Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore

quark wrote:It's hard to do this because we know what happened. For the RHN, the best strategy would have been for Chin to hyper in sooner, in order to hit 3rd for longer, then hyper out quicker, as soon as 8th arrives. Maybe have some destroyers come out of hyper to get the location of 8th, then come out of hyper in close range to 8th fleet.

Actually, Chin's timing to hyper in was preset: "when the commanding officer calls for you and your ships get the tac update from the just-appeared scouting DD", and her response was -- by Tourville's estimation, about perfect except not as close to 3rd Fleet as he might have hoped. He doesn't even brood or nitpick about it though; they still have 3rd Fleet in a box.

SharkHunter snips and corrects KZT's post to say

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:
Also McKean's ships (sic) died with Apollo pods in their bays. But from what were're told a single Keyhole II has enough channels to FTL control an entire 6 ship squadrons stacked launch. So he had fire control to spare. Roll say half his pods early and have other SD(P)s take them in tow. You might lose some to incoming fire, but that should let him launch quite a few much bigger FTL controlled Apollo launched and gut the hell out of 3rd. Instead of sniping one SD(P) per salvo he should be able to smash them in half dozens at least.

My reading of "early Apollo abilities" is different plus I have a different but similar "backup strategy" for McKeon's ships in mind, once their role of blowing away the rest of 2nd Fleet got pre-empted.

kzt wrote:

phillies wrote:Bad idea but different

Leave much of the home fleet in hyper so it can emerge at interesting locations. With perfect hindsight "they fired a gazillion missiles at us, with 16 minute flight times. A shame we are leaving at t=15."

I tried that one once. Home fleet is based at Sphinx. Deep inside the RZ and the hyper limit.

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.

kzt wrote:...This ignores David saying that the RHN was destroying the orbital infrastructure of Zanzibar from the hyper limit, in which case the BOM would consist of the RHN just gone directly for Manticore and Sphinx's infrastructure with ballistic attacks.

Sort of agreement, I'm thinking that "taking out the infrastructure" wasn't on their list of priorities UNLESS they were clearly going to lose early in the battle, the RHN strategy is to get to the planetary orbitals to force a surrender, knowing that they have to take out at least two fleets to do it, but hoping to get all three.

I actually think that the RHN's best strategy would have been to send an appreciable fraction of the 350 in Manticoran space used to attack Trevor's Star, simply to keep Third Fleet and Eighth fleet engaged away from Manticore. It might even have sucked Home Fleet into a more vulnerable position further away from Sphinx, etc. Thoughts?

SharkHunter wrote:

kzt wrote:...This ignores David saying that the RHN was destroying the orbital infrastructure of Zanzibar from the hyper limit, in which case the BOM would consist of the RHN just gone directly for Manticore and Sphinx's infrastructure with ballistic attacks.

Sort of agreement, I'm thinking that "taking out the infrastructure" wasn't on their list of priorities UNLESS they were clearly going to lose early in the battle, the RHN strategy is to get to the planetary orbitals to force a surrender, knowing that they have to take out at least two fleets to do it, but hoping to get all three.

I actually think that the RHN's best strategy would have been to send an appreciable fraction of the 350 in Manticoran space used to attack Trevor's Star, simply to keep Third Fleet and Eighth fleet engaged away from Manticore. It might even have sucked Home Fleet into a more vulnerable position further away from Sphinx, etc. Thoughts?

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.

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.

SharkHunter wrote:Sort of agreement, I'm thinking that "taking out the infrastructure" wasn't on their list of priorities UNLESS they were clearly going to lose early in the battle, the RHN strategy is to get to the planetary orbitals to force a surrender, knowing that they have to take out at least two fleets to do it, but hoping to get all three.

Davis has pointed out that is the Manticore Alliance loses Manticore the war is OVER. So if the RHN actually has the ability to effectively and safely attack planetary orbital infrastructure from the vicinity of the hyperlimit they can just cross the wall with 3 forces of 100 SD(P)s each and then toss 250,000 missiles each at the orbital infrastructure of all 3 planets.

Then they hyper out to reload and come back and "reopen negotiations" given the "somewhat less favorable to Manticore" situation that prevails.

I actually think that the RHN's best strategy would have been to send an appreciable fraction of the 350 in Manticoran space used to attack Trevor's Star, simply to keep Third Fleet and Eighth fleet engaged away from Manticore. It might even have sucked Home Fleet into a more vulnerable position further away from Sphinx, etc. Thoughts?

Timing is very hard, and also very critical, to make a decoy attack work. The two fixed targets you have, the junction and the planet, are both heavily defended with modern forts. They don't have Apollo, but they have lots of MDM pods etc. So yeah, you need to send a lot of firepower to present a real threat. If you had enough firepower to keep the terminus continually covered by effective missile fire that would keep anyone from using the junction, but that is a LOT of firepower. They lost about 1/2 the attacking force's firepower to Home fleet, so I don't think the RHN has enough ships to make this concept work.

fallsfromtrees wrote: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.

8th would have destroyed 5th utterly. The firepower they have is astonishing, and they would have already obliterated 2nd. 8th would have taken damage from 5th in the process, but not that much. Assuming ammo availability they would have been able to immediately resume offensive operations if so ordered.

Anyhow, the lesson of BoM are:

1) Shoot early and often. Do not allow your opponent to carry out their pre-battle plans without attempting to interrupt them. Particularly if you have a surfeit of ammunition.

2) Do not die with unexpended munitions. See point 1. If nothing else, a few hundred pods of Mk23s pointed at the hostiles will make most excellent penaids for the rest of your more tightly controlled missiles.

3) Utilize every advantage or opportunity you have ruthlessly. Kuzak and her CoS went over what advantages 3rd had over 2nd, then methodically threw them away.

4) "Do not take counsel of your fears".

5) Consider the possibility that, if your opponent does something in a battle that makes no sense to you, that you do not really understand the situation and what they are doing.

6) Start to evacuate your orbital platforms as soon as someone with a hostile fleet crosses the wall.

kzt wrote:If 5th is willing or planning on committing an edict violation the only option open to 3rd to stop that was immediate surrender. But as the RHN had NEVER done this before, it's pretty safe that they are not going to do this. Do not take council of your fears.

This ignores David saying that the RHN was destroying the orbital infrastructure of Zanzibar from the hyper limit, in which case the BOM would consist of the RHN just gone directly for Manticore and Sphinx's infrastructure with ballistic attacks.

Billions of electrons and barflies can rejoice that I won't re-open any discussion of the Edict.

Knowing that this particular battle would decide the war, it was entirely possible that political considerations would override what had been Navy policy, so you can't outright dismiss the possibility of long range bombardment. But Tourville had already shifted vector away from planetary intercept.

Kuzak could also anticipate that Second Fleet was getting low on ammo--by this time, the RMN had to know how many pods the Havenite ships carried. She might have believed his combat endurance and his ability to engage in a protracted struggle to be so limited that she would not require as huge a salvo as D'Orville was using.

Side note: I thought in Zanzibar they destroyed some of the extraction and processing nodes in the asteroid belt during the preliminary raid; when they destroyed it in round two, it was a process of destroy the defenders (shoot and rapid reload at the hyper limit) then move in to the inner system and bust up everything. I didn't read that as destroying everything from 20 light minutes out.

regards,

Rob