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Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore

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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by SharkHunter   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 1:33 pm

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fallsfromtrees wrote:Possibily, but the reason for Operation Beatrice was to attempt to win the war before Apollo was in wide spread usage. They already knew that Eighth Fleet at Trevor's Star was equipped with it, so sending fleets against it was just asking them to get slaughtered. Remember that originally Chin's fleet was supposed to be attacking Eighth Feet as it came through, when the two fleets were close enough that the could fight each other. It was just Kuzak's bad luck that she cam through first, and got hammered by Chin.


True on Eighth Fleet with Apollo being a "bad idea to target", but -- for the sake of discussion (we're Academy instructors gaming this out for our super-smart advanced techie students, right?), let's say out of the 350, we reduce Tourville's force by 40 and Chin's by 20 -- so we've only diverted about 1/6 of the strength, and it's too late to recall either force. You don't even coordinate, except to set the clocks so that the Trevor's Star attack is set to go first by a couple hours.

Then the RHN "jumps on" Trevor's Star those ships from a nasty angle relative to the junction. It's a given that BOTH 3rd and 8th aren't going to respond instantly, given that it's a "worst case Zulu" for San Martin -- maybe moving Home Fleet further away from Sphinx and Manticore in the process, then the Case Zulu from Manticore comes through.

My thought is: that would have been a better strategy.

Tactically either the Trevor's star attackers are in a position to go mano a mano with 3rd Fleet at somewhat equal odds -- because 8th Fleet headed towards the Manticore first, (bad luck for HH!! 8th Fleet gets hammered by Tourville and Chin), or Bad Luck local RHN, you get 8th fleet and are going to get hammered.... while 2nd Fleet and 5th Fleet reach the planetary orbitals because Home Fleet and 3rd Fleet got crushed in the well designed trap.

The leaker in that logic obviously being "would Eighth fleet in the trap still have been able to win"...

Thoughts?
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by kzt   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 1:43 pm

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SharkHunter wrote:The leaker in that logic obviously being "would Eighth fleet in the trap still have been able to win"...

Yes. It would take about 8400 pods to kill all 350. 8th HAD 8400 pods.
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by SharkHunter   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 6:24 pm

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kzt wrote:
SharkHunter wrote:The leaker in that logic obviously being "would Eighth fleet in the trap still have been able to win"...

Yes. It would take about 8400 pods to kill all 350. 8th HAD 8400 pods.

Yes and no. (spoiler alert?) She acknowledged to Tourville in a later story that she couldn't have targeted him effectively from where she arrived in AAC, but to be in the trap, she'd have micro-jumped in where Kuzak did -- with the same logic "wipe out 2nd Fleet'. So I wonder about the attrition: does she use enough pods / lose enough SD's to make Chin's task possible, because it doesn't matter if even just TWO RHN SD(p)s survive to reach the planetary orbitals, maybe even just one, Haven wins. That's why it was an "all or nothing roll of the dice".

On the diverging thread though, as Eighth Fleet was not in a position to close as quickly on the terminus, had they started to go after the "sixty contingent" I proposed -- and thereby been FURTHER from the terminus with high v generated in the wrong direction, I think the RHN wins. Yes/no?
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by kzt   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 6:30 pm

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The orbital defense of Manticore and Sphinx did not engage. They are not trivial.

Heck, based on the text in AAC and MoH nobody in the Manticore system felt alarmed enough by the presence of 250 RHN SD(P) to even order evacuation of the orbital platforms. Otherwise people on the Weyland would have not been such whiny little so and so's. But whatever.
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by SharkHunter   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 6:50 pm

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kzt wrote:The orbital defense of Manticore and Sphinx did not engage. They are not trivial.

Heck, based on the text in AAC and MoH nobody in the Manticore system felt alarmed enough by the presence of 250 RHN SD(P) to even order evacuation of the orbital platforms. Otherwise people on the Weyland would have not been such whiny little so and so's. But whatever.

Dang good point, although the reason they didn't engage initially is that they didn't want C fractional missiles headed that close to Sphinx. But you are right anyway. Enough Havenite ships have to arrive with enough force left to do a Lovat/Zanzibar on the system defenses.

So KZT et al., do you think that from the Havenite side, the Battle of Manticore was ever winnable?
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by kzt   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 7:24 pm

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SharkHunter wrote:So KZT et al., do you think that from the Havenite side, the Battle of Manticore was ever winnable?

Yes. But 2nd needs to go after Sphinx and 5th needs to go directly after Manticore without trying to play games. If you can smash the orbital platforms you pretty much win the war. There won't be a lot of the RHN attack force left after the shooting is done, but they can probably get this done.

I'd probably detach a couple of battle squadrons from 2nd and try for Gryphon too, with the hope that it's defense are not that tough. Again, it's a suicide mission, but if you can get all 3 it's game over for the RMN and the Manticore Alliance.

Of course, if the RHN can actually accurately and with total confidence target orbital infrastructure from the vicinity of the hyperlimit, which is what David said they did to draw the defending forces at Zanzibar out of position, then they just do that and leave. As they didn't do that I'm assuming that David didn't really mean that they could.
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by phillies   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 7:29 pm

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kzt wrote:
phillies wrote:That may be where it is based, but it does not have to sit there at anchor waiting for the enemy to come out of hyper.

Yes it does. It was assigned there by the RMN command per the approved defense plans for the Manticore home system. And it has been sitting where it was assigned, on short term alert, for something like 15 years.


However, the problem for the students is to change to improve the outcome against an unknown attack. This is exactly like Avalon Hill Stalingrad. If you keep losing as the Russians, you should consider changing your starting positions. Ditto here. To improve the outcome change the starting positions.
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by kzt   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 8:12 pm

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phillies wrote:However, the problem for the students is to change to improve the outcome against an unknown attack. This is exactly like Avalon Hill Stalingrad. If you keep losing as the Russians, you should consider changing your starting positions. Ditto here. To improve the outcome change the starting positions.

If you have home fleet trying to hyperjump in, then the RHN will simply run a larger scale version of 5th fleet. For example, you have 5th fleet launch the attack on Sphinx, then the responding Home Fleet gets run over by 2nd. Who proceeds to crush everything inside the hyperlimit as they will be largely undamaged and have their full screen.
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by fallsfromtrees   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 9:54 pm

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kzt wrote:
SharkHunter wrote:The leaker in that logic obviously being "would Eighth fleet in the trap still have been able to win"...

Yes. It would take about 8400 pods to kill all 350. 8th HAD 8400 pods.

You also don't know how many system pods were in Trevor's Star. Given that it is a major node in the WHJ, I can't believe that there are none. This would make an attack on Trevor's Star even more problematical.
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Re: Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore
Post by Relax   » Wed Dec 10, 2014 11:15 pm

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Here is an obvious no brainer:

LAC's can tow a single pod without problems by and large. Slight drop in acceleration.

Manticore had roughly 3000 LAC's in inner system or was it 5000? Gah, bad memory.

3000x10 = 30,000 missiles. Would have destroyed around 50 SD.

Never used this portion of their defense.

About as "brilliant" as 3rd fleet not rolling pods. At a minimum McKeon should have had all 1000x3 ships worth of apollo pods predeployed.
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