Honorverse ramblings and musings

Duckk wrote:

cthia wrote:An Aside - FMI:
Another advantage of Apollo of which I'd like to be sure that I'm not in error...

Let's assume Haven has a two-to-one wall advantage over a Manty fleet. They are just inside effective missile range of each other. If the Manty fleet fires first -- compounded by higher missile acceleration and spreads fire over half of the Peep fleet... now this is where my understanding may fade into error...

If Apollo destroys half of the Peep squadron before their missiles arrive, wouldn't the now orphaned missiles belonging to now destroyed Peep ship's be rendered an ineffective threat?

It largely depends on the specifics of the engagement. Assuming a conventional engagement where the Havenites fire immediately after, the first Havenite's missiles would have dropped to internal guidance well before the destruction of their control ships would have been relevant. They're simply too far downrange for them to care about updates even if the launch ships were still there. Subsequent salvos may be affected, depending on how tightly sequenced their fire is.

Missed your post Duckk, thanks. And I'm going to assume that a radical course change at such close ranges wouldn't matter.

thinkstoomuch wrote:And we are back to numbers.

The 2nd had 118 SD(P)s at the start. With the approximate capability of 80 wallers. According to her Intelligence officer. 3rd having 55 SD(P)s.

Next look at the aftermath. Despite 220% the effective combat power used against her compared to her expectations. She still destroyed more than her own numbers.

However, if you look at the narrative, they were losing ships faster to JUST 2nds fire than they were were destroying. Let me dig into that awful book...

First salvo from 2nd killed HMS Triumph, crippled HMS Warrior, HMS Ellen D'Orville and HMS Bellona.

24 seconds later second salvo from 2nd killed HMS Warrior, HMS Bellona and crippled HMS Marduk.

24 seconds later third Salvo from 2nd killed HMS Regulus.

So 2nd is killing ships of 3rd at the mean rate of one per 18 seconds. 3rd had 55 ships at the start, so with just 2nd fleet, so assuming the rate remains constant, the time to zero is 990 seconds. The rate will not remain constant, loss rates will increase as damage is incurred.

So in at most 16.5 minutes 2nd would have totally destroyed 3rd.

3rd had 118 SDs left (~equivalent of 80 effective) and 12 minutes later it had 75 ships (with 56 effective). At 12 minutes against just 2nd fleet, 3rd would have been down to at most 15 ships that were still operable.

So no, 3rd would have had it's head handed to it due to Kuzak's plan.

kzt wrote:

thinkstoomuch wrote:And we are back to numbers.

The 2nd had 118 SD(P)s at the start. With the approximate capability of 80 wallers. According to her Intelligence officer. 3rd having 55 SD(P)s.

Next look at the aftermath. Despite 220% the effective combat power used against her compared to her expectations. She still destroyed more than her own numbers.

However, if you look at the narrative, they were losing ships faster to JUST 2nds fire than they were were destroying. Let me dig into that awful book...

First salvo from 2nd killed HMS Triumph, crippled HMS Warrior, HMS Ellen D'Orville and HMS Bellona.

24 seconds later second salvo from 2nd killed HMS Warrior, HMS Bellona and crippled HMS Marduk.

24 seconds later third Salvo from 2nd killed HMS Regulus.

So 2nd is killing ships of 3rd at the mean rate of one per 18 seconds. 3rd had 55 ships at the start, so with just 2nd fleet, so assuming the rate remains constant, the time to zero is 990 seconds. The rate will not remain constant, loss rates will increase as damage is incurred.

So in at most 16.5 minutes 2nd would have totally destroyed 3rd.

3rd had 118 SDs left (~equivalent of 80 effective) and 12 minutes later it had 75 ships (with 56 effective). At 12 minutes against just 2nd fleet, 3rd would have been down to at most 15 ships that were still operable.

So no, 3rd would have had it's head handed to it due to Kuzak's plan.

The only problem is the Ammo. Assuming an RHN "Sovereign of Space" SD has an ammo bay of ~500 pods like a Medusa did originally (and it is probably less), they will be dry in ~16.7 minutes of full rate fire. Unfortunately, when 3rd faced 2nd, 3rd had already expended about 1/2 their ammo on Home Fleet. Since your calculations are that they will kill Kuzak's force in 16.5 minutes, roughly 1/2 of Kusak's forces should remain when 2nd runs dry.

Now 5th should have enough ammo to remove the remainder of 2nd, as their magazines are full, but doing so should reduce them to the ~50% range on their surviving units, which is insufficient to take out an undamaged 8th fleet, even without Apollo.

2nd was firing salvos of 12,000 missiles ever 24 seconds. And at the end of 12 minutes they were still firing. So with the 6 minute additional time of flight they fired at least 45 salvos, or about 540,000 missiles. Probably less as they pulled two squadrons out of the attack, but they fired an outrageous amount of missiles.

I don't know where they came from...

KZT,

I did mention that this part was not clearly told(huge editing error IMO). If you game it out for both fleet's missiles arriving in the same time frame it works out, sort of.

End Result also known as the bottom line facing 220% of the enemies her intelligence estimate. Still destroyed 115% of her numbers.

If she is facing half as many from one direction she isn't going to to destroy more? Ok, your opinion mine is different.

Really Howard T. pretty much has it spot on.

Heck half the enjoyment I get out of new books is trying to find the editing errors, numbers in particular.

Did I ever mention that I am anal retentive and a pedant?

Enjoy,
T2M

thinkstoomuch wrote:If she is facing half as many from one direction she isn't going to to destroy more? Ok, your opinion mine is different.

Where should the LACS have been to provide effective missile defense against 2nd? They should have been a million or three km ahead of 3rd, right? If they were there they pretty obviously cannot provide any support against 5th. But instead they were able to split their support, so 1/2 protected against 2nd and 1/2 against 5th.

So obviously Kuzak had no intention for deploying them in missile defense mode despite the huge force facing her. You might ask why would someone do such a crazy thing, and I'll answer that people shouldn't smoke crack.

So yeah, if she had actually planned to fight 2nd in any sort of vaguely professional fashion then they could have done better. But that isn't what the book shows.

Who was tasked with the impossible task of programming Honor's tactical sims in the Crusher? Her scores on the tactical part of the exam must have been through the roof. She had to have crushed them. She has probably since been tasked with rewriting that part of the exam herself.

Since Honor's rewriting of the tactical part, Caparelli and Hemphill jokingly call it the Toaster. lol

cthia wrote:Who was tasked with the impossible task of programming Honor's tactical sims in the Crusher? Her scores on the tactical part of the exam must have been through the roof. She had to have crushed them. She has probably since been tasked with rewriting that part of the exam herself.

Since Honor's rewriting of the tactical part, Caparelli and Hemphill jokingly call it the Toaster. lol

Raoul Courvoisier?

Also, bear in mind that Pavel Young and Elvis Santino, amongst others, passed the same Crusher as Honor.

munroburton wrote:

cthia wrote:Who was tasked with the impossible task of programming Honor's tactical sims in the Crusher? Her scores on the tactical part of the exam must have been through the roof. She had to have crushed them. She has probably since been tasked with rewriting that part of the exam herself.

Since Honor's rewriting of the tactical part, Caparelli and Hemphill jokingly call it the Toaster. lol

Raoul Courvoisier?

Also, bear in mind that Pavel Young and Elvis Santino, amongst others, passed the same Crusher as Honor.

I'm sure you're right about the programmer. And I'm sure I'm right about his awe.


Barely passing and crushing it is a Grand of a Canyon apart.


Besides, I've never bought into that propaganda. I will maintain that when the two of them weighed in on the Crusher someone had their boot under the lip of the scales.

--snipping--

cthia wrote:Alice Truman watched in horror as the Havenite flail came down on Alistair McKeon's squadron.

Was it deliberate? she wondered. Were they able somehow to figure out where Apollo was coming from? Or was it just the luck of the draw?

Not that it mattered.

* * *
How the heck did I miss that there were four Apollo capable ships in McKeon's squadron? And with four Apollo capable ships he could only manage to kill one Peep ship at a time? What the hell? Talk about a massive missile gone limp in McKeon's hands. He was like kryptonite to Apollo! Honor sent McKeon though with four Apollo ships and he still managed to get himself killed?

Now, about that little matter of the Peeps able to so quickly identify and destroy four Apollo capable ships that were all somehow in range. H-O-W!?

Perhaps it's just me hitting the pipe this time. <shrugs>

Reason I snipped is tactical. Until 5th fleet showed up, the tactical plan was probably, ok. Afterwards, sheer missile count would have got to McKeon's ships whenever.

My "tactical thought" after is that Yanakov et. all had previously used Apollo to take out one SD(p) at a time at Solon, so that was the newly evolved SOP. Might have also been computing related, by the way.

All things being equal with hindsight in play, I think if I'd been in Alistair's shoes I've had been throwing 1/4 the count at 4 times the ship count, in hopes of taking out the flagships command and control abilities down to the squadron level, say 70 shipkillers per, and coordinating fire with the rest of 3rd to supply the remaining shipkillers (though less coordinated, maybe 1/3 of a second later than the Apollo-guided core) in a time on target salvo on the same 4 ships per.

Thoughts?