The big problem of late Honorverse

Galactic Sapper wrote:He wouldn't have died that much earlier, since the whole point would be that firing early would have meant it would take Second Fleet much longer to kill him. And again, part of the point is that there wouldn't be much of Second Fleet left to attack Sphinx in the first place. Better to handle it himself, weaken Second Fleet to the point the LACs could handle it or the Sphinx pods/missile defenses could risk engaging, rather than risk fumbling the handoff between his dying fleet and the arriving Third Fleet.

Instead of killing 97 SDs and leaving Second Fleet with 143 SDs with various levels of damage, D'Orville could have reduced that to 40-50 SDs with the survivors being mostly combat ineffective. Not to mention reducing the screen and LAC swarm to a much greater degree as well.

I don't see how that could have happened. Home Fleet died in the first salvo and he was within range of Second Fleet from the moment Tourville dropped to n-space. If he fired early, Second Fleet could turn back and across the hyperlimit, choosing the geometry for its engagement with Third Fleet or just escaping. If instead he dragged Second Fleet deep into the limit, Third Fleet and later Eighth Fleet could make sure nothing survived.

D'Orville and the RMN didn't know Chin and Fifth Fleet were around (Second Fleet, at 240 SD(P)s, was already the largest fleet ever assembled, at least in missile throw weight). But everyone knew the RMN had reinforcements just one transit away in Trevor's Star. So from D'Orville's point of view, time was in his side.

Galactic Sapper wrote:
He wouldn't have died that much earlier, since the whole point would be that firing early would have meant it would take Second Fleet much longer to kill him. And again, part of the point is that there wouldn't be much of Second Fleet left to attack Sphinx in the first place. Better to handle it himself, weaken Second Fleet to the point the LACs could handle it or the Sphinx pods/missile defenses could risk engaging, rather than risk fumbling the handoff between his dying fleet and the arriving Third Fleet.

Instead of killing 97 SDs and leaving Second Fleet with 143 SDs with various levels of damage, D'Orville could have reduced that to 40-50 SDs with the survivors being mostly combat ineffective. Not to mention reducing the screen and LAC swarm to a much greater degree as well.


I don't see how that could have happened. Home Fleet died in the first salvo and he was within range of Second Fleet from the moment Tourville dropped to n-space. If he fired early, Second Fleet could turn back and across the hyperlimit, choosing the geometry for its engagement with Third Fleet or just escaping. If instead he dragged Second Fleet deep into the limit, Third Fleet and later Eighth Fleet could make sure nothing survived.

D'Orville and the RMN didn't know Chin and Fifth Fleet were around (Second Fleet, at 240 SD(P)s, was already the largest fleet ever assembled, at least in missile throw weight). But everyone knew the RMN had reinforcements just one transit away in Trevor's Star. So from D'Orville's point of view, time was in his side.

Is it possible to energyze pods with shuttles? Pods normally get their energy wireless from their mothership if I remember correct (some have energy themselfs).

Point is: Drop a lot of your pods, let all your shuttles with all your marines on it at the pods. The shuttles and light units are used as anchors for the pods, so that they face in the right direction. Fire them early with a balistic part. Time them that they arrive with your own ship fired missles. Would increase the missle salvo and made more damage at the Havenites. The shuttles would fly to the next planet to support the defenses after the pods are empty.

That would increase the damage you make and decrease the casulties you have.

Pods have attitude control. They are not wirelessly powered up, they are powered up by filling them full with the superheated plasma from a live reactor. Yes, that seems insane, talk to David. But the capacitors are plasma capacitors, and thats how you also start up the mini-reactors on a RMN pod or missile.

But yes, you could dump the pods off an hour before the battle starts and then tell them to fire. Without detailed targeting their accuracy is questionable at best.

But with Home fleet, seeing the huge volume of missiles coming in, why didn't they just fire every remaining pod in the general direction of 2nd fleet, preferably along with the 1800 in the last salvo. Some will hit, but providing an extra 100,000 valid threats for 2nd fleet certainly isnt going to help their defensive fire allocation.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't see how that could have happened. Home Fleet died in the first salvo and he was within range of Second Fleet from the moment Tourville dropped to n-space.

No, they didn't and no, they weren't. Not without a HUGE ballistic phase.

Second Fleet dropped out of hyper 94 minutes of flight time outside of maximum firing range from Sphinx, more than 8 light minutes from the planet. Think about it: Home Fleet was sitting in Sphinx orbit with cold nodes when Second Fleet translated in, and yet they were underway and well out from the planet when the first salvos launched.

Home Fleet didn't die to the first salvo, either. There were too many survivors for that. While we're not directly told how many "impossibly large" salvos Second Fleet launched, we know it was at least two and more likely 7-ish like Home Fleet did. If the first salvo had completely wrecked all of Home Fleet, there wouldn't have been surviving hulks or a couple thousand LACs after the fifth or sixth salvo hit.

Under similar odds at Salon, Giscard was launching 6-pattern launches at Harrington with little effect. Even the 30-pattern launch didn't achieve a kill on either SD they were targeting - 1080 pods worth of missiles fired at two SDs and those SDs both survived. True, they were newer ships than Home Fleet but the difference isn't enough to explain that level of disparity in outcome. No, Second Fleet fired off at least 6-8 salvos at Home Fleet and it took all of them to wipe it out. And launching 30 patterns of pods to build up each of those massive salvos could have been avoided if Home Fleet had fired sooner and kept firing. Ideally they'd have fired as soon as Second Fleet's acceleration dropped from the donkeys first being deployed, even if that required a significant ballistic phase. The huge salvos would have been much less accurate - making them more survivable - and once Manty missiles started arriving there wouldn't be any more huge salvos at all.

Even beyond that, launching at maximum range or beyond would have meant Home Fleet would have had time to get off even more maximum effort salvos than the seven they did, even if the Havenite salvos were somehow enough to finish the fleet. Each salvo they got off killed an average of 14 SDs, and getting two or three more salvos off would just by itself have taken two or three more groups that size. That's the difference between killing 40% of the Second Fleet and getting 50-60% of it, even if firing early made no other difference.

kzt wrote:Pods have attitude control. They are not wirelessly powered up, they are powered up by filling them full with the superheated plasma from a live reactor. Yes, that seems insane, talk to David. But the capacitors are plasma capacitors, and thats how you also start up the mini-reactors on a RMN pod or missile.

But yes, you could dump the pods off an hour before the battle starts and then tell them to fire. Without detailed targeting their accuracy is questionable at best.

But with Home fleet, seeing the huge volume of missiles coming in, why didn't they just fire every remaining pod in the general direction of 2nd fleet, preferably along with the 1800 in the last salvo. Some will hit, but providing an extra 100,000 valid threats for 2nd fleet certainly isnt going to help their defensive fire allocation.

Take a page from the (future) Solarian tactics of mass fire? Could work. Another option would be to use the fire control of the 3500+ LACs they had - each one could have controlled a pod's worth of missiles, maybe two. Not as well as an SD, but better than blind fire I'd guess.

Galactic Sapper wrote:Home Fleet didn't die to the first salvo, either. There were too many survivors for that. While we're not directly told how many "impossibly large" salvos Second Fleet launched, we know it was at least two and more likely 7-ish like Home Fleet did. If the first salvo had completely wrecked all of Home Fleet, there wouldn't have been surviving hulks or a couple thousand LACs after the fifth or sixth salvo hit.

It's unclear.

2nd fired 524,000 missiles. Maximum control was 84K without rotating links, 134Ksome with. Stated they used no more than 80% of maximum. So somewhere between 5 and 8 salvos.

ToF was 7.5 minutes, total battle was 11.9 minutes.

kzt wrote:2nd fired 524,000 missiles. Maximum control was 84K without rotating links, 134Ksome with. Stated they used no more than 80% of maximum. So somewhere between 5 and 8 salvos.

ToF was 7.5 minutes, total battle was 11.9 minutes.

Given those numbers that's 4.4 minutes between first and last salvo. So
5 savlos would be about 53 second intervals,
6 salvos would be about 44 seconds intervals,
7 salvos would be about 38 seconds intervals, or
8 salvos would be about 33 seconds intervals

They didn't need to roll more pods between the salvos (or at least not many) - so the intervals wouldn't be dictated by pod roll time. And at that range they're not going to have time to get a damage assessment and retarget between salvos anyway - so no need I can see to space it out. I'd guess towards the tighter sequenced smaller salvos; but that's just a guess.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I believe that there were THREE Barricade launches. That amounts to 2 and a fraction missiles taken out of each wave. I also suspect that each wave was not 500 missiles on a plane, it was 125 missiles on 8 planes (eight battlecruisers launching from pods). In that case, the distance between the planes would be greater than the spacing between the missiles. You still might be right on the impossibility of sweeping more than one missile per wave, but I think the situation isn't quite as obvious as you appear to believe. To begin with, the Barricade missile doesn't need to turn, it just needs some velocity at right angles to the SLN launch (less than .01c). Then it turns for the next wave.

The spacing between individual ship salvos is negligible - they all have to be on basically the same plane to avoid their wedges blocking telemetry between them and the launching ships, or sensors tracking the target ships. You can't have a salvo trailing half a second behind another one without both of them being effectively blind-fire. Sure, a few microseconds difference in firing time might introduce a few kilometers difference from a singular perfect plane, but the trailers would be far enough off to the side that no missile would be able to turn tight enough to hit one of the leading missiles and then one of the trailing ones.

First of all, that missile launch was blind-fire (Also, if the spacing between the missiles is twice the interference distance, 3 layers of missiles should have a clear view). Besides, the missiles can only be on one plane if the SLN battlecruisers were in line abreast. I think they weren't. Thus if the missiles in each wave were launched simultaneously, there were be 8 sub-waves to each wave, several hundred kilometers apart, and if the timing on when the drives were activated was adjusted in order to put them all together, they will have different velocities and will separate into 8 sub-waves as it is. Remember, according to WoW, the RMN is one of the few navies that has more than 2 settings for missile drives. For various reasons, it is unlikely that SLN is one of the others.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:If he fired early, Second Fleet could turn back and across the hyperlimit, choosing the geometry for its engagement with Third Fleet or just escaping.

"Early" means to me the point in time the soft-kill vulnerable Donkeys deployed. Firing early puts a decision on Lester: fire now, retract donkeys to within wedges/walls, turn and seek the Hyperlimit (dodge the volley). ANY of these choices is a win for D'Orville. Firing as soon as Donkeys start deploying is a low pH and low pK action. Retraction means limited return fire until the Donkeys are once again re-deployed. Fleeing means everybody wins because nobody loses. The best way to win a fight is not to be there.

TheMadPenguin wrote:"Early" means to me the point in time the soft-kill vulnerable Donkeys deployed. Firing early puts a decision on Lester: fire now, retract donkeys to within wedges/walls, turn and seek the Hyperlimit (dodge the volley). ANY of these choices is a win for D'Orville. Firing as soon as Donkeys start deploying is a low pH and low pK action. Retraction means limited return fire until the Donkeys are once again re-deployed. Fleeing means everybody wins because nobody loses. The best way to win a fight is not to be there.

Wasn't this the first operational deployment of the donkey? If so, then D'Orville couldn't have known Tourville had donkeys and wouldn't know the size of the salvo Second Fleet could produce.

As for translating into alpha, I didn't mean for fleeing. I meant exactly the translation: as Honor used in the Battle of Sol (around Jupiter), you can just evade the entire missile swarm, however big, by not being there, then translating back elsewhere. Tourville would still have over 200 SD(P) at that point and would be a match for either Home or Third Fleets until they linked up, defeating each in detail.