SharkHunter wrote:Keep in mind that Thomas Theisman figured out almost instantly what the Mistletoe drones did and how to counter them; it was Apollo's range and accuracy that he couldn't deal with.
Theisman also figured it out so fast, because he probably gave Sonja the idea.
If you'll recall during the very opening night of Operation Buttercup and the Manticoran strike against Barnett. The Havenite forces, operating under Theisman's battleplans (before he'd been recalled by OSJ to command Capital Fleet) had attached mines to their RD's. Which were then wiped out by Hamish Alexander, firing the first full powered MDM attacks ever seen.
And the only reason they used mines, was because mines are more or less immobile, only capable of station keeping. Which is why during the First Battle of Hancock, Honor and Sarnow schemed ways to deploy mines in an irregular method. The Peeps would have been looking for mines when they closed on the base, which led to Honor suggesting kicking them out during the chase, which led to the final battle plan of using FTL pulse and build the minefield where it was.
Ashes of Victory, Chapter Thirty wrote:"At least a couple of more squadrons of the wall," McQueen said, and the citizen admiral winced. "I don't like it either, but he's got almost all the fixed defenses back up and running, and we've shipped in over three hundred additional LACs. They may not be all that nasty compared to Manty LACs—" she and Bukato met one another's eyes with matching humorless smiles "—but they're a hell of a lot better than nothing for inner system defense. And, frankly, I was impressed by what he's managed with the mines and pods."
"Me, too," Bukato agreed, and he meant it. Minefields were a part of almost any area defense plan, but traditional mines were little more than floating, bomb-pumped laser buoys designed to lurk until some unfortunate entered their range. Theisman had taken them a bit further, using Barnett's local yard capacity to field-modify the mines by strapping the buoys onto the noses of stealthed recon drones. They weren't very fast, and they weren't very accurate, but they had a lot of endurance and they would be hard to detect. McQueen wasn't certain that they would prove effective at sneaking into attack range, but there was always a chance, and it was the sort of innovative adaptation the People's Navy needed badly.
Longer-ranged missiles, deployed in orbit around key planets, were also a common defense. Those missiles were subject to proximity soft kills and always had marginally shorter powered ranges than those launched from proper shipboard launchers, and arranging fire control for them had always been a problem, yet they were a useful adjunct to proper orbital fortresses or launchers on moons and asteroids.
Granted, that's all pre-Buttercup, but that was both the start of mass-produced system defense missile pods, giving RD's some form of offensive punch (whether boot-strapped mines, or purpose-built Mistletoe quasi-missiles), and a good hard look at mines being pretty useless without being en mass.
Second generation Mistletoe drones, would probably just start getting better lasing rods, possibly the Mk 16-G warhead, instead of whatever they have now. Either in boom or burn, a Mark 16G is going to increase their effectiveness in taking out larger amounts of hostile pods, or burning through the sidewalls of ever tougher mobile units.
With the addition of the quad-drive system defense pods, with or without Moriarty or Mycroft, and LAC swarms, suddenly defense is almost laughably easy and very low requirements of warm bodies (LAC crews, between three and six sets of crews for the Mycroft platforms, and a maintenance crew that can rotate through servicing the deployed pods)