Hi Dafmeister,
Possibly down to ~8.5 M km actually, given there's over 1530 words spoken by Honor, Filareta and his staff, for around 25 minutes after the trap is sprung; given all the long words being used, with plenty of verbal pauses.
So if Filareta didn't order deceleration [there's no textev] 11th Fleet would have closed ~3,750,000 further km if I'm doing the math right.
Granted Filareta was much smarter than Crandall or Byng, that's why the MAlign had to kill him, so I expect he did order deceleration, which might have almost cancelled his forward momentum, given all the pauses etc.
The fact that the broadside missile tubes may have been in range implies there wasn't a deceleration order to carry the broadside launched missiles 8.5 M Km, so take your pick, either Filareta forgot or hoped to close so he could at least take out Tango Two and HH.
HH had 2000 LAC's as her missile defense, and if the HoS is correct that the Katana doesn't have any aft CM launchers like the Shrike-B and Ferret, which seems absurd given the hard lessons learned at Second Hancock, and the fact the Grayson's aren't that silly, they ought to easily have the fire control for more than 5; if they are split 50/50 then the 8 CM launchers of the Shrike-B and the Katana's 5 mean they could pump out 13,000 CM's and Viper's every 8 seconds.
5 launches would deal with the 51,240 pod launched MAlign missiles, at an under 80% kill rate, while another full volley would handle most of each broadside launch [3000 more in a second volley should have been cleanup], which may have petered out after a couple or four salvo's, when whoever was now in command realized a salvo every 35+ seconds wasn't going to accomplish anything either and tried to surrender, although I don't think the SLN chain of command had realized what had happened to Filareta in time to stop the avalanche.
BTW, even if his flag bridge had stopped transmitting, there should have been some kind of commo logs of attempts to raise him or his flag captain by his deputies, and his flag captain reporting the flag bridge was out of communication or something.
Figuring 200 MDM's per BF SD would mean 85,400 GA missiles launched; given the rather short range did they bother with Apollo's?
Full power non-Apollo's would work just fine at that range, taking less than 137 seconds to close since the BF is still decelerating.
But since the whole point of having the RHN there was to use their missiles to preserve the RMN's [and the GSN's], Lester should have actually launched that salvo.
211 LAC's were lost in the melee, mainly because they were the only target the BF missiles could see in all the chaos and clutter.
At ~20,000 tons each, that's less than 100 tons per SLN missile, without adding the broadside missiles which might have doubled the SLN total and reduced the tonnage rate to below 50 tons per missile.
By comparison the GA averaged ~34,000 tons per missile perhaps almost 830 times that ratio.
While the SLN still doesn't know that, a thousand to one casualty ratio ought to get a lot of SLN spacers thinking about their own survival, ie how to avoid the same result.
Given Saltash and Zunker, besides second BoM, just how hard or willing are SLN, even FF crews going to be to engage the RMN?
L
Dafmeister wrote:Another thing to bear in mind regarding Second Manticore. The range between Filaretta's fleet and Honor's task force was down to 12.3 million kilometres before Honor started to spring the mousetrap. With Filaretta closing at over 5,000 kps at that point and accelerating at 3.3 kps^2, by the time the missiles started to fly the range was probably under 12 million. By modern Alliance standards, that's practically knife-fighting range.
