Saganami Island lessons: the Battle of Manticore

Numbers mine:

Relax wrote:Here is an obvious no brainer:
1. Manticore had roughly 3000 LAC's in inner system or was it 5000? 3000x10 = 30,000 missiles. Would have destroyed around 50 SD.
2. About as "brilliant" as 3rd fleet not rolling pods. At a minimum McKeon should have had all 1000x3 ships worth of apollo pods predeployed.

Problem #1: is LAC launched pods would be about as useful as ballistic missile shots, Home Fleet being the only ships with controls to handle the Mark 23's besides the defense pods. Home fleet fired as many controlled salvos as they could before they got toasted.

Problem #2: similar. Only McKeon's ships had control capability on the Apollo missiles. So they couldn't pass around and stack a big launch of Apollo controlled MDMs and have those MDMs be any more useful than regular Mark 23's, and less missiles per pod.

Will post another thought about McKeon's ships momentarily.

SharkHunter wrote:Numbers mine:

Will post another thought about McKeon's ships momentarily.

Did you mean that the post will only be available for a short time (which is what you said) or that it be available in a short time (which is what I think you meant) and should have been phrased as "in a moment". Sorry, but this is one of my pet peeves with the usage of the English language.

McKeon's ships, how they could have had more effect:

I'm thinking if I have two hundred rampaging savages shooting at me, I'd rather have shotguns injuring a whole lot of attackers in job lots than kill the closest twenty. Of course my second round of shotgun fire is gonna be aimed at the closest twenty still shooting at me, right?

Instead of trying to mission kill each salvo, maybe McKeon's strategy would have been to stack double salvos and hit as many ships as possible per salvo. On a per ship basis, instead of hitting one SD with maybe 250 missiles instead hit 5 with 50, etc., because some of those hits might do nasty things like taking out inertial compensators, flag bridges and admirals, control runs, launch rails, etc. Not all of those would be mission kills, but maybe enough to get 3rd Fleet partway out of the trap.

Thoughts? weaknesses in that strategy?

SharkHunter wrote:McKeon's ships, how they could have had more effect:

I'm thinking if I have two hundred rampaging savages shooting at me, I'd rather have shotguns injuring a whole lot of attackers in job lots than kill the closest twenty. Of course my second round of shotgun fire is gonna be aimed at the closest twenty still shooting at me, right?

Instead of trying to mission kill each salvo, maybe McKeon's strategy would have been to stack double salvos and hit as many ships as possible per salvo. On a per ship basis, instead of hitting one SD with maybe 250 missiles instead hit 5 with 50, etc., because some of those hits might do nasty things like taking out inertial compensators, flag bridges and admirals, control runs, launch rails, etc. Not all of those would be mission kills, but maybe enough to get 3rd Fleet partway out of the trap.

Thoughts? weaknesses in that strategy?

McKeon's ships should have been running out of pods when 3rd showed up. They were in effective range of 2nd from the moment they exited hyper..

SharkHunter wrote:
Problem #2: similar. Only McKeon's ships had control capability on the Apollo missiles. So they couldn't pass around and stack a big launch of Apollo controlled MDMs and have those MDMs be any more useful than regular Mark 23's, and less missiles per pod.

I disagree with this for two reasons

1) Other ships can use Apollo pods though the backup lightspeed control links (like Mike did at Spindle). And we're told that ships firing Apollo pods in non-FTL mode are still more effective than non-Apollo Mk23s and they get about an 8x boost in the total number of missiles they can control because each fire control "channel" talks to 1 Apollo control missile (which then handles the rest of it's pod-mates.

2) In the infodump on Keyhole Platform Survivabiliyt RFC said that normally only one Keyhole in a squadron will be broadcasting and it can FTL control all the Apollo missiles that squadron launched. (And this duty normally rorates between ships during the flight because Keyhole IIs that are broadcasting are "loud" and trackable, once that are listening are not). But that means if McKeon had said screw stealth and gone loud with all his Keyhole II's his squadron had at least 6 times the FTL fire control he was using to snipe with (even more if the ships have enough tactical support to run each Keyhole fully independantly). So he easily appears to be able to control vastly larger salvos that he was launching.


So spreading Apollo pods around early seems to allow greater FTL controlled launches (more than the ships can roll during combat), and even in the worst case if he's knocked out before those pods are used up they're still more effective for the other SD(P)s to launch than their own internal pods.

Of course that run the risk that the Apollo pods would be shot dry shredding 2nd before 3rd has a chance to spring the track. So now Alice Truman's fleet has a fresh force lighting it up from beyond the hyper limit - but at least its only a 1 axis threat for her non-Apollo SD(P)s to deal with.

KZT, same question, but for the sake of discussion, let's use most of McKeon's pods shotgun style on 2nd Fleet. Do you think they could used that strategy to get 3rd fleet out of the trap?

Jonathan, likely agreement for our advanced students in the PD1930's in terms of using the Keyhole's at maximum capability and screw the stealth. Except they weren't really in stealth mode at all, more at full power fighting superior numbered and equally deadly ships in terms of what they can throw at 3rd Fleet.

At the Battle of Manticore in the lesson manual however...

At Spindle, Henke and company had plenty of time to set it up and program sets of missile pods to use the the 23-E as a guide and forward controller against suckish countermeasure fire. Since 3rd Fleet has no experience with Apollo because McKeon just joined them, I don't know how they set it up in the heat of battle against the RHN while they're under fire from two directions themselves.

SharkHunter wrote:KZT, same question, but for the sake of discussion, let's use most of McKeon's pods shotgun style on 2nd Fleet. Do you think they could used that strategy to get 3rd fleet out of the trap?

If some crack smoking Admiral hadn't prevented the ships for preparing for battle they might have been pretty spectacular. Blowing up 1/3rd of 5th in a single volley kind of spectacular... But some hits on a lot of ships doesn't seem likely to be very effective.

But in any rational world 5th would have shredded 3rd. For example, apparently that crack smoking admiral hadn't bothered to deploy the LACs into missile defense formation, because if she had there would have been no question about trying to split them between the fire from 2nd and 5th as the LACs would have been several million KM in the direction of 2nd.

So while 3rd should have been able to render 2nd combat ineffectual, 3rd is not in a survivable position. Even if 3rd had deployed 300 pods per ship (About 7-8 full sized salvos) they couldn't really kill 5th before they got hammered into scrap due to the missing LACs etc, plus the missiles would already be in flight to kill them.

SharkHunter wrote:Problem #1: is LAC launched pods would be about as useful as ballistic missile shots, Home Fleet being the only ships with controls to handle the Mark 23's besides the defense pods. Home fleet fired as many controlled salvos as they could before they got toasted.

So, you are telling the author he is wrong? Smooth.

Any and every ship can handle MK-23 missiles.

SharkHunter wrote:Problem #2: similar. Only McKeon's ships had control capability on the Apollo missiles. So they couldn't pass around and stack a big launch of Apollo controlled MDMs and have those MDMs be any more useful than regular Mark 23's, and less missiles per pod.

Actually, all Manticoran ships, including LAC's talk FTL. Now the bandwidth available, is another matter entirely. At minimum they have enough FTL bandwidth for Bi-directional video even in LAC's.

In this case, RFC has chosen to NOT allow FTL speaking ships to use the limited bandwidth available to talk to the Apollo birds.

Essentially, someone(single person, maybe upwards of 3 people) has not written a hand shake program with a do-or-die war on, a population of 4 Billion people, allowing smaller ships to use Apollo birds without Keyholes.

They are sending Video of all things via FTL, and yet cannot send simple position vector data... Ug, I'll try not to barf over the pathetic absurdity of the "science".

Or like in Shadow of Freedom, they aren't even smart enough to allow a Hermes buoy or RD to send out a self destruct code either. Now maybe its transceiver does not operate on the frequency the missiles operate on. Limited to only interstellar standard com channels. In that case, the designers need to be fired, and sued for criminal negligence. At a minimum, allow some high school competent person with a HAM technicians license that most Alaskan high school students obtain to talk long distances in the bush to design it. Such simplistic designs have only been freely available for 50 years...