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

JeffEngel wrote:

Bill Woods wrote:Braking the ship to rest will take over 400 hours — that's over two weeks! And then if you want to bring it back to the inner system.... The SAR effort needs to be done, of course, but it better be finished well before that. As earlier noted, a single destroyer's away team seems inadequate to the task.

Letting the hulk and associated smaller bits go flying off into deep space seems sufficient to clean up. Space is big. Nobody's going to trip over a piece who wasn't looking for it. As for scrapping it, I understand that there are several hundred others available with few better uses, which can drive themselves to the boneyard.

For that matter, once it's empty of people, letting it go ahead and hit the gas giant certainly qualifies as getting rid of it, and the show would be pretty spectacular too!

One thing I wonder: The task force was headed in towards Spindle from the closest point on the hyperlimit, right? After the planet itself, isn't the next thing ships are likely to hit ... the star itself? And in about 2 hours, not 20. Or is it standard practice to come in slightly off-radius, precisely so disabled ships don't have to worry about that?

Bill Woods wrote:

SWM wrote:Absolutely correct. In fact, it turns out that changing the velocity (i.e. applying acceleration forward or backward parallel to the direction of motion) is often the easiest way to change the orbit (and orbital intersection point) of an object in orbit. Decelerating actually makes sense from a physics perspective.

No it doesn't. Going at 0.6 c, orbits look a lot like straight lines. Decelerating at 12 m/s2 adds about 2000 seconds to the time to reach the planet. It'll take 400 hours to decelerate it to rest. If the planet's orbital speed is ~10 km/s, the distance at closest approach will be changed by all of 0.2 e9m.
Alternatively, if the ship accelerates sideways at a mere 1 m/s2, after 20 hours, it'll be displaced by more than 2 e9m — ten times as far, for less than a tenth the effort.

You're right--I was thinking in terms of more normal orbital speed. Ah well.

--snipping--

Brigade XO wrote:...Decelerating the SD also means that it hasn't gone kiteing off out of the system takeing the rest of the surviving crew with it to let them die of injuries, suffocation, cold or continuing destruction of parts of the ship from fire/explosions and structural failure. It is not that RMN wants to "clean up" the mess of the ship, it is going to get survivors off and not have the whole mass (and their own ship) running out of the system...

There is no way that RMN is going to just abandon any SLN survivors.

Exactly the right point. What I like about the mention isn't just the character development of those on the SAR mission, which is in keeping with RFC's plotting and writing style, it is also "in character" for the RMN [and most major space Navies] and Manticore as a whole. We don't read any side conversations about enlisted men or junior officers growsing about it being anything other than SOP for the victors to do the SAR work.

To which I'd add that using bigger tractors on damaged ships might not be the best plan; it's the Roland's crew size that seems the issue as the mention of smaller pre-war destroyers to me that DD's may have always had that as part of their general task, but with the older ships actually had the advantage in that task with the larger crew sizes. It seems possible and maybe even likely (but not textev'd) that the RMN would have paused to move additional SAR crew members onto the Rolands briefly or sent other ships along if they didn't have a very good idea of the battle damage to the hulked SD's they were sent to assist.

That said, my final surmise is that n the unlikely event the SAR crews found a ship with many more intact survivors, they would have simply whistled up bigger ship with much more personnel space to come get the survivors.

JeffEngel wrote:For that matter, once it's empty of people, letting it go ahead and hit the gas giant certainly qualifies as getting rid of it, and the show would be pretty spectacular too!

I think you just answered the most debated question on the forums, what to do with the hundreds of vega ans scientist class SD's laying around. Just throw them all into a handy star at 0.8 C and watch the fireworck from far far far

Sorry to wander by so late, but I think you started a lot of discussion on a flawed assumption: What makes you think that 5000 bodies is the total capacity of the evac systems or that there was any desire or need to remove more of the crew than that?

The object of the exercise was to reduce the crews to passage crews at a size the boarding crews could manage without presenting any temptation to revolt. Given that, this is much more likely to be a simple reminder that Cleary faces no difficulty in removing the stipulated number of crew from each ship quickly than a statement of the largest number that can be taken off.

Hutch wrote:< snip >

"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.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

Adding my 2 cents to the discussion of the battle, the part that stuck with me most was the bit about the effectiveness of the SLN missile defenses.
This may be a simple matter of language perception but the wording kind of struck me as odd.

Going from memory, the wording of the passage had a lot to say about how ineffective they defense was. They did top about 1k, which, based on what I've been able to glean from the looking for specs on the ships involved, comes out to between 25-33% hit rate, assuming each CM launcher and each PDLC got one shot in the few seconds available.

What jarred me was the seeming mismatch between the textev of how horribly degraded the defenses were and a hit rate that high. Perhaps it's from a 20th century earth perception where a 33% hit rate is actually fairly good. Perhaps it's a small fraction of how good Crandall expected it to be. But it still seemed off to me.

ericth wrote:Adding my 2 cents to the discussion of the battle, the part that stuck with me most was the bit about the effectiveness of the SLN missile defenses.
This may be a simple matter of language perception but the wording kind of struck me as odd.

Going from memory, the wording of the passage had a lot to say about how ineffective they defense was. They did top about 1k, which, based on what I've been able to glean from the looking for specs on the ships involved, comes out to between 25-33% hit rate, assuming each CM launcher and each PDLC got one shot in the few seconds available.

What jarred me was the seeming mismatch between the textev of how horribly degraded the defenses were and a hit rate that high. Perhaps it's from a 20th century earth perception where a 33% hit rate is actually fairly good. Perhaps it's a small fraction of how good Crandall expected it to be. But it still seemed off to me.

Each SD (not counting the screen has 16 CM tubes and 32 PDLCs in a broadside(ignoring the screen).

71 times 16 1,136 CMs.

71 times 32 2,272.

They stopped 1,007.

Not even a 33% hit rate.

Note that for the PDLCs that is only one broadside. That many missiles are going to attacking at least 2 aspects probably 3. In addition AEGIS upgrade added another 14 (I guesstimate) to the upgraded ships CM numbers. About a third of her ships were so equipped.

Add in the other 59 ships(16 BCs alone) in the screen and you are lucky if it is 1 in 5 achieved an attack missile intercept.

Compare that to Chantilly where 1,400 (MDMs after the LACs) attack 2 BCs. ~300 get to attack range.

Not saying it is horrible but it ain't great either.

Have fun,
T2M

--little snip--

Hutch wrote:

crewdude48 wrote: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.

The armed pinnaces (and perhaps other armed vessels) is something I hadn't considered. Thanks crewdude, you are undoubtedly right on that and it may make up the difference.

I think we can also assume that there needed to be enough SLN officers and crew [but away from tactically controllable bits] s to get the remaining SD's parked somewhere, maybe a Spindle-ease something or other "service shipyard". Then the remaining crew would be evacuated under guard to join their already POW'd shipmates.