs rather than SDPs avoids the political issue is not something I know.

At any rate, my two cents.

Don

I would think that politically it would be unacceptable to bring in any ship under the command of Manticore to control the missiles regardless of it's size. So what if Manticore offered to loan to Beowulf 4 to 6 keyhole-2 platform ships that would be manned by Manticore "instructors" but commanded by Beowulf personal? Maybe Manticore could claim they were loaning the ships to Beowulf as training platforms so Beowulf personal could become familiar with the command and control of the mycroft platforms when they came on line. The ships themselves would never have to engage the SL fleet, it could keep it's wedge down and itself invisible at all times as it would just use it's FTL control linkages to command and attack with all the equally invisible missile pods. Would that be politically acceptable to the situation?

And I do believe that as they are trying to install "mycroft" in the Beowulf system, all missile that Beowulf is building are 23-E versions, it would make no sense to build anything other.

StealthSeeker wrote:

n7axw wrote:The problem really isn't the availability of pods for Beowulf. The GA has hundreds of thousands of those and it would be no trick at all to have those shipped in.

The difficulty is control links for those pods and how to provided what is needed. Further, the system being installed is Mycroft which means that it involves a ftl component with Apollo. How many pods with the Apollo component are available becomes another question which I am not aware of the answer to. The control centers are being constructed which is the hold up. The alternatives here is that you bring in in the Invictuses with Keyhole 2 to control the pods or you wait on the construction of the control centers to be complete. Bringing in the Invictuses, of course, is contraindicated prior to the vote.

However if you bring in the pre-Apollo Mark 23 pods, you can reprise Spindle with a a squadron of Sag Cs which have the control links to handle them. That would be more than sufficient to deal with the actual threat and avoid the expenditure of the Apollo pods. Whether or not using Sac Cs rather than SDPs avoids the political issue is not something I know.

At any rate, my two cents.

Don

I would think that politically it would be unacceptable to bring in any ship under the command of Manticore to control the missiles regardless of it's size. So what if Manticore offered to loan to Beowulf 4 to 6 keyhole-2 platform ships that would be manned by Manticore "instructors" but commanded by Beowulf personal? Maybe Manticore could claim they were loaning the ships to Beowulf as training platforms so Beowulf personal could become familiar with the command and control of the mycroft platforms when they came on line. The ships themselves would never have to engage the SL fleet, it could keep it's wedge down and itself invisible at all times as it would just use it's FTL control linkages to command and attack with all the equally invisible missile pods. Would that be politically acceptable to the situation?

And I do believe that as they are trying to install "mycroft" in the Beowulf system, all missile that Beowulf is building are 23-E versions, it would make no sense to build anything other.

I've made this suggestion in the past, and been shot down rather firmly. Good luck inyour attempt.

I think you misunderstand my thought process on the Protector's own.
--snipping for clarity--

SharkHunter wrote:For that matter, Honor herself is the commander of the Protector's Own, defending her mother's planet from the SL is sort of a no brainer. The Grayson ships would simply pop across the hyper limit at the opportune moment in the battle, putting the Solarians in a crossfire situation, and then ask Beowulf via FTL for the opportunity to join in the Planet's defense because "we take our defend-all-members of the family obligations seriously".

Zakharra wrote:...
It would be a huge brainer because it would be directly interfering in an internal SL matter before said system had voted on secession. It's a political and diplomatic screw up of epic proportions.... Overt aid? Out of the question unless the SEM wants to undo much of what they are working to do. So Honor will likely have to sit by and do nothing and let Beowulf defend itself as best it can. (the Magic 8-Ball says the SLNs chances of success are 'very unlikely')

I think you mistake my thought process slightly, but I may have not been clear. Allison & Alfred live in Harrison Steading when they're on Grayson, so Honor doesn't have to even be in Beowulf space for Protector Benjamin to have sufficient reason to order his "private fleet" to offer to do whatever necessary to protect Beowulf from illegal "Mandarin engineered interference". The Star Kingdom/Star Empire of Manticore decision makers aren't even involved as I am ONLY talking about the Grayson formations, not with Honor herself on the flag deck, Yu & Company are sufficient to whup any SLN formation in space, and the idea is that their mere appearance would cause yet another "tail between the legs" withdrawal from the system or massive surrender of SLN ships AFTER Beowulf says, "yes, please help this is an illegal and unconstitutional attack and we accept your offer to protect family of our families".

In other words and especially post Yawata Strike, I don't think Benjamin would give a half-a-damn about Solarian public or political opinion if it came to protecting any of Honor's remaining extended family, on any planet. But that's just my "if it were me" opinion, not a claim of insight or justification for a plot twist by RFC.

n7axw wrote:All of leads me to question whether or not deployment of Mycroft should have been delayed until Apollo is once again coming off the production lines. Reprising Spindle with non-Apollo birds could be done in a very short time frame and covered the threat window.

Don

No, Mycroft should NOT have been delayed because it doesn't need Apollo pods to provide an insurmountable advantage to the defenders against an SLN attack. Just because Mycroft can control Apollo SDM missiles doesn't mean it can't control other types of missiles, too.

The Mycroft control centers are more than capable of recreating Spindle without needing any ships' assistance.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Much of the recent discussion has been about borrowing some system defense pods from Manticore, and then replacing them from Beowulf's production to ensure Manticore's defensive strength. From ART

“Those are my missile pods, Admiral,” a soprano icicle told him. “Or some of them, to be more precise. I imagine you’re having a little difficulty getting a detailed count, so I’ll save you the effort. There are just over a quarter million of them . . . which represents less than ten percent of the total available to me. Moreover, every missile in those pods has a powered engagement range of better than forty million kilometers. And unlike you, we have the advantage of faster-than-light data transmission for fire control and electronic warfare management.”

From this it is apparent that Manticore could afford to loan a quarter million pods (about 2.5 million missiles) to Beowulf without reducing the defensive ability of Manticore. Since it takes no more than 500 missiles to destroy a SLN SD, that's 50 pods each or a quarter million pods is sufficient to handle only about 5000 SLN SDs. It is unlikely that the SLN will be able to put 5000 SDs into the system, given that they only have 1500 currently, a bunch of which are out in Tasmania, and they have only started activating the reserve.

Minor nit: It takes only about 250 missiles (assuming they all hit their targets) to mission kill or destroy modern Havenite SDs (This was part of Admiral Henke's planning to defeat Crandall's forces).

We know from David's comments, and the RMN has now found out from actually engaging Crandall's (and later Filareta's) forces that the number of missile hits necessary to mission kill or destroy an SLN SD is much lower, due to lack of size/mass (an SLN SD is the size of an RMN Bellerophon DN), inferior armoring layout, and a severe lack of active missile defenses (both CMs and PDLCs) and vastly inferior ECM that allows a much higher hit to miss ratio of missiles fired.

StealthSeeker wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:Many Solarian League systems retain system defense forces - Beowulf's 36 SD's, for instance, are its current known and primary line of defense against League aggression. An SDF is (or has been, anyway) a bit of a luxury for a League member, but still, plenty of them do have them and they don't suffer from the institutional arrogance of the SLN.

For that matter, the SLN is supported by a tiny, tiny portion of the League budget, and the League budget is a tiny, tiny portion of the total League GDP. Luxury or not, it wouldn't be hard for a League member system to maintain an SDF that represents a force all out of proportion to its "share" of the SLN. Suppose Beowulf represents 1/1000th of the wealth of the League. For the SLN to have a wall of battle in proportion to Beowulf's SDF, it'd need 36,000 SD's in commission. I don't have the figure for Battle Fleet's wall in 1922 P.D., but I do know it's vastly smaller than that - even if we were generously to include the Reserve Fleet, full of much older ships totally unavailable anytime soon.

I think your going a bit off track here with your idea of 36,000 SD's being available to the SLN. I would bring to your attention the exchange of messages between Honor and Filareta before their battle (such as it was) where Filareta states that the SLN has 1,500 active SD's and 8,000 mothballed SD's. Nor do I believe that it is common for inner world SL planets to have a System-Defense-Fleet (SDF) as it has been a common discussion in the books as to how much even the rich planets dislike supporting even the current level of expense they pay for the SLN. I can't imagine that they would be willing to spend the money for an SDF of their own when the SLN had damn well better be able to do the job they are already paying them to do.

I think Beowulf is an exception to the general rule about SDF's as they have had a need for their own fleet to pursue their low level war with Mesa and to unilaterally act to stop the slave and clone trade.

As others have noted (teach me to sleep, interferes with forum participation...), it's not a projection of BF's size, it's an example of how large BF would be if the League could/wanted to arm itself as much as Beowulf (while nominally under the SLN's protection!) does arm itself. It's also one example of a powerful SDF. I don't take it as a representative example of a League member system's self-defense - an SDF IS after all a bit of a weird luxury in the League - and Mesa as a target does, as you say, represent a special circumstance for Beowulf that way. (Mesan Alignment membership represents a special circumstance for Renaissance Factor systems.)

Anyway - whether or not systems with Reserve Fleet concentrations and/or SLN shipyards in them have SDF's to get in the way is an open question, rather than a clear "no". On the other hand, chances are any of them are small. 36 SLN-standard SD's in some SDF in the target system, for example, would after Second Manticore quite reasonably stand down when asked politely rather than get between a GA raiding squadron out to destroy a mothball fleet or shipyard that's just in their star system rather than belonging to it.

So - your point ends up being reconstructed and SDF's in the systems with League targets may well be kept out of the fighting.

Something that the waller ratios bring up though - The League, as the League, is stupendously underarmed for its size. It can't afford much of a fleet (for its size), and it doesn't try to keep the capital ships all that modernized (in terms of effect, rather than chrome). It's been running, for its whole history, on the fact that it's just so huge that trivial armament, proportionately, gets the job done because it would be still a ton of bricks falling on anyone messing with it because its very thin (always, for its size) armament is still vastly larger than anyone else's and it can deploy that attritionally to bury whomever. And the sheer reputation for that leaves them not needing to do that - or any longer genuinely prepared to do so.

It's too late for the League, but in the years to come, there is tremendous room for the League's successor states to arm themselves before they feel the pinch. Consider the fleets that Manticore and Grayson fielded, as single star systems. Granted, Manticore has three habitable planets (even if Gryphon is only "habitable") and stupendous wealth, but still, it's got a smaller population among 2.Gryphon habitable worlds than many single Core Worlds and Grayson does what it does with a smallish population, only recent prolong, only recently modern industry and education, and having a hard time getting around to fully employing 3/4's of its adults.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Much of the recent discussion has been about borrowing some system defense pods from Manticore, and then replacing them from Beowulf's production to ensure Manticore's defensive strength. From ART

“Those are my missile pods, Admiral,” a soprano icicle told him. “Or some of them, to be more precise. I imagine you’re having a little difficulty getting a detailed count, so I’ll save you the effort. There are just over a quarter million of them . . . which represents less than ten percent of the total available to me. Moreover, every missile in those pods has a powered engagement range of better than forty million kilometers. And unlike you, we have the advantage of faster-than-light data transmission for fire control and electronic warfare management.”

From this it is apparent that Manticore could afford to loan a quarter million pods (about 2.5 million missiles) to Beowulf without reducing the defensive ability of Manticore. Since it takes no more than 500 missiles to destroy a SLN SD, that's 50 pods each or a quarter million pods is sufficient to handle only about 5000 SLN SDs. It is unlikely that the SLN will be able to put 5000 SDs into the system, given that they only have 1500 currently, a bunch of which are out in Tasmania, and they have only started activating the reserve.

Vince wrote:Minor nit: It takes only about 250 missiles (assuming they all hit their targets) to mission kill or destroy modern Havenite SDs (This was part of Admiral Henke's planning to defeat Crandall's forces).

We know from David's comments, and the RMN has now found out from actually engaging Crandall's (and later Filareta's) forces that the number of missile hits necessary to mission kill or destroy an SLN SD is much lower, due to lack of size/mass (an SLN SD is the size of an RMN Bellerophon DN), inferior armoring layout, and a severe lack of active missile defenses (both CMs and PDLCs) and vastly inferior ECM that allows a much higher hit to miss ratio of missiles fired.

I was being overly conservative - assuming that even the Sollies would have improved their defenses some. Using the 250 number, a quarter million can kill 10,000 SLN SDs, which is more than the active + full reserve, and a lower number still leaves enough left over to kill every BC and CA in the Sollie arsenal. What's left for the Beowuf SDs is cleaning the scrap out of the space ways.

Weird Harold wrote:

n7axw wrote:All of leads me to question whether or not deployment of Mycroft should have been delayed until Apollo is once again coming off the production lines. Reprising Spindle with non-Apollo birds could be done in a very short time frame and covered the threat window.

Don

No, Mycroft should NOT have been delayed because it doesn't need Apollo pods to provide an insurmountable advantage to the defenders against an SLN attack. Just because Mycroft can control Apollo SDM missiles doesn't mean it can't control other types of missiles, too.

The Mycroft control centers are more than capable of recreating Spindle without needing any ships' assistance.

The core issue here is really the availablity of the Apollo control centers which are being put into place which until they are in place leaves the window of vulnerability we have been concerned about.

I did raise the question about the advisability of Mycroft prior to having Apollo missile production lines in place, but I really don't have a dog in that hunt sinse I'm sure you are right about the Mycroft control centers being able to handle the pre-Apollo missiles. Still, the point about the limited availability of Apollo is worth making.

Don