BB(P/C) for rear area security

It's been pretty clearly demonstrated at BoM that RMN ships are not sufficiently survivable against mass MDM fire. If all of home fleet had consisted of the same mass of BC(P)s they would have done quite a bit more damage to Haven and died pretty much just as fast. So the RMN option is either to plan on their SDs having a combat lifetime of under 15 minutes or finding a better solution to the defensive issue.

They have chosen B, but exactly what this consists of has not been shown. And given the path of the books, I have no idea when they will possibly run into a situation where they will need to demonstrate this capability.

Right, because being massively outnumbered in podlayers is clearly a fair fight from which solid conclusions can be made...

Duckk wrote:Right, because being massively outnumbered in podlayers is clearly a fair fight from which solid conclusions can be made...

One of the good things about being the attacker is that you get to choose how big a force to bring to the battle, as well as being able to choose when and where to fight. The defense doesn't get to call a timeout while they go find more ships.

A smart attacker will always attempt to bring a large enough force so it isn't even close to a fair fight. Ideally it should be a wipeout. Military commander who think that a "fair fight" is a good thing should be executed.

So yeah, you can ALWAYS get outnumbered at any given defensive fight, and against an intelligent attacker you usually will. Figuring out how to not get obliterated in 7 minutes when this happens again seems like a pretty good plan.

kzt wrote:

Duckk wrote:Right, because being massively outnumbered in podlayers is clearly a fair fight from which solid conclusions can be made...

One of the good things about being the attacker is that you get to choose how big a force to bring to the battle, as well as being able to choose when and where to fight. The defense doesn't get to call a timeout while they go find more ships.

Yes, but Beatrice used more than twice as many wallers as the RHN had ever put in one fleet before (probably more than three times; I'm not exactly sure what the numbers were for Giscard's force at Trevor's Star off the top of my head) and over half of the RHN's active wall of battle.

drothgery wrote:Yes, but Beatrice used more than twice as many wallers as the RHN had ever put in one fleet before (probably more than three times; I'm not exactly sure what the numbers were for Giscard's force at Trevor's Star off the top of my head) and over half of the RHN's active wall of battle.

You should never get too wrapped up in working out the Intent of you enemy that you lose track of their Capability. A basic question that should always be considered is "what is the course of action that is most damaging to us that our enemies can undertake?"

You then figure out how to prevent this from happening, because your enemies are also working on the question as to "what is the course of action we can take that will most damage our enemy?"

kzt wrote:

drothgery wrote:Yes, but Beatrice used more than twice as many wallers as the RHN had ever put in one fleet before (probably more than three times; I'm not exactly sure what the numbers were for Giscard's force at Trevor's Star off the top of my head) and over half of the RHN's active wall of battle.

You should never get too wrapped up in working out the Intent of you enemy that you lose track of their Capability. A basic question that should always be considered is "what is the course of action that is most damaging to us that our enemies can undertake?"

And the RMN was reasonable to assume the RHN was not capable of attempting something like Beatrice, because if it failed, they'd lose the war. What they didn't count on was that revealing Apollo made it clear to Theisman that they were going to lose the war if Manticore got its new wall of battle, presumably built for Apollo, out of the yards.

drothgery wrote:And the RMN was reasonable to assume the RHN was not capable of attempting something like Beatrice, because if it failed, they'd lose the war. What they didn't count on was that revealing Apollo made it clear to Theisman that they were going to lose the war if Manticore got its new wall of battle, presumably built for Apollo, out of the yards.

No, you are mixing capabilities and intent.

They should have been perfectly aware that they had the CAPABILITY to do it. If not, everyone running ONI needs to get fired. Deep operations have been a thing for a while in the Honorverse.

They may well have decided that they don't won't do it, which is INTENT.

kzt wrote:

drothgery wrote:And the RMN was reasonable to assume the RHN was not capable of attempting something like Beatrice, because if it failed, they'd lose the war. What they didn't count on was that revealing Apollo made it clear to Theisman that they were going to lose the war if Manticore got its new wall of battle, presumably built for Apollo, out of the yards.

No, you are mixing capabilities and intent.

They should have been perfectly aware that they had the CAPABILITY to do it. If not, everyone running ONI needs to get fired. Deep operations have been a thing for a while in the Honorverse.

They may well have decided that they don't won't do it, which is INTENT.

As I recall, at BoM the RMN didn't know about the "donkey", which meant their analysis of RHN capability was somewhat off, because they didn't expect salvos as large as they received.

Also, there is an infodump where RFC stated that the RMN calculated how long it would take the RHN to gather an attack fleet and dispatch it to Manticore if they decided to do so immediately after Apollo was used at Lovat, and came up with an estimate that showed they couldn't respond before the Apollo system-defense pods were online and Apollo SDPs had joined Home fleet. Unfortunately for them, Theisman had already forward-deployed the fleet elements for Beatrice and done the basic planning, so the RHN response came faster than the RMN had allowed for.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/111/1

Pyre Light wrote:As I recall, at BoM the RMN didn't know about the "donkey", which meant their analysis of RHN capability was somewhat off, because they didn't expect salvos as large as they received.

Considering that they had just used it to blow the hell out of Zanzibar there really is no excuse for that. Plus you'd have kind of expected that at least one recon drone would be close enough to see what was going on.

Pyre Light wrote:[Unfortunately for them, Theisman had already forward-deployed the fleet elements for Beatrice and done the basic planning, so the RHN response came faster than the RMN had allowed for.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/111/1

Sure. That's because Theisman HAD done the "what is the single most destructive thing we can do to the Manties" exercise and had planned it before he knew about Apollo. Initiating it was a response to Apollo, but the plan was already done and various supporting elements had been positioned to carry it out on order.

kzt wrote:

Pyre Light wrote:As I recall, at BoM the RMN didn't know about the "donkey", which meant their analysis of RHN capability was somewhat off, because they didn't expect salvos as large as they received.

Considering that they had just used it to blow the hell out of Zanzibar there really is no excuse for that. Plus you'd have kind of expected that at least one recon drone would be close enough to see what was going on.

There's no textev that they were used at Zanzibar, although I seem to recall an argument in the forum about reloading times where RFC suggested donkeys were used to help with the reload...

As for drones, there were only a few minutes between the deployment of the donkeys and pods and the decision to open fire, so probably they couldn't see through the EW well enough to get good counts of pod numbers in the time required. At Second Hancock a BB's EW was good enough to prevent Shrikes in energy range from targeting her towed pods, so there's some evidence for this. The other possibility is that with all the fixed surveillance assets in the home system D'Orville didn't deploy drones the way the RMN was used to doing in hostile territory.