Just a few Bits on the Battle of Spindle-Or other battles

But, Levinsky reminded herself coldly, these weren't Havenite superdreadnoughts. They were Sollies, and that was an entirely different kettle of fish. Like the rest of Tenth Fleet's officers, Levinsky had studied the technical data from the captured Solarian battlecruisers attentively, and unless that data was grossly inaccurate, the Sollies' anti-LAC capabilities were even more primitive—a lot more primitive—than the Havenites' had been during Operation Buttercup.
Which suggested all sorts of interesting tactical possibilities to one Alice Levinsky

Scotty Tremaine watched the hurricane racing toward the Sollies with something very like a sense of awe. He'd seen larger salvos—not once, but many times. For that matter, the mutual holocausts Home Fleet and Lester Tourville's Second Fleet had inflicted upon one another at the Battle of Manticore dwarfed even this. But a full third of these missiles had come from ships under his command, and that realization sent an icy chill through his blood.
He glanced for just a moment at Horace Harkness' profile and felt an obscure, irrational flicker of reassurance. Harkness' elemental solidity, his unflappable sense of who and what he was, was like a touchstone. It was a reminder of all the challenges Tremaine had met and surmounted in the twenty T-years since he'd first set eyes on that battered, competent face, and in the wake of finding himself cast in the role of Juggernaut, Scotty Tremaine took a warm and very human comfort from it.

Jacomina van Heutz heard the quick, purposeful flow of orders and responses around her, and even in the midst of her own shock, she felt a glow of pride. Fear might flatten her people's voices, incredulity might echo in their tones, but they were doing their jobs. They were responding, doing their best, not simply gaping in horror.
Yet behind that pride, there was another emotion—sorrow. Because however well they did their jobs, it wasn't going to matter in the end.

Forty-five more seconds ticked past. A minute. Ninety seconds. Then, abruptly, every surviving Solarian starship's wedge went down simultaneously.
Another two and a half minutes oozed into eternity while light-speed limited transmissions sped towards HMS Hercules and Quentin Saint-James. Then—
"Sir," Captain Loretta Shoupe told Augustus Khumalo quietly, "Communications is picking up an all-ships transmission from an Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. She wants to surrender, Sir."

Hutch wrote:Just re-reading this section of Mission of Honor, and given the amount of pages the MWW gives to what amounts to be a one-volley curb-stomp battle, there is a few things I'm wondering about....

Please feel free to use this thread to comment on...interesting stuff from this and other battles in the Honorverse (one exception-kzt, no rants on First Manicore... )

First there is this:

But, Levinsky reminded herself coldly, these weren't Havenite superdreadnoughts. They were Sollies, and that was an entirely different kettle of fish. Like the rest of Tenth Fleet's officers, Levinsky had studied the technical data from the captured Solarian battlecruisers attentively, and unless that data was grossly inaccurate, the Sollies' anti-LAC capabilities were even more primitive—a lot more primitive—than the Havenites' had been during Operation Buttercup.
Which suggested all sorts of interesting tactical possibilities to one Alice Levinsky

I rather hope that a Sollie squadron comes calling at one of the Talbot Sector planets (say Prairie, we haven't been there yet) and all that is there is 40 or so LAC's--with Captain Levinsky just happening to be on hand...

Scotty Tremaine watched the hurricane racing toward the Sollies with something very like a sense of awe. He'd seen larger salvos—not once, but many times. For that matter, the mutual holocausts Home Fleet and Lester Tourville's Second Fleet had inflicted upon one another at the Battle of Manticore dwarfed even this. But a full third of these missiles had come from ships under his command, and that realization sent an icy chill through his blood.
He glanced for just a moment at Horace Harkness' profile and felt an obscure, irrational flicker of reassurance. Harkness' elemental solidity, his unflappable sense of who and what he was, was like a touchstone. It was a reminder of all the challenges Tremaine had met and surmounted in the twenty T-years since he'd first set eyes on that battered, competent face, and in the wake of finding himself cast in the role of Juggernaut, Scotty Tremaine took a warm and very human comfort from it.

The last several books haven't given Scotty and Horace much to do. I hope that changes in the next book.

Jacomina van Heutz heard the quick, purposeful flow of orders and responses around her, and even in the midst of her own shock, she felt a glow of pride. Fear might flatten her people's voices, incredulity might echo in their tones, but they were doing their jobs. They were responding, doing their best, not simply gaping in horror.
Yet behind that pride, there was another emotion—sorrow. Because however well they did their jobs, it wasn't going to matter in the end.

One of the greatest of the MWW skills is making us care about every single character. van Huetz was the Captain of the Joseph Buckley and appears in only three scenes, but I still wonder if she survived (we know Crandall's bridge did, but nothing about the SD's command bridge)...and find myself hoping she did.

Forty-five more seconds ticked past. A minute. Ninety seconds. Then, abruptly, every surviving Solarian starship's wedge went down simultaneously.
Another two and a half minutes oozed into eternity while light-speed limited transmissions sped towards HMS Hercules and Quentin Saint-James. Then—
"Sir," Captain Loretta Shoupe told Augustus Khumalo quietly, "Communications is picking up an all-ships transmission from an Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. She wants to surrender, Sir."

One of those little 'fill-in=the-blank' snippets I'd love to write (but am proscribed by Forum rules) is the conversations that took place in those 90 seconds from Exclamation point to dropping the wedges. I imagine it would have been...interesting.

And that's all I have. Comment on these, add your own, or pick another battle that you speculate about and have at it.

"So much for any last-minue outbreak of sanity on their side."

Captain Loretta Shoupe looked up from her displays and wondered if Augustus Khumalo was as aware as she was of how calm his voice sounded. She glanced at his profile as he studied the icons in HMS Hercules' flag bridge master plot, and the calmness of his expression, the steadiness of his eyes, were not the surprise they once would have been.

He's grown, she thought, with a possessive pride whose fierceness did surprise her a bit, even now. He's no happier about this than anyone else, but if there's a gram of hesitation anywhere in him, I can't see it.

"Well," Khumalo said with more than a little regret, "I suppose it's time." He raised his voice slightly. "Communications, pass the word to Tristram. Instruct Commander Kaplan to execute Paul Revere. Then contact Commodore Terekhov and inform him that Code Yankee is now in effect. Captain Saunders," he looked down at the command chair com display tied into Hercules' command deck, "tactical command is passing to Commodore Terekhov at this time."

"Yes, Sir," Victoria Saunders replied, and he sat back in his chair. Much as it galled him to admit it, Quentin Saint-James' fire control was far better suited to manage modern missile fire than his aged flagship's antiquated systems. He'd actually considered shifting his flag in order to exercise tactical command himself, and a part of him wished he had, even now. But efficiency was more important than getting his own combat command ticket punched. And Augustus Khumalo was too self honest to pretend he was in Aivars Terekhov's league as a combat commander.

And while all that was being arranged, her destroyers—all five of them—had accelerated off in pursuit of the nine hulked SDs. Five old-style destroyers could easily have found the boarding parties for search-and-rescue operations aboard nine superdreadnoughts. Whether or not her five Rolands were up to the task was another question.

"That poses some obvious difficulties for my boarding parties—difficulties which might well provoke the sort of incident we've both just agreed should be avoided—and I've been giving some thought to ways those difficulties might be alleviated. By my staff's calculations, the combined small craft and escape pod capacity of your superdreadnoughts should suffice to remove approximately five thousand of your personnel from each ship."

stewart wrote:Brought up a thought similar to this in another thread and got shot down. Maybe you will fare better.

I think any SLN CA squadron that tries a commerce raid on a system patrolled by a current generation of Shrikes / Ferrets / Katanna's in going to get an unwelcome surprise, similar to the PN's first introduction to the type at 2nd Hancock / Barnett and MacGregor.
I still feel a GA MacGregor System-type raid is VERY feasible. Time and MWW will tell.

-- Stewart

MacGregor System

Hutch wrote:

"That poses some obvious difficulties for my boarding parties—difficulties which might well provoke the sort of incident we've both just agreed should be avoided—and I've been giving some thought to ways those difficulties might be alleviated. By my staff's calculations, the combined small craft and escape pod capacity of your superdreadnoughts should suffice to remove approximately five thousand of your personnel from each ship."

Wait, what? You have a crew that, by textev, is over six thousand and you only have the capability to remove five? What do you do in an emergency, tell the crew "All hands abandon ship....except for you folks in Section twenty-seven through forty-one." Not a good thing for morale.

It may be I'm looking at this wrong and Mike was simply referring that they could take five thousand off the ship with no trouble....but it sure doesn't read that way to me.

jchilds wrote:I don't think even Manticoran vessels have enough room for everyone. I think there's textev for that somewhere and some of the reasoning to go with it.

Hutch wrote:Well, a couple more items got my brain (such as it is and what there is of it) thinking, so I'll add them here...

And while all that was being arranged, her destroyers—all five of them—had accelerated off in pursuit of the nine hulked SDs. Five old-style destroyers could easily have found the boarding parties for search-and-rescue operations aboard nine superdreadnoughts. Whether or not her five Rolands were up to the task was another question.

I've never quite figured that out. Five of her most manpower-weak ships going to search SDs? Alone? What if they found 300-400 survivors on one of the hulks? Or some 'fight-to-the last' Sollie crew on a SD Graser targeted 1-2 of the Rolands?

I would have sent Scotty's Sag-C's with them; his advantage in acceleration combined with the fact that Crandall had made turnover and was decelerating means he could have caught up, and his 150 Marines per ship could have been a major help (and given the rescuers parity in the number of ships deployed). Therekov and Oversteegen, along with the LAC's, had more than enough firepower to overcome any action by the Sollies.

The ship—or, rather, the battered hulk which had once been a ship—was under an apparent gravity of about 1.2 g. The wreckage had been rotated perpendicular to its line of flight, putting the decks and deckheads back where they ought to be, and Tristram was playing tugboat to slow what was left of the Babbage down. In many ways, Abigail would have preferred to remain in microgravity. It would have made getting about faster and simpler, not to mention avoiding the stress the deceleration was putting on damaged structural members. And she was well aware that the deceleration might actually be life-threatening for survivors under some circumstances. Unfortunately, the wreck's velocity of almost eighteen thousand kilometers per second had already carried it past Flax. It was now hurtling across the inner system at roughly six percent of light-speed, bound for a fatal encounter with the gas giant Everest in just under twenty hours. It was extraordinarily unlikely, given Tenth Fleet's limited manpower, that the SAR parties would be able to completely search ships as mangled and torn as Babbage and her consorts in that time. Which meant they had to be slowed down somehow.

Hutch wrote:

"That poses some obvious difficulties for my boarding parties—difficulties which might well provoke the sort of incident we've both just agreed should be avoided—and I've been giving some thought to ways those difficulties might be alleviated. By my staff's calculations, the combined small craft and escape pod capacity of your superdreadnoughts should suffice to remove approximately five thousand of your personnel from each ship."

Wait, what? You have a crew that, by textev, is over six thousand and you only have the capability to remove five? What do you do in an emergency, tell the crew "All hands abandon ship....except for you folks in Section twenty-seven through forty-one." Not a good thing for morale.

crewdude48 wrote:

jchilds wrote:I don't think even Manticoran vessels have enough room for everyone. I think there's textev for that somewhere and some of the reasoning to go with it.

IIRC, it is assumed that the small craft in the boat bays are also going to be used for an abandon ship evolution. With the escape pods and the small crafts, there is probably enough room to evac everyone onboard plus a fudge factor for visitors and/or evac crafts going without a full load.

In the case mentioned, I suspect that they decided that they didn't want prisoners bringing armed pinnacles with them, so the boat bays were not an option for evacuation.